The Will of the Empress (15 page)

Tris went over and closed the open window.

“It’s
hot
in here!” Wenoura protested. “We need fresh air!”

Tris turned to look at Zhegorz. He had gone silent, white-faced under his stubble. Daja released him so he could cover his face with his hands. He was still trembling.

Tris opened just one of the shutters this time, the half that wouldn’t let air blow directly toward Daja’s table. Neither Daja nor Zhegorz seemed to notice, though the cook and maids sighed their relief. The kitchen
was
heating up.

Tris went over and plumped herself down next to Zhegorz. “Where are you from?”

He flinched from her.

“Stop scowling at him,” ordered Daja, frowning at the redhead. “You’d frighten a Trader’s dozen of crazy people with that frown. Zhegorz is my friend, and I won’t have you scaring him.”

“She’s not scaring me, I don’t think,” muttered Zhegorz.

“Well, you should be scared,” Daja told him stoutly. “Most sensible people are.” She forestalled his protest by raising her brassy hand. “You’re sensible enough, even if you are crazy.”

“If he is, maybe he has reason to be,” Tris said, closing her eyes. “How old are you, Zhegorz?”

He blinked, his thin mouth trembling. “I…don’t know,” he said at last. “One emperor and two empresses…”

“Forty-five, maybe fifty,” Wenoura said behind Tris. “Were you too little to remember the old emperor’s death?”

Zhegorz shook his head, appearing to search his memory.

I don’t envy him the task, Tris thought, watching him count on his fingers. No doubt it’s under layers and layers of magical potions and treatments and being locked up. It wasn’t readily apparent to her daily vision, but that could mean simply that if he did have power, as she suspected, he’d tried to bury it. Deep inside herself she worked a change over her vision, closing her eyes before she brought it up to them. For the second time that day she placed a layer of magic over her eyes, though this was very different from the one she had used to see the fishing fleet. Once she felt her eyes begin to sting—they didn’t like this trick, not in the least—she opened them.

Normally she saw magics, including traces, as silver. This particular spell, one she had learned not long before her return to Emelan, showed her different magics in
different colors. From this perspective, Zhegorz was coated with patch on patch of power, different spells from different mages. He’d been given all kinds of healing potions for his madness, ordinary healings for illnesses, broken bones, and decayed teeth, and a number of truth spells for the secrets he wasn’t supposed to know. Threaded around and through them, almost vanishing under her gaze before it emerged in its full strength, or part strength, was a bright gold thread that belonged to Zhegorz himself.

Tris got up and walked around the table, eyeing him from every angle. The man was an insane patchwork doll of all the spells that had been worked on him since—“When did they first say you were mad?” she asked him.

He would not look at her. “Fifteen,” he mumbled. “For my birthday they sent me to Yorgiry’s House, because I talked to the voices. I went home sometimes after, but I always got worse. They began to leave baskets of food and clothes at the garden gate, but they’d lock the gate. They wouldn’t come out until I was gone. That happened two or three times. Then one time the healers let me out and my family wasn’t there anymore. They had sold the house and moved away. I think I was twenty.” He looked at Daja. “The old emperor died around my fifteenth birthday. All of us who were mad got new black coats to wear for mourning.”

“He’s fifty-two or thereabouts, then,” Wenoura said. “By that count.” She turned: The maids had all stopped what they were doing to listen. “I don’t see supper magicking
itself onto the table,” she said sharply. “Get back to work, you lazy drudges. We’ve supper and breakfast to fix and food for them and the nobles to eat on the road tomorrow while you gape like a field full of cows!”

Zhegorz looked at Daja, trembling. “You’re going away?”

Daja looked at Tris, who frowned at Zhegorz as she pulled on her lower lip. I remember
that
look, Daja thought. Just because we aren’t in each other’s minds doesn’t mean I don’t know what she’s thinking right now. And she won’t say another word until all her thoughts are lined up. She thinks he has magic. She’s thought it since she opened only one shutter. And it must be strange magic, or she’d have told him outright. Or there’s something peculiar in it.

Just because Tris isn’t talking doesn’t mean
I
can’t, she told herself. “Yes, but it’s all right.” She reached over and closed her hands around Zhegorz’s trembling fingers again. “Yes, we’re going away, but you aren’t to worry, because you’ll be with us. It means you’ll be out of the city—it’s worse in the cities, you said?”

Both Zhegorz and Tris nodded.

“You’ll be with us. Zhegorz, you know my magic’s a little—odd, right?” Daja asked.

Zhegorz nodded. Tris stopped pulling her lip and began to chew on the end of one of her thin lightning braids, lost in thought.

Doesn’t that
hurt
? wondered Daja, watching in awe as the redhead nibbled her source of sparks. To Zhegorz, Daja
said, “Well, hers is, too, and so are the magics of the lady who owns this house and our brother.” She spoke under the clatter as the maids and Wenoura got to work. “And the thing with having odd magic is that you are more inclined to spot it in somebody else. My friend here—her name is Tris—she’s already figured out you hear voices because she hears them, too, on the winds.”

Zhegorz yanked around to stare up at Tris. “You hear them, too?” he asked in wonderment.

“For years,” Daja said when Tris only nodded. “So part of what’s wrong with you is that you never learned a way to manage what you hear, or even that the problem was magic all along. We don’t know about the visions”—Daja glanced at Tris, who shook her head—“though
maybe
they’re on the winds?” Tris shrugged.

“Well, she’ll figure it out, I suppose, and you’ll stay with

us while she works on it.”

Chime had endured enough of the maids and cook who now bustled around her napping place. She wriggled out between their legs and took flight, to land on the table in front of Zhegorz. The man flinched away and knocked the bench over to land on his back.

“That’s just Chime,” said Tris, reaching down a hand. “She’s all right. She’s a living glass dragon. They’re not very common.”

Daja snorted: In her dry way, Tris had made a joke. Zhegorz stared up at Tris, then cautiously took the offered
hand. As she helped him to his feet, he said in a voice filled with wonder, “Are all of you decked in marvels? Are all of you as mad as she is?” He pointed to Daja with his free hand. “She walked into a burning building that was collapsing. And before she did it, she saved my life and the lives of others who were as mad as me. Madder.”

“Collapsing buildings?” Tris asked Daja. She released Zhegorz to put the bench upright again. Gingerly the man sat to peer at Chime, who had decided to charm. As she wove her way around and between his hands and arms, chiming, Daja looked away from Tris.

“A man I knew, supposedly a friend, was setting fires,” she mumbled. “It’s not something I like to discuss.”

“She burned him up,” Zhegorz said, smoothing reverent fingers over Chime’s surface. “Her and other fire folk who were present at the execution. The governor was furious.” He looked at Daja. “It was quicker than letting him burn slow. And he broke the law.”

Wenoura handed Tris a bowl of hot soup and a spoon. The redhead set them down in front of Zhegorz. She didn’t appear to see the single tear that escaped Daja’s eye before Daja blotted it away. Daja could still remember that cold afternoon and that roaring pillar of flame. Knowing she and the other fire mages had saved Bennat Ladradrun an agonizing death hadn’t soothed the pain of his betrayal.

“Hush,” Tris was telling Zhegorz. “Some things you can’t fix by making excuses for them.”

And how did you learn that? Daja wondered. Or is it something you just never forgot, after you killed all those pirates?

Tris looked around. “I should ask the housekeeper if there’s a guest room that can be made up for you.”

“I’ll take him.” Briar strolled in, hands in his pockets. They hadn’t seen him arrive. “The servants can put a cot in my room. You’ll want me close by anyway, old fellow. If you get the horrors, I have drops that will help.”

“Putting him in a room on the downwind side of the house will help even more,” Tris replied. “I think part of his problem now is he’s had too many such drops.”

“Sleeping drops, with no magic in them, then,” Briar said. He sat next to Zhegorz and offered a hand. “Briar Moss. These two are my mates.” Not everyone knew this was slang for close friends, so he added, “My sisters.”

Gingerly, Zhegorz offered his own hand. “I can tell,” he said, his voice soft.

Briar clasped his hand, then let go and glared at Tris. “You know, I don’t go around feeding everybody magic the first time they sneeze,” he said belligerently. “It’s not good for them. You get used to it, and it stops helping. You’d be a lackwit not to know that.”

“Not wanting to butt in or anything,” said one of the maids with a wink at Briar, “but shouldn’t you be asking my lady before you go bringing in…” She rethought the word she was about to use and supplied, “Guests?”

Briar, Daja, and Tris all exchanged glances. Daja could see they felt just as she did. They were bewildered at the thought of
having
to ask such a thing of one of them.

“But I had a house and it didn’t bother us then,” she said.

“You’re different,” Briar and Tris said together. They looked at each other and smiled wryly.

“Then it shouldn’t be different here.” Sandry emerged from the shadows by the door into the kitchen. “Don’t I get to meet our new guest?”

Zhegorz lunged to his feet so fast that he ended up knocking the bench over again. He and Briar went sprawling onto their backs. Sandry helped Briar to his feet as Tris assisted Zhegorz again. Chime rose onto her hindquarters and made a crisp series of splintering glass noises at Sandry. It sounded rather like a scolding. Sandry almost dropped Briar on his rump again when she clapped both hands over her mouth to cover her giggle. He staggered to stay on his feet, then grabbed the bench and set it back up.

Sandry looked at them, waved for the maids and the cook to stop curtsying, and said quietly, “I’m still me, you know. And you were very right to scold me. I didn’t think to ask you.”

Tris propped her fists on her hips. “It’s just as well now,” she said, eyeing Zhegorz. “He’ll need someplace quieter than this to stay until we can sort him out.”

Zhegorz blinked down at his stout protectress. Standing, he was five inches taller than Tris. He should have more of a presence, thought Tris. He’s a grown man, after all, older
almost than the four of us together. But maybe it’s that he’s spent so much of his life running and hiding from things, and being locked up. Maybe inside he’s not that much older than fifteen.

“I’ll make sure you have a room, and somewhere we must have spare clothing,” Sandry assured Zhegorz softly. “Will you mind a day’s ride tomorrow?”

The man’s eyes shuttled from Sandry to Briar, to Daja, then to Tris. “You won’t want to adopt me when all your secrets come popping out of my mouth,” he warned them, rubbing a temple. “It always happens.”

Briar clapped Zhegorz on the back. “Well, if it happens, and I doubt it, we’ll make sure you’ve got a pack full of clothes and food, at least.”

“We’re not going to get rid of you,” Daja said, glaring at Briar. “We blurt people’s secrets all the time. You’ll be safer with us.”

“It’s settled, then. Come on, Zhegorz,” said Briar companionably.

As he led their new comrade off, Sandry looked at Tris. “Will we be able to help him?” she asked.

Tris was looking at the chewed end of one braid. “At least enough to get him back to Winding Circle,” she murmured. “I think he’ll have to go there in the end.”

“But you’re going to be nice, right?” Daja asked. “You’re going to be gentle with him, because he’s all broken to pieces inside.”

“When am I not nice?” demanded Tris with a scowl.

That reduced Daja and Sandry to laughter. Each time they met Tris’s glaring gray eyes, a fresh surge of laughter began. Finally Tris herself began to smile crookedly. “Well, nice by my standards, anyway. Treat me right, or I’ll make sure you get rained on all the way to Landreg in the morning.”

Briar had difficulty getting to sleep that night. Bedding down alone—alone in the bed, Zhegorz had a cot in the dressing room not fifty feet away—was a strange new experience for him of late. He hadn’t deliberately set out to ensure there was always someone warm and cuddly to share his blankets with, but it was an agreeable coincidence. It helped that he was so friendly, and the ladies were so friendly in return. He certainly could tell none of them, or worse, tell his sisters, that he had a horror of sleeping alone. Admitting that to anyone would force him to admit there was something wrong with him.

He lay awake for over an hour, listening to the small noises that Zhegorz made, settling into his mattress, then falling to sleep. The crazy man buzzed in place of snoring. It was a soothing kind of noise, hardly crazy at all. When Briar finally realized what it was, it soon lulled him to sleep.

He ran through a series of rock-sided canyons, all of them stripped of vegetation. He reached every way around
him with his magic, seeking even a blade of grass to keep him company, but the ground here was bare and dry, a desert high above the forests and plains of all the world. He kept looking for a way out of the canyons, but all he saw was smooth rock walls, innocent of cracks or ledges.

Behind him Briar heard the thud of Yanjingyi war drums, a loud, flat thump echoed by thousands of marching feet. The sound had followed him into the stone corridors, driving him like game in the dark. Now came the thin, shrill blast of the Yanjing emperor’s battle trumpets, and the frightful first roars of the black powder called boom dust. They were blowing up the stone canyons…

…
which turned into the twisting hallways of the First Temple of the Living Circle, jammed with dedicates, fleeing the attacking Yanjingyi army. Briar fought against their rushing tide, trying to find Rosethorn and Evvy, his student. Where were they? Evvy was small, yet—she could have been trampled in this chaos! He screamed her name, but it was lost in the cries of the frightened civilians who had taken shelter in the temple.

Everything went dark. Suddenly Briar was crawling over heaps of loose and wet bodies, feeling his way, shuddering. He knew he was crawling on the bodies of the dead. He reached out and felt a dying flare of green magic, plant magic. Screaming, he clutched the dying Rosethorn to his chest.