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Stasya woke again to find Ellard kissing her. This time she was more startled by it than excited. Rather than embracing him and pulling him closer, she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded.
“Because I want to,” he whispered. “What would you like to do, Stasya?”
“If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been trying to sleep.”
“Is that a fact? I can think of better uses of our time.”
He started to slide his hand between her legs, but she clamped her thighs shut and rolled away from him. “This is hardly the time or the place for this, Ellard.”
“Those were precisely my thoughts.” He motioned for her to be quiet and to follow him. For a moment, she stayed in her bed, torn between her still-undiminished desire for his body, and her growing sense that something was not quite right with his mind. In the end, her desire won out over her sense.
They tiptoed together across the pale marble of the memorial, past the sleeping forms of Pallavi and Caedmon, and then headed off through the cold, wet grass by the lake. Mist from the river had settled over the park, and the giant palace across the road had been reduced to a dark, hazy outline, punctuated here and there with the warm glow of tiny candle lights. There was no sign of the city beyond the palace—it had been swallowed up in the mist and dark. Even the river itself was invisible.
“Ellard, where are we—”
“Be quiet. There are soldiers up here.” He turned and walked up the hill toward the barberry bushes and the trees of the deer park. Sure enough, there were men on watch there, keeping an eye on the memorial and the hillichmagnars. They had armor and wore blue surcoats with the arms of the kings of Myrcia on the breast. All of them had cloth masks wound around the lower half of their faces under their helmets.
As Ellard and Stasya drew closer, one of the men turned to another and said, “I don’t like this vapor. It has the smell of the pestilence in it.”
“That’s the river you’re smelling,” said the other. “The king’s astrologers say tonight is safe for walking abroad.”
The first soldier shook his head. “And yet I notice that the king’s astrologers are safely in the palace for the night.”
Stasya wondered when the men had arrived there, and whether they were planning to attack. It would be foolhardy in the extreme, but even a hillichmagnar could be killed while sleeping. Stasya hung back, unsure of what to do. Ellard did not stop, though. He walked closer and closer to one of the soldiers, and Stasya expected the man to shout or raise the alarm or draw his sword. But Ellard stopped right next to the soldier, waved a hand in front of his eyes, and then beckoned Stasya to follow. She did, and like Ellard, she passed within a few feet of the soldier. All the while, the man continued to stare straight ahead, oblivious to them.
A minute later, once they were in the woods, Ellard said, “Fairly basic illusion spell. They won’t see us leave.”
“Leave? Where do you think we’re going?”
“I’m going to Odeland, Stasya, and I want you to come with me.”
“What? Now? Without Pallavi and Caedmon, you mean?”
“I don’t think we need them anymore, do you?”
Perhaps Ellard didn’t need Caedmon anymore, but Stasya was acutely aware of how much she still had to learn about magy. If her time with the three older hillichmagnars had taught her anything, it had taught her how much she didn’t know. “I’m only 21,” she said. “I’ve barely learned anything.”
He smirked. “So you’re going to let Caedmon take you back to Diernemynster to find another Lareowess for you? Or were you thinking of studying with Pallavi?”
In all honesty, Stasya hadn’t spent a great deal of time thinking about her next teacher. Insofar as she had, she had a vague idea that she would go to Diernemynster, just as Ellard had said. But since she had met Pallavi, she had permitted herself to be pulled along by events, happy to let her decisions be made by wiser and more experienced people. “I don’t know,” she said to Ellard. “But I think Pallavi and Caedmon would be disappointed if we ran off in the middle of the night.”
“If Pallavi is upset,” said Ellard, “it will only be because I asked you, instead of her.”
Stasya laughed. “You have a very high opinion of yourself.”
“Only because I’m entitled to it.”
“And you’re not the least bit concerned about leaving Caedmon after all these years?”
They had reached a clearing in the woods, centered on a small, bronze statue of a knight on horseback. Ellard leaned against the marble base of the statue and frowned thoughtfully. “I think I outgrew Caedmon years ago, to be perfectly honest. The last time he taught me a spell I didn’t know was long before you were born. Of course, there are still benefits—social benefits—to being his student. His name opens lots of doors, I mean. There are many archives and private libraries around the world that I have seen only because I was tagging along behind him. However,” he nodded in the direction of the palace, “it looks as if the name ‘Caedmon Aldred’ isn’t worth quite as much as it used to be.”
“It is in Loshadnarod,” said Stasya, feeling suddenly and unexpectedly angry on Caedmon’s behalf. “I grew up hearing and singing songs about him.”
“That’s charming, but your country has no archives. Which is,” he chuckled, “likely the reason you’ve all forgotten that Caedmon fought a war against your people, long before he visited with Queen Ferryn to bring a peace treaty. In any case, his reputation in your homeland is irrelevant. We’re not trying to gain entrance to the court of Loshadnarod. And unfortunately, the Myrcian court has a longer memory than one might have anticipated.”
“Do you mean those filthy rumors about him and Queen Ferryn? I’ve heard of them, but now that I’ve met him, I’m sure they are lies.”
“They are not rumors,” said Ellard. “It’s the truth. Just mention Queen Ferryn to him and watch his face. Now, did they ever consummate their love? Probably not. Caedmon wouldn’t have had the balls to try it.”
“How can you say such horrible things about him? You’ve known him for years.”
“It’s because I’ve known him for years that I can say those things. I have known him and I learned from him. I am grateful for everything he taught me. But it is long past time for me to go my own way, and I would like you to join me. I can teach you everything you need to know.” He reached out a hand toward her. “Take it. Go on; trust me.”
The moment she touched his hand, she was no longer standing in the misty woods at night. Instead, she was lounging on a long couch next to a pool. Little fountains played somewhere nearby. Palm trees and flowering hibiscus surrounded, sheltered, and shaded the scene, and overhead, the sky was lit up with extravagant oranges and purples. She had just enough time to wonder at the scene before Ellard was there, too. He sat beside her on the couch, and when he touched her, she realized that she was wearing only a thin, silk robe. “Do you know where we are?” he asked her.
She barely looked around. His hands were inside the robe now, and she was starting to forget why she had ever mistrusted him. “No idea,” she gasped. “Minerto, maybe?”
“No, we’re inside a spell. I suppose you could say this is a place I’ve made just for you. I can take you here whenever you like.”
“Why me?”
“Because I need you.”
She almost laughed in his face, but then she realized he was quite serious. “He’s proposing to me,” she thought. Or at the very least he was asking her to be his mistress. It was a tempting offer; she found him very attractive, especially when he did the sort of things with his hands that he was doing at the moment.
And he certainly could teach her a great deal about magy, too. This illusion was so richly-detailed, so complete. No other hillichmagnar she had ever known had shown even half so much talent and creativity. Evika had been sweet, but Evika hadn’t been capable of making a Minertian garden out of nothing, simply on a whim.
Then again, Evika wasn’t the sort of person who could contemplate pretending to be Uleflecht reborn, either. Someone like that wasn’t going to be happy with Stasya as a partner. She knew that she was, at best, a hillichmagnar of middling ability for her age. As her mother had often said, “You cannot jump above your own head.” Stasya could only do so much with the abilities she had. Ellard had seemed like a good teacher that day at the manor house, but looking back, it seemed he had only been interested in putting his hands on her.
What could she possibly offer him? Well, beyond her body, obviously. He seemed quite interested in that. But there again, Ellard would probably tire of her eventually. A man who imagined himself a figure of history-making significance was never going to be satisfied with Stasya Kirovna Nikonovna, daughter of shepherds. This was not to say that she underestimated her own worth. It was not that she saw herself as inferior to Ellard, rather that she could see that his pretentions would never permit him to love anyone but himself.
She removed his hands from where he had placed them, and held them between her palms. “It is very kind of you to say that you need me, Ellard, but we both know that isn’t true. I am flattered that you would even say that, but you do not need me. And I need someone who wants to teach me magy, not someone who is infatuated with me.”
He stared at her, and then his lips began to pull back over his teeth, in a strange expression that was like a mockery of a smile. He took his hands away, and the moment he was no longer touching her, the tropical sunset garden was gone, and they were back in the misty nighttime forest. She was sitting on the damp ground next to the statue, and Ellard was standing over her.
“And you think that I have a high opinion of myself,” he chuckled darkly. “Do you think I desire your body, Stasya? I do, indeed. But not for the reasons you think. Those sort of base, vulgar desires are the furthest thing from my mind.”
“It seemed to me just now that your base desires were very much at the forefront of your mind.”
“Not my desires, Stasya. Yours. I am willing to give you pleasure if you give me what I want in return: your body.”
This didn’t seem to make any sense. Wanting her body was the same as wanting sex, wasn’t it? But then she noticed how he was looking at her. It wasn’t the way that Bryan the baron’s son had looked at her back at Atherton. It was the way her father had looked at a slaughtered sheep before butchering it for the clan. “What...what do you want with me?” she gasped.
“I don’t wish to hurt you. Not permanently, anyway. But you are the key to the mystery. You are immune to the plague. Your body is the clue that I need to figure out how the plague works. And you have already helped me so very much.”
She started to crawl backwards away from him. “When have I helped you?”
“You don’t remember it, but you did. I wanted to test the theory that you were immune, and I wanted samples of diseased flesh. I sent you into the plague pits. Truly, I would have asked you to do so voluntarily, but I thought you might prove somewhat...squeamish. So I used a little spell on you of my own devising, and then I told you not to remember what you had done.”
So that was what had happened those nights when she had awakened to find her clothes dirty. She thought of the greasy ash that she had often found on herself, and she nearly vomited. “What on earth do you hope to achieve with all this? Curing the plague?”
Again, that nasty, unnatural grin. “Cure it? Whatever for? I don’t want to cure the plague, Stasya. I want to be able to control it. It would make a marvelous weapon, except that it is far too indiscriminate. Suppose one were able to go to the king of a country at war and tell him that, if he agreed to serve you, you would see to it that the enemy’s army fell sick and died without a single battle ever being fought. What do you think the kings of earth would give for power like that? What would they think of the sorcerer who gave them that power? They might think, I daresay, that he was one of the original hillichmagnars reborn.”
“Please tell me this is a joke.”
“A joke? No, not at all. I am quite serious; I need you Stasya.”
Stasya scrambled to her feet and continued to back away. He had gone insane; there was no other explanation. No one could possibly think of doing such a thing. It would violate all the laws of Earstien and man. How could this be Ellard, the charming, funny, clever man whom she had met a few weeks before? How could this be the man she had liked so well that she would have been willing to sleep with him, even though she had barely known him? But that was the problem; she had known almost nothing about him. She could never have guessed that deep inside, under the handsome exterior, there was a sick and rotten heart. “Does Caedmon know?” she wondered.
“I am going to go back to camp now,” she declared, fighting to keep her voice steady. “I do not care where you go, Ellard Koehler, but I am not going with you.”
“Oh, I think you will.” He raised a hand and called out, “Join us, please.”
Two figures shuffled into the clearing from either side. Before Stasya saw their faces, she knew who they were; their white robes were unmistakable. Calleigh Dell and Alwin Garnett were not wearing their sinister beaked masks anymore, but their faces had become strangely mask-like. Their eyes were glassy, their expressions vacant. Stasya called out to Calleigh, begging her to wake up, but the woman did not respond.
“They serve me tonight,” said Ellard. “Just as you served me at the plague pits. They will do whatever I wish them to do. And what I wish for them to do is to guard you and make you come along with me. You could escape them, I imagine, if you wanted to use magy or Wiga. But you might hurt them, and I know you don’t want to do that.”
The “doctor” and his assistant moved closer, their arms outstretched to seize her. “Please, no,” said Stasya. But they did not seem to hear her cries at all.