The Shattered Vine (23 page)

“Weathervines are the least touched legacy. When the Vine was broken, the roots were shattered, each one drenched in Sin Washer’s blood, changed by that touch. Weathervines were . . . somehow, they were less touched.”

“That’s why they’re paler,” Mahault said, with the tone of someone putting two unexpected bits together. “Giordan grew weathervines,” Mahault said now, the first she had spoken since they had gone back inside, meeting the others in the dining hall. “My father offered him the lands around our city because they were best for those vines, and he used them to protect us from the storms that came over the mountains, to divert them. . . .”

Her breath caught as she finally understood. “That is why—you think that Sar Anton was one of this Ximen’s tools, and targeted Giordan not because you were there, not because he associated with Master Malech, but because of his vines. And the same for poor Esoba?”

Ao poured himself another cup of ale and sipped, listening intently, ignoring the platters of food that had been set out for them.

“Yes. But it wasn’t Sar Anton,” Jerzy said. “The Washer, Darian.” Darian had been the one to accuse Jerzy of interfering with another Vineart’s yard, who had forced events in Aleppan to their eventual
conclusion. “It had to have been him, else Sar Anton would not have saved me from the servant who tried to kill me, to keep me from reaching my master and telling him what was happening.”

The Washer, the servant, the aide who had the maiar’s ear and twisted his mind to believe Darian’s accusation, to see conspiracy in every glance, even his own daughter’s . . . all thin roots, offshoots of a thicker one, pushing them one way or another. In the aftermath of the accusations, it had been a tangle, all confusion and fear. A step back, and he could see the patterns, just as Kaïnam had first seen the pattern in the attacks, a net, drawing more tightly around them, driving them to . . . what?

Roots, underneath, spreading . . . why did that image stay with him? The reassurance of the stone-walled hall kept Jerzy from feeling quite the same apprehension that grew every time he looked at the map, the lines and pins drawing ever tighter around the Vin Lands, but the unease that had become his constant companion would not be dispelled by the comforting, familiar smells of roasted meats or bread.

“So he does not grow weathervines. Neither do you, Jer, but you’ve used them.” Ao wasn’t seeing the pattern. “What does it matter, if they have less bloodstain? Why can’t he just . . . ?” Ao waved his hand in the air, unable to vocalize what he thought Ximen might do.

“He has no access. I was invited to work Giordan’s yard, and they . . . they . . .” Those vines had taken a liking to him, allowing him full access, but he could not say that out loud. There was no way to explain to anyone who had not felt the touch of the vines what that meant. “That, and I have weatherwines available to me, the same as any within the Vin Lands with coin to trade. Wherever he is, we know he’s beyond the Lands Vin . . . he has no access to the work of other Vinearts, save what he can steal. And he has not been able to steal weathervines. Giordan was killed”—and it still hurt, to think of the energetic, occasionally foolhardy man, dead—“but the vines were uprooted, his cellar immediately destroyed.”

That was the punishment for apostasy, the same fate that had faced Jerzy and the House of Malech, until the Washers relented. Had Ximen
thought to put a puppet of his own choosing into that vineyard instead? Or had he planned to have Darian take the spellwines already racked and somehow send them to his master? He ignored the Commands—did he even know of them? How far removed was their enemy from the Lands Vin and its centuries of tradition?

Too many questions, and no answers. Not yet.

But the mage had known of weathervines. Had he known that they, like he, used blood in their crafting, to bring those stubborn vines into obedience? Or had the mage been blindly reaching, searching, as he had in Irfan, for grapes with the least touch of Sin Washer upon them?

Sin Washer had protected the Lands Vin, to keep those vines from the mage’s grasp, until now. But they could not count on that protection lasting.

“If he’s seafaring, the lack of weathervines would be a true hardship,” Kaïnam said. “It would explain why our ships were attacked by fire, instead.”

Master Malech had not used weatherspells, finding them too risky because of the way they spread, the magic caught up on the very winds they controlled. They had weatherwines in the cellar, but only a few. Jerzy had worked Giordan’s vines, had touched them, and they had touched him. They lingered within him, changing the quiet-magic of fire and healing he had been sold to, giving him access to not two, but three legacies in his blood.

Three. Like Bradhai.

Purest coincidence, that Giordan had been the one Master Malech sent him to. It had to have been coincidence, there was no other explanation . . . unless Sin Washer wished it so. Unless all this, everything that had happened, his being sent away, his encountering Kaïnam in the midst of the seas, had all been driven by the gods, to keep Ximen from his plans.

A shudder passed through him. The silent gods did not interfere in the acts of man. But that had not always been true, and there was no
reason to believe anything would be so forever simply because it was so now.

The thought was both disturbing and exhilarating.

“So we know that he couldn’t send storms, before. Does it matter, now?” Mahault, practical as a knife.

“Not everything that is important is useful, true,” Kaïnam said, picking up a piece of fruit and running his thumbnail along the skin. “This feels important, though. Even if it’s not a weakness, as such. Jer does have access to weatherwines, so we have magic that our enemy does not. The question becomes, does he have access to magics that we are missing?”

The
vina
they had drunk in Irfan had abused their thoughts, their emotions. Those had been of Esoba’s making, though, his fecklessness and ignorance blending with the power of his feral grapes. Their enemy had manipulated Esoba, but he not been allowed access to those grapes; they had stopped him, unknowing.

The memory of those vines, the subtle power in the
vina,
made Jerzy shudder again: this time not entirely in distaste.

Guardian?
Jerzy reached out to the stone dragon, but received no answer. The dragon did not know, or could not tell; there was still much about the Guardian that Jerzy did not understand and suspected even his master had not known. Like the masthead on the
Vine’s Heart,
a spell that had worked in ways not intended or expected. Perhaps even the prince-mages had not controlled their magic entirely.

“So what does all this mean?” Ao suddenly seemed to remember there was food available and slid a cut of meat onto his own platter, but did not eat, just yet.

“We can’t know,” Kaïnam said, “and so worrying about it does us three no good. Jer, if you discover anything—”

“I will tell you, of course.” Master Malech would not have accepted orders from a man of power, but the world had changed, and only a fool—or a dead man—did not adapt.

Jerzy was a Vineart, but he had learned not to be a fool. An alliance of equals was different from being forced into an Agreement.

“The question that we need answered is, can we use this against him?” Kaï moved back to his own area of knowledge. “In battle, I mean.”

“What, send a storm against him, to blind him during an attack? We would need to know exactly where he was, to do that, and not even Jerzy could send a storm all the way across the sea.” Ao paused, then turned his head to look at the Vineart. “Could you?”

“No.” Something shimmered in his thoughts, not the hard, cool influence of the Guardian but something fainter, softer. The memory of the feeling when he had struck Kaï with the magic, the open palm. The scent of the soil under his bare feet, as a slave. The feeling he had, within these walls. The other mage had gone to great lengths to gather other Vinearts’ magic to him, stealing their wines, their slaves . . . why? “No, but I don’t have to send it against him. I just have to let him know I have it. That my blood-magic, my quiet-magic, carries the vines that were destroyed. Giordan’s vines, and the ones in Irfan both.”

“Not a weapon, but a lure?” Kaïnam looked thoughtful, while Mahault’s eyes lit up

“ ‘Tcha, Ximen, look at what I have,’ make him come to you, and then we cut him down?” She approved, that much was clear.

Only Ao, leaning back in his chair, seemed to have a sense that a straightforward attack was not entirely what Jerzy had in mind.

T
HE MEAL FINISHED
, they nonetheless lingered in the dining hall, as though the comforting, homey sounds from the kitchen made them reluctant to leave. Work continued, however: Kaïnam and Mahault had unrolled a map of the Lands Vin and were moving markers around as though it were a game of Go, while Detta came in, cornering Jerzy for a discussion of something that made her wave her rounded hands in exasperation, and him scowl. Ao felt a moment’s pity: no matter what went on in the greater world, the Household budgets must be squared.

That thought nudged another into shape: leaving magic to the
Vinearts, still even a mage needed supplies, services. That meant people, ordinary people, and ordinary people were vulnerable. . . .

Shaking his head at his own obtuseness for not thinking of it before, the trader picked up a scratch-pen and three sheets of paper from the pile at Mahl’s elbow and wrote out three quick notes, then maneuvered himself back into the wheeled chair, and headed through the kitchen, ducking Lil, and outside. The day was full lit now, the sky a pale blue, the sounds of the slaves working at whatever winter chores they maintained familiar enough that he barely registered it.

He could have made himself walk, exercising the still-weak connection between his body and his false legs, but instead Ao pushed the chair up the hill enough that he could be seen from the pigeon coop, and raised a hand. “Boy!”

The tousled head of the slave appeared, and Ao showed him three fingers, then a single, which he pointed to the south, indicating that he wanted three birds capable of flying to the first outpost directly to the south. The slave nodded and disappeared again, then the entire body appeared outside the coop a few minutes later, carefully carrying a wicker basket in both hands. Inside were three gray-winged doves, cooing and restless.

“Trustworthy, Master Ao,” the boy said. He could not quite say Ao’s name properly, pronouncing only the last syllable, so that it sounded like “ow.”s “As you want.”

“Good, good. They’re only off to the next posting, no need to spell them elsewhere. Here’s the first, then,” and he handed over one of the bound messages resting in his lap, waiting while the boy tied it carefully to the first pigeon’s leg. Two more were attached to their respective messengers, and the slave climbed back up into the coop and sent the birds on their way.

Ao watched them flap their way into the darkening air, then circle once, as though looking for their destination, before setting off. He did not fully understand what magic was used to train these birds, allowing them to have a multiplicity of destinations rather than flying between
birth-coop and training post, but their usefulness could not be denied. At the first outpost, the messages would be transferred to other birds, and sent on the next leg, covering the distance faster than a horse and rider.

“Silent gods put wind under your wings, and keep you from harm,” he whispered, staring up into the sky even after the birds had disappeared from sight. All three messages were for members of his clan: Tel, his cousin, who was a caravan leader and a woman of rare good sense; Ret, who had been Ao’s own teacher and might still have a kindness for him, despite Ao’s behavior; and Kaji, the clan elder.

After his first message, promising news of a great and useful—and potentially profitable—sort, the elder had finally begun sharing information. But while Kaïnam and Mahault seemed satisfied with what trickle they had been fed, Ao knew there was more. Not fact, but gossip, was what traders thrived on. Gossip, which moved so much faster than fact, and could be used in more ways. That was what he needed, now, if they were to move one step ahead of Ximen’s games, and lure him into a trap. For, surely, that had to be Jerzy’s intent?

Ao’s messages asked for that gossip, while warning them of consequences, should Jerzy’s plan—whatever that plan night be—fail, to not believe what was unspoken in Kaji’s responses so far: that no matter what fate befell the Lands Vin, the Eastern Wind trading clan would come out with a good bargain. They thought they could negotiate with whoever ended up in power.

Ao, having seen in Irfan how their enemy treated those he bargained with, thought his people were fools. Hopefully, Tel and Ret could counter some of that, with what he told them about the danger to come. . . .

“Master Ao!”

Ao turned his chair back to look toward the coop, where the slave was waving his arm. “One’s coming!”

Sure enough, there was a speck in the sky, coming in at a direct angle to the coop. Ao held his breath, suddenly sure that an owl would swoop down and take the bird before it reached them. But in a few seconds the
pigeon had landed with a flurry of wings, and the slave was removing the message from its leg, bringing it back down to where Ao waited.

The message was sealed with the tree-and-vine sigil of the Principality of Atakus.

Ao’s breath caught in his throat, and he forced the sudden hope down, not allowing himself to expect anything. His people looked to the main chance, but men of power were different beasts. Kaïnam had sent a bird to his father when Ao’s first salvo went out but had warned the others that it was unlikely his father would respond.

“My father is a proud man, and I am dead to them, or worse than dead. He will have named one of my brothers as Heir, in my place, and . . . and that is assuming the birds can break through Master Edon’s spellcasting, to start.”

“If he incanted the spell to keep out animals,” Jerzy had said, “your people will be starving to death, as no fish will be able to pass through your waters, either. Master Edon is not so foolish.”