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‘Iya, it was the strangest thing!’ he began, but she held up a warning hand.
‘There’ll be time enough later,’ she told him, knowing she must go now or not at all.
She took her place in the harness, breath tight in her chest as she hung her feet over the edge of the hole. Grasping the rope with one hand and the leather bag with the other, she nodded to the priests and began her descent.
She felt the familiar nervous flutter in her belly as she swung down into the cool darkness. She’d never been able to guess the actual dimensions of this underground chamber; the silence and faint movement of air against her face suggested a vast cavern. Where the sunlight struck the stone floor below, it showed the gently undulating smoothness of stone worn by some ancient underground river.
After a few moments her feet touched solid ground and she stepped free of the rope and out of the circle of sunlight. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out a faint glow nearby and walked towards it. The light had appeared from a different direction each time she’d come here. When she reached the Oracle at last, however, everything was just as she remembered.
A crystal orb on a silver tripod gave off a wide circle of light. The Oracle sat next to it on a low ivory stool carved in the shape of a crouching dragon.
This one is so young! Iya thought, inexplicably saddened. The last two Oracles had been old women with skin bleached white by years of darkness. This girl was no more than fourteen, but her skin was already pale. Dressed in a simple linen shift that left her arms and feet bare, she sat with her palms on her knees. Her face was round and plain, her eyes vacant. Like wizards, the sibyls of Afra did not escape Illior’s touch unscathed.
Iya knelt at her feet. A masked priest stepped into the circle of light with a large silver salver held out before him. The silence of the chamber swallowed Iya’s sigh as she unwrapped the bowl and placed it on the salver.
The priest presented it to the Oracle, placing it on her knees. Her face remained vacant, betraying nothing.
Doesn’t she feel the evil of the thing? Iya wondered. The unveiled power of it made Iya’s head hurt.
The girl stirred at last and looked down at the bowl. Silvery light bright as moonshine on snow swelled in a nimbus around her head and shoulders. Iya felt a thrill of awe. Illior had entered the girl.
‘I see demons feasting on the dead. I see the God Whose Name Is Not Spoken,’ the Oracle said softly.
Iya’s heart turned to stone in her breast, her worst fears confirmed. This was Seriamaius, the dark god of necromancy worshipped by the Plenimarans, who’d come so close to destroying Skala in the Great War. ‘I’ve dreamt this. War and disasters far worse than any Skala has ever known.’
‘You see too far, Wizard.’ The Oracle lifted the bowl in both hands and by some trick of the light her eyes became sunken black holes in her face. The priest was nowhere to be seen now, although Iya had not heard him leave.
The Oracle turned the bowl slowly in her hands. ‘Black makes white. Foul makes pure. Evil creates greatness. Out of Plenimar comes present salvation and future peril. This is a seed that must be watered with blood. But you see too far.’
The Oracle tilted the bowl forward and bright blood splashed out, too much for such a small vessel. It formed a round pool on the stone floor at the Oracle’s feet. Looking into it, Iya caught the reflection of a woman’s face framed by the visor of a bloody war helm. Iya could make out two intense blue eyes, a firm mouth above a pointed chin. The face was harsh one moment, sorrowful the next, and so familiar that it made her heart ache, though she couldn’t say then of whom those eyes reminded her. Flames reflected off the helm and somewhere in the distance Iya heard the clash of battle.
The apparition slowly faded and was replaced by that of a shining white palace standing on a high cliff. It had a glittering dome, and at each of its four corners stood a slender tower.
‘Behold the Third Orëska,’ the Oracle whispered. ‘Here may you lay your burden down.’
Iya leaned forward with a gasp of awe. The palace had hundreds of windows and at every window stood a wizard, looking directly at her. In the highest window of the closest tower she saw Arkoniel, robed in blue and holding the bowl in his hands. A little child with thick blond curls stood at his side.
She could see Arkoniel quite clearly now, even though she was so far away. He was an old man, with a face deeply lined and weary beyond words. Even so, her heart swelled with joy at the sight of him.
‘Ask,’ the Oracle whispered.
‘What is the bowl?’ she called to Arkoniel.
‘It’s not for us, but he will know,’ Arkoniel told her, passing the bowl to the little boy. The child looked at Iya with an old man’s eyes and smiled.
‘All is woven together, Guardian,’ the Oracle said as this vision faded into something darker. ‘This is the legacy you and your kind are offered. One with the true queen. One with Skala. You shall be tested with fire.’
Iya saw the symbol of her craft – the thin crescent of Illior’s moon – against a circle of fire and the number 222 glowing just beneath it in figures of white flame so bright they hurt her eyes.
Then Ero lay spread before her under a bloated moon, in flames from harbour to citadel. An army under the flag of Plenimar surrounded it, too numerous to count. Iya could feel the heat of the flames on her face as Erius led his army out against them. But his soldiers fell dead behind him and the flesh fell from his charger’s bones in shreds. The Plenimarans surrounded the King like wolves and he was lost from sight. The vision shifted dizzyingly again and Iya saw the Skalan crown, bent and tarnished now, lying in a barren field.
‘So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated,’ the Oracle whispered.
‘Ariani?’ Iya asked, but knew even as she spoke that it had not been the Princess’ face she’d seen framed in that helm.
The Oracle began to sway and keen. Raising the bowl, she poured its endless flow over her head like a libation, masking herself in blood. Falling to her knees, she grasped Iya’s hand and a whirlwind took them, striking Iya blind.
Screaming winds surrounded her, then entered the top of her head and plunged down through the core of her like a shipwright’s augur. Images flashed by like wind-borne leaves: the strange number on its shield, and the helmeted woman in many forms and guises – old, young, in rags, crowned, hanging naked from a gibbet, riding garlanded through broad, unfamiliar streets. Iya saw her clearly now, her face, her blue eyes, black hair, and long limbs like Ariani’s. But it was not the Princess.
The Oracle’s voice cut through the maelstrom. ‘This is your Queen, Wizard, this true daughter of Thelátimos. She will turn her face to the west.’
Suddenly Iya felt a bundle placed in her arms and looked down at the dead infant the Oracle had given her.
‘Others see, but only through smoke and darkness,’ said the Oracle. ‘By the will of Illior the bowl came into your hands; it is the long burden of your line, Guardian, and the bitterest of all. But in this generation comes the child who is the foundation of what is to come. She is your legacy. Two children, one queen marked with the blood of passage.’
The dead infant looked up at Iya with black staring eyes and searing pain tore through her chest. She knew whose child this was.
Then the vision was gone and Iya found herself kneeling in front of the Oracle with the unopened bag in her arms. There was no dead infant, no blood on the floor. The Oracle sat on her stool, shift and hair unstained.
‘Two children, one queen,’ the Oracle whispered, looking at Iya with the shining white eyes of Illior.
Iya trembled before that gaze, trying to cling to all she’d seen and heard. ‘The others who dream of this child, Honoured One – do they mean her well or ill? Will they help me raise her up?’
But the god was gone and the girl child slumped on the stool had no answers.
Sunlight blinded Iya as she emerged from the cavern. The heat took her breath away and her legs would not support her. Arkoniel caught her as she collapsed against the stone enclosure. ‘Iya, what happened? What’s wrong?’
‘Just … just give me a moment,’ she croaked, clutching the bag to her chest.
A seed watered with blood.
Arkoniel lifted her easily and carried her into the shade. He put the waterskin to her lips and Iya drank, leaning heavily against him. It was some time before she felt strong enough to start back for the inn. Arkoniel kept one arm about her waist and she suffered his help without complaint. They were within sight of the stele when she fainted.
When she opened her eyes again she was lying on a soft bed in a cool, dim room at the inn. Sunlight streamed in through a crack in the dusty shutter and struck shadows across the carved wall beside the bed. Arkoniel sat beside her, clearly worried.
‘What happened with the Oracle?’ he asked.
Illior spoke and my question was answered, she thought bitterly. How I wish I’d listened to Agazhar.
She took his hand. ‘Later, when I’m feeling stronger. Tell me your vision. Was your query answered?’
Her answer obviously frustrated him, but he knew better than to press her. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I asked what sort of wizard I’d become, what my path would be. She showed me a vision in the air, but all I could make out was an image of me holding a young boy in my arms.’
‘Did he have blond hair?’ she asked, thinking of the child in the beautiful white tower.
‘No, it was black. To be honest, I was disappointed, coming all this way just for that. I must have done something wrong in the asking.’
‘Sometimes you must wait for the meaning to be revealed.’ Iya turned away from that earnest young face, wishing that the Lightbearer had granted her such a respite. The sun still blazed down on the square outside her window, but Iya saw only the road back to Ero before her, and darkness at its end.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_87dcf070-3a3b-50d5-9a32-6a7855fddf6b)
A red harvest moon cast the sleeping capital into a towering mosaic of light and shadow that nineteenth night of Erasin. Crooked Ero, the capital was called. Built on a rambling hill overlooking the islands of the Inner Sea, the streets spread like poorly woven lace down from the walls of the Palatine Circle to the quays and shipyards and rambling slums below. Poor and wealthy alike lived cheek-by-jowl, and every house in sight of the harbour had at least one window facing east towards Plenimar like a watchful eye.
The priests claim Death comes in the west door, Arkoniel thought miserably as he rode through the west gate behind Iya and the witch. Tonight would be the culmination of the nightmare that had started nearly five months earlier at Afra.
The two women rode in silence, their faces hidden by their deep hoods. Heartsick at the task that lay before them, Arkoniel willed Iya to speak, change her mind, turn aside, but she said nothing and he could not see her eyes to read them. For over half his life she’d been teacher, mentor, and second mother to him. Since Afra, she’d become a house full of closed doors.
Lhel had gone quiet, too. Her kind had been unwelcome here for generations. She wrinkled her nose now as the stink of the city engulfed them. ‘You great village? Ha! Too many.’
‘Not so loud!’ Arkoniel looked around nervously. Wandering wizards were not as welcome here as they had been, either. It would go hard with them all to be found with a hill witch.
‘Smells like tok,’ Lhel muttered.
Iya pushed back her hood and surprised Arkoniel with a thin smile. ‘She says it smells like shit here, and so it does.’
Lhel’s one to talk, Arkoniel thought. He’d kept upwind of the hill woman since they’d met.
After their strange visit to Afra they’d gone first to Ero and guested with the Duke and his lovely, fragile princess. By day they gamed and rode. Each night Iya spoke in secret with the Duke.
From there, he and Iya spent the rest of that hot, sullen summer searching the remote mountain valleys of the northern province for a witch to aid them, for no Orëska wizard possessed the magic for the task that Illior had set them. By the time they found one, the aspen leaves were already edged with gold.
Driven from the fertile lowlands by the first incursions of Skalan settlers, the small, dark-skinned hill people kept to their high valleys and did not welcome travellers. When Iya and Arkoniel approached a village, they might hear dogs barking the alarm, or mothers calling their children; by the time they reached the edge of a settlement, only a few armed men would be in sight. These men made no threats, but offered no hospitality.
Lhel’s welcome had surprised them when they’d happened across her lonely hut. Not only had she welcomed them properly, setting out water, cider, and cheese, but she claimed to have been expecting them.
Iya spoke the witch’s language, and Lhel had picked up a few words of Skalan somewhere. From what Arkoniel could make out between them, the witch was not surprised by their request. She claimed her moon goddess had shown them to her in a dream.
Arkoniel felt very awkward around the woman. Her magic radiated from her like the musky heat of her body, but it was more than that. Lhel was a woman in her prime. Her black hair hung in a tangled, curling mass to her waist and her loose woollen dress couldn’t mask the curves of hip and breast as she sauntered around her little hut, bringing him food and the makings for a pallet. He didn’t need an interpreter to know that she asked Iya if she might sleep with him that night or that she was both offended and amused when Iya explained the concept of wizards’ celibacy to her. The Orëska wizards reserved all their vitality for their magic.
Arkoniel feared that the witch might change her mind then, but the following morning they woke to find her waiting for them outside the door, a travelling bundle slung ready behind the saddle of her shaggy pony.
The long journey back to Ero had been an awkward time for the young man. Lhel delighted in teasing him, making certain that he saw when she lifted her skirts to wash, and losing no opportunity to bump against him as she moved about their camp each night, plucking the year’s last herbs with her knobby, stained fingers. Vows or not, Arkoniel couldn’t help but notice and something in him stirred uneasily.
When their work in Ero was finished this night, he would never see her again and for that he would be most thankful.
As they rode across an open square, Lhel pointed up at the red full moon and clucked her tongue. ‘Baby caller moon, all fat and bloody. We hurry. No shaimari.’
She brought two fingers towards her nostrils in a graceful flourish, mimicking the intake of breath. Arkoniel shuddered.
Iya pressed one hand over her eyes and Arkoniel felt a moment’s hope. Perhaps she would relent after all. But she was merely sending a sighting spell up to the Palatine ahead of them.
After a moment she shook her head. ‘No. We have time.’
A cold salt breeze tugged at their cloaks as they reached the seaward side of the citadel and approached the Palatine gate. Arkoniel inhaled deeply, trying to ease the growing tightness in his chest. A party of revellers passed them, and by the light of the linkboys’ lanterns Arkoniel stole another look at Iya. The wizard’s pale, square face betrayed nothing.
It is the will of Illior, Arkoniel repeated silently. There could be no turning aside.
Since the death of the King’s only female heir, women and girls of close royal blood had died at an alarming rate. Few dared speak of it aloud in the city, but in too many cases it was not plague or hunger that carried them down to Bilairy’s gate.
The King’s cousin took ill after a banquet in town and did not awaken the next morning. Another somehow managed to fall from her tower window. His two pretty young nieces, daughters of his own brother, were drowned sailing on a sunny day. Babies born to more distant relations, all girls, were found dead in their cradles. Their nurses whispered of night spirits. As potential female claimants to the throne dropped away one by one, the people of Ero turned nervous eyes towards the King’s young half sister and the unborn child she carried.
Her husband, Duke Rhius, was fifteen years older than his pretty young wife and owned vast holdings of castles and lands, the greatest of which lay at Atyion, half a day’s ride north of the city. Some said that the marriage had been a love match between the Duke’s lands and the Royal Treasury, but Iya thought otherwise.
The couple lived at the grand castle at Atyion when Rhius was not serving at court. When Ariani became pregnant, however, they had taken up residence at Ero, in her house beside the Old Palace.
Iya guessed that the choice was the King’s rather than hers, and Ariani had confirmed her suspicions during their visit that summer.
‘May Illior and Dalna grant us a son,’ Ariani had whispered as she and Iya sat together in the garden court of her house, hands to her swelling belly.
As a child Ariani had adored her handsome older brother, who’d been more like a father to her. Now she understood all too well that she lived at his whim; in these uncertain times, any girl claiming Ghërilain’s blood posed a threat to the new male succession, should the Illioran faction fight to re-establish the sacred authority of Afra.
With every new bout of plague or famine, the whispers of doubt grew stronger.
In a darkened side street outside the gate Iya cloaked herself and Lhel in invisibility, and Arkoniel approached the guards as if alone.
There were still a great many people abroad at this hour, but the sergeant-at-arms took special note of the silver amulet Arkoniel wore and called him aside.
‘What’s your business here so late, Wizard?’
‘I’m expected. I’ve come to visit my patron, Duke Rhius.’
‘Your name?’
‘Arkoniel of Rhemair.’
A scribe noted this down on a wax tablet and Arkoniel strolled on into the labyrinth of houses and gardens that ringed this side of the Palatine. To the right loomed the great bulk of the New Palace, which Queen Agnalain had begun and her son was finishing. To the left lay the rambling bulk of the Old Palace.
Iya’s magic was so strong even he couldn’t tell if she and the witch were still with him, but he didn’t dare turn or whisper to them.
Ariani’s fine house stood surrounded by its own walls and courtyards; Arkoniel entered by the front gate and barred it behind him as soon as he felt Iya’s touch on his arm. He looked around nervously, half expecting to find the King’s Guard lurking behind the bare trees and statuary in the shadowed garden, or the familiar faces of the Duke’s personal guard. There was no one here, not even a watchman or porter. The garden was silent, the air heavy with the scent of some last hardy bloom of autumn.
Iya and the witch reappeared beside him and together they headed across the courtyard towards the arched entrance. They hadn’t gone three steps when a horned owl swooped down and pounced on a young rat not ten feet from where they stood. Flapping for balance, it dispatched the squeaking rodent, then looked up at them, eyes like gold sester coins. Such birds were not uncommon in the city, but Arkoniel felt a thrill of awe; owls were the messengers of Illior.
‘A favourable omen,’ Iya murmured as it flapped away, leaving the dead rat behind.
The Duke’s steward, Mynir, answered her knock. A thin, solemn, stoop-shouldered old fellow, he’d always reminded Arkoniel of a cricket. He was one of the few who would help carry his master’s burden in the years to come.
‘Thank the Maker!’ the old man whispered, grasping Iya’s hand. ‘The Duke is half out of his mind –’ He broke off at the sight of Lhel.
Arkoniel could guess the man’s thoughts: witch, unclean, handler of the dead, a necromancer who called up demons and ghosts.
Iya touched his shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Mynir, your master knows. Where is he?’
‘Upstairs, Mistress. I’ll fetch him.’
Iya held him a moment longer. ‘And Captain Tharin?’ Tharin, the knight in charge of the Duke’s personal guard, was seldom far from Rhius’ side. Illior had not spoken for him, but Iya and Rhius had not discussed how he was to be kept away from this night’s business.
‘The Duke sent him and the men to Atyion for the rents.’ Mynir led them into the darkened audience hall. ‘The women have all been sent to sleep at the Palace, so as not to disturb the Princess in her labour. It’s just your Nari and myself tonight, Mistress. I’ll fetch the Duke.’ He hurried up the sweeping staircase.
