40. THE BARGAIN

Caless’s story

The Soaring Halls, the Upper Circle of the Capital City of Quur

Early evening

Caless couldn’t find her daughter.

She’d left Sheloran—also Galen; his healer, Qown; and that small child—in her suite of rooms, but when she returned, everyone was gone. She suspected they’d dropped the child off with the highest-ranked babysitters in the empire, but she’d also expected at least Sheloran to still be there. Caless might have thought they’d gotten a jump on that whole leaving business, but there was a problem: not everything was missing. The healer’s satchel still hung off the back of a chair. Worse—and the thing that made Caless’s stomach knot—was the small leather-bound volume left discarded on a bed.

Her son-in-law always kept such a book with him for whenever he felt the need to write his poetry. He never went anywhere without it. They’d left in a rush, too quickly to take the time to leave notes or remove their most important belongings.

So something was wrong.

She felt a flash of anger, quickly suppressed. It had been too easy of late to lose her temper. Easier still to jump to paranoid conclusions. There was likely a perfectly normal explanation for this.

Her gut told her otherwise. Her instincts screamed that something was wrong, that she should start grabbing people and shaking them until they spilled out answers from their mouths like blood.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason why she reacted so quickly to the spike of tenyé as someone opened a gate into the room. It wasn’t her husband—she’d have recognized his aura. And there was no one else who had any good reason to come calling in such a manner.

Which was why she attacked before whoever it was finished appearing.

The surge of tenyé-spiked energy should have shredded the person immediately. Instead, they caught it.

“Caless, I—” The intruder managed to say before the blast of pure energy from Caless smashed into him. The portal he’d stepped through had already closed behind him, or she might have knocked him back whence he came. Instead, she slammed him into the wall and knocked askew a painting of Simillion and Dana hunting in the woods of Eamithon.1

It was far too much to hope that such a paltry attack would seriously injure the wizard, much less kill him, so she was already weaving her second strike before the sound of his back hitting the wall had even finished ringing in her ears.

“Damn it, woman, I—” he said.

She hit him with the bed.

Her favorite bed too. She’d brought it with her from the palace. It was a magnificent affair. Metal, of course, with room for a custom-made stuffed cotton mattress. It easily weighed a ton; she crashed it into him hard enough to twist the frame. Potentially break a few ribs, if she was lucky. The bedsheets covered his face and, more importantly, his eyes. Retaliatory spellcasting became much more difficult if he couldn’t see her.

“Enough!” he bellowed. The bed exploded away from him in a hail of metallic shrapnel, every piece flying toward her. She interposed a barrier, which stopped most of it, but felt a sting where a finger-size splinter of metal pierced the back of her right hand.

She plucked it free and flicked it back at him, weaving tenyé into it so the splinter melted into a small orb of shimmering metal that then exploded into a roiling sphere of flame.

He batted the fiery bolt aside with a gust of frigid wind and launched a trio of blasts at her; high, low, high again. He alternated between kinetic force, electricity, and a spell for the breaking of bones.

None of them hit her. She wasn’t a novice. While she might not have had the same weight of centuries behind her as some others, she was a god-queen. She dodged the first, deflected the second so that it went out the window, setting a curtain on fire in the process, and let the third fail against her own protective aura.

“Oh please,” she said. She reached into a pocket and cast a handful of small metal flakes at him, agitating them so that they would burst into flames as they drew near. If it worked on the emperor’s enemies, she saw no reason it wouldn’t work on the sorcerer before her.

Except it didn’t. The ataras flakes fell to the floor unlit. He shook his head. “I heard about your little trick,” he said. He looked smug, but Caless saw his eyes dart toward the burning drape fluttering outside the window.

Someone would see that. They would report it. Soon, people would arrive at the door to her suite: soldiers, witch-hunters, Voices of the Council, perhaps even the empress herself. It didn’t matter where Tyentso was when she could teleport across the empire in seconds.

Evidently, the stranger didn’t feel like dealing with that idea, because her visitor lost his temper.

He touched his throat, his face twisted in a grimace of pain. With his other hand, he made a complicated gesture.

But nothing happened as far as she could see. Caless drew breath for her next attack and then realized what he’d done.

The intruder had pulled all the good air from the room. Caless began suffocating in a room with open windows.

Windows.

Yes, that was it. She twisted her hands.

“Stop wasting my time,” the man said, his voice sounding strange in the fetid air. “I have your daughter and your son-in-law. If you’d like to see them again in this life, cease these pointless attacks and let us parlay.” He opened a fan with his free hand.

Caless froze; it was Sheloran’s fan. He smirked at her over the edge of it.

Her spell finished. A breeze blew in from outside, pushing the burning curtain into the foul air to smother the flames. But then the fresh air arrived, and she felt the coolness of it like a sharp knife in her lungs. She coughed.

“Wha—” Her voice was a harsh croak. She cleared her throat, tried again. “What is it that you want?”

A closer inspection brought no enlightenment. Caless didn’t recognize the man. He wasn’t notable—a normal-looking Quuros man, taller than average, but not enough to stand out. His clothes were sturdy, plain and ordinary.

He had the aura of a god-king, which she knew from long experience was a group of people who hated “plain” and “ordinary.” She considered herself something of an expert on the subject, having been directly or indirectly responsible for nearly every god-king or god-queen in existence.² So not a normal god-king and not a normal wizard and not someone she could afford to underestimate.

She stalled for time and hoped that Varik wouldn’t return from his improvised workshop early. With the mood her husband was in, it seemed unlikely—or impossible—that he wouldn’t leap at any excuse to start a fight. And her husband didn’t have a quarter of her experience at magical dueling.

“Who are you?” Caless finally asked.

The corner of the man’s mouth quirked. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure. My name is Relos Var.”

“Prove it,” she snapped back. She did her absolute best to act like the name elicited only mild curiosity and not panic.

He blinked, surprised. “Excuse me?”

Caless crossed her arms over her chest. “You heard me. You’re powerful and you know the name of someone powerful, but that doesn’t mean you’re the same person. Prove that you’re Relos Var.”

An annoyed expression crossed his face. “I hardly think—”

“My mother used to talk about you all the time. Ranted, even. So I do have some idea what you really look like. Not the dragon form. I’m uninterested in that. Show me your birth form, and then we’ll talk.”

She didn’t doubt the man’s identity for a moment, but that wasn’t the point. He’d shown up here with her daughter’s fan and that knowing look in his eyes, the one that said that he knew exactly how this meeting was going to proceed and intended to control every aspect of it. She knew that look of old. They always thought they’d enter her house and take charge, give the orders.

She went out of her way to prove them wrong.

He might have responded in any number of ways, from attacking her again to ordering her to shut up and listen. Perhaps she’d given him an excuse to do something he’d been wanting to do for ages. His form shimmered, the edges blurring and sliding against each other until they settled into a new shape. His expression twisted from the pain, but not more than one might expect from stubbing a toe.

“Ah.” Caless studied him for a moment. The mistake most people would have made was giving themselves voras red eyes. The man in front of her had not. His eyes were blue—not the too-bright cerulean of a D’Mon but a deeper sapphire shade. He was taller than most Quuros but still short for a vané. Dark skinned, but that wasn’t unusual. His hair was tightly braided in a style that suggested he wore it that way to control its otherwise rebellious curl.

Caless imagined a great deal about the man hinged on that idea of “control.” Keeping it, gaining it. It was a pity that he seemed far too proud to ever acknowledge he always would’ve been happiest on his knees.³

She scoffed under her breath. “Yes, I see it.”

Relos Var raised an eyebrow. “This is all quite charming, but I’m here to talk about—”

“Did you know that my mother was deeply infatuated with you?”

Relos Var choked off whatever he’d been about to say. “I’m sorry. What was that?”

“Oh, you didn’t realize?” She laughed at the delightful joke. Delay, delay, delay. She tried not to consider the irony of having to wait and hope she’d be rescued. And how she already knew it wouldn’t happen. “She wanted you so badly.”

Var’s expression turned to one of genuine bafflement. “A moment. Just to confirm. We are talking about Suless, aren’t we?”⁴

“Who else? She was the only mother I had.”

The wizard visibly shuddered. “Suless hated me.”

“Yes, I understand why you would think that. It was impossible to tell the difference between love and hate with her. But she hated you in a special way, one that made it obvious her affection was an emotion turned rotten by years wrapped in jealousy. How badly she wanted you. How bitter she was that she couldn’t have you. She was hardly alone. Why, I imagine half your fellow professors at that school of yours were madly in love with you, simultaneously desperate for your approval and terrified of your criticism.”

He just stared at her. Caless was willing to bet metal that if he hadn’t been a millennia old immortal, he’d have been stammering and blushing. She’d shocked the hell out of him.

“You’re mistaken,” he finally said. “I was never loved.”

She studied him carefully, then laughed. “I rather think you’re the one who’s mistaken. You mean to tell me you never realized? You, walking around, looking like that. A perfect mind carried around in that perfect body, that perfect face. You, a marble statue of a man, gorgeous and cold. Untouchable, unassailable, out of everyone’s reach. I can just picture the students writing each other love poems about you. Quite a few of the teachers too, I imagine. Surely my mother wasn’t the only one.” Caless gazed up at him through her eyelashes. “And you were oblivious. How delicious.”

“My brother was the one everyone loved.” The words seemed to slip past Relos Var’s lips in a moment of inattention. The scowl that chased its way onto his face didn’t move quickly enough to stop their escape.

“Perhaps it may have seemed that way,” Caless said. “But I would wager your admirers were no less ardent. Just more circumspect. People like S’arric are always safe to worship openly. They shine so brightly, it’s difficult to look at anyone else. But not everyone wants to blind themselves. I’ve always preferred moonlight myself.”

He was smart enough to see the offer in her words and far too smart to accept. Still, it didn’t hurt to try. Sometimes people surprised you.

“I have your daughter,” Relos Var spat out, returning at last to the main subject. He seemed genuinely angry now, although Caless suspected that anger was almost entirely aimed at himself.

So she’d gotten to him, just a little. Maybe he’d even been tempted. It was good to know, even as she knew it wouldn’t do a thing to change the outcome. She’d take her consolation prizes where she could.

She’d forced him to pull the conversation back under control.

Caless ignored the heaviness in her gut, the feeling of cold weight that would twist and leave her insides spilled out on the floor. “Yes,” she said. “Obviously. I assume you want something in exchange.”

“The Stone of Shackles.” He gestured at the blue gemstone resting on top of her cleavage.

Caless tasted bile, even though she’d known that was what he wanted from the moment he named himself. She’d tried so hard for all these years to stay out of certain paths of destruction. Var had been at the very top of that list. Still, it wasn’t unexpected. She was only shocked at how quickly the man had come calling. She couldn’t help but think of her son-in-law’s confession that he and Sheloran had caught Relos Var’s attention.

“Just out of curiosity, was Qown here for the Cornerstone too or for some other reason?” It was a guess, but she thought it likely a good one.

The corner of the man’s mouth twitched, even as he didn’t answer. But the look in his eyes—half amusement, half admiration—was answer enough. Not necessarily to the boy’s orders but at least to the identity of his master.

She had previously wondered who had taken the time to so exquisitely twist that poor boy’s mind into knots. Caless couldn’t help but wonder if Relos Var had done it deliberately or if he was just too caught up in his own ambitions to notice the damage he had done to a child in his care. She suspected a combination of the two. In her experience, most people thought far more highly of their skill as parents than they deserved, probably because it was too easy to see children as tools or extensions or as second chances for redemption. Goals rather than people.

“Do we have a deal?” Relos Var asked. “Or shall I point out that I left a mimic watching your daughter and son-in-law? Perhaps we should hurry this up before it grows hungry.”

Caless raised her chin and tried her best to look like every inch the queen she was. “I want all three of them returned.” If Qown still worked for Relos Var, she’d find out quickly and take appropriate action. And if he didn’t, she certainly wasn’t going to leave him in the wizard’s care.

“That can be arranged,” Var told her, “in exchange for the Cornerstone. Do we have a deal?”

She sighed. As if any other outcome were possible. “We do.”