“Maybe that’s a riderless dragon roaring. Or could it be Yar returning?” Lonen asked her, unstrapping the battle axe from his back.
“I don’t think it’s either.” She didn’t sense Yar anywhere near the city. But that densely powerful black sun her sgath revealed was familiar. She hadn’t been skilled enough before to get so much detail about their magical signature, but she recognized them just the same. “Yar may be behind this, however. They have not returned since you left, but I think the Trom are here now.”
“They are here, yes.” Chuffta’s mind voice shivered with trepidation. Very little frightened the derkesthai, but his larger cousins certainly seemed to.
“The High Priestess,” Priest Vico said, fear leaking through the hwil. “Febe would have summoned them, rather than give you the crown.”
Oria stared at him in stunned surprise. “She is the summoner?”
His mask bobbed. “She and Yar both, as priest and priestess. I, myself, do not possess enough grien for the task She worked with him to do it.”
“You could have warned me.” Anger burned in her. Along with the terror. The feeling of that thing touching her. Those matte black eyes staring into her heart and finding a mirroring darkness. Princess Ponen.
“I wanted to, but we were sworn to tell only the king or queen. Since you’re effectively queen now…” he trailed off, voice weakening.
Wonderful. Oria spun to the doors, hissing when Lonen brushed the skin of her hand before he clamped his own on her forearm over her sleeve. “Sorry for that. Clumsy of me, but you’re not racing out there.”
She struggled back the near overwhelming surge of his emotional energy that the brief touch sent rocketing through her nervous system. An intense stew of terror, love, battle rage, despair, determination, hope, and more than she could sort even with the luxury of hours, not moments.
“What choice do I have?” She tried to pull away, but he held on, his touch burning through the layers of silk. “You’re hurting me.”
He let go, but moved his big body between her and the doorway. “I’m not letting you confront those creatures.”
“You know what they’ll do! You’ve seen it with your own eyes. I can’t let them kill my people just to get to me.” All those piles of lifeless flesh… she couldn’t bear for it to happen again.
“How do you know they won’t kill you too?” Lonen shimmered large in her sgath, full of furious frustration.
“They won’t. Or can’t. You saw that too. I’m something to them. I don’t know what, but they won’t kill me. I have to confront them.”
He seethed with conflict, the image slamming into her of him picking her up and carrying her off to some safe bower. “If you’re going, I go with you.”
“Lonen—they can kill you. Don’t make me stand by while you’re turned nothing but boneless heap before my eyes.”
“I won’t attack. They don’t kill if we show no aggression.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Just as you can’t be sure that they won’t kill you this time.”
Stymied, she fumed at him. “Please stay here. I’m asking this of you.”
“No. I said that you don’t leave my side and I meant it.” He touched her masked cheek and managed a lopsided smile. “At least this keeps the priest’s knife away from my jewels a little longer.”
She shook her head, amazed he’d made her laugh under such dire circumstances. “I can’t believe you were going to let him do that in the first place.”
“Nothing gets between me and a goal. I told you that.”
Yes, he had. And what Lonen said, he meant—and made happen. She could use that.
“Then remember this,” she said, leaning as close to him as she dared, keeping his full attention. “You’ve said over and over that you’re going to find a way to bed me.”
Desire rode high in his gamut of emotional energy, though he responded evenly enough. “What are you getting at?”
“You’d better keep that in mind, because that’s a goal and if you let the Trom kill you, it’ll never happen. Think on that.”
His stunned and grudgingly admiring amusement did a great deal to take the edge off her nerves. She began to understand why he enjoyed teasing her. He kept himself in front of her as she walked, a pace ahead with his signature big, bold strides as they hurried out the front doors of the temple. He carried his battle-axe two-handed, a black hole of a barrier before her.
“Leave the axe behind,” she urged.
He didn’t hitch even momentarily, but his incredulity swamped her. “Not even if Arill Herself asked me.”
She had to run to do it—Chuffta half spreading his wings to keep balance on her shoulder—but she managed to draw level with him, grabbing onto his leather-clad arm, glad of his thicker Destrye clothes that buffered some of the impact from her impetuous move. He glanced down at her in some surprise, all of him softening, and he slowed somewhat. “Don’t fret. I learned my lesson, too. As long as I’m not aggressive towards it, I should be fine.”
“Last time you insisted that I put down my sword!”
“Because you could hardly lift the cursed thing,” he retorted grimly. “I don’t know what in Arill you were thinking. If we survive all this, I’m going to teach you to use a weapon your own size.”
“I don’t need a weapon. I’m a sorceress. Magic is all I need.”
“Then this would be an excellent time to use it.” He came to a halt, swiftly sheathing his axe on his back. Not one, but three Trom stood at the bridge to the temple. The sight of them turned her stomach, their magic like Chuffta’s, but as much greater in intensity as the dragons were to him in size, nearly blinding her sgath with the radiance of it.
She’d been too mind-blind to see it before, their charismatic immensity. To the physical eye, they looked like desiccated husks of humans, skin as dry as old leaves stretched over bones, like corpses left to dry in the desert. As if to make up for all they lacked in robust humanity, concentrated magic filled them out on the non-physical plane. It extended inward also, each of them seeming to carry a black star of contained power and paradoxically infinite magic.
It made them hard to look at, the way their magic moved both out and in, as if they existed in multiple places at once, giving her a vague sense of nausea and dislocation.
“I did not see it before, either, but I do through you now. Most … disconcerting.”
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing good.”
“Steady, Oria,” Lonen said as she swayed on her feet, briefly cupping the back of her head over her braids. A fleeting touch that nevertheless heartened her. “I’m taking cues from you now.”
Of course he handed her the decision-making power when she had no idea what to do. The Trom saved her from deciding, however.
“Queen Ponen,” the one in front greeted her with its mouthless voice that emanated from its entire being. “It gladdens us to see you’ve taken not one, but several steps farther down your path.”
She hated to contemplate what that might mean. “Bára greets you. We did not expect you to return.”
The Trom couldn’t smile, of course, and yet it seemed to. Much in the same way that expressions sometimes conveyed themselves from the masked priests and priestesses. She suppressed a shudder and Lonen shifted towards her, his desire to wrap her in his arms palpable. It helped, oddly enough.
“We come when summoned. Though it’s true it was not your call we answered. Someday you will call to us and your understanding will deepen.”
No doubt that day would come—had to, if she planned to wrest control of them from Yar and Febe—but she dreaded discovering what that deeper understanding boded for her. No sign of either of those summoners, cowards that they were, so she took the situation in hand. “None stands here who summoned you, so you may leave again.”
They didn’t move. “You do not yet command our obedience,” the leader replied, just as it had when they met before. If it was, indeed, the same being. Difficult to discern.
Silence whistled through the chasm, a hot wind kicking up a swirl of sand on stone. Lonen’s desperate curiosity to know what the Trom said reminded her that they spoke a language he didn’t know but she somehow understood.
“Mind to mind,” Chuffta said.
Ah, yes.
“We will see the one who summoned us, as required.” The Trom spoke as if observing the weather, without inflection.
Much as she disliked Febe, Oria couldn’t stomach watching her turned to pulp by the Trom, nor did she wish to hand power to the High Priestess in case the dread guardians would respond to her commands.
“The priest you seek is not within the city,” she replied, willing the honesty of that to suffice to convince them to leave.
“But I am.” Febe stepped before them, her sgath shivering with her temerity, her hwil strained. Both afraid and tremulously delighted with herself. “As Summoner, I invite you to enter the temple.”
Lonen swore at that, able to understand those ritual words from the previous ceremonies, though he did not draw his axe, his hands clenching into fists and rage going black. “Stay behind me, Oria.”
And watch him die? Never. She didn’t move, staying right beside him as the three Trom crossed. “Summoner,” the lead Trom greeted the high priestess. “What do you require of us?”
“Kill this one.” Febe pointed at Oria.