The Gantean (Tales of Blood & Light Book 1) (14 page)

He used that same compelling voice. The air left my chest and suctioned towards him.

“Leila,” I croaked, hating that I had no resistance to his magic.

Genuine surprise flashed across the mage’s face, and his magic wavered, releasing my limbs. I shook my arm madly to get the women’s knife into my right hand, launching myself at him to catch him by surprise.

He moved faster than I did, with the instinctual response of long training. He caught me and prevented my attack deftly, immobilizing me with his magic again.

“Leila?” Laith said in a strangled tone as he circled me. “Your name is
Leila
?” He reached for my dagger and gingerly eased it from my frozen grip. “By the gods,” he murmured. “I do believe…” He flipped the small weapon to better examine the hilt and pommel.

He shook his head, frowning as he murmured incantations too low to decipher. He made his magic rapidly, reanimating the other woman.

“Who do you think you are, you bastard mage!” she shrieked. “I’m your Source! You can’t do that to me!”

Laith ignored her and turned his magic on me.

My vision blurred; darkness closed in.

“You can’t just go enchanting me whenever you please,” the woman’s shrill voice continued.

I caught a brief, hazy glimpse of Miki’s face, observing the entire scene from in front of the harbor gates, before awareness left me.

L
aith hovered above me
, his eyes as blue and dark as my own. He held Costas’s dagger, spinning it through one hand. I struggled to a seat, dread rushing to my head like Lethemian wine. Nausea doubled me over again, but not before I took in the well-appointed room with walls papered in a dizzying black and white motif.

Laith appraised me. “How do you feel?”

He had not used the compelling voice, so I did not answer, instead asking, “What happened back there at the fountain? I can’t remember a thing.”

Laith paced towards a desk near the room’s windows. “I brought you to my brother’s townhouse. I’m sorry I compelled you into unconsciousness, but I figured I had no other choice.” He waved the dagger. “This bauble. Do you know what it is?”

“A women’s knife.”

“Indeed. Marked, astonishingly, with the Galatien sigil. You received it from Costas? A very interesting present.”

“I found it,” I lied. “Out in the grasslands above Murana. I thought I might sell it when I got here.”

“Don’t be an idiot. That’s the Galatien sigil wrought in pure gold on the hilt. Amatos, you’re like a child! Don’t bother lying to me. I can feel a lie in my fingertips,
Leila.
He gave it to you.” Laith tucked the knife into a sheath at his waist as if it belonged there.

I barely had time to inhale before I leaned over the edge of the bed and heaved.

Laith scrambled to my side. “Not on the Vhimsantese carpet!” He marched me to a washroom, shoving a copper basin in my direction, and I threw up into it.

“You’re in a bad way.” Laith said. “I’m almost certain I saw—well, I believe you might be pregnant.” He spoke almost apologetically. “I see such things in the Aethers. Costas, I presume?”

I didn’t answer, but Laith didn’t press.

“Tell me the truth about the knife,” he said instead, sending another forceful compulsion my way.

“Costas gave it to me,” I muttered.

Laith’s compulsion continued to push. “Did he make promises when he gave it to you?”

“Promises?”

Laith blew an annoyed breath from his nostrils. “He gave you a women’s knife with his House sigil on it! At his own Brokering! Don’t you know what that means?”

I shook my head.

Laith guided me back towards the bed. “It means you have a prior claim. It means you could stop this marriage with Stesichore Ricknagel if you wanted. He asked you first. There’s precedent for this. Women’s knives have a long tradition of serving as betrothal agreements between noble families.” He plucked the dagger from his belt. “If I’m not mistaken, this very blade was involved in a precedent case, too.” He peered at the women’s knife as though scrying the waters for the future. “By the gods, I almost believe this jewel in the hilt is—Such synchronicity!” Laith’s voice rose with excitement, and again I wondered if he might not be considered a madman.

“He’s marrying Stesichore Ricknagel,” I said.

Laith snorted, lifted both hands, and expertly balanced his glittering magestone in one palm and the women’s knife in the other. “Costas gave you his sigilled dagger inlaid with a powerful magestone and you think you can ignore it? When you’re carrying his...child?”

“I—I don’t understand. He’s been formally betrothed to Stesichore—”

Laith laughed. “Leila. Leila.” The tender emotion in his voice startled me. “Mydon Galatien wanted Costas to marry Stesichore for political gain. He wanted Xander Ricknagel’s army firmly bound to House Galatien because of the situation with the Vhimsantese Empire. King Mydon doesn’t trust magic. He doesn’t like that there are other forces—forces at work that he cannot control.” Laith paused and looked thoughtful. “But a balance must be kept in the Aethers, and Stesichore Rickangel was not the right choice for Costas.” A distant look shadowed his face.

“Were you with her?” he asked suddenly. “Growing up in Gante? Did she keep you?”

Fatigue dropped me to the bed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me go. You let me go in Galantia.”

“I didn’t know who you were then.”

I frowned.
What did he mean by that?

Laith resumed his pacing, still clutching magestone and knife. “Where is she? What does she want? Why did she attack at the Brokering?” Every question hit me like a sword thrust of magic.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I cried helplessly.

Laith stared at me. “Impossible.” He looked at his magestone and then back up at me. “Did you just resist my truth compulsion? That’s impossible.”

“I spoke the truth. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I want to know about the Cedna of Gante. I want to know how to find her,” he said.

“The Cedna?” I echoed, utterly confused. “She fled Gante years ago. No one knows where to find her, the Ganteans—and me—least of all.”

Laith blinked. “But you were there with her! At the Brokering during the attack? You must know where she’s gone. You do know she is Lady Entila’s half-sister, I presume? And what did she do with poor Malvyna Entila? It’s really the most fascinating magical conundrum since Eretrus Avarian’s Immaculate Bind. You don’t know, then, what the Cedna did with Lady Entila? Damnation. I truly thought you would.”

“I don’t know anything,” I emphasized, fighting my still-bubbling stomach. “I need to lie down.” I fell onto the pillows without waiting for Laith’s permission.

“So you’re innocent?” Laith asked, though his voice really didn’t have the tone of a question. “Just another girl from Gante named Leila who captured our Prince’s heart?”

I frowned. Put like that—

“Fucking Amatos.” Laith stalked to the bedchamber door. “I need to think. You should rest. Please don’t worry. You’re safe here. I’ll make sure of it.”

I was too sick to do anything but curl into a ball on the bed, clinging to my knees as if they were the lone piece of sea-wrack keeping me adrift in deep waters.

A loud thump woke me. I sprang up from the bed and backed into the wall. A small, shadowy figure crept in my direction.

“Leila?”

“Miki?”

I lurched against the wall as Miki careened into me. Skinny arms wrapped round me. “Miki,” I said again in relief, feeling a sleek seal fur cloak beneath my fingers. “How did you get here?”

He tugged my arm. “We’ve got to go.”

I hesitated. I didn’t like to leave my women’s knife behind. “The mage—he has my dagger.”

“Forget about that sayantaq thing. I found the Gantean captain. He’s waiting for us up the road with a horse and cart. We have to go now.”

Miki led me to the window. He had scaled the side of the townhouse with Gantean rope, cleverly tied on the decorative scrolls and knobs that garnished the windows and eves.

Miki climbed down first, deft as spider. I followed, unnaturally frightened by the height and the precarious appearance of the ropes. I had been a good climber in Gante; I had never been frightened of heights. I knew what had changed—the knowledge that I carried a child.

We fled over the lawn into a broad, clean avenue lined with mansions and gas lamps. Miki helped me into the back of a cart waiting at the curb. I lay on my back and wrapped my hands across my navel as the cart lurched into motion.

M
urana’s
harbor
bustled even in the middle of the night. Stevedores slouched beneath their burdens, their progress along the docks lit by torches. Ships’ boys scampered across decks. The Gantean captain’s vessel stretched sixty or seventy spans, with a tall mast in front and a shorter mizzenmast to the rear—a flexible boat, made for a small crew on unpredictable seas.

Our driver flung his reins over a post at the side of the cobbled road. Miki and I tumbled out from the back of the cart, and Miki ran to the edge of the dock.

“
Naya.
” A Gantean voice cut the night. I searched the ship’s deck for the speaker, whose greeting sounded like home. A dim, bulky shape gestured to us.

“Come aboard,” he said in Lethemian with hardly any trace of accent. I followed Miki up the rope ladder to board the ship, even as another wave of nausea rushed through me. I presumed the man who spoke was the captain—he moved with the silent, silky ease of a Gantean. Even in the midnight darkness I could see his glittering eyes, as uncompromising as black granite.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said in Lethemian. “Our little friend convinced me to send him on a rescue mission. He said you were Iksraqtaq. I am Atanurat, the captain of this ship.”

I stepped forward and bowed my head. “Leila,
Iksraqtaq qargi Shringar
.”

The cart driver climbed onto the ship’s deck. “Leila!” he exclaimed behind me.

I turned.

“It’s me! Merkuur.” The driver unwrapped his scarf to expose his freckled face and dark skin.

“Merkuur?” I gasped as he grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “But you disappeared,” I slipped into Gantean, thinking of that day moons ago at the slave market in Queenstown.

“I didn’t like the alternative,” he said. “Leila, you are the first! We have found others, but no one from my own community. What happened to Murlian?”

“Someone bought her,” I tried to remember pertinent details. Some images of that traumatic day had been burned into my mind in perfect vivid detail, while others eluded me entirely. “I don’t know,” I said hopelessly. “She was sold in Queenstown.”

“I saw that much.” Merkuur gripped my shoulders and scanned me head to toe. “You look well enough, not like that poor half-starved friend of yours.”

I searched the deck for Miki. He stood beside Lymbok and Amethyst beneath the main mast. I was glad he had returned to get them.

The captain removed his hood. He had obviously Gantean features: heavy black hair, sun-weathered tan skin, slanted eyes. His tight braids fell nearly to his waist. With his strong bones and considerable muscles, he would have sent Gantean girls into giggles every time he passed. Behind him stood another man, a slender, wiry Gantean with shorter hair. He introduced himself. “
Pamiuq, Iksraqtaq qargi Tuq
.” I guessed Pamiuq older than Merkuur by several winters, but younger than the captain.

The captain, Atanurat, studied me closely, the gleam of his dark eyes softening until I almost thought he must be in a shaman’s trance. His vague expression suddenly cleared. “You’re
iksuruq.”

“So I have been told,” I acknowledged as a blush washed over my cheeks.

The captain laughed. “We cannot leave you behind then. You’ll bring us luck.” It was true; Ganteans loved pregnant women—we were considered the luckiest omens.

Atanurat’s ship carried cargo bound for a port on the southern continent of Lysandra, and so we would sail there with the dawn. We pulled from the harbor as the sunrise bells rang, and Murana faded into a hazy glimmer in the distance. Being on the sea relieved me; I sloughed off the sayantaq skin that had grown on me during my time on the Lethemian mainland. Merkuur pulled me into his cabin, offering me a seat on a round cushion where I happily sprawled.

“How did you escape in Queenstown?” I asked. “One moment, you were there, and the next, you had disappeared.”

“I noticed a hollow beneath the pier when we came down the gangway. The binds were easy enough to slip, and I shimmied off the back of the pier when the guards were distracted with Murlian. I ran as fast as I could, and I came out at the other end of the port where they dock the smaller merchant ships. I hopped aboard the first one I found, stowed away, and begged the captain to take me on when he found me at sea. He tested me with knots. I passed.” Merkuur smiled.

I had taught him quite a few knots back when we were children.

“It wasn’t much better than being a slave, working the ship,” Merkuur went on. “I didn’t want to leave you and Murlian, but I didn’t see any other way. I met Atanurat in An-Arian, in Lysandra, of all places. He had been away from Gante for over a decade. He was so sayantaq he didn’t know how bad things had gotten on Gante. He didn’t know we’d been so thoroughly beaten.” He shook his head and lowered his eyes. “We went back there, Leila. To Gante. We didn’t find anyone. The ice comes right up over the southern tundra now. We went to the caches at Umaq and took what few goods we found there—skins, blackstone spalls, nets. We didn’t dare try anywhere else, not in that deadly cold. No one could live in that.”

“So we won’t be going back,” I murmured.

Merkuur shook his head. “Something bad has happened up there. It’s as if—as if the whole island is changing. As if the Hinge is eating up the land itself with ice. I sold everything I found at Umaq. Atanurat agreed.” He said this defiantly, as if daring me to call him sayantaq.

I would never chastise him. I had cast off Iksraqtaq rules with shameful ease. A more comfortable life had beckoned, and I had accepted it eagerly. “Merkuur, you don’t have to explain. I have broken our rules, too. I have—”

“So what, I say.” He cut me off, shrugging. “You must adapt; it is your only choice. The world is changing. Gante refused to change along with it, and did it help us at all?” He shoved a hand through his hair, making it stick straight up. He had cut it in the fashion of the Lethemians. “The Elders valued silence and secrecy, but silence cannot protect you when the world crashes into your shores like a tidal wave. You can’t stand against a wave like that. You have to ride it out.”

I
had never seen
Miki so happy as he was aboard Atanurat’s
Northern Wind
. He scampered over the deck with Lymbok, both of them as eager as puppies. At night Miki came to my hammock and slept beside me.

“Your son talks to me in Yaqi,” he said as we drifted towards sleep. “But I cannot understand him yet.” Miki assumed the baby would be a boy, and the other Ganteans shared this certainty because he had said it would be so.

I spent my days on the ship busy with Gantean tasks: braiding Amethyst’s hair, knotting nets, twisting rope, keeping track of the ship’s stores. How many hours had I spent this way on the Gantean bluffs with busy hands and a calm mind, the wide sea stretching into every vista. The return of familiarity reassured me, though increasingly I rued the loss of my necklace. I still had not told the other Ganteans about what I had been tasked with and what I had lost in the High City. The thought of explaining left me cold with shame.

It took a full sennight to sail south and unload the ship’s cargo. Atanurat’s ship made this passage regularly, carrying Lethemian wine and Lysandrene silk back and forth between the two nations. We stopped at the Vhimsantese port of Vorisipor on the return journey, though Amethyst and I did not leave the ship—women had fewer rights in the Eastern Empire, and Atanurat worried for our safety.

While we waited for the others to return from the Vhimsantese port, I asked Amethyst why she and Lymbok had come with us. I imagined they both would have been happier in the world they knew, in a Lethemian city.

“I never thought I would get out of my father’s den in Galantia,” she explained. “My life there was little more than a slave’s. He worked me hard; he was cruel. I didn’t want to work for another man again. And I have always wanted to see distant places.”

“And Lymbok?” I wondered.

“Lymbok fought the idea of coming, at first, but in the end, I insisted on going, and I don’t think he liked to part from me.” She smiled wryly. “That boy never had any kind of mother.”

When the men returned to the ship, Amethyst cornered Pamiuq, who had displayed a weakness for her more than once. We had both been disappointed to be left on board instead of exploring the foreign port and gathering the news.

“What did you hear in Vorisipor?” she asked.

Pamiuq took a seat cross-legged with us on the deck where I had been teaching Amethyst basic net knotting. He shook his head as he took out his whittling knife and a slender bit of wood. “Nothing good.”

“What do you mean?” Amethyst persisted, moving closer to him.

“Rumors of discontent, mostly. The Eastern Empire believes they have a god-given right to constant expansion, and any Emperor who does not expand the domain is regarded as a failure. They have their eyes on the Lethemian border, and they say Lord Xander Ricknagel has come more than once to parley with the Governor of Vorisipor, but King Mydon refuses to treat with the Empire at all.”

“The Vhimsantese wouldn’t dare attack Lethemia,” Amethyst said. “We have magic.”

Pamiuq scowled at the anbuaq almost finished in his hand, a small fish with a hole in it, almost like a tormaquine. “I wouldn’t be sure of that. They say Mydon Galatien is reluctant to mobilize his mages on a large scale. His reputation makes Lethemia appear weak. It’s Lord Xander Ricknagel who keeps the Empire at bay, and there’s talk that he’s considering concessions that Mydon hasn’t authorized.”

“Do you think there is a risk of war?” Amethyst leaned so close to Pamiuq her new braids brushed his shoulder.

He grinned unexpectedly. “Anything’s possible.” He offered up the anbuaq he had carved in a flat palm, a Gantean gesture I recognized as an overt invitation.

Amethyst giggled as she examined the token of Pamiuq’s regard. “For me?”

Pamiuq said nothing, perhaps not knowing how to interpret her reaction to his gesture. I opened my mouth to explain, but the blushes on both their faces led me to change the subject entirely. “How did you come to sail with Atanurat?” I asked Pamiuq. He never mentioned anything about his Gantean past.

“The usual way. Taken young as a slave by Entilan raiders who sold me in Queenstown. I escaped the master who bought me, and I found work on the ships. I traveled two years working on ships before I met Atanurat—”

“But why didn’t you return to Gante once you’d escaped?” asked Amethyst.

Pamiuq lifted his cool eyes to meet hers. “How could I?” He asked. “I was tainted. I’d lived in the south for years.”

She looked away, clutching the anbuaq he had given her. “I don’t think you’re tainted,” she said, almost too low to hear.

Pamiuq’s story left me melancholy, as thinking of Gante usually did. That sacred life, once abandoned, was impossible to recapture. We were all of us tainted now, according the rules of the Elders.

W
e sailed
over the Parting Sea for moons, with only brief stops for loading and unloading. Atanurat’s base of operations was Murana, and so we returned there every new moon to load new cargo. He always had work; he was willing to sail anywhere to make deliveries. No report of bad weather or difficult harbors intimidated him—why would it? After sailing Gante’s treacherous waters, nothing Lethemia’s Parting Sea could throw at him would seem too harsh or dangerous. Lymbok and Miki were as happy as children could be. Both boys benefited from the presence of the Gantean men, who took their roles as mentors seriously. The days rolled one into the next, the only marker of the passing time the increasing size of my body.

I progressed too quickly; Amethyst agreed that I was abnormally large. I grew anxious and went to Merkuur.

“At the next port, I must go ashore,” I told him. “The baby might come early. Look how big I am.” Already my feet had swollen, and my small frame could barely support my round belly.

Merkuur gave me a startled look. “You hardly showed when we took you aboard.”

I stuck my belly out before him. “Look at me. I’m huge. Amethyst says I should see a midwife.”

Our next port of call was Anastaia, the city in southern Galatien Province where Lymbok had originally wanted us to go. Its clean harbor was full of boats powered by sails and oars rather than engines and coal. The aquamarine waters glistened in unseasonable sunlight. In the reckoning of Gantean moons, we approached the end of the thirteen cycles, the dark, storming time of year. Here in Anastaia no storm seemed likely to disrupt the tranquil waters. It might as well have been summer.

My only fear in going ashore was that it would make the magemark on my shoulder easier to track, though after so long, I doubted anyone was still searching. Lymbok and Amethyst had both assured me that tracking magic was notoriously difficult. The Ganteans didn’t know enough about Lethemian magic to offer their opinions, though Atanurat, who’d had some training as shaman in his youth, assured me that to track any bloodlight cord over long distances was near enough to impossible as to pose little threat.

Merkuur, Amethyst, and I went into the city proper to find the lodgings she and I would keep for the remainder of the winter. Merkuur knew his way around Anastaia; we came to a street of fine looking townhouses, each with its own small garden in the front. He walked up to one and rapped on the door. “It’s a rooming house for women,” he explained. “Atanurat gave me jhass to get you set up.”

Merkuur efficiently booked a room for Amethyst and me with the woman who ran the house. She flirted shamelessly with Merkuur, who didn’t seem to mind bantering back for our cause, which was made more difficult by the fact of my pregnancy. He convinced her we would leave after the baby came and cause no trouble, largely by using his natural charm.

He patted both Amethyst and me on the shoulder before departing. “We’ll all come visit you when we get back from Lysandra. It shouldn’t be more than a fortnight.”

I nodded and watched him disappear down the rooming house stairs, my sense of peace fading. Surrounded by Ganteans, I had felt safe in the world, but Merkuur’s leaving left me cold and uncertain.