Tullier could not. “Llara is my god, not your pretty Twins.” His voice cracked. “To this—I’m blind.”
“I’m sorry, Tullier.” Gaultry stared at the top steps, so dimly revealed by that warm green glow. Surely the gods would not have brought her to this place if they did not intend for her to explore it. “I’ve got to go down there, and it’s the sort of place—if you need a light, that shows you should not be there. Will you wait, or accompany me?”
“I’ll come.” He paused. “Even blind.”
“Good,” she said approvingly, grateful for his nerve. “Take my hand.” Her fingertips brushed his, then found a firmer grip. “It will be like that night you led me through the wall passages in your father’s house,” she added, trying to reassure him. The physical aspect of his Sha Muira training was so thorough, it was not often that she had him at a physical disadvantage. “Only this time you get to be the one playing blindman, and I won’t play you to my advantage and bump you against walls.”
Tullier didn’t answer. She instantly regretted her forced levity. Back then the relationship between them had been very different. To remind him of it now must seem like pettiness rather than jest. “Come on,” she sighed. “Forgive my words. I’ll be careful of your skin—I want you with me. Even if it’s not so nice for you. I’m not sure what we’re going to find down there.”
“Then let me bring a light,” he said hoarsely.
“If we bring a light—” Gaultry was not sure how to explain. “The Twins would consider going down there with our own light to be an act against faith.”
“Faith,” he groused. “Tielmarans rely too much on it.” Sanctimonious piffle coming from Tullier, who had dedicated the first fourteen years of his life to the service Llara-Thunderbringer.
“We’ll take the lantern with us,” she said, ignoring his words. “Just in case.” The lantern, still doused from its fall, would surely comfort him, and she was sure that simply carrying it along unlit would invoke no harm to them. “And make sure that the tinderbox is ready in your pocket if the worst happens and the goddess-light melts away.”
He freed his hand from hers briefly and fumbled in the darkness. “Got it,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“S
till nothing,” Tullier complained. After negotiating the confined spiral of the steps and a narrow cleft, they’d reached a terminus chamber. To Gaultry’s eyes, the green goddess-light had grown ever brighter with every
step they descended. In this final chamber, the light was as strong as day, though still tinted green. It was like the light on a windless day among trees in full summer canopy.
For Tullier there had been no change to the character of the darkness.
“We’re in a circular room.” She paused, unsure how to describe it. Certain elements resonated with the Twin Goddesses’ strength. Overhead, the beautiful dressed stone of the spiral vault palpably emanated the Great Twins’ love and power, the source of all the bright green light. As she stepped toward the room’s center, the focus was even stronger. An open sensation unfolded beneath her ribs—like the half-fearful feeling of standing on an exposed overlook, conscious of the dangerous edge, yet willing to risk it for the view. “This room must be a secret place for Tielmark’s High Priestess to meditate. It’s full of the Great Twins’ power—not just the light, the stone of the room too.”
“Should I even be here?” Tullier’s brow was set with worry. In his blindness, his face showed nerves he would have hidden in full light.
“I think it’s safe,” Gaultry said cautiously. “But you mustn’t try to light that lamp.”
Back in Arleon Forest, Tamsanne had maintained a grotto with a similar feel—the stone parched by constant exposure to magic, the air crackling with power like a forest after a storm. “This place must have been used by Tielmark’s High Priestesses since the time that Clarin freed the throne from Bissanty and built the first palace in Princeport. It’s only old, not ancient.” The room did not have the arcane resonances of a place like the Prince’s cemetery by the sea, or Sieur Jumery’s burial mound with its altar of blood—or even Tamsanne’s grotto, though the godly power there was weaker. Rather than an old site subverted to a new purpose, it had been carved out of the matter of the cliff and dedicated with a single intent: the worship of Tielmark’s Goddess-Twins. Gaultry could almost feel their comfortable presence, swathing her like a protective sheath.
And yet … Gaultry looked doubtfully around the chamber, absorbing the more peculiar elements of its contents. As the gracefully sculpted vault supports curved downward from the spiral dome, they disappeared behind piles of disordered clutter. Racks of scrolls, clumsy sheaves of folded vellum, and hoarded piles of leather-bound books, stacked haphazardly against the walls, covered much of the beautiful masonry. The effect was more squalid squirrel’s nest than meditation chamber. At floor level, a palpable taint of human obsession overlay the Great Twins’ presence.
Gaultry had never seen so many books or so much paper, crowded all into one space. She had never imagined a repository of knowledge stored this way, all heaped in dusty piles and dirty.
Hairs quivered at the nape of Gaultry’s neck. Something in this room was not a healthy reflection of the current High Priestess’s mental state.
“This place has a weird feel,” Tullier said. “Are you sure it’s not interdicted?” He was still by the room’s entrance, one hand on the carved stone of the irregularly shaped doorway, the other half protectively raised in the air in front of his chest. Something in the way he held that loosely outstretched hand—thumb tucked away, fingers held together like a wedge—reminded her that part of his Sha Muira training had gone forward in the dark. Did that make him more or less wary of this place?
“There’s some rather odd clutter,” Gaultry said, “Papers and things. But the Great Twins wouldn’t let me see their light if it was truly wrong for us to be here.” She glanced once again around the rat’s nest piles that filled the room, troubled. If Tullier too could sense the discord, surely she wasn’t imagining it. “I don’t know what it is that you’re sensing, but I think maybe the paper has altered the resonance of the room. Dervla, or the Priestesses before her, seem to have filled up the floor with scrolls and books and things.” She turned around, and then around again, trying to take it all in. The High Priestess, so far as Gaultry knew, was not required to keep accounts or records or other information regarding her tenure. Those were jobs for the Prince’s clerks or historians. What business of the High Priestess’s could possibly require these stacks of dusty parchment?
There was a lectern at the room’s far side. Leaving Tullier by the door, Gaultry crossed over to it. Someone had stood there recently to write. Dry ink, a discarded quill, and trimming from a paper leaf cluttered the surface. The scroll rack at its side contained three scrolls, one so ancient and dry she dared not crack it open, and two of faded dun-colored parchment. Guessing that whoever used the lectern had reviewed these scrolls most recently, she spread one of the dun-colored scrolls open on the cluttered lectern.
It was stamped at its foot with a double-spiral surmounted by wings, the signature seal of Dervla’s mother Delcora. The caption was a line of fastidiously ornamented script:
The PRINCE can have no truer protector than his HIGH PRIESTESS.
Beautiful ornaments in colored ink ran down both the vertical margins. The writing that filled up the space between was
looser, less formal, as though the caption and margins and had been inked in well before the scroll’s actual text.
The Power of the Great Twins is a river in HER body; through HER they speak, through HER the PRINCE is shown the windings of his fate. Tielmark’s HIGH PRIESTESS leads the PRINCE in the eternal circle of the seasons’ change. SHE holds the hidden mysteries that must be followed to maintain Tielmark’s prosperity. The Gods, who give HER strength, bless HER wisdom.
A fortnight has slipped and gone since Corinne was confirmed Free Princess of Tielmark. We have reached Emiera’s month, and already the Ides are upon us. More flowers have bloomed this year than ever I have seen in springtime, and the maying parties went forward with a wild abandon I trust I will not live to see matched. The Feast on Emiera’s Ides was prepared with renewed joy and love, and the farmers came from every corner of the land to refresh their pledges to their Princess.
All was joy. When the time came for Corinne to sanctify her summer pledge, Great Lady Emiera accepted her offer with every evidence of divine delight. This season will bring a harvest Tielmark will remember for years to come.
I guided the Princess and her consort in the ceremony. Helpless and willing, they followed like children in all that I told. Fair Emiera rewarded their obedience with the most favorable portents I have yet lived to witness. Praise Her Glory and my strength for all that was accomplished here today!
Gaultry, realizing belatedly that the scroll was a narrative of the old High Priestess’s daily affairs, closed her eyes and turned away.
“Where are you?” Tullier asked, after a long moment had passed. “What are you doing? I can’t even hear you breathe.”
She had not known she was holding her breath. She exhaled shakily and opened her eyes. Tullier had advanced a little away from the door, his hand tentatively brushing the edge of a wooden scroll rack in what was still, for him, the pitch dark. She could not blame him the edge of impatience in his voice. “I’m looking at the scroll I think Dervla was reading most recently,” she told him. “Her mother, who was High Priestess
before her, wrote it on the day of Emiera’s Feast, fifty years back when the Brood made Benet’s grandma Princess.”
“What does it say?” His voice betrayed no feeling, but once again his expression twisted with dismay, as he forgot once more that she could see him. Emiera’s Feast was the festival Tullier and his Sha Muira master had attempted to desecrate.
“So far just that Delcora takes credit for everything that went well during the festival. What else would you expect from Dervla’s mother?” Gaultry smoothed the scroll guiltily with her hand. She hesitated to read on. Emiera’s Feast celebrated the budding life of spring, the new life sown in the ground by Tielmark’s farmers. Though the ritual that Prince and consort performed on Emiera’s day was shrouded in mystery and discharged in secret, it was not entirely possible to conceal its substance. A disproportionate number of Tielmark’s rulers were born nine months after Emiera’s Day—in years that also brought harvest bounty rich enough to be fondly remembered from one generation to the next. Though Delcora’s scroll detailed nothing of this, Gaultry, reading between the lines, sensed the old High Priestess’s fevered excitement at her guiding role in this, the most intimate and secret of the Princely rituals, in a year and at a time when Princess Corinne, young and newly married, would have been ripe to bear her first child.
She could hardly begrudge the old High Priestess her excitement. Successfully leading Corinne in that ritual, the year Tielmark’s freedom had been confirmed on the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of liberation from Bissanty, must have been the crowning moment of Delcora’s tenure as High Priestess.
It was also not information to which Gaultry had any reason to be privy. She covered the scroll with her hand, uncertain whether she should read further.
It had never been her intention to intrude upon the sacred mysteries of the High Priesthood. She swore silently at Haute-Tielmark, cursing the mission on which he had unknowingly set her. Dervla had every right to hunger for the key traitor-Heiratikus must somehow have stolen. Every right, every reason, to seek zealously to repossess it. What was she doing, skulking with Tullier in this consecrated place, nosing in Delcora’s private chronicle?
Flattening the scroll against the lectern, she began to roll it back into a tight cylinder, furious at her own meddling. Self-anger and the effort not to read further combined to make her clumsy, and she knocked over
the jar of dried ink. The lid fell free, and she barely saved the contents from spilling. As she leveled the jar, the lid tumbled to a rest on the parchment, like a marker to a point below where she had stopped reading.
Tamsanne’s name leapt out, written in cramped and angry letters.
Tamsanne
, she read.
The changeling child of Tamsanne’s womb.
After that, there was nothing for it but to read the entire scroll through. She mechanically placed the lid back on the jar, riveted, as her eyes scanned back to where she had left off reading.
… I guided the Princess and her consort in the sacrifice. Helpless and willing, they followed all I told. Fair Emiera rewarded their obedience with the most favorable portents I have ever seen. Praise Her Glory and my strength!
This, Gaultry realized, was the last of the description of the day’s ceremonies. From there the narrative became more personal—and more damning.
Today, even as I led my Princess through the joyous maze of all that is sacred, Melaney Sevenage set sail for Bassorah City. The ship sailed at noon, a great winged bird, flying swift and white to Llara’s Heart before the wind. I had sworn two acolytes to bear witness, while I was occupied with Emiera’s Feast. As they watched, Great Lady Emiera cast Her judgment: though Melaney called out most piteously, though she tore her hair and rent her clothing, even to the last moment when she was pulled beneath the decks, no one answered the fair Lady’s cries for relief. She who sought to usurp my place in Corinne’s heart is justly punished. The Gods are served.
The PRINCE can have no truer protector than his HIGH PRIESTESS.
I saw that pledge affirmed today.