Lady Warhawk, page 26
part #4 of Zygradon Chronicles Series
"My dear, if Ceera had not said clearly that no one of her bloodline would become Queen of Snows, I think I could name you my heir," Meghianna said.
"I don't want to be Queen of Snows. All I want is to have my baby." The young queen pressed both hands over her flat belly.
"You will. I promise, on the very foundations of the Stronghold." She took a deep breath. "And that is where we will go."
* * * *
Meghianna contacted Mrillis as soon as she and Ynfara reached the tunnel that would take them to the Stronghold. The news he gave her almost made her turn back. The sudden disappearance of Ynfara from Quenlaque had acted as a catalyst for vicious rumors to come out into the open. Though there were many variations, they all had the same theme--the two miscarriages had been by Ynfara's own choosing, because the children were not Athrar's.
The gossips and the enemies who attacked with whispers from shadows could not agree on who her secret lover was, who risked the safety of the Warhawk's alliance, but Lycen was the one blamed more than the others. Meghianna shuddered, thinking of how her son and his family had to be feeling, their fury and helplessness. She had learned long ago that the only defense against people who insisted on believing lies rather than the truth was to live her life the same as always and prove them wrong.
The only way to prove these enemies wrong was to make sure Ynfara gave birth to this child now in her womb. And yet, Meghianna longed to turn around and stand with Lycen and Ilianora against these newest assaults on their honor and happiness. Returning to Quenlaque and telling their enemies, open and hidden, could fight the new, cruel tales, but would leave Ynfara vulnerable to the magic trying to destroy her unborn child.
The longer Ynfara stayed away from Quenlaque, the more people would choose to believe the lies. The fact that Athrar stated he knew where his queen had gone, that he knew she was faithful and she was safe, would do no good. For the sake of the unborn child, no one could know Ynfara was pregnant. Until Meghianna unraveled the magic wrapped around Ynfara's flesh, they could not be sure how it was formed, what triggered it, and if some hidden enemy knew she was pregnant before she did. The only way to protect Ynfara was to get her inside the protective walls of the Stronghold, where the enemy's magic could not reach.
She might need to give birth here, if we are unable to dislodge the spell and keep it from killing the child, Meghianna said.
If Ynfara stays away from Quenlaque so long, it might not be safe for her to return at all, even with a child who is Athrar's image. Mrillis sounded tired, but Meghianna thought he also sounded less distracted than he had been in a long time. I fear that these fools will tear Quenlaque apart with their tongues faster than the catapults of the enemy, he added. There might be no Quenlaque to return to.
Are you well, old meddler? Meghianna wrapped her arm a little tighter around Ynfara's shoulder and gestured ahead. The tunnel turned slightly, and the door into the Stronghold was just around that turn, glowing softly silver and blue in the twilight shadows.
I am unsure, he admitted after several long, waiting moments. There are times I feel as if I move in a dream, and I am unsure what is my waking and what is my dreaming.
Do not go to see Nemma anymore. Please?
Oh, but she will miss me. He chuckled. I can guess your expression, even if you haven't said a word. Yes, I have finally gathered my courage and approached my ghost.
"Ceera's ghost," she whispered, startling Ynfara. They had both been silent during most of the journey down the tunnel.
No, she is no ghost. A warm, delightful young woman. She doesn't know who I am, Mrillis added quickly, before Meghianna could gather her thoughts to interrupt. She is lost. Before she woke in a healer's hall in Quenlaque, her entire life is a blur, lost in the darkness. I have promised to help her find some answers.
Are you sure that is wise? With all the troubles assailing Athrar? Mrillis, I am depending on you to stand with my brother while I am busy with Ynfara.
I will not abandon him. You worry too much, child. Mrillis chuckled, and abruptly the connection between them closed.
Meghianna shuddered. That was unlike Mrillis. And the tight, hot, slightly sick feeling in her belly when she thought of Mrillis talking and laughing and spending time with Ceera's ghost was unlike her. She wondered, for the first time in a long while, if she could indeed be jealous.
There was no time for self-examination. Every moment counted. They had now reached the Stronghold. The door opened and they hurried through. Light and warmth flowed around them as the ancient stone structure came to life. Now was the time for work. The fulfillment of prophecy and the life of an innocent child depended on her utter concentration on the task at hand.
* * * *
Meghianna found the fine web of the spell growing through Ynfara's flesh within a day of reaching the Stronghold, her search aided by surrounding the young queen with the concentrated star-metal embedded in the place. The filaments reminded her of hair-fine roots. When she simply sat and observed, she could see them growing, spreading through her flesh. Like the main root of a grape vine, she was able to trace the malevolent magic back to a tiny spot at the base of Ynfara's neck, one tiny dot of darkness hidden inside her bone, where the tattoo of her grandmother's spell had not been completely eliminated.
Meghianna knew someone had control of the spell, turning it nearly invisible, as it grew through her flesh instead of across her back in an intricate pattern of lovely blackness. The roots of the spell wove through Ynfara's vital organs and enclosed her womb. Meghianna sacrificed two days to merely observing the spell as it grew. She could predict the time when the delicate web of the spell would entirely enclose Ynfara's womb and the growing child. When it touched the child, it would penetrate her flesh and kill her.
"Her." Meghianna yanked back out of the Threads that let her observe the growth of the spell. "You have a daughter."
"A daughter." Ynfara blinked, stunned, then a slow smile touched her face and she rubbed tears from her eyes. "Athrar will be pleased. He said he wants a daughter first, another Lady Warhawk, to watch out for our son when he is born." She shrugged, her smile growing crooked. "He said you had been surrounded by boys too long. He wanted to give you a girl to spoil, and perhaps she could be your heir."
Meghianna blinked away the tears that threatened to scald her face and laughed shakily as she reached out to embrace the young queen.
"No one must know," Ynfara said, when they had dried their eyes and settled back into their seats again. "Athrar, yes, of course, but no one else. They'll say my child is not Athrar's, if anyone knows. Someone will think they are serving Athrar by killing my baby, if there is any rumor that she isn't Athrar's daughter. No one must know."
"There will come a time when you won't be able to hide the evidence."
"I know." Ynfara pressed both hands over her flat belly. "When that time comes, hopefully this trouble will have faded to nothing. Or at least there will be other problems to occupy their attention, so they don't watch me, ready to shred me for the slightest mistake."
"Athrar does love you," Meghianna whispered. "More than he can express."
"I know. And that's why I chose to marry him, despite all the troubles and all the attacks I knew would fall on me. And especially with Indreseen's shadow constantly hanging over us." She shuddered. "Edrout... He frightens me. He's just a little boy, but he's too clever. Sometimes, I think there's someone else looking out through his eyes."
"We will attend to that problem, my dear, when we have ensured your child will be born. That is the focus of our lives right at this moment. Let tomorrow's problems take care of themselves." Meghianna gestured for her to lie down again, so she could continue her examination.
It took eight more days to remove the webwork of magic woven through Ynfara's body. The least frustrating part was that it kept growing, visibly, like roots of a stubborn, prolific weed. Meghianna could handle that. What slowed her and made her sweat was the fact that the spell wove through all of Ynfara's vital organs. She was forced to stop frequently when pulling on a single filament of malevolent magic caused Ynfara distress--choked the breath from her lungs, caused her heart to stutter, tangled her intestines.
Finally, after meticulously wrapping Threads around each filament of the spell to drain it of power, it was all removed. Even down to the tiny speck of original spell hidden in Ynfara's bone. They were both exhausted from the effort, and slept for two days straight, until Lycen's frantic call penetrated the Stronghold's protective, thick shield.
Mrillis had vanished, and there was no sign of him in the Threads. Worse, Nemma had vanished, and every evidence said they had gone away together.
Meghianna searched for signs of Mrillis, but the trail of his pathway through the Threads woven throughout the land grew fainter and fainter, swallowed up in the growing discord of Nemma's presence in the Threads. She followed Nemma's trail, until it suddenly erupted in violence and vanished. Meghianna found the healer woman, lying in a burned puddle of her own blood, eyes wide and unseeing, no signs of struggle, her throat and wrists slashed and her heart cut from her chest. Death magic, without a doubt. All around Nemma, glowing, twisted symbols in a language she had never seen before were scrawled in the dust in blood. The corruption that made the air thick grew stronger, fouler with every breath she took, until it threatened to crawl down her throat and strangle her. Meghianna staggered out of the clearing, feeling the ground shudder under her feet, as if something tried to erupt like maggots bursting through rotted flesh.
Faintly, the last whispers of Mrillis' presence shimmered in the air. Meghianna stretched herself through the Threads, trying to catch his resonance, until she thought her physical body would fade away, absorbed in the effort.
Then, suddenly, Mrillis was gone. She shuddered deep inside, a cry yanked out of her as a far off, discordant shriek of metal filled her blood and bones, and the Threads became visible in the air around her, blazing bright for two heartbeats. Meghianna slid to the ground, her arms wrapped around her head as she waited for the world to unravel around her.
The reverberations continued, silently, lingering, like thunder heard from halfway around the world. Meghianna thought perhaps the entire World would continue trembling on the verge of fracturing until Mrillis was restored.
She pulled herself to her feet, clinging to a tree, staring at the symbols that faded as she tried to decipher them. It seemed to her as if all the ground and air and trees in the desecrated clearing tried to pull away from the abomination of death magic that had taken place there. Then that faded as well, just like Mrillis' presence had faded to nothing. Even the stink of Nemma's slaughter dissipated into a smell of scorched stone.
"It's as if someone shielded him from the Threads as they went along. Enfolding him in a shield like the Stronghold possesses. Or choking off all his imbrose, so he has no magic whatsoever and the Threads do not respond to him anymore," Meghianna reported, when she met with Athrar and Lycen and the Warhawk's council three-quarters of a moon later. She described what she had seen when she followed the intertwined trail of Mrillis' and Nemma's resonances, until all she had left was the violated clearing reeking with death magic.
"If the World's greatest enchanter could fall victim to such a ploy..." Lycen shook his head, then turned sharply to face her and his stern expression crumpled. "Mother, I'm sorry. You've had the worst of all of us, hunting for him and finding such a thing at the end of the trail." He got up from the table and knelt next to her chair and wrapped his arms around her.
Meghianna felt very small as she finally let go and wept in her son's arms. Far in the back of her mind, she thought that she might someday smile at the glorious relief she felt in being able to rest her burden on someone else for a little while.
Even as she thought that, she braced herself for the battle that lay ahead. The world now rested entirely on her shoulders. All the Rey'kil, all the enchanters and Valors, looked solely to her. She felt very young and unready, and very old and tired, both at the same time.
"Meggi ... what was it?" Athrar asked, when she had wept herself empty. He went to one knee next to her. "That sound, when Mrillis vanished utterly. What was it? It made Braenlicach burst into light, so I thought I would be blind for days."
"Zygradon." Meghianna wiped at her swollen, aching wet eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. She wanted to sleep for a year. "That sound was Zygradon, crying out in protest. The bond between them...not shattered. I do believe the world would end if it would ever be destroyed, but Mrillis is cut off from the bowl of power. Without it, how can he ever be restored to us?"
"Could you follow it? Could you find the Zygradon, now that you've heard it?"
"I...don't know." She closed her eyes and rested her head on Lycen's shoulder.
Meghianna swallowed hard, refusing to give voice to the jagged, aching thoughts rattling through her soul: Without Mrillis, what did anything matter? She almost wished the world had ended in that moment when the Zygradon mourned.
* * * *
"Lady?" Ynfara paused in the doorway of Meghianna's workroom. She looked uneasy about entering, and Meghianna didn't blame her--the room had once been Mrillis' province, but she had taken it over because her main library was stored at the Stronghold.
"Come in, dear. How are you feeling? I'm sorry I haven't been up to see you yet, since I got back, but--"
Ynfara looked over her shoulder, both directions up and down the hallway outside, then stepped into the room and pulled the door closed. "Megassa is gone."
Meghianna almost asked 'Megassa who?' Then she blinked, and a crushing feeling of horror stole her breath for a few heartbeats as she searched through the Threads and found no sign of her sister anywhere within Quenlaque. She struggled to push that horror aside as Ynfara settled into the chair opposite her at the long table full of scrolls.
"Thank the Estall, you know who she is. I've asked a dozen people already where Princess Megassa is, and they either tell me she's out riding or she's in her rooms. Or they tell me they don't know who I'm talking about. And no one remembers the boy, Edrout, at all." Ynfara hugged her shawl tighter around her shoulders. "What's happened to everyone?"
"We have been so busy with one crisis..." Meghianna gestured at the many scrolls and tablets and sheets of parchment she'd piled up on the table in her effort to track down the prophecy that would give a clue to finding and freeing Mrillis. "I suspect she and the boy slipped away under cover of that travesty of foul magic, and nobody noticed."
Meghianna searched further through the Threads, and still found no sign of her sister. Megassa had successfully shielded herself, and that indicated a strength of imbrose she should not have possessed. How long had their enemies been planning this? How long had Megassa been part of the plotting?
Ynfara became her confidant, her assistant. Meghianna knew how difficult it had to be for the young queen to spend so much time in Mrillis' quarters. The sense of his presence was so strong here, it had to be disturbing. Meghianna found it comforting, as if she might look up from a long evening of studying, with her head and eyes aching, to see Mrillis leaning against the wall, shaking his head, a smile parting his beard, ready to offer the answer she had been seeking with so little success.
Later, she appreciated the irony that Ynfara was the one destined to find the answer, in the prophecy Ceera and Trevissa had both spoken to Mrillis about his downfall.
"But it offers hope, doesn't it?" Ynfara said, when she spread the single sheet of parchment out on the table between them. "The one he had the least to fear--Nemma, because she was Ceera's ghost--and the one who hated and feared him the most. Me."
"But you had nothing to fear from him."
"When I thought you might not be able to remove the tattoo magic. I thought there was something I had done wrong, that I hadn't fought long enough. And I hated him for my heritage, because it put me in the center of prophecies and all this political fighting..." She sighed and rested her elbows on the table and rubbed her eyes.
"What's wrong?" Meghianna fought a chill that threatened to settle inside her. "What new lies are starting up? We've spent so much time locked away in here, I've quite lost track of the days, let alone the newest stupidity of the Court."
"Some suspect." Ynfara rested her hands on her belly. Only when she pressed her skirts against herself could the gentle swell of the growing child be noticed. "They're dropping all sorts of hints, asking all sorts of questions. Some of them quite nasty. Athrar gives them a blank look and pretends not to know what they're talking about. It was quite amusing at first, frustrating everyone. But I'm afraid we outsmarted ourselves. Some people are sure that because Athrar doesn't know about the baby, that means we are not sleeping together anymore, and the baby is someone else's."
"Lycen's, of course." Meghianna sighed and rested her head in her hands. "No matter what course we take, the choices we make, we put a weapon in our enemy's hands."
"Some of our enemies know I am not unfaithful. They'll try to kill my child." Ynfara took a deep breath. "I want you to take me back to the Stronghold, until my daughter is born. Maybe to stay, if the situation doesn't improve."
"Ynfara--"
"Athrar's heir is more important than anything else. He agrees with me." She shrugged. "He doesn't like it, but he agrees with me."
In the end, Meghianna had to agree as well. The timing was close enough to make it believable when she announced it was again time to check for the magical design in Ynfara's back. Her heart ached when she saw the tearful farewell between Athrar and Ynfara, and knew her brother would face a rising wave of scandal and vicious rumors when his wife did not return.
