Half an hour into the mage council meeting, Penrys was already sick of it.
The room was handsome, if chilly—a locked interior room, windowless and quiet as a cave when she entered it with Zandaril and Zongchas, their footsteps muffled by the hangings suspended along each wall. She didn’t know the events portrayed in their faded colors, but the tall and icy mountains featured prominently left her in no doubt that these were Rasesni-brought, not part of whatever furnishings had already been in place when they arrived.
She wished for that vanished silence now, as the disputes continued around the scarred table. Only four of the five council members were present, but they had no compunction about loud argument. Their minds may have been shielded, but not their voices. She had shielded herself, and covered Zandaril, too.
The pompous Dhumkedbhod leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, his expression unchanged—nose wrinkled as if combating a foul odor and the rest in an implacable scowl.
He waved one fleshy arm at Zongchas. “You can blather all you want about allies, but you have yet to convince me why we should believe them.”
The conversation from the start had remained in Rasesni, and after a couple of protests from Zongchas to switch to Kigali-yat, Penrys had just kept a link open to Zandaril and provided a silent running translation. He took advantage of it to provide his own commentary in return.
*I don’t know what this Dhumkedo god has to say about foreigners, but he certainly says it loudly.*
Penrys mentally shushed him. *He can maybe hear you.*
Zandaril snorted out loud. *So you keep saying. Much I care. Strangers get the courtesy they merit.*
Penrys didn’t detect any reaction from Dhumkedbhod to Zandaril’s scorn, but there was no way to be sure if he couldn’t overhear it, or if he was just canny, a survivor of decades of infighting.
Nyagchos, whose religious objections seemed to be more moderate, tilted his gray head and pursed his lips. “If they won’t trust us enough to show us proof, why should we trust them?”
There were two sticking points. They flatly disbelieved her account of ignorance, that the last three years were all she could remember, and seemed almost insulted at the story. Among themselves they debated how she could prove it, even if she were willing to let them in and see for themselves. “Nothing easier than to put a barrier in place,” Dhumkedbhod had said, “And how would we know the difference?”
The second objection had more possibility of being addressed. After Zandaril had described, in Kigali-yat, their encounter with the Voice, Nyagchos had called for seeing exactly what that had been like, in his mind and Penrys’s, and Dhumkedbhod pointed out the same difficulty of verification. This time, Vladzan had cut in unexpectedly. “If she shows us people we recognize, it would be easier to believe, yes?”
Penrys was not entirely in favor of this. Aside from the danger of granting access, she’d been successful so far in not describing exactly how they’d escaped. If council got its way, they would have to know about her wings, and she’d wanted to keep that as a surprise, just in case.
She sighed. That just might not be possible.
Holding up her hand, she distracted them from Zongchas’s attempts to make progress. “I will show you. I will share it with all of you, Zandaril, too, so that you can feel his testament to the accuracy of it.”
Zandaril and Dhumkedbhod broke in at the same time. In wirqiqa-Zannib, Zandaril said, “You must not let them in.”
Penrys patted the air to urge him to calm, while Dhumkedbhod objected, strongly, “I will not do this, and you would be fools it you did. She’s just like him—look at the chain. She’ll just show you whatever she wants you to see. Dhumkedo forbids it.”
Everyone turned to listen to him as he intoned, “Will you be taken in by another chained monster?”
Zongchas shared a look with Vladzan and Nyagchos, then turned to Penrys. “We will do this.”
Penrys straightened in her chair. “This far and no further,” she warned. “I will protect myself.”
She began with her memory of their capture by the hill tribesmen, the mental voice that had detected and then captured them until they were securely bound. Her audience had to lower their own shields to do this, so she tried to monitor their reactions and their intents while keeping a light touch on Zandaril, too. It was a complicated bit of juggling.
“Show me that again,” Zongchas said. “That tribal camp.”
She listened to their discussion about the weaponry and clothing of their captors and the camp at the base of the horn.
She wanted to shortcut the tedious climb up the trail at the Horn, but they refused. They paused her again to examine her view of the horde, discussing which tribes seemed to be represented. An undercurrent of dismay began to run through her Rasesni audience. The more they believed the truth of what they saw, the worse it grew.
She muttered, “Captives,” out loud, to warn them, and took them through the fettered wizards in rags, pulling water from the air.
“But that’s Igzhun,” Vladzan said. “I’m sure of it.”
“And Drannyal, and maybe Shrigirnang, too.” Nyagchos’s voice was no longer skeptical, nor his mind, either. “I thought they were dead.”
When she finally showed them their enemy, and his chain, she let them feel the throb of her own chain in response. “My chain recognized his,” she told them.
Reluctantly, she showed them the end—how they ran off the cliff and fell through the air, with Zandaril’s weight dangling from her bound hands, and even the two arrows that hit her, before she cut them off and shoved them out, re-erecting her shields.
She tried to suppress the emotional resonance of the event, to control her breathing and heartbeat, but she knew she had failed when she felt the echo of concerned sympathy from Zandaril.
The council members who had come along with her were blessedly silent for a moment, until Dhumkedbhod’s strident voice broke in. “Well? Was it worth it?”