“Well, my Cunning Little Vixen,” said the Sea-King, as an errant current sent a little clown-fish to thread through his hair, thinking it was an anemone. It realized its mistake a moment later, and darted off to swim down to the garden again. “I have a real challenge for you. I know that something is amiss, but I do not know what it is.”
Katya ran her hand along the polished edge of the pink coral parapet on which she sat. This was just about the only thing that she missed badly when she went onto the Drylands. Here in the Sea-Kingdoms, she was essentially “flighted,” since everyone swam in three dimensions. Once on dry land, she was restricted to her own two feet. She was not alone in this. The King hated that so much that he could scarcely bring himself to poke his head above the surface.
The two of them rested atop one of the many towers of the Palace, which, besides having a view as far as the obscuring nature of the water would allow, meant that no one could possibly eavesdrop on them. This was a wise precaution considering what it was that Katya actually did for her father.
It was not always easy being the youngest of fourteen children, but there were great advantages to the position if you were of an observant nature, and Katya was. You watched how people with bonds of affection acted towards one another. You saw how other people would try to use or intrude on those bonds. When your family was important, you saw every possible manner of exploiter turn up and attempt to use them.
You watched your siblings fall for some gambits, make mistakes, have to repair them. You saw your parents forced to fix the ones that your siblings themselves could not save.
You were a child, considered insignificant, safe to ignore by those outside the family. And by the time you were old enough to be significant, to be used yourself, you knew all of the tricks. The Sea-King’s brood was enormous, even by Drylander standards. Seven sons and seven daughters, one for every year, until both the King and Queen had decided that any more would stress the capacity of the Palace itself, not to mention the ingenuity of their father in finding places for them. Eventually, for the major positions, he had decided to mirror his offspring; similar duties, different titles. And being a creature of the Fey, of the Sea, and not nearly as bound in these things by The Tradition as mortals, he elected to mirror the boys against the girls. Each of the daughters was being trained, groomed, and nurtured towards the same sorts of lives as the sons. Take Raisa, the eldest. Like Mischa, she was a warrior. Unlike Mischa, she was not apt at tactical thinking, but her combat skills were exquisite. Fighting in the Sea was not nearly so driven by power and bulk as it was by finesse and quickness. So she was training as the King’s Champion, a Traditional role with a lot of the same Traditional magic behind it as a Godmother’s Champion, and she in turn handled the combat training of exceptional individual fighters.
Tasha was training as a Sorceress, Tanya as her father’s Seneschal, and Galya as his…distraction. Among the brothers, middle son Yerik was the male counterpart to Tasha, Vitenka hard at work already as the Steward—at the moment, sisters Svetlana and Inna were not sure what they wanted to do, but given their bent for diplomacy, Katya foresaw both of them happily making alliance marriages, so that they could go exert their influence in another of the Sea-kingdoms. Which was also what Leonide might do. The highly amusing analog to Galya was the other sort of distraction, the irritating kind—seventh son Fabi had virtually leapt into his Traditional role of the Wise Fool. Fortunately for Fabi, the Tradition of the Wise Fool was not so strong nor demanding in the tales beneath the waves as it was on Dry Land. It allowed him the luxury of being the artistic sort of Fool, the dreamy kind, whose wit was admired as well as just barbed enough to serve as a correction. Fabi was a poet, and a good one. He was, Katya thought, entirely in love with words. In a way she pitied the girls that yearned after him; they could never, ever compete with poetry to claim his heart.
There was no analogous position to Wise Fool for a seventh daughter, for which Katya was very grateful. Like the rest of her siblings that were not “destined” for a particular life, she had been able to choose, with her father’s guidance, what it was that she wanted to do. It had not been the most obvious choice, and in fact, had she not been blessed with a very particular sort of magical ability, it probably would not have been possible.
“Your magic is still as strong as ever?” the King asked his daughter. “You still have no difficulty?”
“Stronger and easier to wield, Father,” she said with confidence. There were, of course, always doubts when one first came into a magic. It could leave, or change, or fade instead of strengthening. But once one passed the magically significant milestone of the twenty-first birthday, as Katya finally had, it was generally stabilized for good and all.
This was important, since Katya’s form of water-magic, though not nearly as powerful as her Sorceress-sister’s and virtually identical to it in such things as “calling water” or forcing water-creatures to obey her at need, did one thing that none of the rest could do. She could walk on the Drylands without precautions or a second thought. That was the gift that touch of Siren’s blood gave to her. Beneath the waves, she breathed the water, while above it, she breathed the air. Transitions were effortless and instantaneous.
That, combined with her appearance—tiny, white-blond, like an exquisite and fragile doll—made her the ideal agent for the Sea King in the Drylands as well as within his own Court.
He had been the first to suggest such a thing, when she brought some of her uncannily accurate observations to him when she was only nine, though he had not proposed anything of the sort at the time. “Keep watching, my Cunning Little Vixen,” he had said. “Keep watching and come to me and we will talk about what you have seen.” She had nodded, pleased that she had pleased him. On her thirteenth birthday, he had told her what she was actually doing. On her sixteenth, he asked if she wanted to continue. On her seventeenth, he had sent her to the Drylands for the first time. No one else knew what she was doing. Not even her mother.
Now she had passed the last hurdle. Now that they both knew that she could go anywhere, any time, the King would be free to send her anywhere he needed her.
“Well this should be interesting for you,” the Sea King said, nodding with satisfaction. “The sea-birds tell me that something dreadful is arising on the island-Kingdom of Nippon.” Katya felt her eyebrows rising, as she looked into her father’s handsome face. “I have never been to Nippon.” This was definitely promising! She tried to recall what she knew about that Kingdom. Nothing really, It was a chain of many small islands and one very large one; she could not really think of anything else. This island-Kingdom was as far from the Palace as it was possible to be and still be touching their borders.
“Nor I, actually. I know only what is in the library. But if the sea-birds are noticing something bad, it is likely to be very bad indeed.” He grimaced. “Since normally all one ever hears out of a sea-bird is ‘Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!’ this does not bode well. I tend to leave Nippon alone, as they are very touchy, but—“
“They are an island and touch the Sea on all sides, and anything arising there will have to cross the Sea to go elsewhere.” Katya nodded. “Lord King my father, I will visit the library to acquaint myself with all that we have, and then I will be on my way.”
His look of pride filled her with confidence, even though this was the first time he had set her a task in a place where neither of them had any real previous experience. If he believed in her, and believed she was ready—then she was ready! “I depend upon your eyes and ears and cleverness, my daughter. I know you will not fail me, nor your Kingdom.”
He returned to his counting-house, and she swam down to the repository of knowledge they all referred to as a “library” although it hadn’t a single book in it. It couldn’t have real books, of course; paper would rapidly disintegrate here. All the magical books that Tasha read were especially created just for her, the letters incised into paper-thin metal pages, the bindings all of metal-covered wood. But to preserve a library full of real books would mean the casting of many spells to protect them, more to allow them to be handled and read. Again, the question of the delicate balance of magics inside the protective shield around the Palace arose, and the answer was the same as always. It was not worth the risk.
But the “library” had been here forever. It had been there since there was a Sea-King in this Kingdom. The magic around the Palace had been put there when it had already been in place for centuries. It was very likely, in fact, that the Palace had been erected here in the first place primarily because the library was already here.
She swam through a coral garden, the most popular garden surrounding the palace, full of secluded, blue-lit grottos, great staghorn branches of black and red corals surrounding soft pockets of sand, sea-fans providing endless places for children or adults to play hide-and-seek. But in the center of the coral garden was her goal, hidden within a sea-cave, and illuminated by the glow of a set of strange, luminescent corals she had never seen anywhere else.
She swam inside, waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimmer light, then approached the library. In the center of the cave was a slab of stone; something translucent and white. She thought it might be quartz, but no one knew for sure, because no one wanted to upset the magic here, and it would probably take magic to find out. It was precisely cut into the shape of a triangle. By whom? No one knew.
On the top of the stone lay a shell.
Not an ordinary shell, mind. In the shape of a conch shell, this one was made of the same translucent white stuff as the table. It must have been carved, although every detail was precisely identical to a real conch, including a few little irregularities and places where it looked as if barnacles had tried to attach.
This, in fact, was the library.
And unlike a real library, it was not portable. You could not move the stone slab, it was somehow rooted to the rock beneath it. You could not take the shell, either. The moment you left the grotto, it would vanish from your hand and reappear back on top of the slab. Whatever magic had created it, also appeared to protect it. You could smash both shell and slab with hammers, and both would heal themselves within moments.
She picked the shell up. “I need to know as much as possible about the island-Kingdom of Nippon,” she said carefully. Then she drifted up onto the white stone triangle and settled down on it.
When she was comfortable, she put the shell to her ear and closed her eyes.
At first, she heard only what you would hear up on the Drylands if you put a shell to your ear; something like the sound of the sea. It was like the sound of the sea, although it was not the actual sound of the sea of course; you could not fool someone from the Sea-Kingdoms into thinking it was. But under that sound came a soft murmuring, and she listened deeply to that murmur, allowing it to lull her, as the voice became clearer and clearer. She never exactly went to sleep; this was more like a state of trance, though that was something she never achieved except when listening to the library. For a very, very long time she remained this way. Somehow her arm never became fatigued, nor her legs cramped from sitting in one position for so very long without moving.
She literally could not tell how long it was that she sat there. The grotto was a timeless place, and there was no light leaking in from the outside.
It was dark when she emerged from the sea-cave, with everything the collective scholars of this Sea-kingdom knew about Nippon stowed away in her mind. Alas that it was not a great deal She knew nothing, for example, of what the people wore, though she did know what they looked like. They were small, but not blond; though another aspect of the magic she got from the Sirens—the ability to look like anyone she cared to—would come into play here, she would not know how to dress. She would have to rely on The Tradition to help her. Tricky, that. It would do so only if the story needed her intervention, or if her story needed its intervention. Still. It had helped her before, and it would likely do so again and it was always worth trying.
Her eyes were drawn inexorably to her home. Now that it was night, the Palace glowed against the dark water like a giant lantern, all pale pink, and if possible, looking even more like a creation out of a dream. The lights from within glowed through the coral walls; except when the Palace settled down to sleep, no room was ever left unlit, so the effect was never spoiled by dark patches. Even then, there were always small lights left burning, so that there was always a faint glow to the place. Down in the gardens, the night fish had come out; luminescent, they sported patterns or lures of glowing green or pale blue along their flanks. Some of the little squid and octopods that lived in the garden also glowed. Some of the patterns moved, or flashed on and off. Some of the anemones glowed as well. The glowing Palace was surrounded by a garden full of tiny, moving lights. And on the surface above and just a little below it, the glow-drift gleamed, thin scarves of pale light that were really made up of millions and millions of tiny sea-creatures almost too small to be seen. This served as stars for the Sea-Kingdoms, though no one who had ever seen the actual stars ever found the glow-drift as satisfying.
Armed with her information, and already wearing her fish-scale armor, Katya was ready to go. Now, it was a curious thing with her father; he hated good-byes. He liked the illusion that if he turned a corner, he just might come across the person that he knew very well was somewhere far, far away. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that as a young child, most of the people he had actually said “goodbye” to had never returned. That had been a turbulent time, when war raged between this Kingdom and the Drylanders of the south, and she could hardly fault her father for having such a reaction.
And although the rest of the family was well aware what how she served King and Kingdom, as were his advisors and other special agents, he had made it very clear that the family was not to know when and where she had gone when she took on a task for him. It could be dangerous for her, for even as cautious as they were, it was possible for something to fall in conversation where it could be overheard. As for the Court—well, since more than a few of those tasks she’d been set when she was younger had been about uncovering the true motives of one Court member or another…it was not wise to inform then either.
As a matter of principle, she allowed herself to trust no one in the Court. Not even when her father trusted them.
So she never said good-bye to anyone. Ever. She just went.
That is what she did now; she swam to the stables to find herself a ride.
“Stables” was a misnomer, really. It was really an enclosure, with walls of net strung between pylons formed of old ship-masts, where various small whales and dolphins who were here at the Palace for one reason or another could stay. The net kept them from drifting off when they dozed, and mullet was served to the visitors several times a day. That made it a good spot for them to relax and hang about; some to gossip with each other, some to get fed without effort, some just because they were willing to lend a fluke now and again to some task like Katya’s. Normally
Katya would select a dolphin, porpoise, or a pilot whale to carry her where she needed to go, but this time, the journey would be a long one, and she needed strength, speed and stamina. With the smaller cetaceans, you could have any combination of the first two, but not all three.
So she was going to have to choose something very different from her old friends, and no little bit dangerous.
She needed an orca.
When she entered the enclosure, there were three orcas there, all habitués of the Palace. Two of them were old, seasoned veterans, one with his flank scarred by the marks of squid suckers, the second with a lopped-off dorsal fin where a shark had bitten it off. The youngest was the one she was most interested in; he was known to be a fast swimmer, not because he had ever taken a rider before, but because he had won several inter-pod races. He was handsome, but not unscarred; there were the marks of combat on his flukes, a clear impression of teeth.
He was awake too, which was good, as the other two were already dozing. Orcas tended to be testy if you woke them.
Like all the Royal Family, Katya had tasted Dragon’s Blood, that of an ancient Sea-Drake that lived in a sea-cave beneath the Palace itself, and woke only once every hundred years or so. She had never seen it awake, though her father had. She envied him.
She and the last four of her siblings had all tasted the blood at once. The Drake was impossibly beautiful, like an enormous cross between a Sea Serpent and a Lionfish. In sleep, it lay coiled around a stone in the center of its cave that had been worn smooth by its movements as it slept. It had an enormous frill of black and white stripped spines, and a ridge of similar spines down its back. Both were folded flat; but moved a little as the King took a knife, nicked the membrane between two toes and collected a thick drop of blood. She had moved forward very carefully and with the others, tasted it from the point of the knife before it could wash away. And then…then she had understood the language of the Beasts. Interestingly enough, it had also given her the Gift for understanding the various spoken and written languages of every race she had ever encountered, though it had not done so for her siblings. She had spoken first to a dolphin, and her life had seemed changed forever.
The Dragon’s Blood had unlocked the speech of every cetacean of course. So it was no difficulty at all for her to bow to the orca and say to it, “Eagle of the Sea, I wonder if I might trouble you for a moment,” and be perfectly understood.
The orca regarded her with its right eye, round and shrewd. “The Sea-King’s youngest daughter comes to have words with me, although we have never met. Presumably, you want something.” Orcas were odd beasts. They absolutely required formality and deference from those who initially approached them, then tested them with rudeness, or sometimes even threats. It was probably because that was the way they treated each other. Big predators were always testing each other.
So she laughed. “But of course! Doesn’t everyone? This offers challenge though. An epic swim, if you will, and perhaps at the end of it, something interesting to see. Have you ever been to the place the Drylanders call Nippon?”
He rolled so that he look at her with his other eye. “Hmm. I have not. It would be a new place to see. An epic swim, you say?” He blasted her with a jolt of sound that jarred her insides for a moment. She didn’t even flinch; definitely another test. “Such a thing would make me attractive to the females. I am looking to start a pod soon. A strong swimmer, a good hunter. Hmm.” He rolled back to the other side. “And you…you are a warrior.”
“Of sorts,” she agreed.
“You do not show fear, only proper deference.” He blew a blast of bubbles. “You would be a good companion. We will go.”
“My thanks. May I know your name?” she asked, going over to the side of the enclosure, which really served only to keep the visitors from drifting off on the currents as they slept, and as a place to hang the various sizes of traveling-harness and the weapons one needed when traveling.
“Sharptooth. You would be the one called Tsunami.”
That pulled her up sharply. She had never heard her Orcan name before. “Tsunami? Why am I called that?” she asked, as she fitted the harness over his nose. He blew a string of laugh-bubbles. “Because nothing at all of you shows on the surface, and only at the last moment do you reveal yourself. And those who see you are swept away.” She had to admit, that was a fairly good encapsulation of her style. “I trust you approve and agree with such a name,” she said dryly, slowly working the traveling harness over his tall dorsal fin.
He blew another string of laugh bubbles. “I am of the People. You need to ask?”
#
Orcas were the fastest swimmers in the sea. Sharptooth was probably one of the fastest orcas in the Kingdom. Katya held to his harness, flattened herself down along his back to reduce resistance, and let him go. As for giving him directions—this was an orca. He had access to the best guides in the world. Other orcas, and the only great whales that could rival an orca for fierce nature, the sperm whales. He simply set out in the right general direction and began calling. Soon, someone replied. “This way.” He oriented himself on the call without slackening his pace. Sound carried for leagues and leagues beneath the water; whichever orca pod was in hearing distance, knew where Nippon was, and was in the right general direction, had called him. Once out of the shelter of the magic around the Palace, the water had turned cold and the magic that allowed anyone to breathe water vanished as they crossed the invisible barrier, and her body had reacted by changing, just as the Siren’s bodies did. There was one moment of icy cold, and a moment when it felt as if she was choking.
Then she was warm again, and she could breathe.
They paused to chase down, catch, and eat some salmon. She spread a purse net vertically in the water; he chased the school towards it. The school hit the net and she pulled the cord that turned it into a bag, catching enough for him with one left over for her meal.
As she sliced raw bits off and ate them, he eyed her. “There were seals,” he offered. “I did not chase them.”
She eyed him back. “If it is a choice between seal and starving…”
He blew bubbles. “Good, you are practical. I doubt you would let me take porpoise under any circumstances though…”
“I’d rather you didn’t eat my allies.” She suspected, from the tone of his voice, that he was teasing her. “It makes for bad feelings all around if you eat allies.”
“True. And we should be gone.”
“So we should.” She sliced off the fillets and stowed them in a fish-skin pouch on the harness. She was set for food now; all they had to worry about was keeping him fed. She secured herself to his harness, tucked herself down again, and they were off. A journey like this had a curious timelessness about it. They stopped to rest when they were tired, hanging together in the featureless, empty blue that was the mid-ocean far from any shore.
When he was hungry, he would query the surrounding water until he got an answer about where the food was, and they would make a slight detour. The sun rose and set above the water; once they waited as it touched the horizon to see if they could catch the “green flash” that supposedly came as it passed beneath the waves, but neither of them saw anything. So they moved on. Finally, there were gulls in the sky, bits of greenery on the waves, and they knew they were nearing some kind of land.
Then they saw it.
Journey’s end, but the mere beginning for Katya; though Sharptooth would be a part of this for a bit longer. First, Katya had to find the right part of what was really a very large island. For that, they needed to listen to the seabirds. At their first landfall, the birds were acting perfectly normally. Nothing much to complain of, it seemed, other than that someone was always stealing food. And there was the usually gull chorus, “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!” They turned their faces southwards along the coastline and plunged on, pausing long enough to give the hungry orca a meal of good mullet. The second time, half a day later, was equally fruitless. It was a full moon, though, so they elected to cover more leagues in the search. But the third time—as sunrise flooded the sky with light, and the seabirds rose to meet it.
“Death! Death! Death!” cried one.
“Despair! Despair!” cried a second.
Katya turned her head to look at the round, bright eye of her companion. “I think we have found the right place,”
Sharptooth had left, after giving the unusual pledge that if she needed him, she must summon him through the Sperm Whales or the Orca pods. She stepped out of the water and shook herself off, waiting while her body shivered in the shock of change, her lungs took in the first gasping breath of air, and she felt things subtly shift inside her. And then, shift again, as she turned herself from a tiny, blond woman to a tiny, black-haired woman.
Then, she spread her arms wide, spun out a thread of magic, and sent it questing after The Tradition. Not that The Tradition was anything like an entity, except…
Except that sometimes it acted as if it was.
Well, no matter. She knew when her magic touched it, and she promptly insinuated her will into it, cajoling. I need to fit it here, she told it; if there was one thing that The Tradition “liked,” it was for everything and everyone to follow down its favored and predetermined paths. This was a land full of small black-haired people who looked a certain way. She didn’t look that way, and wanted to. She sensed its interest, then its power. Quickly, before it could elect to do something annoying, and seized on that image of fitting in, and decided to make her fit in as a beggar, she needed to take control when the power was there.
I need to fit in here, she told it.
And the moment when it decided that it needed to help her do that, she invoked exactly how she wanted to fit it. As a high ranking noblewoman—with whatever was the most beautiful clothing that was available!
Because, after all, it was no fun being a peasant.
She had her eyes closed in order to concentrate; the magic was thick, very thick around here.
No wonder the seabirds were crying doom; whatever was happening was powerful and The Tradition had taken note quite strongly.
But she was a bit taken aback when it suddenly felt as if someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric all at once.
Legs muffled, arms enveloped, head bowed forward—her eyes flew open and she looked down at herself in shock.
It not only felt like someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric—it looked that way too.
She must have been wearing six layers of clothing.
In form, the main article she was enveloped in was a heavily embroidered blue silk robe, but the rectangular, lined sleeves swept down to and along the sand, the robe itself trailed along behind her by the length of her arm, and it was bound around her by a broad, stiff, embroidered silk sash with an elaborate bow or knot that she could feel at the small of her back. Beneath this robe was another; beneath that still another—there must have been six or seven of these robes, each carefully layered so as to show a sliver of colored silk at the neckline. Her hair had been bound up and hidden beneath a wig made in a stiff mounded style with hairsticks thrust through it, and on her feet were wooden sandals so tall she was afraid to take a step in them. Not that she could have even if she had wanted to. She couldn’t move. The clothing was beautiful but—
This was utterly ridiculous.
Would The Tradition give her another chance? She closed her eyes and tested the potential magic about her.
There was nothing there. She’d had her chance. Now she had to find some other way of getting the job done.
Drat.
With a sigh, she began divesting herself of all of the many garments. She would just have to do this the hard way.
By dusk, she was quietly moving through the underbrush at the side of a road, following her instincts into the north. She had found a peasant farmer’s house with commoner’s clothing drying on bushes outside it. Figuring that one of those silk robes was probably worth more than a hundred outfits, she left all seven of the robes neatly folded beneath the bush, with the wig on top. She kept the jeweled hairsticks, the jade ornaments attached to the sash, and the handful of trinkets she found tucked inside sleeves, in the sash. She might not need them, but you never knew.
How do women manage to do anything in this place? she thought crossly, slipping from shadow to shadow. This did not bode well for accomplishing her father’s task quickly. If women were so confined by their clothing, what other fetters did this land put on them? What a confounded nuisance.
#
The Temple was in shambles.
Katya knew it had to be a Temple; religious structures in nearly every land she had ever been in were generally very similar, though this was very small and rather humble. Perhaps it was a Shrine rather than a Temple? This place had a very large front gate, all of wood, which stood open, and a broad avenue lined with stone lanterns leading directly to the front doors, also standing open. There was a large bell and hammer to one side of the door, although one side of the bell frame was splintered and broken. The once-manicured grounds were overgrown with weeds, and the gravel paths had bits of grass sprouting in them. Katya climbed the steps leading to a porch around the entire structure, then stepped quietly through the open doors and peered around in the gloom. The exterior walls were all of wood, and the place appeared to be just one big room with a wooden floor. There was an altar with the statue of a man seated in a cross-legged pose on it. The serenity of the man’s expression was marred by the hole gouged in the statue’s forehead.
Violation of a sacred space. This is not good.
The destruction was not new; in fact, it looked very much as if it had happened many months ago, and yet there had been no attempt to repair it. The Temple looked abandoned.
She prowled around the edges of the room. It was curiously barren, but the walls behind the altar seemed to be composed of nothing but paper stretched in frames. Odd. Very odd. There were no doors, and yet there seemed to be further space beyond the paper walls.
She examined the walls further, and her curiosity increased. It appeared that the center section of each wall moved. She gave the one nearest her an experimental push.
It moved sideways with a faint sound, and she stared at the room beyond…
…and the old man sitting disconsolately in the corner. He looked up at her.
He looked like a more ancient version of the Qin sailors that she had seen, very rarely, among the crews of sailors from other lands on trading ships. He was quite small, no taller than she, and his skin was like parchment, his eyes narrow and slanted. He looked—broken. “It’s no use,” he said dully. “If you have come on her behalf, you might as well know that she has already taken the only valuable thing we had. If you have come for solace, there is none to be had here. I have tried my best, but I am old and hurt, and the others are all dead.”
“What others, grandfather?” she asked, coming over to help him up as he tried to stand. “I am a stranger here—“
“I can offer you shelter for the night, but little else,” the old man said, as if he had not heard her. “My brother monks are dead, and no one comes from the village anymore. I think they may be dead too. I have not had the strength to look.”
She helped him to his feet and at his direction, into a little building behind the shrine, which proved to be an open room with a kitchen at one end. There was a small fire burning in a brazier, with a kettle of water over it. “I have tea—“ he began.
“Grandfather, you will sit, and you will let me tend to things,” she said, firmly. Princess she might be, but she was also not a stranger to every sort of work. That, too, had been part of her training, so that she could counterfeit virtually anyone of any station. Before long, she had the old man comfortable beside a much larger fire, cradling a cup of hot tea. At his direction, she had started a pot of some sort of grain cooking, then went out to survey the rest of the Temple and its grounds.
It had been pretty much ransacked, and the more she saw, the angrier she became. A great deal of the destruction was purely wanton damage. There was no reason to it, if, as the old man had said, there was only one object of value here. It appeared that five or six others had lived here with the old man in lives of quiet simplicity, that had in one day been shattered by an outside force. She did manage to find some bedding that was not too torn up, and the pallet the old man himself must have been using, and some of the same short robes and loose trews of plain dark cloth that both of them were wearing, that had been stored in a closet. That would give both of them a change of clothing.
She returned to the old man laden with her gleanings to find he had gotten enough energy to tend to the food. He looked up at her entrance, face much more alert this time. “Little daughter, you are too kind.”
“Grandfather, it is my duty,” she replied. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
He bowed his head. “It was a witch,” he said sadly, “And we were not prepared to combat her. But we did not know. How were we to know?”
Slowly, as the grain cooked, as she made up beds for both of them near the warmth of the fire, as they ate, she pieced together the story. This was not an important shrine, but it was regularly visited by the folk of a nearby village, and the old man and his five fellow priests tended the shrine and the grounds, and the spiritual needs of the village, faithfully. The statue—she could not make out from his sometimes rambling speech whether it was of a god, or of a great priest of that god—had been unearthed accidentally several decades ago by a farmer plowing his fields, and the shrine built to house it, priests found to tend the shrine once it was completed. No one had thought that the statue was of any particular importance; the dark stone embedded in its forehead had seemed nothing more than a simple bit of ornamentation.
This old man had been one of the first group of six priests to be sent here; as old age had thinned their ranks, others had been sent to replace them. Katya gathered, as she ate the boiled grains and listened closely, that although there were branches of priests that were martial in nature and trained in combative techniques, these were not of that order, being strictly contemplative. “This was just a forest shrine,” he repeated, over and over, his bewilderment evoking her pity. “What did we have that anyone would want?”
Then, two months ago, She had turned up at the door.
She hadn’t been subtle, either. The way the old man described it, she hadn’t even issued a challenge. The first they had known of her arrival was when the doors blew open, and a white-clad, white-haired woman surrounded by a whirlwind of grimacing demons strode into the sanctuary.
“A witch,” the old man called her. Katya would have called her a sorceress, but whatever you called her, it was pretty clear that she was very powerful. It was also quite clear that she was both ruthless and evil.
The old man himself had been the first to bar her way, with amulets binding both wrists and a blessed staff to protect him, he had interposed himself between the witch and the others.
Amulets and blessed staff had been utterly useless. With a simple gesture, she had flung him through the air at the bell-frame just outside. And that was literally the last thing he knew until he woke up again, in terrible pain, lying at the foot of the bell-shrine with a broken arm and cracked ribs.
He had staggered into the sanctuary to find his fellow priests dead, lying where they too had been thrown, and the stone wrenched out of the statue.
“It must have been important, some sort of amulet or talisman,” the old man said brokenly. “But we were simple priests. We never had any magic of our own, only magic in things we were given and the power of our faith. How were we to know?”
“You couldn’t” she soothed him, as she helped him into bed. “You could not have known.”
It was clear that the attack had broken his spirit as well as his body.
The old man had cremated his fellow priests by the simple expedient of dragging their poor bodies to an unused shed, drenching them with oil, and setting fire to the place. He had waited for someone from the village to come so that word of what had happened to his superiors.
But no one ever came, and he was too weak to make the walk himself. And by now, he had lost faith that they still lived.
“Be easy, grandfather,” she said into the darkness. “Tomorrow this will be dealt with. I am young and strong. If there is help to be found for you nearby, I will find it. If there is none, I will take you to where help is.”
As soon as he was asleep, she got up again, and stole out.
She needed very little sleep, and right now she needed information far more than sleep. Thanks to the old man, she knew where the village should be, and the first piece of information she needed was whether or not there was anyone still alive there.
Under the cover of darkness, she sprinted down the road at a supernatural speed, and before the moon was very high, she had come to the village. She had feared that what she uncovered would be “what was left” of the village, and to her intense relief found it still standing.
Easy enough to see from a distance, it was like a collection of toy houses all lit up. She caught a hint of the steep thatched roofs in the moonlight, but most of the light came from lanterns outside the doors and being carried by people milling about. The houses all seemed to be like the shrine; substantial in size, raised off the ground, and sometimes going to two or three stories.
Evidently, there was a meeting of some sort going on in what looked like a village square. Katya slowed to a walk, and the, after pausing for a moment in the shadows, worked her way towards the ones that seemed to be doing the most talking.
She listened silently, on the outskirts of the crowd, keeping herself in shadows. She had the notion that if she stayed very quiet, since she was a female, the men might not notice her. And she was right. There were other women and children hovering half in the shadows, listening, but none of them said a word.
She examined these villagers as well as listening to them; for the most part, they wore the same kind of loose trews and wrapped tunic that she had purloined. The men were quite muscular. The women looked quite strong too, leading Katya to think that, as in Belarus, the women of this land were not inclined to hide behind their menfolk, even if they did defer to them. The “meeting” consisted of a great deal of quarreling, not to the point of shouting, but very near. A minority of the men, mostly young, wanted to find out what had happened at the shrine. The majority were still too frightened to go, and kept reminding the others that “she” had said it was none of their business, and to stay away.
Well, after the priest’s story, Katya had a good idea who “she” was. The witch had given some sort of demonstration of her powers and managed to thoroughly cow the leaders. Katya heard the fear there, fear and even some panic that made the voices of most of those speaking a bit shrill. The faces in the lantern-light were strained, and several of the speakers kept looking back over their shoulders as if they were afraid they were going to be overheard.
But to Katya, the interesting thing was that this witch had threatened the villagers rather than actually doing anything to them. She must have made some display of power, or they wouldn’t be so frightened, but it didn’t look as if the display of power included much actual harm. Not like what happened to the monks. Katya doubted that this was out of the kindness of her heart, or a disinclination to slaughter an entire village full of people. Oh my, no.
It had to have been because she couldn’t do anything to them.
As she listened to the arguments go back and forth, she wondered what the difference was between the villagers and the monks. Because the witch hadn’t hesitated a moment before going all out against the shrine.
What was in the shrine, besides the talisman? Perhaps the answer lay, not in “what” but in “who.” Six unarmed priests, none of whom were trained in fighting, most of whom were probably old or elderly? I suspect that may be the answer. They were not a challenge. . But a village full of working men and women, with weapons or weapon-like objects…whatever it is that the talisman does…might have very little to do with combat.
She might have demons, but evidently not enough of them. Not enough that she could take on a village. Or else…her demons couldn’t cope with something that the villagers could use against them. She began casting glances around at the homes and workshops. There were carvings and written symbols everywhere; they could be nothing, or they could be guardians and runes of protection. But the shrine presumably would have had the same sort of protections. That couldn’t be it. Something common, so common as to be easily overlooked. The iron of their farming implements? The bird-frighteners in the fields? The presence of ancestral spirits about the village? The presence of children in the village? Without having the sort of concentrated and focused magic that a real magician or sorceress had, rather than the bits and bobs that she had as the daughter of the Sea King, there was just no way for her to work it out.
Katya circled the group, looking for clues, hoping for ideas. At least at the moment it appeared that the witch was not all that powerful—certainly not so powerful that she could not be overcome by someone who actually had strong magic. But Katya knew better than to trust to appearances. She wanted to see this creature with her own eyes, to judge for herself just how dangerous she was. And then there were the sea-birds. They would never be crying doom if the danger wasn’t real. So just because this witch wasn’t strong enough to take on a group of simple villagers at the time of the confrontation— She might be very strong now. She had her stone, and as far as she knew, all the priests were dead. The threats had served their purpose; the villagers had stayed away from the shrine long enough for her trail to have gone cold. That may have been exactly what the witch wanted..
Well this would not be the only cold trail that Katya had pursued. Meanwhile she also needed to get help for the old priest. It was a very good thing that she knew exactly how to get that help.
On the outskirts of the crowd were the adolescents, huddled in a knot, listening intently and doing no small amount of grumbling. Katya went to eavesdrop. “Who is this foreign witch to tell us we are not to visit our own shrine?’ hissed one of the boys, keeping his voice down. Katya smiled. “That’s right!” One of Katya’s little magics was the ability to make her words seem to come from anyone other than herself. Right now it seemed to be coming from a group of four, each of whom would swear one of the others had spoken just now. “Besides, those priests aren’t fighters!
What if something happened to them?”
“I’m sure something did.” replied the first boy, grimly. “Someone should have been sent as soon as that witch was out of sight.”
“I never thought I would ever feel ashamed of my father.” That was another of Katya’s little prods. It struck home with more than one of the youngsters.
“If the old men won’t act, we should,” growled the first boy, and within moments, with a little more prodding on Katya’s part, the young men had withdrawn to where they wouldn’t be overheard by their elders. Katya followed them just long enough to be sure that they were of one mind on going to the shrine in defiance of the witch’s orders. But once she was sure—once she had actually seen them marching out on their way—
She felt a little badly about it; she’d manipulated them shamelessly and now they thought of their own parents and grandparents as cowards. On the other hand…
There was an old man, sick and hurt, who had been trying to take care of himself for far too long now. It was more than time that someone helped him.
As she left the village, slipping silently through the shadows with the cool, damp scent of water strong in her nose, they were on the road back to the shrine. And their elders were still arguing whether or not anyone ought to see if the old priests were all right.
Once she got out of earshot, and down to the banks of the stream she had smelled, she had put it all out of her mind. She had far more pressing things to think about.
Now if I were a witch, and I wasn’t planning on fighting my way to power, where would I go?
—Reprinted from Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey, by permission of Harlequin Books, Copyright © 2006 by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.