Apostate's Pilgrimage: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 3) Read online

  “So we’re safe then,” Ella said, changing tack, trying to keep Tai from danger. From Nauro. “Someone would have broken them already and taken the spears if they could.”

  “There was no point, before now,” Nauro said, meeting her eyes. He knew she didn’t trust him. Fine. Let him know. Not everyone had to be friends. “With Semeca alive, all the power went to her. Now that the power has returned to the stone, to her spear locked in the stone, there is every reason in the world to try to find it, and break it open.”

  “And whoever does,” Tai said, almost as if talking to himself, “instantly becomes an archrevenant.”

  “Yes,” Nauro said. “And they will come for you, and your city.”

  Tai took a deep breath, and Ella’s heart sank. She knew what he was going to say already.

  “Then we have to go,” Tai said. “We have to find the stone, and break it.”

  5

  “Not without me,” Ella said, just as Marea did. She looked at the younger woman and grinned.

  Tai glanced between them. “Marea, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you come. And Ella, it’s going to be dangerous and—”

  “And?” Ella demanded. He knew she could handle danger.

  “And we’ll need to move quickly,” Nauro said.

  “I can move quickly,” Marea said, not giving it up.

  “I’m a timeslip,” Ella said in the next breath, loading on the scorn. There was no way she was letting Nauro take Tai away from her. She loved him, and he was smart, and powerful, and lots of good things, but Tai could be too trusting. And Nauro wanted something.

  Nauro opened his mouth, but Ella cut him off. “Tai. Can I talk to you privately?”

  The fyelocke shaman looked perturbed, but Tai nodded. Was it crazy that she felt relieved, that she was still more important to Tai than Nauro?

  She took the stairs with Tai. They climbed them in silence, steps echoing from the rock. His hand found hers, and the world started to feel better.

  “You don’t actually trust him,” she said when they crested the top, back into the blustering cold. No one was around, and the star’s blue light cast a pale glow over the snow. It would still be a sunny afternoon in Worldsmouth. She missed it sometimes.

  “No,” he said. “But if even half of what he’s saying is true—and it all makes sense with Ydilwen—I need to know what he knows. We need to know.”

  “But he’ll only teach you,” Ella said, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.

  Tai scoffed. “Doesn’t mean I can’t then teach it to you, right?”

  “So—you will let me come?”

  He looked confused. “I wouldn’t go without you.”

  She would have kissed him, if it wasn’t so shatting cold their lips would freeze together. She settled for a hug, squeezing the solidity of his body through their layers of fur. “Good. Yes. Well then. What about Marea?”

  Tai hesitated, rolling a shoulder. “I know she’s your friend, but—”

  Ella nodded. “She’s also still a child.”

  “And just looking for the quickest way back to Worldsmouth, if you’re right about how much she hates it here. A boat once the river thaws would serve her better.”

  “And be safer,” Ella said. “Do you really think they’ll come after you?”

  Tai shuffed a boot into snow. “Ydilwen did. I can’t just sit here and wait for someone to ambush us with Semeca’s power. We got lucky once, but I don’t want to count on it happening again.”

  She nodded, not liking it but determined to go if he was. How did this happen again? “So you, me, and a strange, probably evil, man with unknown intentions. It’d be good to have someone else.”

  “I can carry two,” he said. “Three would be a stretch, long-distance.”

  “We can’t fly with Nauro, anyway.”

  Tai frowned.

  “Ydilwen took away our uai, right? And Nauro’s more powerful than Ydilwen?”

  “Seems like it.” Then his eyebrows went up. “Oh. You’re saying if we’re five hundred paces up in the air and he suddenly attacks us, we’re both in trouble.”

  “We’re both dead,” she said. “Which is probably not what he wants, but maybe he just takes me out, or hurts you in some way that you have to depend on him. I mean, he’s probably got the same unshaped power Ydilwen did, right? He could heal himself like a brawler. Fly like a wafter. Don’t tell me he’s been quietly waiting in the woods ignoring all these free revenants Semeca released.”

  Tai popped his neck. “He wasn’t just waiting there. There were tracks leading from his tent out into the woods.”

  “Hunting,” Ella said. “Like Ydilwen said he’d been hunting. For power. Have you considered that even if we do find the stone and open it, he might turn on us once we get the spear? That he won’t teach you as much as you need to know to defeat him if he does?”

  “Yes,” Tai said. “And I don’t know what to do about it. We still need him, need his knowledge.”

  “Well if we’re not flying, we should at least take someone else with us. Someone reliable and smart about fighting the regular way.”

  Tai looked off toward the forest, eyes searching. “Feynrick,” he said at last. “He’s great with his resonance, used to fighting without it, and good at strategy. He’ll get our back, and see things we missed. But I think that’s all we can do. The more we take, the slower we go.”

  She nodded. Feynrick was a good choice. “Okay. So, we’re really doing this? Really leaving and going on some mad quest to destroy an unbreakable stone?”

  He met her eyes. “Yes. As long as we’re together.”

  Prophet’s piece the man was lucky it was freezing out here, or she’d have to strip him naked and have her way with him right now.

  “As long as we’re together,” she said back, squeezing his hand. “Now let’s get the shatters back inside? I’m freezing.”

  He grinned. “There’s going to be a lot colder days if we do this on foot. Sure I’m worth it?”

  She gave him a considering look as she pulled him back toward the stairs. “We’ll see.”

  6

  Then where is the woman, I ask you? And where is my cousin Tayo? House Fenril cannot continue to mask its losses at Gendrys, nor the extralegal commandeering of Councilate forces. Let them be assessed and pay restitution as per our codes. And if they can’t cover it, cede their seat on the Council. I’ve always said their rise was more serendipity than solvency.

  —Lady Asra Mettelken, Speeches of the Day, Yiel 112

  Marea wrapped the furs tighter around her, the best she’d been able to scrounge from the ruins of Newgen. It was cold, a deep biting cold she’d never known in Worldsmouth. The kind she spent winters trying to avoid.

  And now she was walking out into it, Ayugen already hazy behind her, cheeks going numb.

  If her parents had been alive, they would have bought her thicker furs. Would have hired her carriages heated with coals to make the long overland trek to Gendrys. Would have sent porters and attendants with her, to see to her every need.

  But they were dead, and she was done living with their murderers.

  A cold wind skirled across the burned fields of the river valley, kicking up a spray of hard snow. She shivered and pressed on.

  Life in the overcoming school hadn’t been bad. She liked working with Ella, liked what they were discovering with the resonances. But there was always that moment after someone overcame, when their eyes would focus again after being lost in struggle, when the uai raging through them would push them to shout, to celebrate, and their eyes would jump to her hair. To her skin, too dark for any southerner. And then they would look for someone else to share the news. Someone like themselves.

  And then there were the rebels. Tai, Aelya, Dayglen, Lumo. The people who had been inside the walls of Newgen that day, when her family had heard the rebels were attacking in force and fled the enclave. Her mother hadn’t been fast enough, caught inside the gate as the rebels
took it. Her father had run back, trying to pull her through. The rebel who’d cut them down had been so casual. Two strokes to end three lives.

  She would never forgive them.

  And now she was following rebels out into the wilderness. Marea kept her feet carefully in their tracks, following them to the edge of the valley and up into the waving needleaves beyond.

  Ella, at least she didn’t count as a rebel. She’d been involved with them, but her focus had always been academic. She’d had no part in the tactics, no part in the attacks. Had done her best to end them, even, and she’d been Marea’s only friend once her mother was gone. Been the only one willing to help her build her mother a proper pyre, among the droves of Achuri burying their dead in water or earth.

  And it was on Ella that she depended now to take her in. That, and the surety the cold would kill her if they left her alone.

  The sun sank low in the sky, days bitterly short this far south. The star still hung overhead but she hated its blue half-light, a dim sun that gave illumination without warmth. Even here, among the rocky bluffs and packed trees, the wind gnawed at her face, pushed fingers of ice through the seams in her furs. She should have worn more. Her feet were frozen despite layers of socks, her knees aching desperately.

  And this, maybe, was the flaw in her plan: she had no doubt she could follow them until dark. Could catch them even if it took all night. But if she lost their tracks, once the star set too? If the path in the woods faded out, and she was alone in the bitter cold night?

  Marea walked faster, cursing herself, lips sluggish from cold, chewing dried bittermelon, the only food she could find. She would find them. She had to.

  There was nothing left for her in Ayugen. Would she even have a place in the caves without Ella? Marea had seen the lighthaired bodies laid out, the last time Ella and Tai had left the city, the angry glare Aelya and her Blackspines had given her. What if they decided Marea was a threat? There was no one to stop them.

  And even if they didn’t, she was done living with her family’s murderers. Done helping them overcome their problems while hers only seemed to mount. She had watched the snow fall, watched the river freeze over. No boats were leaving the docks. No travelers attempting the road to Gendrys. The only way out was on foot, and Tai’s party the only one taking it.

  So she had to catch them.

  At least, that’s what she’d thought last night, when they’d told her she couldn’t come and made their own plans. Now, with even the starlight dimming and the blotchy shadows of trees beginning to hide four sets of footprints in the snow? Now she was not so certain.

  Full dark came, the moon rising cold and distant above the trees. Fires burned in its dark half, tracing the round sphere against the dark. Her footsteps crunched, solitary and echoing. How far could they have walked? Did Nauro use some shamanic trick to speed their steps?

  It didn’t matter. She would catch them now, tonight, or she would die. She was too cold to possibly survive out here, and there were no villages this direction. Only snow and trees and the mountains that split Ayugen from Yatiland.

  Marea stumbled, banging her knee against a stone hidden under the snow. She cried out, sucking in air—and stopped. The air carried a scent, something other than the dead cold scentlessness she’d been breathing all day.

  Smoke.

  Marea broke into a smile and started shuffling on, sniffing like a dog with her nose, tears freezing on her cheeks. Smoke. A fire. Ella, and her friends. Safety. Warmth, gods praise it. Warmth.

  Around a bend she found firelight spilling from the top of a dark conic tent of furs, two elk hitched to a tree nearby. “Hello!” she called, all guile forgotten in panic and hope and a cold that had sunk to her marrow. “It’s me! Marea!”

  “We can’t keep her, obviously,” Nauro was saying, stirring a copper pot of something that smelled like heaven. Marea huddled in the cramped tent, furs shed to absorb as much heat as she could, body shaking uncontrollably. “She’s a liability.”

  “She’s almost dead, Nauro,” Ella retorted, one warm hand rubbing Marea’s back. “We can’t send her back like this. It’s not safe for Tai to waft her back, and we can’t spend the days to walk her back, not if you’re right about other shamans seeking the stone.”

  This was the rationale Marea had been counting on. Compassion for someone facing death. Looked like Nauro didn’t have any.

  He was as bad as the rebels. Prophet send Ella could talk sense into them.

  “And if she comes,” Nauro said, “you think she has a better chance of living? Even if we open the stone unscathed, knowledge brings its own risks.”

  “Far-off risks,” Ella said. “This one is immediate. She comes.”

  “You would risk the fate of your whole city for one girl?” Nauro asked, still gazing at the soup. “Send her back.”

  They both looked to Tai, and Marea’s heart dropped. This was the flaw in her plan: the ultimate decision would rest with Tai. With a friend of her family’s murderer. And from what she’d seen, he’d always listen to the different sides of an argument, but when he made up his mind, it was final.

  He looked at her, eyes black and cold.

  “She stays,” he said, and for a shocked second she couldn’t believe what she’d heard. Then Nauro scowled and Ella smiled and Marea relaxed like she hadn’t in months. She was going home.

  “But you have to abide by our rules,” Tai said, looking her in the eyes. She met them with difficulty. Murderer. “We have a long ways to go, so you have to keep up. We discuss collectively, but I make the decisions here. And you may see things that you don’t understand. You are not to speak of them to anyone, once you are safely back in Worldsmouth. Agreed?”

  Marea nodded, too relieved even to feel humiliated by the way he was talking to her. Like a child. His friends had ended her childhood a long time ago.

  Feynrick slapped her back from the other side of the cramped tent. “Happy to have ye, for my part. Though this little tent was going to be tight with four. With five? We might all be getting to know each other better than we want.”

  “As long as we’re warm,” Marea said.

  She learned to regret her words, cramped between Ella and Feynrick’s hairy, smelly, snoring form. Sleep took its time coming, but it didn’t matter: she was safe, she was warm, and she was going home.

  7

  It can mean only one thing—the Achuri boy killed one of the nine, and he didn’t know to take their power. But he must have known something more than yura and wafting, to take down a god. And whatever that is, I’ll wager it’s key to unlocking whichever stone holds the god’s power.

  —Meyn Harides, personal journals

  Tai heard the dead man two days later.

  I had a mother, you know. Have one, in Yatiport.

  Tai knew the voice right away, though he’d barely heard the man talk, and then only as he was dying. The shaman they’d killed in Ayugen. Ydilwen. His new revenant.

  “He’s here,” Tai said, breaking a silence that had lasted since their cold lunch of grasscakes and leftover roast ptarmigan.

  “It’s here,” Ella and Nauro said at once, then shot looks at each other. They’d been frosty since Nauro put a shamanic revenant on Tai, then denied he had another to give to Ella.

  “It, right,” Tai said, trying to ignore the feeling that had come with the voice. The sense of a life unfulfilled, the promises made to a lover long dead, the mother freezing in an upstairs apartment.

  Was that all real? Or was the revenant planting ideas in his head even now?

  You saw when you read my thoughts. You know it’s true.

  “Who’s it pretending to be?” Ella asked, tone casual. That was the thing with revenants—it was so obvious when it wasn’t in your head. But when it was…

  “He—it’s the shaman, from Ayugen. The one that attacked us.”

  Feynrick guffawed. “How’s he feeling with that hole in his side?”

  “It’s not actually
him, Feynrick,” Ella said. “This is just the persona Tai’s new revenant chose to be most effective. Though it is an interesting choice.”

  Tai could just see her hands itching for a quill and notebook. He was glad for once she didn’t have one handy. He’d been of scholarly interest to her from the first moment they met, and had never really gotten used to it, even after her interests had gotten more… personal.

  “Agreed,” Nauro said. “Well. We might as well start training.”

  Training. Is that what you killed me for? To get a shamanic spirit?

  Tai started. He hadn’t thought of that—to be a shaman, the dead man would have to have shamanic powers, and Nauro had stopped intentionally on the way back to Ayugen to gather his revenant. Which meant Nauro either hadn’t had a shamanic revenant ready before Ayugen, or he was lying about not having one for Ella, since he’d taken up the dead man’s too.

  Ydilwen. My name is Ydilwen. Or was.

  “Prophets, but it’s hard not to take this thing seriously,” Tai said.

  Ella made a sympathetic noise. “You want us to just get rid of it? We could probably work up enough of a chord to do it.”

  “No,” Nauro said sharply. “It needs more time to seat, and to attract a secondary revenant. Remove it now and he won’t have access to the second resonance, which is the whole point.”

  “Secondary revenant?” Ella asked, looking caught between dislike and curiosity.

  Nauro sighed. “Yes. His current revenant is shaping an uai channel, but they can’t capture all the uai taken thereby—some streams back to their archrevenant, if they have one, and enough escapes that another revenant can survive on it, waiting for their chance to be primary.”

  “And that’s why, after you get rid of your first voice, the second takes a while to show up? Because it’s been just barely surviving, and now needs time to feed and make a plan?”

  “To seat, yes, is how we put it. We will have to wait long enough for Tai to attract a higher level shamanic revenant before we can think of taking this one out.”