A Magic of Twilight

As the servants slid away with low bows and the healer packed up his implements with obvious irritation, the Archigos placed a comforting hand on Renard’s arm. “You’ve been up all night?” Renard nodded.

“How is she?”

“No better,” Renard said. “After you and O’Teni cu’Seranta visited her-” this with a swift, appreciative glance at Ana; she smiled in return despite her own weariness, “-she seemed to rally, but then slowly slipped back. I fear. .” His lower lip trembled and he closed his mouth.

He wiped at an eye with his sleeve. “I’ve served the Kraljica for nearly thirty years, since I was a young man myself.”

“And you’ve served her well,” the Archigos said. “You have been

her crutch and her support, Renard. Don’t give up hope yet. Cenzi may still hear our prayers.”

Renard nodded, but Ana could see the despair etched in the lines of his face. “Leave us with her again,” the Archigos said to him, “so that we might pray with her. In the meantime, get a bit of sleep. You’ll be no good to her if you’re exhausted.”

“I will try,” Renard said. He looked back at the bed and gave a long sigh before moving toward the door. As he came near Ana, he stopped for a moment. “Thank you for your efforts, O’Teni,” he said quietly.

“May Cenzi bless you.”

He bowed and clasped his hands to his forehead. He left the room, leaving them alone with the Kraljica’s erratic breath.

“He knows,” Ana said.

“He’s hardly a stupid man. And he loves the Kraljica.” He was standing beside her and his fingers brushed her hand. She jerked her hand away. His eyes regarded her with what she thought might be pity, but he didn’t touch her again. “He suspects, but he doesn’t know, Ana,”

he said. “And he’ll say nothing to anyone, no matter what the Divolonte states. Nor will I.”

She wasn’t certain that she believed this. She wasn’t certain she trusted any of them. Ana could imagine the Archigos betraying her to save himself, and she rubbed her hands. They would cut them off, and take your tongue as well. . She shuddered.

“Ana. .? Are you all right?”

Ana blinked. The Archigos was staring at her. “I know you’re tired, but this may be our last chance to save her,” he said. His voice was rushed and quiet, and she realized that the Archigos was frightened himself-afraid of what might happen to him if the Kraljica died and the A’Kralj became Kraljiki. In that moment, she glimpsed how fragile was the Archigos’ hold on his position in the church, and thus how precarious her own situation, tied to his standing, was in turn. The realization made her stomach turn uneasily.

She nodded to the Archigos and went to the side of the bed, looking down at the white, drawn face of the Kraljica: her cheeks sunken, her skin draped loosely over her skull. She looked half a corpse already.

She doesn’t deserve this. If Cenzi gave you this ability, then He didn’t intend for you to ignore it.

Ana clasped hands to forehead for a moment, taking deep breaths.

Then she opened her hands wide and let them move in the pattern she felt in her head, and she spoke the words that Cenzi sent her.

Eyes still closed, she shaped the power of the Ilmodo and let it rush into the Kraljica. Faintly, she heard a gasp from the old woman on the bed. “Ana. .” she heard the woman say aloud, and the word echoed in her mind as well. Ana. . The painting calls me and I can’t resist. The stream of the Ilmodo cascaded from Ana into the Kraljica and back out through that terrible rent in the Kraljica’s very being, the awful wound nearly as wide now as it was last night. Ana found herself in the Kraljica and in the painting at the same time-the painting where most of the Kraljica’s awareness seemed to reside now. The body on the bed was largely an empty shell.

Ana found herself marveling again at the spell that had done this: no teni could enchant an object this way. A teni could place a nonburn-ing glow within a lamp that would remain for several turns of the glass, but to do so required the proper chanting and hand motions, which must be performed at the time the spell was cast. But there had been no one chanting to ensorcell the painting-the spell had been cast with Ana’s pull of the cover: instantaneously, without words of prayer or gestures.

Ana had no idea how that had been accomplished, and it made her wonder again if ci’Recroix had been Numetodo. The rumors she had heard about how they twisted the Ilmodo. .

But she couldn’t think of that now. She could not spare the distractions.

Ana reshaped the Ilmodo, wrapping it around the Kraljica and trying to pull the woman back into her body and away from the painting, but the spell within the painting resisted, tearing at the Ilmodo and shredding it so that it couldn’t hold the Kraljica. Where her spell touched that within the painting, it was as if claws raked her body, dragging deep furrows that tore muscles and ripped ligaments from bones. Ana screamed with the pain, not knowing if she did so aloud. She could feel the spell, could glimpse how it had been shaped and constructed. . and there was nothing of Cenzi in it. She could not feel Him in it at all.

The shell on its chain under her robes seemed to be glowing whitehot, burning her skin.

Ana pulled at the Kraljica desperately, dragging the old woman’s awareness back toward her body as much as she could and trying to close off that awful hole within her once more. Slowly, it began to heal itself, but the effort cost Ana. She screamed again, her body and her mind aching from the exertion. .

. . and she could hold the Ilmodo no more. It slipped from her, and she was back in the Kraljica’s room, on her knees on the carpeted floor, her body soaked in perspiration, the front of her teni-robes stained with vomit, her hands curled and as stiff as if she’d been outside unprotected for hours in winter.

“I tried. .” she managed to husk out to the Archigos, who was kneeling alongside her. She looked at him, stricken. “I did all I could, and I almost. . almost. .”

And that was all she remembered for a time.

Mahri

The room was chilly even in the late afternoon sun, but Mahri hardly noticed. He was staring at a shallow, battered pan set on the wobbly table in front of him, in which he could see the distorted reflection of his own ravaged face. He heard the teapot over the fire in the hearth begin to sing, and he went to it. Wrapping the sleeve of his ragged clothing around the handle of the pot, he lifted it from the crane and poured the steaming water into the basin, then sprinkled leaves from a leather pouch on his belt into the water. He sat back.

“Show me,” he said softly, and the steam above the basin writhed and twisted and coalesced. There, in the mist, was a shimmering image: the figure of the A’Kralj, his jutting chin unmistakable even if he hadn’t been dressed in his usual finery, and seated across a small table from him, the Vajica Francesca ca’Cellibrecca. “A’Kralj,” the woman said, a bit too loudly and forced, obviously for the benefit of someone else within earshot. “You do us a great honor by coming here, and I know my husband will be displeased that he missed you. We were both so shocked by your matarh’s collapse at the Gschnas. How is she?”

“No better, I’m afraid, Vajica,” Mahri heard the A’Kralj answer. His hand moved on the table, sliding a few inches toward the woman’s. He glanced away to his right, as if looking at Mahri, and his eyebrows lifted slightly. The Vajica glanced that way also.

“Cassie, would you go to the kitchen and see if Falla still has those cakes from the morning? A’Kralj, some tea also perhaps? Cassie, have Falla make some new tea as well, and bring it here.”

“Yes, Vajica,” Mahri heard a faint voice answer, and there were footsteps and the sound of a door closing from the steam-wrapped scene before him. With the sound, the A’Kralj reached across the table to take the woman’s hand. He started to rise, as if he were about to embrace and kiss her, but she shook her head slightly.

“Not here,” she said in a whisper. “Too many eyes. But we can speak openly, for a moment anyway. The Kraljica?”

“She’s dying,” he said. “If I could keep that dwarf Archigos and that ugly cow of a teni of his away from her, she’d be dead already. I think he’s using the Ilmodo on her, or cu’Seranta is.”

“I’ll make certain that my vatarh knows,” the woman said. “I’m certain that he’d be interested in that.” She