The Amber Legacy (39 page)

‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ Meg apologised.

‘You have every reason to be suspicious,’ Sunset said. ‘I’m surprised you even trust me after what happened.’

‘I never even considered that you would have—I don’t know.’ Meg stumbled on her answer and fell silent.

Queen Sunset issued instructions to Ruby and Wattle, and when the young servants had withdrawn from the bedroom she sat on the bed, and pulled Meg down beside her. Whisper wandered up the green quilted bedspread and nestled at the base of the pillows, allowing the Queen to stroke her back as she settled. ‘She’s been with you all this time?’ Sunset asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Remarkable animal.’ Sunset reached up and stroked Meg’s mane of red hair. ‘It’s grown so quickly,’ she said.

‘It always does,’ Meg replied absentmindedly, tiredness seeping through her limbs.

Sunset’s hand returned to Meg’s hand and she rubbed it gently. ‘What happened?’

Meg related everything carefully, from the hijacking of the wagon, through to the cave beneath the seaside cottage and separation from Jewel and Jon, to the ship voyage and her imprisonment on the island, the involvement of Seer Truth and Seer Light and Follower Servant, the hunt on the island and Sunfire, her escape through the portal, the strange world of grey dust, the imprisoned man on the black dragon sculpture and her final return to her chamber. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she shook as she recalled the images of her loss, her fear, her loneliness, her terror. When she finished, she sank into Sunset’s arms and sobbed, exhausted.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Sunset crooned, stroking Meg’s hair. ‘You’ll be all right.’

‘But I’m not safe here,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Follower—’

‘Follower will stand trial for his treason,’ Sunset said, bitterly. ‘He can join my son in the Royal Gaol. I understand now how and why Future knew so much about my plans.’ She paused and shuddered. ‘And I suspected it all along, but I couldn’t face the truth.’

Meg sat up, wiping her cheeks. ‘You knew?’

‘About Follower?’ Sunset asked. ‘There were clues—coincidences. I didn’t want to find out.’

‘Why not?’

Sunset flicked aside her hair, and looked away. ‘Follower is—was—my consort.’ She turned back to Meg and said, ‘Surprised?’ but before Meg could speak, Sunset went on. ‘I was celibate for a long time after my husband’s death—for my sons and for the sake of the kingdom. Better, I thought, to be a bride to Jarudha than be seen to leap from bed to bed or to ally myself with another Tithe Lord. There was even speculation that I would marry a neighbouring king, but if you saw them you’d realise that was a prospect in which I had no interest. Celibacy seemed the better option. But, you know, that’s not me. I like sex. I like sex a lot. My
husband was a good lover, and the prospect of never having a man’s touch again terrified me. So I forswore my vow and looked for another way. And it was obvious and easy. When you’re the Queen you get special privileges. You can take quiet lovers and no one notices. When Follower became my Intermediary, I chose him for two reasons. He was good at both of them. And discreet. I didn’t expect him to align with my errant sons when the Seers poisoned their view of the world. In fact, I convinced myself that whatever Follower told me was the truth, even when the truth seemed to be the opposite. I didn’t want to entertain any possibility that he would choose my sons over me, the woman he claimed he loved.’ Sunset rose from the bed. ‘I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. I’ve neglected your safety with my blindness.’ She headed for the door, pausing to say, ‘Get some rest. I have business to finish. Tomorrow morning I’ll call for you. I need your help and I need it without question.’ She left the chamber, the door locked in her wake by an Elite Guard.

T
he Queen was in the palace War Room, surrounded by maps and shelves of books. Dull daylight filtered through the tall windows. ‘Future has escaped,’ she said.

Meg saw the despair in Sunset’s eyes. ‘When?’

‘Last night. Follower led a band of Elite Guards and released him from the prison. The most recent report is that they’ve taken a ship to the north.’

‘What does this mean?’

‘For now?’ Sunset shrugged. ‘Nothing. On the greater scale of matters, they’re an irritation. I’ll have spies watch them to see what they plan. There’s nothing else I can do.’

‘Is this why you wanted to see me?’

Sunset studied Meg, shook her head, and said, ‘No. My family issues are not your problem. I told you things last night that I want you to forget.’ She shifted to a large table. ‘I need your help on something much more immediate and dangerous.’

‘What?’

‘The war with Beranix.’

Meg immediately thought of Leader Westridge. Was he safe? ‘How can I help?’

The Queen beckoned Meg to join her at the table where a map of the kingdom was spread, and ran her fingers along an imaginary line. ‘The war is going badly. Beranix’s army has pushed right up to this point, less than three days south of Port of Joy. He’s employed a tribal shaman to aid his soldiers with their magic. Normally, the Seers would counteract them, but the Seers are refusing to help me.’

‘Can’t you order them to help?’

Sunset laughed. ‘They don’t answer to me. They only answer to Jarudha, and, according to Diamond, Jarudha has forbidden them to help in wartime.’

‘But Future had Seers supporting him at the Battle of The Whispering Forest?’

‘Rebels,’ Sunset reminded her. ‘They were breaking all the laws.’

‘Even against Jarudha?’ Meg queried.

‘Semantics. They won’t help now.’

‘But what can I do?’

‘I need your magic. I need you to stop Beranix’s army.’

Meg’s eyes widened. ‘How? I don’t have that sort of power.’

‘Yes, you do, Amber. I know why Truth and Light and the others are frightened of you. They know that you have magical power of the kind they can only dream of.’ Sunset straightened up and looked at a map on the wall. ‘When you went missing, I sent out search parties to find you, and Jon and Jewel. I asked Diamond to help. At first, he pretended to be concerned for your safety and he even pretended to help, but when it became obvious that a Seer had kidnapped you his concern became genuine. Then Light disappeared. That’s when Diamond finally admitted to me why he had refused to train you and why someone was determined to have you killed.’ She turned to face Meg.
‘The Seers have been searching for a Conduit for many generations. When they realised that you carried one, they had to get it from you, somehow.’

‘Why didn’t they try when I was in the temple as an acolyte?’

‘They didn’t know then. You kept it hidden and they thought that you were just a political ploy on my part to make them accept a woman among their ranks. But when you displayed more aptitude than any normal acolyte Light suspected there was more to you. Remember how he tried to take your necklet? That’s why Vale chose to teach you after the others threw you out—because he knew you had the Conduit. He told me that he’d confessed his reasons to you, so I know that you know what I’m talking about. And Vale made the final connection when you learned languages so quickly. In the end, against his better judgement it seems, he told the others what he’d learned. Remember the meeting I called, with the Seers and my advisers?’

‘Yes.’

‘After you had gone, the argument that followed in the room was—brutal is the only word I can think of to describe it. The Seers wanted you executed, at least locked away forever. They pronounced you the greatest threat to the Jarudhan faith ever to rise in the kingdom, and no amount of argument or concession on my part was going to sway them. That’s why I sent you away to safety. It was to buy time for me to make it possible for you to remain in Port of Joy. They were terrified of the Conduit.’

‘Truth tried to steal the necklet when he kidnapped me,’ Meg told her.

‘Where is it now?’

‘Here,’ she replied, placing her hand over her breast.

‘You’ll need to keep it safe,’ Sunset warned. ‘The Seers covet it. They’ll do anything to get their hands on
it.’ Meg smiled and unbuttoned her light blue tunic, exposing the amber discolouration. ‘What’s that?’ the Queen asked.

‘The crystal. I’m the Conduit now.’

‘How?’

‘A spell.’

Sunset’s mouth opened, but she hesitated before saying, ‘This complicates matters for Truth and his friends. And for you.’ She took Meg’s hands in her own. ‘When I had you brought to Port of Joy, I thought I was just rewarding someone with unusual ability and extraordinary luck—a rural hero. A little ceremony, a piece of land, and then you’d go back to your village and we’d forget you. But you’ve proven to be much, much more than I—or anyone—expected. I apologise for using you as a key into the Seers’ enclave. I was pursuing my own personal agenda. But now I’m pleading on behalf of all the people within my kingdom. I need your abilities to help me save the city. If Beranix’s men take Port of Joy, they’ll overrun the entire Western Shess region and destabilise the political balances that currently exist for the good of all. Even your home won’t be safe from this menace. Will you do this? For our people?’

Meg didn’t know how to answer. ‘I—I need some time,’ she stammered.

Sunset frowned. ‘I don’t have time to give you.’ She stared at Meg, and shook her head. ‘I’ll send word to the Marchlords to hold their ground against Beranix’s army, but I can’t promise anything. At best, you might only have the three days it will take Beranix’s army to get here if we can’t stop them.’

‘I need a day,’ Meg said. ‘Truth and Light got rid of the foreign magic books from your library.’

‘I know. Follower helped them do that.’

‘But I’m hoping to find some other texts still in the collection that have spells I can use. I don’t know what I’ll find.’

‘Do what you can,’ Sunset urged. ‘I’ll send word to Warmaster Waters to hold Beranix’s advance. I’ll get you at least a day.’

‘I’m not promising anything.’

Sunset squeezed Meg’s hands and looked her in the eyes. ‘I need you.’

Alone in her chamber, Ruby and Wattle dismissed to wash clothes and prepare her meal, Meg stared out the window beyond the palace walls to the red and grey city roofs, thinking of what to do. Rain was drifting away to the south-east, the grey clouds hanging low on the horizon. If she could create a portal to the island she would be able to retrieve the books from there. She had no idea of the island’s direction, but that wasn’t essential. She’d merely recalled the details of her palace chamber to return to it from the strange place to which she’d accidentally travelled through her first portal, so if she could remember the specificities of her refuge on the island she would be able to link the portal to it.

She needed a frame. The door was an obvious choice, but she’d risk someone accidentally entering at the point of portal creation and they would be sent to the island—or worse. Then she looked at the posts on her bed. Perfect. She checked where Whisper was curled. If she was quick, she only needed to step through, choose the appropriate texts, and return. Whisper could sleep. She focussed on the posters, created a clear image of her island hideaway, and uttered the Ranu words. With a quick glance at the sleeping rat, she passed through the blue haze.

Even though she was confident that she had connected successfully, she sighed with relief when she
saw that she was on the island, surrounded by the familiar scrubby vegetation and wind-smoothed rocks outside her shelter. And then she stared in horror. Her shelter had been torched. In the dirt before it was a broad wind-blown patch of grey and white ashes and slivers of blackened wood, remnants of the crates and boughs she used to shore up her shelter and store the books. Truth had burned everything—every single book.

After she had sifted through the ashes in the vain hope of finding something to salvage, a chapter, even a page, she climbed the hill and gazed across the contours of the island, the salty wind lashing at her hair and face and making her eyes water. Seagulls glided on the wind, buffeted by its moodiness, and the mallee bushes rustled and breathed as it flowed over and through them. Truth was a ruthless enemy—a man without a heart, she decided. Remembering her escape, she cupped her hands to her mouth and began calling: ‘Sunfire!’ She called and called, until her throat ached, and waited, her hopes wrestling with the whistling vagabond wind—but the dingo didn’t come. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, and her tears came from within.

Later, weighed down by her mood but decided on her course, she went to the twin trees she used for her first portal construction, created another with the palace in mind, and left the island.

Even with the foreign texts removed, the Royal library collection was still extensive and laborious to search. Meg waded through tomes, discarding historical and biographical accounts, pushing aside fiction and poetry anthologies, searching for texts that contained instructions for casting spells. She settled on three—
The Art of Arcane War
, by an Ashuak priest named Tusev;
Weapons of the Art
, by an obscure Shessian
shaman named Bend Riverfork, and a thin Andrakian volume, labelled
Summoning
, that Follower and his helpers must have missed because it was incorrectly shelved in a Jarudhan religious section. Meg only discovered it by luck when she considered that the Jarudhan Seers might have useful wartime spells, given the Rebel Seers’ attacks that she’d witnessed. Selections made, she retreated to the guarded safety of her chamber, dismissed the servants, climbed onto her bed beside Whisper and read.

Tusev’s work focussed mainly on how to call dragons and command them, and was useless since dragons belonged to folklore. She dismissed the book as fiction. The Andrakian work was a compilation from five different contributors—disorganised, almost chaotic, as if someone other than the original authors had collected the spells and bound them together. All five entries were detailed descriptions of how to summon creatures and demons from different places and direct them against enemies. One bore a striking resemblance to Tusev’s Ashuak text—as if it had been the original template for the Ashuak priest’s guide for summoning a dragon. The second spell described how to shape the weather in a local area, turning it into a storm. The third was a spell for conjuring extreme fireballs, brutal variations of the kind that she’d witnessed the Seers using. The fourth spell was more passive in that it described how to cast an aura of strength and protection over the defending army. The final chapter stunned her. The last contributor, A Ahmud Ki, detailed a spell that opened a portal to release what he called in his language ‘The Riders of Death’, two horsemen who were invulnerable to mortal weapons, with awesome powers to wreak destruction on the enemy. The more she read of the fifth entry, the more she felt as if A Ahmud Ki was writing about summoning the Demon
Horsemen of her own mythology. What made her stomach churn was that his description matched perfectly the two warriors she had seen in the underground portal chamber. She had seen the Demon Horsemen!

Meg shut the book and lay back, staring at the bed canopy. Where had her portal taken her? What had she really seen? And her skin crawled with fear. Had she closed the portal in her haste to escape? She had no memory of it—only the stinging pain of the sword cutting into her back. She’d closed the others as she passed through them—but had she closed that one? She sat up and stared at the centre of her chamber, which she had targeted. If she had left it open, they would have appeared here. But they hadn’t followed her through so she must have closed it. There was so much she didn’t understand about portal magic. She didn’t even understand why she had arrived in the strange grey desert the first time. She never even knew the place existed. And then she shivered. There was a dream she remembered. She’d seen that place before—in her dream. And there’d been that hollow, bodiless laughter.

Unsettled, she tried to change her thoughts by opening the last book. The shaman author outlined conjuration spells for creating mist, rain and illusions to confuse the enemy, and he also wrote about lesser spells—fire arrows, small fireballs—useful for a shaman when fighting a small group or an individual. Nothing in the book suggested to her that they were capable of generating spells that could lead to the defeat of an entire army, although several skilfully executed shamanistic spells would certainly throw an enemy into fear and disarray.

Dissatisfied, she returned to the library and searched for alternatives. By sunset she had found nothing of greater power than the spells in the Andrakian volume.
Back in her bedroom, she rehearsed the three spells that she felt would be useful. There were no dragons to call, and the Demon Horsemen were not an option. She was interrupted midway through unravelling the fabric of the protection spell by rapid knocking. She rose from her sitting position in the centre of the room and crossed to the door. ‘Who is it?’

‘Me,’ a woman’s voice replied. ‘I’m alone.’ Meg opened the door and the Queen entered. She urged Meg to close the door, and said, ‘Beranix’s army has crossed the Upper Border River.’

‘I thought your army was holding him.’

‘Beranix sent a force further inland and it’s avoided my defences by coming from the east. Warmaster Waters sent two Marches to meet them. As soon as the Marches left, Beranix’s army attacked my main force and drove them back from the river and crossed over. The shaman magic is panicking my soldiers, Amber. I need you to stop that with a show of our own. Did you find anything in the books?’

‘Something,’ she replied.

‘When will you be ready to go?’

‘If I practise tonight, perhaps tomorrow.’

‘Practise,’ Sunset insisted. ‘I’ll have a Group of my Elite Guards ready to escort you tomorrow morning. I will entrust Leader Strongarm with your safety.’ Sunset embraced Meg. ‘I prayed to Jarudha that someone like you would come in my time. Now you have come.’ She kissed her and stepped back. ‘I’ll leave you to practise, and I’ll see that no one disturbs you. I’ll send word to Warmaster Waters that when you’ve dealt with the eastern attack you’ll join him. Be strong, Lady Amber. You hold our destiny in your hands.’ To Meg’s astonishment, Sunset bowed before she withdrew.