The Wizard King (41 page)

“The Sage wants to marry me and raise a new generation of adepts,” she announced, brows arched. If the situation had been less dire, she would have laughed aloud at how closely Jaren’s display of righteous indignation rivaled that of an affronted Archbishop Lukin. “He isn’t too concerned what you’d have to say about that,” she told Jaren dryly. “In fact, he didn’t much care what
I
had to say about it either.” Athaya pinched her lips together in disgust. “He has little interest in anyone’s opinions but his own.”

Durek’s nostrils flared in outrage. “Of all the impudent, conceited—”

“You have to admit,” Athaya broke in, cutting off his tirade before it spiraled out of hand, “it’s a convenient way for me to get a crown. Assuming I wanted one.”

Durek closed his eyes, expelling his breath slowly. “You don’t have to keep trying to convince me of that, Athaya,” he replied. His voice sounded drained rather than angry. “Lord help me for saying this, but I believe you.”

Athaya touched his hand in a silent show of thanks. “So,” she went on, eager to stow the notion of marriage to the Sage in the dustiest corner of her mind. “What have I missed during my unforeseen ‘holiday’ on Sare?”

Jaren and Durek passed the tale back and forth like a pair of bards alternating verses as they told her of the occupation of Delfar Castle, of their foiled attempt to spirit Nicolas to freedom, and of the Sage’s intention of crowning himself king at the end of the week.

“End of the—” Athaya let out a low whistle. “Not much time.”

“And to make it worse, he’s sent messengers to every shire with the declaration that if I don’t come to defend my crown, then I give it up by forfeit. But how am I supposed to defend it?” Durek cried, shaking a fist in frustration at the seemingly winless situation he was mired in. “If I set foot in Delfarham I’m as good as dead, but if I don’t, my subjects will think I’ve abandoned them to this Sarian tyrant.”

“You have to go back and confront him,” Athaya said. “For your subjects… and for yourself. But you won’t be going alone or unprotected.”

She frowned deeply, realizing how little time they had to prepare for what would easily be the most perilous—and perhaps the last—day of their lives. “Five days. Damn, I was hoping to get more practice with my corbals than that. You do still have them, don’t you, Jaren?”

He pointed to a bundle in the corner, just beside his boots. “Good,” she said with a nod. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to use them in the Challenge.”

Durek gazed at her blankly; she doubted he understood the full significance of her words as yet. But Jaren clearly did, and his face went pale as the moonlight streaming through the window. “The
what
? You’re going to play by
his
rules?”

“What choice do I have? Like it or not, Jaren, it’s the only game in town.” She explained to them both what Tullis had ultimately proven to her: that only death would stop the Sage, and that death by Challenge was the only defeat his people would recognize, the outcome of such a contest being long-accepted by Sarian wizards as proof of the will of God.

“But you would become Sage if you win!” Durek blurted out, no less appalled at the prospect than Athaya herself.

“Better than being dead if I don’t.”

Jaren saw the logic of her reasoning but was in no way happy with it. “You’re forgetting the possibility that
he
might win, Athaya. The Sage’s magic is stronger than yours right now—you’ve admitted that yourself. And if I recall correctly, the loser of this contest doesn’t walk away.”

“No, Jaren,” she replied solemnly. “I haven’t forgotten. I’m just trying not to think about it much.”

“Barbaric custom if you ask me,” Durek grumbled under his breath. But behind the easy facade of disdain, Athaya detected a glimmer of respect in her brother’s eyes—not begrudged this time—and his muted astonishment that despite all the bitterness between them in years past, she would freely enter into a duel to the death as his champion.

“Are you sure this is the only way?” Once, Durek would have rejoiced in the knowledge that she might soon be out of his life forever; now the notion clearly disturbed him.

Of course, the notion that he’d probably die within an hour after I did might have something to do with his distress.

“Until Brandegarth is crowned king, he is still the Sage of Sare. If someone Challenges him for that position, he is honor-bound to accept. Yes, I know,” she murmured, seeing Durek roll his eyes at the word ‘honor’ being applied to the Sage in any context whatsoever. “But it has been over a year since his last Challenge—by his own laws he cannot refuse me. Master Hedric confirmed that much himself; it was in the documents he brought from the College archives.”

The mention of the Master’s name brought strained silence to the room. Jaren grasped her shoulders. “Athaya—”

“I know,” she whispered in reply, feeling the pain afresh in the hollow of her heart. “I saw him, right before…” She shook her head, loath to say the words. “He said to ask you how it happened. Something about a charm…?”

Jaren made his story brief, but Athaya could read the lingering grief in his eyes. He had known Master Hedric far longer than she and would doubtless feel the loss even more acutely—and with the added pain, Athaya realized, of knowing that the Master had given his life in payment for Jaren and Durek’s freedom.

“No wonder the Sage was so shaken when he came for me,” Athaya said when he was done, vividly recalling Brandegarth’s powerful yet trembling hands. “He’d just had the scare of his life.”

“If Master Hedric put the fear of God into him, then you can, too,” Jaren told her. “You may not have any Circle charms, but you
do
have a pouch of corbal crystals. And the Sage only knows how to resist them, not use them.”

“I’m not convinced I know how to use them, either,” she observed. “I’ve only done it once. But Master Hedric died to keep my secret, and I’ll do my best to see that his sacrifice wasn’t made in vain.”

Athaya turned to Durek with newfound resolve burning in her eyes. “The Sage dares you to come and claim your crown. Very well, then—you shall oblige him.” She envisioned the stark astonishment that would surely grace the Sage’s face, and the edges of her mouth curled up in spiteful satisfaction. “After that, leave the rest to me. I will submit a formal Challenge. If I win, then I will become the rightful Sage, and my first official act will be to disband the Sarian cult. And if I lose…”

She cast her eyes toward the pine trees swaying gently outside the window, reflecting on the possibility that she might not see them again. “Then may God help you all, for I won’t be around to do it any longer.”

* * * *

The three of them left the next morning for Delfarham, charting a route that would keep them far from the main roads and away from the Sage’s watchful allies. To conserve Athaya’s strength for the Challenge to come—and to avoid popping into view before an unforeseen enemy—they opted to walk much of the way, hiring horses when they could, rather than traveling by translocation.

Along with a small satchel of food, two canvas tents, and a few silver coins, Athaya took with her the good wishes and prayers of everyone in camp, including Tonia, Gilda, and Girard—the latter among the handful who had survived the debacle in Delfarham. Girard was unable to believe that the three of them were going back to the capital of their own free will after all the trouble he professed to have in getting out.

“Give him hell, your Highness,” he murmured, offering her a chaste kiss on the cheek. Athaya couldn’t stop a chuckle from bubbling to the surface at the look of mild consternation with which Durek regarded the man’s simply worded sentiment.

“We’ll be praying for you,” Gilda added, valiantly trying to keep her lower lip from trembling. “All of you.”

Tonia pushed a well-stuffed basket of bread and muffins into Athaya’s arms. “Hedric would be proud.” She turned aside with a sniffle, muttering a feeble complaint that a mote of dust had lodged in her eye.

Athaya plucked out a still-warm corn muffin and bit into it. “He’ll be prouder of me if I win.”

Dozens of hands waved farewell from the dormitory windows as Athaya walked slowly out of the clearing, following the red glow of the rune trail through the Forest of Else for what she sincerely hoped was not the last time.

By that evening, however, the relatively optimistic spirit in which she had left the forest camp had badly dissipated.

After pitching their tents for the night and securing the tiny encampment with wards, Athaya promptly went to work with her collection of corbals; she hoped to channel a simple spell at first and work up to increasingly more difficult ones on each successive night until their arrival in Delfarham. At Jaren’s instruction, Durek stood watch over her, prepared to break her concentration should she become irrevocably snared by the corbal’s power and incapable of stanching the flow of her magic. In the meantime, Jaren distanced himself from the painful disturbances of the corbals and set off to catch some trout for their evening meal.

But despite these careful preparations, when Athaya drew a crystal from its pouch and held it before the campfire, she found that she could not attain the needed focus to tune herself to the crystal, to shift her perceptions into alignment with the gem so as to perceive its secret paths—the necessary preamble to sending her power hurtling through them. As she attempted to reach the corbal’s source by countering its voice with her own, all she heard was the din of her inner thoughts—not the disciplined recitation she needed, but a perpetual and disjointed babble of anxiety about the outcome of the Challenge and the future of Caithe. In the end, it was all she could do to keep the crystal’s heated blades of pain at bay, and after a third botched attempt at reaching the sanctuary of the crystal’s heart, she failed at even that.

“I can’t do it!” she cried, angrily thrusting the gem back inside its pouch. “Damn it all, I just
can’t
!” Her temples were already throbbing badly, a condition only worsened by the shrill, keening sound that lanced through her ears.

“You’re flustered, Athaya,” Durek told her, dutifully offering the words that Jaren had instructed him to say if the need arose. “You just need to relax. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to do it.”

“How can I possibly relax when I’m terrified I’ll never be able to do it again?” she shot back. “And I have to, Durek—channeling magic through these crystals is the only real chance I have of getting out of this Challenge alive!”

And so it went for the next four nights. Each failure made her more agitated, and the more agitated she became, the more complete was each failure.

On the last day of their journey before reaching the capital, Durek went out of his way to be kind to her, acutely aware of how badly the pressure was fraying both her nerves and her spirit. It was a glorious summer day in early August, and as they strolled through the rolling hills east of Delfarham, the gentle breezes and featherlike clouds, combined with his Majesty’s surprising dose of good-naturedness, helped to ease Athaya’s misery a bit.

“Remember when we all went to Nadiera the first summer after Father and Dagara were married?” he remarked. He picked a stalk of wild grass and began to shred it absently. “It was a day much like this. You and Nicolas spent hours lying in the grass fancying that the clouds looked like dragons or lions or whatnot… I thought you were both being ridiculous.”

“I was only six,” Athaya reminded him, “and Nicolas not quite eight.”

“I know. But I was fourteen, and young men of fourteen do
not
go about seeing dragons in the clouds.” Lifting his face to the sky, Durek lazily watched the clouds drift by overhead as if trying to make up for his past omission by imagining what the cottony shapes resembled most.

“Then you wanted to bring home a litter of kittens you’d found in the barn,” he went on, shifting his gaze back to the ground beneath his feet. “You cried for hours when Dagara said no. Funny,” he added archly, “how she found a pair of mice in her bed that same night.”

Athaya grinned broadly at the long-forgotten incident; at the tender age of six, she’d considered it a stroke of tactical genius. “If she’d let me have the kittens, they would have found the mice first.”

Durek glanced at her sidelong. “Yes, you probably would have put them there regardless, wouldn’t you?” The trace of a smile betrayed his approval of the prank—and perhaps a belated wish that he had thought of it first.

They spent their last night camped in a copse of pines a few miles west of the abbey of Evarshot. Although Durek trusted that the good monks would offer them a roof for the night, Athaya and Jaren advised against it; for all any of them knew, the Sage’s men had already visited the abbey to wreak vengeance and absolve the clergy of Caithe for their myriad crimes against wizardry. Still, Athaya would have liked to see the place again, if only to marvel at how completely her life had been transformed since her last visit, when her seed of power was only beginning to bloom and Jaren was no more to her than a suspicious Reykan wizard sent to fetch her to Ath Luaine for what she and Tyler Graylen both assumed were quite sinister purposes.

Durek’s wistful excursions into the past gave her a brighter frame of mind for her last session with her crystals, and Athaya set about her nightly task far less rattled than she had been since leaving Kaiburn. Jaren left her as he did each evening, but this time Athaya sensed that he did so with great reluctance. He had done his best to hide the depth of his concern these last five days, knowing it would only add to the intense pressures already upon her, but Athaya knew—as did they all—that if he returned to find that she had failed yet again, then it was all too likely that tomorrow’s Challenge would not provide the triumph they were hoping for, and that the Sage would find himself king of Caithe when the moon rose once again.

“I’ll do better tonight,” she called to him, as he passed beyond the golden circle of the campfire and into the starry darkness.

“I know you will,” he replied over his shoulder, but Athaya did not overlook the quiet urgency in his tone that rendered the words as much a desperate prayer as a vote of confidence.