The Beholden, page 30
“Of course,” Omaira said. “How else could I see you? We know you human mages creep through there when you have need of magic.”
The Aetheric spirits, Izara thought numbly. The Aetheric spirits are all kajani.
Her head spun, and she pressed herself up against the tree. Everything she thought she knew about the world was coming unraveled.
Omaira said something in a language like broken glass. “How did you learn this? That his Lordship makes his home in the Atharé Desert?”
Izara recoiled at the force in Omaira’s words; the language she had spoken rubbed at the inside of her head. “The F-Founder,” she said, stuttering. “He’s a Laniana, a banyan tree spirit. But he’s the one who told us that Lord Kjari is an Airiana—he said we would find the palace in the Atharé Desert. That Kjari always preferred it.”
“Is this Atharé Desert cold?” Omaira asked. “And desolate?”
“Most of it, yes,” Izara said.
Omaira spoke in her language again. Izara’s eyes trembled. “Follow the stones in the cold desert.” She looked at Izara. “That is what all the books say, for those who wish to serve in his Lordship’s army.”
Izara curled her hands into fists. Sweat fell in fat lines down the center of her back. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s a clue to the puzzle,” Omaira said. “If I’m to prove myself to Lord Kjari, I must solve it.”
“So you can’t help us?” Celestia asked weakly.
Omaira smiled, slow and sharp, and turned to Izara. “I was hoping you’d help me, mage. Why do you think I was following you?”
A hot, damp wind blew through the tops of the trees, although none of it reached Izara below, on the forest floor. She wiped the sweat from her brow, feeling pierced by Omaira’s gaze. “I don’t understand.”
“You wielded great power at Aikha. It was the kind of magic I need—” Her eyes glittered. Izara tried very hard not to shrink away. “The sort of magic that will lead me to His Lordship’s palace. Lead all of us. He hides it from humans and kajani like myself, who grew up in the Aetheric Realm. But with magic, with the right paths, I will find it and join his army.”
“You think I have the necessary magic?” Izara felt breathless.
“I think so, yes.” Omaira leaned against her sword, met Izara’s eye. “But you don’t know the words, you don’t know the paths.”
“And you do,” Izara breathed.
Omaira nodded grimly.
Izara glanced over at Celestia, who had dropped her hand down to her belly. She knew what her sister was thinking: This is what we came for.
“I guess we will need to help each other,” Izara said.
“It appears we will,” said Omaira.
“Are you certain?” the cartmaker asked, peering at her over his desk.
Izara bristled, straighted up her shoulder. “Yes, I’m sure. One cart capable of travel over the mountains to the Atharé Desert, please.”
The cartmarker sighed, shrugged, then began plucking away on his typing machine. “The soonest I’ll have a carriage available is in three days’ time. Is that acceptable?”
She nodded, and the cartmarker hit a final stroke of keys, cuh-chunk, and then whipped out a sheet of paper lined with figures. “It should be an interesting journey,” he said, watching her.
“Yes, it should.” Izara took the receipt from him, glanced over it to make sure nothing was amiss, then tucked it in her bag. Celestia had made some kind of arrangement with Ganon to pay for the carriage—he was giving the money to the cartmaker, with Celestia writing to her staff at Cross Winds to pay him back and broker a trade deal between him and the acreage.
Celestia and her bargains. It was a skill Izara had never learned.
The cartmaker’s office was close to the Grand Isangi, and Izara had walked there rather than calling one of the carriages. What money they had—real money, in-person money—needed to be spent on supplies for the trip to the desert. Celestia was already taking care of it, ordering skeins of water and preserved food from the city market. Tomorrow they would all be going to the shops to find travel clothing appropriate for the dramatic drop in temperatures they’d find in the desert. This was all much more difficult without the Lady of the Seraphine’s boat, Izara thought, and its wellspring of magic. But they weren’t close to the river anymore, and there was no way to contact the Lady, to demand why she had kept the secret of Lord Kjari’s identity from them.
And what a devastating secret it was, that the being they sought was Decay. Out of all the Airiana, it had to be Decay. It had been his power Izara had called on that afternoon in Grand Mage Papazian’s office. His power she had tasted like rot in the back of her throat.
And now she was riding off to the desert to taste it again. Because she suspected the kajani magic she was going to be learning would be laced with his power.
The Grand Isangi emerged up ahead, glinting in the sun. They had only been here a few days, but already Izara was in love with this shining city, and her memories of Jaila-Seraphine, even the Academy, felt drab and uninteresting in comparison. If only she had come here under different circumstances.
She went inside and cut across the lobby to get to her room. But then she spotted Ico, sitting in his usual spot by the windows and drinking. He was alone. Izara glanced at the stairs: did she really want to go back up to the room, and make more plans about this absurd trip with Celestia? If it was just her and Ico and the kajan, that would perhaps not be so bad—a chance to learn about the kajani and their truth of their creation, a chance to learn new magics. But Celestia was pregnant.
And so Izara walked over to the sofa where Ico was sitting. He glanced up at her, took a drink from his glass. Ice clinked against the sides. They used ice like it was river water here.
“You got our carriage?” he asked.
She nodded. He patted the seat beside him. “Sit,” he said. “Let me get you a drink.”
“I don’t want anything—” But he was already gesturing to the barkeeper, some complicated twist of his wrist that the barkeeper recognized immediately. Izara slumped down beside him, pulling her bag into her lap.
“They call it a midnight blood tea,” he said, staring at the street outside. “It’ll go straight to your head. Supposedly it makes you remember the city, but I think it’ll also make you forget about all this other bullshit for a little while.”
Izara didn’t say anything. The barkeeper brought her drink over, handing it off with a flourish. She sniffed it, the chemicals burning the inside of her nose. Ico saw, gave a sharp barking laugh.
“Too much of a scholar to drink?” he said.
“Scholars don’t drink,” she told him. “We have to keep our heads clear.” But she wasn’t a scholar anymore, was she? The Lady of the Seraphine had dragged her away from the Academy weeks ago.
She gulped down the midnight blood tea and immediately regretted it. The back of her throat felt as if it were on fire. Ico laughed again, and when she started to cough and sputter, he hit her half-heartedly on the back a few times until she slumped against the sofa, slightly recovered.
“I don’t see how you can do this to yourself,” she muttered.
Ico lifted his glass. “Cheers,” he said, and took a drink. “I don’t see how you can’t.”
Izara sighed and looked down at the blood-colored liquid, at the broken chunks of ice.
“So you’re really going to be teaming up with the kajan,” Ico said, after a time. “Think it’ll work? We’ll actually find the bastard?”
Izara swirled the drink around in its glass, watching the ice catch the light. “I don’t know.”
“It’s fucking Decay. Who saw that coming?” Ico drained his glass, then gestured at the barkeeper for another. Izara bit her tongue—there was no use nagging him about it.
“It makes sense,” Izara murmured, not sharing the rest of her thoughts: How at the Academy, all the professors had spoken of Lord Kjari as a human man, as a warning to the students. If you did not follow the acceptable forms of magic, they said, you would wind up tipping the whole world into chaos.
Izara wondered if they knew the truth, if they perpetuated the myth of Lord Kjari in order to keep students from uncovering magic the Academy didn’t want them learning. Magic like the sort employed by the emperor and his Starless Mage army, which had allegedly been taught to them by Lord Kjari himself. Magic strong enough to defeat even the Airiana. Magic that was supposed to turn you into a madman.
“You want to know where I was when the Lady of the Seraphine dragged me back here?” Ico said.
Izara looked at him. He was watching the barkeeper make his drink.
“Okay,” she said.
He smiled bitterly. “I was up north. North of Eiren, even.” He peered at her sideways. “Living with one of the Airiana. The Lady of the Cold.”
Izara blinked in surprise.
“It was nice.” The barkeeper made his way over to where they sat; Ico held out one hand to pluck the glass away. “I ran errands for her. Acted as an intermediary between her and some of the Eirenese priests who worshipped her.” He took a drink. Izara listened to all of this with a tremulous fascination. She could hardly imagine this rough, brutish pirate serving one of the Airiana.
“Even told me her true name,” Ico said.
“What!”
He looked over at Izara and grinned. “She did. Not that I’m sharing that with you—ancestors know you’ve already gotten us into enough trouble thanks to some Airiana’s name.”
Izara scowled at him, angry because there was truth in what he said.
Ico took a long drink, fixed his gaze back on the window. “She knew what I was doing out here, the Lady of the Cold. In fact, she was the one who told me about the darkness spreading south.”
“Really? The Lady of the Cold appeared here?” Izara blinked in shock.
“Not here. In a whorehouse. They had an ice fan.”
Izara was not sure how to respond to that.
“So she’s willing to tell me what she wants. But she never told me Lord Kjari was an Airiana. Told me her name, wouldn’t tell me that.” He shook his head, greasy hair falling into his eyes.
Izara thought about what Isossa had said, about how the Airiana loved their games. She had learned something similar at the Academy—part of the lesson as to why it was so dangerous to do what she had done when she didn’t know any better. “The Airiana aren’t human,” Grand Mage Papazian had said, talking to a group of students, a different lesson from the ones she gave Izara one on one. “They don’t think like humans. Their magic doesn’t work like human magic, which can make it safer—there’s less fallout—but also much more dangerous.”
And yet whatever Decay was doing that required the Lady to send a trio of humans after him was clearly generating fallout. Leaving the world, as the Lady has said Kjari was doing? But that made no sense. The world needed Decay.
Izara felt a twist of discomfort in her stomach. What would a world without decay look like? Without death? A world of endless growth?
She thought of the dense formulas in the Aetheric Realm, twining around her fingers.
Izara took a long drink of her midnight blood tea. This time, it didn’t burn her throat so badly.
“The carriage will be ready in three days,” she said. “Do you know of anything else we can do?”
But Ico only stared at the window, and drank.
Izara spent most of the next three days in the library, reading books about the desert. The disquieting thought of Decay, one of the Exalted Twins, leaving the world made her stomach twist up with a thick, nameless anxiety.The library at Cross Winds had brought her solace when the family ran out of money, and then later too when her parents died. She suspected the archives here could do the same. And so she settled down at table in the back of the building, flipping through the silky pages of the books, drinking in the words.
She started with book about Decay, reminding herself of the old myths about him. He was one-half of the creators, although he was the half everyone feared. It was said that he had destroyed the world that existed before this one, rotting it into nothingness, and Growth, weeping at the destruction, had conjured life out of the blackness. Izara was not one to take such stories literally, but she knew Decay was focused on undoing Growth’s creations.
In one account, written in a thick old book with words printed on onionskin-thin paper, she read that some northmen believed Decay was envious of Growth’s ability to create life, and so he destroyed all she made. They did not see Decay and Growth as twins, but as enemies, eternally at war.
The Eirenese five hundred years ago couldn’t have known who Kjari really was, Izara thought. They would never have marched on him otherwise. But she wondered where the truth lay. Why had he created the kajani? Was there jealousy there? A desire to experience creation instead of destruction?
Eventually, she gave up reading about Decay—it only created more questions. She turned her attention to their trip and read an adventurer’s account of a journey through the Atharé, the details no doubt embellished, like all adventurer’s tales—he spoke of slaying a sand monster and encountering an evil enchantress who could control the dust with a sweep of her hand. The evil enchantress was also uncommonly beautiful, and offered herself to the adventurer once he defeated her—Izara rolled her eyes at that. Typical adventurer nonsense. And yet there were details she could glean from her readings—how to extract water from the sparse plants that grew in the expanse, how to build cover when the winds blew cold and dry from the frozen lands of the south. Izara wrote notes to herself in a notebook she purchased from a shop near the archives. She hoped they would be useful.
She also read about pregnancy. Celestia was just starting to show beneath her fine clothes, a bit of an unfashionable curve where her waist should be pinching in. If things were normal, this would be the time for her to retire to home-rest, where she would be pampered until the birth of her child. There was, of course, no advice in the medical texts for a pregnant woman planning on traveling the Atharé. Izara imagined that the doctors who wrote such books—probably all staid and serious, the lot of them—would have roared with derisive laughter over the very suggestion. But she made do with what she could, sketching diagrams of how to give birth outside of the home, writing lists of symptoms of trouble with the baby. By studying and learning, she was able to stave off the worry. It was what she had always done.
And then the day of departure finally came.
They walked to the cartmaker’s—Celestia had arranged for the supplies to be sent ahead. She wore a look of grim determination and an expensive traveling outfit, boots and light-weight fabric that could serve, she’d told Izara, as underthings for when they reached the desert. Izara had an identical frock, but it was packed away with the supplies.
Izara and Ico walked side by side, a few paces behind Celestia. He was pale, his hair lank and unwashed, and he smelled of liquor. He’d probably been up all night, drinking and dreaming of his Airiana mistress.
It was hot out, even for the early morning, and Izara was sweating by the time they made it to the cartmaker’s, where their carriage was waiting, a big dark thing with reinforced wheels for traveling over the mountains. No horses, like all of the carriages in Bloodvine.
“Say goodbye to this heat,” Ico said, wiping his brow. “You’re going to miss it soon enough.”
Izara didn’t say anything; she had known the cold of the mountaintops, windy and damp, and had always preferred it to the wet swelter of the Seraphine. Of course, she suspected the Atharé was nothing like the Academy.
Celestia took a payment note up to the cartmaker, who was waiting in the shade of an overhang. She spoke with him for a few moments, their voices low. She flashed a smile at him, and Izara watched him soften around the edges. Then they shook hands, and Celestia gave a little curtsy and walked back toward the others.
“The carriage is ours,” she said. “It’s already been loaded with our things. We just need to pick up Omaira.”
Izara and Ico exchanged glances. Izara wasn’t sure what he thought of the kajan, not really; he was a pirate, who knew what he really disapproved of? She shivered, thinking of the battle at the ruins, the terror that had swept over her before she’d unleashed her magic. At least Omaira seemed more reasonable than those kajani had.
Celestia pretended she didn’t see the look that had passed between Ico and Izara, however, and instead walked toward the carriage, waiting for them next to the trees. Ico sighed. “Might as well get this over with,” he said, and followed. Izara glanced over her shoulder, to catch one last glimpse of Bloodvine, city of glass and magic. She wondered if she’d ever see it again.
“You coming or not?” Ico called out. He had already climbed on top of the carriage. He claimed he could steer the thing, even without horses. Celestia was peering into the door, frowning.
Izara tore her gaze away from the city and joined her sister. Magic radiated off the carriage, heady and thrilling. She stood for a moment, letting the magic wash over her. Then she climbed inside.
The carriage was larger on the inside than it was on the out. Izara’s head thrummed with dizziness at the unexpectedness of it, and she tottered her way over to a sofa in the corner.
“How is it?” Celestia called.
“It’s fine,” Izara said. “Just watch your step.”
Celestia stepped in, then promptly tilted to the side—but she braced herself against the far wall, and didn’t fall. “Oh,” she said, “It looks like the train car.”
It did, actually—Izara hadn’t noticed. She’d been too busy focusing on the magic, wondering what alchemical formulas she might find lurking if she dropped into the Aetheric Realm.
And what kajani spirits she might find, too. When she worked up the nerve, she would have to ask Omaira to explain it in more detail.
Celestia closed the door and then eased herself down into a chair, her eyes closed. Ico thumped on the roof. “You ready?” he shouted.
“Yes,” Celestia said, not loud enough for him to hear. Celestia never shouted.
The Aetheric spirits, Izara thought numbly. The Aetheric spirits are all kajani.
Her head spun, and she pressed herself up against the tree. Everything she thought she knew about the world was coming unraveled.
Omaira said something in a language like broken glass. “How did you learn this? That his Lordship makes his home in the Atharé Desert?”
Izara recoiled at the force in Omaira’s words; the language she had spoken rubbed at the inside of her head. “The F-Founder,” she said, stuttering. “He’s a Laniana, a banyan tree spirit. But he’s the one who told us that Lord Kjari is an Airiana—he said we would find the palace in the Atharé Desert. That Kjari always preferred it.”
“Is this Atharé Desert cold?” Omaira asked. “And desolate?”
“Most of it, yes,” Izara said.
Omaira spoke in her language again. Izara’s eyes trembled. “Follow the stones in the cold desert.” She looked at Izara. “That is what all the books say, for those who wish to serve in his Lordship’s army.”
Izara curled her hands into fists. Sweat fell in fat lines down the center of her back. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s a clue to the puzzle,” Omaira said. “If I’m to prove myself to Lord Kjari, I must solve it.”
“So you can’t help us?” Celestia asked weakly.
Omaira smiled, slow and sharp, and turned to Izara. “I was hoping you’d help me, mage. Why do you think I was following you?”
A hot, damp wind blew through the tops of the trees, although none of it reached Izara below, on the forest floor. She wiped the sweat from her brow, feeling pierced by Omaira’s gaze. “I don’t understand.”
“You wielded great power at Aikha. It was the kind of magic I need—” Her eyes glittered. Izara tried very hard not to shrink away. “The sort of magic that will lead me to His Lordship’s palace. Lead all of us. He hides it from humans and kajani like myself, who grew up in the Aetheric Realm. But with magic, with the right paths, I will find it and join his army.”
“You think I have the necessary magic?” Izara felt breathless.
“I think so, yes.” Omaira leaned against her sword, met Izara’s eye. “But you don’t know the words, you don’t know the paths.”
“And you do,” Izara breathed.
Omaira nodded grimly.
Izara glanced over at Celestia, who had dropped her hand down to her belly. She knew what her sister was thinking: This is what we came for.
“I guess we will need to help each other,” Izara said.
“It appears we will,” said Omaira.
“Are you certain?” the cartmaker asked, peering at her over his desk.
Izara bristled, straighted up her shoulder. “Yes, I’m sure. One cart capable of travel over the mountains to the Atharé Desert, please.”
The cartmarker sighed, shrugged, then began plucking away on his typing machine. “The soonest I’ll have a carriage available is in three days’ time. Is that acceptable?”
She nodded, and the cartmarker hit a final stroke of keys, cuh-chunk, and then whipped out a sheet of paper lined with figures. “It should be an interesting journey,” he said, watching her.
“Yes, it should.” Izara took the receipt from him, glanced over it to make sure nothing was amiss, then tucked it in her bag. Celestia had made some kind of arrangement with Ganon to pay for the carriage—he was giving the money to the cartmaker, with Celestia writing to her staff at Cross Winds to pay him back and broker a trade deal between him and the acreage.
Celestia and her bargains. It was a skill Izara had never learned.
The cartmaker’s office was close to the Grand Isangi, and Izara had walked there rather than calling one of the carriages. What money they had—real money, in-person money—needed to be spent on supplies for the trip to the desert. Celestia was already taking care of it, ordering skeins of water and preserved food from the city market. Tomorrow they would all be going to the shops to find travel clothing appropriate for the dramatic drop in temperatures they’d find in the desert. This was all much more difficult without the Lady of the Seraphine’s boat, Izara thought, and its wellspring of magic. But they weren’t close to the river anymore, and there was no way to contact the Lady, to demand why she had kept the secret of Lord Kjari’s identity from them.
And what a devastating secret it was, that the being they sought was Decay. Out of all the Airiana, it had to be Decay. It had been his power Izara had called on that afternoon in Grand Mage Papazian’s office. His power she had tasted like rot in the back of her throat.
And now she was riding off to the desert to taste it again. Because she suspected the kajani magic she was going to be learning would be laced with his power.
The Grand Isangi emerged up ahead, glinting in the sun. They had only been here a few days, but already Izara was in love with this shining city, and her memories of Jaila-Seraphine, even the Academy, felt drab and uninteresting in comparison. If only she had come here under different circumstances.
She went inside and cut across the lobby to get to her room. But then she spotted Ico, sitting in his usual spot by the windows and drinking. He was alone. Izara glanced at the stairs: did she really want to go back up to the room, and make more plans about this absurd trip with Celestia? If it was just her and Ico and the kajan, that would perhaps not be so bad—a chance to learn about the kajani and their truth of their creation, a chance to learn new magics. But Celestia was pregnant.
And so Izara walked over to the sofa where Ico was sitting. He glanced up at her, took a drink from his glass. Ice clinked against the sides. They used ice like it was river water here.
“You got our carriage?” he asked.
She nodded. He patted the seat beside him. “Sit,” he said. “Let me get you a drink.”
“I don’t want anything—” But he was already gesturing to the barkeeper, some complicated twist of his wrist that the barkeeper recognized immediately. Izara slumped down beside him, pulling her bag into her lap.
“They call it a midnight blood tea,” he said, staring at the street outside. “It’ll go straight to your head. Supposedly it makes you remember the city, but I think it’ll also make you forget about all this other bullshit for a little while.”
Izara didn’t say anything. The barkeeper brought her drink over, handing it off with a flourish. She sniffed it, the chemicals burning the inside of her nose. Ico saw, gave a sharp barking laugh.
“Too much of a scholar to drink?” he said.
“Scholars don’t drink,” she told him. “We have to keep our heads clear.” But she wasn’t a scholar anymore, was she? The Lady of the Seraphine had dragged her away from the Academy weeks ago.
She gulped down the midnight blood tea and immediately regretted it. The back of her throat felt as if it were on fire. Ico laughed again, and when she started to cough and sputter, he hit her half-heartedly on the back a few times until she slumped against the sofa, slightly recovered.
“I don’t see how you can do this to yourself,” she muttered.
Ico lifted his glass. “Cheers,” he said, and took a drink. “I don’t see how you can’t.”
Izara sighed and looked down at the blood-colored liquid, at the broken chunks of ice.
“So you’re really going to be teaming up with the kajan,” Ico said, after a time. “Think it’ll work? We’ll actually find the bastard?”
Izara swirled the drink around in its glass, watching the ice catch the light. “I don’t know.”
“It’s fucking Decay. Who saw that coming?” Ico drained his glass, then gestured at the barkeeper for another. Izara bit her tongue—there was no use nagging him about it.
“It makes sense,” Izara murmured, not sharing the rest of her thoughts: How at the Academy, all the professors had spoken of Lord Kjari as a human man, as a warning to the students. If you did not follow the acceptable forms of magic, they said, you would wind up tipping the whole world into chaos.
Izara wondered if they knew the truth, if they perpetuated the myth of Lord Kjari in order to keep students from uncovering magic the Academy didn’t want them learning. Magic like the sort employed by the emperor and his Starless Mage army, which had allegedly been taught to them by Lord Kjari himself. Magic strong enough to defeat even the Airiana. Magic that was supposed to turn you into a madman.
“You want to know where I was when the Lady of the Seraphine dragged me back here?” Ico said.
Izara looked at him. He was watching the barkeeper make his drink.
“Okay,” she said.
He smiled bitterly. “I was up north. North of Eiren, even.” He peered at her sideways. “Living with one of the Airiana. The Lady of the Cold.”
Izara blinked in surprise.
“It was nice.” The barkeeper made his way over to where they sat; Ico held out one hand to pluck the glass away. “I ran errands for her. Acted as an intermediary between her and some of the Eirenese priests who worshipped her.” He took a drink. Izara listened to all of this with a tremulous fascination. She could hardly imagine this rough, brutish pirate serving one of the Airiana.
“Even told me her true name,” Ico said.
“What!”
He looked over at Izara and grinned. “She did. Not that I’m sharing that with you—ancestors know you’ve already gotten us into enough trouble thanks to some Airiana’s name.”
Izara scowled at him, angry because there was truth in what he said.
Ico took a long drink, fixed his gaze back on the window. “She knew what I was doing out here, the Lady of the Cold. In fact, she was the one who told me about the darkness spreading south.”
“Really? The Lady of the Cold appeared here?” Izara blinked in shock.
“Not here. In a whorehouse. They had an ice fan.”
Izara was not sure how to respond to that.
“So she’s willing to tell me what she wants. But she never told me Lord Kjari was an Airiana. Told me her name, wouldn’t tell me that.” He shook his head, greasy hair falling into his eyes.
Izara thought about what Isossa had said, about how the Airiana loved their games. She had learned something similar at the Academy—part of the lesson as to why it was so dangerous to do what she had done when she didn’t know any better. “The Airiana aren’t human,” Grand Mage Papazian had said, talking to a group of students, a different lesson from the ones she gave Izara one on one. “They don’t think like humans. Their magic doesn’t work like human magic, which can make it safer—there’s less fallout—but also much more dangerous.”
And yet whatever Decay was doing that required the Lady to send a trio of humans after him was clearly generating fallout. Leaving the world, as the Lady has said Kjari was doing? But that made no sense. The world needed Decay.
Izara felt a twist of discomfort in her stomach. What would a world without decay look like? Without death? A world of endless growth?
She thought of the dense formulas in the Aetheric Realm, twining around her fingers.
Izara took a long drink of her midnight blood tea. This time, it didn’t burn her throat so badly.
“The carriage will be ready in three days,” she said. “Do you know of anything else we can do?”
But Ico only stared at the window, and drank.
Izara spent most of the next three days in the library, reading books about the desert. The disquieting thought of Decay, one of the Exalted Twins, leaving the world made her stomach twist up with a thick, nameless anxiety.The library at Cross Winds had brought her solace when the family ran out of money, and then later too when her parents died. She suspected the archives here could do the same. And so she settled down at table in the back of the building, flipping through the silky pages of the books, drinking in the words.
She started with book about Decay, reminding herself of the old myths about him. He was one-half of the creators, although he was the half everyone feared. It was said that he had destroyed the world that existed before this one, rotting it into nothingness, and Growth, weeping at the destruction, had conjured life out of the blackness. Izara was not one to take such stories literally, but she knew Decay was focused on undoing Growth’s creations.
In one account, written in a thick old book with words printed on onionskin-thin paper, she read that some northmen believed Decay was envious of Growth’s ability to create life, and so he destroyed all she made. They did not see Decay and Growth as twins, but as enemies, eternally at war.
The Eirenese five hundred years ago couldn’t have known who Kjari really was, Izara thought. They would never have marched on him otherwise. But she wondered where the truth lay. Why had he created the kajani? Was there jealousy there? A desire to experience creation instead of destruction?
Eventually, she gave up reading about Decay—it only created more questions. She turned her attention to their trip and read an adventurer’s account of a journey through the Atharé, the details no doubt embellished, like all adventurer’s tales—he spoke of slaying a sand monster and encountering an evil enchantress who could control the dust with a sweep of her hand. The evil enchantress was also uncommonly beautiful, and offered herself to the adventurer once he defeated her—Izara rolled her eyes at that. Typical adventurer nonsense. And yet there were details she could glean from her readings—how to extract water from the sparse plants that grew in the expanse, how to build cover when the winds blew cold and dry from the frozen lands of the south. Izara wrote notes to herself in a notebook she purchased from a shop near the archives. She hoped they would be useful.
She also read about pregnancy. Celestia was just starting to show beneath her fine clothes, a bit of an unfashionable curve where her waist should be pinching in. If things were normal, this would be the time for her to retire to home-rest, where she would be pampered until the birth of her child. There was, of course, no advice in the medical texts for a pregnant woman planning on traveling the Atharé. Izara imagined that the doctors who wrote such books—probably all staid and serious, the lot of them—would have roared with derisive laughter over the very suggestion. But she made do with what she could, sketching diagrams of how to give birth outside of the home, writing lists of symptoms of trouble with the baby. By studying and learning, she was able to stave off the worry. It was what she had always done.
And then the day of departure finally came.
They walked to the cartmaker’s—Celestia had arranged for the supplies to be sent ahead. She wore a look of grim determination and an expensive traveling outfit, boots and light-weight fabric that could serve, she’d told Izara, as underthings for when they reached the desert. Izara had an identical frock, but it was packed away with the supplies.
Izara and Ico walked side by side, a few paces behind Celestia. He was pale, his hair lank and unwashed, and he smelled of liquor. He’d probably been up all night, drinking and dreaming of his Airiana mistress.
It was hot out, even for the early morning, and Izara was sweating by the time they made it to the cartmaker’s, where their carriage was waiting, a big dark thing with reinforced wheels for traveling over the mountains. No horses, like all of the carriages in Bloodvine.
“Say goodbye to this heat,” Ico said, wiping his brow. “You’re going to miss it soon enough.”
Izara didn’t say anything; she had known the cold of the mountaintops, windy and damp, and had always preferred it to the wet swelter of the Seraphine. Of course, she suspected the Atharé was nothing like the Academy.
Celestia took a payment note up to the cartmaker, who was waiting in the shade of an overhang. She spoke with him for a few moments, their voices low. She flashed a smile at him, and Izara watched him soften around the edges. Then they shook hands, and Celestia gave a little curtsy and walked back toward the others.
“The carriage is ours,” she said. “It’s already been loaded with our things. We just need to pick up Omaira.”
Izara and Ico exchanged glances. Izara wasn’t sure what he thought of the kajan, not really; he was a pirate, who knew what he really disapproved of? She shivered, thinking of the battle at the ruins, the terror that had swept over her before she’d unleashed her magic. At least Omaira seemed more reasonable than those kajani had.
Celestia pretended she didn’t see the look that had passed between Ico and Izara, however, and instead walked toward the carriage, waiting for them next to the trees. Ico sighed. “Might as well get this over with,” he said, and followed. Izara glanced over her shoulder, to catch one last glimpse of Bloodvine, city of glass and magic. She wondered if she’d ever see it again.
“You coming or not?” Ico called out. He had already climbed on top of the carriage. He claimed he could steer the thing, even without horses. Celestia was peering into the door, frowning.
Izara tore her gaze away from the city and joined her sister. Magic radiated off the carriage, heady and thrilling. She stood for a moment, letting the magic wash over her. Then she climbed inside.
The carriage was larger on the inside than it was on the out. Izara’s head thrummed with dizziness at the unexpectedness of it, and she tottered her way over to a sofa in the corner.
“How is it?” Celestia called.
“It’s fine,” Izara said. “Just watch your step.”
Celestia stepped in, then promptly tilted to the side—but she braced herself against the far wall, and didn’t fall. “Oh,” she said, “It looks like the train car.”
It did, actually—Izara hadn’t noticed. She’d been too busy focusing on the magic, wondering what alchemical formulas she might find lurking if she dropped into the Aetheric Realm.
And what kajani spirits she might find, too. When she worked up the nerve, she would have to ask Omaira to explain it in more detail.
Celestia closed the door and then eased herself down into a chair, her eyes closed. Ico thumped on the roof. “You ready?” he shouted.
“Yes,” Celestia said, not loud enough for him to hear. Celestia never shouted.
