Gail Dayton - The Barbed Rose

Uskenda opened the inner door and stepped back, waiting for Kallista to pass through. The smaller room was dim, lit only by a sliver of reflected light from a high clerestory and that entering by the doorway. Kallista moved to one side to wait for her eyes to adjust to the gloom and for the general to enter.

After a few ticks, she could make out a form lying still and dark against the pale sheets. General Uskenda stood at the foot of the bed looking down at the woman in it. Then she looked up at Kallista, but remained silent. How bad were the injuries?

Kallista swallowed down her dread and crossed the small space to stand beside the narrow bed. Kallandra’s face showed the years that had passed, or perhaps the strain of her injuries, but seemed otherwise unmarked. Kallista took in the rest in one swift glance, saw Kallandra’s arms lying atop the sheets with bandages swathed from her hands past her elbows.

No. That wasn’t right. Something was off, something wrong about the bandages. They were—

Kallista’s right knee buckled, but her left somehow held and she did not fall when she realized what it was. The bandages did not begin at Kallandra’s hands. She had no hands.

Her arms stopped short somewhere between elbows and wrists, the thick pads of bandage mocking the missing length.

“Oh dear, sweet Goddess,” Kallista whispered. Her hand groped for support, found the wall. “What—”

“Outside.” Uskenda jerked her head toward the open doorway.

Kallista nodded, tears burning her eyes again. She took a moment to whisper a blessing on the desperately damaged woman and stumbled back into the bodyguard’s antechamber. Torchay jumped up and ushered Kallista to the chair he’d vacated as Uskenda closed the door gently behind them.

“What happened?” Kallista whispered.

“What?” Torchay demanded. “What is it?”

“They took her hands.” Miray’s voice was ice, cracking. “The thrice-damned murderers took all their hands—the naitani’s—before they killed them.”

“Goddess.” Torchay’s hand drifted to the sword hilt locked in place over his hip, one of the twin Heldring-forged short swords he wore in the double scabbard on his back, as if he thought an assassin might lurk nearby.

“Kallandra is still alive,” Uskenda said.

“But she has no hands,” Miray retorted.

Kallista couldn’t suppress her shudder. Obed took one step out into the hall and emptied his stomach on the tile floor, then returned to guard as if nothing had happened. Kallista steeled herself against the horror that spun her head and roiled her own stomach, tightening her focus to Torchay standing in front of her. To his hand resting on his hip.

It emerged from the leather cuff holding one of his everpresent blades, which the sleeve of his tunic didn’t quite cover. Narrow, long-fingered and remarkably free of scars, his hand showed the calluses of his trade and the dirt from their rough journey to this place. His hand…

Kallandra had no hands.

Torchay caught Kallista’s hand, clasped it tight, saying nothing. What was there to be said? Almost all naitani needed their hands to use their magic. Bakers kneaded preservation magic into bread with their hands. Weavers wove waterproofing or longwearing strength into fabric with their hands. Healers laid their hands on the sick and injured to mend their hurts. And soldier naitani aimed their magic and sent it against the enemy with their hands.

Only farspeakers and sometimes truthsayers did not use their hands. Some farspeakers had to hold an object that had belonged to the one to whom they spoke, and only a few truthsayers—the Reinine was one—did not have to touch a person to know if they lied.

This was why all military naitani were required to wear gloves in public. Any covering over the hands interfered with the use of magic, and leather blocked all but that under the most exquisite control. Because military naitani held deadly magic, the public’s fear of what might happen if it escaped the naitan—and the occasional frightening incident—had brought about the glove regulation.

What would losing her hands do to Kallandra? To any naitan?

Kallista shuddered, squeezing Torchay’s hand tighter.

“The Reinine is waiting,” the general said. “We must go.”

“Yes.” Kallista let Torchay pull her to her feet. “Blessings of the One on you, Miray, and on your naitan.”

Miray looked up at her, his eyes widening as he seemed to realize just who offered these blessings. “Thank you, Godstruck. May it be as you say.”

She left the room at a normal pace, but couldn’t help feeling as if she scuttled like a bug running for the safety of darkness. Kallandra’s injuries were too unsettling, too horrifying. When Obed fell in beside her, Kallista reached for his hand, too, needing the feel of a hand in both of hers, needing to know she could still do it. He gripped her tight, as if he needed the same assurance.

“You don’t need your hands to do magic,” Torchay said quietly as they reached the first flight of stairs.

“Not for the ilian magic, the godmarked magic, no. I don’t think so.” She refused to release either hand as they started down the stairs, forcing them into an angled formation. “I used my hands to direct it, shape it, but not because I had to. It was just—they gave me something to see. But for my lightning, I need my hands.”

“They will not touch you,” Obed said. “I swear my life on it.”

“I swore mine ten years ago.” Torchay waited while they caught up with him on the second-floor landing. “We’ll keep you intact.”

“But who are they?” Kallista burst out. “What do they want?”

“To change the order of the universe.” Uskenda led them in the opposite direction from the entrance stairwell. “The rebellion was instigated by the Barbs, the Order of the Barbed Rose. BARINIRAB. They want—”

“They want to destroy West magic.” Kallista finished the sentence for her. “And I’m the only practitioner of West magic Adara’s seen in fifty years.”

The Order of the Barbed Rose was an ancient and heretical conspiracy shrouded in mystery, often fading from public knowledge for decades at a time, becoming no more than a whispered tale told round hearth fires. And always it tempted the people because of its enmity toward West magic.

West magic was about endings and mysteries, things that couldn’t be easily understood or explained by mortal beings. Though death’s ending was as much a part of life as birth, it frightened people. So did unexplainable mysteries—such as seeing things that had yet to happen or talking to the dead. And what people feared, they often wanted to destroy. The Barbs, whose influence had been slowly growing over the past fifty years or more, seemed to think that by destroying the magic, they could destroy death itself.

Kallista hadn’t been born with West magic. Her personal magic was of the North—the ability to cast lightning bolts from her hands. It had awakened just after puberty, as magic usually did in those gifted by the One. A person either had magic or they did not, and they only received one gift, which never changed.

A good half of Adara’s naitani held the practical South magic of hearth and home, magic that called the hearth’s fire or brewed better beer or built stronger tables. Most of the remaining naitani were divided between the East magic healers and growers, naitani who dealt with living things and beginnings, and the North naitani whose magic operated on inanimate objects and natural forces like wind or lightning. A very few were given the mysterious talents of the West.

But since that day on the walls of Ukiny a year ago, Kallista had been able to call magic from three of the four compass directions. That is, she’d been able to until the magic left her half a year later in the Tibran capital.