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It had been months and months since any of them had felt that seductive brush of magic across their souls. He missed it. He wondered whether they would ever get it back. Kallista said they would, but when?
Stone was moving, doing something where he knelt, but Fox couldn’t tell what it was. “Learning to dance on your knees like the horse tribes?” he asked.
“Digging a path out of this hole you’ve buried us in.” Stone’s voice sounded sharp, on edge. The women didn’t seem to notice, but Fox had been partnered with Stone for almost twenty years. Since they’d entered Warrior Caste training at six. He knew the man’s nuances.
Carefully, Fox rose to his feet and walked toward the cave entrance where he sat down with his back to the drifted snow. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re going to be sitting in snowmelt in another five ticks if you don’t move.”
Fox shifted a pace away and waited, wishing this knowing of his let him know more than mere presence or motion. He wanted to see Stone’s face, his expression. “Well?” he finally had to prompt.
“We’re running low on supplies.” Stone kept his voice quiet as he continued digging. “There’s enough for the adults for about a week yet, but milk for the babies—they’re too young to be able to eat our food, Merinda says, even were it chewed for them. They could do it for a bit, in an emergency, but not for long.”
Fox’s arms tightened around the little bodies snuggled in against his chest. “We have to find more. A cow. Something.”
“How, if the snow doesn’t stop?”
“We’ll find a way. I will not let our children die.” The fervor in his own voice surprised Fox.
Children had little value in Tibre, until the males joined their castes at six. Women had no caste save the one that they served, so girl children were worth even less. In Tibre, children belonged to the caste, to no one. These tiny girls were his. His and the rest of the ilian’s. That made all the difference in the world.
A gust of icy wind announced that Stone had broken through the layered snow. “Still snowing,” he said.
“How thick is the snow cover?”
“Maybe two paces. Not bad.” Stone moved a short distance away, then returned and laid something over the fresh opening that blocked the wind a bit. Fox touched it; a saddle blanket. Stone laid another atop the first.
Fox was about to rise and head back nearer the fire when Stone sat on the cold cave floor beside him. Apparently in the snowmelt he’d warned Fox against, for he swore and moved to Fox’s other side.
“So, is Merinda ilias? Like the rest of us?” Stone asked in a voice quieter than any Fox had heard from him.
“I—” The question tumbled Fox’s thoughts into a stinking pile. “What do you think?” Maybe if he played for time he could dredge an answer from his memory.
“I don’t know. You were there when it happened, right before we left. You heard what Kallista said when she gave her the bracelet.”
“Ilian together,” Fox quoted. “But that’s not what she said—what any of us said—the night you all married me. Was it the same before?”
As one of the original four in their ilian, Stone had been through the ceremony three times, once when the ilian was formed, once when Obed joined them and once for Fox. “Those were all the same. Not like with her. So I’m asking. Is it just to help look after Lorynda and Rozite, or is it—?”
“You want to have sex with her?”
“Khralsh.” Stone swore by the warrior face of the One they all worshipped. “It’s the other way round. You can’t see the way she’s always touching me, or the looks she gives me. She says we’re ilian now, that I don’t have to be—uncomfortable, she said. You know how long it’s been, what with Kallista so soon after her time and Aisse so near hers and the magic gone besides. It wouldn’t be a problem, except Merinda’s always…there.”
“And you never were one to turn down sex.” Fox grinned. “I wish I could see it. Stone Varyl, vo’Tsekrish, evading a woman’s advances like some—some girl before her rites.”
Stone clouted him openhanded on the back of his head, gently, because of the babies. Otherwise he’d have dealt him a blow hard enough to lay him flat. All in fun, of course. “You’re just jealous she’s not chasing you.”
“Damaged goods.” Fox couldn’t blame her. What woman wanted a man cursed with blindness?
Stone snorted in derision. “I think she’s more afraid Aisse would have her head if she tried.”
“Aisse?” He went still, as one of the babies twitched in her sleep then settled again. “Not that she couldn’t do it, but why would she want to?”
“Beside the fact you sired the child in her belly? She favors you. Over all of us.”
Fox choked off his laugh. “Small favor. Just because she will consent on rare occasions to actually speak to me as well as point and order.”
“See? Favor. So what do I do about Merinda? Is she ilias?”
Fox sighed. “I don’t know, and there’s no one to ask who does, with all of us here born Tibran.”
“Except Merinda.” Stone’s sigh was a longer echo of Fox’s. “I won’t betray my ilian.”
“No.” His brodir’s loyalty was never in doubt. Once given, it remained. Fox took another deep breath. “Ilian together, Kallista said.”
“And Torchay.”
“So.” Fox moved a tiny hand that was digging tiny furrows in his skin with tiny fingernails. “All we can do is assume that means what it says. We are ilian together, in all ways. If you want what she offers, take it.”
Stone remained where he sat. “I wish Kallista were here.”
“So do I. But since she’s not, we can only muddle through as best we can.” He froze. “There’s something outside.”
Stone scrambled for weapons as Fox stretched his peculiar sense in a desperate attempt to discover what it was. Rozite squalled when Merinda plucked her from inside Fox’s shirt but quieted once she was placed against Aisse’s warmth.
“Not human,” Fox said, relinquishing Lorynda to the healer. “Large. A deer, perhaps. We hunt.”
“In the storm?” Stone asked as he handed Fox a quiver of arrows and a spear.
“I can find our way back,” he said with a confidence he did not quite possess. “The babies might not like the blood, but it will feed them, will it not?”
Stone merely moved aside the blankets from the entrance and ducked through it.
CHAPTER TWO
The new path General Uskenda took led Kallista and her men around the bulk of the palace, along the broad surrounding avenues where trees planted decades ago for beauty were being cut down to recreate the defensive space. On the downhill side east of the palace, they passed through an iron gate in a high wall. Kallista felt the tingle of barrier magic as they crossed into a quiet garden where invalids wrapped in thick dressing gowns basked in the pale spring sunlight while they sat on scattered benches. Beyond the garden rose a tall sprawling building, Arikon’s main healing center.
Uskenda led them inside and cut sharply right, taking them up a wide stairway to the third floor. She strode down the long corridor that turned left, then right again before she rapped on a door and entered.
A man with bandages wrapping every visible part of him—head, arms, torso—struggled to rise from the bed where he lay.
“No, no, Sergeant. Don’t get up.” Uskenda motioned him back, and he subsided to a seated position, adjusting the blanket over the smallclothes that were apparently his only garment.
“How is she?”
“The same. They’re keeping her under for fear of what might happen when she knows—” The injured man broke off, voice thick with emotion.
Kallista knew him, knew his face, his voice, but she couldn’t place who he was.
“Miray.” Torchay stepped forward, knelt and carefully took the man’s hand in his. The pieces fell into place for Kallista.
This was a naitan’s space, with an outer and an inner room. Miray was bodyguard to a young naitan who had served with them in the Kishkim swamp campaign five years ago. Kallandra had the same lightning magic as Kallista, so that was the only time they’d served together, but Kallista had liked the young woman. She believed they had moved beyond fellow naitani to comrades. Perhaps even friends.
Kallista glanced at the general and found her looking back, her expression even more grim. What now? Hadn’t she suffered enough shocks today? But Uskenda showed no sign of relenting from whatever her purpose might be.
“Might we look in on her?” Uskenda paid the bodyguard the courtesy of asking permission, though in his condition he could do little to stop them, did he want to. “Just the naitan and myself, to keep from disturbing her.”
Miray turned his face away, releasing Torchay’s hand. “Deep as they’ve got her dreaming, nothing short of hell opening would disturb her. And even that might not.”
“I’ll wait here.” Torchay moved into the chair beside the bed. Obed simply widened his stance in front of the doorway standing guard.
Kallista did not want to go into that other room, did not want to see Kallandra lying motionless on a healer’s bed, but she could not avoid it. Not only because the general insisted, but also—Kallandra was one of the Reinine’s Own, a military naitan. Kallista could not turn away, could not fail to give the other woman the respect and honor that was her due.
Uskenda opened the inner door and stepped back, waiting for Kallista to pass through. The smaller room was dim, lit only by a sliver of reflected light from a high clerestory and that entering by the doorway. Kallista moved to one side to wait for her eyes to adjust to the gloom and for the general to enter.
After a few ticks, she could make out a form lying still and dark against the pale sheets. General Uskenda stood at the foot of the bed looking down at the woman in it. Then she looked up at Kallista, but remained silent. How bad were the injuries?
Kallista swallowed down her dread and crossed the small space to stand beside the narrow bed. Kallandra’s face showed the years that had passed, or perhaps the strain of her injuries, but seemed otherwise unmarked. Kallista took in the rest in one swift glance, saw Kallandra’s arms lying atop the sheets with bandages swathed from her hands past her elbows.
No. That wasn’t right. Something was off, something wrong about the bandages. They were—
Kallista’s right knee buckled, but her left somehow held and she did not fall when she realized what it was. The bandages did not begin at Kallandra’s hands. She had no hands.
Her arms stopped short somewhere between elbows and wrists, the thick pads of bandage mocking the missing length.
“Oh dear, sweet Goddess,” Kallista whispered. Her hand groped for support, found the wall. “What—”
“Outside.” Uskenda jerked her head toward the open doorway.
Kallista nodded, tears burning her eyes again. She took a moment to whisper a blessing on the desperately damaged woman and stumbled back into the bodyguard’s antechamber. Torchay jumped up and ushered Kallista to the chair he’d vacated as Uskenda closed the door gently behind them.
“What happened?” Kallista whispered.
“What?” Torchay demanded. “What is it?”
“They took her hands.” Miray’s voice was ice, cracking. “The thrice-damned murderers took all their hands—the naitani’s—before they killed them.”
“Goddess.” Torchay’s hand drifted to the sword hilt locked in place over his hip, one of the twin Heldring-forged short swords he wore in the double scabbard on his back, as if he thought an assassin might lurk nearby.
“Kallandra is still alive,” Uskenda said.
“But she has no hands,” Miray retorted.
Kallista couldn’t suppress her shudder. Obed took one step out into the hall and emptied his stomach on the tile floor, then returned to guard as if nothing had happened. Kallista steeled herself against the horror that spun her head and roiled her own stomach, tightening her focus to Torchay standing in front of her. To his hand resting on his hip.
It emerged from the leather cuff holding one of his everpresent blades, which the sleeve of his tunic didn’t quite cover. Narrow, long-fingered and remarkably free of scars, his hand showed the calluses of his trade and the dirt from their rough journey to this place. His hand…
Kallandra had no hands.
Torchay caught Kallista’s hand, clasped it tight, saying nothing. What was there to be said? Almost all naitani needed their hands to use their magic. Bakers kneaded preservation magic into bread with their hands. Weavers wove waterproofing or longwearing strength into fabric with their hands. Healers laid their hands on the sick and injured to mend their hurts. And soldier naitani aimed their magic and sent it against the enemy with their hands.
Only farspeakers and sometimes truthsayers did not use their hands. Some farspeakers had to hold an object that had belonged to the one to whom they spoke, and only a few truthsayers—the Reinine was one—did not have to touch a person to know if they lied.
This was why all military naitani were required to wear gloves in public. Any covering over the hands interfered with the use of magic, and leather blocked all but that under the most exquisite control. Because military naitani held deadly magic, the public’s fear of what might happen if it escaped the naitan—and the occasional frightening incident—had brought about the glove regulation.
What would losing her hands do to Kallandra? To any naitan?
Kallista shuddered, squeezing Torchay’s hand tighter.
“The Reinine is waiting,” the general said. “We must go.”
“Yes.” Kallista let Torchay pull her to her feet. “Blessings of the One on you, Miray, and on your naitan.”
Miray looked up at her, his eyes widening as he seemed to realize just who offered these blessings. “Thank you, Godstruck. May it be as you say.”
She left the room at a normal pace, but couldn’t help feeling as if she scuttled like a bug running for the safety of darkness. Kallandra’s injuries were too unsettling, too horrifying. When Obed fell in beside her, Kallista reached for his hand, too, needing the feel of a hand in both of hers, needing to know she could still do it. He gripped her tight, as if he needed the same assurance.
“You don’t need your hands to do magic,” Torchay said quietly as they reached the first flight of stairs.
“Not for the ilian magic, the godmarked magic, no. I don’t think so.” She refused to release either hand as they started down the stairs, forcing them into an angled formation. “I used my hands to direct it, shape it, but not because I had to. It was just—they gave me something to see. But for my lightning, I need my hands.”
“They will not touch you,” Obed said. “I swear my life on it.”
“I swore mine ten years ago.” Torchay waited while they caught up with him on the second-floor landing. “We’ll keep you intact.”
“But who are they?” Kallista burst out. “What do they want?”
“To change the order of the universe.” Uskenda led them in the opposite direction from the entrance stairwell. “The rebellion was instigated by the Barbs, the Order of the Barbed Rose. BARINIRAB. They want—”
“They want to destroy West magic.” Kallista finished the sentence for her. “And I’m the only practitioner of West magic Adara’s seen in fifty years.”
The Order of the Barbed Rose was an ancient and heretical conspiracy shrouded in mystery, often fading from public knowledge for decades at a time, becoming no more than a whispered tale told round hearth fires. And always it tempted the people because of its enmity toward West magic.
West magic was about endings and mysteries, things that couldn’t be easily understood or explained by mortal beings. Though death’s ending was as much a part of life as birth, it frightened people. So did unexplainable mysteries—such as seeing things that had yet to happen or talking to the dead. And what people feared, they often wanted to destroy. The Barbs, whose influence had been slowly growing over the past fifty years or more, seemed to think that by destroying the magic, they could destroy death itself.
Kallista hadn’t been born with West magic. Her personal magic was of the North—the ability to cast lightning bolts from her hands. It had awakened just after puberty, as magic usually did in those gifted by the One. A person either had magic or they did not, and they only received one gift, which never changed.
A good half of Adara’s naitani held the practical South magic of hearth and home, magic that called the hearth’s fire or brewed better beer or built stronger tables. Most of the remaining naitani were divided between the East magic healers and growers, naitani who dealt with living things and beginnings, and the North naitani whose magic operated on inanimate objects and natural forces like wind or lightning. A very few were given the mysterious talents of the West.
But since that day on the walls of Ukiny a year ago, Kallista had been able to call magic from three of the four compass directions. That is, she’d been able to until the magic left her half a year later in the Tibran capital.
Merinda believed pregnant naitani lost their magic because using it was too hard on the mother. Kallista hoped that was so, and not because the magic somehow harmed the unborn child. She hadn’t seen any signs that either Rozite or Lorynda was less than perfect, but she’d used so much magic in those early months…. She thrust that worry away yet again. Her babies were born and she wanted her magic back.
General Uskenda opened a heavy barred door at the end of a twisting corridor to reveal another, heavier iron-bound door behind it. She knocked a rhythm with the hilt of her dagger, received a second rhythm in return and responded with a third before the sound of keys turning in locks came to them. The door cracked open and they stepped through into a well-manned guard chamber inside the palace wall.
Kallista had known there was direct access to the main healer’s hall from the palace, but had never known where it was. Now she did, and the thought disturbed her. As if she had been shown the way because she might need it in the near future.
“Whatever the Barb’s goals,” Uskenda said, accompanying Kallista down the stairs to the courtyards and gardens surrounding the palace buildings, “they did not make you one of their victims. A few others were spared—those who were deep in the countryside on assignment, or whose bodyguards were able to fight off the assassins until help arrived. That is our fortune and the rebels’ misfortune. We will need all the fortune the One shines our way, I fear.”
