But to do that, she had to get close to her father, at least once. She had to see him up close, see him out of his robe. That would usually mean a private audience, but Damon Eram would not bring Keritanima into his presence without a few hundred witnesses around him. The alternative was easy enough to arrange. With her mind weaves and her powers of Illusion, there was nowhere in the Palace she couldn't go. All it took was sneaking in while he was in session with what few advisors he had left. In those more intimate surroundings, her father didn't wear the heavy Royal robe and crown. In those private surroundings, the stress was clearly showing on him. His fur was thinning, stress-induced shedding, and his eyes were milky and somewhat blurry. He sighed a great deal, and moved as if he weighed twice as much as he really did. Seeing him in that degenerated state didn't move her at all. To her, he didn't look bad enough. But she saw all of him she needed to see.
Between the Royal seal she owned, her ability to mimic her father's handwriting, and her ability to create Illusions of her father, she had everything she needed to make everyone think he was going crazy.
The morning after seeing her father was stormy. A savage line of thunderstorms had moved in from the west, dunking Wikuna under a heavy curtain of pounding rain. The skies were dark and gloomy, illuminated only by the occasional flash of lightning. It was a perfect morning to just lay in bed and listen to the thunder and the rain pattering against the glass of her window. Keritanima had always rather liked thunderstorms, finding the droning sound of the rain lulling, only to be shocked to a thrilling state of heightened awareness by the unpredictable flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder. It was a wonderful time to drift in a half-doze, where her mind could drift and ponder, then have her mind brought to reality by a flash of lightning or a peal of thunder, when her musings were bathed in the pure waters of her logical reasoning. It allowed her to think creatively, yet find the merits or flaws of those creative ideas with an ease that escaped her most of the rest of the time.
It was one of the few times she would let down her guard. Keritanima almost always existed in a wary state of tension, and only a very few things could make her completely relax. Being in the presence of her brother and sister was one. Her apartment was another at any other time, when Binter and Sisska protected her and Miranda from the world. But with the very high stakes in the current game she played and the spies looking in from time to time, she couldn't completely relax in her rooms anymore. Only times like that time, with the soothing sounds of the thunderstorm inviting her to take a brief respite from her troubles, allowed her to completely relax and indulge a bit in life's simpler pleasures.
She mused about Rallix. To pay off Ulfan, she had had to go see Rallix. He was all business with her, as usual, but there was something different about him now. He wasn't dealing with Lizelle, he was dealing with Keritanima, and that had a good bit to do with it, she reasoned. But there was something else, something more, something she couldn't quite put a finger on. It teased her, taunted her, nearly mocked her, but no matter how hard she thought about it, she couldn't find anything in his words or his actions to tip her to what it was. Her eidectic memory allowed her to replay the conversation over and over in her head, and she searched her memory of the conversation for any hint at what seemed to nibble at her awareness.
It could have been the setting. For the first time, Keritanima had visited him at home. His modest brownstone was a reflection of his personality, orderly, practially furnished, immaculately clean, and decorated with an understated elegance that told the viewer of the complexity of the man who lived there. Rallix lived in that four story brownstone in the more affluent part of the city alone, without even servants, keeping his house clean on his own. He had brought her back into his parlor after she knocked on the door, giving her a chance to look around as he went to get some wine for her. He had been reading a book called Multipantheonic Theology in the Technological Age. A strange book for a merchant, a book so selective and technical that he had to have a wider educational background than she first thought. Few would read it. Fewer still would understand anything in it. She had no idea what it was about, and that was why a copy of it was sitting on her nightstand the next morning. It had been an exceptionally deep book debating the role of the gods in a world where man and Wikuni both developed machines that would lessen the world's need for magic and for the aid of the gods. It was a stunningly deep book, and its conclusions were quite thought-provoking.
After he returned, she tried to be brief. She asked him to deliver up the other forty thousand in trade bars to Ulfan, through a front that would act as a go-between. She had arranged that before going to see him. But Rallix seemed reluctant to stick firmly to business, asking her about her time in Sennadar, about the Tower, and about her experiences there. She had been suspicious about his motives-Keritanima didn't trust anyone well enough to answer questions like that-but she kept realizing that it was Rallix who was asking. He already knew enough secrets to bury her.
"Why would you want to know that?" she had demanded of him after he asked.
"Because you've changed a great deal since you left, Highness," he had told her in that calm voice of his and those steady eyes. "Most of it was for the better, if you don't mind my saying so."
She had thought about it for a moment before replying. "To put it shortly, I learned about Sorcery, I found good friends, and I did my best to keep from coming back here."
"I read somewhere that the Sorcerers have a patron goddess. Is that true?" he had asked.
"Of course it is," she told him.
"Nobody knows her name," he had remarked to her.
"And nobody will," she had replied immediately. "The name of the Goddess is known only by people who learn about Sorcery, and we're not allowed to tell."
"What's to stop you?"
"We had to swear an oath," she told him bluntly. "Part of it was not to reveal the name of the Goddess."
"From what I remember of Lizelle and what I know of Keritanima, she wouldn't be very sincere about that oath," Rallix had said. "You don't hold much candle for the gods. You've told me so yourself."
And that had been what was really annoying her about the entire conversation. Why would he choose that topic? And what had possibly motivated her response? "Well, the old Keritanima didn't, but I do," she had replied to him after a moment. It had been a statement right from the heart, tumbling from her lips of its own accord.
It had been something of an epiphany for her, something that she hadn't realized until that morning.
She wasn't as agnostic as she thought she was.
She had known in her heart that the Goddess had been communicating with her, but she wouldn't admit to it to herself. It had been the Goddess that had sent her the dream, the dream that told her that Tarrin was going to be alright. She knew it was a divine visitation, but she had tried to convince herself otherwise. Always before, Keritanima had been angry at the gods-all of them-because of the horrid conditions of her own life, and the very frightening world in which she lived. She figured that they didn't care about the world if they allowed young girls to get killed over nothing more than friendship. But then things changed. She had seen evidence of a caring god when Tarrin got help from the Goddess. She had tried to discount that, but it had wormed its way into her mind and heart. And then she had the dream, a direct act by the Goddess that did nothing more than soothe her frenzied fear for her brother. She had no real reason to do that, no ulterior motives. The Goddess had calmed her worries for no reason other than to make her feel better.
For the first time, Keritanima realized that a god cared about her.
The tiny seed that had been inside her had bloomed at that simple revelation. It wasn't the undying devotion that priests held for their gods, or the gentle love and willing sense of duty that Tarrin had for the Goddess. It was more of a softening of her heart for the goddess of the Sorcerers, an invitation to be wooed into a more formal relationship. She acknowledged the Goddess now, acknowledged her as the only god that Keritanima would come close to worshipping or following. A god that Keritanima could get to know better.