385. Two Crowns
There was a very particular satisfaction that came from being inside a warm room, perhaps next to a roaring fire in the hearth and sipping from a cup of hot, mulled and spiced wine, while the snow came down outside. The windows of Liv’s solar were frosted over with angular, geometric little patterns of hoarfrost, and great fat white flakes drifted down from the mountain sky, clearly visible through the fine glass.
Sidonie’s chair was pulled up next to Liv’s, so that they could share space on the desk, and they sat shoulder to shoulder while Liv dipped her quill pen in the ink bottle, then drew a line through one word on their list: Sce. It was the word of the Erskine family, the Barons of the Strand, who’d served as spymasters to the Lucanian crown for generations. The same Erskines who’d led a raiding party through the Aspen Valley to burn farms and murder Liv’s people. That wasn’t why she drew a line through their word, but it did make the action satisfying.
“Stai might work, though,” Sidonie speculated. “You might be able to turn your entire body into stone –”
“Like a statue?” Liv wondered. “Or like sinking down into the face of a mountain?” She waved outside.
“Or even just a sandstorm,” Sidonie said. “Sand is really just little rocks – well, not beach sand. Desert sand, like where Silica lives, is mostly quartz. But when the wind kicks it up over the high desert there, would that be much like your blizzard?”
“I think that it would,” Liv agreed, and circled ‘Stai.’ She moved the tip of her quill down to the next word on their list. “Ters. I feel badly for Matthew and Triss and Ettie, but I just don’t see any way that someone can physically become dryness or dehydration.”
“No, I can’t think of anything, either,” Sidonie agreed. “Cross it out.”
It had been several weeks since they’d returned from Lendh ka Dakruim to a snow-bound White Peak, and while a significant portion of Liv’s time was always filled with the minutia of ruling the Alliance, she’d spent most of her effort on laying out – in writing – a framework, a plan of development, a path that anyone could follow toward doing what she had done. In short, a system of lessons designed to let a student – eventually – survive crossing the bridge to the Last City. Some of it was still guesswork, and some of what Liv had done wasn’t replicable – such as lucking upon the remains of several dead gods and consuming them. There were, of course, three such corpses at Godsgrave, but the idea of using those brought its own complications.
The door to the solar burst open, and Rianne flew in. More like an excited cat than a child, she flung herself up into Liv’s lap with no regard for the presence of an uncapped ink bottle, an extensive written list which had not yet been blotted, or even the sharp wooden edges of the desk. Sidonie snapped the bottle and the parchment up, lifting each into the air above her head, while Liv shoved her chair back with both feet and thrust her empty hand between her daughter’s head and the desk, where it acted as a sort of cushion or shield.
“I presume your lessons are finished for the day?” Liv asked, holding her quill out to one side as the girl got situated comfortably in her lap.
“Mmm-hmm,” Rianne said. “We made icicles. Long ones – as long as your arm, all dripping down from the top of the wall.”
Liv looked over to the open door, where her father crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. She could just catch a glimpse of the two guards on duty out in the corridor. If she’d thought that finally ending Ractia might be cause for Kaija to loosen her standards, she’d been wrong.
“She did well,” Valtteri said. “It comes easily to her, like it did your aunt. Like it did for you.”
“Thank you,” Liv told him. “I’d rather she start this way, then almost kill herself like I did.”
“What are you working on in here?” her father asked.
“A list of tentatively transitional words of power,” Sidonie answered.
“I prefer ‘transformative,” Liv said. “But we haven’t quite settled on nomenclature yet. In any event, these are words that we’re going to recommend for study, because they have the potential of a spell which would let the caster slip into an alternate form.”
“The blizzard,” Sidonie clarified. “Or that cloud of birds the Sherards can do.”
“Your instructions for becoming one of the Vædim,” her father said, and nodded. “Which have you picked out so far?”
“Some of these are very theoretical,” Liv warned. “We don’t actually know whether anyone has made some of these spells work, but –” she craned her head around her daughter, who’d snuggled up right against her chest “ – Avi, Cel, and Ract, obviously, because we know that all of those work. We were just talking about using Stai to make a sandstorm, but again, I’ve never heard of anyone actually doing it. I actually think that Luc might work, even if I’m a bit afraid of how dangerous that experiment could be.”
“Picture a bolt of lightning careening about the courtyard, from one metal thing to another,” Sidonie grumbled.
Valtteri winced at the thought. “That may need to be a very carefully controlled experiment,” he agreed.
Liv scanned her eyes down the list, skipping ahead. “I think Ve, Ved and Ves,” she said, “though we haven’t talked them through yet. We’re a bit divided on Savel.”
“Not so much divided,” Sidonie broke in. “I think it will work. I’m just worried what will happen with reflections. I don’t want to see Keri getting hurt by accident. I’ve been thinking about Deru, and I want to circle back to it. What about turning into a cloud of pollen, or seeds?”
“Once I’ve helped give Rianne a solid foundation, I’ll be working on that storm myself,” Liv’s father said. “I’ve been thinking about how to do it. I’d rather not put myself in the position where I have to figure it out in a split second or be pierced through the heart by a goddess’s trap.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Liv admitted.
“I think instead I’ll go north, and find myself a storm,” Valtteri mused. “The sort of thing that can bury you in snow in an hour, that leaves corpses frozen out on the tundra.”
Liv winced. “As long as you don’t kill yourself doing it,” she warned him. Though she knew her father had been using Cel for decades before she’d ever begun casting spells, and that with his mastery of waste heat – nevermind the hibernation spell – that wasn’t any real danger of him freezing to death. “You have several people here who would be very upset if you didn’t come back.” She tipped her face down to kiss her daughter on top of the head.
Her father smiled. “All the more reason for me not to be left behind.”
☙
After saying goodbye to Sidonie, who had a class to teach that afternoon, and to her father, who had promised to come for Rianne’s bedtime that evening, Liv took her daughter down through the central shaft which linked the castle at the top of Bald Peak to the mana stone mines below. They floated down, down into the darkness on a disc of golden light, with the same two guards who had stood watch outside Liv’s solar just behind them, polearms resting against their shoulders.
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“Will you ever go back to using blue magic?” Rianne asked. She clutched Liv’s hand, and scuffed her shoes against the gold, where thin cerulean veins could be seen, marbling the surface. “I like blue.”
“I’ll use blue whenever I don’t care about how strong something is,” Liv answered. “When it doesn’t matter how much weight a platform can bear, or how much damage a shield can sustain. But now that Ractia’s gone there’s no more reason to hide this. And if I’m going to trust something to hold you up, dove, it’s going to be as strong as I can possibly make it.” In a bizarre way, Genevieve Arundell had actually helped her. If Liv had never fought the woman, had never had a reason to dig into her past, she might never have learned the technique herself.
When they reached the bottom of the shaft, rather than go out through the gatehouse and onto the mountainside, where the old mine-road, now widened, neatly paved and well-maintained, ran down to the heart of the city, Liv turned and led her daughter toward the river.
She didn’t have a convenient bit of magic to make sunlight, as Keri did, but the veins of mana stone which shot through the walls, floor, and ceilings of the caverns all glowed with a soft blue light, and that was enough to see by. The scuff of their shoes on the wet stone set an entire colony of bats fluttering from their roosts, fleeing off down side passages in a leathery shuffle of wings. Each one had a ‘V’ shaped ridge of mana stone jutting out from their brow, but none were larger than the size of a well-fed house cat, and Liv knew they wouldn’t challenge her.
“You know the bats used to get so big they could carry a grown man up into the sky?” Liv asked, while they walked. “When the rift erupted, they would pour out across the countryside, as far as Castle Whitehill.”
“Why don’t they grow that big anymore?” Rianne wondered.
“We don’t let them,” Liv said. “Kaija takes the guards down here to cull any that start to get too big. It’s good practice for them.”
She led her daughter to the top of the waterfall, where a great descending stair had been carved down through the mist, with a metal rail bolted into the stone on the side facing the falls, so that no one could slip and go tumbling down to be shattered and broken among the crashing water. There, Liv slipped her hand into the pocket beneath her skirts, and took out a wooden crown, with thorns growing outward, but not on the inside, where it would rest against a person’s head. She knelt down and looked her daughter in the eye.
“Do you know what this is?” Liv asked.
“A crown like yours,” Rianne said.
“That’s right,” Liv explained. “This one belonged to Elder Aira, and I asked her family if I could borrow it. It was delivered last evening, after you’d already gone to sleep, by a messenger from Al’Fenthia. Here. Put it on.” Carefully, she set the crown on her daughter’s brow. Somehow, though it should have been so large it slipped down over the girl’s face, the crown of thorns instead fit perfectly.
“Good. This isn’t just a crown – it’s a key. Mine is, too,” Liv said. “They were left behind by the Vædim so that people like us could take control of the rifts, when we needed to. I’m going to show you how. Close your eyes, dove, and let yourself feel everything that’s around you.”
Rianne obeyed, and Liv reached out through the crown of Celris to guide her. The feeling was like that of setting her daughter’s hand on something – that quill pen Liv had been using to write, perhaps – with her own fingers on top, and making the movements so that Rianne could feel it.
Liv led her daughter all through the rift, along veins of mana stone, through the rocky riverbed where blind, pale fish swam, and to caverns deep where the light of the sun had never yet touched.
“There’s something alive,” Rianne said, after a moment, her little forehead furrowing.
“So there is,” Liv said. “Can you lead us there?”
“I think so?” The girl opened her eyes, took Liv by the hand, and tugged her along.
Liv knew the way, but she let her daughter lead at her own pace. Rianne moved in fits and starts, at first dragging them both down the stairs so quickly that Liv had to insist she slow down and keep one hand on the rail. Once they’d passed through the mist, each intersection of cavern and tunnel caused a moment of hesitation; but once Rianne had made her choice, she practically yanked Liv’s arm out of her socket with eagerness. They passed the way to the great cavern where Liv had once killed the largest stone bat in the mines, but took a different route headed down – always down, until they’d reached the roots of the mountain themselves, and the yawning hole that led deeper still.
“What is it?” Rianne asked, surging forward to the waist-high stone wall that Liv had once, long ago, asked Rosamund Lowry to raise for her. The child was just over to see over the wall when she got on her tiptoes, enough to get a glimpse of how motes of mana drifted up from the shaft, glowing brilliant blue and liquid gold, dancing in the air like snowflakes in the winter, dead leaves in autumn, or pollen in the spring.
Liv slipped her hands beneath Rianne’s armpits and hoisted her daughter up, placing the girl on her left hip so that she could lean forward and look down the shaft, at the mana stone bloom below. It looked healthier, somehow, than it had when Liv had first glimpsed it with Rose and Sidonie at her side. Near twenty years of letting it grow, of restraining the miners so that they’d done something more akin to trimming hedges than cutting stone, had given the bloom time to recover, and to grow.
The shape of it was utterly alien, somewhere between sea-foam and geometric crystals, and there were places where it actively hurt Liv’s eyes to look at it. Any attempt to follow the lines, the curves, and to make sense of them seemed doomed to failure.
“This is where the mana stone comes from,” Liv explained. Her voice was hushed and quiet, as if she were once again standing among the bookshelves in the library at Coral Bay, a student afraid to draw the ire of the archivists. “It’s alive, and I don’t think it comes from this world.”
“Where, then?” Rianne asked. Her little eyes were so wide that they reflected spots of blue and gold light.
“Bælris told me that the Vædim came from a world that had been destroyed long ago,” Liv told her. “A world which was naturally full of mana, unlike ours. I didn’t have time to ask him, but I think this bloom grew from a seed of some kind – a seed that must have been saved from that world. I think the mana stone blooms are where it all comes from, originally, and that the Vædim saved seeds when they left. They brought some here, but not enough to fill the world – which is why they built rifts.”
“There’s another one of these at the Cradle of Storms, far to the south,” Liv continued. “Where Sitia gave birth to Tamiris. And Auntie Wren found another one in Varuna, west of the mountains, years ago. Both of those had been left alone for a very long time, and they were healthier than ours.”
“Are there more?” Rianne asked. “Or just three?”
“If there are, we haven’t found them,” Liv said. “But I’ll take you to see the others, when you’re a bit older. Anyway. This is ours, and now that you know it's here, do you understand why we don’t ever sell enough mana stone to make everyone happy?”
“It’s like trimming the branches of a tree back,” Rianne said, after a moment’s thought. “If you trim just enough, it makes room for everything to get light and grow. But too much and you can kill the tree.”
“That’s right,” Liv said, and smiled. “You really are so smart, my love. And I’m so proud of you learning magic with your grandfather.”
“You could teach me, too,” Rianne said, shyly.
“I will,” Liv promised. “Only I’m much better about teaching people to fight, than anything else, and I don’t think you’re ready for that quite yet. But you’ll learn from me, and from your father, as well, and your great-grandmother. Don’t worry about that.”
“But magic is only part of it all,” Liv went on. “In fact, a lot of what we’re going to teach people to do isn’t proper spellwork at all. It’s learning how to sense and control mana, and that mana comes from right down there.” She reached out a hand, holding her arm out over the shaft, and let the brilliant motes of blue and gold power dance around her hand, weaving through her open fingers.
“Sense it, control it – and become it,” Liv told her daughter. “Because when the bridge is open, and it's time to leave, you can’t take your body, or any of your things, with you. You have to become this.”
Rianne considered that for a long moment. “I wouldn’t want to leave my doll behind,” she said. “And I want my own bed, with my own pillows. Is it scary?”
“At first.” Liv nodded, and couldn’t help but smile. “But once you realize that you were never really this at all –” she reached over to take hold of her daughter’s plump cheek, and gently tugged on it. The girl giggled and slapped at Liv’s hand, so she let go.
“Once you realize that your body isn’t you, it isn’t frightening at all, because you’re not actually losing anything. And once you make it through to the other side, you just use mana to build yourself back again, just like you were before. You have to let yourself go, and once you do – you realize there wasn’t really any point in holding on so hard, in the first place.”
“We don’t have to do it yet, though, do we?” Rianne asked.
Liv hugged her daughter close and kissed her on the forehead. “Not for a long time yet, my love.”