Wintertide (26 page)

Khamsin thought she was the most beautiful woman she’d even seen.

The Sorcerer, however, was greatly displeased by the sight. “Melande! This is none of your affair!”

Khamsin never heard him speak in anger before. Never knew how much hatred could be portrayed in a tone until now. A chill of fear shot through her as the Sorcerer growled out his words at the figure in gold by the window. Perhaps this was the way his servants knew the Master of Traakhal.

Melande seemed not to notice at all.

“Well, Ro, it’s nice to see you, too, love.” She held slim hands out towards her brother, her fingers laden with jewels. Then with a loud sigh let her arms drift back to her sides. “There was a time, you know, when he would’ve kissed these same hands. He can do that so very well. When he wants to.”

She smiled knowingly at Khamsin, who suddenly felt a dull ache throb inside her. No wonder the Tinker had been anxious to leave Noviiya and reticent in returning. Even the Princesses parading through the city’s tea rooms could not compare in beauty to the woman before her.

Khamsin was barely aware that the Sorcerer was speaking, only hearing the harshness in his tone.

“You’re not welcome here, Melande. Now, will you leave or must I do that for you?!”

“What, sweetest, banish your little sister again?” She pursed her lips into a moue. “Is that how you reward all the pleasure I’ve shown you?”

“You pervert any pleasure.” He spat the words at her.

“Well, if I do, darling, it’s only because you were my teacher.” She walked around the room towards him, trailing a jeweled finger along the mantle, her rings glinting as she passed under the east window.

“Melande, I’m warning you for the last…!”

“At it again, Ro?”

Khamsin spun at a voice behind her and almost lost her hold on the Orb. It swayed dangerously. She was forced to clutch it against her, her thoughts on the man now striding in the direction of the Sorcerer. He matched him in height and features, but not in coloring. The man had hair as pale as lightning.

Her question was answered before it fully surfaced in her mind. He was Lucial. And he was her father.

Khamsin gasped and thrust the Orb away from her body.

The man, clad in deep red robes, turned in her direction. “And good evening to you, Lady. Tell me, do we have here who I think we do?”

Melande stopped in her meandering. “Lucial, you don’t think…?” She scrutinized Khamsin more closely, her dark eyes narrowing.

“Of course,” she breathed. “It’s little Kiasidira. My, she’s grown, hasn’t she? Child, what happened to your hair? Is that what they’re doing now in Noviiya? The latest fashion?”

“You’ve known all along who she is, damn you!” The Sorcerer pointed at Melande. “You were the one who sent the Mogra after her in the Bell Tower. That’s why you sent your riders to Browner’s Grove. To draw me away.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Ro, sweetest. Why, I’ve never seen her before in my life. I only know of her because of what Lucial has told me and well, she does look like her father, you must admit. The last I heard she was growing up sweet and charming in some little backwater Cove.”

“Then how did you know I was in Noviiya?” Khamsin spoke out clearly. Melande and Lucial looked at her in shock, as if unaware she could do such a thing. But the Orb granted her more than Lucial’s identity when she inadvertently held it against her. It had shown her who she truly was as well. Khamsin now understood why she had to be the one inside the circle. She saw what she meant to the Land, and the Land to her. Not to possess it, but to heal it.

She held her head a little higher, met the gaze of the beautiful Witch with more confidence than she’d even known existed in her heart before.

“Why, I just guessed you’d been to Noviiya.” Melande’s hands fluttered as she spoke. “Doesn’t everyone go to the City at some time in their life?”

“Kiasidira.” Lucial stepped towards her. “Child, bring the Orb to me. Before you drop it. Or someone who shouldn’t have it, grabs it.” He glared at Melande.

Khamsin turned to her right, towards Melande, then left, at Lucial. “She can’t get in here.”

“Someone has taught you well, daughter.” His gaze shifted for a moment to his half-brother as he emphasized the final word. “Bring the Orb to me.”

“I think I’ll keep it for now, thank you, m’Lord.”

“Kia, Kia, you can trust your Tanta Melande,” the witch purred. Khamsin glanced in her direction. “Your father, he abandoned you! Why, I remember saying to him when he told me about you, ‘Lucial, let me raise the child if you’ve no love to give her.’ We could’ve been friends, Kia, you and I.”

“You don’t need friends like that, daughter.”

Khamsin turned again.

“Khamsin.” The Sorcerer said her name quietly. Yet she heard it as if his were the only voice in the room. “Put the Orb back in the pedestal.”

“No, Kia. Bring it to me!”

“Daughter, listen to your father. Come here. I can…”

“Lucial, shut up! Kia, don’t listen to him.”

Khamsin spun dizzily under the barrage of voices.

“Khamsin!”

“Kia!”

“Daughter…”

“No!” She thrust the Orb over her head. It jiggled precariously.

All were silent.

“Now,” she said, her voice suddenly firm. “It’s over. There shall be no more fighting. No more burning of villages, killing of children, raping of women. There shall be no more summer snows or poison rain. It stops now. Or I smash this.”

Melande’s face hardened. “You halfling bastard, how dare you dictate terms to me! Rothal, go in there and take it from the bitch.” She swung one arm out towards the Sorcerer. “You can do that, can’t you?”

“Take one step and I drop it!” Khamsin shook the handles slightly.

The man in black did nothing for several heartbeats, then raised his arm. Khamsin tensed, knowing what the movement could signal. But he only ran his hand wearily through his hair. “Smash the Orb, Khamsin. It’s the only way. They’re not going to listen to anything else. Believe me, I know. I’ve tried.”

“Are you mad?” Lucial spun on his brother, his hands coming up in a threatening gesture. “That’ll kill us! We’ll all die!”

“Just a bit sooner than expected, in sixty or seventy years. As we should have, three hundred years ago. We’ve lived, Lucial, too long. Much too long.”

“But we’ll get old!” Melande’s hands raised to her face.

The Sorcerer chuckled dryly. “You passed your two-hundred and twenty-fifth last Summertide, Melly. I wouldn’t call that young.”

“Your humor, Ro, is ill timed, as usual.” Lucial snapped.

“I’m tired, Lucial. Tired of three hundred years of fighting, of deceit, of treachery.” He paused, his words now for Khamsin. “And of emptiness.”

She knew. The Orb had shown her that as well. Rothal-kiarr had been on a journey of his own, not unlike the one she’d just experienced. But his had been crueler, more frightening. Until he turned his back on the beckoning darkness of the ultimate power that consumed Lucial and Melande. They abandoned him, then joined forces against him. Sibling against sibling.

Until a child was born in the midst of a maelstrom.

“Well, maybe you’re tired but I’m not!” Lucial lashed out at his older brother, grabbing him by the arm. “Go in there and take the Orb away from the little tramp, or I swear I’ll…”

“You’ll what, Lucial?” There was a deadly note in the Sorcerer’s voice.

The younger man tensed visibly and snatched his hand away.

“Weakling!” Melande hissed, the venom carrying across the circle. “Kiasidira, now listen to me. You’ve carried on your foolishness long enough. You’re meddling in something you don’t understand.”

“Don’t be so sure,” came the Sorcerer’s smooth reply.

“But this I will promise you,” she continued, overriding her eldest brother’s tones. “You will gain nothing and lose all if the Orb is destroyed. You can’t take away the powers we already have. Nor the knowledge. That’s past. The past can’t be altered. You can’t destroy us. You will simply shorten our time for revenge. But a lot can be accomplished in seventy years, Kiasidira. A lot…can…be…accomplished.”

The threat was there.

Khamsin lowered her aching arms until the Orb swung before her, swirling, pulsing, like a whirlwind full of rainbows. She gazed into its depths before holding it out towards the man before her.

“Rylan,” she said, almost shy in using the name she had whispered night after night in her dreams. “I’m tired, too. But I’m not yet ready to die.”

And she passed the Orb to the Sorcerer as he stepped through the curtain.

Khamsin, you’re sure? You understand?

She nodded hurriedly, the tears trickling down her cheeks as the weight of the past few months flowed over her. Cirrus Cove, the deaths of Tanta Bron, Tavis, Rina and Aric. The pain of being physically beaten by the Covemen. The pain of loving and losing the Tinker. And then there was Egan, so concerned, so caring. Yet he was a Hill Raider, like those who had killed Rina’s children. Like the man who stood before her.

She found herself stripped of all illusions of what she had assumed life was supposed to be. Yet, in an odd sort of way, she understood it all and knew she understood nothing. She was finally open for the truth. She raised her tear-streaked face to the man in black.

He gently pulled the Orb from her grasp and slid it back into the cabinet. She watched his movements as if mesmerized, as if she were here and yet not. But when he turned towards her, she let herself reach out and touch him, laying her hand on his sleeve. He drew her against him, wrapping his arms around her as he kissed the dampness on her face.

She brought her mouth up to his, no longer shy, knowing he was the answer to her questions.

“Kiasidira!” She heard Lucial’s whining voice.

Khamsin ignored her father, having more important things to tend to.

“Rothal!” It was Melande and she, too, received no response.

Finally, Khamsin pulled away. She studied the face yet inches from hers. Nothing had changed. He was still the man she knew as Rylan the Tinker and always would be. But many changes now beckoned to her.

“What will you do,” she asked him softly, “in eighteen years, when I’m older than you?”

He touched his fingers to her lips. “In eighteen years, child, you will still be eighteen, as you will also be for the next five hundred. You’re Raheiran, and to a true Raheiran the Orb grants unlimited knowledge, and a limited immortality. It’s the price we pay for the duty that befalls us.

“Unfortunately,” he said with a sideways glance towards Lucial, “some of use choose to ignore and abuse that duty.”

“Some of us,” Lucial shot back, “aren’t muddled by weak senti-mentality.”

“No. Just greed. When a Raheiran comes into his or her power, it’s easy to be tempted to want to control, instead of guide. Sometimes the Gods’ have bred a little too finely,” he added, his mouth twisting slightly.

Khamsin remembered what Ciro had said: that the Sorcerer was Tarkir’s offspring, but not Ixari’s. Lucial and Melande were.

“That’s why Merkara told my mother to keep you safe from us for all that time. He knew, just as we all did, what you’d learn, what you would become. It was important you reach that day without any outside influences from us.”

“Your
mother
kept me safe?”

“Merkara’s half-sister. You called her your Tanta Bron.”

Khamsin opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it.

“She was keeping you away from us until you could make your own decisions. Bronya knew the mistake she made in allowing Tarkir and Ixari to raise me in their temples. She saw what Lucial and Melande had become, knowing only priests and priestesses, who jumped at their every whim. She didn’t want to repeat that mistake with you.

“And she refused to let me near you, until she could be sure I wasn’t like them…” he motioned with a dismissive gesture towards the Witch and the Wizard, “…anymore.”

He lifted his gaze from her face and looked at his siblings. “Kiasidira has decided. And she has the power to enforce the decision.”

Melande stepped to the curtain, her mouth a tight line. “My riders…”

“Your riders will cease, Melande. As will yours, Lucial. You may not have wanted to listen to me before. But you will listen to us, now.”

“I’ll see you in hell, Rothal-kiarr!” For a moment Melande’s eyes burned with an intense fire, a look that had been known to reduce mere mortals to ashes.

The Sorcerer merely raised one eyebrow in a quizzical expression. His voice, however, was hard as stone.

“Be ye gone, witch.”

And Melande disappeared.

Nixa trotted over to sniff the spot where the Witch had stood, and sneezed.

Lucial eyed Khamsin warily. “You may have a winning hand, Ro, but the game’s not over. Not yet.”

Tarkir’s sons stared at each other through the curtain, Lucial dropping his gaze only seconds before he, too, disappeared.

And then there was a silence in the room. Nothing stirred, not even Nixa who crouched down on all fours ’til her paws were invisible. She stared at a nonexistent point in the distance.

Rylan, too, stood motionless, his hands resting lightly on Khamsin’s shoulders. His own sagged ever so slightly with a hint of tiredness. The eyes that studied the small form in his grasp now lacked the brazen confidence that shone in them, only moments before.

But Khamsin saw none of this for she stared where the gray feline stared, at nothing, as it was often in nothing that it was easiest to find what you seek.

He waited for her to turn her face back to his.

“I know you’re angry with me. You’ve a right to be, no doubt. So say what you will. Or ask what you need to know.”

She paused thoughtfully. “What constitutes a ‘winning hand,’ Rylan? I don’t know. I’ve never played cards before, you see.”

She could tell by his expression that wasn’t the question he was expecting, but then, she had no intention of doing the expected. Nor of facing, at the moment, the very serious issues she knew they’d have to deal with soon enough. She was exhausted, emotionally and physically, and suspected he was as well. She needed, more than answers right now, to see his smile.