The Compass Rose

She wandered in dreams through shining landscapes and blurring fogs, hunting something. Abruptly, she flew through the air, images blurring below her until she stood in the soot-blackened street before the broken wall around Ukiny.

The sun high in the sky near blinded her with its brilliance. Men and women swarmed the breach, clearing away rubble, stacking the salvageable stone near the wall in the space left after the Tibrans had burned the houses built against it. A small trickle of gravel spilled from the southern edge of the wall still standing.

“Back away,” Kallista shouted. “It’s unstable. It’s going to fall!”

But no one moved. No one seemed to hear her. When the wall gave way, sending massive stones and piles of rubble crashing down, shouts and screams of warning came too late. The workers couldn’t escape. The rock fell and they were beneath it.

“Quickly! Move the rock. Get it off before it crushes them. Adessay—” But he was dead. He couldn’t help. Kallista ran forward to pull people out of danger.

“Kallista!” Torchay called to her, drew her back, and she was lying fully dressed in a too-soft bed in a too-dark room with Torchay gripping her shoulders.

“A dream,” she breathed, rubbing her hands down her face. “It was just a dream like any other.”

“Not exactly like,” Torchay said, releasing her cautiously, as if he thought he might have to grab hold again. “I could always wake you from the others.”

“You woke me from this one.” Kallista let drowsiness claim her.

“Not till you were damned good and ready. Not till I shook you five turns and called your name five more.”

“Lie down. Go back to sleep.” She tugged at his sleeve and reluctantly, he did as she bid him.

“It’s not proper,” he grumbled. “I can take the floor. Or out in the corridor.”

“Too far away. And there isn’t any floor in this room. The bed’s too big. Big enough for two more bodies beside ours.”

“You didn’t want me here before.”

“Changed my mind. I need you to wake me from the dreams.”

He lay quiet a moment and Kallista thought he had gone to sleep. As much as he ever slept. He woke at the slightest noise. Then he spoke. “Nightmares aren’t part of a bodyguard’s duty.”

“I know.” Kallista grinned, knowing he couldn’t see it in the dark. “But they are in the Handbook of Rules for Friends. Right after ‘See that your friend gets back home after drinking all night.’”

Torchay turned his back to her. “Go to sleep.”

Kallista turned over and settled her back against his, as they slept in the field while hunting bandits. “Yes, Sergeant.”

She slept the sun around before waking early and alone on the second morning. A smiling acolyte in the yellow-trimmed white of a South naitan-in-training led her to the baths on the floor below. Kallista paddled about in company with a trio of chubby toddlers and their pregnant minder before being escorted firmly but politely to breakfast in the prelate’s office with her hair dripping down her back. There she not only found the green-robed elder, but Torchay looking entirely too comfortable. The first finger on his left hand wore a white-bandaged splint, but it didn’t seem to interfere with his ease.

“Eat, child.” The woman indicated a tray near overflowing with food.

Torchay picked up the plate and began filling it, ignoring Kallista’s sour look.

“I am sorry, Mother,” she said. “I don’t know your name.”

“Mother is fine. Mother Edyne, if you insist on more.”

Kallista took the food Torchay handed her and began to eat, discovering an appetite she hadn’t recognized.

“Your guard has told me what he observed that morning,” Mother Edyne said without waiting. “Tell me what you experienced.”

Over sweet buns, early melon and steaming cha brewed from leaves shipped over the southern mountains from the lands beyond, Kallista told her. When she had finished, the prelate frowned.

“This magic…” Mother Edyne shook her head. “It has frightened people. It smells of the mysteries of the West. That is why I’ve kept you here, you know. So that their fear would have no target.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” Kallista shuddered. No one had been found with West magic in over fifty years. “But I am a North naitan. I’ve always been North. Not West.”

“I admit it puzzles me.” Edyne peered at Kallista, her eyes sharp green. “Have you found a mark somewhere on your body? One that you did not have before.”

Kallista felt Torchay’s gaze on her as she lied. “No. Nothing like that.”

The magic she had already was enough to bear. She didn’t want more. Maybe if no one knew, it would just go away. She reached back and combed her hair down closer over her neck. She didn’t have to wear a queue. It wasn’t regulation for officers the way it was for other ranks. She could grow her hair longer.

“Hmm,” the prelate considered. “Has there been anything else? Any sign of other magic? Foreseeing perhaps? That has always been the most common sort of West magic.”

“No, Mother Edyne.” The dream had been merely a dream. Nothing more than that. It couldn’t have been anything more.

Kallista could feel Torchay’s agitation rising off him in waves. Next, Mother Edyne would be claiming that was a sign of West magic, and not part of knowing him so well for so long.

“Well, that’s that, I suppose.” Mother Edyne stood and the other two scrambled to their feet with her. “No, no. Stay. Finish your meal. And then I suppose you must return to your duties. Unless there is something more you wish to tell me?”

Kallista widened her eyes, doing her best to look as if not only did she have no secrets at this moment, but she had never had any secret in her entire life. “No, Mother. Nothing.”

“Very well.” She motioned them back into their chairs and let a hand rest on each head as she passed from the room. “Be well, my children.”

When the door was closed and Mother Edyne gone, Torchay drew his little blade and stabbed it through a melon slice. “And why,” he asked through clenched teeth, “did you not tell the prelate the truth?”

Kallista hunched her shoulders, embarrassed by her fear and by the lies she’d told to cover it. What she had done terrified her. She didn’t wish it undone. Ukiny would have been taken and thousands more dead or enslaved if she had not done it. But she feared the consequences of her impulsive request.

Already, according to Mother Edyne, people whispered. West magic involved the unexplained and the unexplainable. It dealt with hidden things and with endings, including the ultimate ending: death. No wonder people feared it.

“I’m sure it’s temporary.” Kallista focused on the last of her meal, unable to meet his eyes. “Now that the enemy has been cut down to a reasonable size, I’ll have no need for such a magic. Why bother the prelate with it?”

“When the One gives a gift, She rarely takes it back.”

“But a onetime event is more common—more likely than my having permanent magic from two Compass points.”

“You have the mark.”

She refrained from smoothing her hair down over her neck only through sheer force of will. “Legend. Fable. Nothing more.”

Torchay growled, a sound of utter disgust. She’d heard it countless times.

“Besides,” she said, risking a glance in his direction, “talk is already circulating. I have no doubt word is already flying to the Barbs. How much quicker would they come to investigate if the Mother Temple here added its weight to the gossip?”

The Order of the Barbed Rose believed an ancient and stubborn heresy, that West magic was evil, and that if it and all its practitioners were eliminated, death itself could be eliminated. The Order had been suppressed for centuries and yet could not be entirely crushed. The fear of death and the will to conquer it was too strong. Even the One’s promise of life eternal after physical death was not enough to quell this persistent falsehood.

Everyone feared the Barbs. Their secret membership fanned out through all Adara, investigating any magic that seemed the least bit out of the ordinary. It occurred to Kallista now that perhaps true West magic hadn’t been seen in so long because the Barbs had somehow found a way to identify those rare ones so gifted and eliminate them before or as their power manifested.

“I can deal with any Barb who comes calling,” Torchay said. “As could you. But do you really believe Mother Edyne would contribute to gossip in any way?”

She didn’t, but she shrugged her shoulders. “The fewer who know a thing, the easier it is to keep it secret.”

“Lying to a prelate has its own consequences.”

“I’ll risk it.” Kallista set her plate aside and stood. “We should report in.”

There were funerals to attend. Flames competed with the blaze of the setting sun as Kallista stood with General Uskenda and the honor guard in the plaza west of the Mother Temple. She let the tears flow, blaming them on the sun’s glare, and commended the souls of her entire troop, all five of the naitani and their five bodyguards, into the welcoming arms of the One. Never had she lost so many.

Never had the Adaran army and its naitani been cast into a battle of such size. They fought bandits. They patrolled remote mountain passes and distant, lawless prinsipalities. They did not fight pitched battles against massive armies. They’d never had to. Until now.

Kallista fought back her grief. So many bright young lives, so full of promise, ended here. Adara could not afford such losses. She feared that they would be facing many more such funerals if changes were not made. But Blessed One, did she have to be the one to change?

When the sun had set and the fires burned to embers, there were letters to be written, paperwork to be done. How could she write so many at once? How could she put it off?

The breeze, not so strong inside the city where it was broken by wall and building, stirred her hair. Kallista tucked it behind her ears yet again as they walked back to quarters.

“If you will not braid your hair,” Torchay said from his place at her shoulder, “you should cut it.”

“Oh, that will cover my neck so well.” She pulled her hair back from her face and held it with one gloved hand.

“Don’t cut the back. Just the front, so it can’t get in your face. Or you could—”

“This is not a time to be thinking about hair.”

“True.” He picked up his pace and took her elbow to escort her quickly through a crowd spilling out of a public house. “But it was noticed. Today it was taken as a sign of mourning for the death of your troopers. If you continue to wear it so, it could be taken as a sign of something else. Perhaps that you attempt to hide something.”

Kallista sighed. She was a soldier. That had been her duty, her destiny for twenty-one years. It kept things simple. She would rather things stayed that way, but the complications kept mounting. “We’ll work out some explanation later.”

The sun must have hurt her eyes more than she realized. They kept watering during the short walk, even as Torchay ushered her into their too-empty billet. The setting sun must bother his eyes as well, given the way he was blinking them.

Kallista gave him the courtesy of privacy, looking away even as she briefly touched his shoulder with an ungloved hand. “I have letters to write.”

She managed three, writing to the accompaniment of steel on stone, before her eyes began to cross with weariness. Torchay tumbled her into her narrow bed and took his place on the pallet in front of the door.

Once more her dreams were filled with shine and fog. Again the city wall fell and again she shouted a warning that no one heard. But the dream did not end there.

She dreamed of a man, golden-skinned and golden-haired, his hard body moving over her and in her. As she cried out in passion, he changed. His black hair tumbled around her face, and he changed yet again. His dark skin paled, his hair going bright, and it was Torchay making love to her, Torchay making her cry out.

She jerked, struggling to wake, but something caught her soul and drew her back. She went spinning across the dreamscape, colors of light and darkness flashing by and through her, until she was released to roll tumbling across a rough stone floor, fetching up against a fat table leg.

Before she could pick herself up, a blade was pressed against her throat. The woman holding it shone fierce and bright with power. She was not young, perhaps ten or even twenty years past Kallista’s age. Her red hair was streaked with gray, her freckled face lined with experience. Her green-brown eyes stared deep into Kallista’s.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded. “How did you get in here?”

“I…” How did she get here? “…I don’t think I am here.”

With a snarl, the woman sliced her knife across Kallista’s throat.

CHAPTER FIVE

Kallista recoiled, hands flying up to push the madwoman away. She called for Torchay as she scrabbled backward across the stone floor, her voice a hoarse croak, surprised she still had a voice. She reached up to stanch the wound…but there was no blood pouring down over her undertunic. No pain. Carefully, Kallista felt her neck. There was no wound.

“So. You’re the new one.” The woman stood, tossed the knife on the table above. “How long has it been?”

Kallista ran her hands over the whole of her throat. How could that knife not have cut her? She had felt its sharpness, felt it prick her. “How long has it been since what?”

“Since I died, of course. What’s your name?” The woman poured wine from a silver pitcher into an ornate cup. “I’d offer you some, but I’m afraid you couldn’t drink it.”

“Why not?” Kallista got awkwardly to her feet, staring at the high chamber around her. It was dark, the windows mere slits in the gray stone walls, the candles blazing from bronze candlesticks insufficient to make up for the lack of sunlight. Banners in subtle colors with strangely familiar devices attempted to soften the stone, and a fire burned on a circular hearth, the smoke finding its own way out the hole in the roof. This was the most realistic dream she’d ever had.

“I can drink in my dream if I want to,” she said, recalling what the other had said about the wine.

“It’s not a dream.” The woman gave her a sour look. “Not exactly. You should know that—Here, what is your name?”

“Kallista. What’s yours?”

The woman laughed and took a drink from her cup. As she drank, the smile faded from her eyes. She set the cup on the table, staring at Kallista in shock. “You really don’t know me, do you?”

“Should I?”

“Yes.” The woman had no small opinion of herself if she expected a complete stranger to recognize her and know her name.

“Sorry.” Kallista lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug. “I don’t.”

“How long has it been since my death? Since the death of Belandra of Arikon?”

Kallista stared. She was more than ready for this dream to end. It was becoming far too strange. “Belandra of Arikon never lived. She’s a story. A tale told by the fireside to frighten children and thrill young men.”

“I never lived? Never lived?” The woman—Belandra of her dreams—snatched up the silver cup and threw it across the room. Wine flew in all directions, none of it spotting Kallista’s pale blue undertunic.

“How then did I unite the four prinsipalities into one people?” Belandra demanded. “How did I fight and defeat the enemies of the One? How did I—” Her mouth continued to move, but Kallista could not hear her. It was as if some barrier had dropped between them, cutting off all sound.

In the far distance, she could hear Torchay calling her name and turned to go, to answer him.

“Wait.” Belandra caught her arm. “How long?”

Kallista felt Torchay’s voice pulling at her, drawing her back, but Belandra’s hand anchored her in place. “A thousand years. The four prinsipalities were united a thousand years ago. There are twenty-seven prinsipalities in Adara now. But the first Reinine was Sanda, not Belandra.”

The older woman’s smile showed a deep affection that made Kallista shiver. “My ilias was much better suited to governing than a hot-tempered naitan like me.”

Torchay called again, stretching her thin.

“I have to go.” Kallista clawed at the fingers holding her.

“Take this.” Belandra pulled a ring from her forefinger and pressed it into Kallista’s hand. “I will have many questions when next we meet.”

Which will be never, if I have aught to say about it. Kallista closed her hand reflexively around the ring. As soon as she did, Belandra released her. She went flying back through the light and the dark and the colors to slam into her body with a force that bowed her into a high arc. She gasped, drawing air into lungs that seemed to have forgotten how.

“Kallista.” Torchay held her face between his hands, fear in every line of his moonlit expression.

“I am here. I’m awake.” She resisted the urge to touch him in return, to be sure he was solid and real.

With a shaking hand, he brushed her hair back from her face, then sat up straight on the edge of her bed, setting his hands in his lap. “You were no’ breathin’,” he said, never taking his eyes from her. His thick accent showed the depth of his agitation. “You shouted, like you did before. I came to wake you, but you would no’ wake. Then you quieted. I thought the dream was over so I went back to bed. But you called my name.”

He stared at her, his eyes haunted. “You called my name, and you stopped breathin’. And no matter what I did, you would no’ start again.”

Kallista shuddered. Had that been while she was in that strange place talking to the woman who claimed to be Belandra of Arikon? Could some part of her have literally been in another place? That place? Impossible.

“I’m breathing now,” she said.

“Aye.” He was shaking, trying to hide it, but failing.

She reached for his hand. He took it, gripped it tight. But it wasn’t enough. She used his hand to pull herself up. She put her arms around him and held on tight until her trembling and his went away.

“Do no’ do that again,” he said over and over. “Ever. Do not.”

“No,” she said again and again. “No. I won’t. Never.”

When she could let him go, Torchay picked her up and stood her beside the bed.

“What are you doing?” She had to catch his arm to keep from staggering.

“Moving your bed. I’m too far away across the room. You’ll be sleeping next to me till the dreams stop.” He lifted the bedding, mattress and all, from its rope frame and set it on the floor. “We can bring in a larger bed in the morning.”

“It’s against regulations—” Kallista began, but fell silent at the flash of his eyes.

“It’s against regulations for me to allow you to die. It’s against nature for you to stop breathing like that. I want you at my back.” He crossed the room to collect his mattress from the doorway and laid it beside hers. He was on his knees rearranging the blankets when he paused.

“What’s this?” Torchay plucked a small object from the tangle of her blankets.

“I don’t know.” Kallista held her hand out for it. “What?”

“It’s a ring.”

She could see it now as he held it up to the candlelight, examining it. Cold coursed through her veins.

“I didn’t know you had a ring like this. Pretty.” He set it in her hand and went back to straightening blankets.

Kallista didn’t have a ring like this. It was thick and gold, bearing the marks of the hammers that had shaped it. Incised deeply into the flat crest was a rose, symbol of the One. The ring was primitive and powerful. It called to her, demanding that she put it on. Kallista curled her hand into a fist, resisting the urge. She did not own this ring. She could not. Because it had been given to her in a dream.

She opened her hand and let the ring fall to the floor. She didn’t want it, didn’t want what it might mean.

“Careful. You’ve dropped it.” Torchay shifted to his other knee and picked it up. He held it out to her but Kallista ignored it, so he set it on the chest. “You’re too tired for words. Not breathing’ll do that to you. Come to sleep.”

She was tired. Tired of strangeness and impossibilities and mysteries she couldn’t comprehend. She wanted her life back the way it had been before the Tibran invasion, but she feared that was one of the impossible things, and it frightened her.

Torchay lay down and turned his back to her, waiting for her to set hers against it. Careful in her weariness, Kallista stretched out on her own pallet. Rather than turning her back, she tucked herself in behind him and wrapped her arm around his waist. He startled, then lay still. Too still, as if afraid to move, to breathe.

“I need to hold on to something tonight,” Kallista said. “Let me hold you.”

He didn’t reply, but the tension slid out of him. She snuggled closer, the tip of her nose just touching the top of his spine. This was against regulations, rules she had carefully kept for years. The rules had a purpose, one she agreed with. But right now, tonight, she didn’t care. She needed to hold on to something that was real, that was flesh, blood, bone, against the dreams coming again.

Aisse lay in her hiding place for a day, a night and another day. She crawled out only for water. By the second night, though every inch of her body ached, she could stand, and even walk without too much dizziness.

The noise of the camp—animals bellowing, men shouting, warriors marching—sounded much too near. Now that she could walk, she needed to move farther away, to a hiding place where they couldn’t find her no matter how hard they searched.

She crawled back beneath the tree and gathered her few pitiful belongings, then she returned to the riverbank. Aisse looked downstream, toward the camp. That way lay death. She turned her face upstream and began to walk. This direction might not hold life, but as sure as the sun rose every morning, she knew it at least held hope.

Three days later, Kallista had finished all ten of her damned notification letters and delivered them to headquarters, to be included with the next set of dispatches to the capital. River traffic had returned almost to normal. The Tibrans no longer had enough manpower to interdict travel by boat along the Taolind, and they’d never had enough boat power. The river was the best means of travel to the interior, to Arikon far to the west, and regular dispatches were getting through again.

But now, Kallista had nothing to do. She had no younger naitani to train in their magic. She had no call on her own magic once she chased the cannon from closing on the river gate. Her paperwork, the bane of her existence, was complete. She’d even had time to experiment on her hair with Torchay, settling on simply tying back her front hair in a small horsetail on the back of her head, and leaving that behind her ears to fall free over her neck. She was bored.

Boredom and curiosity had her taking the long way from her billet to the Mother Temple’s library by way of the breach in the western wall. Repairs had begun already and Kallista wanted to see how they were going.

Torchay stalked at her side like some bright avenger, scowling at anyone who came close. He didn’t like all the gossip about the “scythe of death” as the dark magic she’d done was beginning to be called. He took the epithet personally, unable to shrug it off as well as Kallista could, which wasn’t all that well. She tried to tell him it was useless to resent people for their ignorance, but he didn’t seem to hear.

The streets grew thicker with people as they neared the breach. Kallista could see the two walls of mortared stone that formed the inner and outer surfaces of the city wall, and some of the rubble filling the wide gap between the two walls that provided much of its strength. Civilians and a few companies of infantry conscripts swarmed the breach now, clearing away the broken and fallen stones so the walls could be repaired.