The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (43 page)

“Don’t lie about writing me letters that the Italgas intercepted. Don’t pretend you sent me New Year’s gifts and a lovely bouquet for my Tenth. And yes, I can read. There’s only one reason you care about me: because the people of your holdfast expect it. I know it, and Colchua knew it, too.”
 

“Then he’s dead.”
 

Already I’m telling him too much
. “He is. He changed into a grunt and I killed him.”
 

Tyr Freewell stopped eating. “You did?” As if it was something she should be proud of.
 

“I did,” she said sourly. “Do you want to hear the story?”
 

“No,” he said, pulling off a piece of pale fish with his fingers and holding it close to his lips. “I’m sure it’s properly tragic, but it’s not important anymore. There were letters, you know, but I don’t know if they were ever sent. Your mother wrote them.”
 

A chill ran through Cazia’s whole body. Her mother? Ulia Italga, sister to King Ellifer? “Never sent?”
 

“You mother dictated them but didn’t have the nerve to send them. You’ll understand when you go to meet her.”
 

Cazia suddenly had no appetite at all. Why did she have to wait until the world was so close to collapsing to meet her mother?

Tyr Freewell scooped up a bit of apple mush with his bread. “How have your studies progressed?”
 

“As a scholar?” The tyr nodded. “I made some progress, but not as much as I should have. I had too many enemies in the palace to get Doctor Twofin’s full attention.”
 

“The reports I have received say that you’re his star pupil.”
 

Cazia dipped her bread in the mush and tried it. Ugh. Both were delicious, but together, they were a mess. “Only compared to Lar and little Jagia.”
 

“You’re not a very good liar, are you?” the tyr asked lightly. “Why did you come here?”
 

He can see through any lie I tell.
Of course, that’s what he would want her to believe. Cazia felt uneasy sitting within reach of his knife. Was her father really any worse than the other tyrs? Was he really worse than Tyr Gerrit, who had leered at Ivy through the silver mirror?
 

“There’s no simple answer to that,” Cazia said truthfully. “As you said, you’re as far west as we can go before we get to sea giants or Durdric, so I’d hoped The Blessing hadn’t spread far enough to overwhelm you. Also, since I’m your daughter, you might be less likely to murder me.”
 

“Who sent you?”
 

“What do you mean?” Cazia asked. “I sent myself.”
 

Tyr Freewell chuckled without looking up from his fish. “You’re a fifteen-year-old girl. You’re not the one making decisions.”
 

“Oh, no?” Cazia said, her blood rising. “Who else is there? What king, or tyr, or general is left to tell me where to go and what to do?”
 

Tyr Freewell slammed his fist on the table in sudden rage. “
There’s me!
” he roared. “I will command you and you will obey. If you don’t, you can spend the rest of your life in a cell. Now, you will start making more of these kinzchu stones, and I will see them fashioned into spears and arrows.”
 

“Good,” Cazia said stubbornly. “That’s why I came here. Can your people bring me more of this stone? I don’t know if my spell will work on any other type.”
 

“It will be brought to you. You will do this work. For me. Hah! Once, I thought to be king of Peradain, but now I see I was born to be king of all Kal-Maddum.” He smiled down at Cazia, his red-faced rage seemingly forgotten. “And you will be a princess over all the world. Soon, we will rescue our fighting men and…” He caressed his upper lip with his pinky, “… females of child-bearing age from the grunts’ curse, and then the land will be ours.”
 

“They aren’t all fighting men,” Cazia said. Had her father overlooked the obvious? “The Blessing takes everyone, young and old, merchant and servant.”
 

“The young and fit are the ones we want. The others are of no use, except as bait for more grunts.”

Fire take me, I have to kill my father.

Chapter 27

He swept out of the room as though heading to his coronation. Cazia was left alone with two half-finished platters, and she quickly gobbled the fish and bread until there was none left.
 

Bait. Her father wanted to use people as bait. Old Winstul the lumber merchant, with his bony arms and wobbling belly, would have been tied to a tree as a lure for grunts, probably at the cost of his life. Without him, Cazia would be delivering sacks of kinzchu stones instead of functional weapons.
 

For all his guile, her father was a vicious fool. Communities can not run on soldiers and pregnant women alone.
 

A pair of servants entered. They were young women about Cazia’s age, and they were careful not to look up at her.
Females of child-bearing age….
Her skin crawled.

Had he gone hollow? That would have excused his callousness--in fact, Cazia could have restored him to his old self with the touch of a kinzchu stone.
 

Then she remembered the way he had looked at her. Had Doctor Whitestalk ever had a shrewd expression? Had Cazia? No, a wizard’s expression was usually blank, sometimes grief-stricken. It was rarely smug and calculating.
 

No, this was the man she’d been told about her whole life. The man that Colchua said was a monster. And she had already turned over the kinzchu weapons to him.
 

What could she do? Maybe there was no choice; her father was the tyr and she would have to follow. It’s not like she could just overthrow the man. She didn’t know the names of any of his people, not his generals, his spymasters, his tax collectors. Fire and Fury, she was a fifteen-year-old girl and she didn’t even speak the language.
 

The others are of no use, except as bait…
 

The memory of her iron dart sliding between Colchua’s ribs came back to her suddenly. A sudden rush of anger surged through her, and she shut her eyes to wait for the chills and sorrow to pass.
 

Her food finished, she pushed the platters away, half expecting a sudden bout of stomach cramps or dizziness. No signs of poisoning presented themselves, so she sat, quietly, feeling pleasantly full, and tried to think of what to do. Either she needed her father to see reason--and the oily, disgusting way he had spoken to her made her doubt that was possible--or she needed to find someone sensible, like Tejohn, who could take command. She needed someone with authority who could take over without a mini-civil war.
 

And she’d delivered the kinzchu spears to this man. She had made him indispensable to the survival of humankind.

Suddenly, Cazia remembered the Surgish word for
mother
. She turned to one of the servants waiting to clear her platter away and said, “Do you speak Peradaini?”
 

The girl glared at her and shook her head. She almost looked insulted. Fine. Cazia sighed, then pointed to the girl, then to herself. Then she made her fingers walk across the table top, and said, “Mialj.”

The servant made a show of controlling her response—a very different thing from actually controlling it—and turned her palms toward the ceiling: she couldn’t help because she couldn’t understand.
 

Cazia pantomimed again more forcefully that she wanted to be taken to
mialj
and the servant kept shrugging to show her confusion. She said something in Surgish quickly and repeated “
mialj
” as a question. She had no idea who they were talking about.
 

Cazia pretended to be surprised. “Mialj,” she said simply. “Ulia Italga. Well, Ulia
Freewell.
”
 

That caused the expected amount of commotion, and it was no time at all before the servant girl brought someone who could speak Peradaini. While Cazia convinced them she was Tyr Freewell’s daughter, she refilled her broth bowl with a water spell.
I’m a scholar like him.
None of them wanted to believe it, but she had just eaten a private meal with the man, something that was apparently pretty rare.
 

“He said I could visit my mother,” Cazia insisted. Actually, he’d told her to make more kinzchu stones, but since no one had brought the correct rocks yet, she figured she had a little free time. “You don’t have a choice. You have to take me to her.”
 

In another holdfast, her insistence might not have worked, but the Freewell servants had a frightened, hunted look to them. Doing as they were told was a habit, the same way it had been for Chik, the Tilkilit warrior.
 

The servant who spoke Peradaini was a steward from the kitchens, but he looked just as starved and listless as the girls mopping the stone floors in the hallway. He led Cazia through a locked and guarded door into a round room, then entered one of the towers. At the top of the stairs was another set of guards.
 

Beyond them was the scholar-made bridge that lead to the last tower, the one that was just a wooden room atop stone pillars.
 

Cazia had been higher off the ground than this, of course—she’d been taught to fly carts—but for some reason, this narrow bridge with no rail on either side woke the butterflies in her stomach. Still, a chance to see her mother? She strode across the stone walkway, one two three four five steps, then knocked on the door.
 

A servant opened it. She was little more than a girl, barely Ivy’s age, and she had the trembling expression of someone expecting a whipping.
 

“I’ve come to see Ulia Freewell,” Cazia said as pleasantly as she could. She’d almost said
Ulia Italga.
 

“Sleeyem…” The girl was unsure what to say. “Dush Sleeyem kashka?”
 

“Cazia Freewell, her daughter.” That wasn’t going to work. She pointed to herself. “Ulia Freewell, mialj.”

That startled the girl so much that she stepped back. The door swung open and Cazia acted as though she’d been invited inside.
 

It was a meager room, with old, warped wooden floors and gaps in the wall slats. At the western end was a large bed. It looked like a marriage bed, but the only figure in it was a wan, graying woman. She glanced at Cazia once, then looked away, her expression slack.
 

Was that her mother? Was that Ulia, the elder sister to King Ellifer Italga?
 

Cazia stared at her for some time, waiting for some spark of interest or recognition. Surely, she’d heard the conversation with the servant. But—
 

“She’s not ignoring you.”
 

The voice startled Cazia so much that she almost yelped. She’d been so intent on her mother that she hadn’t noticed an old woman in a chair on the far side of the bed. She was dressed in servant robes, but no servant Cazia had ever seen held their heads so high or possessed such cool confidence.
 

Cazia looked back at the woman in the bed. “Is she unwell?”
 

The old woman leaned forward and pulled back the covers. The wan, withered woman in the bed had only a thumb and index finger on each hand.
 

Great Way, it couldn’t be. “She went hollow?”
 

The old woman tenderly replaced the covers. “Years ago. She was never… Do you know anything about Ulia?”
 

“No,” Cazia answered, feeling embarrassed by the answer. “No one would tell me anything. Just that she married Tyr Freewell and came west.”
 

“Tyr Freewell,” the old woman said with tremendous distaste. Cazia had never seen someone so wrinkled; she couldn’t even imagine how old this woman was. “I have nothing against common folk, child; there’s many a commoner with more wit and honor than the tyrs that rule them, but Cwainzik Freewell is not one of them. He is a vicious, ambitious skirmisher with a talent for assassination. When old King Ghrund asked him to name a reward for recapturing this useless outpost from the Durdric, no one expected him to ask for Ulia’s hand.”
 

Cazia hadn’t heard this story before. “Couldn’t Ghrund have turned him down?”
 

The old woman answered sharply. “
King Ghrund,
child. The man may be dead, but he still deserves respect. Yes, he could have, but even before she went hollow, Ulia had a touch of madness. She would never leave her room, would never speak with strangers, would—
 

“You’re the queen,” Cazia interrupted. The history of her mother and father suddenly seemed unimportant. “You’re Queen Eshla Italga, Ulia’s mother and…”
 

“And your grandmother,” the old woman said. “I heard what you said at the door. Although technically I’m the Queen Counsel, or the Queen Outside. Women don’t get to stay queen when their husbands die.”