The Shattered Vine (28 page)

Jerzy had no way of knowing. And he could not take the risk.

You are Vineart.

He had not seen them, not clearly, but it was enough; the Guardian was able to find them: huddled against the near wall of the sleep house, knees bent, their heads bent together. They had a piece of machinery in front of them and files in their hands: they were sharpening the tiller, so that it would be ready come spring, when it was time to break up the soil and weed the rows again.

Ordinary work, the sort of thing he might find any slave doing during the slower hours of winter. There was no scent of the taint around them, no feel of wrongness or danger.

Too much at risk, if he was wrong. He could allow no weakness within his walls. This was not attack, but defense. But how . . . ?

The memory of the servant in Irfan came to Jerzy. How simple a thing it had been to let the vines that wrapped around his chest, holding him in the chair, tighten. The sound of his rib cage as it cracked, the gasping of breath as a vine around his neck turned into a noose, the way his dark-skinned face had become tinged with blue, and his jaw had hung open, white froth on his lips . . .

Jerzy had not touched him. He had not needed to. The unblooded grapes had surged at his lightest thought, had done what was needed. He had blamed the vines, let it take responsibility.

“These are healvines,” he said, barely a whisper. Vines he had tended, weeded, harvested, and protected.

What heals may also kill.

The Guardian’s mental voice was as it had always been: cool, uninflected, unjudging. It had acted once without directive, when it brought Jerzy back when the House was attacked and Malech killed. If Jerzy did not act . . . would it?

He closed his eyes, but the realization remained, burning like spellfire, cold and bright. “I am Vineart,” he said quietly. The Guardian might do many things, but not this. It was a tool, created to protect, not destroy. If what Jerzy had touched was indeed the remnants of the old magic, if Sin Washer had softened that cold, fierce magic with his blood, warmed it to malleability . . . he had also made Vinearts fierce enough to match it. To do what must be done.

Vinearts stood alone. Vinearts served. Vinearts stood between the cold power and human flesh. That realization did not shake Jerzy this time so much as ground him. This was his purpose, to shape the magic, make it useful . . . keep it safe.

His sense of the dragon remained, cool and firm, but his thoughts were his own. Jerzy felt his mouth water, quiet-magic rising, a mingled sense of healwine, firevines and weathervines, and the distant bitter-tart flavor of the unblooded grapes, lingering at the back of his tongue. Firewine, to dry and sere flesh. Healwine, reversed to deny vigor. Earthwine, solid and steady, the pulse of the earth, to make things grow . . . or
fail. And the faintest remnant of aetherwine, the memory of it still in his awareness, to draw the very spark of breath and cast it away. Only weather stood apart, present but not needed.

He knew all the elements, how each moved and flowed, the ripened swirls of power. All the legacies, the taste of the unblooded grapes, tangled in what already existed, forming something new, fierce, terrifying.

There was no decantation for this, no learned words to direct the magic, only an innate understanding of the magic within him. The magic that was him. The two figures blurred and faded, the files dropping from their hands even as their eyes widened and their chests heaved.

“Die,” Jerzy said, his voice soft as an evening breeze, gentle as the newest curling leaf, as unyielding as the sun at summer’s peak.

In that instant he
felt
the House move around him, the beat of the dragon’s wings, the heat of the kitchen’s hearth, the shifting of the horses in their stalls, whisking tails and flickering ears as a slave moved down the aisle to groom them, the sound of Mahault’s voice as she spoke to someone within the House, and the clatter of Ao’s wheels, the feel of a map unrolling under Kaïnam’s capable hands . . . Detta, her feet a steady rhythm against the worn flagstone steps, the slap of the House keys at her waist. A heady sense of disorientation took him, his thoughts dizzy, his body trembling.

And then he was back in his study, ink staining his fingertips where he had clenched the pen, a blot on the page he had just completed.

He felt . . . cold. Dry. Hollow inside, like rotted wood and empty flask.

The overseer, or another slave, would find the bodies. They would be disposed of, and nothing would ever be said. Slaves died. Had anyone known what he had done, had he gone into the field himself and cut their throats, nothing would ever be said. He was Master. His was the hand of life or death.

The dragon rested, cool and heavy, within his chest.

Jerzy licked his lips once, tasting the sweat on them, and carefully tore out the blotted page, resetting the pen and beginning the report again.

The act of writing anything now seemed like folly. The likelihood was high that their enemy would win; that he, and the others, would die in some fashion in the very near future; that the Lands Vin would crumble and fall. If he, Jerzy could not find some way to strike back, that likelihood was near-certainty. And yet . . . Vineart Giordan’s master had left behind only books of drawings, the lifetime of study. Giordan had treasured those books, and given them to Jerzy. Jerzy had left them behind, when he fled Aleppan, and he regretted more than seemed reasonable, losing that connection to those who had gone before.

Jerzy had possibly just killed the slave who would have followed him.

Seh veh. The seasons do not end.

Jerzy didn’t know what the Guardian meant, but somehow it eased the dry, hollow feeling inside him, filling him with a sense of inevitability. Malech had foreseen the need for the Guardian—had he known why, what role it would play?

It did not matter. He trained the vines, crushed the grapes, crafted the wine, incanted the spells and let them loose into the Lands. What he had done was done.

Jerzy picked up the pen once more, dipped it into the inkwell, and completed the page, a methodical recounting of every detail, the way he had been trained. For whoever might come, after.

Finished, Jerzy left the last page open to let the ink dry, and stood up, stretching his arms overhead again until he could feel his spine crack, his shoulders pressing down the way Cai had taught him, to prevent his body from becoming too stiff after sitting so long. As he did so, his thoughts slid into place as well, and an idea occurred to him.

Jerzy moved around the desk to look at the map that hung on the far wall in place of the ancient tapestry that had been there. The tapestry had shown the known Lands Vin, as they had been centuries ago. Where once the lands had been torn apart by prince-mages waging war
against each other, there had been two thousand years of relative peace and prosperity, the ambitions of the landlords kept in check by the Vinearts’ control over available magic.

This map, more recently drawn, was the result of Ao and Kaï’s combined work, the trader’s careful hand marking the results of their recent journey. Jerzy now had the location of every vineyard and every lord or prince who had reported disturbances, or been somehow marked by the taint. Points of attack. For Ximen—and for them.

Jerzy studied the map, noting how each point connected to the other, tracing the invisible lines between with his finger. Kaïnam’s original theory, that the attacks were a net, drawing the Lands Vin into some kind of confrontation, seemed born out. They had been maneuvered, all of them: Washer, Vineart, and land-lord. Driven by fear, panic, the way a wolf might harry a flock of sheep, but instead of picking off the weakest, the strongest were taken. The strongest . . . or the most useful.

His plan would work. If he could make himself such a target, something too strong to be resisted, to useful to ignore, Ximen would come, ignoring all else.

The Guardian protected House Malech too well. For his plan to work, Jerzy needed to flaunt himself. To do that, Jerzy needed not to avoid Ximen, but find him.

“Foreseer wine would be useful about now,” he said to the Guardian. “I don’t suppose Master Malech left any hidden in the racks?”

No.

No, of course not. It was among the rarest of the rare aethervines, and a wonder that Malech and his master Josia had enough to see the need for the Guardian. He would have to do this some other way. Turning back to the pile of journals he had pushed to the side of the desk, Jerzy flipped through the pages until he found the passage he had been looking for. Not a decantation, but the offhand mention of Master Vineart Bradhai, who had rid the world of true sea serpents by tracking them to their undersea lair.

Jerzy didn’t have foreseer wine, and the last time he had attempted
scrying he had been sent not toward the source but the strongest taint, but that did not mean he was giving up.

Master Malech had not been able to identify the legacy used to craft the serpents, and Jerzy had not been able to find the source of the magic, distracted by the taint itself. Up until now, Jerzy had tried to trace the path of the taint, tracking it back to the source. But if what they had learned was true, and this Ximen worked through others, channeling his magic across the Western Sea, then it was doubtful a straightforward scrying spell would lead them directly to the source. Ximen had covered his tracks too well for that.

The traditional means did not seem to work against their enemy.

To find him, Jerzy would have to step away from tradition. Willingly, knowingly break Commandment. No way to hide behind ignorance or half measures. There was one step yet he had not taken.

He swallowed, raised his hand to the back of his neck, threading his fingers through his hair. The urge to talk to the others, to seek their opinions, came and passed. He walked over to the rack of bottles against the wall and selected one, a golden-brown glass with a wax stopper in the mouth. Aetherwine. He could sense it, even stoppered, untasted. It did not linger within him the way his own legacies did, nor the weathervines he had taken from Vineart Giordan, but an awareness, like voices in conversation, heard from another room.

These were not foreseer wines. But that might not matter, for what he needed. Knowing what he knew, and what he had to do.

Jerzy uncorked the bottle with his teeth and, with his free hand, lifted the silver tasting spoon from his belt and poured a portion of the spellwine into the shallow cup. It glittered darkly, shifting shades of red. Holding the spoon with one hand, Jerzy recorked the bottle with his teeth and placed it back into the rack, moving with the smooth motion of long practice.

Tied to the map with one of Detta’s needles was one of the feathers taken from the bird-beast that had attacked them, while just below it hung one of the long fangs scavenged from the sea-serpent corpse. Flesh
and magic, bound together. Jerzy studied them, considering their nature, their origins. Two items were not as good as three, and five would have been better, but two was what he had.

“Blood. Blood . . . not his blood, but passing under his hands.” The habit of speaking through his work remained, and he could feel the Guardian’s intent presence at his back, although the dragon did not speak. “The blood was on his hands.”

Jerzy raised the spoon and let each item dip briefly into the spellwine, just enough for the color to stain the tip of the dun-colored feather, and the slender, curved fang to set up a swirl of motion across the spellwine’s surface.

Decantations were for pre-set spells, to trigger the incantation already pre-set. For the second time in an afternoon, what Jerzy was about to do had no decantation that he knew or had been able to find; if it existed, it was lost, along with all the other spells he would never learn from his master.

But this time, it was not merely a question of redirecting a spellwine he knew well, but crafting something new, entire. It was possible; tradition aside, all spells came from nothing, once. But that never meant it was safe.

“Guardian?”

Here.

Jerzy leaned against that rock-solid reassurance. Once before, when he had miscast a spell and caused near-disaster, the dragon had held off the worst of the effects, kept anyone within the House from coming to harm. Master Malech had not known the dragon could do that, had never had need for the dragon to do any such thing. In one long year, Jerzy had discovered more to the spellcrafted Guardian than even the Guardian itself knew it could do.

The Vineart sent a quick but heartfelt request to Sin Washer, that they would discover no new ability today, and placed the spellwine onto his tongue.

“Old to new,” he said, careful to enunciate each word, even with the
liquid resting on his tongue. A much-used decantation carried itself, despite the speaker; this new decantation needed to be clear. “Blood to bone. The one who looks for me, mine to find.” He paused, letting the magic gather itself, burning as brightly as he could manage, visualizing himself as a beacon in the night sky, and then, remembering to speak softly, an entreaty as much as a command, whispered, “Go.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, as dawn lifted over the ridge, Jerzy sent a slave running down the road, a red kerchief tied about his arm and a short message on its tongue. Several hours later Mahault, wearing not the graceful dress of his last visit but sturdy trou and vest like a solitaire, met their guest at the door. She exuded a steely grace that did not allow him time or opportunity to gape at his surroundings as they passed through the main hall and into the Vineart’s study.

“Vineart Jerzy.”

“Washer.”

“Please,” Jerzy said, making a gesture with his left hand, “be seated.”

The Washer, his face older-looking than the last Jerzy had seen him, adjusted his robes and sat in the single chair set opposite the desk.

They stared at each other, assessing. Jerzy sat in the high-backed wooden chair, his finest robe over a shirt and trou, polished boots of smooth leather on his feet, and the ring that had been his master’s on the third finger of his left hand, the only finger it would fit, the others being too thick. The metal felt cool against his skin, and he resisted the urge to twist it.