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Thadred
“You’re not what I expected a sorceress to be like,” Thadred said, shivering with a wet blanket pulled around his shoulders.
“And what was that?” Sairydwen clipped, her eyes daring him to continue.
“Well.” He almost said prettier, then thought better of it. He looked her over. The pair of them hunched under a stone ledge jutting near the base of a small cliff.
Her hair clung to her in wet strands, flat against her pale neck and her grey wool dress was heavy and weighed with rain against her chest. White streaked her hair with silver, but she wasn’t that old, was she?
Despite that, it wasn’t her appearance that had surprised him the most.
“Sorceresses aren’t supposed to sit shivering in the rain like sad little mice.” Thadred glanced up at the rain, still falling hard as it had been for at least two hours since dawn.
Their mules stood a few paces off, tied to a tree branch. Sairydwen had oilcloth covers for the animals, enough to keep the saddles and gear dry, but not enough for their riders.
So Thadred and Sairydwen, unable to find a suitable cave, had been left to shiver under a pathetic excuse of a ledge.
The cold rain made the ropes on Thadred’s wrists swell and the knots tighten. It would take a knife to get them off after this. They’d already chafed red rings and he wondered if the newly forming sores might become infected.
He’d mentioned it to Sairydwen, but she’d dismissed him with a snort and told him he would be fine. Not that he had expected her to be truly concerned.
“Can’t you make this rain stop?” Thadred asked.
Sairydwen rolled her eyes. “I’m a sorceress, not a goddess.”
“Sorry, I thought that was the same thing.”
“Can the princess make the rain stop at will?” Sairydwen asked.
It took Thadred a moment to realize she meant Amira. He hadn’t thought of her as a princess...well, ever, really.
“I thought you were more powerful than her,” he quipped back.
“I’m not.” The sorceress’s blunt honesty caught him off guard.
“But you bested her,” Thadred pointed out. He’d heard the crash and Amira’s cry of pain.
“That means nothing,” the sorceress replied. “I know how to use my power. She hasn’t even scratched the surface of hers.”
Thadred arched one eyebrow. He was a little surprised Sairydwen was telling him this.
She continued. “Magic is what happens when ka is harnessed and channeled for a specific purpose,” Sairydwen said. “The symbols, sigils, spells, potions, and all of that, they have no magic, just as ka has no magic. When a sorceress binds ka in the right way, it produces a result and we call that magic.”
Thadred pursed his lips, thinking. He’d never had much interest in sorcery, mostly because he couldn’t use it. It had always seemed a waste of time. As a boy, he had tried to learn, but had never even sensed magic.
The other young Kadra’han in the palace had mocked him for it, though most of them could do little more than sense ka. It made for useful guards and scouts, but not much else. They’d hated him for having a title, having a family, such as it was. And they had been merciless.
Once, a group of boys with some minor ability to weave spells had jumped him after supper in the barracks. Three of them working together had managed to use his own ka to trip and bind him to the floor, wrapped up like an insect in a spider’s web. He’d stayed that way for hours until the servants found him, and Captain Darrigan had to personally unknot the spells.
After that, Taylan—who was the closest either Dain or Thadred had to a father—had arranged for the acquisition of a ring that prevented Thadred’s own ka from being drawn off by a sorcerer. He hadn’t had trouble with sorcerers using their spells on him again until today.
“Princess Amira has a great deal of power—a great deal indeed. But her understanding of how to use it is elementary at best. A few primitive incantations.” Sairydwen shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I have little magic, but even the most low-level spells can do a great deal of damage if wielded properly. In this way, magic is less about natural ability and more about ingenuity.”
Thadred pulled his arms closer against his body as thunder rumbled in the distance. The rain had begun to let up.
“You will learn this,” Sairydwen said, “when you get your own magic back and begin learning.”
She might as well have said when you get your legs back.
Thadred shot her a sideways look, teeth grinding. “What are you talking about?”
Sairydwen folded her arms closer around herself, watching as the mules stomped their hooves and shifted. “There is much that will be possible after we break your curse.”
Thadred blinked at her. “That’s impossible.”
He’d seen a Kadra’han’s curse broken once before. Amira had defied Daindreth’s order, but had done it in order to save him. Her defiance had forced the curse to attack itself as its warring halves—rewarding service and punishing disobedience—were pitted against each other. That had nearly killed Amira, but in the end, she had emerged alive, freed from the curse of the Kadra’han, and stronger, far stronger. Her power still grew every day.
But Thadred wasn’t Amira. She had been born with magical ability. She came from a long line of sorceresses. Magic obeyed her in ways it might as well have not existed for him. He and Amira were as different as a pheasant and a falcon.
“Every curse can be broken,” Sairydwen said, quoting the old adage Amira had repeated so many times since they had set out to rid Dain of Caa Iss.
“And all magic has a price,” Thadred clipped back.
Sairydwen straightened, looking into the trees. “It does,” she confirmed. “But better to pay that price and live free than grovel on your knees before a tyrant.”
Around them, the rain slowed to a trickle and then a sprinkle. The storm was passing.
“Dain isn’t a tyrant.”
“No?” Sairydwen shot him a glare. “Those who speak against the imperial family can be executed anywhere in the empire. Thieving from the imperial coffers costs thieves a hand. If a man falls behind on taxes, he forfeits all his family’s possessions.”
Thadred wasn’t sure what she was getting at, but he wasn’t in the mood to hear his captor regale the obvious. “Things are that way in every country, wherever you go.”
“Then perhaps this world is full of tyrants,” Sairydwen said in a tone that made it hard to tell if she was speaking to herself or to him. “Perhaps one day, we will find what it’s like to be led by benefactors instead of slavers.”
“We will. Once Dain is emperor.”
Sairydwen cast him a caustic smile. “You honestly believe that. Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
The rain lessened until there was just the occasional patter on leaves beyond their small hiding place. Thunder continued to rumble far in the distance as the storm receded.
Thadred wondered how long they could expect before the next one came along to soak them all over again. He’d spent most of this trip cold, wet, and tired and he was beginning to hate this tiny northern kingdom. What right did it have to be this miserable?
He couldn’t believe people lived here on purpose.
“Get up.” Sairydwen stood, watching the sky through the leaves overhead. “Come.”
Thadred groaned as he obeyed. “What if I fought you right now? Would you torture me until I obeyed?”
With his bound and unarmed hands against Sairydwen’s considerable repertoire of skills, he didn’t expect to best her. All the same, he could make life very inconvenient for her.
Sairydwen’s nostrils flared. “You can mount that mule, or I will drag you behind it. Your choice.”
Thadred’s leg throbbed. He was already cold, stiff, and sore from riding in the freezing in the rain. A sharp ache had settled into his hip and upper thigh, throbbing and burning.
Thadred studied the sorceress, wondering if she really would drag him behind the mule. It didn’t take him long to decide that yes, she would.
Even with Thadred’s compliance, it still took a few minutes for them to get him back in the saddle. Everything hurt.
Thadred let off a choked cry of pain as he crawled aboard the mule’s back, hunched over and breathing heavily. His entire side felt as if it were being stabbed with hot irons. “Son of a flea-bitten tramp,” he swore, gripping the pommel of the mule’s saddle. “Son of a half-dog whore.”
Sairydwen glanced to his injured hip, eyes narrowing as if she could see beneath his trousers and skin, straight to the mangled bones.
“What are you looking at, witch?” Thadred growled, his usual charm washed away by pain.
Her hand rested on his thigh, and he flinched. He’d never been particularly shy, and gods knew other woman had done far bolder things to him, but this woman was different. Cold and mildly predatory. It was like being touched by a snake.
“Your bones were poorly set,” she said. “If you were a woman, that break would have made you sterile.”
Thadred wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he wasn’t particularly interested. “Of course they were poorly set,” he spat back. “Have you ever tried resetting a broken pelvis?”
Sairydwen cocked her head to the side. “The damage was...extensive.”
“You’re telling me.”
Sairydwen dropped her hand. “Short of shattering it again and possibly killing you, I don’t see what we could do for it.”
Thadred hadn’t realized he’d had hope for healing until Sairydwen snatched it away. Istovari could break a Kadra’han’s curse somehow, but not heal a few broken bones. He glared at the mule’s ears and the forest beyond.
“What’s all this talk of breaking my curse and healing me? I thought I was a hostage.” Come to think of it, Sairydwen had mentioned teaching him about magic, too.
Sairydwen turned and moved toward her own mule. “You’re a man,” she said, as if that were an explanation unto itself.
“And your people are short of those at the moment?”
“Yes, as it so happens,” Sairydwen clipped back. She swung aboard her own mule, reins in her hands. “Most of our men gave their lives in the war.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t have sent them to die in it,” Thadred snapped.
Everyone had heard the stories of how the sorceresses had sent their sons, husbands, and brothers to die against the armies of the empire. When the final tower had been raided and the sorceresses ousted, the Erymayan army had found the bodies of dozens of men with their wrists cut—willingly, by all appearances.
Now Thadred knew that there had been a girl among them, too—Amira—though she had not been quite dead. And that had all been the cost for infecting Emperor Drystan with Caa Iss.
Sairydwen kept her back to him. “They gave their lives willingly,” she said with a short and final tone.
“Something tells me you’re not used to men talking back, are you?” Thadred challenged, spine straightening. He had a talent for getting under people’s skin, but this sorceress made things easy.
“Men should do as they’re told.” Sairydwen snapped the reins of his mule, jerking the animal forward.
“There are some places they say that of women,” Thadred snarled back.
Sairydwen spun a glare on him. “We are not there. We are in the lands of Istovar and in the lands of Istovar, you will learn your place.”
“Or what?” Thadred snapped. “What will happen?”
Sairydwen hunched her shoulders. She pulled the hood of her cloak up, but it stuck to her like a second skin, plastered against her head by the rain.
“You Istovari might have decided that you’re better than everyone,” Thadred grumbled, “but that doesn’t mean you are. Men run most of the world.”
“And how’s that working out for the world?” Sairydwen’s question met him with the weight of a lifetime’s skepticism.
“Why you don’t live in the empire, then?” Thadred countered. “Vesha has kept control there for more than a decade and the land prospers.”
“Does it?” Sairydwen asked. She tilted her head back to the grey sheet of sky.
“Last I checked.” Thadred shifted and grimaced at the pain in his hip.
“We’ll see how long that lasts,” Sair said.
“Look, I have my own issues with Vesha, but Dain is a good man. He’ll be a good emperor, a great one, even. You people all fear the day he’ll come into power, but the truth is that the empire could do worse. He’s honorable to a fault and braver than ten of me combined. He might be an idealistic idiot, but he’s a kind and honorable idiot.”
Sair’s nostrils flared. “You sound so eager to return to slavery.”
“Dain is not a slave master! How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“You don’t know,” Sairydwen said, shaking her head. “You don’t know anything.”
“Then enlighten me, your ladyship,” he sneered. “What do I not know?”
“Your heritage, your birthright. Damn it all, you don’t know the first thing about who you are, who we are, do you?”
Thadred’s chest seemed to turn into a block of stone. Everything went hard and heavy all at once. “I know exactly who I am. I’m the bastard son of an unknown northerner and some noblewoman who abandoned me at birth.”
Hearing Sairydwen’s words, he could almost imagine that these unknown Istovari mothers were his mother. He imagined her sending Sairydwen to make this offer, expecting him to be grateful when she should be the one groveling for forgiveness.
No one could expect to abandon him for his entire life and then welcome him with open arms when it suited them. If he really was so precious to the Istovari, they shouldn’t have waited until now to find him.
Cast off, discarded, used. Thadred was all of those things and more, and at the same time, less.
Even the many women who warmed his bed never stayed for long. When it was over, they all left him for better prospects. Some of them did it tearfully and under coercion from their parents and guardians, but they all did it just the same. They left him like everyone else, except Dain.
Dain had been his brother, his best friend, for as long as he could remember. Even without the Kadra’han’s oaths, he would have sworn loyalty to his cousin a thousand times over.
If Sairydwen thought she could bribe him with vague allusions to the father who had abandoned him and a power he could never have, she would find he wasn’t so easily fooled.
“You’re lost,” Sairydwen said simply. “That’s all. Just lost.”
“Lost?” Thadred blinked at Sairydwen’s back, wondering if she could hear herself. “If I’m lost, it’s because you don’t know the roads. As you’ll recall, you abducted me. I’m not a stray kitten or a wandering calf. I’m a knight and a man sworn to serve the archduke.”
“You’re more than that,” Sairydwen said. “So much more.”
“What if I don’t want to be more?” For his whole life, Thadred had been told who he was—a bastard and the by-product of a noblewoman’s indiscretion. Then he had been a ward of the court and playmate to the archduke before being told he would be Dain’s knight and a Kadra’han.
There had been no choice in any of that. The only real choice Thadred ever had was which noblewomen he would charm into his own indiscretions on his own time. It might have been hypocritical, but he’d fathered no bastards to the best of his knowledge. He’d taken precautions against that or made sure his lovers did.
Hearing Sairydwen decide that he was going to be an Istovari sounded a lot like hearing Vesha decide he was going to be Dain’s knight. Thadred was tired of other people deciding for him.
“You are more,” Sairydwen replied, still not turning around. “What you want makes no difference.”
Thadred seethed. “What do you want with me, sorceress?”
Sairydwen was quiet.
“I asked you what you want with me! Am I to be a slave? Surely you and your sisters are not so lonely for male companionship as all this. Though if they’re all like you, I’d be surprised that any man would—”
“You will be sent to the Elder Mother,” Sairydwen said. “If she is able to break your curse, she will. Either way, she will decide your fate.”
Thadred swore at Sairydwen’s back. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”
Sairydwen remained silent and didn’t respond to any of Thadred’s prodding after that.
