THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 28: Blood Afire
“It is not for the sake of God that we serve life, but for the sake of life that we serve God.”
– Reverend Brahm D’Mair, The Union of Light (180 PA)
Panna woke early after a night of restless sleep and crept quietly from the Tynerion team’s tent. No need to wake anyone else just yet.
Outside, she was surprised to find that she was not the first to rise. The old Prian captain, Tiberius, sat on a slab of granite jutting up from the ravine floor. His hawk flew in lazy circles around the Waygate. Snow drifted and eddied around the softly glimmering ring but did not stick. Tiberius looked up at Panna as she made her way through the camp.
“Good morning,” he greeted her.
Tiberius didn’t look like he had slept at all. His white-shot gray beard had gone from unkempt to shaggy. He looked down at something he held in his lap. As she came closer, Panna could see that it was a glass blade. Not a knife — it had no handle, just a few splinters jutting from the bottom.
“Good morning. Is that a spearhead?” she asked. “An Arcadian one?”
Tiberius nodded without looking up. “It belongs to Maeve. It broke off the shaft back on Stray, when she was stealing Baliend back from Gavriel.”
“May I see it?” Panna was hesitant to ask, but she couldn’t help her curiosity. “I’ve never actually seen Arcadian glass. My parents talked about it, of course, but they didn’t bring any with them from the old world.”
Tiberius seemed about to refuse, but then handed the blade to Panna. She accepted it carefully. The Arcadian glass was heavier than she expected. It was cold and perfectly smooth, much like the Waygate material. The spear was at least a century old — probably more — but the edge remained razor-sharp.
“Why hasn’t it been repaired?” Panna asked. “Doesn’t Princess Maeve need it?”
“Maeve hasn’t actually been in a single fight since Stray, if you can believe that,” Tiberius said.
He raised one big hand, whistling sharply. Orphia keened, then circled back and settled onto her master’s shoulder.
“These spears were only carried by knights of the White Kingdom. It shouldn’t just be… ignored,” Panna said. She examined the bottom of the blade. There were a couple of colorful fibers stuck to the glass inside. “There would have been tourney ribbons here. Are those gone, too?”
“Yes,” Tiberius said. He stroked Orphia’s feathers. “You know a lot about Arcadia, dove.”
Panna sat down beside Tiberius, balancing the glass spear blade in her hands. “For most of my people, history is an open wound. But I’m an anthropologist. I don’t look at the White Kingdom with the kind of romance that they do.”
“You seem fond enough of fairy things,” Tiberius said, arching a bushy eyebrow. “Even without your own wings.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I love my people, and our culture,” Panna told him. “There were many beautiful things in the White Kingdom. Can you imagine what an entire city made of this glass would have looked like, Captain Myles? There’s nothing like it in the core, not even on Axis. But I didn’t grow up in the White Kingdom. I was born here, in the Alliance. I feel a little differently about some things than the older Arcadians do.”
Tiberius frowned. “Go on.”
“The other fairy species, for example,” Panna said.
It felt good to finally discuss some of her ideas. Concealing her heritage usually meant hiding her interest in the White Kingdom.
“What about them?” Tiberius asked.
“Dryads and nyads were more or less second-class citizens in the White Kingdom,” Panna said. “The race we call Arcadians used to be aerads, until Cavain conquered the White Kingdom. He gave them a new name, one to differentiate them from the fairies that they ruled over.
“And then there’s the war itself. It’s the subject of the entire Lay of Cavain, probably the most well-known piece of Arcadian lore. Most people focus on the etiquette it describes, but do you know what else it discusses? The pyrads, the fire fairies. There used to be four races of fairies, but Cavain wiped out the pyrads because they wouldn’t dissolve their own nation to join his.”
Tiberius’ frown deepened. “I never heard about that.”
“I would be surprised if you had,” Panna said. “That was all ten thousand years ago. We live longer than humans, but that’s a long time even by our standards. The exclusively Arcadian monarchy wasn’t cruel and the Arcadian knights kept everyone safe. It wasn’t the worst empire in the galaxy. But what the older fairies won’t tell you is that it wasn’t perfect, either.”
Panna turned the spear blade over and caught her reflection on the polished surface. Round ears, no wings… It seemed hypocritical to talk about her people’s own history when she looked human.
“I think that’s part of why we’re still such a ruined culture, even a hundred years after the fall,” Panna said. “Without the pyrads to raise hell, everything in the White Kingdom was so peaceful. And then the Devourers come out of nowhere and the survivors ran away. We don’t know how to fight, really. Not anymore.”
“Maeve always seemed to have plenty of fight in her,” Tiberius objected.
“The princess is a strong woman,” Panna said with a wry smile. “Some say that there’s pyrad blood in the House of Cavain. They’re the only black-haired Arcadians, you know.”
“That would mean Cavain went to war with his own kind,” said Tiberius.
“Yes,” Panna agreed. “But it would also mean that there’s still a bit of the fire fairy blood left, and that Princess Maeve has it. Maybe that’s why she still fights.”
“An interesting idea. Total birdshit, of course, but interesting.” Tiberius closed his blue eyes. “I’m not a damned Ixthian. I don’t believe for a minute that our genes dictate who we are. Our Maeve is strong because she’s got fire in her soul, not her blood.”
“Well, she’s not the only one,” Panna said. “The Cavainnas may be fierce, but there were other knights in the White Kingdom. They fought and died to defend their people. There are still strong Arcadians out there…”
Panna trailed off. She hoped that — by blood or spirit — Maeve was strong enough to withstand whatever the Cult of Nihil did to her. Panna held the glass blade out to Tiberius. He looked at it, still stroking Orphia’s feathers.
“Do you know how to fix that?” he asked.
“I think so. I’ve got some experience restoring artifacts. This isn’t exactly the same, but if I can figure out the length, the rest shouldn’t be too hard. Do you know what kind of wood the original shaft was made of?”
“No idea.”
Panna could probably examine the splinters left in the base of the blade and figure it out herself. If the wood originated in the White Kingdom, she would have to find the closest replacement… Panna closed her eyes and sucked in a breath. What good was fixing Maeve’s spear if she could never give it back to the princess?
Still, it was something to do. Panna looked up at the huge, shimmering Waygate. And she didn’t want to work anywhere near that thing today.
Xartasia refused to answer any further questions, but she waited with Maeve until dawn. She had given Maeve all the sleep that she would allow. Xartasia was gentler than her black-robed friends, but her soft wing-tip prods kept Maeve awake until Gavriel returned. The withered Nihilist barely glanced at Xartasia as he sat down.
“Go,” he said. “Hallax and I will keep our guest company now.”
Xartasia bowed, then departed without a word. Maeve’s empty stomach twisted as Hallax stepped into the room. She clenched her teeth and fought the urge to shrink back from the Nihilists. She would not be weak before them. She would not… And there was nowhere to go, anyway.
“You will not torture the memories from me,” Maeve told them as defiantly as she could manage.
“No, princess,” Gavriel agreed. “And I can’t risk your accidental death. When you finally die, it will only be with my blessing.”
Gavriel gestured over to Hallax, who knelt and pulled back one of the fairy’s tattered, blood-stained sleeves.
“There is no pain you can inflict which will break me,” Maeve said. She hoped that was true.
Gavriel smiled. “Your cousin said that you were strong and she was right.”
“Then… then what are you doing?” Maeve asked.
“Listening to Xartasia,” Gavriel said. “She told me about your strength, but also about your weakness. I shouldn’t have been angry with her for speaking to you, apparently.”
Maeve didn’t understand. Even with their sudden and terrible association, Maeve knew next to nothing about her cousin and suspected Xartasia knew little more about her. What could Xartasia have told Gavriel that could be of any use?
“You may actually enjoy this, Maeve,” the old Nihilist said. “I understand that you have a certain fondness for chemicals. Vanora White, in particular. How convenient, since we happened to have procured some from the original tenants of this building.”
Hallax held a loaded syringe in one hand and now Maeve did flinch. She kicked out at him, ignoring the pain in her swollen ankle and lacerated body, but couldn’t reach the Emberguard. He jabbed the needle deep into Maeve’s arm and pushed down the plunger.
Logan sat on the wing of his Raptor, holding the foil wrapper of his breakfast in his good hand. His neck and shoulders were stiff from a night of sleeping in the fighter.
Both the Prian and Tynerion archeological teams had extended tentative invitations to stay in the base camp, but Logan had no intention of trying to sleep in the long shadow of the Waygate. The scientists said over and over that it was an amazing discovery. That it would change everything. But every time Logan looked up at it, all he could think about was Maeve.
The snow had finally stopped falling and the sky was a uniform clear, bright blue. The thin air was still cold and smelled of ice. Wind tugged at Logan’s hair and clothes.
This wasn’t about the Nihilists anymore. This was about finding Maeve, about getting her back from Gavriel. And if she was dead… Logan’s cybernetic fingers screeched across the Raptor’s fibersteel wing. He let the thought go no further.
One of Kemmer’s trucks wheezed up the mountain and stopped on the edge of the moraine. Panna climbed out and pulled a long, straight branch from the back. It wobbled and plopped down into the frozen snow. She looked up at Coldhand, seemed to consider asking for help, then thought better of it and wrestled the branch up the slope alone.
What was she doing? The wingless Arcadian was almost as frustrated by their dead-end investigation into Maeve’s disappearance as Logan. He jumped out of the Raptor and caught up to Panna as she tried to figure out how to get her branch down the ladder and into the ravine.
“Climb down,” he said. “I’ll hand it down to you.”
Panna looked up at Logan, surprised and nervous as though he might tackle her again.
“I could just drop it,” she said.
“The branch is too long. It’ll break.”
Panna nodded slowly and began climbing down the ladder. She stopped halfway and waited until Logan handed her the branch. She lowered the tip, then carefully dropped the other end. Logan climbed down after her.
“I’m taking this back to camp,” Panna told the bounty hunter.
That was obvious, but Logan let the comment go unremarked. He simply nodded and helped Panna carry the branch down the ravine. When they pushed it the rest of the distance into the Waygate chamber, Logan helped Panna maneuver the bough between the tents and then lift it up onto one of the tables.
“Thank you,” she said.
Logan was curious what she was up to, but Panna didn’t seem interested in talking as she began cutting stray twigs away from the branch. Logan lingered until it became clear that he could offer no further help and then wandered away.
He walked a slow circle around the base of the Waygate. The diggers had more or less evened out the floor of the crevasse, but it was still rough in places, icy in others. The Waygate shone with that ethereal glow, like lights shining through the water. Was that what it looked like just before the Devourers poured through and destroyed Maeve’s life, her whole world?
The Waygate’s radiance pulsed brightly and then darkened as though in answer to Logan’s unspoken question. A second later, the gate brightened again. Had he imagined it? Kemmer and Xen stood in the arch of the great ring, talking about something. They didn’t seem to have noticed any change.
By the time Logan finished his seventeenth circuit, it was midmorning. Tiberius and the rest of the Blue Phoenix crew had gathered around Panna’s table. In the circle of warm floodlights, Duaal hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt. Xia stood behind him with her arms around his waist and her fingers splayed against his dark skin. When Gripper saw Logan, he waved the bounty hunter over.
“We don’t need his help,” Tiberius said. The old man looked exhausted.
“No one’s done much to help at all, actually,” Panna pointed out, gesturing with a small hand plane.
She had finished stripping bark off her branch and was now painstakingly straightening the piece of wood. A glass blade sat on the table’s edge. Logan recognized it. He had faced that spear too many times to forget the long, thin angle of glittering glass.
“So, what do we do next?” Duaal asked.
“Maybe we could ask around Pylos,” Gripper suggested. “Someone must have seen Maeve or the Nihilists.”
“Pylos is too big for that,” Duaal said. “We wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“You just hate Maeve and want her to stay lost!” Gripper cried, waving his long arms.
“Stop it, Gripper,” Xia said. “That’s not fair.”
The Arboran’s shoulders slumped, but his expression remained furious. “Isn’t it? You never liked Maeve, Shimmer! You never liked anyone until… until now! Until Silver!”
They were arguing… again. They were angry at the Nihilists and afraid for Maeve. Each of her friends thought they had the most at stake. That they were in the greatest pain.
Logan whistled sharply and every face around the table turned toward him. As long as they thought that the bounty hunter didn’t care, then they would all assume that he was being objective, even reasonable.
“Arguing won’t get us any closer to Maeve,” Logan said.
Tiberius gave him a look that might have been frustrated or grateful.
“With the camp relocated down here, our job is much simpler,” the old Prian said.
“Thanks for that, at least,” Duaal agreed.
“That means we can focus on finding the princess, if we can just figure out where to start looking,” Panna said. She measured the freshly peeled stick against the spearhead and marked the width on the wood with a pencil.
“You’re saying the princess like she’s the only one,” Duaal said.
Panna looked up from the spear, confusion on her face. “She’s the only surviving member of the royal family, isn’t she?”
“Almost,” Duaal told her. “There’s another princess. Xartasia.”
“Her name was Titania,” Logan said. “She is the king’s daughter and Maeve’s cousin.”
“Titania…?” Duaal asked. Now he looked confused, too. “Wait, I know that name.”
“You probably heard it from Maeve,” Xia said.
“No, that’s not it.” Duaal shook his head, unable for the moment to dredge up the memory.
“I’ve heard of Xartasia, when I was reading about what happened in Gharib,” Panna said. She glanced at the looming Waygate. It shimmered like the inside of a shiny shell. “I assumed that it was some kind of mistake. Xartasia’s not a name. It’s more like an oath or insult.”
Logan remembered Maeve talking about that. He nodded. “It means the dream of death.”
“Emphasis on dream,” Panna said. The anthropologist was in her element now. “There are eleven words for dream in Arcadian, with several nuanced meanings. Il’atasia means the sort of dreams you have when you’re asleep, but can also refer to something that isn’t real, like an illusion or hallucination.”
“She certainly seems plenty real,” Duaal answered. He leaned on Panna’s worktable. “I know my Arcadian pretty well, but I’ve never heard… il’atasia, you said?”
“I’m not at all surprised. Based on what Xia told us on the flight here, Gavriel taught you Arcadian, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, you were learning spells,” Panna said. “Words for making very real changes. I doubt you ever had any reason to learn that kind of vocabulary. Gavriel had to teach you the basics because that was the language of the charms he was learning from his own Arcadian teacher.”
Duaal stood up suddenly straight, eyes wide.
“That’s where I know the name Titania! She was the one who taught Gavriel magic,” he said. Xia touched his shoulder, but Duaal shook his head. “I’m fine. I should have recognized her back on Stray. I must have been blind!”
“You were only a child when Gavriel took you,” Xia pointed out. “It’s a wonder you remember anything at all.”
“I remember her singing. Hours and hours of singing,” Duaal said. “And then… headaches. Like I keep having now. Do you think it’s connected?”
“Maybe it’s the magic. Have you been using any?” Xia asked.
“Not really,” Duaal answered with a wink. “Except the magic between the sheets.”
“Magic shouldn’t cause any side effects like that, anyway,” Panna said. “I’ve studied magic, but I can’t do it myself. Actually, I’ve been working on a theory about magic. What do you know about quantum uncertainty theory?”
No one said anything. Logan wondered what Panna was getting at. It seemed like an overlong explanation of Duaal’s familiarity with the Arcadian language.
Some of his impatience might have been a little… unfair. In the year he spent hunting Maeve, Logan had learned a bit of Arcadian. Enough to understand the names she called him. It was strangely intimate, somehow, a secret between hunter and prey. A secret that Duaal knew much more about, it seemed.
Panna scribbled something onto a datadex and then turned it face-down on the table. “Quantum uncertainty goes something like this: observation influences the outcome. Particles moving without an observer act differently than those being watched.”
“So?” Tiberius asked.
“So, it’s been theorized that directed observation can influence physical matter. Did anyone see what I drew on that datadex?”
“Kind of,” Gripper said. “It looked like a duck, I think.”
Panna winked and turned the datadex over and showed them a scribble on the screen. If Logan tilted his head a little, it did look like a very ugly, long-legged duck.
“You all see a duck, don’t you?” Panna asked. Everyone nodded. “It was just a scribble. But because Gripper said that he saw a duck, you all did. Now, imagine if this were a little more literal, if your observation could actually turn it into a duck. That’s how magic works.”
“Wow,” Gripper said. “Really?”
“Yeah. Now, it only works on a very small scale. It’s quantum uncertainty, after all.”
“That’s true,” Duaal said. “Lightning and fire and that painkiller charm Maeve likes so much all work on a tiny scale. Molecules and cells. The effects build, but at their heart, they’re all very small.”
“We have to use microscopes and optics to see anything that small and finely calibrated lasers to make molecular changes,” Xia argued. “As far as I know, the Arcadians don’t have that sort of technology. How can they observe anything so small?”
“That’s where the Arcadian charm-songs come in,” Panna said, snapping her fingers at the Ixthian. “Those songs are basic descriptions of what they want to happen, like telling a story. When you listen to a story, you can visualize what’s going on. That’s what the Arcadian songs are for and that’s why Duaal had to learn the language. So he could understand the stories.”
“That’s why Maeve still sings those songs, even after telling me how pointless the symbols are,” Duaal said. “Those are just focal points, but the song actually directs the spell.”
“The spell songs are memorized and used to imagine a specific effect, like lightning or anesthetic,” Logan said. He repeated Panna’s explanation as best he could and she nodded. “But why couldn’t Gavriel do it alone? Why did he need Duaal?”
“I haven’t been working on that theory as long,” Panna said. “But I do have a guess. It’s important that the mage truly believes that just singing a song will change anything. It’s easy for Arcadians of the old world. They grew up surrounded by magic. But not in the core worlds. Out here, only a child has that kind of faith and imagination.”
“I felt his… his thoughts inside me,” Duaal said with a shudder. This time, he accepted Xia’s reassuring touch. “He didn’t have to tell me what to do. It was like I was just a part of him.”
Across the Waygate cavern, Xen and Phillip were deep in discussion about the Waygate’s impact on the stability of the inner mountain. Ava and Phillip sprayed canned foam into cracks in the granite walls, filling the fissure with a sharp chemical smell.
Just how long could they afford to wait? How long could Maeve survive? They were only wasting time, trying to fill the hours until something changed. But nothing was going to change, Logan knew. The only thing that would find Maeve now was perseverance, unceasing vigilance and chance.
Logan turned away, intent on climbing back up to the surface, to his Raptor. Maybe he could see something from the air. It was the same fighter as those flown by the police. Maybe the sight of the Raptor in a search pattern would spur the Nihilists to some sort of visible action… It would probably rouse the interest of the Pylos police, as well, but Logan didn’t care anymore.
“Where are you going, Coldhand?” Gripper asked.
“Back to Pylos.”
The Arboran trotted after Logan. Duaal and Xia shared a glance and then the medic raised her hand.
“Wait, Coldhand. Do you actually have somewhere to go?” she asked in a carefully neutral tone. “No one seemed to have any ideas a few minutes ago.”
Logan didn’t answer. His plan sounded thin, even to him. But the helpless frustration was eating him alive and left the hunter a bundle of raw, twitching nerves. The archeologists watched him, too, curious in spite of themselves.
“Coldhand!” Tiberius called to him now, full of authority accustomed to obedience. “If you know something, you better damned well tell us!”
Logan turned back, mismatched fists clenched.
“No, I don’t know anything else,” he said too loudly. His voice echoed through the ravine. “I don’t have any plan. But I’m going back out there. I can’t do this anymore. I want this done, Tiberius. I don’t care how, but I need to find Maeve.”
Logan felt hot and cold at the same time, flashes of fever and chill. He had to end this, somehow, even if it meant roaming the Pylos streets, screaming for the Nihilists until they came for him.
“Can I help…?” Gripper asked. “Please? I… I don’t want to just sit here and wait, either.”
“You won’t fit in the Raptor,” Logan answered curtly.
“Your Raptor?” Tiberius asked, narrowing his eyes. “What are you thinking, Coldhand?”
“I’m going to look for her.”
“In your fighter?” Duaal pulled himself away from Xia. “No, you can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“That’s a police Raptor,” Duaal said. “You can’t go flying that after Gavriel. He’ll see you. He’s afraid of the Prian police. He had a lot of trouble with them when we were here before.”
“I know.”
“You lost that to an Emberguard,” Tiberius said, pointing to his illonium left hand. “Captain Cerro showed me the file. He thought you might have gone over to Gavriel.”
Logan looked down at his fist. “Is that what they think?”
“Is what you actually did any better?” Tiberius asked him. “The police closing in was what chased Gavriel off Prianus last time. You go in now, without thinking, and you’ll send him running. He’ll kill our dove or take her off the planet. Either way, we’ll never see her again. You stay here until we have something to move on.”
Logan closed his eyes. Tiberius was right.
The Vanora White oozed through Maeve’s veins, cool and smooth and heavy as quicksilver. She floated to the top on a cloud of bright light. There were shadows, she remembered faintly. Something that was looking for her. Or something that belonged to her…
But that was so far away, so easy to forget.
Maeve stretched her wings, but they were tangled in the clouds. It tickled and she giggled as the sparkling white twined around her. The softness clutched at her heart, slowing it beat by beat. And it whispered to her.
Remember the Devourers, Maeve. Remember them.
She didn’t want to think about that. It hurt and she was tired of pain. It was so much more peaceful here in the White. And warm. It was nice not to be cold. She couldn’t remember why she had ever stopped taking the chem.
Show me the Tamlin Waygate, said the light. Show me your spell. Show me the Devourers.
“No,” Maeve whimpered.
Even through the deep haze of drugs, Maeve shied away from the painful memory. She just wanted to sleep, but the white sky wouldn’t leave her alone. It clung as close and sweet and light as cloud-candy.
Show me, Maeve.
