The Quin had an advantage over the rest of Kavet: they never expected help from the royal house, so they didn’t wait.
Other groups did, but help never came. The palace doors remained sealed. No lights shone through the windows.
When Dahlia mentioned the meetings to Jade, he asked permission to join and get help for the other Silmari; he brought Mikva along as a representative for the Tamari soon after.
Then the fire had come. The bitter, frigid winds had sucked all the moisture from the air. No one had ever taken blame for the spark that kindled one of the shattered ships the Osei had tossed onto the shore, and spread through most of the docks, burning an entire village of homes mostly inhabited by members of the Order of A’hknet as well as several storage warehouses.
Dahlia considered and discarded a dozen replies to her father before she said simply, “I was the only one capable.”
Two weeks after the storm—after Verte’s death, after the royal house had gone into seclusion—Helio had approached Dahlia.
The Order of Napthol has always relied on the royal house to guide our efforts and provide for our needs in exchange for our labor, he had explained, awkward with embarrassment. But the doors of the palace are still sealed. I’ve heard you’ve started organizing repairs and other work. Rather than operate separately and perhaps against each other, we thought it might be good to put our heads together.
Dahlia had convinced the others to let the sorcerers join their meetings, but Celadon had still been moderator then, and his first attempt to work with the sorcerers had devolved into useless bickering and such loud shouting that the owner of the Turquoise had thrown Maddy and Celadon—the two main culprits—out of the building.
Dahlia remembered her furious words as she confronted the two in the street: You’re like children! You need to trust each other, just a little, for this to work. She turned on Celadon then. He had used his moderator’s power all night to cut off every contribution or request one of the sorcerers tried to make. This isn’t just about the Quin anymore. You need to stop being so willfully blind to everyone else’s needs and run these meetings in a way that treats everyone fairly. And if you can’t do that, you need to step down.
Celadon’s hostility had died then, gone as abruptly as a blown candle flame. I have spent my life focusing on nothing but the needs of the Quin. It is my habit to take their part and advocate for them. I don’t know how to do anything else.
Dahlia had never imagined that, when they returned inside, Celadon and Maddy would come to their first agreement: They had both gestured for Dahlia to take Celadon’s place as moderator.
“Come to the next assembly meeting,” she urged her father. “See what it is we’re doing here.”
Maybe, once he realized she was doing good work—even from here inside the sorcerers’ home—he would be proud, and support her as he always had before.
Crystal dreams. That’s what Jade called silly hopes that distracted you from reality.
Jade was a topic she had avoided in her letters to her father. He would never approve of her close friendship with the Silmari noble, or the plethora of more exciting rumors that had spawned about it.
“I’m here to represent Eiderlee in the farming report,” he said. “I wanted to speak to you first, but I—”
“Indathrone?” Gobe interrupted.
“Yes?”
“One of the volunteer guards wants to speak with you,” Gobe said. “I told him you were in the middle of an important meeting, but he says it’s urgent.”
“I should get to the farming committee meeting before I’m late, anyway,” her father said, before Dahlia had to send him away. “Dahlia . . .” He hesitated. She braced for a last question or disappointed sigh. “This is the first time Eiderlee’s opinion has ever been sought, instead of our taxes being set by the royal house and collected without question or explanation. And I do like knowing the woman in charge of making decisions here knows a duck from an ox. I was never sure the Terre did. I just worry that, in a place like this, and a group like your assembly, a young lady from the country might be seen as an easily manipulated pawn. I know you’re not. But if they don’t know that yet, and they find it out later . . . Please be careful.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” Gobe spoke up cheerfully. “I’ve got a pig-sticker on me. I wouldn’t let anyone get to her.”
Her father’s warning and Gobe’s casual promise of loyalty made Dahlia’s throat tighten. She wasn’t able to respond before her father excused himself and the guard stepped forward—one of the palace guards, Dahlia noted, a woman named Tealyn, who had taken initiative to propose and organize an expanded police force when ill-willed groups had taken to causing trouble in areas where storm and fire had left large swaths of neighborhood damaged and abandoned.
“Thank you, Gobe,” Dahlia managed to say before the young man raced off again.
The youth shrugged. “You’ve been good to us,” he said simply. “I’ll let the assembly know you’ll be late.”
“Permission to report, Miss President?” Tealyn asked once Gobe was gone.
She winced at the title. How had that one made it into the rest of the population? Dahlia had thought of it as a joke when one of the Tamari had suggested a vote to make her official president of their assembly, in acknowledgement of the work she did. She had waved off the suggestion and returned them all to more important tasks.
“Permission granted,” she said.
Tealyn was pale, and a bit green, and her eyes were just a bit too wide. Dahlia wanted to ask her to sit, but had already learned that such a request made guards trained for work in the palace uncomfortable.
“What’s wrong?” Dahlia asked instead, anxiousness twisting through her when Tealyn didn’t immediately speak.
“There’s been a murder. I think it’s a murder.” Her voice shook.
“What?” The world spun around Dahlia, and she put a hand onto her desk to steady herself.
“I found . . . we were patrolling, and we found a body.”
“And you came to me?”
“The royal house has domain over that kind of crime,” Tealyn explained. “Over any crime involving magic. We’ve always been ordered to report any suspected sorcery to them and defer to their judgment.” Tealyn spoke rapidly, as if struggling to put sense into her words while her anguished eyes made it clear she had seen something horrible. “We need someone with power to investigate in order to know for sure, but any sorcerer at the Cobalt Hall is a suspect. We haven’t even been able to identify the body.”
“Calm down,” Dahlia said, conscious of the possibility of eavesdroppers right outside the door. “We’ll . . .” They would what? “What makes you think magic was involved?”
“The body was . . . I don’t know how any person could do damage like that,” Tealyn said. “I spoke to the medical examiner, and he couldn’t come up with a weapon that could do it. Some of the injuries looked like they had been made by an animal of some sort, but if so it was nothing native to Kavet. We thought . . . maybe the Osei . . .”
“Where is the body now?”
Tealyn was starting to calm down now that she had passed the news up the chain of command. Dahlia, meanwhile, felt like that chain had wrapped around her stomach.
“Down dockside,” Tealyn replied. “It was hidden by some crates of supplies until the workers shifted them this morning. We had to move it a little so the examiner could look, but we didn’t do anything else once we realized there was probably sorcery involved. I have several others keeping workers away so they can’t see the scene.”
“Good.” What now? “I don’t see any choice but to speak to one of the followers of the Napthol. Someone with magical power needs to look at the body if sorcery was indeed involved. Meanwhile, you’ll continue your investigation?”
Dahlia spoke tentatively, the last few words more a question than a statement, but the guard nodded solemnly, seeming comforted by her attempt to take charge.
One more tangle, she thought. The Osei. The ice. The fire. And now this. And they all kept looking to her to tell them what to do. Longingly, she remembered when she was just a teacher, when she had a clear answer for every question and no one ever came to her to help organize something more complicated than the harvest ball.
Chapter 25
Henna
Henna sat, back rigid, in her place at the high table. Maddy was at her left, then the Order of A’hknet woman, Gemma. On the other side of the table, Celadon was looking through his notes while Jade and Mikva, representatives for the Silmari and Tamari, discussed the supplying of ship rations. Two seats at the table were currently empty: the head where Dahlia would sit, and a chair next to Mikva that was always left open as a courtesy to Kegan, though he rarely chose to attend unless he had a particular interest in that day’s agenda. The Osei representative had been left behind in Kavet when Verte had been killed, seemingly abandoned by his masters; Sepia had taken him in, and when the Osei had sent new demands three weeks ago, Kegan had returned to their service and joined the assembly as their ambassador.
Between Kegan and Mikva, Henna sometimes found it difficult to look at that end of the table. Mikva returned the favor; since their first, heated meeting about three weeks before, Henna didn’t think the Tamari captain had ever willingly met her gaze.
This room, with its vaulted ceiling and purple-veined stone floor, was used infrequently these days, but she still associated it with joy and light. Back when the Cobalt Hall was the royal seat of the country, there had probably been lavish balls in the great hall, but the Order of Napthol primarily used it for the celebrations of welcome when newcomers entered their midst, and ceremonies of initiation when novices declared themselves full members of their Order.
The high table, set on a raised platform and reserved for the guest of honor’s closest friends and family, had never seemed uncomfortable before. But now, Henna shifted, trying to find a comfortable position without making her pain obvious.
“If you need to miss this meeting—”
Henna shook her head, trying to cut off Maddy’s sympathetic words before the others at the table heard them.
Too late. Celadon asked, “Are you all right?”
His tone was more wary than solicitous, as if he worried she might have some disease he could catch.
“Just a little under the weather,” she answered. “I slept poorly. I’ll be fine,” she added firmly to Maddy.
Maddy had wrapped the bandages. She knew Henna wasn’t “fine.” She also knew how deeply Henna regretted the last time she had avoided a political event due to her personal discomfort, even if her presence probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome of events.
Probably.
They all looked up as Gobe mounted the platform to the table. He announced, “President Indathrone is delayed by important business. She’s gone to check something con-fi-dential out.”
He drew out the last word, as if it were a fancy term he was excited to have an excuse to use.
At first Henna had wondered what possessed Dahlia to take the semi-literate, orphaned scamp on as her personal secretary, but she had to concede these days that it had been a masterful stroke. In doing so, Dahlia had captured the hearts and therefore loyalty of the usually fickle members of the Order of A’hknet. When she needed critical news relayed, she turned not to the severe Quin preacher or the lofty Silmari aristocrat—both of whom were rumored to be her lovers—but to an Order of A’hknet boy. She trusted him, when so much of the world distrusted and dismissed anyone who wore A’hknet’s sigil.
“President Indathrone?” Jade chuckled. “You know she hates that title.”
Gobe gave a well-practiced, to-the-Abyss-with-it smile. “She likes it,” he insisted. “She just thinks she shouldn’t, because she thinks it makes her disloyal to the royal house.”
“I heard there was a farmer who went to confer with her before the agriculture meeting,” Celadon said. “Is there anything we should know about that?”
Gobe shrugged. Henna recognized the overly casual posture and predicted he was about to bait Celadon, just before he said, “That was a personal meeting. They seemed very . . . friendly.” As if Celadon’s expression hadn’t gained new lines, Gobe continued. “He’s a well-regarded, influential man from her hometown. But the conversation was private.”
“Of course,” Celadon said, flatly.
“Oh, for Numen’s sake, it was her father.” Maddy’s voice was sharpened, Henna knew, by her own concealed pain. “I met him when he came in. Is there anything else we should discuss while we’re here, or should we delay this session until Dahlia returns?”
Predictably, a half-dozen members of the assembly surrounding the high table stepped forward then to bring up their own grievances and ask to have them added to the agenda. Celadon jotted them all down while Gobe listened to each question and concern with a keen expression that told Henna he was memorizing every word.
Finally, she was able to flee.
The public had been given permission to use the grand hall, a few of the smaller ground floor conference rooms and offices, and the front foyer, but they were still forbidden from the personal areas of the Cobalt Hall. Therefore, Henna found only others of her own kind in the kitchen.
“Would it be irresponsible to take a nap?” Maddy asked, joining her a few minutes later. She could have been speaking Henna’s thoughts aloud.
Feigning strength when every movement tugged on hidden cuts and burns was exhausting, physically and mentally. Each twinge of pulled, damaged flesh down her back and legs reminded Henna of recovering from the debilitating lashing she had received after her first, failed attempt to escape from the Osei.
Had she thought those wounds, those scars, were bad?
Then there were the nightmares. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept soundly—before Festival, surely.
“Though I need to eat something first,” Maddy continued, “and see how Clay is doing.”
The rambunctious toddler spent most assembly days with Helio, Dove, or Lyssia. Maddy had tried leaving him with a mundane babysitter, one of the palace servants who had been looking for work he could do, but they had quickly discovered that Clay had just enough power to make life interesting for someone without sorcery.
Staring without interest at the loaves of fresh, nutty bread waiting on the counter, Maddy pulled off the elbow-high gloves she had taken to wearing. Doing so revealed a series of marks up her right forearm, dark patches left behind by frostbite. There were more down her back by her left shoulder; Henna had helped her salve and bandage them a fortnight ago.
“Any better?” Henna asked.
“They still ache a little, but not so bad,” Maddy replied. “Yours?”
Henna winced at the question.
“Let me see.”
Henna allowed Maddy to lift the back of her shirt, to examine the blistered burns running up and down her spine and across her shoulder blades, on top of the scars and tattoo that had long ago marked that skin. In addition to those, there was a row of thin but long cuts arranged like claw marks on the right side of her rib cage. Like Maddy’s, the wounds had inexplicably appeared during the night.
“I’ll help you salve them,” Maddy said. “Yours seem to be some of the worst.”
Henna wasn’t sure that was true. While her injuries extended over more of her body than anyone else’s, Lyssia had lost the vision in one eye to frostbite, and Helio, whose cold magic was as powerful as Maddy’s, had started walking with a pronounced limp.
“Henna?” Another of their ilk, a young man who Henna knew had burns all down his left side but thankfully no serious claw marks, poked his head in the door. “Indathrone wants to speak to you.”
Henna sighed and tucked her shirt back into place. Maddy had a wonderful salve that took most of the pain away for hours, but she would have to wait until later to use it.
At least Dahlia was doing a good job, so far. Henna had cons
idered taking charge when Madder and Celadon had nearly come to blows in the Turquoise. She thought she could have made the Silmari and Tamari and the followers of A’hknet respect her leadership. The Quin would have been tricky to work with, but she could have managed Celadon as long as he continued to attempt to be reasonable.
But she had stepped back, and made a point in front of the other followers of the Napthol to look to Dahlia Indathrone. Because she remembered a vision, the first time she had seen the girl.
You have no power in the traditional sense, the sense of magic, but you have a strong destiny . . . You aren’t meant for the Order, but you will walk its halls.
After Verte had died, Henna had railed against her power and its useless prophecy. Why had it shown her the blood if she couldn’t prevent it? She had demanded answers from Helio, from Dove, from anyone who could hear spirits or had any hint of prophecy within them, but the dead held their silence and visions remained blank.
Only when Henna had seen Dahlia’s rise as a leader had she understood: Her power hadn’t shown her a way to save Verte, but the path to save Kavet. If Dahlia hadn’t been with Verte that day, she wouldn’t have been in a position to bridge the gap between the Quin and the Order of Napthol, or any of the other groups that had joined the fledgling government.
Henna found Dahlia in her office, her face grave and her body vibrating with tension.
“What’s wrong?”
“I—” Dahlia had to visibly gather herself. “We need your assistance, in a confidential manner.”
“You have it, of course.”
“There’s been a murder.” The words, spoken so softly and calmly, seemed even more crude coming from this young woman. “The guards and a medical examiner believe magic was involved, so I need someone versed in sorcery who can inspect the scene.”
Murder.
Henna had been called by the royal house to help on scores of projects, so it hadn’t seemed strange to join the governing council. This was another matter, a task she wanted to call someone else’s responsibility.