02 - The Barbed Rose (4 page)

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.”

The general scowled. “Civil war is always an ugly thing, and they have taken much of the northern coast. They can get firearms from Tibre.”

“Maybe it won’t come to actual war.” Kallista knew she was grasping sand, but hope was all she had just now.

“It wouldn’t, if you could take out their leadership like you did before.”

Kallista held her tongue. Until her magic returned, she couldn’t light a candle with a spark, but no one needed to know that.

Nor did the world need to knew that she—and her ilian—had ended last year’s invasion in such a spectacular fashion. She couldn’t stop the rumors, but as long as no one knew for certain…

“Or if you could repeat what you did in Ukiny,” the general went on when Kallista didn’t respond, “that would make these rebellious idiots think twice.”

True. When every enemy in a two-hundred pace radius died in the space of a breath, it did tend to make those remaining rethink their plans. Kallista shifted her shoulders against another magic-born thing she didn’t like remembering. “These are Adarans. I hate to use such a weapon against our own, even if they
are
rebelling against the Reinine.”

“If it comes down to it—”

“I know. If things reach that point, we’ll have to use whatever we have. But we’re not there yet. Are we?”

“No.” Uskenda begrudged the word. “But if things don’t change, it could be soon.” She turned Kallista and her iliasti over to the guardpost at the east entrance to Winterhold Palace and departed.

A guard led them through chaotic corridors. Not only was half the land in rebellion against the duly-chosen Reinine and the other half apparently in Arikon seeking refuge or assistance, but it was also nearing time for the annual move from the snug, warm chambers of Winterhold to the cool, airy Summerglen Palace in another part of the enormous royal complex here in the center of Arikon. Trunks and crates lay stacked in the halls and servants bustled everywhere, weaving their way through the throngs of military.

Kallista craned her neck as they passed through one particular section of the palace, but she couldn’t see whether the courtyard where she’d first practiced her new magic—the one blown to bits by gunpowder—had been repaired. Only by the grace of the One God and Kallista’s poorly controlled new magic had she been able to shield herself, Obed and Stone from the blast.

Palace windows stood open today to let in the warmish breeze. Doubtless a few days earlier, they’d been closed tight against the chill rain that had frozen the travelers on their entire journey south. Except for the overflow of soldiers and the organized chaos of the move, court looked much the same as the last time Kallista was here.