The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way (2 page)

“I’m glad they didn’t eat you,” Cazia said.
 

“I am made glad, too. What has been happening?” Kinz asked. They sat in a little circle. The mists were thick that day, but the girls could not even pretend they could talk in secret. Tilkilit warriors moved at the edge of the clearing, just within sight, and the queen never seemed to sleep.
 

“Nothing,” Vilavivianna answered. “They keep us prisoner here in the forest, moving us only when the mists become so thin that they fear one of the Great Terror will attack from above.” The
Great Terror
was the Tilkilit name for the gigantic eagles that nested in the cliffs above and hunted them ruthlessly. “We are not even allowed to relieve ourselves in private.”
 

“It is not like they make to peek, Ivy,” Kinz said. Her voice was thick with exhaustion. The three of them glanced up as a nearby warrior passed close by. Its reddish-black, hard-shelled body was as narrow as a man’s thigh, and its tiny eyes were sinister and opaque. It wore nothing more than a green sash—apparently a signifier of rank—and carried a short spear, pouch of stones, and tiny mace it carried in lieu of a dagger.
 

The Tilkilit could leap surprising distances and were deceptively strong. Cazia knew she and her two companions could escape from the Tilkilit if they could get a decent head start; while the warriors were quick, they had no endurance. Unfortunately, the Tilkilit knew that, too.
 

“They are careful,” the princess said. “And they are waiting for something.”
 

Cazia tore a few blades of grass out of the dirt and threw them back down. “They’re waiting for us to surrender.”
 

Kinz looked at them both. “Do they know everything? Ivy?”

Vilavivianna lowered her eyes. “They do. The Alliance, the five peoples, the serpents, the giant eagles, and...and the tunnel Cazia dug to bring us over the mountains.”

“They also know the tunnel is blocked,” Cazia said, “although I doubt it worries them much. I think the only reason they haven’t already scaled the mountains on this side and started down the tunnel is that we can’t really remember where it is.”

“No,” Ivy said decisively. “They will not climb above the mists, not with the birds circling above us. It would be a slaughter. And what would the queen do? Set up the holdfast here in Qorr? No, they want another way out.”

Cazia felt herself flush. Of course they wouldn’t expose themselves to the birds. What’s more, their riding beasts could never escape over the mountains. They were simply too huge.
 

The queen was getting the better of her. The thing was inside her head, listening to her every thought, and she had no space to plan a counter attack.
 

Cazia ran her fingers across the stiff, broken grass beneath her. Did the queen know where she was at every moment? Certainly not, or they wouldn’t be watched so closely, even when they went behind a tree to relieve themselves. Could the queen see out of her eyes or hear what she heard?

If so, she must have been as bored as Cazia was, spending day after day in this meadow, with nothing to look at but the same few trees and the white mist, which never completely cleared even during the warmest hours. It was one of the few aboveground places where the Tilkilit could hide. Worse, late at night, when the wind blew strongly out of the east, Cazia could hear the terrifying sound of crashing surf.
 

Ivy sniffled. “I miss home,” she said. In that moment, the princess looked like the little girl that she was, although Cazia was just three years her elder, and Kinz two or three older than that. “I hate sleeping on the wet grass. The food they give us is disgusting and I am always thirsty. Why can they not let us relieve ourselves in private!”
 

“Little sister,” Cazia said, but Ivy didn’t want comfort. She stood and stamped off into the mists. Warriors followed her. Warriors followed all of them.
 

Kinz’s expression was pinched and unreadable. The Tilkilit queen might have been able to read the older girl’s thoughts, but Cazia couldn’t.
 

They both glanced at Ivy. While she was the youngest, the princess had been raised with private tutors who had taught her about the wider world. She spoke several languages and had negotiated for the supplies they needed for this trip. Kinz was mostly good for catching fish and carrying their packs. Cazia herself had merely blundered along, misusing her magic until she had driven herself to madness. It was Ivy who had saved their lives, more than once, with her common sense.

I should never have let her come along.

::You are my property.:: The Tilkilit queen’s “voice” was loud and sharp in her mind. Cazia felt a sudden revulsion at the intruding thoughts. The creature hadn’t used language since that first meeting. ::You are my property. You will accept this. As I obey the voice of the god in the air, you will do as I command. If you do not, I will take away your little sister.::
 

A white-hot fury run through Cazia. She hated everything about those oily, red-sharp thoughts. The queen’s mind was flat and hurried and utterly alien to her own. And she’d just been stupid enough to threaten Ivy.

If she’d still had her magic, Cazia would have started burning every Tilkilit in sight, and Fire could take the consequences.
 

If you do anything to hurt that little girl, if you or your people put so much as a bruise on her,
I will kill myself
and leave you stranded here.
 

Cazia could feel the creature’s shock. She could feel the way it grappled with the concept of suicide as though it was a new and unimaginable idea. Risking death it understood, but ending life voluntarily?
 

Clearly, the queen wanted to dismiss the idea as an empty threat, so Cazia recalled the few suicides she’d known in her life in the palace--two servants who had hung themselves, a guard who had fallen on his sword, a young scholar who leaped from the top of the tower. The queen was right there in her thoughts and understood that this was truly something her kind did.
 

Confusion flooded them both. Cazia was as alien to the queen as it was to her.
 

A wave of censure washed over her, and the queen’s anger was so intense that Cazia blacked out.
 

The scream of an eagle woke her in the middle of the night. The fog was so dense that it blocked out all starlight and she could not see her own hand when she held it up to her face.
 

However, she could hear the beating of huge wings and the panicked clicking of the Tilkilit warriors. There was another piercing scream, and she heard the Great Terror flapping away.
 
Kinz and Ivy grabbed hold of her and they clutched each other in the darkness, waiting for silence to return.
 

Kinz led them toward the trees. Cazia crawled after them, trying to be as quiet as possible. There was no way the giant eagle had targeted its prey by sight; it had to have located it by sound. Once they found a narrow space between two large trees, they wrapped their arms around each other again, and they did not shiver from the chill wet air alone.
 

The Tilkilit queen wanted a tunnel. Cazia wasn’t just supposed to surrender to the queen’s authority; she was still alive because the queen wanted her to dig a tunnel through the Northern Barrier that was large enough for the giant worms. The Tilkilit would have passage into the rest of the continent while the queen… Could she be moved? She lived in utter darkness; the one time Cazia had been near her, she could not see anything but she had the unmistakable sense of hugeness and immobility. Maybe the queen wanted to rule from her burrow in Qorr, or maybe she planned to create a second queen to make the trip into the Sweeps.
 

Not that it mattered. Cazia had no intention of--

She blacked out again.
 

It was not quite dawn when she came around again. The same night? At first, she couldn’t tell, but she didn’t feel thirsty enough to have missed a whole day.
 

“Are you well, big sister?”

Ivy’s hand was cool against the side of her face. Cazia sat up and clutched at her head. She’d had worse headaches in her life, but she wasn’t sure if the queen had caused it or if she was merely parched. “I’m thirsty.”

“Take this.” Ivy pressed a bowl of water into her hands. The Tilkilit drank from wooden bowls, for some reason. “They brought us double rations of water today. Perhaps they’re not trying to kill us after all.”

“I’ll believe that when they set us free.”

She drank deeply from the bowl, gulping the chilly, slightly salty water. Great Way, but it felt good to wet her throat. Then she noticed two more in the grass beside her and gulped them both down greedily. It wasn’t enough, but she felt better.
 

Kinz approached them with a pair of apricots. She handed both to Cazia. “We have eaten.”

“Kinz,” Ivy said. She laid her hand on the older girl’s shoulder. “Kinz.”

Cazia noticed the servant’s face was pale, and there were dark, puffy circles beneath her eyes. “Kinz,” she said with none of Ivy’s gentleness, “why have you been crying?”

“I am not free,” she said. “The Poalos are no longer made free. Ever since I was old enough to run beside the herd, I have known the day might come when I would make to lose my freedom. The bad marriage. The sudden sickness. Grabbed in the night by slavers out of Indrega—”

Ivy gasped. “My people are not slavers! How could you say such a thing!”

Kinz gave her a withering look. “Raiding parties make from your lands
 
to skulk into ours. My own cousin was taken when I was seven. She is probably still making to scrub pans in some minor chief’s kitchen, assuming she has not been whipped to death.” Ivy opened her mouth to protest, but Kinz cut her off. “You might have had all the best tutors, little princess, but there is still much you do not know.”
 

At that, Ivy fell into a resentful silence. Kinz looked guiltily back at Cazia, as though she knew no one really wanted to hear her. She continued anyway. “But I always thought it would be soldiers out of Peradain. Whenever their spearmen and -women made to approach our camp to collect their tribute—”

Taxes,
Cazia thought automatically, but she kept her mouth shut. What did it matter now if the Poalos and other herding clans had been part of the Peradaini Empire? The empire was gone.
 

“I was sure they would take us all away,” Kinz finished. “Turn us into
servants.
”
 

“You are a servant,” Cazia blurted out. “You’re my servant, and Ivy’s, too. You swore service to us on the day we left the Ozzhuacks.”

“I think the Queen of the Tilkilit has made to take my contract by force.”
 

Cazia wouldn’t accept that, not when--a sudden bloom of censure began to crowd out her thoughts. It wasn’t enough to make her black out, though. The queen wanted them all as her servants.
 

All they needed was a chance to put some distance between themselves and the warriors. Cazia didn’t know what it would be, but it had to come sometime, in some form.

The queen’s censure grew stronger. Cazia saw spots before her eyes.
 

“Has the queen stopped the attacks on you?” Ivy asked.
 

Kinz shook her head. “It is not enough to make a surrender to her,” the girl said. “She wants us to love her, too.”
 

It took all the willpower Cazia had not to bark out a derisive laugh. She held her anger and outrage inside, squeezing it down until it was as smooth and hard as an iron coin. Love? The Tilkilit? Did the queen understand anything about her?
 

“She doesn’t just want us to surrender,” Cazia said. “She wants us to be part of her swarm...hive, whatever she calls it. And we can’t be part of her hive unless we are as devoted to her as her warriors are. Only then will she trust me enough to order me to dig a passage through the mountains into the Sweeps.”

Kinz and Ivy stared at her, openmouthed. “A tunnel that lets her people out,” Ivy said, “would let The Blessing in. Has she not read our minds?”

Kinz shook her head. “Do you think she believes us?”

The question startled Cazia. Of course the queen believed them. The queen was a bug. She and her insect people thought bug thoughts; they were orderly and dense. While the queen could insert her thoughts into the minds of others, most of the complicated conversation that took place among the rest of her people was done by smell.
 

The Tilkilit didn’t arrange discrete words into a long caravan of sounds that revealed meaning. They spurted out bursts of odor. It was very short and very complex, and if Cazia was any judge, it was
not
well suited for lying. Confusion bubbled through her thoughts, and of course, it belonged to the queen. Dishonesty seemed a more difficult concept for the Tilkilit mind than suicide was.
 

But Cazia’s people--and it was only since she’d seen the city of Peradain fall to The Blessing that she had begun to think of the Peradaini as hers--were famous for their song, storytelling, and theater. What’s more, none of their performances were meant to be literal; everything was coded. Flooding stood in for the devastation of war. A man who risked all for some ambitious goal “built a tower too high.” A duel between two enemies was a bloody, punishing footrace.
 

In fact, the spells Cazia had learned--the ones the Tilkilit’s anti-magic stones prevented her from casting--affected the physical world only. They couldn’t change a person’s mind or make them fall in love any more than the queen’s mental bullying.
 
But art could. And the Tilkilit didn’t seem to make art.
 

They don’t lie.

“I love it here,” Cazia said suddenly. The other two girls stared at her in mute surprise. “I love everything about this and I’m so glad I don’t get to make my own decisions any more. If there’s anything a girl my age likes, it’s to have someone else tell her what she ought to be doing.”