S Farrell - A Magic of Dawn

“I was surprised to see you there, Vajiki,” she said.

“I once thought of becoming a teni myself,” he told her. “My vatarh talked me out of it, but ever since…” She felt him shrug. “I still find great comfort in the Faith. And besides, I knew there was a good chance you would be attending.”

“Ah? And why would that be important, Vajiki?” she asked.

He laughed at that, deep and throaty and genuine. She liked that laugh, liked the way it deepened the lines around the man’s eyes. “I never had the chance to properly thank you for the dance at the Gschnas, Kraljica.”

“That’s all? Are all Magyarians so aggressively courteous, Vajiki?”

Again, the laugh. They were approaching the doors, and the teni there opened them wide. The western sky above the buildings that fringed the plaza was touched with red and orange, as if the clouds were afire. They entered out into a cool evening. A crowd of citizens had gathered-some who had come out of the side doors of the temple to see the Kraljica, as well as the usual curious tourists. Allesandra’s carriage was waiting several steps away, the driver already holding open the door for her. They cheered as she emerged from the temple, and Allesandra lifted her hand to them. “No, I’m afraid not,” ca’Vikej answered as the crowd roared. “But they don’t have the incentive of your beauty. As you can see, even your subjects are overcome.”

Now it was Allesandra who laughed, stopping momentarily. “You’ve inherited your vatarh’s golden tongue, I see, but I don’t flatter that easily, Vajiki. Forgive me if I say that I suspect your motives are more political than personal.”

“In that, you’d be-” he began to reply. But a shout from the front of the crowd interrupted him.

“Don’t be a traitor to your own faith, Kraljica!” a male voice shouted. His voice was strangely loud, as if enhanced by the Ilmodo, and all heads turned toward it. The gardai holding back the crowd were suddenly shoved aside as if some invisible, gigantic hand had pushed them sprawling to the flags of the pavement, and a green-clad teni, the slash of his rank on the robes telling Allesandra that he was an o’teni, stepped through the gap. She recognized him, though she didn’t know his name; his was a face she’d glimpsed among A’Teni ca’Paim’s staff. “You defile Cenzi if you bring the body of a Numetodo heretic into this sacred place. Cenzi will not allow it!” The o’teni stalked closer. Allesandra felt ca’Vikej’s arm leave hers. “Those who are truly faithful will stop this travesty if we must!” The man’s face was twisted as he shouted, and now he began to chant, his hands moving in the pattern of a spell. But Allesandra heard the whisper of steel being drawn from a scabbard, and ca’Vikej had rushed from her side. One muscular arm was around the teni’s head and a dagger in his hand was pressed against the man’s throat.

“Another word,” she heard him say in the teni’s ear, “and you’ll have no throat with which to talk.”

The teni’s hands dropped and he stopped his chant. The gardai, regaining their feet, were now around him as well, several of them stepping between Allesandra and the teni. She heard shouts and cries. Hands hurried her to her carriage. Past uniformed shoulders, she saw the teni being dragged away, still screaming. “… betraying the Faith… no better than a Numetodo herself…”

She stepped up onto the carriage, and saw ca’Vikej, the dagger taken from him, also being hurried away. “No!” she shouted. “Bring Vajiki ca’Vikej here.”

They brought him to her, a garda holding each arm. “You may release him,” she told them; they reluctantly let go of ca’Vikej. “Give me his dagger,” she said, and one of them handed it to her. “Vajiki, in my carriage, please.”

As the door of the carriage closed and the driver urged the horses forward, Allesandra glanced at ca’Vikej. He was disheveled, his clothing torn, and there was a long scratch on his shaved head with beads of darkening blood along it. She lifted his dagger from her lap-a long, curved weapon, crafted from dark, satiny Firenzcian steel with a carved ivory handle. She turned it in her hand, admiring it. “Very few people are permitted to bear a weapon in the presence of the Kraljica,” she said to him, keeping her face stern and unsmiling. “Especially one made in the Coalition.”

He inclined his head to her. “Then I beg your forgiveness, Kraljica. I will remember that. Please, keep it as my gift to you; the blade was forged by my great-vatarh-my vatarh Stor gave it to me before…” She saw a brief flash of teeth in the dimness of the carriage. The springs of the seats groaned once as they jounced over the curb of the temple plaza onto the street.

She allowed herself to smile, then. “I thank you for your gift,” she said. “But in this case, I think it’s better to return it. Let that be my gift to you.” She handed the dagger to him.

He hefted it in his hand, touched the hilt to his lips. “Thank you, Kraljica,” he said. “The blade is now more valuable to me than ever.” She watched him sheathe it again in the well-worn leather hidden under the blouse of his bashta.

“Are you hungry, Vajiki?” she asked him. “We could take supper at the palais, and then…” She smiled again. “We could talk, you and I.”

He inclined his head in the deep Magyarian fashion. “I would like that very much,” he said. His voice was like the purr of a great kitten, and Allesandra found herself stirring at the sound of it.

“Excellent,” she said.

She hadn’t expected to find herself in Brezno. Her matarh had told her to avoid that city. “Your vatarh is there,” she’d said. “But he won’t know you, he won’t acknowledge you, and he has other children now from another woman. No, be quiet, I tell you! She doesn’t need to know that.” Those last two sentences hadn’t been directed to Rochelle but to the voices who plagued her matarh, the voices that would eventually send her screaming and mad to her death. She’d flailed at the air in front of her as if the voices were a cloud of threatening wasps, her eyes-as strangely light as Rochelle’s own-wide and angry.

“I won’t, Matarh,” Rochelle had told her. She’d learned early on that it was always best to tell Matarh whatever it was she wanted to hear, even if Rochelle never intended to obey. She’d learned that from Nico, her half brother who was eleven years older than her. He’d been touched with Cenzi’s Gift and Matarh had arranged for him to be educated in the Faith. Rochelle was never certain how Matarh had managed that, since rarely did the teni take in someone who was not ca’-and-cu’ to be an acolyte, and then only if many gold solas were involved. But she had, and when Rochelle was five, Nico had left the household forever, had left her alone with a woman who was growing increasingly more unstable, and who would school her daughter in the one best skill she had.

How to kill.

Rochelle had been ten when Matarh placed a long, sharp knife in her hand. “I’m going to show you how to use this,” she’d said. And it had begun. At twelve, she’d put the skills to their intended use for the first time-a man in the neighborhood who had bothered some of the young girls. The matarh of one of his victims hired the famous assassin White Stone to kill him for what he’d done to her daughter.

“Cover his eyes with the stones,” Matarh had whispered alongside Rochelle after she’d stabbed the man, after she’d driven the dagger’s point through his ribs and into his heart. The voices never bothered Matarh when she was doing her job; she sounded sane and rational and focused. It was only afterward… “That will absorb the image of you that is captured in his pupils, so no one else can look into his dead eyes and see who killed him. Good. Now, take the one from his right eye and keep it-that one you should use every time you kill, to hold the souls you’ve taken and their sight of you killing them. The one on his left eye, the one the client gave us, you leave that one so everyone will know that the White Stone has fulfilled her contract.. .”