The Last Page (73 page)

He would save war plans for another night, after he had talked to Sigmund one more time and verified again that certain technical aspects were not beyond the realm of possibility.

Even so, things were moving fast. They had to move fast. Without trade, Isca would not survive the winter and winter was, according to the austromancers, barely a month away.

After Alani had finished a second pipe and the two of them had said good night, Caliph went upstairs. He pulled off his boots and tossed them under the bed. Sena did not stir. He watched her breathe for several minutes—wanting her.

“Quit staring at me,” she mumbled without opening her eyes.

He wondered how many hearts lay like wreckage in her wake, wondered again if his might become one of them. Caliph cracked a window and took time to breathe. He inhaled the smell of rain as the sky grumbled.

“Mmmm—” Her purr came from behind. “I like it cold.”

He turned. The candles poured gold across her skin and hair. The blue stripe looked purple in the dark.

Caliph undressed quietly and crawled into bed. Despite his desire he could not bring himself to brave the rejection he felt waiting, lurking like a quiet beast beneath the sheets.

Sena listened to him. Eyes so intent she could hear them staring at her. She waited for him to adjust his body, make some casual, seemingly coincidental touch that would serve as the starting point.

When he did nothing, she became bored and finally drifted off to sleep.

The following day, green leaves rained sporadically, petulant that they, in their supple beauty, should be ripped from their laughing parties on the limbs and tossed out like rowdy guests. They tumbled from branches, destined to be changed hideously against the ground. With irregular weather patterns along the cooling sea, the wheat fields swirled with fog.

Sena’s boots stuttered through patches of blue shadow and striped sunlight. Her soles scraped over half-buried stones.

She bent down and examined one, but passed it over. With the disconcertingly early fall, she had decided to step up her timetable. She couldn’t stand the duality of her relationship with Caliph any longer.

The Healean Mountains had received a dusting of white, as though some prankster with all the Duchy’s powdered sugar at his disposal had orchestrated a grand hoax in the middle of the night. A sudden crispness inveigled the air.

Sena found the shift in temperature abrupt. With it, everything she had prepared for seemed to have suddenly crept up on her. The nearness to her goal, the realization of the cruelty she was about to effect brought a lump to her throat.

Caliph had already dealt with so much disloyalty. If only she could tell him what she planned to do! But the recipe was precise:
taken by theft,
it read.

Her time at Isca Castle was coming to an end.

I will go south,
she thought,
before winter seals the mountains shut.

She stopped, turned and shielded her eyes from the sun. A knee-high wall fenced in the square of untilled ground through which she had been walking. Her pack held two roundish rocks. She stooped to heft a third. She tossed it, caught it, spinning it in air, revealing its qualities.

She put it in her pack with the others and started back. As she picked her way over the weedy ground, she noticed a bent crone watching her.

Sena’s lips struggled frantically. Her hand fumbled for her sickle knife. Then she realized with internalized embarrassment that it was not Giganalee that had stopped along the road. Paranoia tongued her brain.

Heart still pounding, Sena flushed under the grandmother’s scrutiny. She was a caricature, old and short in a black shawl, peering and leaning on a stick of wood. Her crumpled mouth whispered syllables in Hinter to the two wide-eyed children half-hidden in her skirts. A boy and a girl stared at Sena with anesthetized alarm.

Sena stared back, warily. She pulled the strap of her pack tight against her shoulder and fingered her curls.

The old woman continued to whisper.

Sena headed for the road, departing the cemetery with a backward glance. She felt the setting sun burn orange around the contours of her face and suffuse her eyes with fire. Though unintentional, the effect seemed to startle her spectators, who trudged quickly on their way.

This was the country that hunted witches, cut off their legs and left their torsos to freeze in Ghoul Court.

Despite her immunity, or rather because of it, stories of the High King’s witch had inundated the countryside. Litho-slides of her face filled the papers. People recognized her; they did not like her poking around in their cemeteries.

Sena left the fog in the valley and ascended the tree-sheltered lane that led to Nathaniel’s house. By the time she reached her destination, both shoulders were raw and her back sore from the bulging rocks.

It was late. Light filled the sky like the albescent flesh of a mussel; only the land was dark and indistinct. She pushed her way through the years of wild bramble growth and tramped back to the spot she had chosen.

It was early. She had been planning on the first of Thay. But she would have to do this now because by Thay, she would be hundreds of miles away.

Sena had cut away a small section of meadow grass with her sickle knife and formed a circle in the weeds. A carefully balanced stack of round stones rose into a rough conical shape. With a final heave, the ones in her pack dropped like hammer blows, denting the ground. She placed them in the mound and stepped back to assess her work.

For a moment she rested. Finally, she began the formula.

Some of the rocks had come from Caliph’s family burial ground. Others were from the woods. A few she took from the fields and the last three were from the graveyard west of Isca.

She circled the pile, walking backward, repeating the numbers and counting each repetition.

Meant to keep horrors like those at the Porch of S
th forever cordoned from physical dimensions, the numeric statement had been part of the Sisterhood’s set of seasonal traditions for several hundred years. She hoped it would also keep Gr
-ner Shie at bay. It was something she could do for Caliph . . . for the Duchy.

Her heart fumbled, feeling momentarily sentimental about Stonehold. Despite everything . . . she liked being here.
But I can’t stay!
She banished the thought immediately and continued her numeric chant. It was almost complete when the world shook.

An explosion of panicked marsupials filled the air when the movement began. They dropped from the dreadful eves of the house like soft stones, squirming from web-thick attics and churning clumsily into the sky.

Trees swayed.

Sena, despite her nimbleness, stumbled and fell. It felt as though the ground had come alive; it tossed her into the weeds like a doll.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, everything grew quiet. Sena’s heart clenched rapidly like a nervous fist.

Her meticulously balanced pile had shaken down to a low mound. Another faint tremor rumbled deep inside the mountain.

Standing up, Sena repeated the numeric charm, no longer certain of its efficacy.

The quake had roused the last of summer’s bugs. She watched them take flight, sing wildly, trying to seduce a mate. Overhead, predators circled the yard, feasting on the insects’ heedless love: soft green bodies gnashed in tiny vicious maws.

Sena returned to the castle.

The streets were alive. The cobblestones and lamp-lit bistros along King’s Road were packed with little crowds talking about the quake. The High King’s witch went unnoticed.

Sena crossed into the Hold and over the drawbridge; she took a coach to the castle from the gate. When she arrived, she went inside and began her long climb up to bed.

Caliph’s whisper arrested her. It came out of a blackened parlor that bordered the hallway, a temporary lair where he had holed-up to brood.

“Where were you?”

Sena jumped. She turned toward the tall narrow doorway that framed a curtain of negative space.

“I was at your uncle’s house—thinking.”

Caliph’s shape materialized from the darkness as out of brackish water. Sena’s imagination transformed the scene; she pictured herself hovering over him . . . his body floating in a pond. Shadows filled his eyes and collected around his limbs and neck. His robed arms reached out and pulled her slowly toward him.

It struck her both morbid and funny at the same time. She hadn’t pictured him worrying about her. The realization made her feel strangely warm.

“I’m all right,” she whispered.

“I thought I might have lost you,” he said quietly.

It would be tonight or never,
Sena thought. They went upstairs. Sena closed the bedroom door.

She slipped powder into his wine. They drank and flirted. Caliph unlaced her blouse and kissed her shoulders. She wanted him suddenly, savagely. It had been weeks now without relief. But the drug was quick. Foreplay became the only play as it slipped from delicious to slurred to clumsy and revolting. Caliph collapsed, a clouded expression on his face.

Sena sighed.

Distraught but determined, she pricked her finger and whispered the words that would deepen the rest of the mountain herb. If the narcotic did not keep him quiet, the Unknown Tongue would.

She looked at him.

Under the oil lamp he seemed like a sleeping copper figurine. Molten orange and blue-black shadows drooled across him.

Sena hesitated and touched his chest. She grew momentarily softhearted.
I love him,
she told herself.
And he loves me.
She held her sickle knife over his chest, deliberating.

With a quick jerk the blade parted his skin.

She chose the muscle of his upper arm for the task. For a moment he did not bleed. Then the dark fluid ran, an endless supply, flowing from the tissue into the silver vial she held below it. He twitched slightly, eliciting a groan.

Her thumb pressed the flesh above the cut and instantly the flow stopped. With her teeth, she tore a piece of clean linen.

Her hands moved delicately, like moth wings, fingers caring for the wound with attentive tenderness. She held the skin apart and filled it with orange powder.

Then she whispered a weak equation, using Caliph’s own blood to mend him. The skin closed slightly.

She took another piece of fresh linen she had soaked in antiseptic and wrapped it several times to bind the wound, embalming him, it seemed.

With utmost care she removed the tourniquet. She stoppered the silver vial and got dressed.

Betrayal.

It caused a strange pain in her heart.

Caliph shifted. A dark wrinkle passed over his features as though from a bad dream. The monkshood would cause vivid hallucinations.

Lifting her pack quietly, Sena turned the gold handle on the door. Her skirt murmured in a rustling chill that trickled from the window. She left him to dream.

Caliph dreamt of Marco.

Vivid stripes seared the horizon like orange marmalade trapped between layers of molten tar. The color was intensely bright. Leaves rustled. Stars peeped down through a steeple snared by trees.

Caliph fought his way through saplings and emerged in a lowering black yard heavy with sinister shapes.