5 Plague #2
Of course it is. Sarai looked into the terrified faces of the few still remaining in the marketplace and knew there was no hope of containing this fear with a tidy announcement tomorrow as Cassandane had hoped. The quiet hadn’t so much as lasted three days.
Numb, she transcribed as Kadra delivered his judgment in favor of Junia—only insofar as making Lucanus pay for a healer.
Fatigue worsened her hand tremors. Steadying her wrist with her left hand, she told herself that this was the last of it.
She could return to Aoran Tower and perhaps even sleep before Edessa descended into paranoia once more.
A white-hot streak flashed above, sending her hand across the parchment in a splotch of ink. She stared at the steel-lined sky with consternation while Kadra’s vigiles darted into motion, herding people away from the marketplace and into the vigile station, only a street away.
Rolling up the half-finished judgment, she glanced askance at Kadra when he didn’t move. Foreboding coiled in her gut at the familiar ice solidifying in his black gaze even as a deafening clap of thunder made the ground throb beneath their feet.
What do you see? she wanted to plead. Why won’t you tell me?
Instead, she followed Gaius and the much-dwindled group of spectators down the street and into the station, catching the first burst of rain before the skies sent down a deluge.
For all its wanton destruction, there was something dazzling about stormfall.
In the lightning dancing between the clouds, in the hums and roars of thunder.
In how it brought a city to absolute quiet and ordered it to catch its breath.
Yet, the new strain on Kadra’s face said that he saw too deeply into its workings now.
Feeling a headache coming, she strode down the hallway toward his office and collapsed into her chair, raising her head in surprise when Gaius followed her in.
“You received this.” Gaius thumbed through one of the stacks of correspondence he brought Kadra daily and pulled out a ragged bit of vellum, rolled into a semblance of a scroll.
Well, shit. Only the coldest parts of the north wrote on vellum instead of parchment, so the ink would last the long journey south. She’d written several such letters to Cisuré what felt like an eternity ago.
Sarai didn’t have to break the crude seal to know the sender. She quashed the urge to toss it out of the window. Chieftain Marus wasn’t one to ask for help, especially from her. Her nerves flared with adrenaline as she unrolled the square. Her eyebrows rose. Two lines.
Arsamea is in need of aid. Do your duty.
Gaius fidgeted. “I take it you aren’t fond of your hometown.”
“No,” she said slowly. “The only home I’ve found is here.” And I don’t know how to protect it.
Like his Tetrarch, Gaius didn’t pry further. “You and the Magus Supreme look like you’re on the edge of collapse.” He peered past the office’s floor-to-ceiling window to wince at the storm slickening the roads to shallow rivers. “I saw him adjust his back several times today. Has he injured it?”
She frowned. “Not that I know of, but on the gods, he hasn’t so much as slept the past week.”
“He’ll turn the land into a fortress for you yet.”
She swivelled to him in surprise.
He took the seat across her. “I’ve seen Magus Supreme Kadra run himself ragged for years.
At first, I thought it was out of atonement for the crimes he had to overlook while amassing the power to climb up this city.
But there’s something heated about how he pushes himself now.
Almost like desperation.” Worry underpinned his voice.
“Hours before the graduation, he said something about the life you should have had if it hadn’t been for… ” He cleared his throat.
She closed her eyes, twin waves of fondness and heartache squeezing her chest as she saw his persistent overwork in a new light. A guilt complex the size of both moons. “I haven’t been able to convince him that he has no debt to repay.”
“This may be more about your future than the past, Petitor Sarai. The Unraveling brought every thread of conflict in this land into prominence, and we’ve been walking a tightrope since.” The vigile pondered Kadra’s laden desk for a moment. “Do you believe in omens?”
Her hands curled into her palms. “I’m trying not to.”
Gaius’s genial features turned grave. “For months, the Elsarian Order pointed to the northern riots and beetle plague as your doing. They called you Ruin’s handmaiden, plotting to deliver the land to her.
But after you dispelled that at the Hearing, people are noting that there were Summonings in Ur Dinyé, many centuries before, without subsequent upheaval. What there hasn’t been is someone—”
“Who returned from the dead,” she finished. Fear bubbled in her chest. How much faster will they turn on Kadra after they learn of the deaths at the horreum? “What do you believe?”
“I have had the privilege of working for the Magus Supreme for nine great years. I have never seen him in greater danger. Politically and…” Gaius’s expression fractured, and the breath caught in Sarai’s throat.
He’s guessed it too.
They sat in silence, confirming each other’s knowledge by speaking nothing of it.
Gaius tracked her tense stare to the crackling hearth. “Omens or not, I believe the country’s enemies remain quite mortal.”
She rested her forehead against Kadra’s desk. “Thank the gods for that. If they aren’t in fact raining down omens, that is.”
Problem after problem knotted in her head like the snowgrape vines she had once climbed.
A clap of thunder set the windows aquiver reminding her of the way Cretus’s tavern had shaken during an Arsamean snowgale.
What was her hometown facing for Marus himself to have written to her? The beetle plague?
“I. Don’t. Understand.” She hit her head against the desk with each word, and Gaius shoved a stack of parchment under it before she could addle her brain further. “I’ve never heard of boil beetles infecting people let alone entire cities. Then, there’s the rioting.”
“Everything seems to stem from the north,’ he said sadly.
She stilled. “Say that again.”
He squinted in confusion as he did.
The vines in her head loosened into an ugly pattern.
“Northern riots. A northern plague. The Guilds, the Order, and Aelius’s puppets all have ties to actively dispossessing the north or fostering anti-northern sentiment—Gaius, you’re brilliant!
We’ve had our attention split between a thousand fires a day, but what if they stem from one inferno?
” Her heart sank. “Something’s been brewing up north. ”
“The odds are good, Petitor Sarai, but without a Bridger, it’s at least a fifty-day journey there and back again.” He sighed. “The Magus Supreme won’t like it.”
Neither do I. But it merited consideration.
Wondering how she hadn’t seen it sooner, she thanked Gaius and left the office, making for the frightened group of marketgoers huddled together and watching the storm.
It was dangerous to have them so unanchored.
Fear was a weapon, and the Order would wield it once they heard of the plague. She had to get ahead of them.
Sitting beside the group, she spoke quietly, “It may not feel like it, but we aren’t at a loss. Everyone here fights for you daily. Help us by believing it.”
She reassured them until hope returned to their eyes, then resumed her writing of the plague case’s judgment. She finished as the storm dwindled to a close.
Rainwater pooled into Edessa’s deep storm gutters. Petrichor scented the thick evening air, devoid of the smoke that indicated a burning home. The city was already cooling. Soon, all would be ice.
She took the long way back to Aoran Tower, avoiding busy streets that could get a deluge of questions thrown her way. Leading Caelum into the stables at the edge of Kadra’s property, she unbuckled the mare’s saddlery and brushed her down. At least the rain’s over with.
A sharp clap of thunder was her only warning that she’d assumed too much too soon. Standing under the eaves, she glowered when a second bout of stormfall slammed down, wrenching out memories of the Fall. Of spiteful drops peppering her skin like arrows.
Don’t think about it. She closed her eyes. It’ll pass.
Long minutes slid by to rain’s accompaniment.
She was contemplating a run for it when the patter wetting her sleeves ceased.
As she raised her head, her heart fluttered at the lattice of lightning doming above the stables to enclose her.
Rain hissed harmlessly as it struck the shield.
She turned to find Kadra leaning against the stables’ doors, severe features relaxed in amusement.
“Trapped in the rain, Petitor?”
Warmth and longing uncurled in her gut. There was no one to see them, and for once, the world was standing still.
She moved, and his arms parted, sealed around hers even before she closed the distance.
He pulled her tight against him, tension draining in a long exhale.
Her breath drew in rain, citrus, and the sweat curving down the blade of his jaw.
He had ridden hard to return home, to return to her, and it burned her resolve to ash.
“I miss you,” she said fiercely. “Dearly. Deeply. I only ever see you in court or at the station.” She pulled back with a raw exhale. “I’m not complaining, Kadra. You’ve better things to do than attend to me when the nation teeters on the edge of chaos. I never want to impose—”
He trapped her jaw in his hands, something pained flitting across his face. “What have I told you about not being an imposition?”
“You’re spread thin. Gaius was just saying that your back seemed to be troubling you. I can’t make demands on your time when the land’s the priority.”
“Have I made you feel like you aren’t one?” There was a stark note to the question that had her clutching his arms.
“No!”
“Then, come to me,” he ordered, drawing a thumb down her cheek. She leaned in, and his eyes gentled “Give me your burdens.”