Oathen (45 page)

“It’s all right,” she murmured. “You weren’t
mine then. I had no right—”

His dark eyes burned. “But you do
now.”

~~~

As the pair kissed again, Meena smiled
inquiringly at Ahm, noticing the grins on the other Oathbound
couples’ faces. “That typical?” she asked, nodding in the direction
of the dais.

Ahm smiled. “Either that, or a full-arm slap,”
he replied.

“Or both,” a Scion woman said, and her Oathen
chuckled.

“Ah.” Meena grinned.

“You didn’t experience this at your
Oathbinding?” Ahm asked, curious.

Meena lowered her head, smiling in
remembrance. “Arisson and I were already married. They cleared the
room for us.”

Ahm’s eyes widened. “Oh,” he said, clearing
his throat with a grin. “That does happen, sometimes, with existing
couples. It’s a powerful spell.”

Meena grinned, her cheeks warm. “That it is,”
she said, watching the two new Oathens cling to each other, wet,
happy, and completely distracted from the fact that all too soon,
they’d be walking into mortal danger. “That it is.”

When they’d dried off and ascended to the castle’s
high-ceilinged dining hall, Sanych let go of Geret’s hand and
demonstrated to the others her ability to
blink
between
locations and to turn her light in on itself, making her or her
shield invisible. She started to go into heavy detail, but when she
felt Geret’s ability to follow her explanation begin to wane, she
stopped. Curzon would be the only one able to grasp her theory
anyway, and he wasn’t there.

Rhona and Salvor walked in just then. The
tension boiling off of them was palpable to Sanych, despite the
amorous afterglow of the Oathbinding spell.
Or
, she
wondered,
has it made me more sensitive?

“But this is wonderful, Sanych,” Ahm said.
“Your talent could save us days of travel. We could coordinate a
simultaneous large-scale attack on all of Dzur i’Oth’s known
locations! It’s the sort of power that Oolat alone has possessed
until now. Your gift could turn the tide of this long war and end
it.”

“There aren’t any Scions who can transport
like this?” Sanych asked, surprised.

Sosta shook her head, a wry smile on her face.
“Each cell has only a few spellcasters, and none so blessed as to
have the gift of controlling light. We did have one, a man named
Jelm, a few cycles before I was born, but…”

Sanych saw a look of surprise flicker over
Meena’s face, then it was gone. “He was killed?” she asked in
sympathy.

“No,” Sosta replied. “He left Shanal; he and
his Oathen didn’t meld well. You know that magical gifts are
heritable? They also tend to occur in future generations, although
new ones emerge regularly as we marry non-Scions. It was a great
blow to our cause when Jelm left; he was a strong spellcaster.” She
shook her head, and then met Sanych’s eyes and smiled. “You can see
why we’re so ecstatic to have you join us. Most of us are strictly
warriors of the hack-and-slash variety. Only our spellcasters and
our Oathbinding truly enable us to stand up to the cult. With your
magic, and with Meena’s help, I have a good feeling about our
chances at destroying Dzur i’Oth.”

Sanych nodded. She caught the look on Meena’s
face and was disturbed to see the predatory gleam in the
Shanallar’s eyes
. No, that is why we’re here: to rain death.
I’ll just help that rain fall faster.

“And we can’t wait any longer to get that
done,” Meena said. “Oolat probably has the
Tome
by
now.”

“His first order of business will be to
destroy us,” Ahm added. “We need to warn the other cells to be
extra vigilant tonight, and we must plan an assault as soon as
possible. Sanych, can you take me to them?”

Sanych gulped. It was one thing to transport
herself, or a rock, but to be responsible for another’s life as
well? She let out a breath and nodded. Stepping close, she took
Ahm’s hand. In a moment they were gone.

~~~

When they finally
blinked
back into the
dining hall, Sanych was chilled and exhausted. She’d taken Ahm to
every other Scion cell, often by
blinking
along their last
known path until they crashed into their protective spells, which
hadn’t been pleasant. The cell leaders had arranged a coordinated
attack at dawn on the Dragon Temple, the farmhouse, the Ochre Tower
and other known Dzur i’Oth locations.

“Thank you, Sanych,” said Ahm. “Now go get
some sleep. We have a vital day ahead.”

Sanych stumbled toward the stairs, not looking
forward to all the
blinking
she’d have to do in the
morning.

“You going to stay awake long enough to find a
bed?” came Geret’s voice.

She looked up, seeing him waiting right where
her sense of him said he was: across the room at the base of the
staircase. “I think so,” she said, smiling.

He came forward and put an arm around her
waist, and together they climbed to the third floor.

“Listen, Sanych,” Geret said, “will you help
me with something? Just for a minute.”

Sanych frowned, trying to read his mood, but
received only an image of a starry night sky. “What is it?” she
finally asked out loud.

He bit the inside of his lip. “Will you come
in with me?” he asked, tipping his head toward a nearby, unoccupied
room.

Her brows instantly lowered, and unhappy
associations flowed from her mind to his. He pursed his lips. “I’m
not going to live that down easily, am I?”

Her silent stare was her only answer, but she
sensed the ache it made in his chest.

“Please,” he asked, his eyes gently insistent.
“I feel now how much you distrusted me recently, but just because
you can read my mind now doesn’t mean everything is all right
between us. I want to start again. Don’t you?”

He really means it
, Sanych realized.
She nodded. He opened the door, hearing it squeak on its hinges
from infrequent use, and led her inside the dark room. A table, two
chairs, a wardrobe, a small basin and ewer on a half-circle table,
and a wide bed with a dark red coverlet were all that furnished the
room, aside from numerous floor-rugs and an unused fireplace
stocked with dry wood.

“All right, what sort of starting again did
you have in mind?” Sanych asked, rubbing her arms against the cold
for a moment. She focused a beam of light at the fireplace logs,
narrowing it to a fiery point, and the bottom-most log caught
fire.

Geret stared at the fire for a moment.
“That’ll take some getting used to.” He took her hands, murmuring
for her to sit on the bed’s edge. Her brow wrinkled, and
vulnerability and mistrust hovered thinly around her.

“Wait just a minute,” he said, as she sat. He
turned away and grabbed the empty washing basin, planting it upside
down between the bed’s enormous feather pillows. “There we
go.”

Sanych could only read smugness and excitement
from him; he was enjoying not telling her what he was doing, and
pleased she hadn’t figured it out yet.

“All right, scootch over,” he said, his voice
eager.

Sanych eyed him, but sensed nothing to give
her pause. She slid over next to the wall, and Geret lay down on
the coverlet next to her.

As she lay down, head next to the upturned
basin, he looked over at her and frowned. “It’s still not right
yet,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The lighting’s not right. Can you make some
stars on the ceiling for us? Please?” he asked, and she felt the
first flickerings of his self-consciousness.

Sanych’s eyes shifted back and forth. Finally,
she understood what he was doing, if not why. She raised a finger
and pointed at the ceiling; a few dozen starry lights winked into
existence, shimmering down on them.

He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes
far away. “Perfect.”

Sanych smiled, turning her head toward him.
“The
Cuttleboat
. But…why the basin?”

He rapped it with his knuckles and chuckled,
“It’s a coconut, of course.” Sanych snorted in laughter, and Geret
nodded against the coverlet. “That’s when things started going
wrong between us; I kissed you when I shouldn’t have. I should have
respected your choice, should have respected you. I didn’t realize
how strong my feelings were for you, until I couldn’t stop myself.”
He looked away from her eyes, and she felt a wash of shame rush
through him. “The same thing happened with Rhona, in a way. I was
so distracted—”

“Geret,” Sanych interrupted, sending him a
rush of irritation, “you’re repeating yourself. You’ve been running
this guilty song through your head ever since we were
Oathbound.”

“Well,” he blustered, defensive, “it’s on my
mind!”

That made her grin. “All right, that’s fair,”
she said, brushing a calming hand down his arm. “But I’ll be glad
when you pick something else to obsess about.”

He looked into her eyes. “I wanted to go back
to this moment and start again with you. Make things different this
time, better. Maybe even right.”

“So, you’re
not
going to kiss me this
time?” she teased.

“I’ll kiss you if you choose to let me,
Sanych, and only then. That Oathbinding was pretty powerful, and
I’m not sure I’m ready to jump into being together with you,
knowing it was sparked by a spell instead of by us. I want us to do
this together. Whatever it ends up being.”

Sanych nodded silently; she mirrored his
feelings on that matter. “Then I guess you’d better kiss
me.”

The rush of emotion from Geret took Sanych’s
breath away. At her quiet sigh, he eased his shoulders toward her
across the coverlet, smiling into her eyes, and let his lips press
against hers for a long moment.

“This is a good fresh start.” Her hand slipped
into his palm in the dark, and they lay together, sharing emotions
with their heads tilted together, touching, as if to encourage the
transfer of feelings.

When Geret sat up to seek his own bed a while
later, she tugged on his hand. “Stay.”

He frowned. “After all those unhappy thoughts
you keep having, you ask me that?”

Her eyes met his in the winking starlight, and
she made her feelings known through their bond.

“You’re right,” he said in response to her
unspoken explanation, “I wouldn’t want that to happen
either.”

He tugged off his boots, and then hers,
plunking them onto the floor, and they slipped under the covers.
Geret reached out an arm and wrapped her small waist, scooping her
against him, her back against his chest. Laying a kiss against the
back of her ear, her prince sighed in deep contentment and
murmured, “Rest well, Archivist.”

Sanych relaxed against his warmth, the tension
and heartache of the day, and of many days beforehand, fading into
pale jade shadows. “Rest well,” she murmured, “Oathen.”

In moments, they were both asleep in the
starlight.

~~~

Meena did not sleep. She didn’t need it,
especially on the very eve of what she hoped would be the final
battle of her life.

She sat sideways between two of the
magic-formed, toothy crenellations atop the castle’s wall, her view
of the rolling forested hills hindered only by darkness. Her knees
were pulled to her chest and her back pressed against cold stone.
The toes of her boots bent up against the next crenel. The freezing
wind whirled around her, through her short red hair, and she let it
soothe her into a state of reminiscence and meditation.

Hours passed; she considered the generations
she’d outlived, and how she’d shaped their future with her
arbitrary will. The world as it existed now was largely as she had
intended it, at least in some lands.

Shanal was finally going to be one of them:
her last gift to the world, and especially to her new-found
children.

Her cheek felt the bite of a particularly
strong gust of icy wind as her thoughts turned to her Oathen,
sacrificed by her actions hundreds of years earlier. Here and now,
he felt more vivid than he had in decades.

Arisson. Perhaps, this last time,
I will finally find you.

She sighed, tipping her head back against the
stone. She’d never mourned him properly. She’d fled the day he
died, and returned only rarely, busy with her own planet-saving
agenda. Time had blunted her sorrow and loss to a dull weight,
invisible in her heart like a stone forgotten in one’s pouch, only
drawing notice when the fingers of her mind brushed against it. Now
it was far too late for mourning.

It was never too late for vengeance, though.
She slitted her eyes and smiled with dark promise. She had not been
able to protect her Oathen, but by the blood of the ancient dragons
of Shanal, she would avenge him. Once and for all.

Determination firmed in her mind like a steel
blade, and she smiled into the weak orange light of impending dawn
as it fought its way through the scudding clouds. Daily, light won
over darkness. And today, she hoped to do the same.