Chapter Thirteen
8 Teretar
Radryntor noticeably cooler toward both Cederic and me. I think the only thing keeping her from changing her mind entirely about our rule is the Balaenic Army camped outside her gates. I’m prepared for us to leave the city if that becomes necessary. Cederic—I can’t believe I can’t remember the last time we made love. We’re just so busy…but I think we shouldn’t ever be too busy for that.
Anyway, Cederic looks grim these days, or I should say, looks grim to me; I doubt anyone else will see that in his normally impassive expression. Outwardly, he’s as calm and reassuring as ever, overseeing whatever Mattiak thinks needs his attention, sitting in judgment occasionally in Lethess and Pfulerre so people will see he’s a just ruler, drafting handbills to send out throughout the country condemning the King’s actions and reiterating his (Cederic’s) claim to the throne. I cannot imagine anyone better suited to this role, and I don’t think I say that just because I love him.
I’m going to wait up for him. I still haven’t told him about Roda—I don’t know if he even realizes she came to see me, because I bet Mattiak would think it wasn’t his business to discuss my business with my husband, and we haven’t had the right moment to talk about it yet. We need to remember we aren’t just these roles we’ve been playing, that at heart we’re two people who love and support and need each other. It’s hard to remember, these days, what it was like when all we had to worry about was the God-Empress finding out we were married and using that to threaten or hurt us. As if that were anything so trivial—but it certainly feels that way now.
9 Teretar
Fell asleep before Cederic came to bed, didn’t wake until after he was gone again this morning. Never had a chance to talk to him today—he was in Lethess most of the day, and I was with the mages, and then we had dinner with Radryntor and that was, of course, not a place where we could have a heartfelt conversation. Tonight for sure.
10 Teretar
See above, except this time I actively tried to speak to him and kept being called on for stupid little things I’m sure anyone could have handled, except, naturally, having the attention of the Empress-Consort makes people feel better. I wish I were just Sesskia again. I wish all of this were over. I wish Radryntor would stop being so stupid. I wish the God-Empress would drop dead and take the King with her. I wish Roda
I can’t bear how cynical and vicious I’ve become. Something has to change. I can’t quite bring myself to go into Lethess.
11 Teretar
More news out of Venetry, sickening news: the entire Chamber has been executed for “disloyalty.” We’re holding out hope this isn’t true. It’s come to us via rumor rather than official decree, but it seems so much like something the God-Empress would do it’s hard to stay optimistic. Not that I really liked any of them except maybe Jakssar, and Crossar was probably an active threat to us, but I didn’t wish any of them dead.
I’ve given up waiting for Cederic at night. Eventually, things will be less hectic, and we’ll have a chance to be together again. For now, I’m so tired I can’t bear it.
14 Teretar
No chance to write—well, chances to write, but not much to say. The new kathana that will unify how we apply our will to pouvrin is coming along very slowly, as expected, and everyone’s doing their best not to be impatient or worried at what that means about diminishing magic.
What I worry about all the time now is that bringing our two magics together isn’t going to make a difference. That magic isn’t diminishing, it’s spreading out the way it did after the worlds separated, and it can’t be stopped. Because, really, what does the world care if people can’t use magic? It’s not like it destroyed the worlds when that first stupid kathana split them apart. We just won’t have magic. And I refuse to think that’s inevitable. I think of how much Castaviran society depends on magic, of how many benefits Balaen might see from it, and it makes me more determined than ever to find a solution.
15 Teretar
Good progress on the kathana today. Everything else as usual. More news out of Venetry confirming the Chamber has been disbanded “in pursuit of a more unified government of our blended countries,” but nothing saying the Chamber Lords were executed. Hope that’s good news. Granea invited me for dinner and I made an excuse, then felt terrible. I’m not going to be magically dragged to wherever Roda is just because I step into the city. I hate this feeling.
16 Teretar
Kathana almost ready. We hope. Jaemis and Orenna seem confident; they’ve taken the lead on this, and by the verbal wrangling I infer they’re satisfied with the results. I’ve never seen two people so prone to expressing their fondness for each other by shouting. They’re like a couple of siblings born thirty years apart.
Radryntor is back to being cold. I think she took the expulsion of the Balaenic Chamber as a sign that the God-Empress is truly as pro-Castavir as Radryntor thinks we ought to be. I never see her except at dinner. Spoke briefly to Cederic today and he said we should definitely be prepared to force the issue.
Two more days, and we can do the kathana. I don’t dare make plans beyond that.
17 Teretar
I think everyone is prepared for their role in the kathana, even our Lethessian mages, who were completely unfamiliar with Castaviran magic until recently. It’s extremely complicated, so it’s a good thing the Balaenic mages don’t have to scribe th’an using their pouvrin or anything that would make it even more complicated. We’re using the offensive pouvrin, the mind-moving and fire pouvrin, to force a shape out of the th’an that will then bind the pouvrin into something less fluid, something will can gain purchase on. Whether this will affect all pouvrin and not just the two we’re using is still uncertain, as is whether this will make the magics come together, but we all feel confident about it.
Mostly confident.
I don’t think I’ve been this nervous about magic since I learned the mind-moving pouvra and was afraid I might kill myself using it. Sleep now, kathana tomorrow.
18 Teretar, noon
I’ve sat here gripping my pencil, not knowing how to begin, for an hour. I feel so weary, so defeated, there almost seems no point to writing anything. So I guess I should start with the list of the dead, so their names won’t be forgotten, Balaenics and Castaviran together because after this, the distinction doesn’t matter anymore:
Cerran, Aelisa, Loevaron, Selwen, Elevia, Bedaeka, Harisson, Obren.
Jaemis.
So few, when I write them down, and I should be thinking of how fortunate we are it wasn’t more, but every one of those names was someone I knew and cared about, even Obren and Elevia, whom I’d only just met. And I keep going over it. I know I shouldn’t. I had to have Orenna sedated because I couldn’t stop her trying to fix it any other way, but it’s impossible not to look at that list and think we should have understood it better, or been more patient, or something.
We started preparing early this morning, getting a good breakfast, some of us going for a run around the camp, others meditating, whatever limbered up their bodies and minds for working serious magic. I spoke briefly to Cederic, who was headed off for yet another meeting with Radryntor, and he told me he regretted not being able to be there, and he was gone before I realized I hadn’t kissed him goodbye. That felt like a bad omen, but I shook it off and went to do my own preparation ritual, which is to find a quiet spot and let my mind drift. That was hard to do today, and part of me would like to blame that for my contribution to the disaster, but I know that had nothing to do with it.
So I rested, and eventually went to where we were going to do the kathana, a big empty spot about a third of the way toward Lethess from the camp.
We needed something more permanent this time, so we we’d taken the trenching tools yesterday to dig a kathana circle out of the sod and carve out the inert th’an, which we filled with black clay we’d made by mixing white clay with charcoal. It took a lot of charcoal to get it good and black, and it left everyone’s fingers filthy, but the black stood out nicely against the pale ground.
Then we all took our places at the cardinal and ordinal points, kneeling in lines of four—that is, each point had four people lined up behind it, with Balaenic mages at the cardinal points and Castavirans at the ordinal points. I was the anchor, the last person in the row, for the northern point, Jeddan was farthest from me at the southern anchor point, and Jaemis knelt in the center, with his back to me, facing south.
The most complicated part, to me, was keeping the beat: there were five “musicians” with different instruments scrounged from all over Pfulerre, and I still don’t understand how they can tell the difference between two flutes that to me look and sound exactly the same, but it seems those small, nearly invisible differences matter. Maybe we used the wrong ones. I have to stop rethinking this.
Anyway, our five musicians each had a different type of instrument, drum, wooden block, fife, bell, and something that looks like a very short xylophone, and it took them about ten minutes to tune up and then get into harmony with each other. Then they began playing.
It’s the first kathana rhythm I’ve ever heard that actually sounded like music, and one of the things we worked hardest at, in preparing for this, was learning to identify when the melody reached the end and started over. I let myself relax and fall into the rhythm, which to me felt like a dance, and I remembered how the mages had swept back and forth across the kathana that summoned the Codex Tiurindi, and how beautiful it was, and that helped me relax even further.
After three repetitions, there was a sighing noise as everyone drew breath at once, and I can appreciate that now as I didn’t when I was absorbed in the rhythm, because it meant we’d passed the first obstacle, getting everyone synchronized. I was aware of movement on either side of me as the Castaviran mages to left and right brought their slates up and began scribing. I let the fire pouvra emerge from within me and began bending my will to its shape just as the mages across from our line began doing the same to manifest the mind-moving pouvra. That was how the pattern went: each pouvra in opposition to the other, with the Castaviran mages scribing th’an with the same effects, also opposite one another.
It was so difficult, as if I were trying to shape water, but eventually I felt it respond, and before it could ignite anything I let it pass from me into Davik’s grip. Once it was gone I felt utterly drained, weakened, but we’d expected that, because being able to shape magic and then give it to someone else to use was so difficult we’d almost had to devise a different kathana before Relania worked out the technique. The idea was for each mage to bring the pouvra (or th’an) into shape, then give it to the next person, who would combine it with his and pass it forward until the keypoint mage, the one at the circle, was handling four times his normal ability.
It sounds dangerous. Was dangerous, clearly. I still don’t see that we had another choice, except
Never mind that. If I write it all down, it makes their sacrifice less of a waste.
I was at the back, so I couldn’t see the rest, but I knew how the kathana was meant to work. We’d never been able to get the Balaenic mages to work the pouvrin at the same speed, because some of us just take longer than others, so as each keypoint person received their burden, he or she started slapping the ground in time with the song’s rhythm. As soon as everyone was doing that, Jaemis would begin his part, linking the eight magics together and essentially telling the pouvrin to act like th’an, rigid and malleable at the same time.
Like I wrote, I couldn’t see any of this, but I could hear this noise begin, a range of pitches that sounded like moaning. I think it was moaning, the sound of those eight mages trying to keep the magic from escaping. I know it’s not a living I don’t know if magic is living or not. Maybe that’s the problem. But I couldn’t help picturing it trying to escape, as if we were caging it, or tormenting it.
There was the music, and the moaning, and very faintly the sound of someone dragging a knife or a stick through the hard, half-frozen earth, and then I did see something—an icy glow that sprang up around each of those keypoint mages. If winter were a color, that’s what it would be, silver-white light that looked like it would burn anything it touched, except our mages weren’t screaming in pain, so it was just an illusion.
And then they did start screaming.
Four of the mages at the circle went up in flames, gold mixed with that silver-white light. The other four—I couldn’t see them, just that the light grew more intense and then shrank down to limn their outlines. I saw Jaemis, just barely, as he collapsed and began thrashing on the ground. That was when I tried to stand and found I needed the support of my hands to get to my feet. Everyone else was screaming, and I reached out with the extinguishing pouvra, thinking I could at least put out the fires, and it worked, but the silver light was still there, and they were all still thrashing around, and I did the only thing I could think of—flung myself forward and scrabbled at one of the inert th’an, finally prying it up and crushing it in my hands. The light vanished.
I didn’t think I’d ever be able to move again. Then someone helped me stand—it was Jeddan, and he was saying something I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hear him, but I felt addled, as if language were beyond my understanding. He had to repeat himself several times before I realized he was asking if I was all right. I nodded, though I think I was lying—it depended on what he meant by “all right.” At least I wasn’t injured. Then I looked around, and I thought I might never be all right again.
All the keypoint mages were dead. Four of them were blackened husks curled up on themselves from extreme heat. Four of them were crushed and mangled as if they’d been caught in a rock slide. Jaemis was unrecognizable as human. It was so silent that if Jeddan hadn’t spoken to me, I’d have thought I’d gone deaf. Then someone began sobbing, and it was as if that had broken through some invisible barrier, because everyone joined in, screaming or wailing or just making these inhuman groaning sounds. Jeddan and I both sat down and held each other, crying without making a sound.
I don’t know how long it took before people from our camp came to investigate the light. I had my eyes closed because it was too hard to keep them open, and because everywhere I looked I saw a dead friend, but I heard them running toward us, and then at least one person threw up. That told me I had better get control of myself, because someone would need to supervise everything, starting with taking the bodies to where they could be cared for before being buried.
It was just as hard to stand as it had been before, but Jeddan and I helped each other—well, he helped me and I tried not to weigh him down—and I was able to face the soldiers and give them instructions. Then I went to each of our mages in turn and made them calm down enough to look at me, and told them to go back to the palace and rest—in groups, if they could, because I didn’t think any of us should be alone. Not that I had any choice about it, myself.
I stayed long enough to ensure the bodies were being handled with respect, then followed that horrible white-sheeted procession back to camp with Jeddan. Neither of us said anything. There wasn’t anything to say, really, until we’d seen our friends cared for, and then we walked back to the palace. Once we were at the door to his chambers, Jeddan said, “I can have someone send a message to Cederic.”
“He shouldn’t be interrupted,” I said, “and when Radryntor finds out about this, who knows what she’ll think it means? I just want to sleep, Jeddan, and hope this doesn’t look quite so bad later.”
Jeddan didn’t look convinced. “You don’t look well,” he said.
“Neither do you,” I said. His normally tanned complexion looked chalky.
“Well,” he said, “if you can sleep, sleep, but come back to the mages’ quarters later. I think everyone could use some reassurance.”
“I will,” I said, but as I write this I’m not sure I’m capable of reassuring anyone because I can’t even reassure myself.
This is the worst disaster I can imagine. Not only did we lose so many people, we failed utterly at the only thing we could think of that would make our magics whole. Magic is fading, we don’t know how to stop it, it’s nearly spring and we have barely any support and only a shred of an army, the God-Empress is winning, and I might as well have no husband for all we ever see each other.
I know I told Jeddan I would sleep, but I feel as if I will never sleep again, just go on putting one foot in front of the other like a puppet on strings, and writing in this book is all I can do. And it’s completely pointless.
I’m going to bed now. Maybe all I can do is stare at the wall and think about my failures. Maybe that will shake something loose. Maybe not. But it’s all that’s left to me.