The Rival Read online

  The Fey's reaction might be even stronger.

  He pushed the straw off Yeon.

  "I don't know why I let you talk me into this," Yeon said. "It's a fool's project, and it will never ever work. No one can make varin into a sword. No one can make varin into anything."

  "That's why Old Lady Fice had varin tools in her stable," Matthias said. He had shown Yeon the varin tools over a year ago, when they had first discussed this project.

  "Find her smithy and have him make the sword for you."

  "Her smithy is dead, and I have you."

  "I'm a scholar just like you, holy man. My smithing days are long gone."

  Matthias smiled. "They were long gone. But you've had six months of practice now."

  "Six months of exploding metal." Yeon picked straw off his skin. He had welts too. He wiped an arm over his face, leaving a long black streak on his forehead. "Most metals don't explode."

  "I suspect that's what makes this one so special." Matthias picked some straw off his stomach. He was in the middle of the straw pile on the outside of the smithy. The water had exploded backwards, into the smithy, putting out the forge fire, but leaving the furnace running. Steam and smoke still poured out.

  They would have quite a mess to clean up.

  "I think you're chasing your tail," Yeon said, as he pushed himself to his feet. "I really do."

  "Maybe," Matthias said, "but if I am, you're chasing with me."

  Yeon grunted, put a hand over his mouth, and went inside.

  Sometimes it did feel as if they were chasing a dream. But Matthias's scholarship had turned up interesting changes in Rocaanism over the centuries. The Fiftieth Rocaan had pointed the way by resurrecting the original recipe for holy water. Once he put in an ingredient missing from the common recipe, some people started to have skin reactions. Elder Reece had the worst one, and it was his lack of a reaction that led the Fiftieth Rocaan to know that a Fey had tampered with the holy water in the Tabernacle.

  The reactions intrigued Matthias. What if the Islanders' reactions were merely a mild form of the melting the Fey suffered? If that were the case, then perhaps there were other ways of attacking the Fey, ways forgotten or not yet discovered.

  He brushed the last of the straw off himself. He had started pursuing this theory when he couldn't get that Fey's voice out of his head. Burden, the Fey he"d murdered, had said Matthias had Fey-like magick, and that he had used that magick to create the poisonous qualities of holy water.

  You changed the water's properties, Burden had said. Your magic is now part of the mix, and that is a sign of a very powerful magic maker.

  His voice mingled with the voices of so many others.

  Demon spawn.

  They had called Matthias that from childhood because of his unusual height. That had been one of the reasons he'd decided to join the Tabernacle.

  You're tall, Burden had said. Islanders usually aren't tall. Height seems to go with the magick for reasons we don't understand.

  Matthias had killed him for saying that. Or at least, the Fey had tried to make Matthias believe he had killed Burden. There had been another Fey in the room, a spark of light known as a Wisp, and it had flown into Matthias's face before Burden's death. Who knew what kind of magick the Wisp had imparted? Who knew how they had tried to warp his mind?

  He had resigned as Rocaan. He hadn't been able to continue anyway, not after Jewel's death. But he hadn't lost his interest in the history of the Tabernacle. And that interest had gone from the history of the Tabernacle to the history of the Secrets.

  So many of the Secrets the Rocaan held were useless pieces of information. The Tabernacle no longer held the Feast of the Living nor did it celebrate the Lights of Midday. Those sacraments had disappeared during the time of the Twentieth Rocaan, although the Secrets to the ceremonies were still passed from Rocaan to Rocaan. There were two dozen such Secrets, of which the Rocaan still employed about five.

  The one that had intrigued Matthias most was the Secret of the Sword. The Eighth Rocaan had discarded this one, saying that Rocaanists no longer needed to carry weapons. But the Sword-Making ritual was passed on from Rocaan to Rocaan in an unbroken line from the time of the Roca's death. Forty generations of unused knowledge.

  Matthias was trying to resurrect it all. Five years of research had finally revealed the material used in the Roca's sword.

  Varin.

  Which made sense. The legends about the Roca — of which there were many not recorded in the Words Written and Unwritten — made his Cliffs of Blood origins extremely clear. Seze, the missing ingredient in the holy water, was native to the Kenniland Marshes now, but in the Roca's day, it was grown in the Cliffs of Blood as well.

  Detail upon detail. The Cliffs of Blood held the center of the religion, only Rocaanism didn't acknowledge them any more.

  Matthias did.

  He stood. He was a bit weak in the knees from the heat and the steam and the bruises. He gulped hot air, felt it singe his lungs. The smoke was clearing inside, and he could hear Yeon mumbling.

  "We're doing something wrong," he said as he headed to the smithy.

  "Using the varin."

  "No, something in the process," Matthias said. "Maybe we should go over it again."

  Yeon emerged from the smoke and steam, his body shining. His pants, once a fawn color, were black with ash. "I think we've done it your way long enough," he said. "I think we should go to the fall back plan."

  "There's no need," Matthias said.

  "There's plenty need." Yeon wiped his hands on his pants. "Every year we wait, the Fey get more cunning."

  "They haven't tried anything in decades."

  "For all we know, they're growing little Fey so that they can come after us with an army." Yeon crossed his thick arms. He looked solid, indomitable, like the leader he had been until Matthias stumbled on his little group. "I say it's time you mix us up gallons of holy water and we saturate their hiding place."

  "It's been tried. It didn't work."

  "Twenty years ago," Yeon said. "Maybe it"d work now."

  "No," Matthias said. "I won't risk lives."

  "You already are. We're lucky this stuff doesn't kill us."

  Matthias sighed. "I don't want to fight old battles."

  "We won't be," Yeon said. "What if I can get my people to kill the Fey one on one?"

  "Then you'll alert the full body of the Fey and they'll come after us."

  "Right," Yeon said. "They can't do anything to us if we've got holy water. Wipe them out. What'll it hurt?"

  Nothing. It would hurt nothing if they did it right.

  "We'd have to plan it down to the last campaign," Matthias said. "I don't want them coming out, slaughtering innocents."

  "Leave that to me."

  "No," Matthias said. "I've done that too much in the past. We do it my way."

  "We stop playing with strange metals and get on with what we know."

  This fight had been building for months now. Matthias might win it this time, but he wouldn't win forever. And he didn't know how long it would take to get the sword right. "All right," Matthias said. "You devise your plan, I'll make the holy water, and by the end of the summer, we'll go after the Fey. But I want a sword to take along."

  "We can't have it done by the end of the summer. I don't think it can be done at all."

  "Nonetheless," Matthias said. "I won't make holy water until you make me a sword."

  "That's the same agreement we had."

  "No," Matthias said. "Before we had no deadline on it. If at the end of the summer, you can't make me a sword, I won't make you holy water. If you can find someone else who'll make the sword by my deadline, I'll have more holy water than you could ever use."

  "You don't even know the water will work without being Blessed," Yeon said. "You're not Rocaan any more."

  "The Words say the Rocaan is Rocaan until he dies." Matthias had never quoted that passage aloud before. No one had resigned before him. Par
t of him feared, the superstitious part, feared that God was angry with him.

  Most of him believed that there was no such thing as God.

  "So the current Rocaan is a pretender?"

  "He's just a place-holder, not the real thing at all," Matthias said.

  "What's that mean to the religion?"

  Matthias shook his head. "I haven't been able to figure that out. I just hope that his skills as Rocaan will never have to be tested."

  "Well, I don't think it matters much to us in any case," Yeon said. "What matters is getting rid of those Fey once and for all."

  "And you think your tactics will do it?"

  Yeon nodded.

  "You don't think they're prepared for an assault?"

  "I think they've lost their preparedness. So many of them have gone Outside anyway. The rest seem to have forgotten why they came. I think we can get them, yes."

  "And if your method fails, then what?"

  Yeon narrowed his eyes. "I think you're too frightened, holy man."

  "And I think you're too rash." Circles. They had been going in these circles forever. Matthias wiped his damp hands on his own filthy pants. "Get me my sword and I'll get you your holy water. Let's do this before the winter rains begin."

  "I won't work on the sword. I'll get someone else to." Yeon spoke as if that were a bad thing. Matthias merely nodded. He had wondered if part of the problem were Yeon, but hadn't quite known how to go around him.

  "Do what you have to," Matthias said. "The quicker we get a sword, the quicker you get to attack the Fey."

  "The less chance the King's men catch us, too."

  Matthias laughed. "The King's men have no idea that we exist. You worry too much, Yeon."

  "His children — "

  "Aren't our targets. They'll have no kingdom if the Fey go."

  Yeon nodded. He turned back toward the smoldering forge, then stopped. "Why'd you agree to this now?"

  Matthias froze. Sometimes, Yeon was smarter than Matthias gave him credit for. "I'm sorry?"

  "You've been fighting me for nearly six months on my plan. Why give in now?"

  "Because," Matthias said, "something tells me we have to move quickly." That much was true. He hoped that Yeon would ask no more.

  "I've had that feeling too," Yeon said. He walked across the wet straw. Strands stuck to his feet.

  "Yeon, do me one more favor," Matthias said.

  Yeon stopped. He kept his back to Matthias as if he were expecting this to be the real reason that Matthias gave in.

  "Get me some strands of green ota leaves."

  "I'd have to send someone to the Cliffs," Yeon said.

  "Do that." Matthias smiled. "I want to hold a feast."

  Yeon shrugged and went into the smithy.

  Matthias watched him go. If they couldn't make a Sword that worked, they could try another Secret. The Feast of Living would do nicely. The followers wouldn't even know he was experimenting.

  Therefore, only he would know if he succeeded.

  EIGHT

  Miserable smelly villages. Rugad wore his fighting boots, the ones the Domestics had spelled to keep clean in all conditions, mud, blood, and piss. This village had more piss running down its middle than any he had seen on Galinas.

  That wasn't entirely true, of course. Poverty in any country smelled the same.

  He crossed the river of waste running down the middle of the street and headed toward Shadowlands. It was behind the tottering, and now empty, kirk. Appropriate, he thought, considering what he planned to do to this religion that had cost him so much grief.

  And given him such an opportunity.

  He waved a hand to open the Circle Door as he went. The door, a collection of blinking lights a moment before, widened into a full circle, surrounded by lights. It opened like a mouth behind the tottering kirk and he dove in, rolling on the opaque floor and coming up inside his tent. He still didn't trust these villagers enough to camp in their buildings.

  Since he arrived, he had created eight Shadowlands, one for each village along the Snow Mountains. There were other assemblies of huts, places so small they didn't even have names, but those residents didn't seem to care who ruled them as long as those people provided food. The attitude and the poverty here shocked him. He had thought Blue Isle rich. That's what the Nyeians had told him. Somehow he hadn't thought poverty a part of life here.

  But it clearly was. Malnourished children with distended stomachs, young mothers with rotted teeth and boils on their necks, and men with legs bowed with rickets. Poverty, starvation, and hopelessness, and all of it blamed on the government in Jahn. Until two weeks before, most of these Islanders had never seen Fey. They had thought the Fey a myth to justify the cut-off of trade to Galinas. They had thought their government had arbitrarily ended the villagers livelihood to destroy life in the Snow Mountains.

  They had starved for two decades, held on by sheer determination, and hadn't even known why.

  By the time they saw the Fey invaders, they didn't care who ruled them. All they wanted was food and shelter and a promise that the days of prosperity would begin again.

  He sat down on the cot inside his tent, and pulled off his boots, massaging his feet. He had walked the length of this village and found it no different than all of the others. They had blurred so much that he couldn't even remember its name. He had spent part of the last five years learning Islander so that he could be a politician as well as a conqueror. But these apathetic creatures didn't care if he was either.

  This lack of resistance took some of the joy out of his effort. He hoped, when he stopped at the garrisons his troops were establishing on the roads north, that he would be able to make use of his learning. Blue Isle couldn't be a simple, pathetic place. His estimate of his son, Rugar's, abilities was low, but not that low.

  Rugad leaned back and stared at the tent's brown ceiling. He had learned long ago to make his quarters in Shadowlands as dull as possible because the Shadowlands leached the color out of everything. He hated being inside, hated it almost as much as he hated dwelling in the same place too long. Shadowlands, particularly the way he constructed them, were tight, narrow, economical boxes. Some Fey couldn't even stand upright in them. From the outside, they were invisible to the naked eye. They were marked by a few blinking lights that looked, to the uninitiated, like fireflies winking in and out.

  The only time he felt his age was at rest. He knew he still had years yet — he had at least fifty Visions unfulfilled, and in them all he looked older than he was — but sometimes he felt as if he were on the cusp of old age. He was still vigorous, and could fight Fey one quarter his age, but his bones ached when he stopped moving, and when he got up in the morning he was stiff, even if he hadn't fought in battle.

  Old age was the curse of the warrior, and the blessing of a cunning man.

  He smiled. He was cunning. So far things had gone almost as well as he could hope. His son, Rugar, was out of the way, and his granddaughter, Jewel, had lived long enough to mate with the wild magic in this place to produce a great-grandchild worthy of the Black Throne.

  Rugad had waited nearly two decades to invade Blue Isle. He had several reasons. He wanted the Islanders to become complacent. He wanted them to forget how to fight. And he wanted his great-grandson to become an adult, to come into his power.

  Now that Gift was a man, it was time to bring him into the fold. Rugad didn't want to rule forever, nor did he want his other grandchildren to take over. Rugar's other children were as foolhardy, impulsive and reckless as he was. None of them would take the Black Throne to Leut. Only Gift would.

  Rugad had Seen it.

  The Circle door opened. It whistled faintly, a warning only Rugad could hear, a safety feature he added into all his Shadowlands. He sat up as Wisdom, one of his advisors, entered.

  Wisdom was so named not because of any added intelligence but because, as an infant, he had the look of an elderly Shaman. He still did, even though he was Jewel's age
, mid-thirties, still a child in Fey years. He was slender and strong, his magick the subtle power of Charm, a power that didn't work on other Leaders, but one Rugad found invaluable in his own advisors. It kept the troops happy, something Rugad always valued.

  "This is not a victory," Wisdom said, "It's an acquiescence." He flipped his long thin braids, done in Oudoun warrior style, off his face and down his back. Wisdom was an example of all that was good about the Fey's conquering. He was named in the L'Nacin tradition, wore his hair according to the Oudoun, and dressed (until recently) like the Nye. The Fey took was best about a culture and used it.

  So far, Rugad saw nothing here to use.

  "It's just the beginning. The Isle is big."

  "Not as big as Galinas."

  "But as big as Nye."

  "Bigger if the old maps are to be believed." Wisdom leaned on the small chair beside Rugad's cot, and crossed his arms. They were covered with scarification from his heroics in the Battle of Feire.

  "We won't be staying here now. We have much to do before this Isle is completely ours."

  "We shouldn't have stopped at all. We should have maintained the momentum."

  Rugad shook his head. "We needed to take the time. The mission is a delicate one here. I have never completely Seen my great-grandson. The Visions are unclear and I know him only in shadow. I do not want to risk a death in my family, even an accidental one."

  Wisdom shuddered. "What of their King? Is he family?"

  "He will determine that. He's not of the Blood."

  "But his children are."

  Rugad nodded. "A dozen Shamans have been unable to determine what his fate will be. The swirls are thick here. We have to tread carefully. Each action will send us in a different direction."

  Wisdom scowled. His delicate, almost female features looked suddenly fierce. "Once you have found your great-grandson, put me in charge of the Failures." He touched his arms. "I know ways to make their deaths particularly unpleasant."

  Rugad smiled but made no promises. The surviving Fey, if there were any, were another problem. If they believed that Jewel made her bargain in good faith, they were not Failures. But if they knew that the invasion had lost, they should have died long before. Failures had the duty to die when their mission failed. That way the enemy could not learn about the Fey.