The Element of Fire by Martha Wells (top novels TXT) 📕

the timber and stone wall of the house seem flimsy, as if they were separated from a vicious animal by only a thin layer of decorative fence. Thomas found himself watching Kade. He was no longer certain what to think about her, and that disturbed him far more than it should, considering everything else there was to worry about. I always try to understand my enemies, he thought, but it’s time to admit that the one thing she is not is an enemy. Finally, he asked, “What does it mean to be the Queen of Air and Darkness?”

Her brow furrowed, she said, “I don’t have a kingdom, except for the castles my mother kept. Some of them are in little pockets of the Otherworld, some are in this world, but protected by spells. But in a way… From knowing Titania, Oberon, the other rulers of Fayre, I have the sense that what I am somehow defines what they are. I might exist to balance them, the way they exist to balance the Unseelie Court. But it isn’t good and evil, either. I’m not particularly evil most of the time, and they aren’t particularly good hardly any of the time, at least not by human standards.” She shivered, and the moonlight brought silver to her hair. “The Unseelie Court doesn’t approve of balance, and they’re always scheming to upset things. My mother Moire accepted a wager from them, that she could steal all the grain from Oberon’s stables without missing a single seed. She got past the fay guarding the stables by changing herself into a beautiful white mare, and she made all the grain vanish—except for one flax seed. The Unseelie Court had suborned a flower sprite that lived in the stable, and it hid the seed in the bell of a flower, so Moire couldn’t find it. So she lost the wager, and they sent her to Hell. They seemed to think I should be grateful for it. She wasn’t a nice person and we didn’t exactly live in a state of joy together, but she was my mother.” After a moment she seemed to shake off the recollection and pulled her blanket more closely around her. “The weather will be worse tomorrow. Grandier wouldn’t have spared us the snow.”

Thomas hadn’t missed the hurried change of subject. He wondered why she had told him so much. He asked, “Spared us?”

Kade looked up at him.

“When did it become ‘us’?”

She turned from the window and started to walk away, but stopped after a few steps. “Do you remember me?” she asked.

Because of the intimacy of standing here in the shadows watching death come out of the north, or just that he was becoming used to her way of speaking, he knew what she meant. He said, “Not the way you looked, not really. Not very well.”

“I remember you.”

He didn’t reply. The silence stretched, and Kade faded back into the shadows.

Thomas turned away from the window and went down the stairs and back to the map room. The weather was one more thing to worry about, one more factor to take into account. At least a freeze would put off the possibility of a plague brewing up among the unburied dead in the east quarter of the palace, and the rest of the city.

As he neared the open door of the map room, he saw an outline of a long cloak or robe silhouetted by the edge of the firelight. Someone was there. Thomas stopped in the doorway, feeling an inexplicable chill that had nothing to do with the cold.

But a flare-up from the fire showed him it was only Galen Dubell warming his hands near the hearth, his stooped shoulders shivering faintly underneath his heavy robe.

Stepping into the room, Thomas said, “You’re awake early, Doctor.”

The sorcerer looked up and smiled. “It’s a trifle cold for my old bones.” He shook his head. “I’ll begin work on counter-measures against this weather as soon as it’s light. You realize it is not natural.”

“Kade told me.” Thomas lit the candlelamps with a twig from the fire, and began to go through the maps stacked on the table, looking for the one of the city walls and the solid paths through the water meadows. Under the maps, he found the pile of translated Bisran court documents instead. They had been sent over the night of the attack, and he had never had the chance to look at them.

Dubell took the armchair near the hearth that Commander Vivan had occupied some hours ago. “I must admit, Kade is not the same girl I once tutored,” he said.

Thomas sat down on the bench and began idly paging through the trial documents. He said, “I would hope not.” The list of questions and answers was much the same as the monk’s account had been. Grandier had refused to name accomplices, which must have cost him a great deal. Thomas also thought the Inquisition showed an unhealthy degree of interest in sexual relations with demons.

After a long silence Dubell said, “I find myself wondering at her motives.”

Thomas looked up. The sorcerer’s expression was vaguely troubled. “I don’t think it’s as complicated as it seems. She has unfinished business with Roland and Ravenna.” Thomas had been younger than Kade was now when he had had the devastating and final confrontation with his father, when he had left to pursue the commission of Captain that would allow him to legally and permanently disown his entire family. The urge to try to settle old arguments and angers had been strong, and his attempts along those lines had turned out just as badly as Kade’s seemed destined to.

“Perhaps you’re right.” But Dubell didn’t seem convinced.

Thomas turned over the last page of the trial transcript and glanced over the next closely written document. A note at the top described it as a Bisran priest’s description of Grandier’s confession during his questioning.

Thomas skipped through most of a page of unconvincing preamble as to why this disclosure wasn’t violating the sanctity of confession. The rest of it read:

…and he confessed to me quite freely. He had not dealt with the darkness, or at least the Evil One as we recognize it. He had been approached by the aspects of the Fay, who had offered him powers beyond the reach of mortal sorcery in exchange for mortal souls, which they must annually tithe to Hell to preserve their soulless immortality. He had refused these offers, but our ill treatment (I but repeat his words) had caused him to reconsider. They had offered him swift travel and flight, but what he would bargain for was the terrible ability to alter his physical form, that no wizard of human blood had been able to accomplish. This would cause great pain to him, and once done he would never be able to resume his own shape, nor any other shape that he would assume and abandon, and it required that he could not assume a shape in an image worn by a living man, he must destroy its original before he could assume it…

…before he could assume it. Thomas found himself wiping his hands off on his trouser legs. It had the ring of truth about it as nothing else in the Bisran documents had. It was far too realistic for a Bisran priest, who had been trained to find evil influence in every lung fever and to hate magic like a mortal enemy, to fabricate. This is true; this is what he told them after they drove him mad with torture and accusations. And if you were Grandier, which shape would you choose… He looked up at Galen Dubell.

The sorcerer was sitting absolutely still and watching him with an expression of thoughtful speculation. He was no longer shivering from the cold. “What are you reading, Captain, that has apparently been so revealing?”

“Nothing in particular. A dispatch from Portier.” Thomas’ rapier stood against the wall near the hearth perhaps four steps away. He started to stand.

“I don’t think so.”

The gentle contradiction held no anger, but Thomas stopped. He had betrayed himself somehow, but Dubell had always shown a talent for guessing at others’ thoughts. I can’t let him kill me now. If he burns these papers and walks out of here no one will ever know until it’s far too late. It may already be too late.

The old sorcerer said, “Perhaps the time for the masquerade is over anyway. But I think I’ve been found out.”

“It’s a priest’s report of Grandier’s…of your confession during your trial.” Thomas slid the document across the table, but the sorcerer didn’t take the bait and reach for it. Thomas kept expecting the mask to drop but it didn’t. It was still Dubell’s face, Dubell’s eyes. Dubell’s look of regret.

“Indeed,” Urbain Grandier said softly. “I didn’t expect to have anyone take it seriously. Not in Bisra, at least. They all believed I was hand in glove with the Prince of Hell, you know. As to how the incriminating document followed me here, I suppose I can credit the Church’s league of brotherly spies.”

The fire popped loudly in the silence. Thomas felt the extreme danger that lay in carrying on this conversation but was unable to stop. Knowing and believing were two different things. If a weapon had been in reach, there was a good chance he would have hesitated with it, and that would have been fatal. And he looked up at me over Trevile’s dead body and said, “I’m sorry.” He said, “Did you do it when you kidnapped him from Lodun?”

Grandier looked mildly surprised. “Oh, no. It was long before that. I kidnapped myself, you see.”

It would have had to be that way. Dr. Surete’s death, and Milam’s. It was simplicity itself, he told us, if one had the stomach for it. Grandier watched him with a dead man’s eyes. Thomas said, “Why haven’t you let the Host in yet? That’s part of your bargain, isn’t it? Your payment to them.”

“The Unseelie Court did me a great service,” Grandier agreed. “I owe them much. The first shape I took was that of the man who served as the secular judge at that farce the Inquisition deemed my trial. He was so cold, so forbidding even to his own family that aping his manner presented no challenge. He was powerful, and I took my revenge as I liked. I lived as him for nearly half a year, before I tired of it. Then it was a young servant in his house, for I needed to move about without drawing attention to myself…” Grandier gestured the memory away, his expression wry in the firelight. “But my plans do not always coincide with those of my associates, a fact they fail to understand.”

A log shifted in the fire and as Grandier reflexively glanced toward it Thomas rolled backward off the bench, grabbed his sword from where it stood against the wall, and whipped off the scabbard. Grandier leapt out of the chair, his hand moving as if he were gathering something out of the air and tossing it. Thomas saw the sorcerer’s quick motion and scrambled sideways, coming to his feet as a blue blaze of light struck the wall where he had been. It splashed on the bricks, sizzling and smoking like acid. Thomas threw himself at Grandier with a suicidal lack of caution. But Grandier dodged backward with surprising agility and the tip of the rapier only slashed a yard-long hole in the hanging fold of his sleeve.

They both saw Kade standing in the doorway at the same time.

Thomas’s first thought was that faced with the situation the only reasonable conclusion she could come to was that he was attacking