Chapter 54 A Secret on Sancsari
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A Secret on Sancsari
Dawn rose, and the rain eased, and when Auria and Nissa slipped out the back of the stakeout house—nodding amiably as they changed guards with Detective Dallar—it was officially Sancsari.
“I don’t suppose you’ll be celebrating the holiday,” Auria said to Nissa, exhaustion smudging her words together. Her tongue tasted stale and bitter from the overconsumption of ginger tea.
Nissa shook her head—the Eqorans were largely disinterested in the Saints as a construct, and though Nissa had lived in Vallin more than half her life, she’d never adopted the faith. “I usually get together with my grandmother, but she died a few months ago.”
Auria’s chest sank. “You didn’t tell me. Or anyone.”
Nissa shrugged, the sun accentuating the shadows beneath her eyes. If she felt any sorrow, she didn’t show it. “I keep my personal life personal.”
“Were you close?”
“I’m too tired for this, Marriosan. What are your plans?”
“Heading to my mothers’ house for a few hours of sleep, then spending the day drinking and eating and exchanging gifts before I’m due back here in, oh,”—she checked her watch—“fourteen hours.”
“You do strike me as a person who adores holidays.”
“I’ve been dreading it, to be honest,” Auria admitted. “The first one without my grandfather, without Tiernan.” But at least I won’t be alone, she thought. “Do you want to—no, forget it.”
Nissa raised a dark brow. “Do I want to what?”
“Spend the day with my family,” Auria muttered, a feeling of immense stupidity crashing through her. “My grandmother will be there, and my sisters. Nary a vock to be seen.”
Nissa erupted with laughter. “Nary a vock. Who talks like that?”
“It was primarily designed to make you laugh. Anyway, forget I said anything. You probably don’t want to spend a holiday you don’t care about with people you don’t like.
But on the off chance you did…there are spare bedrooms. You could get some sleep, wake up to the smell of fresh brewed c?nnafyr and my grandmother’s honey roast Sancsari lamb.
Both of which are divine in their own right. ”
Nissa eyed Auria suspiciously. “Why would you offer that?”
“We just toasted to reluctant allyship. Unlike some, I honor my oaths.”
Miraculously, Nissa seemed to be considering it. “Would your family not mind?”
It was Auria’s turn to laugh. “I’ve complained ceaselessly about you for nearly two years. I’m sure they’re intrigued enough to allow you into their home. Either that or they’ll believe I’m acting under duress.”
“Perhaps you are. Those pesky migraine auras, always causing you to hallucinate violence.”
“Saints, Karvas is such a—”
“You probably shouldn’t blaspheme on Sancsari,” Nissa pointed out.
“My hatred of him is deep enough to warrant it.” Auria jerked her head in the direction of her family home. Somewhere above them, dawndoves cooed. It would be a fine day, the winter sun buttery and clean. “Shall we?”
When the house on Goldendawn Avenue came into view, Nissa let out an emphatic whistle. “Wow. You kept your tremendous wealth quiet.”
Auria, who had always been a bit embarrassed of it, tilted her chin high as she knocked on the pastel pink front door. “My mother is a Royal Wardholder. King Quintan rewards her handsomely.”
“You know it’s all funded by the Joribali, right? The wards, most of our defenses. We’re in immense amounts of debt.”
The thought of Vallin’s empty coffers always rattled Auria.
Their nation was showing all the classic signs of decadence, the hedonism of pleasure-induced magic, the materialism of fine things for the sake of fine things, the faithlessness of vast swathes of the population, the immorality festering among the scarlets and the whites and everyone trapped in-between.
She hoped she didn’t live to see the downfall of the society she had dedicated her life to protecting and upholding, but she suspected that once the Jade Bank of Joribal decided enough was enough and they’d recoup their debt—through war if necessary—it would all come crumbling down.
Lulí answered the front door in a lavender silk nightgown, her round face bare of makeup, her close-cropped ginger hair frizzy and somehow oranger than ever. She smiled and made the sign of the Saints, hands balled into fists and knuckles slotted together.
“Joyous Sancsari, M?mi,” Auria said. “This is my colleague Nissa—she’ll be joining us today.”
Lulí’s smiled broadened. “Joyous Sancsari, daerlin. Joyous Sancsari, Ni—”
“—Nissa isn’t a patron.”
“No matter.” Lulí shrugged and gestured for them to come inside. “We’re not all that zealous here either. I mostly celebrate the gifts and the truly excellent honey roast lamb.”
Hedonism, materialism, faithlessness.
Auria smacked down her irksome education with the blunt side of a shovel.
As they walked through the lavishly decorated hallway—Nissa staring bemusedly at all the intricate paintings—Lulí looked at Auria’s drab work satchel, clearly stuffed with notes and not gifts, and frowned. “Sweet child of mine, I do hope you haven’t come empty-handed.”
Auria laughed. “I stashed your gifts here last time I visited—though I have to admire that you don’t even pretend it’s my company you cherish on this holy day.”
“Can’t a mage want both?”
Victaria was already awake and pottering around the kitchen.
Her eyes were a little pink and raw, as though she’d been crying—it was her first Sancsari without her father, after all.
Auria felt the grief echoing in her own chest, hollow and oddly afraid, a small animal inside her searching for a lost owner, that feeling of where are you, where are you, come back, I need you, where are you?
“It’s so early that you’ve beaten everyone out of bed, I’m afraid.
” Victaria smiled, but it was pale. She folded a tea towel that did not strictly need to be folded—she’d always been one to keep busy, to mask the pain with doing.
Auria inherited that from her, the same way she inherited the frizzy copper hair from Lulí.
“By the time you catch up on your own sleep, the festivities should be in full swing. All the bedrooms are taken—your aunt and uncle came in from Carduban at the last minute, and your sister brought a friend—but we can make up a bed of couch cushions on Auria’s floor?
With enough heaped blankets, it should be comfortable enough. ”
“No blankets needed,” Nissa laughed, that rough, smoke-laced sound. “I run hot.”
Lulí piled several pots of fresh c?nnafyr on the table, along with two plates of coffee cream puffs covered with edible gold—it was Sancsari, after all—and gestured for Nissa and Auria to take a seat.
“I didn’t want to bring it up myself, but since you mentioned running hot…I must say that your eyes look distinctly dragonborn to my Nyr?thi eye.”
Nissa stiffened mid-pour of c?nnafyr. “So I’ve heard.”
Auria silently willed her mother to cease this topic of conversation, to pick up on Nissa’s clear discomfort, but Lulí had never been especially good at registering social cues.
Stirring her own drink absently, Lulí’s voice grew soft and misty.
“I grew up in K?lva, right at the foot of the Haeldrekys Peaks—where the dragons sought refuge after the Dreadreign. Folktales were exchanged over bivkar like coins, and my favorites were always about the dragonborn. Many were crude, of course—mages fornicating with dragons, can you believe!—but some really captured the imagination.”
Nissa sat like a stone statue next to Auria.
“All nonsense, I’d imagine,” Auria muttered, knowing how much Nissa loathed to talk about the heritage that led to her family being chased out of Eqora by dragonseekers.
“Well, of course,” said Lulí, waving a hand.
“But indulge an aging crone her myths, won’t you?
Many years before I was born, there was a young immigrant boy in K?lva who was obsessed with dragons.
” Lulí intentionally thickened her Nyr?thi accent for the purposes of the story.
“His family were Augurest missionaries from western Bellandry—Charlet, I believe—and his parents had uprooted his life to bring him over the Nyr?thi border, so that they might spread the great word of the Augurs.
“They were not particularly well received, as you might imagine.
The Nyr?thi are immensely proud of the fact we offered safe haven for the dragons in the aftermath of the Dreadreign, yet many of the staunchest Augurests believed the dragons should be destroyed, so that the Timeweavers may never return to power.
And so the boy was raised as an outcast, the ridicule of the schoolyard and the high street alike, and a Ludder, to boot. Poor kid.
“Could anyone blame him, then, when he developed a fascination with the very dragons his parents preached against? In secret he read and researched and questioned, but when his mother found out about his heretical hobby, she beat him senseless. At the ripe old age of twelve, the boy left home alone in the dark of night, bruised and bloody, and made for the Haeldrekys Peaks, where the dragons had been biding their time for many generations.”
Auria could’ve sworn she heard the frantic patter of Nissa’s heart.
Lulí took a sip of her c?nnafyr, completely oblivious to the tension around the table.
“After many months, perhaps years, it’s rumored that the boy found the dragons, entered their mountain lair, and underwent an arcane ritual—one that nobody in this world knows anything about—to become dragonborn.
He returned to K?lva many years later, gold of eye, fire in his blood, the wielding ability manifested seemingly from nowhere. ”
Victaria frowned over her cup. “But why would a Ludder be worthy of the dragonblood ritual?”
“A good question.” Lulí leaned forward, gleeful now, like a polderdash player about to play the winning card.
“With the caveat that this is all likely just folklore, there is a Nyr?thi scholar who has gone to great lengths to verify the accounts. That boy has long since grown, and has always refused to talk about his experiences in that mountain lair. But the scholar’s working theory is that the dragonborn exist as a check to the Timeweavers’ balance.
Dragons famously produce the wicks necessary for a weaver’s wand, and yet the wicks themselves are never granted directly to the weavers. Only a dragonborn can harvest a wick.
“It is believed that only those of great honor, those whose goodness runs all the way to the bone, are made dragonborn—that way, when they vouch for a Timeweaver, the dragons have faith in said weaver’s intentions. Checks and balances. Dragonborns and Timeweavers.”
“So where is the boy now?” Victaria asked.
Lulí grinned. “Rumors are that he has the fading disease, but he’s made a wonderful life for himself writing books. His name is Erling Tandall.”
“The author of The Great Adventures of the Lost Dragonborn?” Victaria scoffed. “Sounds like he has a great publicist.”
But Auria was barely listening. Her gaze was trained on Nissa, who was growing stiller with every line of the folktale. Disquiet prickled up Auria’s neck, the backs of her arms, the bone of her sternum.
Nissa rose to her feet, her spine straight as a staff. “Actually, I’m not feeling too well. Night shift always leaves me queasy—or perhaps it was all the ginger pastries. Thank you for the hospitality, and I wish you all a joyous Sancsari.”
Auria had never heard Nissa talk like that before—overly polite, overly controlled, stiff, and eerily pleasant.
The gold-eyed Wielder strode out of the vast, bright kitchen to the blossom-colored front door, opening and closing it with a spectral silence so unlike her entry to the stakeout house the night before.
Auria shot her mother a death stare and hastily followed, catching up to Nissa halfway down Goldendawn Avenue. She grabbed her colleague by the arm from behind, but softly, a nudge rather than a yank, not truly expecting Nissa to stop.
But she did stop. She turned slowly on her heel, and when Auria saw the expression on her face, she fought the urge to gasp. It was as though someone had scooped all the life out of her, all the soul, leaving naught but an empty shell behind.
No. Not empty. Something dark and devastating stirred beneath the surface.
“I’m sorry, Nissa,” Auria said, her tone pleading.
“I know it makes you feel like a zoo exhibit when people talk about your heritage. It’s not an excuse, but my mother is an eccentric.
She—she just loves old folklore, fairytales, mythology.
All that stuff. Although I’m not convinced that was even a Nyr?thi folk story. I think she plucked it from—”
“It’s true,” Nissa murmured, golden eyes shadowed, haunted.
“My sisters didn’t die in a sandstorm. Without my parents’ knowledge, we snuck away to Háldriel’s Hill one night—we’d heard it was the only place on the continent other than the tundral north where dragons still resided.
We were young, and we were foolish, and we were right.
” A single tear beaded along Nissa’s waterline before slipping to the pavement.
“My sisters died during the ritual, but I lived. I became dragonborn, and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
To my family. My parents have never truly forgiven me, and I have never forgiven myself. ”
“Nissa, I…”
“If you really value our reluctant allyship,” Nissa murmured, as though she’d seen a ghost, “you’ll keep that to yourself.”
And then she turned and walked away.
Nissa Naszi, the dragonborn.
The check to the Timeweavers’ balance.
A person so innately good that the winged beasts had made her one of them.
Auria felt everything she thought she knew about her colleague—and about the world—shatter.