Saint Death's Daughter Read online

  Nita’s gaze landed on her like a yoke. “Come sit,” she said softly.

  Lanie clenched her hands in her pockets and obeyed, trying not to wither. But Nita, like any extreme heat, was a desiccating force. She took after their mother, whose own mother had been half-Quadoni, a lion-colored people. Her wizard marks were also gold, but glitteringly metallic—a slash above her right eyebrow, another forming an almost complete ring about her throat. Her hair was the only soft thing about her, an opulence of golden spirals. (Doll’s hair, Blood Royal Erralierra had once called it, tweaking a curl—nearly at the cost of her fingers.)

  But where their mother had been cold, Nita flashed hot. She was easily irritated, sensitive to a fly’s landing. To Nita, the world of Athe was peopled with flies. It was easy for her to look down on people, for—like their father—she was tall, lean, rangy, her carriage haughty. She had corded legs and hard arms and a pouncing walk. And her eyes, like their father’s, were shark-black—until they weren’t. Until they glowed yellow with her magic.

  Lanie remembered how their father’s one remaining eye had opened for her, down in the lacklight of Stones Ossuary, where she kept her workshop. His eye had not been black then—not anymore—but blue with ectenica from the resurrection rite. He had stared without sense, without breath, then died again.

  Shying from the memory, she shifted on the bench, crossing her legs at the ankles and venturing, “That coat is very dashing, Amanita Muscaria.”

  It was the right thing to say; some tension in Nita’s spine came unbraided. She brushed a hand down the peacock-colored velvet of her riding coat, with its cuffs embroidered in orange-red flames, and raised one plucked-to-filament-thinness eyebrow.

  “Fine, isn’t it? It’s not Quadoni—velvet not being a popular textile in the desert. I bought it in Kalestis on my way back. One must dress. And how does your death magic progress, little sister?”

  Lanie’s palms sweated at the sudden turn. Nita hadn’t even made it into the great hall, and already her interrogation had begun.

  “Slowly,” she replied.

  Nita abandoned the straps, laces, and buckles binding her boots to her thighs and turned her complete attention on her sister. “Tell me.”

  “Let’s see. Um. Well, last week in my workshop”—Lanie leaned back, casually, only narrowly avoiding bumping her head on a rusted brazier—“I mixed my blood with a mess of last winter’s potatoes. The ectenica caught on like wildfire; the entire bin started bleeding blue light. Then the eyes of the potatoes began to grow, too fast to track, till they were as long as tentacles, reaching out for me. They were darlings—I wanted to keep them as pets—but ectenica never lasts for long. A few minutes later, the whole thing melted off into the most foul-smelling black sludge. I’ve been working on a way of preserving ectenica—starting small, you know: old vegetation, dead bees, that sort of thing—so I don’t have to rely on my quarterly panthaumic surge to do all the heavy lifting. I’d love to perform more permanent acts of death magic without waiting three months between. And it gets tiresome, in the meantime, sticking myself with a syringe every time I want to do something small. But somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think potatoes are quite the right medium for stabilization…” She trailed off, embarrassed.

  Blurting again. And to Nita, of all people! That was the trouble with being alone so much; Lanie was forgetting how to hold a normal conversation. Goody rarely spoke, and Grandpa Rad chattered so much there was no getting a word in edgewise.

  “Progress indeed.” Nita sounded almost proud.

  “It’s… coming along,” Lanie agreed cautiously.

  “Alas,” her sister purred, bending over her boots, her smile a cream-licked curl, “that your undead potatoes could not save our parents.”

  Ah, this was more familiar. This glittering prick of failure. Lanie stammered, “I—I tried. I did try, Nita, but… It was off-surge—I didn’t have a boost. No panthauma to help me, and my ectenica wasn’t enough to keep them going. Worse than the potatoes. Much, much worse—the smell, you wouldn’t… And then, after, there wasn’t anything left…” She was talking too fast, forgetting to breathe.

  Nita held up her hand, soothingly. “Hush, Miscellaneous. Hush, I know.”

  How could she know? Lanie wondered bitterly. Nita had only the smallest kind of magic. She used it well, of course, like any weapon in her arsenal—but it was just a tool to her, not an art. Not a vocation.

  “So,” Nita’s voice caressed her, coaxing, “how did it happen? Our parents?”

  Lanie crossed her arms over her chest, then immediately dropped them again. Nita tended to turn into a battering ram whenever she spotted a defensive wall.

  “You want it chronologically?”

  “As you wish.” Nita shrugged. “Oh, but”—she waved her hand—“you can skip the part about Aunt Diggie. Mother wrote me all about that—how they found pieces of her scattered across the Diesmali Woods. Diggie’s fault, of course. She liked putting her own skin in the pot. Said wagering was more thrilling that way—the stakes couldn’t get any higher.”

  Lanie did not address that. She could not, not without making herself sick. The events Nita was asking her to recite would present difficulties enough; she was glad not to have to include the spectacular demise of Digitalis Stones in her upcoming report.

  “Father first, then. Most of the details I got secondhand, mind,” Lanie warned. “From Canon Lir.”

  Nita pressed her lips together, and Lanie froze. Her sister’s jealous rages were quiet but devastating.

  “Still exchanging letters with your chubby fire priest? And yet when I was in Quadiíb, letters from you were rarer than rain. Four years I was gone, but I can count on my two hands the times I received…” She stopped, visibly calmed herself, and gestured for Lanie to continue. “Never mind. The account!”

  Lanie hastened on, not wanting to discuss Canon Lir with Nita, which would be a little like handing a baby sparrow to a catamount and telling it to take care.

  “Late last year, Father was in Liriat Proper, attending Blood Royal Erralierra at the First Frost Harlequinade. It was the day after the high holy fire feast of Autumn Equinox. The whole city was still celebrating. The best-dressed clown in the Harlequinade was to be awarded a prize at the end of the procession—a cap with ass’s ears and real gold bells. Father sat with Erralierra in the royal pavilion set up on Moll’s Kopje. Each clown who passed before them made their genuflection for judgment. Near the end, a clown in orange and black motley, with a black and orange-painted face, leapt up from her knees to perform a dance routine with her baton. Said baton ended up buried in Father’s eye. There was a blade,” she explained, “concealed beneath a knot of ribbons. But the clown wasn’t Lirian—she was Rookish! What they thought was face paint wasn’t—it was her wizard markings. She belonged to the Blackbird Bride—one of her Parliament of Rooks. Canon Lir said that her face melted back into feathers when Erralierra executed her.”

  There, Lanie thought, that wasn’t too bad, was it?

  The toes of her left foot were numb, and she suspected a rash was starting under her right armpit, but Nita couldn’t tell that just by looking at her. If Lanie could just hold still. And not scratch.

  Nita was nodding, a remote expression on her face. “Surely the Blood Royal put the killer to the question before executing her?”

  “In fact…” Lanie hesitated. Her throat itched, her sinuses prickled. It was a dangerous day for her to recall; this was going to get messy shortly.

  Nita knew it. Her right eyebrow arched up, her wizard mark flashing at the movement, as she invited the whole tale and Lanie’s allergy with it.

  “In fact,” Lanie continued, after a pragmatical clearing of the throat, “Erralierra asked Mother herself to perform the interrogation. Bring all your skills to bear, was the order. The clown—the Rookish wizard, I mean; the killer—arrived here at Stones Manor in a prison wagon that afternoon. Mother took her into her workshop.”

  So
much Lanie had witnessed for herself but no more, for she had immediately left to visit her own workshop in the ossuary, staying away from the main manor house all evening and all night, even sleeping down amongst the bones. There she could not hear the screaming, nor feel the repercussion of the killer’s pain in her own highly reactive body.

  Nita’s face was avid. “And what did Mother learn?”

  Lanie licked dry lips, which prickled like impending cold sores. The nausea of memory was coming to a stormy boil in her stomach.

  …Aba Stones, striding into the courtyard at dawn after her bloody work was done, a fug of exposed viscera and wet feathers following her like a trail of slime, blotting out her perfume of almonds and ice and kicking off one of Lanie’s three-day migraines…

  “If confession under torture can be trusted—”

  “Of course it can!”

  “—then,” Lanie said, “the Blackbird Bride had nothing to do with Father’s death. The clown who killed him was a young wizard, but recently inducted into the Parliament of Rooks. She wanted to impress her liege wife and queen, celebrate her new wings. Unnatural Stones being something of a celebrity—Brackenwild’s Chief Executioner! The Left Hand of Liriat!—murdering him would bring her glory in the Parliament. You know the Rookish court; they’re always vying for Bran Fiakhna’s favor. The Blackbird Bride’s got so many wizards dangling from her strings, she’s like a spider with a bunch of marionettes.”

  “But was Mother content with the killer’s confession?”

  Lanie paused. Aba had been; Lanie was not. Grandpa Rad’s declamations at the time had made her uneasy about the whole thing. He had ranted for days after the killer’s execution, an endless lecture about the training all Rookish wizards receive before being inducted into Bran Fiakhna’s Parliament. How no wizard who belonged to the Blackbird Bride would have acted without her knowledge or consent—or without her direct order. Rook, he said, had every reason for wanting to weaken Liriat’s power base. Beginning with the Stoneses.

  But Nita would no more want to hear Lanie repeating the ramblings of a ghost than Mother had. She didn’t even believe in him.

  So Lanie replied carefully, “Mother was certainly thorough about obtaining the confession.”

  “Good.” Nita’s voice hardened. “Now. How did Mother die?”

  Lanie’s throat crawled like poison ivy on a summer’s day. Was it allergy, or guilt? She had nursed Aba while she could, but in the end, Lanie had been bedridden herself from such prolonged proximity to her mother’s deathbed. When exposed too long to physical damage, her allergy began reproducing the symptoms of that damage until it laid her low. Contagious illnesses didn’t count (Lanie was still susceptible to those, although she had so little contact with outsiders she rarely caught a cold), only damage caused by intentional violence—either self-inflicted or at the hand of an outside party. In Aba’s case, it was the former.

  “From what I could divine,” Lanie swallowed to ease her tight throat, “shortly after we interred Father in Stones Ossuary, Mother ingested a quantity of a potion called ‘Elixir of Adamant.’”

  The label, as she explained to her sister, had been Leechese in origin, promising Longevity, Clarity, and Invincibility. The bottle was expensive, stoppered in crystal.

  “But Goody and I analyzed the ingredients,” she said. “Mere quackery.”

  Or worse, as she’d later theorized—deliberate sabotage. It had consisted of two parts briarbark syrup (for sweetness), one part alcohol (for kick), one part diamond dust (for murder).

  Nita blinked as Lanie imparted all of this to her. From Nita, that was practically a flinch.

  “Over a period of a few weeks,” Lanie said in a rush, hoping to get this over with before her reaction became severe, “the diamond dust perforated and abraded Mother’s organs. She was already blind and delirious from alcohol poisoning. What I do not know is if she knew what she was drinking. Or if she drank it believing the label, looking for some insurance against her own mortality. Father’s death was… difficult for her.”

  The sisters regarded each other. Not quite three seconds passed. Nita’s eyes were still black, but Lanie slid her gaze to the left and down, just in case. To her surprise, Nita brought her hands together in slow, loud applause.

  “Oh, Miscellaneous! You have grown. Look at you—still on your feet after all that! Mother and Auntie used to sneer at your running noses, your headaches, how you vomited all the time.” Laughing, she recalled, “Aunt Diggie used to call you that mewling runt, do you remember?”

  Oh, Lanie remembered. She did not laugh, though she knew she should probably try. Thankfully, Nita didn’t notice this time.

  “Father told me once that what Mother always called your weakness—your allergy—was a sign of your power to come. Stoneses, he said, have been favored of Saint Death since the days of the Founding Queen. He said that your violent reaction to violence was the core of your necromancy—that one day your body would revolt so magnificently against death that you would raise the very dead themselves, call them forth from tombs and catacombs and bend them to your will!”

  Nita laughed again, the sound rising like golden bubbles that skittered from the vestibule into the great hall. “I should have believed him, Miscellaneous, not Mother! We might have been better friends, you and I. You might have written me more letters when I went away, told me of your studies. I might have confessed to you how I… but”—she shook her head, controlling the strange tremor in her voice—“all that is over. I am home now. And you have welcomed me.”

  Lanie said nothing, uncomfortable with this new, confessional Nita. She wanted to go back to the library and curl up with a book next to Goody on the tiger rug. Even Grandpa Rad’s dogmatic droning would be preferable to staying in this dusty black vestibule one minute longer.

  Nita patted the basalt bench beside her. Rattled, Lanie sat.

  “Had you been able to solicit my advice, Miscellaneous, I would have urged you not even to try and raise our dead. What do we want with them now? Would we have the inimitable Abandon Hope Stones, Royal Assassin of Liriat, and her husband Unnatural Stones, Chief Executioner, reduced to revenants? Living on nothing but your blood and their own memories, bound to your will like that great lump?” She indicated Goody Graves, who had silently re-entered the vestibule, and answered herself with a vehement “No!”

  Lanie opened her mouth to impart a procedural correction on the various properties and provenances of panthauma versus ectenica (Nita obviously did not know as much about death magic as she thought she did), but her sister overrode her.

  “No,” she repeated, “it is best they are gone.” Her nod was decisive. “I am even glad for it—for without your letter, I might have stayed in Quadiíb another year! A waste, believe me. Within days of arriving, I had already accomplished the primary mission our parents taxed me with: to discover the perfect stud horse for our stable. A man and mate worthy of Amanita Muscaria Stones, one who will renew the magic in our bloodline. It only remained how to extract him from his…”

  Nita’s gaze grew distant, almost drunken. Her throat moved. The glittering ring of her wizard mark seemed to strangle her. It was as if she were forcing down some mutinous mouthful.

  “You perhaps recollect reading some mention of my mentor, Gyrlady Gelethai?” She opened her hand as if to usher the woman through the front door. “I wrote home regularly about her.”

  “I addressed all my letters to you in care of her, remember?”

  “Ah, yes. That’s right.” Nita smiled, a bear-trap tension in her jaw.

  Lanie had pored over all her sister’s letters, hoping they might reveal some insight or observation about the world—especially Quadiíb!—that Lanie could dream on. She herself had never left the boundaries of Stones Manor, and never envied Nita so much as when she was sent away to the Traveling Palaces for her schooling. But Nita’s descriptions consisted solely of the snubs and slights (real or perceived) that continuously assailed her from al
l sides; how it rankled her to stomach these insults from her teachers, classmates, and even random vendors at the marketplace; how she put herself to sleep at night by imagining infinite retaliations, like variations on a lullaby.

  At one point, Aba had observed to Diggie—within Lanie’s hearing—that this exercise of restraint was good for Nita, whose first response to an offense was usually to swing out like a trebuchet. What Nita needed, Aba stressed, was to learn the long, cold composure of vengeance. School abroad doubled as an intense course in deep cover in a foreign country. Nita would need these skills when she took over Aba’s work as Royal Assassin to the Blood Royal Brackenwilds.

  Before Nita’s departure, Aba had arranged everything. She had written to the Traveling Palaces on her daughter’s behalf, organized Nita’s journey and citizenship papers (Quadiíb granted partial citizenship to any direct descendant of a full Quadoni citizen up to four generations after their death, including open admission into the Caravan School without having to put your name in the lottery), drilled her in languages and international policy, art, music, math lessons, history, cultural studies, and everything else Nita would need to know to pass for a scholar.

  A scholar! Nita! How it rankled Lanie even now. The only joy Nita might ever take in a library would be burning it to the ground.

  And yet, she grudgingly admitted to herself, Nita had endured her deep cover for four years. It was admirable.

  “It was Gyrlady Gelethai,” Nita said now, “whom Mother arranged to ‘tutor’ me in the ways of our Quadoni forebears. Tutor me? More like thwart me!” she burst out, a yellow beam flashing in her black eyes. “At every turn, she…” Her hands clenched in her velvet-covered lap. Her chin jerked up. She finished, softly, “But I triumphed in the end.”

  Lanie bent forward, elbows on knees. “I envy you.”

  It was a phrase calculated to soothe her sister, for whom the envy of others was ambrosia. But she meant it. To leave Stones Manor. To leave Liriat. To walk the Caravan School circuit, and study Quadic and ancient magic and who knew what else with the great Professora Ambassadors of Quadiíb! It had long been her own dream.