The thought was sweet and tempting, but he thrust it away. Instead, he continued to smile. “I can arrange a room for you at the Kraljica’s apartments in Passe a’Fiume,” he said. “I can also assure you that the locks work perfectly well. In exchange, you can tell me your story. Are we agreed?”
“Only if you tell me yours as well,” she answered. “Yours would be far more interesting, I assure you.”
“The other person’s tale is always more interesting,” he said. “Frankly, my tale is rather boring. But-we have an agreement, then. So-let’s start. Tell me, why is a young woman walking to Nessantico in the rain?”
She looked away then. He could almost hear her thinking. He wondered what she would say, but he was certain that whatever it was would not be the truth.
“It’s because of my great-vatarh,” she said. “We lived not far outside Ville Colhelm, and he had decided that I had to marry this boy from the farm next to ours-”
“That’s a lie,” Sergei interrupted. He kept his voice calm. Unperturbed. “I’m sure you’d make it a very entertaining and convincing lie, but it’s a lie nonetheless.”
Her hand drifted back under her tashta-smoothly, a movement that would have gone unnoticed by most eyes, since at the same time she shifted her position on the seat, placing both legs down as if she were readying herself to move. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I’m not from Ville Colhelm, not from the Holdings at all. I’m from Sesemora, from a town on the Lungosei, but my family is largely from Il Trebbio, and so they were under constant suspicion. The Pjathi’s soldiers came one day, and-”
Sergei was already shaking his head and she stopped. “Why don’t you tell me your real name,” he asked. “Rhianna, perhaps? Or is that one also a lie?” He saw her gaze dart to the door of the carriage. “Don’t,” he told her. “There’s no need for you to be alarmed. As you said, you know me. I have done terrible things in my lifetime, and there’s nothing you can tell me, I suspect, that will shock me. Whatever you’ve done, whatever’s happened to you, I’ve no intention of holding you. Especially since you have your hand on a knife at the moment, and my only weapon is this cane.” He lifted it, moving deliberately slowly and grimacing as if it pained him to lift his shoulder-he also neglected to mention the blade he could draw from the sheath of the cane at need, or the fact that Varina had enchanted the cane for him: with the release word she had taught him-she claimed-he could kill an attacker instantly. He had never used the release word, since Varina had said that the spell was incredibly costly and she could not (or would not) do it again. “Use it only in dire need,” she had told him. “Only when there is no other option open for you…”
“The door is unlocked, and I will sit over here away from it,” he told the young woman. Grunting, he slid on the seat to the side opposite the door. “You can reach it long before I could stop you. There-now you can escape into this horrible weather whenever you like. But if you’re staying, I would like to hear your story. The true one.”
She stared at him, and he held her gaze placidly. He saw her relax slowly, though the hand never left her hidden weapon. “I could kill you, Sergei,” she told him. “Easily.”
“I’ve no doubt of that. And if it happens, well, I’ve lived a long life and I’ll trust you are skilled enough to make my end fast and easy.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Neither am I,” he answered. “So, is your name even Rhianna?”
The silence stretched long enough that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. There was only the creaking of the carriage and the rocking motion of the ruts of the Avi. She slid closer to the door, and he thought she would bolt out into the rain again to be gone forever. Then she let all the air out of her body in one great sigh. She looked away from him, lifting the flap of the door to stare at the rain.
“Rochelle is what my matarh named me,” she said.
Nico Morel
Fire slithered up the walls, licking at the faces of painted Moitidi and long-dead Archigi. Smoke hid the summit of the dome from view, coiling toward the openings of the great lantern at its very top. The chanting of the war-teni and the shrieking of their spells was a backdrop to the screaming of the injured and the calls of the Morellis as Nico half-ran, half-stumbled toward the main gates with Liana struggling behind him. “Absolute!” Ancel shouted, and he saw the man’s gaunt figure through the haze. “The gardai are charging toward the temple!”
“Tell the war-teni to respond,” Nico called. “They’ll break. They’ll run.” He said it with a confidence that he no longer felt, and he apologized to Cenzi for his doubt. I’m sorry, Cenzi. I believe. I do…
The ferocity of the initial attack had surprised him. Nothing he’d seen in the dreams that Cenzi had given him had prepared him for the reality of this battle. The war-teni had been unable to turn that initial attack-it had happened too quickly, and they had mistakenly thought that the fireballs were created from the Ilmodo when they were purely physicaclass="underline" black sand projectiles that exploded on contact. The blasts tore open the doors they’d so carefully barricaded: broken timbers and stone shot backward like terrible missiles into the main temple, hurling pews and raining dust and debris. At least two hands of his people had died in that first, horrible moment, and many more had been injured. The screams of the wounded still echoed in his head. He’d gone to them, comforting them as best he could, praying to Cenzi that He move through Nico’s hands and heal them-and for some, He had responded, though it left Nico as tired as if he’d used the Ilmodo himself against the tenets of the Divolonte, which forbade the use of Cenzi’s Gift for healing.
It had been Ancel who had taken command of the defense of the Old Temple as Nico and Liana tended to the wounded and prayed for the dead. The war-teni who had responded to Nico’s call now retaliated, sending out their war-spells toward the onrushing gardai. Their low chants filled the nave, and they gestured angrily as they sent volley after volley out into the storm. Nico could hear the screams and cries of the heretics outside; he could see the fires beginning to consume the buildings around the plaza.
The destruction was terrible to see. It made Nico want to weep. “This is what You wanted of me, Cenzi,” he prayed. “Let me continue to do Your will…” He hugged Liana. “I have to go,” he told her. “I have to help. Take care of those who are hurt. And be careful.”
“Nico…” He could see the fear in her soot-streaked face, and he embraced her quickly, kissing her. She clung to him and he let himself sink into her for just that moment, trying to sear it into his mind and keep it forever. He wondered at the impulse. Then he pushed away and kissed her again. “Be safe in Cenzi’s love, and mine,” he told her.
“I love you, Nico,” she answered. “Be careful.”
He smiled. “I have Cenzi’s protection,” he told her. “They can’t harm me..”
And with that, he left her.
He pushed his way through the wreckage, toward where Ancel was standing. He peered out from the ruins of the main doors toward the plaza. “Where are they?” he asked, but then he saw them. A line of gardai rushed out of the pelting rain, with swords raised, their mouths open as they shouted, all jumbled together so he couldn’t hear what they said, if there were words at all. Nico raised his own arms as the chanting of the war-teni intensified. He felt the coldness of the Ilmodo envelop him, wrapping all about him, and he gathered that power with the language of Cenzi and his gestures, and he threw it away from him. He didn’t know the spell he created; it came to him unbidden and complete-a gift as natural as breathing.
A wave pulsed outward from him, visible in the broken doors and pillars of the temple it sent flying outward, as it threw the rain backward as if storm-wind were blowing it, as it slammed hard into the gardai and sent them tumbling and crashing backward, the power ripping and tearing at them. When it passed, they were gone, the plaza before the doors was swept clean as the rain returned. “Absolute…” Ancel breathed. “I have never seen the like…” The war-teni had stopped their chanting as well, staring at him with awe on their faces.