A Lonely Magic (19 page)

“The main score in Val Kyr is dance. For the bodies of the Val Kyr, movement is art and weapon, entertainment and production. Unfortunately, their demographic issues are the most challenging of the remaining Sia Mara enclaves: their population as reported during the last trade exchange consisted of 6891 males and 922 females. In the 174 years since the last Great Council and a full census, only three girls have been reported born in Val Kyr.”

Fen wasn’t going to bother to figure out the math for that. Three girls every two hundred years did not make a sustainable population base.

“However, Val Kyr’s population is the lowest of the cities in part because they are more willing to sacrifice life for honor. Or rather, for what they perceive as honor.” Elfie’s tone on the last might as well have included a dismissive sniff. Fen felt her lips relax into a smile.

“May I ask to what you listen?” Kaio inquired.

“Gaelith gave me a thing.” Fen gestured to her side. “A tattoo to answer my questions.”

“A data access pattern?” Kaio sounded surprised. “And it amuses you?”

Fen nodded and took another bite of fish. “She’s being snippy,” she said through her mouthful.

“She?”

“She sounds like me in my head, so I figured a girl’s name made the most sense.” Fen couldn’t stop her smile, as she added, “Elfie. Since she’s my Library Voice—El Vee—and my guide to Elfland, Elfie.”

“You named it?” Kaio’s eyes widened.

“Well, yeah.” Fen set down the fish skewer and looked at the rest of the table. What did she want to try? The green stuff must be Kaio’s favorite, since he’d been digging into it like nobody’s business, so it ought to be good. She picked up the bowl and scooped a clump of leafy strands onto her plate.

Looking up, she caught his intent look. “What? Did you want the rest?” She held the bowl out to him. It wasn’t as if she’d finished it off.

“No, no.” He spread his fingers. “You must eat your fill. But might I see your data access pattern?”

Fen stilled. But what the hell, the tattoo wasn’t anywhere too revealing. “Sure,” she said with a shrug.

She set down the bowl and stood, hiking up her tunic, and slipping her trousers a little lower on her waist to reveal her upper hip.

Her mouth fell open as Kaio leaned forward.

“My,” he breathed. “Gaelith’s skills have indeed grown impressive.”

“That’s not—that wasn’t…” Fen squeaked.

The tattoo—her tattoo, her crappy lotus flower tattoo, done by a guy who didn’t know what the hell he was doing—had morphed. Gaelith had filled it with lines, pink and white, intricate, but not artistic. Now, however, it sat on her hip looking like a painting by some artist she’d never heard of. Looking like she could pluck it off her hip and bring it to her nose to smell it if she wanted to.

Looking like a real flower, three-dimensional, with shaded petals and shadowed leaves.

“How did that happen? Elfie, how did that happen?”

Fen wanted to hyperventilate, but she stopped herself.

Magic.

Right.

Magic world.

No big deal if tattoos morphed.

Hell, clothes did. Furniture did. Walls did. So a tattoo did, so what?

“The goal of the data access pattern created by Gaelith Del Mar was to answer all your questions. More resources were needed to solve the queries you posed.”

God, Fen was so tired of people—things—who couldn’t just give a straightforward answer. “You made my tattoo prettier because you needed help?”

“Pretty is an arbitrary cultural distinction not supported by valid research. More resources were required. This modified the pattern, granting it a denser informational value.”

Fen rolled her eyes.

Kaio quirked a brow at her.

“I think she’s telling me she needed to be smarter, so she made the tattoo fancier,” she told him.

His eyebrows went from quirked to fully raised, and then settled back into their proper place. “I see. That is… most interesting. I look forward to discussing it with my sister.”

“Is she okay?”

“Indeed.” He looked surprised again. “Should she not be?”

Fen shrugged, feeling shy. “She said her reputation was destroyed from coming up to save Luken and I couldn’t tell whether…” She let the words trail off.

Kaio’s smile was wry. “It is most true that she is become the scandal of the decade and that the grande dames will be whispering behind their palms about her at every public event for the foreseeable future.”

Oh, God, poor Gaelith. Okay, it wasn’t being slaughtered by the Val Kyr, but Fen remembered what it was like to walk through the halls of her high school with everyone staring at her.

But Kaio continued, “It is also true that, barring other circumstances, the Val Ohta will be held in twenty-two years. The last three queens of Syl Var have been born in the House of Del Mar and Gaelith Del Mar is the strongest of our House. She resigned the motherhood out of respect to our mother at the last Val Dagora when she was not yet three hundred years. Barring the complete collapse of our civilization before then, her time in the stockades of public humiliation is likely to be short-lived as our neighbors recall that in the fullness of time, she will be their queen. Most likely.”

Fen blinked furiously as Kaio took another bite of green stuff.

She didn’t understand a word he’d said, except for the last few.

Most likely.

Queen.

Okay.

Damn.

Politics and More Politics

“Queen? Like, ceremonial-ribbon-cutting type of queen?” Fen asked.

“No, more of the run-the-city type of queen,” Kaio said, voice dry. He dipped something that looked sort of like a dumpling into something that looked sort of green.

“How does that work?”

Kaio, halfway through putting the dumpling into his mouth, paused.

“No, never mind,” Fen said, “I’ll get Elfie to explain. Elfie?”

Kaio resumed his bite.

“Query unclear,” Elfie answered. “Do you wish to learn of the queen’s responsibilities in governance or of the queen’s ascension to power?”

“I want to know how Gaelith gets to be queen, yeah.”

“Upon a ruler’s millennium, her city hold the Val Ohta, a test of ability. The winner becomes the next leader of the city. A similar test, the Val Dagora, is held every two hundred years to select the members of the City Council. Based on her scores in the last Val Dagora, Gaelith Del Mar is widely predicted to become the next Queen of Syl Var.”

“You pick your politicians based on how magical they are?” Fen asked.

“Magical is perhaps a weak interpretation. A more viable translation might be their communication skills.”

“Cool,” Fen said. “And so Gaelith—?”

“Communicates well with the magic. If she had chosen to do so, she could have taken her mother’s place as head of House Del Mar at the last Val Dagora. Del Mar has been one of the ten Great Houses in Syl Var for millennia. Or she could have stepped away from Del Mar and formed a new house, but that is rarely done.”

“So Gaelith’s like a super-mage?” Fen’s smile did not want to stay hidden. “And she knows she’s probably going to be queen someday?”

Kaio answered before Elfie could. “I suspect Gaelith has been aware of the odds on her accession since she was your age or younger. Then it might have troubled her. Now, not so much.”

“Nice.”

Kaio nodded. “Indeed, when I pleaded with the queen to permit an intercession for Luken, it was with the surety that our sister would dare much.”

“So what’s the deal with that? Girls don’t go up?” She twirled her hand toward the ceiling to demonstrate what she meant.

Kaio shook his head. “Only when it is necessary to travel for the Great Councils. The surface is too dangerous otherwise.”

Fen made a face. “Sexist,” she said without heat.

“Perhaps,” Kaio agreed. “Although I suspect not as you might think. Our leaders do not venture into danger because we cannot afford to lose them. Their skills are desperately needed.”

“What?” Fen said, blinking. “Your leaders?”

“The Sia Mara select our rulers based on the ability to communicate with magic and so our leaders are, with some few exceptions, female. Women are magically stronger than men, just as men are physically stronger than women. Although one can improve one’s abilities with practice, innate differences linger.”

Fen bit back her laugh, but Kaio must have seen it as he added, “I imagine the first Watchers were equally surprised by human society.”

“I bet. So girls never go to the surface, but they make the decisions? That seems so whacked to me. Yeah, it’s pretty cool down here, but there’s a whole huge world up there.”

Kaio’s answering smile was a twist of the lips. “How much of the history of the Sia Mara have you learned from your data access portal?”

Fen shrugged. “The basics, I guess.”

“Then I shall assume some understanding, and if I am unclear, you shall correct me.”

“All right.”

Kaio leaned back in his chair. “Many thousands of years ago, the Great Council of the Sia Mara met for decades—”

Fen interrupted him. “Got that part. Volcanoes, boom, sunken cities, lots of death. The Cataclysm.”

A glint of amusement sparked in Kaio’s eyes. “Correct. But before the Council set the Cataclysm in motion, they also wrote laws governing our behavior during the time of refuge. Half destroying the world in order to hide our homes would have been fruitless if all did not also agree to keep our secrets.”

“Makes sense.” Fen frowned. Some of them must have cheated over the centuries. The stories about elves and lands in perpetual twilight were too similar not to have come from somewhere.

“Originally, the surface was forbidden to all, but for the travel necessary to hold a Great Council every two hundred years. However, over the last three millennia or so, it became increasingly clear that the refuge plan was failing.”

“Three thousand years you’ve known this? And you haven’t fixed it yet?” Jeez, talk about slow on the uptake.

Kaio spread his hands. “The Great Councils became increasingly acrimonious. At council after council, pledges were made to research, to study, to investigate, to somehow solve our population problem. Or, failing that, to buttress the refuges.”

“And?”

“Approximately one millennium ago, the Great Council determined that desperate measures were needed. For the first time, the Voices revisited the idea of trying to share the surface world with humanity. In support of this possibility, they deemed that every city should post a limited number of Watchers on the surface to observe humankind. But living on the surface poses far more risks than living in our enclaves. In Syl Var, the most common cause of death is old age. The surface is neither so friendly nor so safe.”

Fen shivered.

Kaio’s voice was so bleak that the sound started tears prickling in the back of her eyes. He’d lost someone, she knew, someone he cared about.

Should she ask? She wanted to. She wanted to know. But she didn’t know what she’d say. When people tried to comfort her after her mother’s death, their words were nothing but meaningless dust in the storm of her grief.

And then the moment was lost as Kaio continued. “Because of the risks and because males already greatly outnumbered females, Watching became exclusively a male score. Unfortunately, at every Great Council, the Watchers were unanimous in their conclusions. The surface dwellers were far too dangerous. We would not be able to live safely among them. The Great Council of 9548 lasted for three years as the Voices debated the best course of action, but again, they concluded the council without resolution.”

“And the Council after that is the one where Wai Pa was a no-show.”

“Your Elfie teaches you well,” Kaio said with a nod.

“You guys are screwed,” Fen said.

“More so now than ever. For now, in addition to our own slow decline, the dramatic changes caused by human action make our precarious system even more unstable. Something must change and swiftly.”

Fen wrinkled her nose. “You’re talking about global warming?”

“Indeed. Unlike humanity, extreme weather events are not an issue for us. The super storms, droughts and rising sea levels that will inevitably kill many thousands of human beings will not affect the Sia Mara.” Kaio sat forward again. “However, we rely on the oceans to sustain us.”

“Can’t you just magic up more food if you need it?” Fen asked.

Kaio chuckled, but not happily. “Nanomites offer no nutritional value, although they may taste quite pleasant. To eat magic food is to slowly starve. But if temperatures continue to rise, the acidification of the water and the damage done to marine ecosystems means that we shall all starve, one way or another.”

“Well, if you’re counting on my species to save the planet, I’m pretty sure you’re SOL.” Maybe she shouldn’t be so flippant when he was talking about the eventual extinction of his kind, but she wasn’t exactly excited by the possibility he and his people would decide to extinct her species instead. “What are you going to do?”

“At the moment, call an entirely unprecedented Great Council into session. It is twenty-six years early, but within a few days, we will have Voices from each of the cities present in Syl Var. And this time the Council will not disband—cannot disband—until resolutions have been made. There is no more time for research.”