Lonen's War
Sorcerous Moons – Book 1
by
Jeffe Kennedy
An
Unquiet Heart
Alone in her tower, Princess Oria has spent too long
studying her people’s barbarian enemies, the Destrye—and neglected
the search for calm that will control her magic and release her to
society. Her restlessness makes meditation hopeless and her
fragility renders human companionship unbearable. Oria is near
giving up. Then the Destrye attack, and her people’s lives depend
on her handling of their prince…
A Fight Without Hope
When the cornered Destrye decided to strike back,
Lonen never thought he’d live through the battle, let alone demand
justice as a conqueror. And yet he must keep up his guard against
the sorceress who speaks for the city. Oria’s people are devious,
her claims of ignorance absurd. The frank honesty her eyes promise
could be just one more layer of deception.
A Savage Bargain
Fighting for time and trust, Oria and Lonen have one
final sacrifice to choose… before an even greater threat consumes
them all.
To Sassy Outwater,
who wanted a fire-breathing guide dog.
Close enough?
Copyright © 2016 by Jeffe Kennedy
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the
U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the
prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, or business establishments, organizations or locales is
completely coincidental.
Thank you for reading!
Credit
Editor: Deborah Nemeth
Production Editor: Rebecca Cremonese
Back Cover Copy: Erin Nelson Parekh
Cover Design: Louisa Gallie
~ 1 ~
O
ria squinted into the heat
shimmer rising in the distance beyond the high walls of the city.
Maybe if she looked long and hard enough, the weapons of the
clashing armies would give off a telltale glitter or the shouts of
the men would echo back. But, even though her high tower gave her
one of the longest views in Bára, she remained blind and deaf,
stuck in her chambers, remote from the battle underway.
Just as she’d lived most of her life
isolated from the rest of the world.
Despite the lack of other evidence of war,
the hot wind seemed to carry an unfamiliar smell to her rooftop
garden. Layered among the scents of sand, the brackish bay, and
distant ocean came something new. Something like roasting meat,
redolent of rage, despair, and determination. An unsettling
combination unlike anything she’d ever experienced. But until this,
no one had attempted to attack Bára in her lifetime. Not for a long
time before that either, according to the histories.
She paced the gilded balcony as Chuffta,
perched on the rail, watched her without moving, green eyes sliding
back and forth as if he were watching a xola match.
“
You realize you walk much and get
nowhere,”
he said in her head.
“Yes, yes—the story of my life,” she snapped
at her Familiar. “Besides, it’s not as if I need to conserve my
energy just to hide in my rooms while the city falls.”
“Bára will not fall,” Queen Rhianna said in
a mild tone. Her nimble fingers never faltered as they wove seven
needles threaded with different colors in an intricate embroidery,
a casually powerful exhibition of her magical skill, her the golden
metal mask that covered her face without eye holes demonstrating
her ability to see in other ways. “It has not these many years and
there’s no reason to believe it will now. Don’t put attention on a
result you do not want. You know better than to articulate such
thoughts, lest they manifest in truth.”
Oria frowned at her mother. “I don’t know
any such thing, but let’s try it out. Everything is fine! The
Destrye army has vanished into thin air and we’re no longer under
attack.”
Queen Rhianna sighed, leaking the barest
hint of exasperation through her carefully cultivated calm. “Your
casual attitude toward powerful forces beyond your ken will be your
undoing, daughter. You should know better than that, too, by
now.”
“If they’re beyond my ken, how can I respect
them?” she grumbled.
“
You’ve never met a Destrye and you fear
them, so your logic is faulty,”
Chuffta pointed out.
She did—and fear of their ancient barbarian
enemy drove her to rudeness, as Chuffta obliquely noted. Sometimes
her Familiar’s wisdom grated on her. Okay, a lot of the time, but
he offered sincere advice and helped her when no one else could.
True growth is uncomfortable, even painful
, the temple
taught. She made herself stop and stroke the winged lizard’s soft
white scales between his eyes. “You’re right. I apologize, to both
of you,” she added to her mother.
“What is Chuffta right about?” her mother
asked.
“That I’m afraid of the Destrye without
knowing any, so my logic is bad. Though there are plenty of stories
and illustrations to inform
that
opinion.” Oria’s longtime
morbid fascination with the warrior race that shared their
continent had led her to ignore the texts she was meant to study in
order to linger over the vivid drawings of the Destrye with their
big bodies, darkly gnarled hair, black-furred garments, eyes wild
in their cruel faces. So unlike the Bárans.
“As there are similarly many stories,
diagrams, demonstrations, and
lessons
on how magic works,”
her mother was saying in a placid yet pointed tone. “You may not
yet have access to all of the temple’s knowledge, but you know the
basic laws. If you paid as much attention to those as to the gory
histories, you might be making more progress than you are.”
“Yes, but they never really
explain
anything. Like ‘you’ll understand
hwil
only when you master
hwil
.’ How in Sgatha is that remotely helpful?”
“Some things may only be understood through
experience. You know that we would tell you if it could be put into
words.”
Oria did know that, not that it helped.
“None of this has anything to do with my original question. How can
you sit and
sew
not knowing what’s going on out there?” She
flung an impotent hand at the desert beyond the city walls.
Her mother raised her featureless mask
toward Oria. “Is pacing about like a wild thing giving you
information on how the battle goes?”
“Maybe not, but it makes me feel better than
sitting still does.”
“I know it’s difficult for you now, but once
you master
hwil
, all will become clear. You’ll understand
that there’s infinite motion in stillness, and you’ll be able to
channel the energy that makes you so restless into its intended
purpose. You will find great relief in channeling your sgath to the
common pool And, following that, you can begin to seek your perfect
partner and perhaps find a temple-blessed marriage. Once connected
to him, you will be able to express your magic to its greatest
extent, as Sgatha intended.”
Oria turned to stare into the distance
again, choking back her impatience. Queen Rhianna, like the other
sorcerers and sorceresses of Bára who wore the masks of their
office, exemplified
hwil
, the art of peacefulness under
duress.
Sgath only flows through a calm mind
, Oria’s
teachers explained again and again. Though they never said it out
loud, in the last years their featureless golden masks seemed to
hold disapproval—and the resignation of those who’d given up on
her.
Oria could never sit through a full
meditation session. Her body unfailingly thrummed with restlessness
to get up, to do something. Her mind dashed from thought to
thought, like the jewelbirds in the garden, pausing in its mad
flight only to hover over the worry that she’d never find the key,
never qualify to receive a mask of her own. Never realize her
mother’s patient hopes.
If course, the possibility that she ever
would grew less likely with each passing day since she’d never even
glimpsed this perfect state of
hwil
where all became clear.
Of them all, only her mother remained confident that she could.
Would it be so terrible if she didn’t,
beyond disappointing her mother’s unshakeable belief? Her three
brothers had all passed the final testing, each possessing enough
power and control to succeed their father, needing only marriages
to solidify their positions as heirs. They’d all taken their masks
before they were twenty—including her baby brother Yar the year
before, a prodigy at sixteen—while Oria trailed miserably far
behind, facing her twenty-second birthday within weeks.
Truly, the blow to her pride rankled. And in
her secret heart, more than a little unbecoming jealousy, nursed
all those years as her brothers practiced the showy battle magics
below her tower, so she could at least watch. They’d meant to
entertain her, not deepen her envy.
Oh, her teachers could go on about how the
male grien magic was easier to learn; that it burgeoned in young
men, pushing up from the ground below Bára like the sap in the
trees in springtime. How they only had to practice restraint,
focus, and release, and that such things came naturally to men,
while women’s magic worked in the reverse. Instead of exploding
outward, sgath drew in and received.
Thus the emphasis on meditation, calmness,
and peacefulness. A woman should be like a serene lake, always
refilling from those deep wells, so she could nurture with her
magic. The sacred blessing of creation belonged to women, a divine
obligation that provided Bára and her sister cities with the
blessing of fruits, greens, and grains in the desert.
In the most exalted partnership, a sgath
sorceress and a grien sorcerer married with temple blessing, their
magics complementing and enhancing each other in a perfectly
balanced flow. She to receive and grow magical energy, he to focus
and release it. For this reason, the temple frowned on same-sex
partnerships as not ideal, though they weren’t strictly forbidden.
Many settled for lesser marriages, not temple-blessed, and every
person regardless of gender possessed some sgath and some grien, in
different measures. Even the purest and strongest sgath carried a
seed of grien, just as their parent moons, Sgatha and Grienon,
waxed and waned, one around the other’s orbit. Diligent study led a
sorcerer or sorceress to develop his or her best self, all the
better to serve Bára.
And that best self would be reflected in a
temple-blessed marriage, such as her parents enjoyed. An ideal none
of Oria’s brothers had yet achieved. Something she could be first
in, if only she could find a way to be still long enough to grasp
the essence of
hwil
.
If only.
As the partnered sorceresses of the city did
their half of the work of defense, the halcyon shimmer of women’s
magic pooled below Oria’s tower, radiating from their stations on
the walls, flowing out like a reverse bore tide. Queen Rhianna
would have been with them if she hadn’t elected to keep her
daughter company. As it was, between the immense power of her sgath
and her temple-blessed marriage with the king, she could be
anywhere and feed him magic, a constant vital flow Oria sensed but
could no more access than she could the battle taking place leagues
away.