The Way Into Chaos (45 page)

These were worse. She hadn’t thought to count the number of times she’d cast the Eleventh Gift, but it might have been a hundred and fifty times. Probably not more than that. Sweat made her skin prickle, and her stomach felt leaden.
 

After a short while, she laughed at herself. Was this the terrible consequence that had frightened Doctor Twofin? A scary dream? She lay back down, still feeling a bit odd, and shut her eyes until she fell back to sleep.
 

In the morning, they started upward again. Cazia’s troubled sleep left her stomach feeling like a bundle of wet rags, but she soon forgot that. The spell came more easily each time she cast it, and she began to lose herself in the gestures and mental images. The magic seemed to be flowing through her, spell after spell, and as her trance-like state deepened, she began to understand it better. Little variations in her hand movements had always created minor variations in the effects of the Gifts, but as she kept going through the morning, those effects became clearer to her, allowing her better control over the size and shape of their tunnel.
 

Were these the supposed special insights that hollowed scholars had? It couldn’t be so. For one thing, the changes she could make to the spells were so trivial, they barely qualified as insights. For another, she certainly hadn’t gone hollow.
 

However, her stomach continued to feel like lead, and along with her increased mastery, loneliness began to build within her. A longing for her lost home and lost friends tugged at her thoughts and made her insides flutter.
Colchua, I am so sorry.

The Gifts eased that pain, strangely enough. The focus and energy required to make each spell work--to
go into it
in the very real way that was helping her learn control--allowed her respite from the sorrow growing in her heart. In the time between spells, when she had to clear stones away and crawl on her hands and knees up the ramp, her emotions seemed to rush at her, ever so slightly stronger each time.
 

It was late in the day when the others asked her to pause for a meal. Cazia did so, reluctantly. She pushed a handful of stones through the gap in the wall, letting them fall all the way down the cliff. They were high up, but she couldn’t be sure how much farther they had to go.
 

Kinz passed a wrapped package to Ivy, who passed it to Cazia. “We will have to make to be careful with our provisions. I do not...Cazia, what is wrong?”

The little princess looked at Cazia’s face in horror. Cazia touched her eyes, nose, and mouth. There was no disfigurement there, no weeping sores or blood, only dirt and sweat.

“Kinz!” Ivy called behind her, then crawled forward to touch Cazia’s collar.
 

The servant squeezed beside Ivy
 
in the tunnel. “Inzu’s Grace! Cazia, what have you done to yourself?”
 

“Am I bleeding?” Cazia was surprised to hear her own voice, which sounded as though she’d been crying for hours. But her grief and misery had barely begun to swell up inside her. She couldn’t understand why they were staring at her with such alarmed expressions. The urge to cast another spell to gentle her emotions was powerful, but she resisted.
 

Finally, it became too much for her. She began to sob. “My brother,” she said, the words coming out in a squeak. “I loved my brother so much, and I
killed him
.”

Ivy’s embrace was physically painful, but Cazia didn’t shake her off. She just sobbed, and wept, and her raw grief washed over her in terrible waves.
 

But at the same time, she felt removed from herself, analyzing things the way she had when Mahz flashed her pointed teeth. Cazia had always been one to analyze things. She couldn’t lose herself in anything, it seemed. Not even this.
 

Scholars should never show tears.
 

The tears stopped, then the embrace stopped. Cazia put on a brave expression, her skin still raw and tingling where Ivy had squeezed her. They ate, emptied their canteens, and let Cazia fill them again. When she cast the Fifth Gift to refill the canteens for later, her misery did not ease much at all, not like it had when she cast the Eleventh Gift.
 

She returned to her digging, still unclear why Ivy and Kinz had been so upset when they saw her face. It didn’t seem important.

She continued casting the Eleventh Gift through the rest of the day, stopping only when the light faded through the thin break into the outside world. Cazia created another chamber for them to sleep in, then endured their worried looks while they ate.
 

Great Way, but she felt miserable, and only the Gifts could ease her pain. Exhausted, she fell asleep, and her nightmares were just as awful as the previous night’s.
 

She woke in a terror several times. At dawn, she was parched and exhausted. Fine. A few bad dreams could make her life unpleasant after all. She drained both canteens and tried to force herself to sleep again but couldn’t.
 

When daylight came, they ate their morning meal in uncomfortable silence. The sound of Ivy and Kinz’s chewing and breathing irritated Cazia to the point that she wanted to scream.
 

“Cazia,” the princess said, speaking as though she was addressing an irrational person, “we must turn back.”
 

“Go right ahead.” She sounded stronger than she felt.
 

“No,
you
must turn back! You can not do to yourself again what you did yesterday.”
 

Cazia sighed. “No, it’s all right.”
It’s not all right.
“I was just careless. I cast the same spell too many times in a row, and that made my emotions a little difficult to control. Today, I’ll vary things a little and I’ll be fine.”

Both girls looked at her skeptically, but Kinz had a chillier, more analytical edge. “Have you never done something like this before?”

“I’m still in training,” Cazia admitted. “I’m quite capable, but I don’t know every spell yet.” Adding the word
yet
seemed like fruitless hope, but she said it anyway. There was probably no one left in the world who would teach her magic.
 

Ivy shook her head. “We are still worried about you.”
 

They had no right to worry about her. “What did you see last night? Why were you so upset when you saw me?”

Kinz answered as though it was a subject she had discussed with Ivy in depth while Cazia slept. “You are the girl who betrays your every thought by your expression. Do you recognize the truth of this? Your face makes lively, and everyone can know your mind in every grimace or roll of your eyes--even when you make to watch us while pretending you do not.”
 

Cazia didn’t know how to respond, so she drained the canteen instead.
 

“But,” Kinz continued, “last night your face was utterly slack and devoid of life. You looked like the moving corpse.”

Like Doctor Whitestalk.

“My cousin had a man who was kicked in the head during a fight,” Ivy said. “The skull broke and he very nearly died, but after he recovered, he never really returned. The memory, the sense of humor, everything that made him who he was had all been destroyed. Cazia, last night your expression looked just like that. I thought your magic had destroyed your brain.”
 

“Well, it didn’t.”
 

“But you looked terrible,” Kinz insisted. “How much farther do you make to take us? All the way over the mountains? I like you and do not think you are Cursed. Yet. But if you do not stop, you may make yourself so!”
 

Cazia looked down at her hands. They were trembling slightly. What did Kinz know? “I expected this to be hard,” Cazia lied. Could they really tell what she was thinking? She looked down at her lap and kept her face still. “But I forgot that I’m supposed to vary the spells. I was just too eager. I’ll go slower today. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“I will worry anyway,” the princess said.

“We have heard you,” Kinz said as though conceding the point, “but do not forget that you have made to block the tunnel behind us.”

Cazia took a deep breath so she would not laugh. She’d forgotten about that.
 

“This is why you have not conquered us all, yes?” Kinz asked. “Your magic is powerful, but the toll it would take if you used it all the time would destroy you. This is why you can not make every crop the feast, or collapse the mountain, or build the wall to block the Sweeps.” She fell silent for a moment. “We have seen your Cursed Ones at work.”
 

Cazia wasn’t sure she would like where this conversation was going. “Have you?”
 

“We spy on you,” Ivy said blandly. “You spy on us. It is how things are.”
 

Kinz continued. “We see your researches. We see the power of your spells, but it has been much debated among the clans and Indregai emissaries why you have not used them more, and why your people make weaker versions of the spells in inanimate objects. My own father was convinced that you were bound by the will of Inzu.”
 

“Please,” Cazia blurted out. “Until I met you, I never even heard of Inzu.”
 

Kinz’s lips pressed close together for a moment, then she said, “Then I wish for you the blessing of the one true god.”
 

“Oh, good,” Ivy interrupted. “A religious discussion. These always turn out so well in my father’s councils.”
 

Kinz looked at a spot on the ceiling. “I was just making the innocent observation.”
 

“Well, then,” Cazia said. “Here’s another: I have a death sentence on me because I am here with both of you.” Should this have frightened her? It didn’t. “Do you understand? Scholars never travel without bodyguards, and those guards are trained to slay scholars before they fall into foreign hands. They protect imperial secrets above all else, and scholars as long as it seems feasible. What you have already learned--which is not nearly enough to cast a spell of your own--would have me dragged to the Scholars’ Tower, whipped, and then hung. Or stoned to death. I’m told they sometimes kill women by stoning.”
 

Ivy was very still and her eyes were very wide. “We know about this.”
 

“I’m throwing my whole life away to do this,” Cazia said, and as the words came out of her mouth, they gave power to the half-formed thoughts that had haunted her for days. Even if she wanted to turn back, even if there was someplace to turn back to, she couldn’t.
 

Colchua had already died, and Pagesh, too. If there was something she could do to fight the Enemy that had claimed them, she would risk everything. How could she do anything less?
 

How could she do less than hollow herself out?
 

“Nonsense,” Ivy said. “I am engaged to the Peradaini king! He
will
be restored; I believe this. And even if he were not a fair man--and you know better than I do that he is--as the queen, I would forbid any punishment against you.”
 

Cazia spoke gently. “Little sister, even if none of this had happened and your wedding had gone as planned, I don’t think you would have had the power to save my life. You would have been another hostage.”
 

For once, Ivy did not know what to say. Kinz sighed, irritated. “This is how she sees the world. We are all made hostages to be taken.”
 

“No,” Ivy said. “She is the hostage. She has been one the entire life.” Ivy leaned forward and touched Cazia’s hand. It took all of Cazia’s willpower to avoid snatching it away. “Big sister,” the princess said, “I will follow you anywhere.”
 

It took real force of will, but Cazia smiled at her. “Let’s get ready.”
 

Cazia turned toward the wall. The rock-breaking spell was ready in her mind, almost as if it had been waiting for her. She cast.
 

A large section of the wall crumbled, falling toward her in a mini-avalanche. All three of them began to cough from the dust, and Cazia realized she’d put too much power into the spell. As annoying as it was to crawl over the larger stones in her long hiking skirts, dust might choke them to death.
 

She began the spell again, vaguely aware that it might be polite to apologize. This time she widened the opening into the outside world. The light and fresh air was welcome and there were no eagles visible in the dawn light. She stuck her head through the gap but couldn’t see how much farther she had to go. The daylight felt raw against her face, but she knew the spell would ease her discomfort.
 

She cast ten more times before switching to the water spell. Kinz gave her the canteen to fill, then she drank from it. She also took more time between spells, slowly sweeping the tumbling rocks around and behind her, shoving them against one side of the tunnel. Ten more spells and she created another lightstone. Ten more and she fired a broken rock out over the Sweeps like a dart.
 

It helped. Raw grief still surged through her between spells, but the deadening effects of casting them became fainter.
 

So she kept going, trying to keep careful watch over her mental state the way a shepherd watched her flock. Minute by minute, spell by spell, she couldn’t detect any change in herself, but as the long day wore on, she had to admit that each spell left her feeling more dead inside. Worse, the ever-growing sense of grief and longing became so strong, it nearly overwhelmed her between spells. Casting slowly became a form of torture.
 

When the fading daylight shone horizontally through the gap in the wall, she realized that she was crying again. Ivy called her name and squeezed through the narrow tunnel to crawl beside her. She rubbed Cazia’s cheeks with her gritty hands as though trying to revive them, then embraced her tightly.