Chapter 25 The Court of Sand
It was a bliss, part illusion, all veil, for suddenly, the courtyard was gone, rippling away like the creatures and the spear.
There were no salt pines or shafts of light.
There were no suns above, baking our skin.
We were inside a dark temple with columns holding up a high ceiling.
Incense pots burned from many stands, and tiny lizards scurried up the walls.
The seven ironmages also rippled into reality.
There were two harpiar, two fauns, one minotaur, and two homani. One of them was my mother.
She stood like a queen in robes of teal and red.
Her hair was as black as night, adorned with rubies and bone.
It was piled at the front and fell down her back to her thighs.
Her eyes were deep and dark, distant as the stars, lethal as a stormy sea.
She was always more beautiful than anyone, certainly more beautiful than me.
She wore it like a crown. She wielded it like a weapon.
Those eyes flashed at the sight of me.
“Honor,” she said. It was not a greeting. “You cut your hair. You look like a boy.”
Of all the things she noticed. Of all the things she’d say.
“Still, you have found yourself an impressive commission,” she said. “I did not think you would leave the woolback farm in Stone.”
She turned to the captain.
“I am Magister Valor Renn,” she said. “This wayward creature is my daughter.”
Thanavar stepped between her and me, and I felt a rush of pride.
Pride kills, he had said. Sometimes, pride saved.
“The bargain is between the Court and me,” he said. “My crew is not for sale.”
“Then there is no deal,” said my mother.
“I can deal, sir,” I said. “I promised Dev.”
Thanavar’s jaw worked, his eyes dark with something I didn’t dare name. For a heartbeat I thought he might forbid me outright. Then his shoulders eased, just barely, as if he’d set down a weight he hated to carry. He would let me choose, even if it tore him apart.
“There is no deal at all if the prince dies,” said Thanavar.
A faun and the minotaur swept forward.
“I am Magister Song,” said the faun. She was the one with the flail, but now it was simply a runestaff. “These are Magisters Tekamorian, River, Elisski, Padamar, and Liskeel. Welcome to the Court of Sand.”
“Tell us about the prince of Oversea,” said the minotaur named Tekamorian.
“He was shot by a three-barreled flint pistol,” said Echo. “But there is something else at work, and I haven’t been able to stop it.”
“Valor?” asked Song, and my mother raised her glittering hand above the litter. Rune spun to life from her palms, filtered down toward Fahr, and hovered a moment over his chest. Pattern rippled, and I could see his skin, his ribs, his flesh, his heart spasming without rhythm or strength.
My mother frowned.
“Strange.” She looked up, cast her eyes to the shadows. “Take him to my greencellar.”
Other robed figures appeared from the shadows of the temple. They moved in like a wave to overwhelm him with shadow, and instinctively, I made a shield augmented with chimeric. The ironmages stepped back, but not in fear. They almost looked hungry, as if the chimeric whet an arcane appetite.
“Stand down, Aro’el,” said Thanavar, and he laid a hand on my shoulder. “This is why we are here.”
He drew me back against his body, and I felt stronger with his warmth against me. One man, a harpy, looked over at the faun. He shook his head but bent back, and together, they lifted the litter without their hands.
“I will do my best,” said my mother. “My daughter shall accompany me.”
“As will my doctor,” said my captain. “He will know if your intent is to deceive.”
She looked Echo up and down.
“Thoughtspinner. Such a gift would be useful in the Court.”
She smiled, but it was a dagger. Brilliant, sharp, shining, and deadly. In that instant, I remembered all the reasons that I hated her, all the reasons I had left.
“This way,” she said, and as she flowed away with the litter to the shadows, Echo followed. I looked up at Thanavar, asking everything but without words. He nodded swiftly and stepped back, but there was shadow over his gold-flecked eyes, and it filled me with dread.
“Come with us, Priestlord,” said Song. “We will discuss your terms.”
They turned and disappeared into the temple. I watched him go, certain my wayward heart went with him.
Everything in this room spoke of my mother. Every shelf, every vial, every jar, every blade. It even smelled like her, and once again I was six years old, watching her dissect my pet rabbit to teach me what a body looked like on the inside. Also, to not get attached to anything on this erthe.
That was a lesson I learned full well.
This time, the subject was not a rabbit but Devanhan Fahr, First Mate of the Touchstone and Crown Prince of Oversea. He looked dead.
I dragged my eyes from him as she worked, moving her hands above his body like she was spinning a web. Echo watched her, and I wondered if he was listening in his clearseer way. I also wondered if he’d helped the captain know which of the illusions were real and which were not.
I could see Fahr’s heart beating, written in the patterns above his chest. It looked wrong, off, delayed somehow, but I couldn’t see why.
“Three shots, you say?” asked my mother.
“Yes,” said Echo. “Here, here, and here…”
She narrowed her eyes, her fingers spinning rune like a weaver.
“You have the shots?”
“I do.” He produced a wool sack from his satchel. “They are quite rusted. I was thinking there might be something toxic in the rust.”
He poured them into her palm, and she lifted one to her eye, tasted it with her tongue.
“Not rust,” she said. “Poison.”
“Poison flintshots? Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
She covered the balls with her fingers, and instantly, they dusted into ash.
“It is sickening his heart and lungs.” She looked up at him. “There is something I can try.”
She turned to me.
“Honor, you will assist.”
She led me to a wall of moss, against which her shelves were stacked.
Just like home and her greencellar of herbs, roots, and mystery.
She reached for a jar of ointment, snatched a stoppered tube of yellow gas, and scraped some moss with a long fingernail.
Dropped them all into a mortar and passed me a stone pestle.
“Grind them, seven tenths.”
Flashes of my childhood. Silently, I set to work.
She moved to a copper-and-glass distillery set, where a clear liquid dripped into a brass bowl.
She dipped a finger into the bowl, and mist rose at the touch.
Once again, she put her finger to her tongue, and I saw her beautiful face fade into her skull.
Nothing new. I’d known the bones of her face long before I could speak.
The skull faded, and she was my mother once more.
She carried the bowl to the mortar, added five drops, carried it solemnly back.
When I finished the mixture, she reached in and gathered the paste in her palm.
Made a fist and closed her eyes. I watched her lips move as she recited the incantation.
It was the Ferous Venomdonai. She made me memorize it when I was five.
Then she poisoned my soup to see if I remembered.
When she opened her hand, the paste was sizzling with pattern.
The only way to join them is to kill one and take their place, Thanavar had said.
I wondered whom she had killed, and how.
It was then that the floor boomed beneath our feet, and her medicines rattled on the shelves. I spun to look at Echo. My heart stopped there and then.
He was kneeling over the First Mate, both hands wrapped over Fahr’s one. I bolted to his side and dropped to my knees beside them both. He looked up at me, his eyes rimmed and red.
The floor boomed again, and this time, fine dust rained down from the ceiling.
I reached across him to search for Fahr’s pulse. I searched his wrist and his throat, waiting for that flutter that said life, that said here, that said me.
But there was nothing. I was searching in vain, and my stomach began to sink like an anchor in the sea.
“I failed him,” said Echo. “I didn’t see the poison. I’m a clearseer, and I didn’t see…”
“You gave him time,” I said, my throat tightening. I laid my hands across his. “You gave him almost four days.”
Faun tears, splashing on my wrists.
“I didn’t think of poison…”
I had no words for him, this kind, good, lovely man. So, I squeezed his hands and leaned my head against his shoulder, feeling the tips of his horn in my hair. My own tears brimmed my lashes, and I fought to keep them contained.
I barely heard my mother as she knelt beside us, her teal-and-red robes spreading across the stone floor like a pool.
She raised her hand over Fahr’s chest once more, and I hated her for posturing.
I hated her for being too late. She drummed her fingers in the air, spinning pattern and raining sparks across his body.
I could almost read the runes coming from them.
Wylde magik had been our own language, once upon a time.
The floor boomed again, and I knew it was the captain. Just like Bilgetown, he would bring it all down on our heads. We would die under his grief.
“Chimeric,” said my mother, and she looked at my gloved hands. “Gavriel said you had chimeric. How?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
She reached over to take my hand, then snatched hers away as the patterns burned her skin.
“Chimeric is power,” she said. “It gives life, and it takes life away.”
“What do you want?” I snapped.
“Do you want to save him?”
“He’s dead,” I barked. “What I want means nothing.”
“Never underestimate the power of ‘want,’ daughter.”
Suddenly, I understood Thanavar. After all, I’d made a bargain, too.
I removed my gloves and gave her my hands.
“These runes…” She turned my hands over as the patterns danced and sang. “They speak.”
“Are you going to heal him or not?”