1 Order #3
“I didn’t kill Aelius to enforce anyone’s rule, but to see justice done.
” She struggled to keep her voice calm when the spectators’ epithets grew louder.
“Perhaps the Order spends too much time watching forests to see it, but sometimes, the only way to justice is blood. Because the law, as largely shaped by religious determinations of morality, has failed people.”
That earned her a chorus of contemplative murmurs, but Silvus’s gray gaze lit with laughter. “Then, I hope you never fail the people. It would be a pity to see you impaled on your own blade.”
Unease pricked at her nape. “I—”
“We’ve heard enough of your rationale.” Verentia held up a hand. “Relate that day’s events.”
Her lips parted to repeat the same sequence she had given before curious crowds and diplomats for months in an effort at transparency.
It had changed nothing. The fatigue she’d been reining in throughout the deluge of work since the Unraveling swamped her.
The Elsarian Order were vultures, waiting for her collapse.
You wish it had been you. It was in their clenched jaws, slitted eyes. The most important moment for the Elsarian religion in decades, and one of your own wasn’t behind it. Sliding her frigid fingers into her pockets for warmth, she ended her recitation.
“Quite a tale.” Verentia’s frenetic tapping on Cassandane’s seat resumed. “How well-versed are you in the Codices?”
“I haven’t read much beyond the Gospels of Wisdom.”
“Have you pledged yourself to any god?”
Sarai tensed at the Inquisitor’s thoughtful mien. What are you planning? “I haven’t.”
“Have you encountered one of the Elsar before?”
The audience was rapt, quiet. “I saw Lord Death some five years ago when I nearly died at Tetrarchs Aelius and Tullus’s hands,” she reminded them. Judging by the yowling from Aelius’s worshippers, they thought he should have finished the job.
“Unlearned and unpledged, yet you’ve seen one of the most elusive of the Elsar twice.” Verentia ceased her tapping. “Why do you think Lord Death appeared to you and not one of his many faithful?”
Sarai watched her warily. “Because I was able to Summon him.”
“So, you’re a Twelfth-Tier magus then?” Verentia’s teeth gleamed. Her trap sprung shut.
Shit. Sarai flinched.
Among the challenges posed by her lack of formal education was her limited understanding of the complexities of magic. Her lessons with Magus Telmar had taught her that it wasn’t so simple as an inner wellspring of power that was unlocked upon use of a rune.
A magic-user, or magus’s, body had twelve inner Thresholds—spigots of varying strength.
Crossing the First provided a trickle of power, sustainable for over a day by most. Runes like zosta that she used for Examination, required opening of the Fourth Threshold and could drain her in fifteen hours.
But crossing the Twelfth unleashed a torrent that bled the user of magic and killed them in minutes—magic and life force being intertwined.
Almost no one had the control to seal the Twelfth Threshold after crossing it.
But the rare, rare, unfathomably powerful user who could access and leash that deluge of power at will were known as Twelfth-Tier magi. Like Aelius. And Kadra.
Not her.
A smile crawled across Blasius’s face at her silence. “You are aware, certo, that Summoning runes are largely Twelfth-Tier Runes and require the user to cross the Twelfth Threshold?”
“I am.”
“Then, you should have no difficulty with my question,” Verentia said smoothly. “Are you a Twelfth-Tier magus?”
Exhaustion and anger buzzed in her skull. “In that moment, I was.”
Blasius’s gaze glittered with triumph. “That isn’t how magic works.”
“It’s how desperation works,” she bit out.
“Why were you so desperate, Petitor Sarai?” Spittle flecked his beard when he hissed the word. “Was it because the Magus Supreme’s death stripped you of the power he’d cloaked you with?”
The Aequitas fell dangerously quiet. Rage balled in her chest, pulsing with a violent heartbeat of its own.
Because there were a thousand things that had forced her into this Hearing.
That she was uneducated. That she was a northern woman.
That she was a salaried government official beholden to a people intent on tearing their own land to shreds in bigotry’s name.
And that there was no better way to get to Kadra than through her.
“Absolutely not.” Her voice rang clear.
Blasius’s eyes slitted when the Order’s Petitor-turned-Cleric confirmed that she wasn’t lying. “Then what made you so desperate?”
Her breath puffed out in a smoky sigh swallowed by the wind. These hypocrites wouldn’t understand love if it slapped them. Turning, she glanced at the man who held her heart.
A muscle worked in Kadra’s jaw. He had told her that she didn’t have to do this, to cut herself open before a crowd once again.
But to be a politician was to either outmaneuver people or be deposed by them.
She wasn’t a Twelfth-Tier magus or a Tetrarch, but she could do this much.
For him, for peace. Her smile was a quiet promise.
Kadra’s gaze altered and sharpened as he sat up in his seat. She turned around.
“There is nothing that I wouldn’t do for Magus Supreme Kadra. No Threshold I wouldn’t cross for his sake.” She spoke faster when Verentia’s gloating smile parted. “Exactly as you all feel about the High Elsar, I imagine.”
The crowd’s stifled laughter altered to stunned murmurs. The final Inquisitor who’d been silent until now looked staggered.
“The two aren’t remotely comparable. You speak of sentiment. What we hold is—”
“Wisdom and Wrath, do the Inquisitors for the gods hold no sentiment toward them?” Sarai pressed a hand to her lips in feigned shock. “What is devotion without love? What keeps you tethered to your posts? Fear?”
A hush swept the Aequitas. Verentia shot the suddenly wordless Inquisitor a glare. “The target of that sentiment is different. One is human, and the other so divine that—”
“And yet, I Summoned the divine because of a human,” Sarai mused. “How strange that your divine sentiment has Summoned no one.”
One by one, the Elsarian Order turned a becoming shade of puce. Looking inches from an aneurysm, Blasius shot to his feet. “For all we know, it was Ruin you Summoned not Death!”
Finally. They’d reached the pinnacle of the accusations against her. “And what have I done to merit that outrageous accusation?” She knew she’d erred the second her voice rang out across the Aequitas. Too harsh, too loud.
Verentia’s measured chuckle made stark contrast. “We’re well aware that you have a temper, Petitor Sarai, but try not to embarrass yourself. You’re the subject of a Hearing. Rein it in.”
Her blood boiled. At the corner of her eye, she saw Kadra’s features harden with lethal promise. It seemed to be costing him everything to keep his word to her not to interfere.
Blasius took advantage of her brittle silence. “The facts are that you continue to hide your disfigurement, proof itself of an unnatural survival—”
The audience gasped when Sarai touched a bloodied fingertip to her armilla. She hadn’t needed to prick it with the pin slotted into the white gold bracelet. Her nails had already drawn blood from her clenched palms.
Crimson sank into nihumb, the rune for “Concealment,” which flared silver. The weak illusion over her skin faded, scars unfurling like vines. Hundreds of eyes fastened on her and slid away in disgust. She hated their morbid curiosity. She might even hate them.
Stalking toward the slew of priests on the dais to the Tetrarchy’s seats, she presented herself for their perusal with a raised eyebrow. “Well?”
Verentia seemed lost for words. Fascination briefly lit and vanished from Silvus’s gaze before it turned impassive.
“Inquisitors, yours is a tiresome reaction. I’m no priest with too much time for leisure, but a Petitor to a Tetrarch.
I conceal my scars to save the minutes of gawking each petitioner would otherwise eat up during my workday.
” Heat throbbed behind her eyes, making the tilt of her chin feel short of the strength she wanted to exude.
“Twice now, Lord Death has allowed me to live. A good portion of Edessa saw him at the Unraveling. Any accusations that I Summoned Ruin are baseless.”
Blasius slammed a fist against the arms of his seat. “How are we to prove that? The memory is walled off, can’t be Materialized by a Petitor! We dug and dug, but—”
“Enough!” Verentia roared with sudden panic.
Sarai’s jaw dropped as Blasius’s meaning registered.
“You’ve dug?” she repeated. “You Probed people who were at the Unraveling to see if I was lying?” She turned to the Petitor-turned-Cleric sitting on the steps, who avoided her gaze.
“Searching people’s memories is a punishment, reserved for those on trial or on their deathbed before it! ”
Blasius waved a hand. “They were handsomely compensated.”
Verentia flinched when the crowd erupted, roaring from all five-tiers.
Sarai dug a hand into her tangled braid, still reeling.
Wrath’s teeth, they just fucked themselves over.
Ur Dinyé wasn’t pleased with her infractions, but they wouldn’t abide the Order’s either.
She wanted to revel in how thoroughly the Order had compromised their case, but she couldn’t find any glee.
“This is madness.” She walked away from the dais, too weary to look at them.
“I haven’t read all eighty-three volumes of the Codices, but I can imagine why the Elsar prevent Probing and Materialization of memories involving them and why they don’t appear during a second Summoning by the same person.
Else they’d be called to heel over and over to grant wishes for some Twelfth-Tier with a swollen head and dreams of conquest. Or the rare moments when they interact with us would be Materialized and exploited as tools of oppression, and they would be, wouldn’t they, Inquisitors? ”