Work Text:
i. a darling child
Mother gave you the scorpling the day that you turned twelve, an indulgent smile upon her face.
“His name is Saharkis,” she said.
The vassal houses laid gemstones at your feet, and Uncle Primus bestowed on you a sphere of polished ivory, an arcane focus of peerless quality. You thanked them all with the politeness they deserved, but your eyes never strayed far from the creature placed in your hands, trust and responsibility falling warmly around your shoulders like Univere’s finest cloak, the one you would steal from her closet when you wanted to feel queenly.
Saharkis was the size of a rabbit, his carapace soft and colorless, his claws two pairs of pliant nubs.
“He will grow to protect you,” Mother said, “if you protect him now.”
With slim legs, he climbed upon your back, and his life weighed between your shoulder-blades.
“I am his mama now?” you asked.
“You are his Lady. And he will die for you if he must.”
i. a desperate squire
I was fourteen, the first time I dueled against my cousin Aniko. It was not so much a duel as a mortification.
Our visits to the House Tachonis were rare, and my forays into sorcery limited. When my cousin’s eyes slitted, I froze as a hare would, powerless to stir against his will. His blade was unnecessary. He struck me just beneath the temple with the pommel, and I crumpled like a bag of wet sand.
The earth struck my new armor, and my new armor struck my back. Blotches of pale pink and green swam across my vision, and my breath rattled uselessly in my lungs.
I forced myself upright. My limbs were my own again, but my vision spun, and my arms were numb. I struck blindly at my cousin and felt my sword wrenched from my grip. A boot lodged itself in my stomach, and I struck the earth anew.
“A knight of House Seremai must bear great gifts to the Tachonis. And I see none in your keeping.”
His words rang against the walls of my skull long after he left the courtyard, and long after I forced myself to sit upright.
“I shouldn’t heed him too much.”
I turned to find my cousin gone, and, standing just inside the colonnade that lined the courtyard, a girl two years my junior, dark hair half-bleached by the gifts of sorcery. Resting in your arms, as a lapdog might, was a scorpion with a mottled gray carapace. This, I knew from study, was the young Lady Tertia, and halfway through stumbling to my feet, I dropped to one knee.
“My lady.”
“It’s all right. Rise. Doset has made a pet of him, and they are both dreadfully vain about it.”
“I—” I knew no protocols for disagreeing with my liege lady, and I knew just as few for speaking ill of her older brother. I was caught, as if between your scorpion’s pincers. “Am grateful for your kindness, my lady.”
“Our House is more grateful for your loyalty,” you said. “Which I am sure is a greater gift than a couple of parlor tricks.”
To the Tachonis, I supposed, my cousin’s terrible gifts would be only that.
I bowed, for again I was without protocol, a flaw I was to strive against until my death, it seems. “Thank you, my lady. I—” I was a girl of fourteen, and I was curious. “How old is your…”
Pet? Weapon? Probably both, like the sleek black mamba Aunt Abra wore coiled about her throat at state dinners.
“Oh! This is Saharkis.” You told me, and for the first time you stepped toward me, your slippered foot sinking into the grass, dirt staining the bone-white fabric. “He’s six months old now, and I’ve had him for five. He’s old enough to walk by himself, actually, but he likes being carried. Big baby.”
Scratching his head and beaming down at him, you didn’t seem to mind.
You smiled at me, though I didn’t deserve it. “I hope his armor will be as grand as yours one day, Dame Seremai.”
ii. a gifted sorcerer
“How do you do it?”
You startled at the quiet voice just behind your head. Upon the walls of the Castle in Death, you had been exercising your gifts—or, at least, that was what you meant to tell Father or Univere if they found you leaping from the walls with Saharkis and casting Feather Fall halfway to the ground, dizzying yourself with laughter.
And it did serve the good of the family, you told yourself. If an assassin of House Royce pushed you from the walls, you would strike the ground lightly, ready to hurl a psychic lance through his skull and warn your cousins of the danger.
Sure, it wasn’t quite as important as whatever Doset and Univere were getting to talk with Father and Uncle Primus about in his study, but you weren’t going to be bitter about it.
Saharkis, still small enough to carry in your arms, sprang onto the windowsill from which the voice had issued and lashed out once with his tail.
The figure who had spoken cried out and stumbled back into the room, narrowly dodging the sting at the end of Saharkis’s tail and landing hard on the flagstones.
“Sorry!” he cried out. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Hold!” you yelled, and Saharkis froze, crouched upon the windowsill, his tail still lashing eagerly for anybody who might do you harm. He stilled only when you set a hand on his back and smoothed it over the shining black of his exoskeleton. “It’s all right. It’s just Occtis. Isn’t that right?”
“Um, yeah.” Your cousin, still sprawled on the floor with a probably-bruised tailbone, nodded. “Yeah, just—Occtis.”
Your hackles lowered. You’d run across the only member of your family entirely lacking the authority to get you in trouble.
“What did you want?”
“I—what does it feel like for you?” he asked. “When you cast a spell, where does it feel like it comes from?”
Your eyes strayed to the book that had struck the ground beside him. Maybe the rumors were true.
“Like when I slowed my fall, just now?” You knew what Occtis was asking, but the fact that he had to ask raised the hairs on the back of your neck.
“Yes.” He nodded again, a horrible, beggarly hunger in the deep green of his eyes that you didn’t want to look on for very long. “Were you weakening the force of gravity, or were you decreasing your own mass—or, the acceleration quotient, were you cutting it down somehow?”
You shook your head. He was thinking about it all wrong. It wasn’t a matter of force and mathematics, it was—
“It’s like—” you tried to think about it, driven to stomach your discomfort by something that might be named pity—“I know what I want to do and I just… draw it out.”
“Like with a pen?”
“Like with a well.” You set a hand to your heart. “It comes up from below. It’s always there, ready when I call for it. Like Saharkis.” You stratched the top of his cephalothorax, and the distraction eased the tension drawing your shoulders together. It wasn’t too hard, now, to conjure a smile.
Even if you were not so strong as Doset, and Doset was not so strong as Univere.
“Oh.” Occtis’s weight sank back onto his hands. He didn’t make any move to raise himself from the floor. “Right. Well, thank you for sharing. Enjoy your game.”
For a moment, as he lay there like a misbegotten little spider on the flagstones, his pointless research scattered around him, you thought of asking him to join you.
You didn’t.
ii. a knight of the barrowguard
My tattoo was still fresh the day I took my oaths to the Barrowguard.
Before I left home, the Tachonis were so kind as to send the same artisan who had worked upon the face of the Lady Univere to outfit me in ink. It was an honor—a heavy one, the kind that crushes the lungs and leaves one speechless.
The Lady Vacharis, a distant cousin of your mother’s, was precise in her work, and accommodating indeed. She asked me what design I might like most, and told me I was free to choose as my heart desired.
She knew there was a right answer, and so did I. I chose it proudly.
Into my service to the world, I would bear my loyalty to my House upon my skin. My deeds would be theirs, no matter how far afield I strayed. Perhaps I had not the gifts of my cousin. But I would serve the noble ends of the Tachonis even still, upon the borders of the Endless Night, among friends.
I would send the dead to Death.
That is what I told myself. You can call me a fool. I suppose we both were. I cringed under the needle, when it reached the thin skin of my throat. It hurt, yes, but it was ticklish, which was the worse part of it. I gripped the sides of the table so tightly my knuckles pained me, and I gritted my teeth with such force that my head ached for the next day. Only by those methods did I keep my proud serpent from becoming a misshapen worm.
I saw you as I set out. You and your brother were passing through with Aniko, I think. You were in the stables, when I went to collect my horse, feeding a goat to Saharkis. He was drinking from it as a man would a wineskin, and you were casting some spell upon your hands that made the blood flake from them in a fine mist. It had been five years since the first time I saw you, and your hair had all turned silver. You carried yourself with the same gravity as your sister, robes of shining black adorned with points of iridescent light, so you shone like a sky of stars at midnight.
I was aware, painfully, of the swelling of the serpent at my throat, bared just above the collar of my breastplate.
“Dame Seremai,” you called out, and at last I had earned the title. I bowed cleanly at the waist, as I should have the first time I met you. “You’re setting out for Castle Torch, aren’t you?”
I straightened. “Yes. The Barrowguard has need of troops, and it will be an honor to represent my House and yours there, my lady.”
You smiled upon me. “It seems you have gifts to offer after all, whatever Sir Aniko may have said.”
I remember feeling stricken, as if by an arrow—by some implement, driven through the chest—by the fact that you recalled that day at all.
“You are kind, my lady. Thank you.”
“I saw you fight in the tournament at Telmora two summers ago, you know.” Your smile grew sly. “I’m not so kind. Just observant.”
I gritted my teeth. “To my memory, Sir Davinos carried home more pride to his house.”
“To my memory, Sir Davinos only bested you because you were wounded defending your partner in the melee, and then he was sick in front of the stands. I know who I would rather entrust with my House’s name.”
“Thank you, my lady.” Always those words, but they were always what was most appropriate.
“You will be riding into the night, won’t you?”
“Yes.” The sun was lowering. Father had tarried with his goodbyes.
“Here.”
Before I could know what you meant to do, or protest it, you stepped forward, taking my head in your hands and pressing your thumbs to my brows. Your palms were cool. I didn’t understand the words that you spoke, but every shadow in the stable seemed to lighten, darkened corners revealing themselves in clean lines.
“That should keep the road ahead clear for you, no matter how dark it gets,” you said as you stepped back. “Well, for the next eight hours, at least. Tomorrow, you should probably just find an inn.”
“I will,” I said, and then, again, “Thank you, my lady.”
I wished, for the first time, that I might have leave to say more than those four words.
But I did not. So I bowed once more, and I left, never to see you again in life.
iii. a willing sacrifice
Tannesar had its upsides, you guessed. You felt your power swell in its constant shadow, even if you missed the stars. Saharkis adored the sands beyond the temple walls, and you spent your evenings with him, hunting the deadlands for whatever prey was sturdy enough to survive the Barrowdells. Out there, in the cold and dark, you were free.
Father had been there for months already with Uncle Primus by the time he sent for you and your siblings. For what purpose, you didn’t know. Mother hugged you so tightly when you left that your ribs ached.
Univere was silent. Doset chattered with endless, insufferable panache, which he usually only did when he rounded a corner and came upon Saharkis without warning. He retired early at night, and so did Sir Seremai, and you wished you might have stopped at Castle Torch on the way.
Yes, yes, it was an errand of haste and secrecy, but it might have been—well, novel, you thought, to see Dame Seremai dueling with her fellows under the sunset before the Endless Night, her hair a jet-black whip behind her, her dark eyes intent and her skin gleaming with sweat and fading sunlight.
But oh, well.
Father called you into the Apotheon Vindicta, two nights after you arrived, his face grave.
“Tertia,” he said. “House Tachonis has need of you.”
“For what?” You already knew. You just didn’t want to.
You’d seen, from a distance, the minor Halovar cousins in cages. You’d seen them vanish below the surface never to return. And each time you looked away.
You’d seen Father and Uncle Primus’s notes, seen Univere consult with them alongside Petra and Ryah and emerge with a troubled brow. Surely, with the power of so many great sorcerers combined, the solution would reveal itself. The Deva Vindicta would rise, and House Tachonis would know security from every enemy that might raise a hand to it—surely you would not have to lift your own.
“Our House,” Father said, “is in danger. You know this well enough. You have seen your—cousin. And you know the Halovars ever extend their reach.”
“Yes, I know.”
“The Deva Vindicta will not rise from a Halovar. For whatever reason, their bodies reject the prosthesis. Perhaps, they were never truly the most worthy of the priestly houses.” His eyes met yours, and your blood ran cold. “For our House to endure, we require the heart, body, and soul of a Tachonis.”
Just outside the tent, Saharkis’s mandibles clacked nervously. Your mouth went dry.
“Father, I—”
“You will know power.” He rushed to say it, as if pressing his hands over a stab wound through your gut. “You will be our salvation, Tertia.” His voice caught in his throat, and he had to swallow before he could speak further. “You are a gifted sorcerer, and my brave girl, and—I believe you can do this. We need you to do this. Will you?”
Shining in the depths of his eyes was the same grasping desperation that had seen in Occtis’s half a decade ago. Across from you sat a man so terrified by the cost of failure that he had brought his own child across a Barrowdell for the slaughter.
That terror would claim all of you, you understood, even Lord Primus, without the blessing of Man’s Last Angel.
You looked across the table, at the man who was your father, who had sent for you, brought you here, to die.
You were weaker than Doset, who was weaker in Univere, and you still had a gift to return to your House.
You said yes.
iii. a loyal vassal
“Dame Seremai,” said Lady Petra. “A word?”
“Of course, my lady.”
She and Lady Ryah had appeared upon either side of me, melting from the shadows without so much as a sound and falling into step with my route around the outskirts of the castle. Even under the noonday sun, the temperature dropped as if I had stepped into a gulley of deep shade. After nearly an hour’s patrol, it was a welcome change.
“What did you wish to speak of?”
Petra’s pallid face was expressionless, even as her mouth moved. “The Revolutionary Council sees a danger within the Night, centered upon the newly discovered ruins of Tannesar. You are familiar?”
“Yes,” I said. “I had a missive from Lord Segundus that he had business there, though of what kind it was not my place to inquire.”
Lady Ryah smiled, ever so slightly. “Our business there is resolved. But the Revolutionary Council found cause for concern in his reports. Warlocks from Venatus are pressing further into the Night, seeking the ruins that they might pillage them for their own ends.”
“This must be prevented,” said Lady Petra. “At any cost. The Council would ask that the Barrowguard send a battalion at once to hold the ruins against these interlopers.”
“Of course, my lady,” I said. I wondered if I ought to have said ‘my ladies,’ but decided that I had come too far to amend myself. “I should be happy to relay your letter to Captain Phaedron.”
Lady Ryah gritted her teeth. A faint hiss not unlike that of Aunt Abra’s mamba emerged from behind them. “There we run into some difficulty, Dame Seremai.”
“What difficulty?”
“The letter was lost,” Petra said. “Our attendants upon this journey have been incompetent to the point of farce. One of them had a hole in his pack and failed to notice until we were halfway through the Dvalmar Pass.”
“Much of our correspondence is lost to the winds, I am afraid.” Ryah set a hand upon my shoulder. In my periphery, it looked like a vast, pale spider. “Could you give word to Captain Phaedron on our behalf?”
Never had any member of my liege house granted me so profound a trust.
I remembered a girl, who I did not yet know was dead, stepping out onto the grass to speak to me and sullying her slippers in the process.
I gave them the thing that she had named my greatest gift.
I said yes.
the creature
They began by cutting its chest open with a hot knife.
They had chained it down, so that it wouldn’t disrupt their work. It had agreed to that.
Its brother threw up in his handkerchief, and pretended that he hadn’t. Its eldest sister held its hand as its father forced a hand into its abdomen.
He plucked its heart from its chest. Plucked is too neat a word. Arteries were severed. Blood stained him to the elbows. It screamed for him to stop. It had already said yes.
Into the fire went its heart, and it sizzled there and burned. Something cold took its place—a sphere of ivory polished to a sheen, a piece of a body that had seen a hundred score more years than the ribs that now enfolded it.
Wings unfurled. Chains snapped. Skin shriveled tight against bone, and then split upon it.
It screamed for its pet, who had not been given the chance to die for it.
A tail of bone, crowned by a barbed stinger, shattered the stone table it had risen from.
Time passed. Shadows moved. Blood flowed. When it wept, the walls trembled. When it sighed, ears bled.
So much time, nothing but time, it hadn’t worked, if it had worked, it wouldn’t be cold, it was cold. It was not salvation. It was not even ruin. It was a failure, and like its cousin it bloodied itself against the wall of what it could not be.
Voices came. They brought warmth with them.
Among them moved a figure it recognized—broad shoulders, a braid like a coiled whip.
Here was someone known, trusted, and it seized upon her, carried her high, pinned her down. It was a kind of embrace. It could give no other kind.
She fell at its feet and turned, coughed. Blood stained the serpent’s tongue on her chin. There were the high cheekbones, there the strong nose. It knew this face.
It pierced and shattered it. It knew now the fate earned by loyal things.
the victim
I died with the taste of my own blood in my mouth. I had time enough to be frightened, but not enough to scream. I felt my nose break between my eyes, and then nothing at all. In the darkness, before bone lanced through my brain, I saw nothing but the battering of white wings.
I was afraid that I might know who you were.
Dame Seremai
I gasp awake—or, not awake. Dead. There is no air in my lungs. I touch the bridge of my nose and find it whole, and when I move to wipe the blood from my chin, I find none.
The darkness still presses in close around me, but it is not the stagnant chill that permeated the halls of Tannesar. The air is warm upon my skin, and it smells of moss and fallen leaves—bloom and richness and rot. For a moment, I look about for the druid Thaisha, but it seems she has been more fortunate than I.
I think that I should get to my feet, and in thinking it, I find myself upright. In the seconds after a battle—a battle that killed me—my nerves should buzz with fear, but my body is tranquil. No terror burns through my veins; no heartbeat slams against my ribs.
Cicadas sing among the shadowed trees. Lights thread out of the darkness beyond me, a soft, beckoning gold.
I don’t answer their call. Not yet. There is one charge I may still fulfill.
When you emerge from between the trees, tears shining on your cheeks, I am waiting for you.
Tertia
Your cousin’s face hangs over your memory. Find who you were on the other side.
He gave you the same measure of kindness you offered him years ago, which is to say, only a little.
Your soul is a small thing, amputated from something great and terrible, and it feels ragged at the edges. Your hair clings to the side of your face in wisps of silver, and the winds of the path buffet you this way and that, threatening to drag you into beckoning shadow.
I stand ahead of you, one hand outstretched, the other ready on the hand of the blade I carry even in Death.
“D-Dame Seremai!” you call out. Your voice cracks, yet you feel nothing in your throat. The tears on your face don’t roll downwards of their own accord. You wonder if they will ever fade. “It was you. I—I’m so sorry. I failed—I failed.” I catch your arms, but it does not stop you from falling at my feet.
Sight and form are different here. You are yourself as you died at Tannesar. You are the girl of twelve with the pet scorpion. You are the sorcerous teenager leaping from her family’s roof, and you are something terrorized and terrible, and you are so sorry.
Saharkis’s tail was dangling from Occtis’s belt. Univere promised that she would not leave him behind when you were gone. She promised.
How deeply you must have failed, for her to neglect your last living wish.
“So did I, my lady.”
You look up at me in shock, and in one another’s eyes, we see ourselves reflected: a bold knight, handsome and strong, striving ever toward that which is right, and a brilliant sorcerer, luminous and merciful, shedding wonder and kindness all around with shocking generosity.
“I wanted to visit Castle Torch,” you tell me.
Thank you, my lady, I should say even still. Even here, it is the only proper thing to say.
“I wish you had,” I tell you, and I draw you to your feet. We are grasping one another’s arms tightly. It is something like an embrace—something like your talons sinking into my shoulders.
You flinch. “It—it’s too late, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know, my lady.”
You lurch forward, curl an arm around my shoulders, smear your tears upon the side of my throat.
“I—always knew what waited for me here,” you say. “I knew the way would be easy, and I would—end up where I was supposed to. I knew so many things so certainly.”
“And now you know nothing at all.” I understand that well enough.
The world has gone mad. Let us be madder still.
“We—should be on our way. I think I can find the path. I think I can keep us on it.”
I think that you can, too.
“I will guard your steps, my lady.”
“Thank you, Gaya.”
“Of course, Tertia.” Your name, light and unadorned, strikes you as a relief.
We join hands, and I draw my sword. The Path unfurls before us.