Queen of Song and Souls (9 page)

Torvan and his mentor talked about the rule of Demyan Raz, and the hidebound traditions of the Mage Council. They shared treasonous, revolutionary thoughts and plotted ways to increase their own powers by supplanting older but less talented Mages. They even conceived the idea of breeding stronger, more powerful
umagi
by crossing magical bloodlines.

And then the Mage Wars began. Gaelen vel Serranis slaughtered Demyan Raz and every last member of his clan—erasing the most powerful Mage family in Eld and upsetting the balance of power: As the Wars raged. Primages fought like vicious dogs to ascend to the dark throne of Eld. Intrigue, betrayal, even murder became commonplace in the great Mage Halls scattered across the land.

It was Torvan's mentor who finally succeeded where all the others had failed. Torvan's mentor whose revolutionary ideas and forethought had led him to build the first underground stronghold, into which his trusted inner circle and a few thousand Mages and
umagi
fled when Rain Tairen Soul scorched the world. It was Torvan's mentor who assumed the mantle of power and claimed the purple robes of the High Mage of Eld.

And soon, very soon, it would be that same mentor who would lead Eld back to greatness. Then all the world would tremble and fall prostrate before them. And all the world would venerate the name of Torvan's mentor, the High Mage Vadim Maur.

Vadim Maur.
The mere mention of that hated name sent a bolt of fear shooting through Ellysetta's veins.

As if alerted by her fear, a familiar sentience suddenly turned its dagger-sharp attention in her direction. Ellysetta gave a choked scream and flung herself backward. She yanked her consciousness back into herself and raised her mental barriers in a flash. Her hands clutched Rain's arm so tightly, her nails broke against the unyielding surface of his golden war steel.

"Fey!" he cried. A six-fold weave sprang up around her the same instant twenty red Fey'cha daggers sank into Eld flesh. The Mage died. Ellysetta's knees gave out and she collapsed in Rain's arms.

Still kneeling by the dead Mage, the vol Oros sisters continued to hold his head and spin their Truthspeaking weave. Several concerned warriors tried to pull them away, but they resisted until another group of Fey yanked the body of the Mage out of their grip.

"What just happened?" Rain demanded. "Ellysetta?"

Still trembling, her throat too tight to speak, she shook her head and tried to swallow. "The High Mage ... he was there. While they were Truthspeaking that Mage, he was there."

Rain's head snapped up. His gaze pinned the vol Oros sisters. "Narena? Faerah?. Did either of you sense anything?"

"Aiyah,
but it wasn't
our
Truthspeaking that drew him." The pair turned their piercing eyes on Ellysetta.

"I wasn't Truthspeaking. How could I be, when I've never done it before? Ellysetta paced the confines of Lord Teleos's private audience chamber. The Fey had Fired the body of the Mage and dispersed the ash into the winds, and Lord Teleos had offered his personal chambers for the use of Rain, Ellysetta, and the vol Oros sisters.

Gaelen, who stood at the perimeter of the room along with the other members of the three
shei'dalins'
respective quintets, gave a humorless laugh. "When has lack of experience ever stopped you from weaving great magic,
kem’falla?”

"But wouldn't I have known? Wouldn't you"—she glanced at Rain and her quintet—"have known? That weave they spun took no small amount of magic."

"When several
shei’dalins
spin, Feyreisa, even strong threads can hide among the others." Narena, the elder of the two sisters, offered the possibility. "You must have analyzed our pattern and added your own threads to our weave shortly after we began. It is a common way to learn a new weave."

If she had, she'd done it purely without conscious thought.

"May I ask what made you search the Mage's mind for memories of his mother?" she asked the vol Oros sisters. "Is that something you usually do when you Truthspeak a Mage—tap into the emotions he felt as a child in order to enter his mind?"

Surprise flickered in dark eyes. The sisters exchanged a look. "We made no such search, Feyreisa,'' Narena said slowly.

Ellysetta frowned. "But you did. You discovered his name, and his memories of his mother, and used those to probe deeper into his thoughts."

The sisters continued to look at her as if she were some unexpected—and disconcerting—-surprise discovered beneath a scientist's close-viewing glass. Ellysetta's hand rose to her throat. "But surely you heard him? Surely I wasn't the only one to see the memories of his childhood? How he became a Mage ... how he rose in rank and came to know the High Mage"—she swallowed and forced herself to say the name— "Vadim Maur?”

Faerah moistened her lips. "Did he ... tell
you
all that, Feyreisa?" Horror and curiosity mingled in equal parts on her lovely face.

"I..." Ellysetta's cheeks began to burn and her hands went clammy. She hated when she did things like this. Hated when her gift—or curse, as often seemed more the case—made her seem such a strange, odd misfit of a person. She hated the way it made people look at her—as if they couldn't decide whether she was Fey or foe, magic or monster.

Most of all, she hated how it made her wonder the same thing.

Rain's hand closed around hers, the broad strength of his fingers squeezing gently, and with that simple handclasp came the rush of emotion she needed most: love. Utter devotion and unswerving acceptance. He was the unyielding haven in the center of her storm.
«Breathe, shei'tani. It's all right. Every
thing will be all right.

She took a shuddering breath and nodded as she fought to control her racing heart. So long as Rain was at her side, she could get through all of the oddities of her existence, even the parts that shot terror through her soul

"What did the Mage tell you, Feyreisa?" Narena echoed her younger sister's query.

"He told me about his life... well, 'told' isn't exactly the right word. It was more like he let me live his memories with him...." She glanced at Rain. "Almost the way tairen do when they sing."

"You mean you heard his song?”

"Yes." His horrified expression made her flush and begin to stammer. "No. Oh, I don't know, Rain. 1 don't know what I did, or how he shared what he shared. I only know it was the truth," She squeezed his hands. "I
know
it was the truth. His name was Torvan Zon. His father was a Primage, and his mother was an
umagi
concubine."

She also knew that Torvan Zon had loved his mother. Even after he'd woven so much dark magic that he was no longer capable of love, he couldn't erase the part of him that belonged to her before it belonged to the Mages. By then, however, he had learned to consider love—or any form of emotional attachment—a weakness, and so he had hidden it away deep inside his mind, a shameful secret never to be revealed.

"Rain, Zon knew Vadim Maur—before he was the High Mage. He was Vadim's …" She hesitated. "Friend" wasn't the right word. Mages didn't have friends. They reviled all emotional attachments. She finally settled on: "He was one of Vadim Maur's inner circle."

She pressed her hands to her temples as she paced the room. She could still remember everything so vividly ... as if some part of the Mage had become part of her... or rather as if his memories had become her own. She remembered the slow decline, from the child warm in his mother's arms to the Mage who had, without a twinge of conscience, enslaved another person's soul for his own use. She
knew
exactly how triumphant—almost godlike—he'd felt when he'd completed the claiming of his first
umagi
and then forced that
umagi
to do his bidding. She knew the euphoric rush of exultant power that had flooded the Mage's body. That rush—that feeling of greatness and invincible power—was the drug, the addiction, that kept Mages pursuing ever-greater, ever-darker magic. She could still sense it, even now. And some part of her liked the taste of it. Her stomach lurched. She stopped pacing and put her head down in an attempt to quell the nausea. Oh, gods. What had she done? Had she opened her soul to Torvan? Had she inadvertently admitted some part of his evil Eld darkness into her own soul—or, worse still, released the darkness that had existed in her own nature all along?

"
Shei’tani
?" Rain was there in an instant, searching her face in concern as he pulled her into his arms. "What is it?"

She leaned against him for a moment, closing her eyes and letting herself shelter in his strength. When he held her like this, when his soul reached for hers as it was doing now, he almost made her fears melt away, almost made her believe that she truly was as bright and shining as he claimed.

If he knew the truth, he would recoil from you in horror.

Ellysetta flinched at the cold whisper that snaked through her mind, taunting her, filling her with doubts. That voice—a voice that sounded more like her own than the High Mage's— was the same that had urged her to weave Azrahn in the Well. Alarmed, she pulled out of Rain's arms. "Ellysetta?"

"I'm all right," she reassured him, taking a quick step to evade his hands. "It's just that the Mage's memories were so vivid." Not a lie. Not the whole truth either, but she wasn't about to admit the ugliness of her dark thoughts in front of these two
shei'dalins.
"It's unsettling to be that closely connected to evil... to know what pleasure the Mage felt when he enslaved a person's soul.. ." Ellysetta's shudder was entirely genuine. That gloating triumph, that thrill of dark joy as a weaker soul succumbed to the Mage’s domination was disturbing in every way ... but not half so disturbing as her own echo of that thrill. Gods save her.

She forced her features into a mask of calm and tried to deflect everyone's attention, from her.
"Teska,
let's not dwell on. this. It doesn't matter, in any case. None of what the Mage showed me shed any light on the High Mage's plans.
^”
She infused her voice with a gossamer weave of Spirit to encourage the Fey to turn their attention elsewhere. Spirit was her strongest branch of magic, strong enough that even Rain and Bel admitted she spun a finer weave than they — and they were two of the Fading Lands' most gifted Spirit masters.

Without so much as a blink of suspicion, Rain turned to the vol Oros sisters. "Were you able to learn anything? What were the Mages and
dahl’reisen
doing here in Orest?"

Narena frowned slightly, but if she sensed a compulsion weave, she gave no other sign of it. "As you already suspect, Feyreisen, they came for your mate. The High Mage has not given up his pursuit of her."

A chill raised the hairs on Ellysetta's arms. Though the shields spun around her each night as she slept kept her dreams free of disturbing nightmares, she never deluded herself that the Mage had decided to leave her in peace. He was not the sort to admit defeat.

"Do not fear,
shei'tani
," Rain murmured. "He will never see that aim fulfilled."

"
Nei
, he will not," Bel echoed, his cobalt eyes calm and filled with unwavering certainty.

She turned to the leader of her quintet, who had become her dearest friend over the last months, and for his sake, she forced a smile and pretended a confidence she did not share. Bel meant what he said. He would die to protect her, as would every other
lu'tan
who had bloodsworn himself to her. But that would not stop the Mage from coming after her.

Rain brushed a caress of warm Spirit against her senses, but kept his gaze fixed on Narena. "What of Koderas?" he asked.

The
shei’dalin
nodded and folded her hands in her lap, long fingers twining gracefully. She seemed so calm, so perfectly composed. Serene and queenly. Much more so than Ellysetta, the uncrowned and exiled queen of the Fading Lands.

"The fires are lit, as you surmised," Narena confirmed. "The Eld are preparing their invasion force."

"Where does the High Mage intend to strike?"

"An armada will reach the mouth of Great Bay in five weeks' time and move on to Celieria City once King's Point and Queen's Point are destroyed, but that is not the Eld's primary target. The bulk of the forces from Koderas will attack Kreppes." Kreppes was Great Lord Cannevar Barrial's fortress, located where the Azar River flowed into the Heras. "Once they establish a stronghold there—"

"They can bring the full might of his invasion forces across the Heras to conquer the North." Rain's boots clapped on the hard stone floor as he began to pace. "I thought it would be Moreland, Great Lord Sebourne's keep. It's a straight shot down the Selas River from Koderas. Kreppes is less obvious, but still damaging enough if they capture it."

Narena watched him with a sober gaze. "There is more, kem'Feyreisen. This Mage did not know the exact numbers of the Eld army, but every time he thought of it, his mind compared it to the Army of Darkness from the Time Before Memory."

Ellysetta's heart skipped a beat, then resumed at an accelerated pace. Little was known about the Army of Darkness, but all the legends concerning the scouring of the world that had ushered in the dawn of the First Age spoke in awed terms of an army that stretched farther than the eye could see. An army so vast that, even marching nonstop, it would take days to pass through a place. An army that made the earth shake beneath its boots.