“Then it’s settled.” Still, Caliph paused, seemed to hedge on asking one final question. “What are the odds,” he asked, “that Mr. Vhortghast will return?”
Alani suppressed a grin. “That is something you need not trouble yourself with. I will keep an adequate amount of resources fixed in that regard.” He picked up his pipe and smoked before proceeding. “I will of course need to do some cleaning.” His fingers fluttered like a feather duster. “Appoint some . . . different people to positions within the organization. That sort of thing. Don’t be alarmed if you see new faces around the castle or in my company. All of this, you and I,” he motioned with his hands, “is based on trust.”
Caliph felt sick. Trust, specifically, was a word that chafed him.
Isca had been cut off from fresh imports for at least two weeks. Yet, even with southern commodities being conspicuously absent from shelves all across the city, Caliph held back.
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.