The Seer - eARC (66 page)

“You—”

Because of you,
she started to say.

Something circled her, like steam trailing out the spout of a kettle. She turned the other direction. No, that felt wrong. She reversed direction, turned with it, drawing the spiral of hot steam downward.

“You should be long past blaming me for your suffering, Marisel. The study is never easy. Did I say it would be? I believe I said exactly the opposite.”

He had. At great length.

“I was a child. I didn’t understand.”

“But you stayed. Twenty long years.”

The final handful of years together had been every kind of misery; as his impossible demands intensified, so did her loathing and resistance. If there had been any way to break the contract, she felt certain he would have. By then she had given up escaping and had resolved to survive. To finish, no matter what.

Finally he had put her before the Council. She had survived, passed the test, and left the first moment she could.

“Stubborn,” she said.

“Stubborn,” he agreed, “and thus were you created. There is no other way.”

“But you—” She wanted to say something cutting, but she was too focused on drawing down the trail of etheric steam to able to form words. The steam kept getting stickier and thicker.

Her fingers spread, stretching lines across the room, searching everywhere for stone and metal, the children of the earth, to find and hold fast.

“I taught. You learned. The contract was satisfied. Do you have a complaint?”

She shook her head, throat tight.

The glow around him was a vast reservoir from which etheric smoke encircled her. She recognized this particular challenge: it was one they’d practiced before, in the mock battles she’d had with him so long ago, intended to prepare her for the world of mages. In the time since, she had managed to avoid mages inclined to conflict. Everything she knew about fighting with magic she had learned from Keyretura.

The surround had grown thick enough that the details of the room—table, books, teacup—were dim, as if she she were wrapped in a heavy fog. She tried to cut through it with her focus. Nothing changed.

What are you missing?

She had assumed it was an attack. A touch to the gauze. It rippled around her fingers like fog over a mountaintop. She pushed a hand through and it parted. A step through and a look back at a slowly spinning funnel.

Not an attack after all.

The floor beneath her seemed to move without moving. He was sundering her orientation to ground, she realized, to stone and dirt. She lurched abruptly.

All her lines. In a blink he had cut every one.

She groped blindly to the tile floor underfoot. Tile—just stone, writ small, baked hard. Weaker, but it remembered the ground from which it had been drawn. Small tethers, then; her toes and fingertips quested into the floor.

As he sipped at his teacup, she held tight to the tethers she’d found, and yanked on them all at once as if flying a kite, hoping to catch his attention while she cast around the room for something else to ground onto.

There was a sharp shift as every one of these new tethers was severed.

She let them go, instead latching onto the ceramic cup in his hand. It was common among mages to habitually and etherically mark and own those items they touched; the cup itself could be connected to her aetur’s power lines, in which case she could perhaps find some ground through it, through him, while searching for more.

But as she reached fingers of thought for the ceramic in his hand he moved it suddenly, tossing the contents of the cup into the air. The liquid seemed to hang there a moment, then puffed suddenly out into a glistening fog, a thousand tiny mirrors all angled to catch the faint sunlight coming through the windows of the room, a hot flash of white that momentarily blinded her.

She shut her eyes, the afterimage still bright against her lids, still casting about for something in reach that remembered the earth. But he was there, everywhere, making slick each thing so that her etheric fingers could not find purchase. She grasped again and again, slipping. Slipping.

A loud knock at the door.

“Enter,” said Keyretura.

As he spoke he dropped every sluice, flash, and diversion. Maris found tile beneath her; copper and silver in the lamp; rings at the posts of the bed, pewter plates and a steel knife; a pitcher of glass; ceramic pipes between the walls; iron grating in the fireplace, and the stone hearth. In a moment she had touched and secured tethers to a hundred things, trickling down her ground through the walls to the earth beneath the palace.

A sense of solidity filled her.

Srel stepped into the room, ducking his head to Keyretura and Maris in that not-quite-bow people gave mages.

“Forgive me, High Ones, I did not realize—”

“What is it?” Keyretura asked.

“The evening meal is ready for you. Shall I bring it or delay it, ser?”

“Bring. With enough for my guest.”

“I am not your guest,” Maris told him hotly, “and I will not eat with you.”

“Then eat without me. Or go hungry.”

She could feel him then, a touch within, so fast he was there and gone before she could respond or deflect, leaving a painful pressure in her stomach, making her keenly aware that she was, indeed, hungry.

Another violation. Angrily she pushed out the door past Srel, and stopped in the hallway, breathing hard, too upset to steady anything, not heartbeat, not blood, not the sweat trickling down her back.

After a moment, Srel emerged. He shut the door behind him and watched her a moment.

“Maris,” he said gently. “Allow me to bring you food and wine. In the library, perhaps?”

She managed a nod.

In the library enough time passed for her to eat some of what Srel had brought her, and to find herself reading a small book in which she was quickly lost.

It was a journal from some sixty years back, by a Perripin fiddler who had decided to traverse the then-boundaries of the empire, reporting on the places he visited and the people he met. She nibbled at what Srel had brought her, drank hot wine, and read. Lost in the graceful and alluring verse she almost forgot about Keyretura.

Almost.

He touched on the cord connecting them, and Maris was yanked out of the book. She put it away, feeling him come closer to the library with each step.

“Well?” he asked, stepping inside. “What is your grievance, Maris?”

She shook her head mutely.

“You have come all this way to do what, then? Show me how well your new robes fit you? To discover that you are craven? Speak.”

Even knowing he said this to provoke her did not stop it from working.

“My parents,” she said bitterly.

“Ah, that. If they had survived, Marisel, you would have abandoned the study to care for them, become another Broken, making their sacrifice for your contract worthless.”

“My contract was not worth their lives.”

“Clearly they disagreed.”

“You are responsible for their deaths.”

“To refrain from healing is not the same as killing. I did not save them. Nor did you.”

“I didn’t have the skill to save them, and you knew that!”

“But you do now. Because of them.”

She felt fury warm her from head to toe. “You are a horror,” she told him. “A corruption.”

“Insults,” he said, with a shrug. “Not even inventive ones. You disappoint me.”

“Don’t I always? My grief to you, a hundred times, and a hundred times beyond that.”

He made a warding gesture, an ancient Iliban sign. A superstition. An insult. The sides of his mouth curled in derision. “Is that your best?”

The door to the library opened. Srel stood there, eyes wide, expression stark.

“Forgive me, High Ones. The queen—there has been an attack.”

Only now did Maris became aware of urgent shouts becoming louder. Keyretura’s gaze was suddenly distant.

“So there has.” He looked at Maris. “I will be busy for a time, but you will wait for me.”

“I do not stay or go at your pleasure.”

“Again, the evidence seems to indicate otherwise.”

He followed Srel out the door and was gone.

When at last the fever pitch of agitation caused by the attempt on the queen’s life eased, Maris was in the bath.

It could, she reasoned, be her last one.

And Keyretura? He would find her when he was ready. It had always been thus: asleep or awake, fed or hungry, naked or clothed, her aetur would come. Lecture. Press. Demand. Test.

Every day for twenty long years.

A bell passed. Then another. With the water cooling she was trying to decide between ending the luxurious immersion or ringing for more boiling water. The door opened and Keyretura stepped in.

“The queen?” she asked him.

“The matter is settled.” He studied her a long moment. Then, his voice low, he said: “So be it, Marisel: if you prefer to depart rather than continue this engagement, I will allow it. But be gone before moonrise.”

She stood from the tub, dripping.

What was this? A trick? Or was he truly dismissing her?

“Dirina and Pas,” she said. “Tell me where they are.”

He walked to the door, paused, his back to her.

“No.”

He left.

* * *

She dressed hurriedly, eager to be gone before he changed his mind. She walked the now-darkened halls, navigating her way as much by memory as sight. At a window she paused to look at the night sky.

Be gone before moonrise.

Simple enough instructions. She would leave her belongings and the horse; it could all be replaced. She would walk. Be gone from this city and from Keyretura.

At each quick step down quiet palace stairways, she listened for him, expecting the touch that meant he had changed his mind. She paused at the palace doors, watched by wary guards who, it was clear, would do nothing to get in her way.

She took the palace grounds one quick step after another. At the gates, cloaked in shadow, she slipped by unnoticed.

Nothing stopped her feet on the well-maintained cobbles of the great square. No taste of him. The line between them was quiet.

Perhaps she was free.

At the huge center fountain, the basin of carved marble, water played out in arcs in all directions. While down-city, the poor struggled to find water they could drink, here in the realm of wealth, water flowed freely all night long. For a time she stood there, watching the streams cascade into the pool below.

She turned in place to gaze over the rooflines of the Great Houses, darkly silhouetted against the starry sky.
There
, she thought, estimating where the moon would rise.

What was she doing? What was wrong with her?

Be gone before moonrise.

She would not allow him to order her around, she decided. Never again. He could command her to go, but she did not have to—

Childish foolishness, this was. Let him command.
Go.

Yet she stayed another moment and then another, watching the roofline where she expected the moon to rise.

Dirina. Pas. She could not simply abandon them to him.

But even that was not the real reason she stayed.

At last, a point of glowing white slid up and over the huge mansion’s roofline, exactly where she had anticipated. In moments it grew into a glowing, curved white blade, the rising halfmoon coming free of its cover.

She felt him then, standing at the edge of the square, and she took a step away from the fountain, away from the palace, away from him, fear driving her fast footfalls. Nothing, etheric or otherwise, barred her way. No leash snapped tight from her gut. Maybe she could still leave.

He had not moved. He had not spoken.

But instead of leaving, she stopped at the edge of the square. She realized how weary she was of her own terror. The connection between them, the one that she had been trying to escape these many years, was not merely an etheric one.

Turning, she walked toward him, stopping a few paces away. “Aetur, let the Iliban go. They have done nothing to offend you. Please don’t make them pay for my mistakes.”

“They pay for the seer’s mistakes, not yours, and their lives are of no consequence to me.”

“Their lives matter to me. Tell what I must do to save them.”

“Show me what you have learned in the years since you were created.”

Pinpoints of light came from distant shadowy corners, like flashes at the edge of vision. Why he did this, she did not know, but from her earliest memories, this was one of the signs that a hard testing was to come, leaving her sobbing, bleeding. Aching in body, spirit, mind.

Pain. So much pain.

No, that was the past.

She whirled in place, trailing her outstretched fingers, pointing downward, dropping tens and then hundreds of lines of flow into the stone-covered square, down into the dirt and farther into the basalt below. He would cut these ties in moments, so she must quickly find another plan. What?

Suddenly, a hold on her right wrist. A pull, a yank, as if a mountain lion had clamped onto her forearm, locked down, crushing bones, rending and tearing her flesh. She cried out in pain, making a quick set of changes inside her body to temporarily dampen the agony, a practice she knew from her work with mothers birthing their young. She sank her grounding lines into the earth through the mangled arm as well as the good one; life would carry magic no matter how broken it was, until the very moment when it began to rot.

His next attack would come soon. What to do? What did she know that he did not?

As she finished her turn, drawing power from the earth, she sent it back down through the lines she had made, flinging the ends farther and farther from herself so that they trailed out to cross him at his feet, ankles, legs, thinking to disrupt his intention, even a little bit, to give herself time to find the next step to surviving this.

For a moment she wondered at his intention. Surely, if he had wanted her dead, she would be dead?

He might be toying with her. There was still time to die.

As the lines crossed his body, he slowed, but only a little, stepped over them, as if treading knee-high ocean swells.