Archigos,” Ana said, looking down at her matarh unmoving in her carry-chair. “That would have killed Vatarh, too, after all that had happened to us. So I. . I. . Just the smallest help. . Just enough that. .” She couldn’t finish, her voice choking. Her hands lifted. Fell back to her sides.
“You know the punishment for this sin? You know the Divolonte?”
Ana clasped her hands behind her back. She could barely speak.
“Yes, Archigos.” Cenzi has given me His own punishment to bear for what I did. If I’d let her die, then Vatarh might have married someone else, and he might have left me alone.
“Look at me. Quote the Divolonte for me; you’ve certainly heard it often enough in your studies.”
She forced herself to look down into his face: stern now, the wrinkles holding his ancient eyes drawn harshly in his skin. Her voice was little more than a whisper. “ ‘The sinner has abused Cenzi’s Gift and shown that she no longer trusts in Cenzi’s judgment; therefore-’ ” She stopped.
“Finish it,” the Archigos told her.
“ ‘Therefore, strike her hands from her body and her tongue from her mouth so that she may never use the Gift again.”’ Ana took a long breath.
“You put yourself above Cenzi?” the Archigos asked.
“No, Archigos,” Ana protested. “I truly don’t. But I watched her suffering, watched my vatarh suffer with her. . ”
“Does your vatarh know what you did? Does anyone?”
“No, Archigos. At least, I don’t think so. I was always alone with her when I tried. I made certain of that.”
The Archigos nodded. His hand was still on her matarh’s arm. “You didn’t do all you could for her, did you?”
Ana shook her head. “I was afraid. I knew Cenzi would be angry,and I was also afraid that everyone would notice-”
“Do it now,” the Archigos said, interrupting her. At her look of shock, his stern face relaxed. “The gift of healing is the rarest tendency, the most easily abused, and the most dangerous to the person using it, which is why it’s proscribed. It’s also why I made certain that the only other person here tonight was someone I could trust. Your hands and tongue are safe for now, Ana. Show me. Show me Cenzi’s Gift. Use it as you wanted to use it. Go on,” he said as she hesitated.
Ana took a long breath. She could feel the Archigos staring at her as she closed her eyes and brought her hands together. As she been taught, she reached deep into her inner self as she prayed to Cenzi to show her the way, and again the path to the Ilmodo opened up before her, sparking purple and red in her mind. Her hands were moving, not in the patterns that U’Teni cu’Dosteau had laboriously taught the acolytes but in her own unconscious manner, the way she knew they must go to shape this particular Gift. She could feel it now, a warmth between her still-moving hands, a glow that penetrated her eyelids and sent blood-tinted, pulsing streaks chasing themselves before her.
Before, she’d stopped at this point, just as the energy began to be felt, and applied it to her matarh. This time she allowed it to continue to flow around her, gathering it. She chanted: words she didn’t know, in a language that wasn’t hers. A calmness filled Ana as her hands stopped moving, as she cupped Cenzi’s Gift in her hands.
She opened her eyes. Her matarh was staring at the brilliance she held between them. “This is for you, Matarh,” Ana whispered. “Cenzi has sent it to you.” With that, she bent forward and placed her hands on her matarh’s shoulder. The brilliance darted out, striking her matarh and seeming to sink into her.
As Ana touched her matarh, she felt again the wild, black heat in the older woman: patches of it in her head, around her heart, in her lungs. It paled where the Ilmodo touched it, and this time, this time Ana let the power flow freely, let it cover the illness. She could feel it through her hands: as if Ana herself had the Fever, as if it could crawl out from her matarh into herself. She pushed it back, back into the maelstrom of the Ilmodo, and the heat rose so intensely that she thought her hands would be burned.
She lifted her hands away from her matarh, unable to hold the power any longer.
Abini jerked in her seat, a shuddering intake of breath as if she were a drowning person gasping for air. Her eyes went wide, and she gave a long, low wail that held no words at all. She sank back, her eyes closing. . and when they opened again, her pupils were clear, and she looked at the Archigos and O’Teni Kenne alongside him, then at Ana in her green robes.
“Ana? I feel as if I’ve been away for a long time. . I’m so tired, and I don’t remember. . Why are you dressed that way, child, like a teni?
And so much older. .”
Ana’s breath caught in a sob. She felt too weary to stand, and sank down alongside the carry-chair, gathering the woman in her arms. She looked at her own hands, marveling that they weren’t burned to the bone. “Matarh. .” The doors to the chapel pushed opened suddenly and her vatarh strode in, looking concerned. The servants peered around the opening. Ana glanced at him; her matarh turned in her carry-chair and laughed.
“Tomas!”
“Abi?” he said. He gaped, almost comically, caught in a half-stride.
“Abi, is that you I heard?”
“Indeed it was,” the Archigos answered him, moving between Tomas and Ana as Kenne lifted Ana to her feet, his hands supporting her as she swayed, exhausted. “Cenzi has moved here tonight, Vajiki, in honor of your daughter’s anointment. We have witnessed a special blessing.”
Ana heard the Archigos’ last words as if they were coming from a great distance. She thought she saw her vatarh rushing to them, but the shadows in the chapel were growing darker and the candlelight could not hold them back. The darkness whirled around her, a night-storm.
She pushed at it with her hands, but the blackness filled her mouth and her eyes and bore her away.
Movements
Marguerite ca’Ludovici
“Kraljica?”
“When I’m eighteen, I’ll be Kraljiki just like you became Kraljica,” Justi said, smiling at her as she held him. She laughed.
“Is that what you want, Justi? That means I only have twelve more years to live.” She pouted dramatically, and Justi’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. The courtiers gathered around them laughed.
“Oh, no, Matarh,” Justi said, the words tumbling out all in a rush. “I want you to live forever and ever!”
“Kraljica?”
The Throne Room smelled of oils. When Renard’s voice came,Marguerite found herself startled-she’d nearly fallen into a trance as the painter ci’Recroix first sketched her likeness on the canvas and began applying the underpainting. She was startled to see darkness outside the windows of the West Reception Chamber, and to find the room lit by a dozen candelabra and the eternal glow of the Sun Throne.
Several of the courtiers were standing well to the back of the room-banished there because ci’Recroix had said that he could not work with gawkers looking over his shoulder-and talking softly among themselves while servants bustled about. How long had she been sitting there? Had she ordered the candles lit? It seemed bare minutes ago that Third Call had sounded.
“Yes?” she asked Renard, blinking at him standing before her with hands on forehead-here, in public, always the correct image of an aide. Renard glanced over at the painter. Ci’Recroix straightened by the canvas set at the foot of Marguerite’s dais, stirring his brush in a jar of turpentine. Pale colors swirled around the fine sable hairs. The strange, dark box of a mechanism he’d used to sketch her initial likeness, the device he’d called a “miroire a’scene,” was draped in black cloth on the floor nearby.