The Living God, page 29
Rowe shifted at her bluntness. He bowed his head sharply and excused himself from the room. Darshan faded into warm laughter well before the door slammed, stepping back into the shadows to lean against the wall.
“Do you accept my terms?”
Darshan kicked at the hay tangled over his boots. “Accept your terms? Of course. How could I refuse?”
“If you do anything to jeopardize this or to undermine me, I will kill you and find myself a new rebel Mage to marry. You’re not special, Darshan. You’re convenient. As convenient as I am for your legitimacy concerns, but the only problem is that you are a silver a dozen and I am rare. I could step outside these walls and make the offer to six of your men. I am the only one that can make you king, not just in title but in soul. The Core will accept nothing else.”
Darshan’s cleverness washed from his face. He bit at his lip, his aged expression growing stern. She could tell by the lengthening lines of his face how seriously he understood his situation.
“You loved my mother,” Saran continued. “You tried to save her, and I found you endearing for it. I looked to you as a father, and Rowe did the same. You will never gain back the trust that was lost between us. You are no longer the man that loved my mother. He is gone. The man who has replaced him holds no favor in my heart and is expendable. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes,” Darshan replied.
Saran moved to stand but found that her legs wouldn’t obey her. She hated the idea of calling Rowe back to help, worse than admitting weakness. She pressed her hands into the sides of the stool and pushed with all her might, thankful for the robe and dressing gown to hide her quivering legs. She knocked harshly on the door and walked slowly through it, using the wall to carry her weight. Rowe waited outside, pressed against the stone hall. When he saw her, he offered her his arm.
As angry as Rowe seemed, he didn’t stray far for the rest of the night. He only disappeared for a short while to order the guards to tear through Yarin’s room. “Empty everything out,” he’d told them. “Down to the last crumb, the last puff of dust, until it is empty, and bring any key found to me.” When he returned, he found Saran sitting near the fireplace, staring into the flames.
“You should be resting.”
Saran nodded but did not let her eyes roam from the embers and the long, hot fingers of fire wrapping around the logs. She knew he was right. She had to rest. She had a whole day ahead of her and needed strength to make it down the length of the throne room to her place at its end. She needed to be able to walk on her own. Anything else would show weakness before those who could sense the limp of prey.
Saran sat in an overstuffed chair unfamiliar to her or her room. Actually nothing in her room belonged. She imagined the whole city had a similar issue, after her magic turned it from a barely standing ruin to a newly constructed mecca. All her trinkets, all the little beautiful things she’d collected over the years from her visits to the Second and Third were gone. All the books she pored over and absorbed by reading thousands of times, even her favorite one that reminded her of Rowe, had been replaced with different books that were both new and old all at once. The scratches and dents on the floor where she carelessly discarded Keleir’s armor on nights of passion were polished over. New, clean boards replaced them. She’d never even seen her bed before, and impossibly it stood even more opulent than her old one.
“I think this was my mother’s room,” Saran admitted. “When she was a girl. Perhaps even my grandmother’s … It is old enough. Everything in here is ancient and new all at once. There are some things that oddly haven’t changed, like the dagger in the wardrobe and my wedding dress. I knew it had to be old, but I didn’t think it that old. I wonder what magic seamstress could weave fabric that would stand a hundred years without disintegrating.”
Rowe admired the room down to the deep blue curtains that he’d never seen before. “I haven’t bothered to look at mine.”
“You won’t find the key in his room,” Saran whispered. “If it wasn’t there before, it definitely isn’t there now. Nothing is in any place that it was before. Everything is different, down to the smallest details.”
“This scale of magic should have killed you.”
“But it didn’t.”
“Why?”
Saran shrugged her shoulders. “I am stronger than you think.”
“Obviously. You’ve recovered from Keleir’s death fast enough.”
Saran’s green eyes shot up to him, narrowed and sharp. She had a hardness to her face that he didn’t recognize. “Get. Out.” Short, demanding words spoken after several long, agonizing seconds of silence. Tears brimmed her eyes, and she held her jaw tight to keep her lips from trembling.
Rowe felt shame at his words. He’d spoken them against his will and couldn’t repair the damage fast enough. “I didn’t … I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, losing the war with her tears. When Rowe shifted off the wall to go to her, she held up her hand to him with a look in her eyes that said she wished her magic could stop him. He stopped of his own accord. “Saran, I’m sorry.”
“I can’t,” she gasped, wrapping her hands around her neck. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” She couldn’t breathe.
Rowe knelt next to her and wrapped his hands around her arms and held her tight. She sobbed, wild and hard, until her lungs seized with sorrow. “I couldn’t save him.”
“You tried,” Rowe whispered, brushing her tears away. She only cried harder.
“I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t save him. I promised I’d save him. I’m sorry, Rowe. I’m so sorry.”
“Shhh,” he pleaded, wrapping her up in his arms. “Don’t …”
Saran shook her head. “I did so many horrible things to get to my father. I killed and I couldn’t reverse it. I couldn’t bring them back. I couldn’t save anyone. He’s gone, and I can’t bring him back.”
“You haven’t lost him. Not completely. There is a part of him in you. In your child.”
Saran froze, hiccupping through tears. Her expression turned mournful. The feeling welling in her wasn’t sadness for a child that had not been, but the stinging reminder that she and Keleir had been robbed of that joy with his passing. “No, I don’t.”
“You … lost it?”
Saran shook her head again, harder. “I wasn’t pregnant. I was sick with worry or food poisoning, something, but it was not a child. Madam Ophelia confirmed it.”
Rowe pressed his hand to her cheek. They hadn’t discussed what the possibility of a child meant to her, she knew that. She read it in his eyes. He fought to find the right words to soothe her. Saran took his hand, unable to tolerate the uncertain anguish in his eyes. “It’s okay … I’m okay. It is better this way.”
She believed those words, without a shadow of a doubt, and hated herself for it.
FORTY-SEVEN
THE NEXT DAY started early for the servants in the palace. They had much to do to prepare for the coronation, a ceremony that had not been performed in so long that only a few of the remaining priests who understood the rites were available, and most were too old to attend to it themselves.
The servants had trouble locating many of the items familiar to them. Storage rooms lay empty of the usual supplies. Instead they held completely different ones. Some storage rooms weren’t for storage at all anymore and held empty beds in them. Saran’s magic had turned the palace upside down. Some servants spent the entire night searching it over just trying to find their quarters and their belongings, which, of course, no longer existed.
Time had changed in the city by a hundred years.
The benefits outweighed any price paid by the change, because when the servants searched the typically empty vault for the crown belonging to the queen, the last real wealth Adrid possessed, they found chests of gold and silver, trays of jewels, and racks upon racks of jewelry. They pocketed some of it for themselves, collected the crown, and ran off to tell the queen the good news. Adrid was no longer destitute.
Rowe left Saran in the care of her new personal guard, led by Raener, one of the soldiers who let her out of the dungeon. The Lightning Mage spent the morning rummaging through the king’s chamber. The servants had obeyed his order and emptied it out. Only fitting for them to do it anyway, since Saran would be moving into it by the end of the day. He spun around an empty room with polished wood floors, crisp curtains, and perfectly clean windows.
Clean windows …
The palace hadn’t had those in all the years the Lightning Mage lived there. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t have the man power to clean them before, but the fact that Yarin had specifically ordered them not to.
Rowe went to the window and peered out at the courtyard where they stacked dried wood for the pyre that Keleir would rest upon that afternoon. He watched them methodically arrange the logs and limbs around a wooden platform built specifically for the body to rest upon. The platform stood ten feet tall, high enough for all that would stand in the courtyard to see the Fire Mage burn.
He doubted many people would attend Keleir’s funeral. Not many liked him, even among his own men, much less Darshan’s rebels. Perhaps they would attend, if only to watch the famed Vel d’Ekaru burn away to nothing, thereby relieving any fears held that he might rise and wipe them out. Rowe winced at the idea, at the mental image of his brother disappearing in the flames. He’d seen Keleir walk in fire, seen it wrap lovingly around him as a woman might, but the fire never hurt him. He was born of it, and after today he would return to it, return to the Core that granted him her most precious gift.
“Lord Blackwell,” a meek voice murmured to him from behind. Rowe turned to find a shy servant girl, no older than fifteen, standing just behind him. “We didn’t find the key you are looking for, but we found these. I’m not sure what they belong to.” She held out a ring of keys and placed them in his outstretched hand. “Might I suggest talking to Madam Ophelia, m’lord?” There was an uneasiness in her eyes, a tinge of fear when she spoke of the healer.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Betha, m’lord, his majesty’s chambermaid. I was, at least.”
Her name felt familiar to him, and he searched his mind for what he should remember of her. “Tell me, do you know what the king did with the key, Betha? You can tell me. No one will hurt you, I promise.”
FORTY-EIGHT
SARAN ADMIRED HERSELF in the mirror, something she never really took the luxury of doing. Ora had outdone herself this time. Despite the heavily embroidered, corseted dress she’d worn for her wedding, she felt comfortable. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the fact she’d accented it with armor.
The brown leather armor of her breastplate, gorget, and pauldrons covered the top of her dress fittingly, along with the metal and brown leather bracers around her arms. The curls of her deep red hair were piled up with the elaborate headdress worn by the Adridian queen woven across the crown of her head. Ora painted her face to mask the paleness and bruising. She looked just as unfamiliar as she had on her wedding day, with deep-colored lips, rose on her cheeks, and black around the rims of her eyes.
Madam Ophelia stood just in the doorway, waiting patiently for Saran to address her. The whole situation felt oddly familiar. Saran thought back to her wedding day, musing over the healer’s joy at the idea of a woman on the throne. She imagined Madam Ophelia felt very happy to finally see her dream come true.
“Ora, would you leave us?” Madam Ophelia asked, offering the girl a tight half smile. “If you’re finished, of course.”
Ora smiled at Saran’s reflection. “Never have I made a finer masterpiece in all my life. The armor was a lovely touch. Great idea, Your Highness. I’d shiver in my boots if I were your enemy. You are a warrior queen if there ever was one.” The servant girl bowed deeply and scurried off past Madam Ophelia, who closed the door behind Ora and allowed herself farther into the room.
“Warrior queen, indeed,” Madam Ophelia echoed. She looked extra prim in her gray healer’s attire, which seemed washed and pressed nicely for the occasion. Her hands clasped tight, she held her head higher than normal.
“What can I do for you, Madam?”
“I just came to admire you,” Madam Ophelia admitted with an empty sort of reverence, the voice of a mother who could not believe her dreams had come true.
Saran fiddled with the armored bracers on her forearms. “Is the pyre being prepared?”
“It is almost complete and will be ready for the funeral after the coronation,” the healer replied, taking a step forward. “It was such hard work, but it all worked out in the end. You are here, taking your place as you should. I had my doubts, but I never should have.”
The queen paused in her fidgeting, staring at the mirror, at Madam Ophelia’s proud expression in its reflection. “Hard work?”
“I worked hard to separate you from them and look how you flourished! Look what you became!” Madam Ophelia’s eyes welled with tears. “You don’t know how hard it was to keep your magic from you, but I needed you to understand how strong you could be without it. I worried when you wasted away as soon as it was gone. I couldn’t stand your phlegmatic attitude toward life—it nearly drove me mad.” A happy laugh involuntarily burst from her. A laugh from a healer was like watching a goat sprout wings. “I almost carved the key out of your father’s body and gave you your powers back. But Darshan told me to be patient. He knew that you’d come around once Ahriman was out of the way. You wouldn’t be blinded by girlish ideas. And then he was away, and you were even worse. I mourned it and I nearly lost hope.”
Anger boiled in Saran, but she couldn’t force herself to stop the woman’s monologue. A desperate part of her needed to hear it all, wanted all the frayed edges of information made whole. Madam Ophelia cried happy tears and cupped her hands over her heart as if she prayed, as if she worshipped Saran as those who worshipped the Vel d’Ekaru. Saran allowed the healer to worship herself straight to her own doom.
“Blackwell held you back more than Ahriman ever did. I poisoned your food, just a little, to make you sick and convinced him I thought you were pregnant. I knew he wouldn’t let you stay here in that condition. But I also knew you couldn’t leave the city. Blackwell would either die trying to free you or abandon you.”
“You did all that just to get me alone?” The calmness of her own voice startled Saran, but the surprise did not show on her face. “You’ve been working with Darshan all this time? You knew where my father hid the key to the Bind? You did all that, just to see me rise to this?”
“I only worked with Darshan up until yesterday. I used him to help me get you here. I knew you’d never let him have control. I trusted you.” Madam Ophelia grinned, joyful tears rolling down her face. “It all worked. As soon as you were separated from all those crutches, you flourished. You flew!”
Saran stepped closer to Madam Ophelia and cupped the woman’s face, brushing her tears away. A deadly calm settled in her soul. “Do you think I deserve to have my powers back now? Now that I’ve proven myself to you?”
Madam Ophelia nodded. “Yes. I do.”
“And you hid it in my father’s body?”
The woman smiled. “The wound in his leg. We hid it there after your wedding. Once the coronation is over, I’ll retrieve it for you.”
Saran nodded hollowly and turned from the woman, going to her wardrobe as stiff as a puppet with no strings. “I have very few things in my possession,” she murmured, numb and broken. Her hand swiped across the top of the wardrobe. “But I think I have just the reward for your cleverness.”
Madam Ophelia pressed her hands to her heart. “I am astounded. I half expected my account to be suicide. But I felt compelled to tell you so you would understand the depths of my devotion to you, to the Grand Feminine we’ve longed for.”
Saran paused. The numbness she felt began to crumble. “Of course I understand. Without you, none of this would have been possible. You, Madam Ophelia, are the root of all of this.” All of this pain. All of this. All of this. All of this!
Saran stepped out from behind the wardrobe door, tucking her hand in her skirts and easing them around the furniture. “Everything, from the moment you soothed my wounds with tea to this brave confession. I know only one way to reward such devious cleverness.”
Madam Ophelia bowed her head low. “I am at your disposal.”
Saran smiled, cruel and beautiful. Her father’s smile. “I killed for the first time yesterday, did you know that? I’ve hurt people before, I’ve killed before, but no one ever stayed that way. Every life I’ve ever taken, I’ve restored … until yesterday.”
For so long she’d been powerless, unable to exact revenge on her father, unable to have control over her own life. Rage built against a woman who had been Saran’s advocate, a woman who had practically raised her. Madam Ophelia orchestrated the destruction of Saran’s dreams of escape and the death of her husband. She created the lie that Saran carried a child, gave the princess the brief thought of that ill-timed future, all for the sake of leaving her hopelessly alone. The real villain in all of this was Madam Ophelia.
Saran’s hands shook, and the quiver spread through her whole body. She is the reason for all of this pain. All of this sadness. Helplessness. Death. All of it.
The healer caught the glint of a dagger before the princess drove it up into her stomach. Shock washed over the healer’s face. She lifted her eyes to Saran’s blank stare before stumbling away and falling backward to the floor. Madam Ophelia cupped her hands around the wound, gasping and staring in disbelief at her creation. Saran shook with rage, unable to quell it in her heart even to see what she had done.
The healer drew the dagger from her stomach with a sharp gasp and pressed her hands to the wound. Saran offered a sympathetic frown, her hands and legs quivering. “That helplessness you feel? I know it well now. It is a horrible feeling … watching something you care about slip away because you don’t possess the power to mend it.”
