Solstice
While Kaiataris lay unconscious, Math worked with the grim resolve of a man tidying a massacre.
He shoved Huraiik’s severed limbs into the underbrush.
He circled spells to clean the blood from his shirt and from her silk dress—though part of him hated that kindness.
He even mended the broken strap on her sandal.
The air was still. The glade smelled like blood and green sap.
She looked like something out of a child’s tale—but not a happy one. A cursed princess, laid out in a bower thick with shadows, the hush of it too deep, the breeze too absent. The quiet made his skin prickle. It was a nightmare dressed up in innocence.
Not inappropriate, considering their location.
When the necromancer stirred, it was with a child’s startled gasp, a full-body twitch. Then she stiffened, her breath trapped in her lungs.
Her eyes flicked to him, wild, as she realized her limbs were caught in living vines—still faintly pulsing, as though they too remembered her pain.
“Don’t,” Math said, before she could do more than open her mouth to scream or curse—or both. “I can’t trust you. Not after you neglected to mention the spell you cast on me.”
Kaiataris’s lips pressed together. Her dark eyes flicked across the clearing, lit with Math’s magic.
“I had every intention of mentioning it,” she said, her voice tight. “You may recall, however, that our conversations have been rather rudely interrupted.”
“I can feel your pain,” Math accused. “Literally.”
She bit her lip but said nothing.
Math dug a fingernail into the flesh of his palm, hard enough to sting. She flinched.
“And that,” he said coldly, “is why I can’t trust you.”
He braced for an excuse. A lie. A sidestep. Instead, her fury hit him like a slap.
“You cannot trust me?” she snapped. “You, who command the forest? And I am to presume you bear no allegiance to the Parnathi? Am I to be grateful that the person bound to my protection consorts with my enemies?”
“Consorts with them?” Math laughed. “The torn-up little pieces of Huraiik disagree with you. You get the same speech he did. I don’t command the plants. They happen to like me, which isn’t the same thing.”
Kaiataris twisted against her bonds as she glared at him with narrowed eyes. “Tell me you’re not gullible enough to believe that.”
“It’s the truth.”
She scanned the glade—the gouged earth, the scarring roots. “Is it?”
“Yes!” The word burst out louder than he meant. Her skepticism was a pressure in his chest, scratching under his ribs. “They want to protect me, but they don’t obey me. There’s a difference.”
“Have you tried giving them a direct order?”
He bared his teeth. “If I were working with the Parnathi, I wouldn’t have healed you.”
She quieted. The fire in her dimmed, replaced by something harder to identify.
“That is … a fair point,” she finally said. “Thank you.”
“What bothers me,” he continued, “is that I shouldn’t have rushed to your aid, yet I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t even consider doing anything else.”
Her gaze sharpened, struck. “Would it have been better had you let me die?”
Math flushed. A proper Idallik Knight would’ve seen her for what she was and acted accordingly. Beautiful or not, she was a grim lord.
Even if she had saved his life three times now.
She touched her chest, just above the now-healed wound. “I did not stay silent concerning the spell to deceive you. I stayed silent because it is not working as designed.”
Math tilted his head and waited for her to continue.
“The bond was meant to be one-way,” Kaiataris explained. “You would feel my emotions. My pain. If I grew distressed, you might fetch a cup of tea. Perhaps a nice biscuit. If I found myself in danger, you’d come to my rescue. It was not meant to be … reciprocal.”
“Sure. Because why would you care what your thrall is feeling?”
“You are not my thrall,” she replied, with imperious frost. “As I should think is proven by my current predicament.” She tugged her arms against the vines, not so much to escape as to make her point.
“So what went wrong?”
Her glare deepened. “You! You went wrong. You turned the spell back upon me. Which should be impossible, but since ‘should be impossible’ defines your style of magic, I have no choice but to accept the result.”
“And if one of us dies?” Math pressed. “Was that part of the design? Bind me to your survival so I can’t walk away?”
She looked appalled. “No! That is a vile suggestion. I would never—”
“But you don’t know, do you?” His voice dropped. “The spell isn’t working right. So what happens if you die? If I do?”
Kaiataris turned her face away, shame rippling through their connection like heat from a forge. “You were supposed to know if I was hurt. Not feel it.”
“Answer the question.”
“I can’t! I cannot say what happens at the edge of death.”
“Fantastic,” Math muttered. “Love that. And undoing the spell? How easy is that? Don’t take this the wrong way, but my life is basically over if I find myself permanently bound to a grim lord!”
“I am not a grim lord!”
“Trust me when I say you are the only person who believes that.”
She gave one of her bound hands a vicious yank. “Let me out of this.”
“Answer the question. Can you undo the spell?”
“Of course,” Kaiataris snarled. “It was never meant to be used on an unwilling subject, only a volunteer.”
Math barked out a bitter laugh. “Since when does walking through a door count as volunteering?”
“Were you shoved, then? Sent through blindfolded?” She sniffed with indignant disdain he could both see and feel.
“I’ll repeat it again.” Math stepped closer. “If I untie you, will you remove this enchantment?”
She studied him with a gaze that seemed to see more than it should. “Yes,” she said finally. “I shall.”
He unwound the vines. He pretended not to notice the way they slithered away into the underbrush like shamed servants.
Kaiataris rose slowly. She brushed off her dress, straightened her back, and ran her hands down her arms, brushing away every leaf like a queen regaining her poise.
“Your turn,” Math said. “Undo the spell.”
But she didn’t. Instead, Kaiataris regarded him cooly. “First, I must pose a question. It is relevant, I promise. How long has it been since the destruction of these ‘grim lords’?”
“All the grim lords but you, you mean.”
She visibly clenched her teeth while shoving down her anger. “If you insist. Yes, all but me.”
Math frowned. “A thousand years. Maybe more.”
He felt the ripple of her panic, though it never showed on her face. “And how…” She exhaled a shaky breath. “How long did they rule?”
“Centuries. I don’t remember the exact number.”
“How many centuries?”
“At least four.”
Kaiataris closed her eyes. “Fourteen hundred years,” she whispered. “By the stars…”
She looked as though the ground beneath her had cracked open, as if the axis of the world had shifted beneath her feet.
She looked so small in that moment, so lost—and the emotion that welled up in his chest made him furious. Math didn’t want to pity her. Pity made her real. Pity made her human.
He forced the emotion down, strangled it.
“This explains everything,” she said at last, drawing herself back together like gathering tattered silk. “Why I am so diminished and weak. You see, the world’s magic flows in cycles between two great forces—”
“Necromancy and—”
“No,” she snapped. “Absolutely not. Order and Chaos. Everything is Order and Chaos. The rest is nothing but dressed-up superstition. Order and Chaos diametrically oppose each other, a cycle of waxing and waning power that lasts exactly two thousand years between crests.”
“And when one’s at its peak, the other’s at its lowest…” he murmured. “That’s what you meant by ‘solstice.’”
She glanced at him, surprised. Her pleasure and approval was a warm, tingling sensation across his skin. “Yes, exactly so. The solstices are terrible, dangerous times when the magic of the universe is horrifically out of balance. The last solstice belonged to Order—”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
She gave him a long look. “What is more orderly than death?”
That shut him up.
“Nothing that breathes or dreams or changes should have survived the last solstice. The only reason that you and I are here to argue the matter is because we—myself and my peers whom I presume you would also classify as ‘grim lords’—wove a spell powerful enough to carry life through death’s nadir in a magical slumber.
We would wake when the tide of Chaos had risen high enough to support life again.
After which we would have over a millennium to prepare for the next solstice, the one that Chaos brings. ”
She gestured to the dark rents and burned patches of woodland floor where Math and Huraiik had fought, already half-reclaimed by roots. “But I have woken too late.”
“The Green grows,” Math murmured. “They meant the rise of Chaos.”
“Naturally. Chaos is life. But imagine, if you would, that life without death. Mutation. Madness. Growth with no end, no limit. War without peace. Violence without end. A world that devours and regurgitates its children in infinite, brutal variation.”
He swallowed hard.
“That’s what the Queens want,” she whispered. “They’ve been waiting for it, anticipating it.”
Math couldn’t stop himself from shuddering. Then he blinked, and gave the beautiful dark-eyed woman a hard stare. “And that’s bad,” he agreed, “but I can’t help but notice you haven’t explained what any of this has to do with removing the damn enchantment on us.”
Kaiataris stepped backward. She turned her head, startled, as a vine shifted against the wall behind her.
She calmly looked Math in the eyes. “Haven’t I?”
“Stop playing games,” Math hissed. “You haven’t explained a—”
He paused.
No.
He shook his head in horror, denying a truth even as he spoke the words. “You … you use objects for your magic, don’t you? The walls of the maze, your jewelry, the map. You tie your magic to things that are permanent. Stable.”