Chapter Twelve
30 Jennitar
It’s definitely diminishing. Slowly, barely a trickle, if magic were water or sand, but every day it’s getting harder to make magic work. We’re certain it’s because magic isn’t unified. Still no progress on figuring out how to make will work correctly. Radryntor increasingly rude to me and abrasive to Cederic. So very discouraged.
1 Teretar
Audryn collapsed yesterday and she finally, finally woke up an hour ago. The baby’s fine, thank the true God, the healers said she didn’t act as if anything were wrong with her mother, kept on moving and all that. But that’s it for Audryn participating in active magic from now on. Even she had to admit I was right, though I think it was the look on Terrael’s face that convinced her. I told her she could go on helping Terrael devise experiments, but that was all. It’s a huge blow, losing her, but it was also a warning that we have to be even more careful about overexerting, even though she was almost certainly more at risk than the rest of us.
I asked the Pfulerrian mages if any of them wanted to join in our research, and discovered something unexpected: they tell Radryntor everything they do. I found this out at dinner (just the two of us, Cederic busy elsewhere) when Radryntor said, “What exactly is it you’re calling on my mages to do?”
Since I hadn’t said word one to her about talking to the mages, let alone that magic is diminishing, it caught me off guard. “I—we’re studying the nature of magic,” I said.
“And how it’s diminishing,” she said.
“That too,” I said.
She got the pinched look I see so often when she’s talking to me. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she said.
“I’ve been preoccupied, Lady Radryntor,” I said, “and it’s not as if I prepare daily reports, even for Cederic.” This is not true. I write down what we learn, which isn’t much, so he’ll see it even if we don’t get a chance to talk. I can’t remember the last time we really talked about anything.
“I think I deserve to know what my mages do,” she said. The pinched look was turning into an actual scowl.
“No offense intended, but isn’t that up to your mages?” I said. “And since I only asked them this morning, it seems they told you what they were doing almost immediately.”
She looked as if she wanted to snap at me but was afraid to so directly challenge the Empress-Consort. “I…hope they will be of use,” she said.
“I think they will,” I said. “They’re extremely competent—that is, Terrael Peressten says they are, and I think you’d agree he’s a decent judge of magical ability.”
“It’s a real pity he lost his magic,” Radryntor said. “Such a shame that magical talent should hinge on such a ridiculous quality. It’s not as if, for example, brown eyes make you an exceptional general.”
“I agree completely,” I said with some fervor, because it still makes me mad to think of all that talent wasted. Though I probably should be grateful for all the Balaenic mages who never would have gained their abilities if not for the convergence.
“I don’t suppose you can do anything about that, in your…research?” Radryntor said.
“Unfortunately, no,” I said, “because trying to do that is what caused the worlds to split in the first place. The best we can do is find ways for those mages to continue to serve our combined country.”
I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the combined country. Radryntor’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything more, just turned the conversation elsewhere. I’m definitely going to conceal the fact I asked the Lethessian mages to join our efforts too. We can’t afford to lose her as an ally, even if she doesn’t have the military force we need the way Teliarne does. But it bothers me that I’m almost pandering to her and her smugness about Castaviran magic being superior, which it isn’t. She looks more like a liability every day.
I don’t know if we can let her continue as a consul if she can’t treat everyone equally. Come to think of it, Pfulerre and Lethess are too close together to justify both being the centers of whatever governing districts we come up with after the God-Empress is defeated. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to put Granea in charge of both cities, given that Pfulerre is about three times the size of Lethess. But we also can’t cater to the bigotries of Castavirans any more than we can coddle the egos of Balaenics.
That’s not to disparage Granea’s abilities. She’s a competent and fair-minded Lord Governor, and I have no doubt she’d be capable of ruling a larger district containing Pfulerre. Despite the difference in our ages, we’ve become friends, and although we haven’t had our official welcome to Lethess, I’ve gone into the city a couple of times, mostly to talk to the mages, but once to walk on the beach. It’s every bit as beautiful as I remember.
Orenna and Jaemis have developed a similar relationship, and the two of them are dogged in their quest to discover what’s happening with magic. Listening to them argue (because they seem to enjoy arguing for its own sake as well as for the results it produces) is reassuring, or was right up until Audryn went pure white and collapsed like a folding chair. I haven’t been that terrified in years.
3 Teretar
We made our processional into Lethess, and I realized that as friendly as Pfulerre had been, we haven’t truly and wholeheartedly been made welcome until today. Granea and Cederic made speeches, and I said some things about how much I liked the city that I think everyone could tell were sincere. As nice as our room in the consul’s palace is, I wish we were staying here instead. And not because I’m Balaenic.
Today was the first day I’ve seen Cederic in
I can’t remember how long it was since we’ve had time to talk, other than with Radryntor’s sullen presence casting a very long shadow over our dinners. We didn’t have time today either, because there’s been trouble north of Pfulerre again, more clashes between the cities, and Cederic had to oversee the situation because neither city is willing to let the other pass judgment. Granea wasn’t happy about it either.
Today we had dinner with her, after we all returned from investigating the problem, and she said, “I can’t help feeling Radryntor is opposed to a Balaenic passing judgment on cases like this because she knows she’d be partial to her own people if she were in that position.”
“That has to be true,” I said. “She’s convinced Castavir is superior and ought to be given jurisdiction over Balaen, like a conquered country. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
“I surmise Lady Radryntor’s overtures of peace aren’t that,” Cederic said.
Granea snorted with amusement. “They’re more like demands Lethess capitulate on property ownership, or that Pfulerre be allowed to collect tolls for use of the coast road that passes within its borders,” she said. “I’ll bow to your decrees, your Majesty, but I expect you to keep your word that Balaen is not going to become a subject state to Castavir.”
“It may come to a point where I have to make it explicit that Lady Radryntor is not the supreme ruler here, which might mean threatening her with the Balaenic Army,” Cederic said.
“Because that will end well,” I said.
“Which is why it will be our tactic of last resort,” Cederic said. “And that is all I will say on the subject.”
“You probably shouldn’t have said that much in front of me,” Granea said with a grin, “me being equal with Radryntor in the eyes of the government, Lord Governor and consul.”
“Precisely,” Cederic said, “and I trust you will not mention my slip of the tongue.”
“As far as I’m concerned, we talked only of whether the King is still planning to marry your deposed Empress,” Granea said, “and how long he’ll survive once he has.”
So we talked gossip for a while, then I went back to the mages and Cederic went to see the quartermasters about the supply situation. I’m not sure that’s really his job, and I wish I’d proposed we go back to our room together instead. I can’t wait until things are less busy and we can be together. I’d love to walk on the beach with him.
4 Teretar
Once again I’ve sat, pencil in hand, not even knowing where to begin. It seems so utterly ridiculous, the worst possible kind of coincidence, and yet—why not? My sister had to end up somewhere, and she always liked the sea. And there I was, parading happily through Lethess with thousands of people cheering me, so why shouldn’t Roda have seen me? It’s been sixteen years, yes, but Sesskia’s not a common name, and I recognized her immediately too. I wish I didn’t. I wish I’d thought to tell the messenger who came for me I didn’t know anyone named Roda. That I don’t have a sister. Because for all those sixteen years I felt as if I really, truly didn’t.
The messenger arrived as I was finishing my breakfast (alone) and preparing for another long, tedious day with the mages. Everyone’s trying different things and it’s my job to look at everything they try and see if it’s worth pursuing as a group. How I’m qualified to do that is one of those mysteries life comes up with sometimes. (That sounds so bitter. Well, I feel bitter right now.) The messenger was from the Army, from Mattiak actually, and he had a folded note with just a few lines on it: There’s a woman named Roda here who claims she’s your sister. Her story matches what you told me. I think you should verify her claim.
I know I read those lines several times, but I only understood them the first time. The rest was my eyes running over the characters, seeing Roda in memory—teaching me to swim, to pick the least rotten fruit from the barrow, helping me clean Bridie up after one of her seizures. And Roda telling me It’s for the best and walking away for the last time.
I set the paper aside on the table and left the room without a word to the messenger. Mattiak knew something of my history, enough that he would know whether someone claiming to be related to me actually was. I guess there was a chance Roda had told her life story to a friend, or a lover, and that woman decided to get close to me by pretending to be Roda, but what would be the point other than maybe to try to assassinate me? No impostor would be able to fool me face to face. I might not have thought of Roda much in the last sixteen years—all right, the last ten, because I cursed her name every day for the first six—but I sure as hell would recognize her face.
I’m supposed to have a bodyguard wherever I go, four of Mattiak’s hand-picked men, and I think they were following me when I left Pfulerre, but I wasn’t paying attention to anything but the well-trodden path we’d made between the city and the camp, and I wasn’t paying much attention to that. I was barely aware of startled soldiers jumping up to salute me as I passed through the camp to Mattiak’s command tent and pushed the door flap aside instead of waiting for the sentries to hold it for me.
And it was her. I’d forgotten how small she is, or maybe I grew a few inches after she left, but I’m not very tall and she’s truly petite. She looks like Dad and Bridie, dark-haired and blue-eyed—Dad wasn’t very tall either—with that round face she and I got from Mam, only her lashes are pale and stubby and mine are thick and long. She wore her hair cut short and shaped to her head so it framed her face, and she was wearing a nice shirt and trousers and good shoes that weren’t suited to walking anywhere but on a paved road.
She was facing Mattiak, but turned her head when I entered, then took a few steps so she was facing me instead. She didn’t look happy, or sad, or guilty, or anything but impassive, like she was waiting for me to react so she could pick the right response. I said, “Outside. All of you. Right now.”
I don’t think I’ve ever sounded more like an Empress-Consort. Everyone left, even Mattiak, who didn’t even say anything, just clasped my shoulder and squeezed as if in support. Then it was just me and Roda. I honestly couldn’t think of anything to say. Roda said, “Hello, Sesskia.”
“Have you been living in Lethess?” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t shout at her. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t angry, because I was, it’s just that sixteen years is a long time to hold on to a white-hot anger, and it felt as if it had dulled into something more like a toothache: painful, always there, but sometimes it stops throbbing and you forget about it until the right jab starts it up again.
“I’m here on business,” Roda said. “It’s good to see you.”
The ache throbbed again. “Since I’m sure you never expected it, I guess you would feel that way,” I said.
Her impassivity cracked. “I went back ten years ago,” she said. “I looked for you.”
“How generous of you,” I said. “Was Mam still alive?”
“Yes,” Roda said. “She didn’t recognize me. Didn’t recognize much of anything. Some of the neighbors were caring for her, said she didn’t have much longer. I stayed long enough to bury her.”
I felt a twinge of guilt I ignored. I’d already given Mam more than Roda ever had—more than she deserved, probably. “Thanks for that,” I said. I meant it, too.
“Where did you go?” Roda said. “Nobody knew what had happened to you, just that you left maybe a year before I came back. I didn’t think Bridie was well enough to travel.”
“Bridie died two years after you abandoned us,” I said. “Not that you’d give a damn about that.”
“Don’t you dare,” Roda began, then swallowed, and more calmly said, “I loved her. But that wasn’t enough to cure her. You know that.”
“What I know,” I said, “is you left me to take care of both of them and I was barely twelve, damn it, twelve years old in the slums of Thalessa with a drunken mother and a little sister who had fits, and I had to claw out a living any way I could because you were too wrapped up in your own needs to care about any of that!” That ache was starting to burn bright again, after all.
“I couldn’t stay!” Roda shouted. “I was turning into Mam—you think that would have helped any of us? I couldn’t make a living in Thalessa short of selling my body, I had to go, and I couldn’t take you with me!”
“Because you didn’t want to be burdened!” I shouted back.
“Because I couldn’t support the three of us!” she said.
“And you think I couldn’t have helped?” I said. “I was old enough to support two other people, but not to work with you to support three?”
Roda turned away. “I didn’t want Mam left alone,” she said, more quietly now. “I’m not saying it was the smartest decision. But I was the head of the family and I did my best. I thought I’d be back in a year or two.”
“That makes me feel so much better now,” I said. “Knowing you did your best. Like you did your best to find me. Was it a relief, knowing I was gone so you could go on with your life?”
“I did look for you!” she said. “I talked to everyone who’d ever known us, everyone you’d worked with—you just vanished as far as all of them were concerned. Mam didn’t even remember she’d had a daughter named Sesskia. At the end all she could do was babble about—you know, how she used to go on about our family’s lost glories and how we’d be living in a manor if not for Dad screwing up all our lives. I searched up and down the coast for over a year, thinking you might have stayed here, and in the end I had to give up because Balaen is huge and I’m only one person. I’m sorry, Sesskia.”
She sounded sorry. She sounded sincere. I didn’t care. “That doesn’t make anything better, Roda,” I said. I ignored the part of me that wanted to forgive her, the part of me that wanted her to make everything all right.
Now that I’m writing this, I feel guilty that I couldn’t forgive her. It’s been so long—what’s the point of holding onto my anger? But I can’t—I still remember how it felt the day she laid that burden on me, told me “you have to take care of them now” and then just walked away before I could do anything to stop her. And when I remember that, it’s as if she did it all over again. Maybe it makes me weak. I don’t know anymore.
Anyway, Roda said, “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you in that procession. I thought, maybe it’s some other Sesskia, because why would my sister be hailed as a ruler? But it was definitely you. It was like being given a second chance. I’m sorry, Sesskia. I’m sorry I left and I’m sorry I didn’t come back in time. We’re all that’s left of our family. I don’t want to lose that again.”
My anger was slipping away no matter how hard I tried to hold onto it. I didn’t want to forgive her. It felt as if doing that would be like saying everything she did to me, to us, was all right. Like I didn’t have a right to be hurt by it. “What exactly do you want from me?” I said. “Money? Rank? Political power?”
She flinched. “I want my sister back,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re a fish scaler in Thalessa or Empress of the whole damned world. I want to sit with you and find out what you’ve been doing all these years and how you ended up on that platform in the center of Lethess claiming to be the new ruler of Balaen and this strange new country we’re cheek-by-jowl with now. I want you to forgive me, if you can.”
I shook my head and realized I was crying. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I can.”
Roda’s shoulders slumped. She was crying too, and it was almost enough to change my mind. Almost. “I’m staying at the Salten Arms in Lethess,” she said, “down by the docks. You can find me there, if you decide you want to. Goodbye, Sesskia.” She left the tent, and I stood there, crying, because
I’m crying again now. I want to forgive her and I can’t forgive her. I hate her and I love her. She’s my sister, even though she abandoned us, and true God help me, I don’t know which of those things matters more.
I couldn’t talk about this at dinner in front of Radryntor, so I told Cederic I needed to talk tonight, but I don’t know if he’ll remember. I’m beginning to feel like he’s a stranger to me.
5 Teretar
Still nothing to report. Based on the kathana Terrael created to track the decline in magic, it’s not a regular decline (even though it never increases) so we can’t pick a future date and say that’s when it will be gone forever. It’s also not happening as fast as all of us feel it is; our fears are exaggerating the truth. I barely see Cederic these days, what with me being involved in research and him dealing with an increasingly testy Radryntor. I’m wondering whether she’s really that important as an ally.
6 Teretar
We got the word, finally, that the King and the God-Empress are married. Nobody in Lethess celebrated at all, but there was a funny undercurrent in Pfulerre I didn’t like. Cederic and I are going to address the city tomorrow to reassure them this changes nothing. I hope it works.
I keep thinking about Roda and trying not to, because it makes me so angry and guilty and I hate both those feelings. I wish she’d never approached me.
7 Teretar
I don’t know how effective that was. Cederic spoke about the God-Empress’s cruelties and the oaths he swore at his coronation. I told them about the King, about his weakness and how ineffectually he’d ruled Balaen, and asked them if they wanted someone like that co-ruling them. I think that made more of a difference than what Cederic said, but mainly because a lot of Pfulerrians have picked up on their consul’s bigotry. I don’t know how they reconcile disliking a Balaenic King ruling them with being fine with a Balaenic Empress-Consort ruling them. I just hope they go on doing it.
We’ve given up on trying to reconcile the two extremes of using willpower to work magic. It’s become obvious it’s simply impossible for human minds to fathom, and since the point of this is to restore a unified magic humans can use, there would be no point in that magic requiring something we can’t do. It feels like we’ve wasted so much time.
Audryn is back on her feet and looks perfectly healthy, but she got into an argument with Terrael about her coming back to active research and I had to add my voice to his. She cried a lot, then apologized, and then we hugged and I cried because I feel so overwhelmed, and I know how I’d feel if I were in her position. Unable to work magic, I mean. I have no idea what it’s like to be pregnant.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, though. I stopped taking the contraceptives after Cederic was nearly assassinated, in case the worst happens and someone—anyway, I haven’t told Cederic because it feels like superstition. Nothing’s happened, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like. I never pictured myself as a mother, mostly because I never dreamed I’d meet anyone I’d want to have a child with, so now I’m afraid because we have to produce at least one heir to keep all of this from sliding back into chaos when we’re gone. And it’s not just the giving birth; suppose I can’t raise my child—children, maybe—to be a good ruler?
This is so much greater a responsibility than most parents face, where if you have a rotten kid, he or she is only going to inflict that rottenness on a few people, not on an entire country. I don’t want to talk about this with Cederic right now, not with everything he’s dealing with, and I probably shouldn’t worry about it until we’ve defeated the God-Empress and brought everything, or mostly everything, under control. But it’s something that worries me when I have time to spare from worrying about magic, or Radryntor, or Audryn.
I thought about going into Lethess today. Decided not to. Tried not to feel guilty.