“I was looking for advantage,” I said. “If they had found out I could not read, they would have thrown me out of Gillarine. I had no intention of starving.” As I said this, it came to me that this crass rendering was naught but truth. Yet even if I had dared explain to Sila Diaglou how my motives had changed, she would not have understood. Faith was not a word she had use for.
“So what of the monk you saved from my hangman—the chancellor Victor—what happened to him?”
“Osriel never permitted me to see him. He claimed that his house mage had put Brother Victor into a healing sleep to recover from his wounds. I didn’t particularly care. Save for Jullian, the Tormentor can take the whole lot of the cursed cabal—including your pet monk, Gildas. They thought to use me, just like every other person in my life has sought to use me, and when they had squeezed the use from me, they threw me to the dogs. The boy was the only one of the lot who tried to teach me how to read their fine books.”
“Loyalty is a great virtue and should be rewarded.” She stood and motioned me toward the door. I prayed I had not given her anything of value, nor condemned myself with some contradiction of Stearc’s testimony.
“Jakome!” The guard came running. “Return Magnus to his chamber and unbind his hands. Then inform Gildas that, at his convenience, he may release the boy to our guest’s protection.”
She held my wrists and smiled, sending spiders’ feet creeping up my back. “Sleep well, and do not think to deny Malena again. She is strong and faithful, and it is my will that she catch your seed.”
Chapter 24
Leaving Sila’s chamber felt like crawling out of a grave. Jakome led me to the tower stair, only to have Sila call him back to her door for one more message—a summons for Gildas to join her for the evening meal.
As I awaited my jailer’s return, the downward stair gaped dark in front of me. I wished an apology to those who languished below. One more day, Lord Prince, I said. One more day, Stearc. Let me get Jullian and then I’ll find a way down to you. More than any bloodline, book, or tool, this world needed something of innocence preserved.
“Come, Grandam. I will take you back to your room.” As Jakome sauntered back toward me, Sila led her grandmother down the gallery. The old woman moved in a halting, rolling gait, leaning heavily on Sila’s arm and a walking stick. Surely some cruelty had blighted her life to nurture such malevolence.
Of a sudden, the world held its breath…as bits and pieces of our strange interview peppered my thoughts like wind-driven sand. “What’s wrong with the old woman?” I whispered, not expecting an answer.
“Move along or I’ll see you walk the same as she,” said Jakome, snarling and shoving me roughly toward the stair. “Even crippled, you can still service a quenyt.”
I balked, staring at the two receding backs. “Sila’s grandam…her legs are crippled…or is it her knees?”
“What of it?” he said. “Now get on with you.”
The old one, they called her, the venomous old woman who knew the lore of Danae. A woman bitter at humankind and the Danae and Caedmon’s line alike, whose shapeless garments hid hands and feet, arms and crippled knees…and what else?
“What do you name the old woman?” I said, as I stumbled numbly up the stairs and through the door of my tower chamber.
“She gives no one her name,” said my jailer, unbinding my hands. “She says we’re to call her the Scourge.”
Surely breaking a girl’s knees at fourteen would sow hatred enough for a lifetime of bitter harvesting—especially in a girl whose half-Danae father had broken the Canon and whose human mother had murdered her kin. Especially in a child who had been taunted and shunned and used to trick her own mother to her death. Ronila.
The one person who had ever been kind to her—a human man vowed to chastity—had tormented himself with guilt after lying with her. And even Picus had turned away from her, choosing to hold to his monk’s vows and stay with his young prince while Ronila fled to the human world, bringing with her knowledge of the Scourge—the Danae vulnerability to tormented death.
Wind howled through the window bars. I had neither eaten nor drunk since the previous night, and the hunger and chill crept into my bones. I wasn’t sure whether I needed to crawl under the quilts or take off my clothes.
Jakome slammed the door and shot the bolts. I sank to my bed and imagined what might have gone through Ronila’s mind when Eodward and Picus had returned to Navronne. An old woman by then, she would have seen Picus still in his prime, reflecting his prince’s glory. Five short years after their return, Picus had vanished—after Ronila had shown him evidence that the offspring of Danae–human mating had no souls, a grandchild, perhaps, nurtured and tutored in the ways of hate, a granddaughter who saw no crime in slaughter, who believed that art and beauty, learning and faith were corruption and that the earth must be wiped clean of gods and Danae, monks and kings—everything Picus valued. Even in his despair, he could not have imagined what she would grow up to be.
Now I knew what had nagged at my head when Picus recounted Ronila’s accusations. The halfbreed girl’s condemnation had reflected the words of the Harrower blood rite—sanguiera, orongia, vazte. Bleed, suffer, die. Ronila, the Scourge. Sila Diaglou, a mixed-blood Dané.
No wonder Sila used a wordless map. She could read words no better than I could. No gards marked her hands—not even the pale silver of gards too long hidden. So she had not passed even the first remasti. My experience was so different—being half-Aurellian sorcerer already—I had no idea what power Sila might have. Was it her Danae blood that enabled her to mesmerize a crowd, to make women weep when they saw her scarred cheeks, to make men believe that they should tear down their cities and burn their fields? She had said her grandmother had taught her to control her heart and her body, so she must be unmatched in discipline…but then, the world knew that already. And she would not be easy to kill. Gods, the others…the cabal…Osriel…needed to know this great secret.
I crouched beside the door and ran my fingers over the lock. The warded iron was no more yielding of its secrets than earlier. Nonetheless, I pulled one of the pebblelike armaments game pieces from the clothes chest, examined it carefully, and used its likeness along with my experience and estimates of this type of lock to lay the rough groundwork for a spell.
Once I had done what I could—without a better idea of the lock or magic to feed the spell, that was not so much—I shed my outer layers of pourpoint and boots, hiked up my shirtsleeves and unlaced the neck, and sat against the wall under the middle window. As sheltered from the wind as I could manage, I hoped the bit of exposure might strengthen my gards without giving me frostbite. I practiced closure and control, listening only for footsteps on the stair. Ready.
Next time the door latches rattled, I was able to visualize the snap of the bronze levers and the draw of the lock pins. By the time the door opened to Gildas, I had refined my internal image of the lock.
“Whoa, a dismal, blustery afternoon,” he said, standing in the doorway and holding a small lamp. “Is the coming storm too stout even for a halfbreed Dané?”
“Where is Jullian?” I said, without moving. “The priestess gave her permission for him to stay here.”
“Jakome brings him. I wanted to make a few things clear before his arrival.”
Gildas wrenched a balky handle on the outside of the door and shut the door firmly behind him. The pins and levers moved—slight differences this time with the latch already set. I refined the lock’s image yet again.
Suppressing a smile, I opened my palms in invitation. My gards wreathed my fingers in sapphire light.
He used his small lamp to light the larger one on my table. Then he squatted beside me and reached for my right arm, hesitating only at the last moment. “May I?”