Looking into his eyes with a strange combination of what seemed to be triumph and awe, Succiu placed an affectionate hand around Shailiha’s waist, pulling her close. His sister smiled.
“Your blood never ceases to amaze us, Chosen One,” Succiu said quietly. “The child in my womb grows faster than even we had predicted. Later today, early tomorrow at the latest, you shall have a son. Imagine, the firstborn child of the Chosen One may in fact be born on the day of the Reckoning. Fitting, don’t you think? Pity you shall never know him, or any of the other children you shall give us.”
My child, my firstborn, carried by such a monster, he thought, the hideousness of it almost bringing him to tears. And still I have no inkling of the meaning of Wigg’s words. “Sometimes only a small urging is all that is required to move mountains. And sometimes it is easier to let a thing come to you, rather than for you to go to it.” What does it mean? His thoughts turned to the pewter locket that the wizard presumably still carried around his neck, hidden beneath his robe. Does he still have it? he wondered frantically. What is it for? Am I somehow supposed to know?
Failee levitated herself and glided serenely across the room toward Wigg’s cage, the hem of her black gown fluttering slightly in the breeze of her passage. Tristan could see the madness in her eyes; the strange, hazel irises seeming to glow more brightly than ever.
Three hundred years, Tristan thought. Three hundred years she has waited for this day.
The First Mistress floated higher in the air until she was level with the wizard. “So, Old One,” she said softly, “we have now come full circle. There are those of us in this room who believe that you should already be dead, that your continued presence here among us can only be a danger. But I know different. I know how robbed you are now of your power, and I enjoy seeing you this way, the way I wished to see each of the males of endowed blood during the Sorceresses’ War, as you now call it.” She paused, continuing to look at him through the bars of his cage as she taunted him.
“But I shall let you live, at least for a little while. I wish to have you see with your own eyes that all your attempts to undo what I have accomplished here shall eventually end in ruin for you, and see those failures you shall. And all of this shall happen just before we take the advice of our fifth sorceress and turn you into a blood stalker, to walk the lands of Eutracia for all time.”
Wigg reached out and grasped the bars of his cage, pulling his face as close to hers as he could. “I tell you for the last time, woman,” he said urgently. “You must stop this. Your knowledge is fragmentary at best, and you will be the ruin of us all. You have known me for eons, and I have never lied to you. I do not lie to you now. This is my last warning! Stop this madness, or we all may die.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “A wizard’s warning. A tradition of the recently departed Directorate, I believe. How noble. Your oath, again, no doubt. How does it go? ‘I shall take no life except in urgent self-defense, or without prior warning.’ Yes, we heard the prince recite it several times while unconscious. Do you seriously expect me to believe you?” she asked, almost politely, as she continued to gaze at him.
“No, Wigg, that would be much too easy. I have waited and suffered far too long to be persuaded by a wizard’s trick. I told you three hundred twenty-seven years ago, upon the decks of the Resolve, that one day your oath would be your undoing, and so here we are.”
She turned her eyes toward the prince. “The wizard wasted your time when he spoke to you obliquely, because he is quite wrong in whatever it was he was thinking,” she said softly. She smiled at him. “There is no way to stop me. Soon he will be dead, and you, like your sister, will be one of us.”
It’s true. They were listening to us all the time, Tristan realized. His mind raced, trying to understand the wizard’s riddle, at the same time wondering whether the sorceresses having heard them talk had made any difference. But there is an answer—there must be—and Wigg knows what it is. Too many times I have not trusted the old one and have paid the price for it. I shall never mistrust him again. But his thoughts were interrupted by the voice of the First Mistress.
“So as to placate the other members of the Coven, I have devised a little gift for the wizard.” She raised her right index finger toward Wigg, and immediately the wizard put his hands to his throat, protectively, and opened his mouth to speak. But no words came. In a flash, his arms were frozen at his sides. Whatever slight amount of room that might have once existed in his gibbet was now obviously gone.
Wigg looked at Tristan with what the prince thought to be an even greater sense of urgency; his mouth moving silently, pitifully, as he hung there in his cage. Geldon, trembling with terror, looked back and forth between the prince and the wizard, as if he could somehow help them communicate. But Tristan could see in the dwarfs eyes that he, too, knew all was lost.
“The Lead Wizard is now unable to speak or to raise his hands or arms to gesture to you in any way,” Failee said haughtily. “Qualities I enjoy in all wizards. For your information, the old one is in no pain and is still quite able to watch the ritual that I am about to perform. But any communication that the two of you may have been planning on during the Communion, verbal or otherwise, should now be quite impossible.” She turned to look lovingly at the four other members of the Coven standing dutifully before the altar.
“And so it begins,” she said quietly, as if to herself.
Without further explanation, she glided back down to the floor, stopping at the altar. Tristan watched as she placed the golden goblet directly in the center of it, beneath the skylight.
Tristan looked again to Wigg, but the helpless wizard could only stare back frantically in return. Think, you fool! the prince thought angrily. What was it that Wigg was trying to tell me?
Tristan began to try to remember everything that Faegan had told them that night about the Communion. A small amount of blood would be taken from each of the five sorceresses and combined in the goblet. The goblet would then be placed in the center of the altar, directly below the skylight, and Failee would begin the ritual. The stone would be removed from around her neck and suspended over the goblet of blood.
He stopped thinking for a moment to glance at Wigg, as if seeing the wizard would help him to remember. Finally, the tragedy of the Communion came back to him. The mistresses would take their places in their thrones at the five points of the Pentangle, and the combination of the stone and the blood would call the light from the sky. It would strike the stone, refracting it into different colors that would cascade into the goblet, charging the blood, already strengthened by the purity of Shailiha’s blood, with the power of the stone.
Then they would each drink, sharing the power, the Communion complete. The Reckoning would invariably follow.
Tristan’s head hung down to his chest in defeat, his mind painfully calculating the horrors that the Reckoning would bring. World enslavement, he thought. The death of Geldon and Wigg. The loss forever of Shailiha and her daughter to the Coven. And the enslavement of myself to produce Failee’s super being, so that she might rule with it in perpetuity, continuing to “experiment” on the masses. The insanity never ends! And the culmination of it all is almost here.