The Living God, page 21
If only the world were different. If only they’d gone away like Keleir had wanted. If only he’d never told her that he didn’t love her.
She pushed him away when he lingered too long. He felt the hooves against the earth. “Go!”
He nodded, torn and broken, but intelligent enough to know she spoke truth. He stepped back into a wall of blinding light before his poor judgment made him stay.
THIRTY-ONE
SARAN LOWERED HER hands from her eyes when Rowe’s gate dissipated in a shower of blue sparks. In that second, she had never felt more alone. The metal bars to the city were gone, but she remained more a prisoner than ever before. She tried to push through the pass beneath the stone arch, just to test it once more, but the Bind on her wrist caught, as if an invisible hand held her firmly in place.
The Saharsiad rode up around her, circling menacingly on dark horses.
“Arrest her,” one of them said, and two bound her hands together and tied her to the back of a horse.
Though it was a short distance back to the castle, the walk felt like an eternity. The closer they got, the larger and more hatefully the stone fortress loomed over her. The lightning flashing across the sky made the spindling towers look like black fingers reaching out over her. Her chest tightened; her stomach twisted.
The prospect of death did not frighten her. Being trapped frightened her. Not being able to escape to freedom, not being able to protect … She pressed her hands to her belly.
The walk from the bottom of the castle steps to the foot of Yarin’s throne went by in a quick, rushing blur. The hard crack of a sheathed sword against her back sent her to her knees and brought her more aware of the throne room and the angry eyes of her father.
“He escaped?” Yarin muttered, drumming his fingers against the arm of his throne.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the leader of the Saharsiad said, placing his boot on Saran’s back and crushing her against the gritty floor. “This one was with him. She is bloody, but it is not hers. He’s badly wounded.”
Yarin sneered, the light rhythmic drum of his fingers silenced with a final loud tap. “I’m saddened that you thought it would be that easy. Have I not taught you better?”
Saran lifted her head and struggled to push up from the floor with the heavy weight of the Saharsiad boot against her back. She offered him nothing but a black glare before spitting on the stone in front of her.
“He wasn’t taking you to Keleir, you know.” Yarin sighed, his brow furrowing with sympathy. “He was lying to you, Saran.”
Saran clenched her teeth and turned her gaze to the floor.
“He planned to take you as far away from him as possible. He believes in the prophecy you deny. He would have betrayed you to fulfill it.”
The princess did not meet the king’s eyes. She stared at the stone, feeling a knot in the back of her throat choke whatever protest she could muster. Yarin could not be trusted, but Rowe did believe in that prophecy and he would lie in order to protect her from whatever he deemed a threat. The Lightning Mage had proven that already.
“Well, are you going to say anything?”
The weight of the Saharsiad boot grew heavier, until every breath she exhaled could not be fully replaced. She wheezed, struggling to breathe. Her hands pressed into the stone, and she shifted her legs beneath her to try to push the weight away.
“Teach my daughter the respect she has forgotten,” Yarin sneered, resting his arms across his knees and peering down at her with a dark glare. “If you weren’t a necessity, I would rid myself of your insubordination permanently. I can only hope that, with some proper tutelage, you will be better behaved in the future.”
The weight lifted from Saran’s back. She took a deep breath and slid up to her hands and knees. A dark shape moved quickly off to her side, and she caught sight of the boot just before it drove into her stomach. The sweet breath of air she’d stolen left her in a horrible gagging rush. She curled her arm around her belly and fell over onto her side, sucking air in wet and tight.
The next boot came for her, but she rolled so that her back took the lick. Each one that swung, she tried her best to make sure her ribs or spine took the punishment until she rolled flat on her stomach and covered her head with her hands. They stomped down around her, grinding her into the gritty throne room floor.
“Turn her over,” someone said.
Saran struggled against the rough hands that grabbed her and forced her over onto her back. She curled her knees to her stomach and kicked at them, bit at them, screamed at them. When one tried to drive their heel into her gut, she tangled her legs around them and tripped them up until they ended up on the floor next to her.
She gave a feral growl, snarling like a savage animal, and tore her hands free from the Saharsiad. She wrapped her arms around herself and glared at them through loose strands of curly crimson hair. “It’s easy to beat a woman when she’s weaponless, isn’t it, pigs?” She spat blood at their feet.
One kicked at her, and she offered him her back, rolling into the hit and repelling off hard enough to crack her head forward against the stone. She went still, frozen as a flash of bright white pain exploded through her skull. Vaguely she noticed the shuffle of feet, felt the hard leather of a boot shove against her until the Saharsiad rolled her over.
Her vision wavered on the cusp of black and blurry, but she saw enough to know the attacks weren’t finished. She made a groan of protest, fumbled her arms up over her waist, and wrapped them like a shield about her belly.
Saran, born a woman of some privilege, had lived her life in a deserted city surrounded by soldiers and very few women. The women she did know were servants or healers, and while she had tried her best to befriend them, even they knew that it was safer for them to keep their distance. Despite her lack of female interaction, Saran knew enough. She saw and heard enough. She knew young servant girls who paid brutish soldiers to beat them so that they lost the child, since the healers refused to give them the proper potions to end it by any other means.
Saran knotted her hands in her clothes, locking her fingers tight and her arms like a protective vise. If she were pregnant, it was ill-timed. There were too many important deeds to be done and really no room for such a thing. But this was her child. This was Keleir’s child. Her father had taken many things from her, but he would not take this.
“I’m sorry,” she huffed. The words spilled out of her mouth before pride could snatch them back. She exhaled a ragged, angry breath. The room seemed infinitely quieter than before. Even the torches crackled with less enthusiasm. She gathered herself on her knees at the foot of King Yarin’s throne and turned her face, marred by bruises and blood, up to her father.
Yarin’s old, withered face sneered back at her. He rolled his eyes and ran a hand over his head. “Your words are insulting,” he muttered. “I know you are not sorry, Saran.”
Her fingers clutched at the stone beneath her, as if holding it tightly enough might give her the strength she needed. “I am,” she said, her voice cracking. She bent forward slowly, wincing as every bone and muscle in her body protested. She couldn’t tell if the pain were physical from the beating or emotional from the sheer will it took to grovel at his feet. She pressed her bleeding forehead to the stone and prostrated herself before the King of Adrid, not as a princess, but as a slave.
It felt like an eternity, and it was a number of minutes, but eventually the old man moved on his throne, shifting his bony body into a more comfortable position. “Curious,” he muttered, drumming his fingers against the arm of his chair again. “I don’t believe you. It isn’t genuine. But what I would like to know is why you are so desperate to avoid your beating. Tell me, and I’ll not let it continue.”
Saran mulled over the words, slowly rising from the floor to her knees again. “It hurts,” she muttered, smoothing her dirty hands over her clothes.
“It hurts, but that isn’t why, is it? You’ve handled worse than this before without a word. So why?”
Saran didn’t reply. She stared at him, trying to find the right answer that would please him.
“One last chance, my dear. Tell me the truth.”
She weighed her options and the consequences of silence. She chose a lie—no, a halftruth. “I don’t have my magic. What if they do something irreversible? Something I can’t fix.”
“Wounds heal, my dear, and they leave scars as a lesson to our faults. Perhaps scars are what you need to remember your place,” Yarin said, a sympathetic look in his eyes. She wondered if it was for her or for himself, for having been cursed with her for a daughter. He exhaled a heavy, watery sigh and motioned to the Saharsiad. “Continue.”
Hard hands grabbed her arms and pulled her back. Fear leapt up, sudden and scalding. It burned through her senses until it had hold of her heart and her mind and her voice. She yelped, the first real show of fear ever displayed before the old bag of bones that called her daughter. She kicked her legs out, tried to drag her arms away from their heavy gauntleted hands, tried desperately to wrap them around herself again. When she couldn’t, she gave up on standing and instead let herself fall heavy to the floor, let herself dangle like a rock from their grip, and she drew her knees up to her chest and clenched her whole body tight, willing the joints to fuse into place.
A Saharsiad stepped forward and reared his fist back, his knuckles covered in sharp metal points that would tear into her flesh mercilessly. Saran closed her eyes and turned her already bruised cheek to him.
“Stop!” Yarin called, a strong tone in his normally feeble voice.
Her heart dropped and lifted again. Her body uncoiled like a broken spring as relief washed over her too quickly, turning her thoughts dizzy and her skin flush. She felt tears of relief, too shocked by them to notice her father leaving the comfort of his throne to greet her at the bottom. His aged eyes studied Saran before the concern left him and replaced itself with malevolent joy.
He laughed. The sound echoed off the walls, reverberating back and forth until it sounded as if he’d multiplied in presence. He laughed for so long that it became white noise in her ears. But then he laughed until he coughed, and he coughed so hard that a Saharsiad had to catch him before he fell.
“Does he know?” the king asked, clearing his throat and righting himself. He beckoned for his cane. One of the Saharsiad jumped quickly up the podium to collect it for him.
Saran turned her eyes away as Yarin knelt before her, his joints popping as he pressed his knees to the floor. He touched her bruised and bloodied cheek with a trembling old hand and then ran it over her damp, curling hair.
“Just like your mother,” he whispered, uncharacteristic affection hanging in his voice. “If he doesn’t know, he will. I’ll send a letter to Mavahan tonight, once I wrangle someone to replace the departed messenger. Until Keleir returns, we’ll find you a nice, cozy cell on the first floor of our dungeon.”
THIRTY-TWO
YARIN, TO SARAN’S great relief, could not send a letter to Mavahan that night. While there were several individuals with the capacity to take over the role of messenger, none of them seemed to have the way with birds that the last messenger possessed. Short-range crows and long-range pigeons were different in temperament. She’d learned this from Madam Ophelia, whom Yarin sent down to her small dank cell just beneath the first floor of the castle to tend to the abrasions from her beating.
The cell wasn’t so far down as to encase her in complete, hopeless darkness. It sat just at the edge of that bleak, inescapable prison, where the air wasn’t too cold or the floor too damp. A bed made of straw sat tucked in the corner with a tin bowl to piss in. A metal grated window hung where the top of the wall met the short ceiling. A small beam of moonlight filtered in to bathe the torchless room in a pale glow. The storm had passed.
A guard stood at the open door, his arms folded across his broad armored chest, and a sympathetic frown marred his features. He watched Madam Ophelia tend to the wounds with the aid of a very weak candle resting on the floor near her knees.
Madam Ophelia’s cold hands wrapped gossamer bandages about Saran’s arms to cover the scrapes. The healer took greater care with the smaller wounds than she normally would, muttering about the conditions in which the princess would be kept and how they could lead to infection.
Saran hadn’t spoken a word since the woman arrived. A hundred thoughts warred in her mind, some she felt the need to voice, but the heaviness in her heart made the idea of speaking them too exhausting. She resigned herself to watching the old woman, whose gray hair pulled so tight that her wrinkles stretched smooth.
“There are a few spells I can run on your blood to determine whether or not you are carrying a child,” Madam Ophelia said. “Shall I?”
This startled Saran. She’d convinced herself so surely that it was true, she hadn’t even considered the possibility that it wasn’t.
“Yes.” Her voice broke as she spoke and she coughed to clear her throat.
“It won’t hurt to add another cut to you.” The healer sighed, taking out a tiny blade and holding it up to Saran’s finger. The guard at the door took a half step forward but stopped when Saran lifted her hand. Strange, she thought, that the man keeping her prisoner felt a duty to protect her from a tiny knife.
Madam Ophelia cut Saran’s finger and drained the blood into a small glass vial, which she corked and pressed into the pocket of her cotton apron. “I’ll come back when the spell is over.”
Saran grabbed her hand as she stood and drew her low enough to whisper, “I’m not. Do you understand? Even if it says I am, I’m not. Tell no one the truth.”
Madam Ophelia’s eyes, often cold and distant, softened. She pressed her other hand to the top of Saran’s head. “My loyalty is always and ever to you. Soon we will show them the light. When you are queen, we will rise.”
Saran nodded softly, her lips parting with words she wouldn’t speak. There were too many prophecies, too many conflicting religions, and too many people who believed in salvation derived from impossible idols. The healer was part of a sect of women who worshipped the Grand Feminine, a belief that men were inferior and had doomed the world, and that one day a woman would rise to power and the reign of man would be over. Women would rule over the world, bringing peace and justice. A fairy tale. Saran didn’t believe in it, and she wasn’t unwilling to use it to her advantage. But when confronted with Madam Ophelia’s kindness and loyalty, it made Saran want to admit the truth.
But she wouldn’t.
Like her father and his Living God, Madam Ophelia wouldn’t be swayed from her beliefs. She wore this look in her cold eyes, a hardness as sharp as diamonds that said, if pushed, she had a terrifying desire for violence and a need to quench it. Madam Ophelia was dangerous, though her power could only ever be used for healing. Saran realized then how glad she was that healers only possessed the power for mending and not breaking.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Madam Ophelia scooped up her bag of medical supplies and the candle on the floor. She gave Saran a gentle curtsy before the guard let her out and locked the door behind her.
In the dark, quiet cell, Saran lay stiff and sore across the straw bed. It smelled of mildew and dust, and each breath she took coated the inside of her mouth and nose with dirt.
THIRTY-THREE
THE BUMPING AND jolting of the wagon woke Rowe to damp morning air and a gray sky glaring back at him. His mouth was too dry to swallow, and his body ached despite all the work that Darshan’s healers had put into him. He ran his half-gloved hands over the wet tunic and the gaping holes in his garment.
“Healers are good at patching flesh, not so much with fabric,” Darshan’s voice filtered down to him. The Lightning Mage lifted his gaze to the back of the straw-bed wagon where the rebel leader sat tucked into the corner, one leg bent and the other stretched out before him. He wore a leather cloak over his shoulders with the hood pulled low over his brow. He was damp, but whether from rain or water magic, Rowe didn’t know.
“Are we near Salara?”
“Not exactly,” the older Mage said. “We’re nearing the byroad to Salara that crosses the main road to Andrian. This is where we will part ways, you and I. I will lead the army to the capital and you will lead the diversion to Salara.”
Rowe slowly drew himself up and against the hard-planked sides of the wagon. “Taking the main road isn’t very smart, Darshan. The army will be using that road to get to Salara.”
“I will not be on the main road. We will be diverting to the forest, and I’ve requested that our resident Earth Mage hide our tracks this far and onward. No one will notice a company of this size has been through the area. Your job is to get to Salara before Yarin’s men. Logan, Desme, and Shalo will be with you. I would hope that four Mages plus a few armed peasants can subdue some military tax collectors.”
The Lightning Mage scowled. “They are a bit more than that, and you know it. I really think we need to consider our other options now that Saran is completely a prisoner of her father, and especially now that I’ve defected. He’s bound to know where I’ve gone and has to assume that I’ve given away our secrets. Aren’t you concerned in the least that he will change his tactics or forgo missions all together to compensate for that leaked information? He might not be heading to Salara at all, Darshan, and you’ll be walking into a trap.”
“A poorly laid one. Andrian’s walls are nothing more than wet parchment, and we’ve got the firepower to send it falling down around them. Yarin thinks his military is a force to be reckoned with, but it is nothing compared to the will of men who wish to be free.”
“Let’s be realistic here,” Rowe muttered. “Numbers matter quite a lot, especially when you are pitting farmers against well-trained soldiers, men I trained as a matter of fact. At least let the others go on to Salara and allow me to go with you. If you are walking into a trap, I want to make sure you survive it.”
