The Black Queen (Book 6) (22 page)

It was the Isle itself that scared her. Since she had spoken to her father, she had had two more Visions. In both of them, the Black Queen stared at her with empty eyes. A lisping male voice, breaking as if it could not finish a word without taking a breath, called weakly for help. And then her father, frowning as he looked at her, saying,
Perhaps I understand even less than I thought
.

She didn’t know what any of this meant. She didn’t know how the pieces went together and there was no one to tell her. Her father’s Visions were weak—he always admitted that—and her uncles, whose Visions were not much stronger, hadn’t come on this trip. The Infantry Leaders had a bit of Vision, a bit of insight, but not enough to consult them. And there were no Shaman here and none, so far as she knew, on Blue Isle.

The only other Visionaries with whom she could compare what she Saw were her cousins, Gift and Arianna. Lyndred shuddered. She couldn’t imagine talking with the hard-eyed woman of her Vision or her brother who was said to be so like her as to be the male version of her.

Lyndred had to figure these Visions out on her own, and what she saw so far, she despised. Her father had told her to let them play out, but maybe, this afternoon, she had just been handed a different opportunity. Maybe, she had received a chance to stay away from the blond man who would, someday, father her child.

She put on the blouse and pants she had taken from her sea chest, then slipped on her boots. They were dry. She picked up her wet clothes. She would take them to the Domestics, and then she would find her father. She wouldn’t discuss Visions or the future or anything so very obvious.

Instead, she would find out how he felt about a Gull Rider named Ace. This time, she would act with her father’s approval. And this time, he wouldn’t even know he was being manipulated.

TEN

GIFT STARED at the Shaman. He felt even more distant from them than he had when he walked into this room. Most of them had not moved from their chairs. They sat with their fists clenched on their knees, and watched him. Only Perdom, Madot, and Kerde were standing beside him. The apprentices huddled in the back, clearly feeling out of their element.

The incense had cleared from the room, for which Gift was grateful. The door was open, and the light from the Fey lamps in the corridor seemed even stronger. The candles inside the room had burnt halfway down, their wax pooling in the base of their holders.

The Shaman had made it clear why he could not be part of their order. As angry as he was, as much as he wished they had told him sooner, he understood their reasons, and he was appalled he had not realized what he had killed someone, however inadvertantly.

But things had changed—and more than in his status at Protectors Village. They had changed in the way the world felt around him, in what he understood about himself. He couldn’t let his mixed and quite troubled emotions guide him. He had to take control of this meeting, and he had to do so with an authority he rarely used, an authority he had been denying since he had come here.

He had to do so as a member of the Black Family.

“The magick cannot control us if we understand it,” he said, repeating and turning Kerde’s words back to her. “That’s the first rule any Fey child learns.”

“Some magick is beyond us, and has always been,” she said.

He turned and walked into the hall, half afraid they would close the door behind him. They did not, probably startled that he had treated their leader rudely. But he wasn’t leaving.

He was right; the light from the Fey lamps had grown brighter. The souls trapped within had all moved within their little glass prison, crowding against the section closest to the meeting room. They were watching, trying to hear, and in so doing, shedding their light on the same area of floor.

He picked the nearest Fey lamp off its peg and brought it into the room. Kerde backed away from it. Perdom put his hands in front of himself as if to block the light. Madot shook her head, telling him without words that his action was incorrect.

“These souls,” he said, “have given themselves over to another magick, one that we don’t entirely understand. In here,” and he waved his hand at the lamp, “are Shaman who believed their time was done, and in service to the rest of us, gave the last of their being to illuminate the world around us. You allow these lamps to burn for no reason at all, to light a corridor no one is using. You are wasting magick.”

Kerde crossed her arms. “They cannot come in here while we meet.”

“You have ceased meeting as Shaman to apprentice. You are now meeting with one of the heirs to the Black Throne.” Gift made his voice sound powerful. He grabbed the lamp by its hook, and hung it on a peg. As he did so, he turned to the nearest Shaman. “Get the rest of the lamps. You,” he said, pointing to another, “blow out the candles, and remove the incense holders.”

They all looked at Kerde, as if waiting for her response. He didn’t give her time to make one.

“You may stare at Kerde all you want,” he said, “but the Fey follow simple rules. You are all subject to my family’s authority. You heard Kerde. She believes I should be on the Black Throne. If that is the case, then you are not only disobeying the Black Heir, but the one who will, someday, take the Throne. Are you willing to risk that?”

It was a gamble. The argument was weak, especially given his denial earlier. But he was counting on the training, embedded early in all Fey, to do as the Black Family wanted and to avoid confrontation, since no one ever knew where such confrontation could lead.

Finally, the Shaman nearest him stood, and with a dip of her head as if she were trying to avoid Kerde’s gaze, left the room. The other Shaman, the one Gift had told to put out the candles rose as well, pinching the wicks with his wizened fingers. An apprentice in the back began to remove the incense holders. Another apprentice slipped to the front, and disappeared into the hallway, only to reappear with the first Fey lamps.

“Good,” Gift said, in that new powerful voice. He stood as he had seen his Islander father stand, as his Fey grandfather used to stand, feet apart, arms at his side, braced, or so it felt, for anything that would come his way.

As more lamps came into the room, Gift could actually see faces, not as a uniform whole, but for who they were. He could put names on the Shaman before him, see how some of them had watched this entire proceeding with distaste and how others, mostly the older ones, had such impassive expressions on their faces that he knew they were hiding any emotion they felt.

They knew that the meeting was his now, that he had turned the tables on them in a way they didn’t entirely understand, and that he would control what happened from now on. If they thought about it, they would realize that they had won. They had forever forbidden him from becoming a Shaman, and at this moment, his own future was, as Kerde said, in doubt.

But they would help him with that. He would not allow magick to control him or his family or the Empire that his sister ruled. He had felt like an apprentice going into that palace, and like a man controlled by magick when the blackness of the Throne swirled over his hand. But he would never forget the feeling of power he had in the moment at which he pulled away from the Throne.

The moment lasted long enough for him to note it, but barely longer than that, for he got slammed with the light and then the Visions, and lost that feeling of control, of victory that he had. But the moment had been enough.

He had learned from his father that nothing was impossible. No matter what Kerde said, no matter what the Shaman said, Gift knew that magick could be controlled.
All
magick. They just had to figure out how.

When the last of the Fey lamps had been brought into the room, it was as light as day. All of the tiny beings inside the lamps pressed against the glass, watching the proceedings. He pointed to another Shaman, a man who had never spoken to him, indeed had gone through the last five years with his face averted every time he crossed Gift’s path.

Gift purposely did not use his name. “Tap the lamps. Warn them that they’ll all burn out prematurely if they don’t take turns resting.”

The Shaman glared at him and for a moment, Gift thought he would do as Gift asked. Then he stood, so slowly that Gift thought he could hear the man’s bones creak, and tapped on the lamp nearest him. Inside the lamp, half the beings sat down, their lights growing dim.

“All right,” Gift said. “Now, we will do as I asked before. We will discuss
all
Visions that pertain to the Black Throne and the Black Family, as well as the history, all legends and all prophecies. I want to start with legends. Perdom.”

Perdom didn’t even look at Kerde for permission to go forward, which was good. Gift had taken such control of the meeting that Perdom probably didn’t even think of turning to her.

“The Black Throne,” Perdom said in his lecturer’s voice, “has been in the custody of the Shaman for nearly a thousand years. The palace has been empty that long. Before the Shaman took it, the Black Family lived there. When the Fey started their expanse away from the Eccrasian mountains, they abandoned the Throne.”

“But not all at once,” Gift said.

“No,” Perdom said. “For the first several generations, a rejected family member guarded the Throne. Then, when the Black King went blind, the rush to the Throne by the other family members and those with Vision was so intense that people were killed—fortunately, there was no Black Blood against Black Blood at this point—and the Shaman intervened. Because we could not kill, we became the guardians of the Throne itself, determining who would and would not touch it, and whether or not they even knew it existed.”

Gift had to restrain himself from taking a small, revealing breath. Some members of the Black Family weren’t even allowed here. They had let him come not to study, but to wait until the appropriate moment so that they could take him up the mountain.

“From that moment on,” Perdom continued, “we have controlled the Black Throne and the Place of Power. It has been the primary duty of the Shaman. For it is in this place that the Mysteries and Powers speak most clearly, and here where we get the most accurate Visions.”

Gift had never heard that. He doubted that most Fey knew this. He wondered if the Black Family should have known.

The Shaman who was tapping the lamps had gotten halfway through the room. The intense brightness was decreasing, bringing the glare to tolerable levels. The other Shaman had removed their fists from their knees. They were watching closely, but seemed more relaxed. Gift wasn’t certain why.

“So,” Gift said when it became clear that Perdom was not going to continue, “how is it that a member of the Black Family comes here?”

“Sometimes the member determines his own future, and comes on his own, as you did,” Perdom said. “Other times, he is asked to come here. Every once in a while, a Black Ruler will request that a son or a daughter or a niece or a nephew be tested by the Throne and we usually accommodate.”

“Then the Throne accepts or rejects,” Gift said.

“Yes,” Perdom said.

“And what happens after that?”

“Any potential ruler accepted by the Black Throne is assigned a Shaman.”

“My great-grandfather did not have a Shaman,” Gift said. At least not one that Gift knew of.

Perdom’s chin raised slightly. “He did, once.”

“The Shaman that became my father’s Shaman?”

“No,” Perdom said. “That Shaman, Chadn, was brought by Rugar to Blue Isle, not as the family’s Shaman, but so that the troops would have someone to rely on in times of question. She was never to be a Shaman to the Black Family. She didn’t have the training.”

Gift started. “Training?”

“In interpreting a ruler’s Vision.”

“That interpretation,” Gift asked, “is it an intuitive thing or does it follow certain rules?”

“He has no right to know that,” Kerde said. Her voice seemed little shrill.

“I think that we have already established that things are different,” Gift said.

“Rules, of course,” Perdom said, without looking at Kerde. It was as if he were trying to pretend she was no longer in the room. “It was the rules your great-grandfather objected to about his own Shaman, feeling she did not accurately reflect the Visions he was receiving, that she was not open to the wishes of the Mysteries so much as trying to control his actions.”

“Perdom,” Kerde whispered.

“So she was sent back here.”

And Gift finally understood the undercurrent he was feeling. He looked at Kerde. “Did my great-grandfather dislike you that much, or didn’t he trust you either?”

Her intake of breath was sharp. “You have no right to ask me such things.”

“I have every right,” he said. “You may have great powers, but beneath them all, you have a heart that beats just like the rest of us.”

“Are you threatening me?” she asked with such shock that he almost wished he had been.

“No,” he said. “I am saying that you love and hate and feel the same as any other Fey. My great-grandfather was a difficult man.” Gift shuddered as he said that last, remembering how strong his great-grandfather had been when he had invaded Gift’s mind. How strong, how intelligent, how resolute. A man like that would be difficult to like, and even more difficult to serve. “He had to have some reason for sending you back here. If a Fey ruler always has a Shaman beside him, then why didn’t someone come back to take your place?”