“I fully expected such rebellious sentiment from you, Magnus. Your indignation but confirms that you are meant to stand at my side and lead our people into a new age.”
“Lead? At your side?” No beggar presented with a crown of rubies could be more astonished or more skeptical.
She rose and joined me at the map, smiled again, and with one finger gently closed my mouth. “Who else could I trust to see both the wisdom of the future I propose and its dangers? Your life will stretch long enough to ensure we move past our time of suffering and penitence and into the new order”—she touched my wrist, setting my skin afire where a streak of pale blue peeked out between the silkbinding and my sleeve—“longer than I first imagined, longer than my own. Your unique magic will grow in these stretched years, serving to keep you safe and strong enough to lead. And your moral stature will shield the remnants of the old races from oppression as they die away.”
I had expected to find Sila Diaglou evil incarnate, a leering devil who relished blood, or perhaps a drooling madwoman who saw macabre visions. What was beginning to disturb me most were these times that she seemed halfway reasonable. She shivered in the chilly fortress, relished her supper, had a grandmother who taught her songs. She worried about moral stature and oppression…which made her act of stabbing a spear through Boreas’s gut to pin his bleeding body to the earth all the more horrific. I would not allow myself to become one of her besotted sheep.
I wrenched my attention from her face before I was completely undone. Behind her, the hanging blanket that covered the door to the gallery swayed, as if just dropped back into place. Despite Jakome’s wards, someone had been standing there, listening to what she had just said. Or perhaps I was merely twitchy because Gildas’s danger loomed so large. The last place on earth I dared stand was on some pedestal Gildas desired for himself.
I stepped away from Sila. If she viewed the move as a retreat, so be it. “Madam, I claim no unique magic and no moral stature. Indeed I think you mistake me for someone entirely different. But even if I were as you say, and even if I espoused your goals—which seem so grand as to be impossible—how could a person of any ‘moral stature’ countenance your tactics? These rites of blood, these burnings, and spreading fear…” I dared not mention the Danae. Not until I understood more. “I don’t believe in your Gehoum.”
“Your feelings are but confirmation of my judgment,” she said without the least trace of rancor. “They do you credit. But you must abandon your childish views, these notions of benevolent mother goddesses, compassionate father gods, and nurturing Danae guardians. No one tends this world. The universe is not benevolent. Look upon the stars—equal in their clarity, undivided in their brilliance—and the harsh truth of the universe becomes clear. I name this truth Gehoum that my followers might grasp it. It prescribes simplicity and demands order, and we who see the rancorous division and greed our ancestors have wrought upon the world, the corruption, this hoarding of talent, wealth, and privilege, the cruelties of war and servitude, must accomplish its return to purity. To me falls the dread task of cleansing, to you the task of regeneration. Our destinies track side by side, but shall never…marry.” Her apologetic smile ravished my wits.
Of a sudden, wood rapped on stone from the gloom at the far end of the chamber. “Regeneration? Fool of a girl! Didst thou think I would not learn of this connivance?”
“Grandam! Why are you hiding here?” Sila grabbed an unlit torch from the sconce by the door and shoved it into the brazier. Once it flared, she raised it high.
The shadows fled to reveal a person sitting in the room’s farthest corner. Shapeless robes and wimple hid all but her face and the walking stick she rapped angrily against the floor.
“I seek to understand why my dearest girl has not brought me this perverse creature fallen into her grasp. As she does not see fit to confide in me, I must resort to devious means.”
The pale-complected woman who voiced this harsh complaint was the ancient I had seen with Sila in the hall the previous day.
“Have you learned no lesson I’ve taught you, girl? The long-lived are a wound, festering with pride and corruption. They serve no purpose and cannot be made clean. And these Aurellian magicians dare set themselves above the rest of us. The world must be purged of them both, along with Caedmon’s prideful get. This halfbreed is abomination, yet you think to breed him and make more?”
“I will not bend just because you and I disagree, Grandam.” Exhibiting her coldest self again, Sila set the blazing torch in its sconce and knelt beside the old woman to kiss her cheek. “You would chastise me did I betray my convictions for sentiment, would you not? Thus I chose not to distress you with my decision.”
“But what is this breeding plan but sentimental attachment to corruption?” No excess affection displayed itself between Sila and her elder as they argued the merits of the world’s ruin.
Momentarily abandoned, I shook off my fascination with Sila Diaglou’s family disagreements, and stooped down as if using my bundled hands to adjust my boot. A little more wriggling and my thumbs poked through the layered cords and touched the floor. I poured out magic, searching for the threads of life I had created the previous night. Gods, I was halfway to the prince and Stearc.
“Magnus?” Sila’s hand touched my shoulder.
I blinked and looked up. “My boot…”
The lady’s laugh bit flesh as fiercely as Malena’s blade. “Do you think I don’t know what you do when you touch the ground? Gildas has told me of your Aurellian bent—and of your fondness for the Karish boy. Truly I have no wish to do him harm.”
This gentle declaration appalled me. She did not see what she had done to Gerard and Jullian as harm. How could a flesh-and-blood woman feel nothing?
One by one my secrets had fallen open to her, but anger hardened my resolve that she would not learn the rest. “You are most gracious, madam,” I said, bowing my head and climbing to my feet with as much dignity as bound hands allowed. “This child…I’ll confess I am preoccupied. He saved my life. Such a debt must be repaid, else a man’s life never comes into balance. With my own fate so little in my control, my concern for his rules both head and heart.”
“You must tame such weakness that your mind may be devoted to the greater good, Magnus. So my grandmother taught me.” She beckoned me to follow. “Come, she asks to meet you.”
Dutifully I stood before the old woman—older than I had thought from a distance. Framed by veil and wimple, her brow was high and her cheeks taut over square-cut bones like Sila’s, her dry skin finely checkered, like linen washed too many times and shriveled in the sun. Yet her turquoise eyes were astonishingly unclouded by time. They could have looked out at me from the face of a maid of one-and-twenty, save for the layer upon layer of despite in them. No few decades could have accumulated the depth of malice written in this woman’s face.
“Tell me of your parentage, abomination,” she said, wasting no time on pleasantries.
More than Gildas, more even than Sila, this woman incited me to caution. Her intelligence and festered grievance were so closely twined, opening anything of myself to her felt akin to spreading the lips of a wound and asking for salt. “I believe your granddaughter thinks bloodlines important only in their purposeful unraveling.”
She leaned forward, her invisible hands propped on her stick, her body formless beneath the heavy robes that draped her head and spilled from her shoulders. “Call it an old woman’s curiosity.”
Years…malevolence…somehow the pressure of her scrutiny squeezed an answer out of me. “My father is Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria, a pureblood who languishes in drooling mania for his sins. I did not know my mother, and he did not tell me of her. I was raised as human, only learning of my dual heritage these past weeks.”