Chapter 23 #2
Her face had gone slightly pale. She swallowed. “I doubt they believed him. He’d gone quite mad. I have a theory that without true immortality’s protection, the working that protects the island is more severe.”
I nodded. It wasn’t as though I was going to tell anyone the Maere’s secrets. “Does Rhiannon know this?”
“No,” Ember replied. Then she pursed her lips. “The other Maere don’t know yet. I’ve been in the habit of keeping too many of the island’s secrets.”
“You should tell them,” I said. “The island hasn’t been completely honest with you about a lot of things.”
“You’re telling me.” Ember’s sigh was long suffering. “We need to move along if you want to see the big show. If you’re not too chicken to go, that is.”
I rolled my eyes at her gentle ribbing. “I’m going.” It was important that I understand this. If what I suspected was true, it was going to be a difficult thing for the Maere to process, Rhiannon especially. I had to be sure. “And you can trust me not to scramble my brain by telling your secrets.”
“Stick ’em on there,” Ember replied with a wry grin. Then she whispered. “I like you a lot, Eryx.”
Despite the fact that she was a little dense to Rhiannon’s feelings, I liked Ember Verona too. And what’s more, I trusted her. I pressed my hands to the marble plinth and everything went dark for a moment.
When I opened my eyes, I stood on a stone patio, a twisted pine casting shade over a tiny amphitheater of seats carved into alabaster. Huge waves crashed onto the dramatic black rocks of the shore below.
I’d never seen the sea so unfettered, so close. In the distance, a serpentine body rose out of the waves, its maw gaping as it closed over a smaller animal I could not make out at this distance.
The Ceti were out there. The monster crashed into a wave so high it would cover a skyscraper. Perhaps this was why no one had ever found the island. Calling those seas dangerous would be a wicked understatement. But they were beautiful. And this place—it shimmered with power.
But it was more than that. An ache built inside me, brick by brick, a longing to be close forever with that undercurrent of power. This is where magic was. This place was my heart’s true home. My jaw tightened, my throat constricting as I swallowed the onslaught of pure sadness assaulting me.
“Rhiannon brought your brother here once,” Ember said, her voice softer than usual.
Her hazel eyes were wide, compassion shining in them.
We didn’t have to discuss what I felt. “She wanted him to know me, to know why I am how I am. Maybe I can do the same for you—and her. By now you’ve figured out that she needs more help than she lets others give, haven’t you? ”
The timbre of her voice was hesitant, like she was afraid she was telling Rhiannon’s secrets. I nodded, hoping she would keep talking. Ember touched my arm lightly, pointing to the impressive stone structure behind the patio. “This is the lyceum.”
The building was impressive, larger than most of the Three Cities’ temples to the Saints—or the gods, depending on what you believed. Behind its enormous columns were several frescoes. Ember beckoned to me and I followed her to the one on the furthest end of the building from us.
“This depicts the last of the parapsych refugees making their way to Otrera,” she said, standing in front of an enormous painting of ships battered in the waves.
The painter had depicted one ship being swallowed by a Ceti, another being dragged under by the angry sea, a hint of a Kraken’s tentacle showing under the water.
Ember walked to the next of the frescoes.
A blonde woman, statuesque with familiar features, stood on a rocky outcropping, her arms raised.
She looked like Rhiannon. Behind her stood a host of people.
I recognized many of the faces: the Admiral, who had masqueraded as Mother; Ember, Rhiannon and Lara, standing close to one another.
Ember tapped the woman on the rocky ledge with her arms raised. “This is Rhiannon’s mother, Silea, our queen. This shows her closing the mists, trapping magic here, forevermore. Protecting it from unscrupulous humans.”
I raised an eyebrow. I had some idea after the heist that Rhiannon was from a powerful family, but I hadn’t fully understood that she was an actual princess. For a moment, I felt the expanse of what we didn’t know about each other stretch out before me.
“This is what you came to see, I think.” Ember said, moving on to the next painting, which showed a series of events.
“First, we see the cloistering of true magic. What once was abundant in the world lives on here, protected. And these are the scholomages and the smiths, the women who created the spells that allow for the Maere to be reborn off the island, with their swords fused, metaphysically, of course, to their spines.”
I marveled at the detail in the frescoes, a cool sea-breeze ruffling my hair. The salty air smelled of sharp evergreen and something faintly citrus. “There are more Maere than just the fifteen of you?”
Ember shrugged a little. “That depends on how you look at it. The word “Maere” was used to mean the warriors that protected Otrera for eons before the particularities our role was conceived of, or even needed.”
I sat down on a stone bench that faced the frescoes, frowning a little as I sorted this information with my theory. “Otrera was the first of the Maere, correct? And the island is named for her?”
Ember sat next to me, staring at the frescoes along with me, a deep longing in her eyes. “Yes. Otrera was a goddess herself, Tanith and Amarante’s daughter. The gods are not a metaphysical concept, Eryx. They are real entities, and Otrera is Rhiannon’s ancestor.”
My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “She is a goddess, then.”
Ember chuckled. “I can certainly understand why you’d think so. And yes, some part of her is divine. All of the island’s original inhabitants are demigods, technically, and parapsychs all carry divine blood. It’s what gives you your powers.”
My head spun with the information. I had been devoted to the Saints my whole life, but they had been a vague concept. Something distant. If they were real entities, they’d abandoned us. Abandoned their children to this wretched world. It was a slight I could hardly forgive.
As my heart hardened against gods who could abandon their progeny to the world, Ember’s voice dropped to a low hush.
“It is the swords, of course, that make us truly immortal, not just long-lived like the rest of you. All Maere have sacred swords, but not all of the warriors on the island have been purified by their blades, as we have.” With her last words, she gestured towards the last frescoes.
I drew a sharp breath in, needing to process what she’d told me. “Does that mean you could have been killed when you didn’t have them?”
Ember shook her head, a dark smile in her eyes. “No. Unfortunately not. Once the swords were fused to our souls, they might be stolen in physical form, cutting off our connection to the well of magic here, but the immortalizing effect was permanent.”
I stared at the paintings that showed the apparent steps that had been taken to create a soul that might be reincarnated as truly immortal.
It was bizarre to see it, all the way to the end, where those who now guarded the Three Cities were run through with their swords, losing their first lives to the magic that would bring them back on the Continent and doom them to a life of duty.
“We cloistered magic,” Ember said, “but we also promised ourselves to the world. It was the best we knew to do in the face of everything.”
Rhiannon, as I knew her now, had been created out of this purification, this brutal ritual. She’d died to protect parapsychs as well as she could from the evil of the Authority. How she could think of herself as a monster was beyond me.
Suddenly, I knew I wouldn’t be sad to leave this place, though I was glad I came.
It was time to go home. More than anything, I needed to be where Rhiannon was.
Gods and Saints were nothing to me now. They’d abandoned us to the cruelty of the world.
If there was anything truly divine in this world, it was Rhiannon, and the rest of the Maere. They did the work the gods had refused.
I nodded. It all made sense now. “So those of you who have not undergone the ritual, the purification as you call it, you live and die as others do?”
Ember smiled. “The people of this archipelago have always been a bit sturdier than the rest of the parapsychs—and because we are demigods, extremely long-lived, but yes.”
I moved away from the frescoes, going to the amphitheater as my mind raced.
I stood at the stone balustrade facing away from the sea, looking out over the island.
Beyond the lyceum, in groves of evergreens, was a temple district.
Further beyond that, the terraced cliffside was dotted with bright white buildings, some with colorful domed roofs.
People moved about, dressed in an ancient style, tiny dots in the distance.
Everywhere I looked there were new marvels. Overhead, great birds with the faces of beautiful women flew in flocks, their ethereal songs echoing through the valleys. And then I saw the spirits. They flitted in and out of the underworld with no friction, no unhappiness.
My eyes locked onto a woman, far below us, sitting on the side of the road, eating a piece of fruit I could not quite make out. She braided a spirit’s hair, without actually touching it. She was a necromancer. I was sure of it.
A necromancer, who seemed to be having an amiable chat with a happy spirit.
Rage and hope battled within me. The entire world could have been like this.
Peaceful. If only humans had known how to accept us.
If only we had known how to stop lording our power over them.
It wasn’t a simple matter of which group was good and which was bad.
We were all both, circling around one another in an endless loop of violence and sorrow.
I gestured to the woman, and Ember, who’d come to stand next to me, followed the motion of my arm with her eyes. “There are parapsychs here, then? Necromancers, thaumaturges, cognoscenti?”
Ember nodded. “Some here, many on the other islands. There was room for more, but so few came.” She shook her head. “Many believed staying would stop the Authority from winning, that they could turn the tide from within.”
“And what do you think?” I asked, wondering if the same battle that waged itself in me lived in her as well. I turned away from the island, barely able to contain my emotions.
Ember shrugged. “I chose to be reborn in a world I knew wanted to see my spirit broken, didn’t I?
” She stood next to me, all skinny, gangly limbs, throwing an arm back out at the frescoes.
“I’ll never know if all this was worth it.
It’s been centuries, and the world is different—better than it was in those days in so many ways…
and in others, I think it may be worse.”
She covered her mouth with one of those long-fingered hands, shaking her head. “I don’t know, Eryx. I’ve never been one for the big picture. People like Rhi, your brother, fuck, even Lara, are all better at seeing ahead than I am. What I am good at is staying.”
Ember and I were not so different from one another, in that way.
There was a power in staying. In refusing to move in the face of a storm.
Cleverness, foresight, even vision all needed one thing to be truly effective: endurance.
Change was not a flash in the pan, it was a test of spirit. A horrific battle of persistence.
“They need us,” I murmured. “The Areses and Rhiannons. My brother needs someone who is deeply grounded to pull him out of his head and into the world.”
Ember’s smile was wicked now. “I suppose he does. And she needs you, Eryx. She just can’t admit it yet. This place fucked her up. Her mother fucked her up.”
I nodded, my reason for being here surfacing. I needed to know who Cassandra really was, and I was sure that Rhiannon’s mother knew the answer. “That is why I need to speak with her.”
Ember shook her head. “Buddy, you’ve got a set on you.” I had no idea what the Orphium Maere’s commander would do next. When she pushed off the balustrade, I was surprised. “Come on, then. If we’re storming the castle, we don’t have a lot of time.”