Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (51 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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Gaultry glared, and tried to kick out, but it did her little good. She was weak from the aftereffects of whatever magic the witch had used outside by the well. The shooting agony in her shoulders as her hands took her body’s full weight made her cry out, and the awful moment of scrambling to regain her balance told her she would be a fool to attempt an attack that way again. “What have you done?” she said, panting and trying to catch her breath. Her arms were aching. As soon as she gathered herself, she would burn through her bond with the full angry power of her Glamour. There was no reason to suffer this: In rescuing Tamsanne from the syphon-spell, her power had finally broken free, and she no longer feared to use it. She would call her strength and crush this woman; she would fight—
The old woman, reading her expression, cackled maddeningly. “Save your strength. Do you imagine I would have woken you if there were any risk that you could fight me?” Flinging one skinny arm outward, she indicated the milling sheep. “You are one with the herd, pretty one. And sheep—alas for you, sheep are not greatly aggressive.”
“What do you mean?” Gaultry glanced again, this time more suspiciously, at the sea of woolly white backs. They had unkempt coats in need of trimming, ugly skinny legs, and short, dished faces. A breed with which Gaultry was not familiar. But the silly, brainless way they milled and mobbed—there was nothing unusual there.
The light of triumph in the old woman’s eyes was an ugly thing. “I am master,” she hissed. She stepped into the pen, closing the little gate behind her to keep the sheep out. Her teeth were a grim yellow bridge in her face, more snarl than smile. “Learn that quickly, and your suffering will be less.” She reached and drew an imaginary line down Gaultry’s body, from her collar all the way down onto her gut, across the front of her filthy, water-soaked shirt. There was nothing Gaultry could do to shake that touch off. Then the witch brought her face close to Gaultry’s, still smiling her grim yellow smile. She caressed the young woman’s cheek. “Try using your powers within this space, and you will find that you have mightily enriched this herd, in return only for exhaustion. These animals are mine, born and bred. Their first dam—I bred her from the Changing Lands, fifty years back, when your own granddam played me clever, and slipped her head from my noose. I was not a fool like Delcora—I knew
Tamsanne’s child was alive, and I made due provision. You cannot imagine the number of sheep I lost to those woods, before I managed to contrive a tether that would bring one which I sent over back. I have prepared for this day all those many years.”
“Good pet,” she said, withdrawing her hand. Her face was so close that Gaultry could smell the stink of grain and blood on her breath. “Young one, you are a woman with powers like unto a god, but you will not be able to use them here. All you can do is hang from your wrists and wait for the screaming to stop.”
“I don’t understand.”
“All to the better.” The woman smirked. “I have no intention of explaining.” As she spoke, she reached inside her grey overrobes and pulled out a deck of cards.
There was no misunderstanding what it was: a deck so ancient and powerful the cards had turned rimy mahogany reddish-black, the design on their backs hardly distinguishable. A Rhasan deck.
“You are Richielle,” Gaultry breathed. “You are the goat-herder.”
“It is not just goats I drive before me.” The woman chuckled. “It was a pretty thing, seeing you and your boy puzzle as the land waxed and waned beneath you. If the Changing Lands had not called you, I would have had you here last night.” She shuffled the deck, those nimble, powerful hands Gaultry had noticed before moving quick and sure.
Gaultry’s attention sharpened. It was
Richielle
who had drawn her and Tullier south, not her dryad grandfather. The knowledge touched her like a fresh feeling of abandonment. Or was that right? If what Richielle said was true, then he’d sent power to her and
interfered
—
“I know you,” Gaultry said, cold certainty moving through her as the goat-herder cut the cards. “You are the witch from Bissanty. The one who read Rhasan cards for Columba. And Issachar Dan. And even for Lukas Soul-breaker.” She said it more from terror than from any hope of understanding. “Why even pretend to shuffle those cards? You already know what you intend to pull for me.”
“Is that how it works?” Richielle cocked her head, mocking. “If it were that simple, your grandmother would be dead these fifty years past, and Benet would reign now on Tielmark’s throne as King.” She shuffled a last time, with those clever card-sharp’s hands, and held the cards, fanned, out to Gaultry. “I do not make the future, child.” Her eyes glittered evilly. “Poor lambkin. You have no hand free to make your choice. How will you choose with your hands tied over your head?”
For one blazing moment of hope, Gaultry thought that Richielle would free her. Then the taunt of the old woman’s expression revealed the truth. With a last spiteful smile, she touched the fanned deck to Gaultry’s stomach and whispered a word of power, so quietly that Gaultry might not have felt it if its touch had not resounded upon her skin.
“Everyone has secret desires,” Richielle said. “How difficult is it to see them, when it is only a matter of looking closely? The desire of the deepest soul: That is what the Rhasan brings to the surface.”
Gaultry twisted against her bonds, not caring about the pain. Richielle was forced to take a half-step back. “Columba didn’t want what she got,” Gaultry said softly, accusing. A memory of Tullier’s sad, treacherous sister, bound by Richielle to a slave’s lot, rose before her. “You degraded her,” she said, staring at the old woman with fresh loathing. “You robbed her of Imperial protection, as well as of Imperial power. Do you have any idea of the terrible things that happened, once that protection was stripped from her?”
“And that isn’t what she wanted? Are you so sure she was unwilling?” Richielle tapped the top card of her deck. “This is your card. What lies at the secret heart of your soul?”
Gaultry closed her eyes and tested the line binding her hands. A cord of twisted leather and twine, bound together with a spell. Hating Richielle, determined not to let her read that card, she flung her power outward. It left her like a wave: a wave that parted around Richielle like water around a stone. Gathering power, it crashed outward and spread toward the sheep.
They baaed with confusion, some making animal cries of alarm. Gaultry’s power, mysteriously, had dissipated among them.
She looked at the sheep with new understanding. Sponges. These animals were woolly hoofed sponges, bred specifically to absorb her Glamour.
“You chained my power to them.” Panic rose in her like another wave. “What are they, that you could do that?”
Richielle laughed. The blaze of triumph in her eyes told the younger woman that she had not been entirely confident that her magical contrivance with the sheep would be a success. “Use your power again,” she taunted. “Use it as many times over as you desire.” She held up the Rhasan deck, and once again tapped the top card. “Now. What do you think I will read for you here?”
Gaultry drew a shuddering breath. Something the woman had said
earlier came back to her.
I have no intention of explaining
. Nothing Richielle said was meant to help her understand—it was intended only to herd her in the direction where Richielle wanted her to go. She would not help Tullier—she would not help herself—by listening to the woman’s patter, by answering her questions.
She closed her eyes again, shutting out the heaving backs of the sheep, the horrible light that shone in the old woman’s eyes. Richielle had spoken of seeing people’s hidden desires, had hinted at the strength that gave her to form their hidden futures. What were the things in herself that old Richielle couldn’t see? What were the things she could not imagine?
The dryad’s face rose before her like a cooling rain. His wildness, the twisted flowers in his ruddy hair. The alien velvety green of his skin. The glittering darker green of his eyes. Richielle had sent her and Tullier racketing down to the southern border, pushing them out of their path, but Gaultry didn’t believe that she had controlled what had happened in the Changing Lands. She would not have known about the dryad.
Jarret never left the woods,
Tamsanne had whispered. No one at court had ever shared her secret loss. Not even Sieur Jumery, who had come closest to it, had understood. Protecting that secret, keeping it safe, had been Tamsanne’s hidden, unshared pain, making iron of her will. Richielle feared the Changing Lands. She would not have plumbed their secrets.
“You must have had a terrible time with those poor sheep.” Gaultry opened her eyes, an eerie calm possessing her. “How did you ever manage to ferry them across the river? They are not very brave, poor things. The Changing Land must have been a terror, even as its powers entered their flesh.”
The expression on Richielle’s face hardened. It was frightening—her expression had not been overfriendly to start.
“Your own fears must have been terrible indeed,” Gaultry said. “Tamsanne was so much braver than you—so much more dangerous. But of course you must have known that, or you wouldn’t have persevered with your sheep.”
“I have the power to kill you now,” Richielle said coldly. “I could butcher you, right here and now, like one of my own animals. I could bury a knife in the flesh of your throat even before I finish my business with the boy.”
“Would it make you feel braver to do it?” Gaultry closed her ears to
the woman’s threats. She would not allow herself to think on her own helplessness. “Tamsanne never had to kill to believe in her own power.”
“Take your card!” Richielle flipped it toward her with an angry gesture. “I am through with talking!”
Grandfather
, Gaultry prayed,
stay with me
.
Protect me.
But she glanced at the flimsy rectangle of paper before she could stop herself.
It was not what she expected: the Slaves’ card, or the Chained man. It was the Orchid. The Glamour card. The drawing of the flower was ancient and crude, a line tipped with a bulblike shape and two leaves. Unlike the two representations of the symbol which she had seen previously, this flower was not grounded in earth. It was held in the upraised fingers of a man wearing a strange ragged cape that might have been made of raw sheepskin, save for the moss flowers that were twined into the flowing locks of the garment’s hair. The ragged man brandished the flower skyward, as if making an offering to the brazen sun in the card’s upper corner.
Her grandfather. Holding the gift of her Glamour-power on high to Andion Sun-King.
“Is that what you expected?” Gaultry sagged against her bonds, cold wonder filling her. She had been braced for the image to expand and take her—as it would have done, had it been dealt from Tamsanne’s Rhasan deck, casting her into a wild vision world. Tamsanne had told her Richielle’s deck was more powerful than her own. Was Tamsanne wrong?
The expression on Richielle’s face was pure murder, and there Gaultry read the truth: Whether or not the image was what Richielle expected, something had intervened to block the card from spreading its power to control her. The deck was horribly strong, horribly dangerous. When the goat-herder had pulled cards for Columba and her dark lover, Issachar, they had been forced by Richielle’s Rhasan to couple, right there on the temple floor before her. She could only wonder at her own escape.
“It does not matter,” Richielle said coldly. “It will not affect the outcome. You will not be able to stop me from slitting the boy’s throat. You will not prevent me from burning his heart in the sacral fire.”
The old woman stepped back, still staring at the image. Gaultry could see now that the image had startled her, as well as its apparent lack of effect. The Rhasan card images—they were not stable. That was part of the danger inherent in their use.
“You will not be Kingmaker,” Richielle said abruptly. “You are only the tool who has brought the boy to me.” Saying that seemed to give her
comfort. She thrust the Rhasan deck back into its hidden pocket inside her robes.
“Why are you doing this?” Gaultry shouted, desperate to stall her. “Why are you even alive to care? The
Ein Raku
is safe in Princeport. What would you gain if you killed Tullier now? A dead child, blood on your hands, and all for nothing. You can’t make Tielmark a kingdom if you don’t have the Kingmaker knife.”
Richielle smiled, reveling in the note of hysteria that Gaultry was unable to purge, the setback with her Rhasan cards put from her. It was more horrible than her expression of murder—for there was no real joy in it. Then she spoke. “Do you really imagine I would have gone to all this trouble if I did not mean to see Tielmark free?”
Stepping back, she pushed her robes open, revealing a dirty, double-belted leather dress beneath. The first belt, narrow, low-slung against her hips, was weighted with a bulging purse.
But it was the second that caught and held her attention: a dagger belt, with the blade hanging in a simple leather scabbard, comfortably riding Richielle’s right hip. “You are right. I no longer possess the
Ein
Raku
with which I would have made Corinne queen. Delcora stole it.” Richielle’s voice was pure venom. “As High Priestess, she was not without power herself, and once she had it, there was no reclaiming it. The power that formed the Ein
Raku
—there is nothing like it on earth today. I had to wait more than forty years, almost despairing, before the stars aligned, and I could at last replace it. The gods have grown selfish of their powers. The days when they made light of raising a man to Kingship are long behind us.”

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