Otha insisted she go as the others went – on foot, wearing a cloak that would help her blend with the forest shadows. The only concession to her rank she accepted was the use of a small, sure-footed donkey who would carry her pack and perhaps herself if her old feet grew too sore, though she was determined not to use him for that purpose.
The party left the valley at sunrise, just as the first rays of light topped the mountain and spilled down to illuminate the mist. As Otha began to walk, following the shifting hem of High Mage Agina’s cloak, the mists parted to let them through.
The Tessilari were leaving the valley. They moved through the mist, two by two, the strongest mages the race had to offer. Otha couldn’t help but survey the faces of the others with some dismay. These were not the Tessilari of old. Otha could remember the men and women who’d fallen the last time the Tessilari had faced a diod. There had been Lewlin, who had carried a sword of fire and ice. There had been Elesi, whose silver tessila could grow large enough for her mistress to ride into the very clouds. And there had been Vesra, who had died in a terrible conflagration of shadow and force, using her own heart to detonate the spell that had destroyed a diod.
Otha knew that spell. She’d memorized its workings long ago. Before the surviving diod had been trapped, she had planned to use it herself, to purchase with her own life the destruction of something too horrible to be allowed to live. Other Tessilari knew the spell as well. They all did. It was taught to every child who bonded a tessila who had even the slimmest chance of being able to cast it.
The truth was, Otha did not believe the other Tessilari had the might to back the spell. Grip was old, yes, but he was powerful. He thrummed with vitality in a way the younger tessili, bred in captivity, grown to maturity in greenhouses, did not. He was the reason she was still alive. His power was what allowed her old body to go on, day after day.
And Otha had gone on for so long because, long ago, she had seen her own end. It would come in a burst of purple light, a ripple of titanic force, and it would bring about the destruction of a diod.
As her old feet moved in sync with the younger walkers around her and the mists fell behind, Otha felt a vast lifting on her heart. She had waited. She had waited for a long, long time. At last, it was time to die.
◈
It wasn’t how Jey had expected to return. Never in even her most outrageous fantasies had she imagined a scenario where she would walk into the academy openly, through gates no longer locked, no longer topped by guards bearing stunrods.
The last times Jey had been to the academy, she’d been struck by its emptiness. The place had been built for a much larger population of students and professors than it had held in recent years. This had produced a feeling of vast quiet and solitude.
All that had changed. Jey and Elle, walking side by side, made their way through the gatehouse that stood at the end of the bridge and came to a slow stop on the other side. A courtyard stood before them. Down the slope towards the river stood the deployment blocks. A small shudder ran through Jey’s body at the sight of them. Up the slope lay the faculty compound. Straight ahead stood the gatehouse and the massive wall.
The buildings were familiar, but nothing else felt the same. Where once there had been guards and orderlies and faculty, now there were Tessilari.
They seemed to be everywhere. They walked along the top of the wall, strolled across the courtyard, moved freely in and out of the faculty compound. The wall was no longer dangerous to tessili. That magic had been undone. The stunrods had been collected and stowed away. There was no longer anything here that could hurt her.
Still, Jey’s feet seemed to stick at the sight of those open gates. A million memories crowded up like the remembered threads of a nightmare. Except these were not nightmares. They were real things, things Jey had been forced to do by the people who had once run this place.
The Tessilari had assembled a special team to see to the current students, to assess them and determine the safest way to wean them of their drugs. The faculty had been mostly let go. Only Professor Liam had asked to remain, saying he knew the library, knew more magical theory than any other living person. He thought he could help.
It was, in fact, the sight of her old professor that broke Jey out of her frozen position on the cobblestones. He stood, rising from where he’d been sitting on a bench outside the faculty compound. He began to move in their direction. He’d been waiting for them, Jey realized. And that knowledge helped dispel the cold dread that had begun to coil around her heart.
Phril, too excited to hold still any longer, took off. He’d spotted a cluster of tessili flying in loops just above the wall. Jey felt her heart seize as he left her, his red hide brilliant as a jewel in the clear air. Now that the spell no longer contained the tessili, they were everywhere. They danced beneath the sun, free, as they were meant to be.
Liam came to them and stopped, reaching out to clasp Jey’s hand, then Elle’s. Though the academy had been turned over to the Tessilari several days before, Jey and Elle had waited, giving the place time to transform. And transform, it had. The academy was now home to a significant percentage of the remains of the Tessilari. It was a strategic move as well as a practical one. The massive wall was now a barrier between the Tessilari and the population of Masidon – a barrier that would make both sides feel safer until such time as true trust was restored between them.
Liam glanced over his shoulder as two laughing boys raced each other down the river bank, careening right past the deployment blocks without even glancing at them. “I can’t believe it,” Liam said in a wondering tone, “I was offered the chance to go, at last, and I did not take it.”
Jey wondered if the deployment blocks had been gutted, or if the walls of weapons still remained, if each still held a drawer full of syringes.
In the days since the King and Queen had come to the forest to accept the treaty the Tessilari offered, things had been happening very quickly. Although the Tessilari had not demanded it, when the High Priest’s crimes had been revealed, his power had been broken, his position in government dissolved. The House of Magics, which had been disbanded around the time of the betrayal, had been reinstated. High Mage Agina was made its head, so she was now the High Mage of all Masidon, not just the Tessilari, and the third most powerful person in the country. All the seats within the house had been offered to the Tessilari. Which meant the government had been restored to the way it had been before the Betrayal.
Jey wasn’t entirely sure if she was satisfied. Certainly, this was progress, but it felt too easy to be real. As she stood in the bright sunlight, rubbing her inner arm, Jey’s mind swarmed with all she’d learned in recent days.
A suspicion had been growing in her day by day, coalescing as more details about the recent history of Masidon had been revealed to her. She’d tried to avoid thinking about it, but it had formed anyway. Now, she turned to look at Liam. There was more gray in his hair than in the days when she’d been his student, but he’d lost the sad air of defeat that had clung to him then.
She spoke in a sudden rush, the words tumbling out of her mouth of their own accord. “I killed other people like us, didn’t I?” she said. She rubbed harder at her arm, remembering all those nights she’d ridden from here into the darkness. “They were people who would have become Tessilari if they had been allowed to live, weren’t they?” She had puzzled over this question for some time. She could remember all the killing. What she hadn’t been able to figure out was why? Who had she been used to systematically murder?
Liam went still, his smile fading. He’d been put in charge of organizing information since he was the only remaining person on the campus who was at all familiar with how it had run before the turnover. He would know the truth.
Now, he looked at Jey. His eyes were both somber and kind. “Everyone has agreed students are not to be held accountable for any actions they may have been forced to engage in when sent on opportunities.”
Jey
closed her eyes. She could remember the people whose lives she’d taken. It was the cruelest aspect of her fractured memory. The drugs and flashnodes in the academy had scrambled her ability to store day-to-day recollections. Only when she’d been on opportunities had her mind been unfettered, able to function properly.
So Jey remembered killing. She’d killed women, children, men – the young, the old, the strong. She’d been a weapon, a tool, finely honed to be precise and effective.
She opened her eyes. Liam was still watching her. She said, “I need the truth.”
He sighed and looked away, his eyes straying down towards the blue river. “Yes,” he said at last, his tone unhappy. “Your primary role here was to respond to confirmed reports of members of the populace who’d started to show an aptitude for magics. It is how the church kept a magical population from emerging again. You were also used for political purposes, to eliminate factions that expressed the belief that the laws against the use of magics were too harsh, and to promote the High Priest’s views on other issues as well.”
Jey felt Elle’s cool hand slip into hers. The world seemed to dip and sway around her. For a moment, it was too much. The horror of what she’d done felt too heavy. She wanted to collapse to the grass and never get up.
Liam spoke. “You can’t blame yourself, Jey. Generations of girls were used in this way, but only you accomplished the impossible. You not only saved other students from living your life, but you’ve now saved every child, man, or woman of the future who suddenly finds themselves able to weave a spell.”
The words felt hollow to Jey. Phril, sensing her distress, left the cluster of tessili and flew back to her. He alighted on her shoulder, wings flared, spirits high. Liam watched him with open admiration.
Drawing comfort from her tessila, as she always did, Jey drew in a long, slow breath. “Thank you,” she said to Liam. She gave Elle’s hand a small squeeze. “I’m ready to go in now.”
◈
The shelter in the hillside was no longer a place of stillness. Like the academy, it bustled with life and activity. The Tessilari had come, and they filled this place. Holdam and Biala and their granddaughter had been given a small corner at the back, away from the activity. But Jey was growing worried. The child had still not woken up.
“It all happened so fast,” Holdam said. The solid man sat on a low stool, leaning back against the carved wall. Biala was on the floor, near the sleeping child. The girl’s tessila had returned, at last. The small creature had emerged through the stitchring into Jey’s shirt about an hour before where it had found itself trapped. It had struggled weakly for only a moment before giving up.
Jey had been in the library at the academy, reading some promising texts about weapons melding with Treyam and Liam. She’d left immediately, afraid the creature would go frantic with terror when it realized Marim was not nearby. She cupped him in her hand, gently pinning his wings to his body, remembering all the nights she’d held Shai so Elle could sneak into the academy to steal brillbane.
Marim’s tessila, however, did not struggle. He lay in her grip with an air of defeat. He was a brilliant yellow in color, his head finely boned with pronounced brow-ridges and a tapering muzzle. He looked up at her with his black eye, unflinching. She couldn’t tell if he was afraid or not.
Phril, for his part, was not happy. He hated it when other tessili came near Jey. The nights she’d held Shai, Phril had been furious. But now, Phril was only irritated. He sat on her shoulder, annoyed but not incensed. She could feel that he understood the necessity of what she was doing, and that he would not interfere.
That in itself was remarkable. Jey let her feelings of warmth and admiration for his newly developing temperance flow freely through their bond, making sure he knew she was happy with this new, more rational Phril. He preened a little, and made a show of not even keeping both eyes on the yellow tessila, at least not all the time, as Jey made her way back to the shelter where Marim still slept.
She found Holdam and Biala near their granddaughter, as always. She set the yellow tessila gently on the girl’s chest. He seemed happy, walking up to her neck to rub his face against her jaw, then settling down on the soft skin at her throat, where he also went to sleep.
Jey watched the tessila, then said in a low voice, “Where are her parents?”
Holdam shook his head as if he could deny the past. Biala’s face went dark with sadness. Holdam said, “It started with little Marim here. You know the old song, I’m sure? The song about the signs?”
Jey shook her head. She knew little about the lives and culture of the people of Masidon, even though she must have been born somewhere, the child of parents perhaps not so different from the kind cheesemaker and his wife. She could remember nothing of her life before the academy. Though she could remember missing her family, she could not so much as recall her mother’s face.
Holdam began as if to recite a song, but Biala cleared her throat and touched his hand. She glanced at the space around them, which was full of Tessilari – people who had expressed an aptitude for magic and bonded with tessili. “Perhaps not here,” she whispered.
Holdam’s face went a little pale. He glanced up the long room. “Right,” he said. “Anyway, there’s a song that tells the early signs of an aptitude for magics. Some of them don’t mean much now, like the tessili following a person everywhere, since there are no wild tessili anymore. But some of them are uncanny, like, and they sound like nonsense until you see it start to happen. Strange things, like feeling your mind suddenly change about something when someone touches you, or someone appearing next to you without you noticing their approach. Most of all, though, it’s the hunger.”
Jey blinked, shifting her gaze away from the sleeping yellow tessila to Holdam’s face. “Hunger?”
Holdam nodded. “They go ravenous for a time, eating for half a dozen people yet never getting any the thicker for the extra food. In fact, they go skinny.” He thrust his chin towards Marim. “She got the hunger five years ago. Her parents came to us in a panic. We thought we could hide it, since there is food aplenty at the cheesery and no one to notice how much gets eaten before it leaves us. But then the hunger came on her parents as well. They say it often happens that way, coming on a family like a contagion. We were scared to death, as you can guess. The worst came less than two weeks after they arrived. I woke one morning to find our son and his wife dead in their beds. And little Marim. Well, she was gone. We never saw her again until the night she came pounding at the kitchen door.”
Holdam’s eyes had gone slick with tears as he told his story. He reached out to touch Marim’s hand, as if to reassure himself she was still there. Jey shuddered, wondering for a sick moment if it might have been her. Had she been the one to creep into the sleeping house, murder two adults, and abduct a child?
But no, five years ago she’d have been too young – not yet advanced enough to go on opportunities. The thought gave her some small measure of relief.
Jey set her hands on her knees, preparing to rise. She was anxious to hear what Treyam and Liam were discovering. But as she shifted she caught a strange glimmer. It came from near Marim’s chest where one of her hands rested in repose.
She blinked and looked again, but saw nothing. The child’s wrist was thin, the skin bearing fine scratches left from pushing through thick underbrush.
Jey felt something strange then – a desire not to look more closely. For a moment, the magic almost worked. She almost turned her head, almost let it go.
But Jey had been trained to recognize this type of interference. As one part of her mind turned aside from the curiosity, another came awake like a furious guard hound. She snapped her attention back to the child’s wrist. This time, she saw it.
A thin chain was fastened there. She could see it clearly now that she’d pushed through the spell that encouraged her not to pay attention. Attached to the chain was a pendant. “What is this?” she said, leaning forward to a pull the object free
of the girl’s sleeve. It was only a disc of flat metal, engraved with the telltale swirls and runes of the Tessilari.
Biala frowned, blinking and staring at the bracelet. At the same time, it seemed to Jey that the thing wavered somehow, shifting as if to evade notice.
Biala’s voice was low and wondering. “I never saw that before. I bathed her. I swear it wasn’t there.”
Jey could feel enchantment on the thing – a passive echo spell and something else, something darker. She leaned forward and undid the clasp so the bracelet fell free of the girls’ wrist.
Marim gasped, her eyes flying open. With a small shriek of pure terror, she sat up.
◈
The silver pendant glittered in the late light as it dangled on its chain between Liam’s fingers. “It’s a suppressor,” the professor said. “I’ve read about them. They were used to force the Tessilari who built the academy in compliance. They draw power from the wearer. Marim must have been so exhausted, it was taking all her energy, making it impossible for her to wake up.”
Jey felt a shudder of pure rage ripple through her. She’d brought the thing to Liam after taking it off the child’s wrist. The girl, once awake, had been all but incoherent with hunger and fear. Jey left her with her grandparents and returned to the academy, finding Liam still in the library in the old faculty compound. Treyam had looked up when she’d entered, greeting her with a hopeful look. Then he’d seen her face. He’d been seated in a worn chair, his long coat pooling around him. He’d stood and taken a step in her direction.
Even carrying the thing in the pouch on her belt had been a strain. She could feel the weight of it there, dragging on her mind and her bond with Phril. She’d snatched it out and all but flung it at Liam.
Jey, too restless to sit properly, now perched on the long table that stood beneath the window. Treyam had settled back down not far off, but she was aware of a keen look in his eye as he watched her.
Some of the tired creases Jey remembered from her days in his class returned to Liam’s face as he looked at the pendant. He glanced at Jey, then back at the disc. “It was one of many ways your people were coerced into orchestrating their own extermination.”