Reader and Raelynx (44 page)

“It doesn’t matter! The cost is too great!” Valri cried. “Amalie, you are the one we are all battling for! If you are lost to some—some—trick of magic, the whole fight is in vain! You are the one who must be saved, not the one who should be risked!”

“But I am the only one who can take the risk,” Amalie said. “And it
is
my fight. And I am glad to make it instead of asking others to lay their lives down for mine.”

A hawk circled above them and made a smooth landing, transforming itself into Donnal. “Riders are on the way,” he said briefly. “What’s wrong here?”

Kirra instantly poured the story into his ears, while Valri continued arguing with Amalie. Tayse had put his arms around Senneth from behind and she leaned against him, literally seeming to draw strength from his body. She put one hand up to the gold charm she wore at her neck, the pendant he had given her upon their marriage. She closed her eyes, but some of the color began to return to her face.

Cammon felt as if he had been slapped by certain knowledge. “Senneth!” he exclaimed. “Give it to me!”

Senneth opened her eyes and stared at him. “What?”

He had his hand out to her but he was looking around at the others. “And Kirra—give me your lioness charm. Ellynor, what do you have? One of those black opals you Lirren girls wear? Let me have it. Donnal, do you carry anything you can give me?”

Kirra understood first. “Oh, this is like the time you helped me change Justin!” she exclaimed, rooting through her pockets for the small stone lioness she always carried. “You’re going to feed our power to Amalie.”

“I’m going to try,” he said.

Senneth had already stripped off her wedding gift. She lifted it to her lips, gave Tayse a smile from over her shoulder, and passed it over. “If it melts in your hands, I swear I’ll never forgive you,” she said.

Ellynor offered him a gold bracelet set with black opals, but Donnal shook his head, smiling. “I don’t carry anything like that,” he said.

Kirra took his hand. “
I’ll
be his charm,” she said. “You can pull his magic through me.”

“I don’t understand,” Valri said.

“Cammon is an amplifier,” Senneth said. “He can take someone else’s magic and boost it with his own.” She shook her head. “Impossible to explain. Impossible to understand. But he seems to think he can feed all of
our
power through his own, and give it to Amalie, and make her even stronger.”

Cammon slipped Senneth’s pendant over his neck, fastened Ellynor’s bracelet around his wrist, and cupped Kirra’s lioness in his hand. He felt prickles of magic dance along his skin; his blood was bubbling in his veins. It was hard to stand still. “I think I can,” he said.

“Please don’t,” Valri whispered. “Amalie, please don’t do this.”

Amalie kissed her stepmother on the forehead. “Valri, I must.”

From across the field came Coralinda’s voice, raised in mockery. “Senneth! Have you failed so quickly? Have you spent all your power on one attempt to destroy me? Or do you finally see how my goddess protects me from all such abominations as your magic?”

Without another look at Valri, at any of them, Amalie turned to face the Lestra and took a few steps deeper into the valley. “I will duel with you on Senneth’s behalf,” she called, and quiet though her voice was, it carried across the field that separated them. “Coralinda Gisseltess, I will strike you down.”

Amalie did not throw her hands in the air or take a melodramatic pose. She merely folded her fingers before her, and bowed her head, and
thought
about Coralinda Gisseltess. Cammon could almost see her mind building a bridge across the valley, a tumbling, haphazard structure that nonetheless raced across the grass and flowers with an implacable speed. And across this insubstantial structure her curious soul went questing, and crowding behind her came the blinding energy of a half dozen mystics.

It was as if she had opened a tunnel for an invading army, and Cammon felt himself standing on the threshold of the tunnel door. They stampeded across him—Senneth blazing in the lead, Kirra and Donnal bounding after her, Ellynor and even Valri stealing behind the others, armed with dark and mysterious weapons. They were across the pathway—they were descending upon Coralinda—they were laying about them with blade and claw and sorcery.

A shriek of pure rage went up from across the valley, and it was so forceful it seemed to rock them all backward. Amalie stumbled, and Cammon briefly lost his footing. A silver onslaught had set all their own soldiers in retreat—Coralinda’s mirror magic turning their own weapons on them, forcing their armies back across the bridge.

But only briefly. Cammon felt Senneth’s surge of renewed determination, racing through him with an actual heat, pouring into Amalie and back across that bridge. The others, too, pressed closer, offered him more, filled him with wild and kaleidoscopic impressions. Senneth raged in orange and gold; Ellynor and Valri brooded in saturated blue. Kirra and Donnal danced between them, shifting and uncontainable. Cammon had the strangest thought that he was a prism in reverse, collecting the whole spectrum of color, feeding it into an indescribably delicate piece of crystal, and compressing it into a single beam of pure unadulterated light.

That light broke against the blackness that was Coralinda Gisseltess, and was absorbed, and reformed into something still and dark and insatiable. She ate their light, she negated their color; they drove themselves against her, and she did not waver at all.

He felt Senneth’s body burn higher; he was flushed with fever. Hotter. Impossible that anyone could sustain such a temperature.
Hotter.
She staggered a few steps toward him, cried out in a hoarse voice, and fell to the ground.

Instantly, there was chaos. Amalie faltered; Kirra dropped to her knees beside Senneth. Coralinda’s black-and-silver counterassault came charging across the bridge, straight for the princess.

“Kirra!”
Cammon shrieked, frantically summoning some of his own buried power, feeding to Amalie any of the fuel left in his own magic. Coralinda’s dark force was halted at about the three-quarter mark. “Leave her! I need you!”

Tayse was on the ground beside Senneth, and Kirra leapt to her feet again, pouring a furious stream of energy directly into Cammon’s head. It wasn’t enough. Coralinda was regrouping. In seconds, she would begin battering against their greatly weakened defenses.

Cammon sent an impassioned plea a mile away, across the battlefield.
Jerril! Areel! Help me!
he cried. He felt Jerril’s attention jerk his way, felt Jerril’s power immediately and completely accessible to him. More slowly, he sensed Areel scan the battlefield, comprehend the plea, and unlock the closed treasure chest of his mind.

Power poured through him like rainwater through a parched riverbed.

But there were other mystics on the battlefield this day.

He sent his mind skipping across the royal camp, seeking out those Carrebos recruits, begging for assistance. One by one, startled or frightened or pleased or confused, they responded to him, turning from their ordinary tasks to wage an extraordinary war against a common enemy. Their power rolled to him in a bewildering array of strengths and colors, but he bundled it all up, coiled it into a weapon, and thrust that weapon into Amalie’s hand.

Coralinda’s army was halted, but he was not sure it could be defeated. For a long moment they all stood frozen, tense, suffused with magic, perfectly balanced and perfectly opposed forces that could move neither forward nor back.

A single plaintive yowl split the silence. Cammon was startled to feel a warm weight suddenly push against his thigh, and he stared down into the savage face of the raelynx. It made that piteous noise again, and again batted its paw against his leg.

Sweet gods. This lawless creature was offering him its own wild power.

Cautiously, Cammon opened his mind to the raelynx, but even so he was not prepared for what boiled into his body. A rush of violent red, a fever-bright fury, a thoughtless and primitive instinct for carnage. He took the raelynx’s rage and magnified it and fed it straight into Amalie’s veins.

From across the valley, Coralinda choked and stumbled, and Amalie’s forces pushed her back to the halfway point of the bridge.

But only halfway. They were locked again in symmetrical combat—too strong to yield to the Lestra, too weak to destroy her. All the mystics in all of Gillengaria could not defeat Coralinda Gisseltess.

Behind him, small noises—a whispered word, the rustle of clothing.
Help me stand,
said a voice, very faint. There was the sound of a boot striking a rock.

Senneth was on her feet.

He felt her presence in his mind first as a gentle glow, the faint gleam of candlelight in a room at dusk. But quickly the fire gained strength, gained brightness, began to consume everything in its vicinity. Soon it was a blaze, then a bonfire, then a roaring inferno of uncontainable rage. From ten feet away, Cammon felt the heat radiating off her body, intense enough to make him perspire. He turned his head just enough to glimpse her from the corner of his eye. Her eyes were closed, her arms were raised above her head. As he watched, her whole figure erupted into fire.

As if he were connected to her by a powdered fuse, Cammon saw a spark race toward him across the grass, and he was enveloped in flame. He was a coruscating wick, a walking conflagration. He cried out, more in wonder than in pain, and lifted his hands to watch himself gesture with fire. His breath rasped in and out of his seared lungs; his skin burned like kindling. Cinders stung his eyes and skittered across his skin. He thrust his hand through the air and sent the blaze straight for Amalie.

She did not burst into fire but she seemed to bloom with light. She was suddenly wrapped in so much radiance that she appeared to be twice her size, and she was too bright to look at. Within that fierce halo, he saw her arms move—he almost thought he heard her speak. She pointed her right hand toward Coralinda Gisseltess, and a white fireball exploded across the valley and incinerated the Lestra where she stood.

Cammon was deafened by the noises that followed.

Surely everyone heard that cannonball crack of thunder. Surely the others should have been knocked off their feet by those percussive repeating booms. Cammon covered his ears and went rolling to the ground, trying to drown out the elemental cacophony of a deity falling to her knees, but no one else seemed to hear a thing. Amalie was beside him, her face worried, her lips moving, but it was as if she whispered, as if she made no noise at all. Ellynor had knelt beside Amalie, and her cool hands tugged at his hot ones, pulling them away from his ears. She said something to Amalie, but he had no idea what. The world was empty, erased of all sound.

Something jerked Amalie’s head around, and he saw her staring out at the field, with her hand pressed against her mouth. He struggled to sit up, for if he could not hear, he could still see. He experienced a moment’s horror at the sight of Coralinda’s black-and-silver soldiers tearing across the valley straight for their small party. But then he became aware of a contingent of their own soldiers sweeping out to meet the enemy, and he realized that reinforcements had arrived while the mystics were battling. There—that was Wen, that was Coeval. A dozen other Riders raced out shoulder to shoulder with Justin to meet the Lumanen soldiers in the middle of the field and plunge into furious combat.

Tayse was not among them.

Scrabbling on his hands and knees, Cammon swung around to locate the other Rider. Tayse was sitting in the grass, Senneth across his lap, rocking her gently against his chest. Cammon felt a spasm of fear so intense he might almost have been facing the Lestra again. He had been burned so clean by magic that he could not even tell if his own talents were still intact. He could not, at this moment, sense Senneth—sense Amalie—sense any of them at all.

It was not possible that Senneth could be dead.

Kirra was on her knees beside Tayse, and she had wrapped both of her hands around one of Senneth’s. Kirra’s face was white and exhausted; her lips moved as if she was praying. Tayse didn’t even look at her. He didn’t glance at the battlefield. All his attention was on the woman in his arms.

Terrified, Cammon grabbed Amalie’s hand. He couldn’t speak; he couldn’t hear her if she answered.
Is she alive? Is Senneth alive?
he demanded silently.

Amalie put her hand to his cheek and brought all his attention back to her. Her pale skin was flushed; her dark eyes seemed, in a day, to have acquired some impossibly ancient knowledge. She looked unutterably weary, as if she had not slept for days, and peaceful, as if that didn’t matter.

Senneth is unconscious, but alive,
she replied, and her voice reached him as clearly as if she had spoken and he could hear.
And Coralinda Gisseltess is dead.

He stared up at her, consumed by too many emotions to sort them out—relief, hope, wonder, exhaustion, and bewilderment.
I saw them, Amalie—I saw the goddesses sparring,
he told her.
The Bright Mother and the Pale Mother, using our power to battle each other. But if—but if—if the Lestra fell, is the Pale Mother gone, too? Destroyed on this field before our eyes?

Amalie took his hand and spread it against her heart. Her smile was utterly tranquil.
The world changes and the world stays the same,
she told him, still in those utterly clear syllables that sounded only in his head.
The old moon sets. New moon rises.

S
ENNETH
missed the immediate aftermath of war.

When she regained consciousness, everything had been settled, everything had been tidied up. Romar Brendyn and her brother Kiernan had accepted the surrender of the rebel army. The Arberharst forces had fled to the various ports where their ships lay waiting, chased halfway across Gillengaria by royal soldiers. Troops had been sent to secure the major cities of Fortunalt, Storian, Gisseltess, and Tilt. The mystic Lara had healed every last wounded soldier—from both armies—then walked the length and breadth of the battlefield, repairing the damaged earth and coaxing shy blades of new grass to poke through the churned and bloodied soil.

It seemed Senneth had slept for almost three days.

It had not exactly been sleeping. It had not been a peaceful, restorative sort of slumber. She had been lost in chaotic darkness, falling through tunnels of emptiness, buffeted by exotic and sourceless winds. And she had been so
cold.
Shivering and frightened and falling and lost.

But not alone. Always, throughout that whole strange, terrifying journey, she had been conscious of a shadow at her back, a protector at her side. When she cried out, he comforted her. When she shivered, he warmed her body with his own. When her lungs seized up, he put his mouth against hers and breathed.

When she clawed her way back to sentience, he was there. Lying beside her on some bed she did not remember, gazing at her, guarding her sleep.

“Tayse,” she whispered.

The expression on his face—hope, relief, joy, and love—was so raw it was almost painful to see. “Senneth,” he answered. “Are you with me again?”

Strangely, a smile came to her face. She wouldn’t have said she remembered how to smile, hadn’t remembered what a smile was. She lifted a shaky hand and touched his stubbled cheek. “My love, I am always with you,” she said.

He leaned in and kissed her gently on the mouth. “And now I am returned to the world,” he said.

They lay there a moment in silence, his arms around her, her head against his chest, content for the moment just to exist. But she couldn’t escape the consciousness of time passed and important events going forward without her.

And she felt like red and silver and black and opal hell.

After a moment, she stirred in his arms. “Feed me something,” she said. “Bring me water. Tell me what’s happened.”

Carefully he helped her sit up, though the movement made her dizzy. She seemed to be in a sizable tent, maybe Amalie’s; she couldn’t bring herself to care enough to try to identify the furnishings. Tayse held water to her mouth and, sweet gods, nothing had ever tasted so good. After that, he offered her juice, and then broth, but only a little. She was ravenous and hollow with the certainty that no amount of food would fill her up.

“How long have I been lying here?” she demanded when he finally let her eat a piece of bread. “What happened to me? What happened to everyone?”

He didn’t get a chance to answer. The canvas door flapped back and Kirra pushed inside.

“You
are
awake!” she squealed. “Cammon said you were! And lucid? Sane? Oh, but you look absolutely dreadful.”

Automatically, Senneth’s hand went to her hair, and found it filthy, matted, and crisp with soot. Oh, yes, the last thing she remembered, she had been standing in a circle of her own flame, intent on setting the entire world on fire. She must look even worse than she felt, though it was hard to imagine.

“I think I’m lucid, but I couldn’t swear to sane,” she replied cautiously. “So what happened? Is Coralinda dead?”

“Dead and her army dispersed,” Kirra said. She emptied half a pitcher of water into a small towel, perched on the side of the bed, and began to wipe Senneth’s face. Tayse grinned and moved over to allow her room. “You’ve been out for three days. Romar and your brother left for Ghosenhall yesterday to prepare the palace for Amalie’s return, and the rest of us are hoping to leave soon—whenever you are able to move. Everything is in utter turmoil, but nobody seems to mind. We are victorious, Amalie is secure on the throne, and you are not actually dead.”

Senneth tried a smile again. “Did you think I was?”

Kirra scrubbed a little harder at what must have been a particularly stubborn streak of ash. “Let’s just say it was the thing everyone was most afraid of.
I
couldn’t do anything for you. Ellynor couldn’t. That strange woman—Lara—she came by but said you had to heal yourself. She did do something to take away your pain, though.”

Senneth remembered pain, but only dimly. “I had one of my headaches?”

“Well, your hands were clutched around your head and you kept moaning, so that’s what I assumed. But once Lara left, you seemed to relax a little, although you still didn’t wake up.” She glanced at Tayse. “Your husband never left your side.”

“I know he didn’t,” Senneth said quietly. “I felt him here the whole time.”

“I wanted to be here,” he said, “in case you needed me.”

She reached for his hand, and his fingers instantly closed over hers. She felt her throat closing up, but it was stupid to cry now. “What of everyone else? Amalie—she’s safe? All our friends?”

“The princess suffered surprisingly few ill effects from her mortal combat with the personification of evil,” Kirra said. She had laid aside the towel and now she was pulling a comb very gently through Senneth’s tangled hair. “She was tired, of course, but eerily serene. Which was good, since around her there was complete and utter mayhem. On top of everything else, she had just made it indisputably clear that she is a mystic of no uncommon power, and anyone who hadn’t figured that out already was left stunned and nervous. So far there has been no fresh mutiny, but I feel certain there will be a reckoning of sorts when the news is carried to the four corners of the kingdom.”

“And everyone else?”

“The Riders bore some losses, but all of our friends survived,” Kirra said.

Senneth cut her eyes Tayse’s way. The death of any Rider would strike him hard. “Who?” she asked.

“Coeval. Brindle. Moxer,” he replied. “Janni was severely injured, but she’s been healed. Justin was badly hurt in the fight against Coralinda Gisseltess, but Ellynor was instantly beside him, and he is mending quickly.”

“Cammon was deaf for a full day,” Kirra continued. “It was strange, because he found it hard to talk while he couldn’t hear, and so he didn’t say anything, and you know Cammon never
shuts up.
But just as I was beginning to think I could get used to a Cammon who never says a word, his ears started working again, and now he’s our same happy street urchin again.”

That made Senneth smile. “So what’s the plan? Return to Ghosenhall as soon as we’re all well enough to travel?”

Kirra nodded. “Tomorrow, I would think. Everyone is eager to get back and assess the damage there.”

The tent door fluttered and Amalie’s voice sifted through. “Is she awake? Can I come in?”

“And me?” Cammon asked right after her.

Senneth gaped in horror. “Not while I look like this,” she said to Kirra. “Will they let me bathe first?”

Kirra and Tayse were laughing. “I’ll hold them off,” Tayse said, rising and crossing to the door.

“I’ll fetch bathwater,” Kirra said. “But you won’t be able to keep them out for long, you know. Everyone has been worried about you.”

Senneth smiled faintly. “The way I feel, everyone was right to be worried.”

“Back in a few minutes,” Kirra said, and disappeared behind Tayse.

Alone for the moment, Senneth tested her strength. Her hands were too weak to clench. Her legs moved when she kicked them against the bed, but even that small effort was exhausting. Her back was sore and her vision did not feel particularly reliable. She’d only been awake fifteen minutes and she was ready to sleep again.

She held her right hand out before her, palm-up, and studied its lines and calluses. The other hand she placed over her heart, seeking out the eternal heat at the core of her body. But her fingers were chilled and there was no great combustion rumbling inside her chest.

She balled up her fingers, and splayed them wide, but no fire danced from the tips of her hand.

She remembered those last desperate moments of the battle against Coralinda Gisseltess. As if the Bright Mother had been watching, as if the goddess would take such a sacrifice, Senneth had offered herself.
Burn me. Burn my body. Turn me into your elemental fuel.
She had not, actually, expected to survive the encounter.

And it seemed she had not survived it whole.

Kirra returned quickly, lugging a small metal washtub, and then made a half dozen trips between the tub and the tent door to fetch buckets of water. Steam rose from the surface of the tub; the water must have been close to boiling.

So Kirra knew.

“Come on, come on,” Kirra said, motioning Senneth over. “I have a nice big towel, almost clean, and a sliver of soap. This water won’t stay hot forever.”

Senneth sat on the bed unmoving. “I’ve lost my magic,” she said.

Kirra nodded. “I know. Come on. Wash up.”

Senneth stood, a little shakily, and discarded items of clothing as she crossed the small space. “How did you know?”

“Your skin was so cold.
You
were so cold. In you go.”

The tub was so small Senneth practically had to crouch inside it, but the hot water felt unspeakably good against her skin. “Will I ever get it back?”

“I can’t even begin to guess,” Kirra said. “Here, bend your head down and I’ll pour some water over your hair.”

Kirra’s matter-of-fact acceptance of this dreadful truth was making it easier for Senneth to keep talking about it; but it was such a huge thing, so impossible to assess, that she was sure she hadn’t absorbed it completely yet. “Does Tayse know?”

“Maybe. He lay beside you for three days, keeping you warm with his own body. He doesn’t know much about mystics, but he knows a lot about you.”

Senneth shook her head. It was hard to tell whether those were tears on her cheeks, or stray rivulets from the water Kirra was pouring over her. “There have been so many times I cursed my magic and what it had made me,” she said, trying not to sniffle. “But the thought—of having it leave me—of being completely ordinary, completely ignored by the gods—Kirra, it feels so strange. I don’t know that I will still be
me.
”

Kirra was briskly rubbing soap in her hair, and Senneth could feel the silky lather bubbling up against her ears. “I hardly think the gods are done with you so soon,” she said. “You have proved too useful so far. If indeed your magic is gone, they will find some other way to employ you.” She paused long enough to pour another bucket of water over Senneth’s head. “Certainly Amalie will want your services, whether or not you can burn down Ghosenhall.”

Senneth sniffled again. “Maybe I can become a Rider. I suppose now there are even more openings in their ranks.”

“Maybe you can become a teacher. I bet Jerril could use you to train all those wild Carrebos mystics, even if you don’t have magic of your own.”

“But I want magic of my own,” Senneth said softly, and started crying in earnest.

Kirra instantly threw her arms around her, heedless of splashing water and Senneth’s wet skin. “I know you do, Sen. And maybe someday you’ll get it back. But for now I don’t care. Tayse doesn’t care. Nobody cares. We thought you might be dead, and you’re not dead, and
all
of us would have given up our magic if it meant you wouldn’t die. So we know the gods still care about you, or they would have let you go.”

S
ENNETH
was able to compose herself enough to face the others when, twenty minutes later, her hair was combed and she was dressed in clean clothes. They burst into the tent as quickly as the small flap would allow—Justin, Donnal, Cammon, Amalie, Ellynor, Valri, Tayse again—each of them hugging her with an unrestrained delight. They permitted her to eat more food and vied for her attention to tell, and retell, their own individual parts in that last spectacular battle. She listened, exclaimed, teased Cammon about his deafness, examined Justin’s latest wound, commended Ellynor on her healing skills, and generally warmed herself at the fire of their affection.

But their presence was exhausting, and Tayse chased them out before an hour was up. “We want her to be well enough to travel in the morning,” he said. Not until he lifted the tent flap to encourage them to leave did Senneth realize that it was nighttime again. Excellent. Time to go back to sleep.

But she was still sitting upright on the bed when Tayse sat beside her, taking both of her hands in his. It was so odd to feel his body warming hers, instead of the other way around.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“My magic is gone,” she said bluntly.

“I don’t love you for your magic,” he replied.

That made her smile, just a little. She moved over to lean against him, and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Then why do you love me, Tayse, Queen’s Rider?” she asked. “If not because I have bespelled you?”

“Because you own my soul.”

She lifted one hand and laid it against his cheek. His skin was rough; he still had not bothered to shave. “Ah, that was magic,” she said. “I beguiled you and I stole your heart.”

He turned his head to kiss her palm. “You didn’t steal it,” he said. “I had already tucked it inside your hand. Not my fault you didn’t realize it was already yours, so you had to waste your time with sorcery and theft.”

That made her laugh. As always, his body against hers was feeding her power. She absorbed him, the way others might absorb sunlight, and she felt restless energy kick through her tired bones. She shifted in his arms, locked her hands around his neck, and kissed him on the mouth. “Whose tent is this anyway?” she whispered. “Amalie’s? Would it be an affront to the throne if two lesser mortals made love inside the queen’s private quarters?”