The Dochte Mandar will be expelled. When we are gone, you will soon discover that our presence held at bay a malevolent force. You will feel the presence of unseen beings who will wish to do you harm. I can no longer protect you from them, but I leave this kystrel for you.
I may never see you again, Lady Maia. I had hoped to serve under you when you became queen. I fear I may not live to see that day. My only regret is that I never sought to become a maston myself. Had I served the Medium with but half the zeal as I served your father, then it would not have left me naked to mine enemies. Until we meet again, in Idumea.
Your servant.
Maia felt the tears slip from her lashes and drip onto the folded paper, smudging some of the words. She struggled to rein in her feelings, but she could not, and hung her head, weeping softly in the gardens.
Chancellor Walraven had sacrificed his position, his eminence, and his future to preserve her right to inherit the throne. To stall the decline her father’s debauchery had caused in court and throughout the kingdom. Weeping was an unfamiliar act. She did not like the way it made her tremble and shake, her nose drip, the wildness it threatened to unleash inside her. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, trying to calm herself. What a strange mixture of emotions. Gratitude and sadness, hope and desolation. She would not be able to see her mother. She would not be able to see her friend, her mentor—the man who had taught her to read even though it was forbidden by his own people. She would remember that. She would always remember him. She sighed, struggling to tame her tears until she finally succeeded. She wiped her mouth and read the letter twice more.
Once she had it memorized, she turned her attention to the kystrel. Cupping it in her hand, she felt the hard edges of its woven, whorl-like pattern. It did not represent any specific creature. It was just a ring of interwoven leaves that were neither uniform nor precise. A kystrel—named after the falcon. A small bronze chain was affixed to it.
Maia stared at it, remembering that long-ago day when she had watched the chancellor use his kystrel to summon mice and rats to the tower. At the time, he had said she was too young to use one. He had warned that her years as an adolescent would be full of turbulent emotions—a storm of feelings she would have to learn to control before using a kystrel. He had promised to give her one when she became an adult. The fact that he had done so now meant that he did not expect to live to see that day. The thought grieved her.
Maia straightened the chain and slung it around her neck. She waited, pensive, trying to see if she would feel any different. But she felt the same as she always did. Nothing had changed.
She tucked the kystrel into her bodice so that its cool metal was pressed against her skin, then folded the paper tightly and hid it in her girdle. She wondered if she would see Walraven again.
He will be dead in a fortnight.
Maia stopped, eyes wide. She had heard the whisper in her thoughts as loudly as if someone had spoken them. It made gooseflesh spread across her arms and neck and a shiver go down her spine.
A fortnight later, when news arrived of Walraven’s death, she learned to trust the voice of the Medium.
The Naestors fear us greatly because the Dochte Mandar have taught them to. They have witnessed the evidence of the Medium’s destruction when a people violates laws of justice, honor, and compassion. Thoughts bring good or ill, depending on the prevailing temperaments. More than anything else, the Naestors fear the annihilation they witnessed after coming to our shores and the mastons who, despite the fervor of their faith in the Medium, could not prevent it. You will learn, great-granddaughter, that the Dochte Mandar took upon themselves the duty to control the feelings of the population. They seek to prevent another Blight. What happens to the flood when the levees are stripped away?
—Lia Demont, Aldermaston of Muirwood Abbey
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Myriad Ones
You say the watchword is ‘Comoros’?”
Maia stared up at the captain, high on his saddle. He was a big man with a blond turf of stubble on the dome of his head and a trimmed goatee. He had an easy smile, but his eyes bored into hers and stared up and down her body. A twitch at the corner of his mouth flashed and was gone.
All around these men, Maia could feel the sniffling, snuffling reek of the Myriad Ones. Oily blackness gripped her heart. There was a mewling sound, inaudible to the ear, that felt like the whine of a bow driven over a lute string at an awkward angle. It made her teeth hurt and her stomach shrivel.
Jon Tayt hefted an axe in his hand, and the hound Argus growled threateningly.
There were twelve men in all—each on horseback, dressed in the king’s colors, and carrying weapons. Three had crossbows.