The vir swept Dorian’s courtiers’ pillows into a pile three paces from Grakaat’s feet.

Dorian let his glory fade and turned to the girl. He smiled at her. “Come, love.” Khali, give me strength, Dorian prayed, and found he had it. God forgive him, his strength didn’t flag for an instant.

Afterward, Dorian stood, his body gleaming with sweat. Eesa lay panting, oblivious, obscene. For the first time, Graakat Kruhn was staring at Wanhope with the fear a Godking deserved. The Godking said, “I’ll be expecting you come spring. If your warhost numbers seven thousand, I will put you over the Quarl, Churaq, Hraagl, and Iktana clans. On spring’s first new moon, we march to Black Barrow. The girls stay with me.”

70

Vi woke to Sister Ariel shaking her. The windows were still dark, and the only light in the room was from a single candle. Vi sat up and gazed blearily at the maja, who was red-eyed and wearing the same tent-like dress she’d worn the day before.

“What are you doing?” Vi asked.

“I found it. I can help you.”

“Help me with what?” Vi asked.

“Get up, I’ll tell you on the way.”

Vi dressed and followed Sister Ariel. Sister Ariel said nothing until they were on one of the punts that would convey them to the Chantry. Even then, she spoke quietly, leery of how voices traveled over the water, even in the pre-dawn fog that wreathed the lake.

“Long ago, there was an Alitaeran emperor named Jorald Hurdazin. By all accounts, he was a skilled and wise leader. In his younger years, he solidified Alitaeran control from what is now Ymmur in the east to the west coast of Midcyru. What is now Waeddryn and Modai were his last conquests, and with his marriage to Layinisa Guralt, the Seeress of Gyle—essentially its princess—the lands that are now Ceura came under his control as well, and there he stopped, mostly because of her influence. He spent the next twenty years consolidating his empire and for the most part bringing justice and prosperity to the lands he had conquered. He was, however, magically poisoned by one of his many enemies. The poisoning was caught early, but the magi could only delay its effects. They treated him every day, but soon determined that Emperor Hurdazin would die within two years. Obviously, this was a closely held secret, and obviously, they called as many green magi and magae as they could. To make matters worse, there was no heir, and in agreeing to bring Gyle into the Empire, Gyle’s king had insisted that Jorald and Layinisa be married with rings like yours. For a man of his power, finding such rings was no problem, and though their marriage was first political and magical, all the histories I’ve read agree that Jorald and Layinisa deeply loved each other. The green magi found nothing to heal Jorald, and they soon found that Layinisa was infertile. Women with great Talents sometimes injure themselves with their magic, and infertility is common in those who use too much magic, or too much too soon.

“The emperor put as many magi as he dared trust to work on both magical problems. He believed that Layinisa might hold his empire after his death, but if she were infertile, that would only delay the collapse, and he didn’t want to be yet another emperor whose empire died with him. In the end, it was Layinisa herself who discovered a way around the rings’ bond.”

“She did?” Vi asked.

“Don’t get excited. Now we’re here, say nothing until we reach the library.”

They walked silently through the dark halls of the Chantry. Vi wondered for a moment that the building was beginning to feel like home. The dim magical torches that illumined the walls and followed them seemed normal now, the austere marble arches comforting in their strength rather than menacing. In a few minutes, they were deep in the Chantry’s storerooms, far below the waterline, a place Vi had never been allowed to go. It was neither dark nor dirty, but it did have an air of abandonment. Numbered oak boxes lined the room to the ceiling. The one small desk had an oak box already upon it.

Instead of opening the box, however, Sister Ariel closed it and put it back on a numbered shelf and grabbed a different box two rows down. Vi understood that she had left out the wrong box in case some spy checked what she was studying. At first Vi wondered why the boxes were oaken, but then she looked again and saw the spell sunk into the wood. Each oak box had one spell to strengthen the box and make it watertight, one to make it fire resistant, and one to suck air from the box as it closed to preserve whatever was kept inside.

“Magically reactive materials are kept in special rooms on the next floor; these archives are for mundane records only. Because of how they’re preserved, they only have to be copied by industrious tyros such as yourself every few hundred years—if they’re not frequently opened,” Sister Ariel said. The box opened with a hiss, and she gently lifted out sheets of bound parchment that to Vi’s eyes looked scarcely ten years old.

“At the time of Jorald and Layinisa’s marriage, binding rings had been forbidden for almost fifty years. They were still common among royal families, of course, who were rarely willing to surrender them. The rings continued to cause misery wherever they were used and all magi became more and more convinced that banning them had been one of the best decisions the Chantry and the brotherhoods had ever made. Every group eliminated knowledge of them and how to make them to the best of its ability. This did lead to bloodshed a number of times, especially among the Vy’sana, the Makers, who to this day are a small brotherhood. When Layinisa figured out how to circumvent the magic, there was a great debate among us. Some wanted to follow her research to find a way to fully break the bonding. The majority, however, feared that any dabbling in those arts again would lead to a full rediscovery of how to bond. The suffering of those few who were presently bonded was weighed against the possibility of vast suffering if bonding were rediscovered by the unscrupulous. I don’t know if you’ve experimented with your bond, Vi, but it does have an element of compulsion. That’s what made it break the Godking’s compulsion on you. The order of the ringing makes the compulsion in your rings flow from you to Kylar.”

“What?” Vi asked. “You mean . . .”

“I mean if you told Kylar to walk on his hands to Cenaria, you’d find his body somewhere in a mountain pass with stumps where his hands had been. It’s a compulsion stronger by far than what the Godking used on you.”

“But there’s a way out?” Vi said, her throat tight.

“Not out, child. Because you’re the mistress of the bond, however, you can do what Layinisa did.”

“Which is?”

“She used the compulsion of the bond to force Jorald to divorce her and marry a princess. She was then able to suspend the bond to allow him to produce an heir.”

“What happened?”

“He died but the empire lived, minus the country of Gyle, which was deeply insulted by Jorald divorcing their Seeress. Layinisa served Jorald’s new wife and supported her regency for five years, until the new empress marched against Gyle, at which point Layinisa committed suicide. The enmity between Alitaera and Ceura didn’t cool for centuries and would probably be raging right now if the countries still bordered each other. The point is, if you wish it, you can suspend the bond—partially. A maja named Jessa worked with Layinisa on the rings. Jessa was in the camp that wished to learn about breaking them, and when the Chantry forbade it, I suspected that she tried to defy them. Jessa was a Healer, but she was also interested in gardening, so I’ve been looking through her books. They’re not terribly enlightening; others did far better, and she wasn’t an important maja, so I think no one ever studied her books. If they did, they would have found what I have. She’s hidden it in plain sight, and not well. She was no cryptographer. After I read the books, I began applying ciphers, then I worked on her marginalia. If you could read Old Ceuran you’d see how ridiculous this is—she’d capitalize a strange word in her margin notes and everything from that capital to the next capital was part of her secret message. If you look at all the marginalia from the last to the first, the message unfolds. I don’t even understand everything Jessa wrote, but I think you will. Oh, one more thing: Vi, I haven’t told Kylar or Elene about this, and I won’t. This is your burden. It is yours to decide if the price is worth it.”