The Storm

“And so the roof should be finished by tonight. Morg’s been putting the color-changing paint into framed sections of the walls to make moving paintings. The effect is quite—ow! Quite nice,” Dominor added, gritting his teeth and striking back, trying to land a blow that would repay, bruise for bruise, his annoyance at letting Rydan through his guard. “You should come see it when it’s finished.”

“I have to, anyway,” Rydan grunted, absorbing some of the blow on his shield before bashing the spell-enforced steel into his brother’s shoulder. “Kelly wants a garden—wall—!”

“Ha! Missed!” Dominor said, twisting away from Rydan’s practice sword, only to grunt as Morganen thwacked him in the back. Dominor rounded on him with a glare that was visible through the grille of his helm. “Hey! We’re not fighting you, you know.”

The four of them were taking their turn in the palace salle, practicing against each other after breakfast. Sometimes they practiced after supper, whenever it was convenient, but Evanor had scheduled an hour for the four of them this morning. The youngest of the brothers grinned and whacked at the thirdborn again.

“Hey, no fair,” Morganen argued, only to have to fight off both Rydan and Evanor. “We’re not supposed to be using magic in here.”

“Dead,” Rydan chided his sibling, stabbing Morganen’s breastplate. The sword didn’t puncture the metal, though it could have, had it been a real weapon and had Rydan used all of his strength. As it was, the blade was nothing more than a piece of pot metal enchanted to leave nothing but bruises. Some mages never bothered to learn how to protect themselves from a physical attack, but even the most powerful of spellcast defenses could be exhausted and overwhelmed if enough bodies were thrown at a spellcaster. “Your left-hand guard is sloppy.”

“I could always rearrange it so you spar with Saber,” Evanor pointed out, lightly smacking the flat of his blade against the back of Morg’s helm. He pointed with his other hand at the hourglass resting on a shelf above the armor rack in the corner. “Two more minutes, and we’re done with this.”

“Dom, regarding your request,” Rydan stated, catching his brother’s attention. Dominor faced him. “You may go to Koral-tai after the house is done. You don’t have to wait until the scheduled trade.”

“Thank you. I’ll let Seri”—he flung up his shield, blocking Rydan’s blow with a clang—“na know. And you’ll have to try harder than that to get past my—”

“Pookrah-pile!” Morganen and Evanor both shouted, whacking at their thirdborn brother while he was distracted, toppling him in a clamor of indignant protests and banging metal.

Their high spirits rubbed at Rydan’s beast. It was a minor irritation, not enough to prevent him from grinning and joining in the roughhousing. Seven days ago, if he had come here to practice instead of skipping a sparring session, he would have fled, his beast rubbed raw and thus sensitive to such teasings . . . but seven days ago, Rora had come to him and convinced him that he wasn’t slowly going insane. That there was a way to control what he had suffered until now.

“This looks nothing like the Font at Koral-tai,” Serina said a few days later, peering at the vaulted arches of the long, broad hall, arches supported by columns carved out of the granite bedrock surrounding them. The house was now finished, and just in time, for the sailor Marcas and his friend had apparently arrived on the island that afternoon, plus some woman who had come for a visit. Rydan was forced to hold to his word, allowing the Arithmancer and his thirdborn brother access to the fastest way to return to Koral-tai, and Serina was clearly ready to take advantage of it.

“I’ll admit I didn’t get a good look at it, the one time I was in here,” Dominor added. “I thought there were channels in the floor, but those are merely carvings outlining where the catch-basin pipes run, before being absorbed into the mountain—and I don’t remember those streams reaching up to the ceiling.”

“Well, you’ll just have to suffer my presence this time around,” Dom chided his younger sibling. “Mariel says morning sickness gets worse with mirror-Gating. Even on the best of aether days, Koral-tai is too far away to Gate there, the Portals aren’t even an option at the moment, and I’m not letting my wife wander off without me to watch over her. If nothing else, I can keep an eye out for vomit in the Fountainway.”

“Don’t be vulgar, dear, or my stomach might think it’s a good idea.” The tall, pale-haired Arithmancer touched some of the markings carved onto the pillars as she passed them. “No, this room is just . . . wrong. At least, compared to Koral-tai. For one thing, it’s far too bright. For another, the room isn’t balanced right. Mathemagically, the Fountain should be in the center of the chamber, not at one end. Of course, if I had a chalkboard on hand and could run some simulations on what these ancient sigils and rune-patterns were for . . .”

Sighing roughly, Serina eyed the pillars wistfully. “I can’t wait until we can re-invoke the Convocation of the Gods. With that kind of political influence, I could get a lot more cooperation out of the mages in the areas where the worst damage from the Shattering struck.”

Dominor grimaced. “Sorry—I guess we forgot to tell you. Kelly’s decided to invoke all of the Gods and Goddesses as our Patron Deities, rather than attempt to evoke a Patron of our own.”

“No, it makes sense,” Serina argued. “With barely more than a dozen people on the island, we don’t have enough faith amassed to create a brand-new deity, but by providing a home for the Gods to reconvene the Convocation, we don’t have to have a massive amount of faith built up to supply Them with the strength to act on our behalf.”

“If it worked for the whole of Aiar, bolstering the power of half a hundred local Gods and Goddesses into a massively powerful nation, it’ll work for an even smaller island,” Rora agreed.

“That’s something else we get to look up, when we get to Koral-tai,” Dom told his brother, nudging his wife away from the pillar she was covertly trying to study. “So if we could get on with it . . . ?”

Sighing, Serina allowed herself to be guided away from the rune-carved columns. Dominor gave his wife a one-handed hug in consolation; the other hand balanced the strap of the pack slung over his shoulder, holding changes of clothing for both of them, and no doubt a few of Serina’s ever-present slates. Rora brought up the rear—until copper gold mist spewed into existence in front of her, blocking her approach. A voice rippled the fog barrier, issuing from its depths.

“It’s a sort of protective spell,” he dismissed, waving off his brother. He addressed the magic directly. “Madam Mist, who do you . . . ?”

Shifting to the side, Serina peered at Rora, then at the fog. It had spread itself between two of the pillars, forming a visual barrier to the younger woman’s progress. “Oh . . . I get it! I can enter, but she—the other ‘she’ referenced—cannot! How clever; it’s some sort of enchantment, obviously, but where . . . ?” Eyeing the columns to either side, Serina tipped her head back, following the rib of one of the arches until she was facing another pillar. From there, she moved toward the Fountain. “Mine at least looks like a Fountain, even if it’s a Font. This one looks like a fancy-tied bow, the kind made from many strings.”

“I’m just tracing the power. I won’t touch anything . . . ah! How interesting,” the Arithmancer stated, and pointed at two of the pipes spewing their ribbons of energy. “These ones here are where the energy originates. A stasis flow, which is the amber one, and a communications stream, the copper one. The latter goes into this catch-basin, yes, but some of it is diverged at the basin, flowing it up and through this decoration here,” Serina continued, pointing at the floor as she followed her previous path back to the source, “which looks like it’s several sigils layered one over the other. And . . . it . . . is triggered by . . . temporal runes?”

“Amazing. Whatever this thing is, I think it may have been set in place by a Seer working in close conjunction with a highly educated mage. Some of the runes are Fortunai, if I’m not mistaken, while others look to be Katani, and I know at least one of those sigils appears to be Draconan in origin. Of course, if the island was abandoned at the Shattering of Aiar, and I’ve heard no rumors of hermits living in permanent exile in this place,” she mused thoughtfully, “then it’s likely the last Guardian was before the Shattering, which means before we lost the great, cross-continental transportation Portals.

Rydan gritted his teeth. It was bad enough Serina had insisted on seeing his Fountain in person, wheedling it out of him, but he would not tolerate her lingering in his sanctum. Luckily Dominor got to her first. Catching her by the shoulders, he gave his wife a gentle shake.

“Set it aside, Serina. That is the Font we’re supposed to be studying, remember?” He pointed in Rora’s direction over his wife’s shoulder. The younger woman was stuck behind the curtain of translucent mist, but her outline could still be seen.

Serina tugged on her braided hair, pouting. “Fine. Spoil my fun. I’ll focus on Rora, I promise. But this apparition only seems to emphasize my belief that it would be dangerous for her energies to combine with those of a second singularity point. And I will study this Font someday.”

“That day is not now,” Rydan told her. A gesture, a pulse of his power, and several of the ribbonlike energies flowed out of their graceful arcs, bending down to almost touch the floor near the base of the Fountain before curving back up again, continuing on to their original drain spouts. Stepping around the Fountain and its petal-like pipes and energy streams, he played his fingers through a different copper-hued stream, one that led off to the unseen east. When he spoke, his voice echoed oddly through the hall . . . much like the female voice that was Madam Mist. “Guardian Naima, are you there?”

Extracting his hand, Rydan held up his arms, swirling his fingers in a binding motion. The deformed ribbons of filtered energy knotted themselves together. Energies blended, stretched, striped, and abruptly swirled. They formed a colorful vortex that glowed white at its center, which seemed to bend in an eye-dizzying way up toward the softly glowing sphere, marking the boundary of the Fountain’s source-point.

A curt gesture waved Dominor and Serina toward the oval tunnel he had created. First Serina, then Dominor stepped into the vortex. Each vanished with a gleaming whoosh of light and sound. A moment later, the ribbon Rydan had touched shifted and roiled.

“They’re both here, and they’re quite safe. Here—they can speak for themselves,” Guardian Naima’s voice reassured him. Rydan extracted his fingers from the misting magic so that he could unbind the energies used to create the Fountainway tunnel.

Serina spoke first. “Wow—I thought for certain I’d feel nauseated to pieces, traveling through the Fontway. But no, I feel perfectly fine! Not a speck of morning sickness. Hey, it might be it’s because of the Permanent Magic I’m currently working on; our baby was conceived in the heart of this Font, after all.”

“Focus, woman.” Dominor’s voice came through, chiding his wife as Rydan sent the streams of energies back into their normal arcs. “We’ll grab a few texts tonight and get a head start. Serina thinks she can remember the general section of the Archives wherein she glanced through the information on Fountains being carried around by living hosts, so we’ll start there. With luck, we’ll be back in time for the party.”

“Party?” Rora asked. She was still blocked from getting physically close to the Fountain by the wall of mist that had sprung into being, but it didn’t block the sounds the others were making. “What party is that?”

“Rora wishes to know ‘what party’, as do I,” Rydan relayed, fingers brushing through the rippling ribbon of communication magic once again.

“It’s your citizenship party. Kelly’s decided that citizenship takes a declared intent to stay and settle on the Isle, an oath of citizenship, and a ten-day minimum waiting period. Amara has already stated her intent to stay, so there’s just Rora’s declaration, and two more days of waiting. Kelly’s planning a party to welcome you to the family.”

“My sister has agreed to stay?” Rora inquired dubiously. “To become a citizen, of her own free will? Mother Earth, what have I been missing by staying up all night?”

“I will set the wards to alert me instantly, should you find anything worth sharing. Go and start your task,” Rydan directed his brother and sister-in-law. “And . . . good night.”

“Civility from my brother? Has the Third Moon resurrected itself?” Dominor’s voice quipped, only to be followed by a reverberating, “Ow!”

“Actually, that was me. I will not tolerate blasphemy in my presence, even if it involves someone else’s Patron Deities,” Guardian Naima stated quellingly. “Good night, Guardian Rydan.”

Extracting his hand, Rydan checked the Fountain to make sure it had been returned to normal. Serina was right; it did look like a fancifully tied ribbon. Or perhaps the blossoming flower that Rora had compared his emotions to, when she had Seen him during a moment of amusement two days ago. Satisfied it was safe, he retreated from the pipes and ribbons. Stepping around the mist-blocked pillars, Rydan rejoined Rora, who gave the wall of mist a last look before turning to join him in walking away.

“I do hope they can find the right information. I’ve waited all my life to find out what I am, and I know I can wait at least a few more days with patience, but I don’t know if I could wait a few more years,” she said.

“My brother is tenacious when he wants something. Serina will hunt down anything that interests her with equal fervor,” he told her. “Together, they will succeed. There is no other conclusion.”

“If you say so,” Rora agreed. “So, what now? The house has been built, work on the rest of the city won’t be quite as urgent, and we have to wait for Dom and Serina to uncover something useful. What shall we do while we wait?”

Catching her elbow, Rydan swung her around to face him. Deliberately, he took a half step forward, bumping their torsos together; they had stopped just within the last set of pillars lining the Fountain Hall, not far from the corridor that led to his underground quarters. Black-clad chest to green-covered breasts, he let himself radiate his desire for her, waiting for her to See it and hopefully act upon it.

“What? Oh, no, I wasn’t. Sorry.” Double-blinking, she concentrated, shifting her vision. Yellow annoyance tinged the edges of his aura, but the veils of his emotions quickly flushed with purplish red desire and violet blue longing. They formed tendrils that brushed her face, particularly her mouth, which was where he was gazing. Blinking it away again, Rora quirked her eyebrow. “You would like to kiss me?”

Rora yelped, startled. Rydan loosened his grip a little, twisting to face the source of Madam Mist’s abrupt, echoing voice. Copper gold fog had risen between the two nearest pillars. The mist almost brushed his elbow, it was that close.

“What?” There was no face, no body in the roiling of the sound-disturbed mist, but Rydan felt her disapproval. Expecting a rhyme from the fog, he blinked as she continued in plain speech.

“I have invested too much effort to allow a moment of untimely lust to cloud your good judgment. Patience,” Madam Mist repeated, “is a virtue.”

Rydan shook his head. He didn’t know what was going on, other than that he apparently wasn’t supposed to kiss her. The disappointment that ran through him left a sour taste in his mouth and irritated his beast. Struggling to master his mood, he let go of Rora. Frowning at the now empty air, she tucked her arms around his elbow, then stuck out her tongue.

“I’m not giving him up! Do you hear me?” she asked loudly enough for her voice to echo through the Hall. “I really like him, and he likes me. Whatever you are, you have no say in that! Only we do . . . right?” she asked, glancing up at him as she lowered her voice.

He didn’t answer for a moment. The emotion her words stirred made his beast ache, but in an unfamiliar way. Rydan set aside his confusion as her confidence faltered. Pressing a soft, brief kiss to her lips, he rested his forehead against hers. “Yes. I like you.”

Her smile was eclipsed by the rush of warmth his words stirred. Rydan closed his eyes, basking in the feeling. Leaning in closer, he touched his mouth to hers again, wanting to return some of those feelings.

Irritated, Rydan flipped his hand up in a rude gesture. He kissed Rora a little longer, but his conscience nagged at him. Madam Mist was right; he shouldn’t let his emotions and needs overcome his common sense. Ending the kiss, he exhaled roughly, resting his brow once more against hers. His forehead tingled from the contained force of her magic.

Rora cupped his cheek, knowing he could feel her silent sympathy and her own frustration. Covering her hand with his, he pressed it to his face, then shifted enough to give her palm a kiss before stepping back. He kept ahold of her hand, but put some mind-clearing distance between them.

“We need something to occupy our time while we wait for Dominor and Serina to figure out what we can do with you. Something platonic,” he added, resigned but not happy about it.

“Well, there’s always enchanting more buildings,” Rora offered. “Though that runs the risk of waking the newcomers who apparently arrived earlier today. But it’s after supper, so it’s probably too late to visit anyone, and that means it’s too late to be force-growing stone frames.”

Tipping his head back, Rydan studied the suncrystals. “It is getting late,” he agreed, gauging the time by the brightness of the crystals embedded in the ceiling. “But we can work inside sound-dampening wards. Come. We’ll shadow-walk to the harbor. Working on the city will be a productive distraction, and more useful than carving mindless pictures into stone.”

“But I like your pictures,” Rora said, earning her a bemused look. “I don’t think they’re mindless at all. They’re very expressive and lyrical—they make me want to visit the places you’ve carved.”

“But that’s not true. Down in the river passage?” she offered in example. “The carvings on the lower gallery walls look like the port city of Alasia, in Amazai. It has three domed towers that are very distinctive, viewed from the harbor, and the perspetive is from the harbor. I remember seeing it as we left Aiar, the day we set sail for Fortuna.

“And the upper balcony, I’d swear that was a view of the village of Five Springs in the kingdom of Mornai. I haven’t seen it from the cliff overlooking the river valley for almost a decade, but there do seem to be enough streams meandering through the image to match up with what I can remember. We kept passing those sections on our way out to the marble vein and back, so I have had more than a few chances to study the murals,” Rora reminded him.

“Perhaps they have a superficial resemblance, but not the others,” Rydan argued. “At least one of those cities is underwater. If that is a real place, you would think that someone would have heard of it by now, for it would take a great deal of magic to sustain, and who knows how they’d sow and harvest crops, underwater. You should remember that one, since that’s where you found me, the second time you visited me. And there are images of war, of women and children being hunted by guardsmen on horseback, of unspeakable evils being done in horrible places . . . which I carved.”

Mindful of his rising agitation, Rydan took a moment to breathe deeply and calm his beast. They were still within the Fountain Hall, after all. He shook his head.

“For those latter ones alone, I pray to the Gods they’re not real. Such torments should not exist. That I should carve them disturbs me.”

“I may strive to be perennially cheerful, but I am aware that evil does exist. And it is not evil to record that such things happen. It is only evil to do them,” she stated with conviction. “You do not actually do those things, therefore you are not evil.”

“Why do judges have court scribes who write out the details from a case of murder or rape? Why record such evils?” she challenged him softly. “It’s so that we do not forget, so that we remain vigilant for the signs of such things in the future. You are probably the most heavily affected by the evils and agonies of the world, because of your sensitivity. Something inside of you wants to make sure that no one else forgets—that’s all.”

Rora wrapped her arms around him, hugging him as he bowed his head. A stray thought flitted through his head. Rydan almost kept it to himself, since it was partly an uncomfortable thought, but the woman in his arms deserved to hear it. “You . . . seem to understand me better than my own twin. Or at least tolerate me more.”

That made her chuckle and squeeze him. “In some ways, you understand me better than my twin does. Or at least believe in me more. But never doubt that Trevan loves you. As do the rest of your brothers. They do more than just ‘tolerate’ you.”

Caught off guard, Rydan laughed. Hugging her close, he kissed the top of her head. Then, mindful of Madam Mist’s interference, he shifted from hugging her to merely holding her hand. “Come. We have plenty of work to do while we wait for news from Koral-tai.”

“Madam Mist wishes us to work, rather than to play. I would like to know why,” he muttered, glaring at the pillars and the spaces between them, “but until then, we should fill our time with work . . . unless you wish to tell us, Madam?”

The air remained quiescent. If Madam Mist knew, or had known, she wasn’t sharing it right now. He owed her, though; the mysterious voice had guided him into being the Guardian of the Nightfall Fountain. If she wanted him to remain in ignorance for now, he would. Sighing roughly, Rydan led Rora out of the Hall.