Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Read online

  Since that first night in Southlight a year and a half ago, he had been hurtling blindly through the night. He had striven to ignore the rest of his principles and let just one guide him: his love and gratitude for his sister. He protected her. He did as she asked. But it was no longer enough.

  He knew what would happen next because it was the same thing that always happened: they would berate Syntal, try to talk sense into her, maybe even bandy some threats about. But no murder or massacre, no sin, would outweigh her value to the King. In the end, she would receive a slap on the wrist. Her school of new chanters would continue growing. She would open the next wardbook, and the next, her wide-eyed transgressions growing and his power to stop her dwindling until she, too, leveled a cataclysm like the one they had all witnessed in Kesselholm. Murder on an incomprehensible scale, delivered with a shrug and the claim that it was all she could do.

  The wardbooks couldn't be re-sealed. The chanters' value to the King couldn't be erased. Some things were too big for him to stop, now. He knew that.

  But others were still in his power.

  His plan formed slowly over the next few days on the road, in the silence and simmering horror that permeated the trip. On the fifth night out from Twosides, their last before their return to Keswick, it finally gelled. He waited until he was alone on watch, then went to Syntal's tent.

  "Wake up," he said—and she did, immediately. That was a change. Normally she was the hardest sleeper of them.

  "Seth?" The grogginess in her voice burned away fast. She could kill him with a whispered word, he knew. She possessed the ability and the will, had demonstrated both more times than he could count. And she would not like what he had come to say.

  "You have to stop chanting."

  She sat up in bed, her hair a wild halo in the thin lantern light. "What?"

  "You can't control your sorcery. You know it as well as I do. You don't make good decisions, and people get killed."

  "I told you, those men were―"

  "I'm not even talking about them. I'm talking about all the times you put me to sleep while there was an arc hound at my throat. I'm talking about the way you nearly killed Angbar, going after the fourth wardbook. I'm talking about the Keswick residents you caught in the crossfire of your lightning, going after Marcus, and the kid you killed at the Winterwheat field."

  "The horse killed him, not me," she said. "It was an accident! I didn't know the horses would spook."

  "I know. You always have an excuse. It's never your fault. The men you massacred in Twosides are just the latest. But they have to be the last."

  Silence. She looked away, her face a shadowscape of gaunt angles in the lantern light. He waited.

  "I won't stop chanting," she said when she finally looked back. "And you have no right to ask me that."

  "Maybe not. But the men you killed in Twosides do. Their wives and children. The parents of the dead boy in Keswick. They can't speak for themselves, so I'll speak for them."

  "We're at war, Seth. And my chanters are going to be the King's best weapon in that war. Weapons kill people. You don't break a longsword because it did its job."

  "We're not at war. Not yet. But you may have ensured that we will be."

  She waved this off. "Melakai promised to tell the King. He'll make the decision."

  "The King can do what he wants. I'm making my own decision. I'm telling you, you need to stop chanting. Set it aside. Harth can handle training new chanters, and Takra."

  "They only exist because of me," Syntal said. "I'm the expert on this. No one understands it as well as I do."

  "And no one is as willing to go to the same lengths."

  She shrugged, her face neutral—as if his comment could easily be taken as a compliment rather than a rebuke.

  "You're not hearing me, Syntal. You are going to stop chanting. Either you agree to that, or I will see to it myself." He let the threat hang in the air, gave her time to understand its meaning. "We'll reach Keswick early tomorrow. I'll come for your answer at highsun."

  And he left her.

  iv. Melakai

  The reception that greeted them when they returned to Keswick this time was muted compared to the first. The people could sense something had gone wrong—the caravan had returned early, missing nearly all their wagons, and the wretchedness in their faces betrayed their failure. Worse, they learned that Winterwheat had ended while they were gone, the field as fallow one morning as it had been to start with.

  Kai nearly told one of his men to carry his message to the King. He didn't want to let Syntal out of his sight. But he decided word of the Twosides massacre had to come from him; Isaic might have trouble believing it otherwise. He didn't want Syntal to run, but it was a risk he'd have to take.

  Isaic agreed to see him in his receiving room within the hour. Once he'd closed the door behind them, Kai said, "The girl is dangerous."

  "Lyseira?" Isaic said. "Is she planning something?"

  "No. Syntal." He told the King what happened—how uncertain the men of the town had been, how easily they might have turned on their own cleric, and how Syntal had slaughtered all of them in plain view of the townsfolk. He watched the blood drain from Isaic's face, the rage and fear mingling in his eyes. "But that's not all of it. The rest is almost worse. When I asked her what in Hel she'd done, she insisted it had been her only possible response. She refused all other suggestions. She wouldn't admit she'd made a mistake; she insisted we'd all been about to die." Kai shook his head. "Your Highness, I could have taken on half that group myself. They were no match for us, and they knew it. They just wanted to eat."

  "Blesséd sehk," Isaic breathed. "How did the others react? Lyseira?"

  "Lyseira and Angbar both chastised her, but she wouldn't listen to them either."

  "Where is she now?"

  "I don't know for certain. At the school, I assume. It's too important to her—I don't think she'd try to run, not yet. And I assumed you'd want an immediate report."

  Isaic nodded and leaned back. Ran a hand over his pale forehead. "Sometimes I wonder what Father would do in these situations. I suppose all sons do. But Father never dealt with anything like this."

  "No." Kai said no more. He wasn't the man's counselor.

  "I'll need to make an example of the girl, clearly. If I let this kind of butchery pass, I'll look weak. People will think she could do the same to me."

  And she could, Kai thought. She could.

  "But I need those chanters," Isaic went on. "The Fatherlord has thousands of clerics. When He comes this way I'll need every advantage I can get."

  "I was thinking about that, on the way home. With your permission?"

  Isaic nodded.

  "The Church despises witches. They've spent centuries decrying them. They're natural enemies of Keswick's chanters, which makes you the chanters' natural ally. 'The enemy of my enemy.' Nothing you do to Syntal will change that."

  "I'm less concerned about losing them as allies, and more concerned about losing them as subjects."

  "Then establish your authority now. Make it clear that you're in control. Pull her leash—hard." Execute her. The thought flickered through Kai's thoughts and vanished. It may well have been an appropriate punishment for one who had killed twenty of the King's subjects, but he knew Isaic would never agree to it—the politics of the thing were too complex for such blunt responses. "Maybe order Harth to escort her to the palace for judgement—he seemed to be loyal, so make him prove it."

  "And if I issue such an order, and he refuses?"

  "Better to know it now, I'd say. Issue the order again, secretly maybe. To someone else. Takra, or Ben. Those four are the strongest. Someone will value the favor of the King, and you can reward them. Ben, in particular, owes you."

  Isaic fell quiet, thinking. It was a difficult problem—Kai didn't covet the King's duty to handle it.

  "One more thought," Kai said, before the moment passed. Isaic nodded. "If you do nothing else, outlaw the use
of that spell."

  "The death mist?"

  Kai nodded. "You're lucky you didn't see it, and my description of it didn't do it justice. It didn't just kill those men. It . . . melted them. I watched their faces just . . ." He stammered to a halt. He didn't possess the words to describe the horror he'd witnessed. "It began rolling into town, almost immediately. She ended it then, but if she'd lost track of it, or hadn't acted fast enough . . ."

  Isaic swallowed and gave a sharp nod, but Kai felt the words had to be spoken. "It would have flowed into town. Slaughtered any man, woman, or child it touched."

  When Isaic spoke, he sounded sick. "I can write anything on a sheet of parchment. That doesn't give me the power to enforce it."

  "No, but it will give impetus to the chanters to avoid the spell, even make a pariah of anyone who would use the Hel-damned thing. And it also establishes a precedent—get them to agree to your authority on this, and you can more easily maintain that authority in the future."

  "That's an awfully thin stone to build a throne on," Isaic said. But his eyes were far away—he was thinking about it. "Anything else?"

  "Just the obvious—that we'll need to watch the western road when the snow breaks. If they didn't hate us in Twosides before, they do now."

  v. Harth

  The school's door blew open with a blast of freezing wind, sending a host of loose paper and half-written scrolls fluttering to the floor. Syntal entered, her eyes darting.

  "Syn?" Harth took to his feet. She was back early. "Are you―?"

  She slammed the door and rushed across the room toward the dorms' entrance, beckoning him to join her. A number of students stopped their studies to watch her retreating back; Takra shot him an uneasy look. "I'll be right back," he said to Torth—the two of them had been working on something—and ran after her.

  He caught up when she was halfway to their shared room. "What's going on?" He put a hand to her shoulder. "Syn!"

  She swept into their room, closed the door behind them, and rummaged through her pack. "Something happened," she said as she dug. "I have to go."

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "In Twosides . . ." She pulled out a sheaf of rumpled papers. "Here. These are letters for the soldiers' families. You have to make sure they get them." She opened her coin purse, spread her money onto the desk. "And split this between them. It's not much, but it's all I have."

  "Syn." He took her by the shoulders. "What's going on?"

  "Seth is going to kill me."

  He hesitated, stunned. "What?"

  "We were attacked in Twosides. I fought back with a chant from the fifth wardbook. It won the fight—decisively—but . . ." She shook her head. "It was ugly. Really ugly."

  "So Seth decided to kill you?" Harth had never trusted that kid. There was something damaged about him, something broken. But this had to be a mistake. Some kind of misunderstanding.

  "He said it was either that, or I give up chanting." A spark came into her eyes. "That will never happen."

  "He can't ask you that!"

  "It doesn't matter that he did. I won't do it." She pressed the letters into his hands. "Once the snow starts melting, the couriers should start running again. Get these to Twosides. Promise me."

  Harth looked down at the letters.

  —did his duty bravely—

  —some small compensation—

  He shook his head. "Get them there yourself. You're not going anywhere."

  "Seth gave me until highsun today. He'll be here within the hour."

  Harth sputtered. "Let him come! He thinks he can just walk in here and murder you? Surrounded by chanters, by us? The King―"

  "The King will be as mad as he is. Melakai saw the whole thing; he's probably telling Isaic right now." She ground her teeth, stared at the floor. "I should've cast something else, something they'd seen before, but there were so many of them that I . . ." She met his eyes again. "I don't want to drag the school into this. It's me they're after. The school has to go on. It has to." She hauled out the fifth wardbook. "Put this with the others—and keep opening the Seals, no matter what the King says. It has to be done."

  She's serious. The realization crashed over him like an ocean wave. She's actually leaving the wardbooks. She's really doing this.

  "Wait," he said, shaking his head. "Wait, Syn, you can't just―"

  "I have to." She took his head in her hands and silenced him with a kiss, passionate and wistful. He leaned into her, desperate, willing her to stay.

  But she pulled away. "Don't follow me," she said, swiping at her eyes as she turned toward the door.

  Then she was gone.

  vi. Syntal

  She hurried down the street, pushing through the snow and dirty slush toward Royal District and the southern gate. She could rent or buy a horse there, along with supplies for a few days' journey—a few illusionary crowns would put any purchase within her reach. She didn't have a complete plan, not yet, but the pieces of one swarmed around her head like gnats: ride south toward Bitterfork, buy the rest of what she needed with illusionary coin, and make for Chesport. From there the entire world lay open to her. Bahir, Shalda, Borkalis . . . they were all possibilities.

  But none of that mattered yet. For now she flew south on a wind of urgency, fighting to keep focused on her goal. It wasn't easy. Harth's betrayed eyes haunted her. Second thoughts sneaked in at the edges, seeped through her defenses. If you're overreacting, they whispered, you're throwing everything away for nothing. The wardbooks. The school. Harth. All the joy she had discovered over this long winter, all the incredible beauty the world had revealed to her—for nothing.

  She longed to turn back, ached for some other way. But she had never seen such cold certainty in Seth's eyes. He was done debating. He had decided what needed to happen, and nothing would dissuade him. She could lie to him, of course—swear off chanting just to get him to leave her alone—but she wouldn't keep the promise, and he knew that. Maybe he'd ask Lyseira or Elthur to enforce it with an Oathbond, or make her swear to the King on her life. Either way, she refused to give in to him. This was her power—she had bared her soul for it, nearly drowned for it, risked her life for it countless times.

  How dare he? After she had saved all their lives dozens of times over, after she had proven herself more than capable of his trust?

  She had earned this.

  Maybe I should go to the King instead, she thought, still grasping for an alternative. He'll understand the value of a spell that can slay a score of soldiers in a heartbeat. He'll stop Seth.

  But she didn't know that. It was a risk, just like the other options—a risk that could end with her death.

  No. She would leave Keswick, maybe even leave Darnoth. Give all of them time to find another focus for their superstitions and their hate. The discovery of new chanters might only be a steady drip now, but it would soon become a flood; she was sure of that. And once they had proven themselves indispensable, the King would have no choice but to welcome her back.

  It's not forever, she told herself. I'll return when they need me, or help from a distance. She could start a new school elsewhere; the blood fever had to be manifesting throughout Darnoth, not just in Keswick, and no one would turn away a cure.

  As she reached the stable near the southern gate, her resolve steadied. She put doubts behind her. She opened the door to the attached shop, ready to bargain with the owner, and saw Seth waiting for her inside.

  Her heart leapt into her throat. Ironflesh. She Ascended, the chant jumping to her tongue—but Seth jerked his spear to the ready, a warning in his eyes.

  "Don't," he said.

  The only spell she might be able to finish before he impaled her was Ves—and even that, he might be fast enough to beat. She froze, her mind ricocheting through the options as the secrets of reality lay bare before her.

  He took a step forward, spear still raised, and said it again. "Don't."

  She Descended. For once, the pain of losing the Pul
se paled in comparison to the bitterness of reality. She felt the shopkeeper's eyes on them as she asked, "You're going to kill me, then?"

  "I don't want to. Swear off chanting. You've killed enough."

  "I won't do that." She marveled at the steadiness of her own voice. "But I have another answer for you—I'm leaving."

  He narrowed his eyes.

  "You won't see me for a long time. I'll leave Darnoth. Will that put you at ease?"

  He considered, his spear still at the ready. "That won't solve this."

  "I've left the wardbooks with Harth and Takra. I won't pursue them further."

  "That's a start. But you have to swear it all off. You can already commit mass murder with your sorcery; I won't let you do it again."

  It was her turn to consider, and again, his request made her fume. "I have the right to defend myself." She met his eyes, stared him down like he was a wild dog, and saw his doubt. His pain.

  She had misread him, that night in her tent. He wasn't certain at all.

  "Seth," she said. "I know you've always hated me."

  "That's not true." Then, paradoxically: "That has nothing to do with this."

  "It does. You and I both know it does. You've never trusted me, never believed me. Even when we were kids, you didn't want me around—not really. You made me feel like an intruder from the day I arrived."

  He watched her, spear readied, his face like stone.

  She sucked in a breath. "Damn it, Seth, I didn't kill your parents. I'm sorry it happened, m'sai? I lost my Mom and Dad in that storm too, but you've never acknowledged that, all these years."

  She had hit the mark. Old pain flickered behind his eyes like a whisper of distant thunder. "They wouldn't have been anywhere near that river if your parents hadn't come."

  "No. But it was an accident. I didn't ask them to come that day, of all days! I didn't ask them to try and cross the bridge! You think I wanted that? And all these years, you've blamed me for it."

  His eyes didn't move from hers. His spear didn't waver. The pain she'd seen in him vanished, hidden once more behind the wall of his Preserver training. "Maybe I have," he admitted, "but that has nothing to do with this."