The Storm Witch (48 page)

Xerwin squeezed his eyes shut and held both hands up in the air near his ears, as if to shut out any more information. Dhulyn fell silent, glancing quickly to where her Partner stood, arms folded across his chest.

Parno raised the index finger of his left hand. “May I? They want to try bringing the two worlds together. They succeeded in bringing Javen Finder into the Vision place with them, and they’d like to try the same with your sister’s body.”

“With the Storm Witch, you mean.”

“Since she currently occupies the body, yes.”

“And you need me for this.”

“I don’t think there is anyone else she will trust.”

Xerwin was silent for so long that Dhulyn was beginning to wonder whether he had changed his mind yet again. And to consider, what, if anything, she could do about it if he had. One thing was certain, she thought. She would not be very happy if that lonely child in the thicket clutching her doll continued to appear in any of her future Visions.

And even if she didn’t, how comfortable would Dhulyn be, knowing that the child was out there?

Apparently Xerwin came to the same conclusion.

“Where do I bring her?” he said at last.

“To the White Twins,” she said.

Carcali leaned her eleven-year-old forehead against the trembling shutter on her bedroom window, her right hand to her mouth as she gnawed on her thumbnail. The wind had risen alarmingly, and the rain was much worse. There would be flooding by daybreak, she knew, at the very least. She switched to the other thumb. She just had to hope it would be no worse.

She let her hand fall into her lap, twisting her fingers together. She’d left it too long. A stupid apprentice’s mistake—something she would never have done in a million years. She should have been watching more closely, and now it was too late.

“Except it isn’t.” There, she’d said it. The old Carcali, the confident, know-it-all Carcali, could fix this rain in a snap of her fingers. No problem. But not today, not this Carcali. Not the one who was afraid to release herself fully into the weatherspheres. Not her—oh, no.

A noise came from the outer room, and she jumped, banging her elbow painfully on the edge of the shutter. Who could be coming at this hour?
Someone who wants to speak to me about the weather.
And she could guess who. She smoothed back her hair and straightened her shoulders as she got to her feet.

As Carcali expected, Finexa, a robe thrown hastily over her sleeping gown, opened the bedroom door and stepped into the room. But it was a different Finexa from the one Carcali was expecting. There was not the carefully disguised triumph that a summons to the Tarxin usually brought, no smugness, no prim little smile. Instead Finexa was pale, licking her lips. Her attempt at an affectionate look when she caught Carcali’s eye would have been funny, if it hadn’t been so obviously born of fear.

“What is it?” Carcali said. “What’s happened?”

“You are summoned to the Tarxin, Light of the Sun, Tara Xendra.” The woman clung to the edge of the door. “The messenger says immediately, please. Do not stop for ceremony. It will be explained.”

Carcali’s first impulse was to refuse to go anywhere until she had the promised explanation. Finexa clearly knew something that had shaken her—though something that shook Finexa wasn’t necessarily something Carcali needed to worry about. She let the woman wrap a robe around her and pin a veil on her hair—apparently that much ceremony was still required—and prepared to follow the three guards who’d been sent for her. She’d stepped into the hallway before she realized she was alone.

“Aren’t you coming?” she asked her attendant, but Finexa was already shaking her head.

“The Tarxin, Light of the Sun, asked for you alone, Tara Xendra,” she said.

Carcali felt a stab of fear. Was she being arrested? Surely that wasn’t possible? She was the Tara Xendra, for the Art’s sake. But it was possible, the more rational part of her mind said, even as her fear tried to choke her. Carcali had overheard her attendants talking, when they thought her so absorbed in her maps that she wasn’t paying attention. They’d been talking about the first Tarxina, Xerwin’s mother, and it was Xerwin’s name that had caught Carcali’s ear. A sudden illness, everyone had been told, and the whole country had gone into mourning. But that’s not what had really happened, the ladies were saying. The Tarxina had displeased the Tarxin, displeased him
severely,
and not just by not having any more children—at least, not any more children by
him,
one of the older ladies had whispered while the others looked on, wide-eyed, frightened to be hearing such a thing, and yet avid for more, like children telling each stories of demons. The Tarxin had sent for his wife, in the middle of the night, and she’d never been seen again. And even her attendants—some of them—hadn’t been seen again either.

At the time, Carcali had dismissed the story as the kind of court gossip that ladies with nothing better to do titillated themselves with. Such things didn’t really happen. Now, she was not so sure. The man had shown her that he could starve her to death if he chose to. Would it be so much harder for her to have an accident in the middle of the night?

She stopped in her tracks. Especially since she’d had one accident already. Is
that
what had happened? But what was it an eleven year old had done to anger the Tarxin?

“Tara?” the senior guard said. “We should not waste time.”

“No, of course not.” She resumed walking. She’d done what the Tarxin had asked for—well, not exactly, but he couldn’t prove she hadn’t. Was he going to upbraid her for the storm that could be heard even through the thick stone that surrounded the passage? Well, if he had any complaints, she knew what to say. “You rushed me,” she would tell him. “I warned you there could be dire consequences and you only gave me two days.”

Much sooner than she liked, Carcali found herself in front of the double doors that marked the Tarxin’s section of the palace. From the chamber beyond these, doors on the right led to the public-use rooms, and on the left to the family’s private rooms. Not that any of the ruler’s rooms were really private. She took a deep breath and nodded to the leading guard. He opened the right-hand leaf of the doors and stood back to allow her to enter.

Carcali took three steps into the room and froze. There were more guards here, and most of them were wearing that same look of thinly covered pity that she’d seen on the faces of her escorts. One or two, she thought, eyed her speculatively.

“This way, if you please, Tara Xendra.” A Steward stood at the set of doors in the left-hand wall. A private audience, then. But her thoughts were spinning so wildly Carcali couldn’t work out whether that made disaster more or less likely. The Steward’s face told her nothing, but then the man was trained not to react to anything.

Her hand lifted to her mouth, and she started on the nail of her index finger as she followed him through the door, across the anteroom within, and into the Tarxin’s private study.

It seemed that every lamp in the room was lit, including those in the wall brackets by the door. All the Tarxin’s rooms faced the sea, and the flames of the lamps flickered slightly in the wind that managed to get through the closed shutters of the three narrow windows. Carcali unclenched her hands and tried to stride forward with confidence, suddenly aware that she was the only person in the room wearing nightclothes.

As she drew closer to the table, the man looked up, and the face he showed Carcali was not that of the Tarxin at all. The man at the worktable was Xerwin. Suddenly, all she could hear was the pounding of her heart.

“Here, here, sit down.” Someone with very warm hands was taking hold of her arms and easing her into a chair. Something soft, heavy, and warm was draped over her, and tucked around her feet.

“Thank you very much,” she heard Xerwin say. “If you would leave us now? I will call when you are wanted. Thank you.”

“What did they tell you? Why are you so frightened?” Xerwin had taken her hands and was rubbing them between his own. Carcali coughed, trying to get the muscles in her throat to loosen.

“The Tarxin sent for me,” she croaked.

The rubbing stopped. “And you thought . . . ?” Xerwin shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

“Where is he?” Things couldn’t be
too
bad if Xerwin was here, but there still had to be some kind of explanation. Now that it seemed she had less to be scared of, Carcali found she was starting to get angry.

“Through there.” Xerwin sat back and nodded toward a door on the other side of the room. He glanced at the door she’d come in by and leaned forward again. Carcali edged to the front of her chair and put her head as close to his as she could manage.

“Carcali,” he breathed. “He’s dead. I killed him.”

Carcali felt her mouth drop open. Was she dreaming? Had Xerwin somehow heard her thinking about it and killed the man? She blinked and swallowed. Time for all of that later. Xerwin was Tarxin now. That’s what they’d meant when they’d said the Tarxin had sent for her. That’s why they’d all looked at her that way, because her father was dead. The guards and soldiers were loyal to Xerwin, everyone knew that, but—

“Who else knows?”

Now Xerwin was blinking at her, his head tilted to one side. “Everyone,” he said, his voice puzzled. Then a light seemed to dawn. “Oh,” and with a flip of his hand he indicated how closely they were sitting. “No, this is just so that we can speak freely about
other
things.”

“Should I start crying or something?” Carcali suddenly felt that tears would come easily, she was so relieved not to be frightened any more.

But Xerwin was shaking his head. “No one would believe it, I’m afraid. Look stricken, by all means when we leave the room, but shocked more than grieved is what people will expect.”

Carcali nodded. “I can do that,” she said. “So what happens now?”

“This is the tricky part,” Xerwin said, lowering his voice. “You and I need to get to the Sanctuary of the Marked. Dhulyn Wolfshead is waiting for us there.”

“Why?”

He blinked at her. Carcali felt a flash of impatience. “I’m not Xendra, remember?” She shook herself. She’d been more frightened than she liked to think about, but there was no need to take it out on Xerwin. “I don’t know all the little rituals and ceremonies that come up when the Tarxin dies and there’s a new one.”

Now he was nodding. “Of course, of course. You are right, this is one of those rituals. You and I, because,” he cleared his throat. “Because we are the only ones of the Tarxin’s blood and must go to the Sanctuary and hold a vigil with the Marked. It is, uh, a tradition. Our wound is Healed, our hearts are Mended, and our serenity is Found.” He smiled. “Oh, and the Seers give us a Vision for the new reign.”

Carcali chewed on her fingernail. “They don’t have to touch us, do they? I mean, this is just a formality, right?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely, just a formality. In fact, all the more so because,” and he lowered his voice again, “you are not Xendra.”

“And the Paledyn will be there?”

“Just in case there are any questions afterward,” he said, tilting his head once more in the direction he’d said the old Tarxin’s body lay. He stood up and began to draw her to her feet.

“Wait.” She looked at the door and leaned toward him. “Wouldn’t we get them to come here? The Marked?”

Xerwin sighed and sat down again. “I can see I’m going to need to explain more to you,” he told her. “We’re not going openly to the Sanctuary,” he said when she was once more seated facing him. “Not yet. We’re going to go now, privately, to prepare for the real ceremony, with the Paledyn there to vouch that everything is correct.”

“But why the secrecy?”

He shut his eyes and sighed. “Because you’re
not
Xendra. And the Marked know this. Because Dhulyn Wolfshead assures them that it is correct to do so, they are willing to perform the ceremony, but there are special preparations that must be done privately. Then, the public ceremony can take place in the usual fashion.”

Carcali waved her hands in the air. “All right, yes, whatever you say.” That was the problem with primitive societies, she thought. Empty rituals, ceremonies stripped of all meaning because there was no longer any Art to inform them. To say nothing of the silliness that politics was responsible for.

“Then, if you are ready, this way.”

 

Xerwin could hardly believe that anyone, let alone a Storm Witch, would have fallen for the mass of confused nonsense that had just come out of his mouth. Though he had to admit, as he led Carcali through the hidden passage that was the Tarxin’s private corridor to the Sanctuary, he liked that bit about Healing wounds, and Mending hearts. That was inspired. He should have taken more time to create a better story, but all had ended well. Carcali was a little arrogant, in her way—as all powerful people were, he realized. Otherwise she would have listened more carefully to him, questioned him more closely. He should take a lesson from this himself.