SENACH
The night before, in the town of Beller, Teryn had lain beside Cody, watching him breathe in and out, his mouth a little open. He ran his hand over the other boy’s shoulder, down the slope of gentle muscle on his arm. He had not loved him like a boy, and of late, really since before they had left Sunderland, Teryn had stopped thinking of him as such. There were times on their journey, when Cody had proven to be more clever than he appeared. In the night, Cody turned over and kissed him hungrily. They fooled around with each other, stroking one another to desire and then, as often happened, Cody mounted him and they moved together, Teryn surrendering to the hunger and strength of someone who had not appeared to have either. When it was done they lay together, limbs tangled, Cody’s arms strong about him.
“We reach the princess tomorrow.”
“What is she like?” Teryn wondered, his hand light in Cody’s damp hair.
Cody’s cheek pressed to Teryn, he said, tiredly, “A lot like her mother.”
Senach and Essail had once been one land. In fact, the capital of Senach, Waybury, had been the original capital of Essail, and Senach the center of the old Essailian homeland. The Ayl and the Hale had originally not accepted women to their thrones. A long civil war between the daughter of a king and his cousins had created the two nations, Senach standing by Queen Ermentrude and the original house while Essail took on a cadet branch. This was always a note of pride to the smaller kingdom, that it held, to this day, the descendants of the true House of Senach and that their city was, of old, the ancient Essailian stronghold.
Senach was smaller than Zahem, the smallest of the New Kingdoms, but the nation had made itself strong with its allegiances, binding itself to Westrial and Sussail, patching over the old disputes with Essail. Even as they crossed the border, Teryn saw men and women who looked like him, ivory skinned and bronze haired, or darker with bronze and golden and even brown skin. Long had Senach gone deep into its Royan past and made connections with Armor across the sea as well as the lands of the west. A small kingdom, they knew, must be great in its allegiances. And now as Cody, Teryn and Eva, pulling her cloak about her against the south wind, crested the last hill they saw ftom from new hills the city of Waybury with Eleduc, the white-gold palace of the Kings and Queens of Senach, its walls spreading over three great hills and sheltering the capital, glimpses of the blue sea twinkling in the sunset beyond.
“So,” Queen Bereneice nodded to Linalla who sat beside her on a little throne, “your mother has sent for you, and I cannot believe it is for your safety.”
“Wife?” King Gandar chided.
“You know it’s true,” she said.
Bereneice rose.
“You have traveled long,” she said to Cody and to Teryn and Eva. “Refresh yourselves. Have you eaten?”
“No, your Grace,” Teryn said. “Not since late this morning.”
“We will have baths run and send victuals to refresh you and then, perhaps, you will join us for a late evening meal.”
Eva curtseyed prettily, and Cody bowed as did Teryn.
“Yes, your Grace,” Teryn said.
“Morgellyn is my niece,” Bereniece said, “as are here sisters, Imogen and Hilda, though they have taken after their mother, and I don’t know where Morgellyn came from. She is fair like an Aethelyn, but her character is low. Perhaps it was the death of my sister or living with Cedd, but Tourmaline would be sorry to see what became of her daughter.”
“Lady,” Teryn said, “I did not know you were sister to the late Queen.”
“Oh, yes,” Bereniece said, “it was not safe for Wulfstans. Our father sent us south, hoping to make allegiance with the southern kingdoms by marriage, perhaps even wishing to raise up a Wulfstan heir, though it seems like Ohean Penannyn did that himself. I came down with my older sister to marry Thingeric, a duke and an Aethalyn. He died, leaving my childless and so I was wed to my lord who in time was made King of these lands.”
“Things have been heard,” Teryn said, as he pushed a sautéed mushroom across his plate, “about goings on in Essail The Queen wished to know what was said in other nations.”
“That she murdered her husband.”
Here the Princess Linalla sucked in her breath and beside her, her cousin Adrian said, “Mother, we don’t know that.”
“Or that she opens her thighs for every man who comes to her?” Bereneice went on.
“Wife,” said the King.
“Sir Teryn wishes to know what is said, and I will tell him. Oh, surely some of it must be dismissed. Any woman in power will be maligned, any woman, really, but this is what is said.”
“And is it believed?”
“What is said that is not believed a little?” the Queen asked. “That Queen Isobel is a witch, that I am a harpy who has castrated my husband, that the girl Myrne, who is now Queen of the two Hales rules through her husband and commands lightning and earthquake? Or that Edith Baldwin put herself in power.”
“What of Edith Baldwin?” Linalla asked.
“You need to pay more attention, great-niece,” Bereniece said. “King Edmund is in the keeping of King Osric, and it is said that Edith and her brother put him there. I would not blame her, though.”
“And what of William?” Teryn asked.
“What have you learned in your travels, Sir Wesley?” King Duncan asked. “William’s ships have gone back for Daumany, to defend his land against Solahn.”
“But he thought he would be King,” Teryn said. “He thought he would be King over all the Sendic Kingdoms.”
“He won’t,” the young man Adrian spoke.
He was gentle faced with what Teryn judged to be too much hair, but he looked earnest now.
“William will never be King in the South. This is Locress. No matter how much time passes, this is Locress. If there is a King in the South he will rule at Ondres, and we who are little and bow to no ruler, would accept him as High King.”
Teryn’s eyes changed. He said, “I have heard of such things. When I was little, down in southern Westrial. I suppose it is spoken of in Sussail.”
“It is known in Sussail,” Bereniece said. “In time of trouble there will be a King in Ondres, a Hero, who passes over the earth and under it and pulls his crown from the crystal cave.”
“My Lord,” Teryn said, gently, “I do not mean to sound flippant…”
“But that sounds like foolishness, like a legend for the future.”
“Yes,” Teryn said. “That’s exactly what it sounds like. Do you really think such a… king will come.”
Adrian looked to his parents and to Linalla, who seemed to be as nonplussed as Teryn. But the Queen nodded and Adrian said:
“We believe that he already has.”
FERO HOUSE
Derek remembered what the morning after was like, when one had thoroughly celebrated the Alcot. The feast was three nights, and the days full of solemn ceremony, fasting, prayer and liturgy that at the close of the day gave way to contemplation. Then at the rise of the night, they returned to orgy and the thrill of the body taken through high religious ritual which could only be expelled in lust.
The morning after the last night of the Alcot was almost a relief, no, was a relief, and it ought to have been. They had done all they could and all they should in celebrating the Passion of Adaon. Now, all of Derek’s body ached and he understood why the elders participated in only one night and some of them not at all. Now, especially, a deep ache was in Derek’s anus and the skin around his nose was singed from the strength of smelling herbs and fumes which had enabled him to go further than normal. He had bent himself over many times for many men, been penetrated and penetrated many. He throbbed, sore and spent, jaws aching from fellatio, and when he sat down to shit, his ass burned.
On the fourth morning, all he wanted to do was sleep. He and Lorne and the boy Tobin dozed in one bed, and Cal slept on the floor like in old times, and remembering old times, Derek thought of Conn. Conn had been present. Derek had almost seen him. Things troubled the edges of Derek’s mind, but they were not for right now. Right now was about sleep, and maybe later it would be about drinking so much water he became the ocean. Only then would it be about eating, and finally, possibly after that it could be about bathing as well.
When he woke, it was against the warm weight of Lorne, and Tobin was lazily, almost meditatively, sucking his cock. Derek didn’t stop him, but readjusted and closed his eyes in half sleep giving himself to Tobin as the boy sucked on him. He was almost, but not entirely, surprised by how he rose to hardness, and how Tobin wordlessly mounted and began riding him. In the end, weariness left Derek enough to sit up, turn the boy over and plow him, and he was not conscious of who was in the room or not while Tobin cried out under him and, at last, Derek came.
He did not bathe, but wiped down, then a blue hooded robe over his nakedness, Derek left Asiemento House and went down into the library. He saw Gabriel once, reading earnestly at a great table under the high ceilings. But then Gabriel was always reading, and it was only a little later, while wandering through the histories, The Rise and Fall of the Sinercians, A History of Avrance, and Armor in Ancient Days that Gabriel found him again and asked, “What mood is on you, and what are you looking for?”
“I can scarcely describe my mood. It is as if I am on the edge of something, and what the something is I cannot say.”
“I know you cannot say it,” Gabriel said. “But you might hint at it, say as much as you can.”
“It is these feelings, these visions and dreams that say something is happening.”
“But we know something is happening.”
“But that is all that we know,” Derek said. “Surely a priest of your grade knows more.”
“I know there is war in the south and Chyr lacks a king or a queen, that war in the north seems to be coming to an end, that the priests of the Ahna Ahnar sing that the Age of War is over, that Conn is trained as a sorcerer and the first Blue Priest to be trained as one in years, But… what it all means I cannot say.
“Perhaps you should speaking to Fero.”
At the mention of the abbot’s name, a tingle of fear and something else ran through Derek. In most Blue houses, the Abbot or the High Priest was the first person who trained an acolyte in the ways of sex. But it had not been so here, and it was only in the days before Derek had left the first time that Fero had begun having sex with the members of the House, including Derek, and during the Alcot, he and Derek had been nearly inseparable. A large part of his current aching was being pounded by Fero, the mortar at the end of the pestle of Fero’s lust. And in the light night early mornings of their drug fueled lust, Derek crawled on hands and knees to take Fero’s thick dark penis into his mouth. But there was still that old prudishness, the world of the outside that thought, after such excess, how can I come before him as the Abbot again?
And yet, hadn’t he and Gabriel spent many nights pressed together, giving themselves up to all pleasure, and now here was the bookish redhead with the most sensible suggestion in the world.
“Go to Fero.”
“Because you have had dreams?” Fero said. “And because you have known visions?”
They were in the large many windowed office of Abbot Fero, and through the thin white curtains Derek saw the east side of Kingsboro stretching to the Pasture Fields and the wide, flat river.
“During the Alcot I saw Conn. He was in caves, somewhere under the earth. Akkrebeth was there. And Prince Anson. And there were some I did not know. And Conn saw me.”
“Of course. You two are linked,” Fero leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingertips together.
“But… how? Do you see? Do you see others?”
“Sometimes. Not often.”
“But we are not wizards. We are only priests.”
“All of the old orders have some magic to them. You know that. You know the Blue Magic is a thing, long linked to the Blue Mages of the Hidden Isle.”
“Linked, but not the same. And not like this. Not like Conn, who is trained as a mage.”
“And more to the point not like you.”
“What?” Derek looked up at Fero.
“Surely you cannot continue pretending you are like the others. There is something different in you. The thing that makes you like Conn.”
“Conn has Royan blood, and through that the enchanters skill,” Derek said.
He held out his hands.
“I am white as white can be. I’ve said there is Royan in me, but if so it was so long ago, I cannot tell it.”
“There may very well be distant Royan in you,” Fero said. “But you are a Dauman, nearly pure blooded.”
“Daumans do not breed sorcerers.”
“That is not entirely true.”
Derek thought a while, and he said, “That sorcerer… Phineas…”
“But he is something different.”
“I have heard tales of their Hands, the soldiers that terrorize the southern lands. But they are not sorcerers.”
“Are they not?”
Derek frowned.
“Dauman sorcerers?”
The Hands are not Daumans. They were before the Daumans though now even the Daumans have forgotten it. They traveled into the North long ago and lay with the mothers of the Hale and the Ayl and passed some of their traits onto them so that their blood would in time bring them back to the land from which the Hands came. But of old the Hands were not apprenticed to darkness. They were free and powerful, a nation of witches, as pale as many Royan were dark, with black hair and blue or black eyes, and they were called the People of Gozen.”
“They were sorcerers?”
“They were witches,” Fero said. “Their power different from what is known on the Hidden Isle or even what is known on the Woman’s Isle, for though Nimerly and her women call themselves witches, many possess the enchantment of the Utter East as well.”
“All of this is over my head, Master.”
“Some of it may have been above even Ohean’s, which is why, while he recognized you, he did not recognize you for what you are as he did Conn. Indeed it took me some searching to figure it out myself. You do not possess the scraps of magic, Derek, but magic itself. This is why, until you find a teacher, rather than asking Gabriel or myself what all of these visions and signs mean, you will have to ask yourself. You are full of power, only you did not know it. You do not have magic despite being Dauman, but because of it. You are—”
“I’m a fucking Hand!”
“You are what the Hands were and will be again,” Fero said. “You are a witch of Gozen.”
“Well, then why aren’t we all witches?” Derek wondered later that afternoon as he sat smoking in the gardens of Asiemento House and Gabriel sat beside him.
“I have been wondering about that too,” Gabriel said. “And this is what I think. It must be like anything else. You have to be near something to bring out something in you. Here you are in the Blue Temple, the oldest part of the Old Faith, and that brought it out in you some, and then you probably have Royan blood and maybe that brought it out more. And then Conn brought it all the way. Maybe?”
“Maybe,” Derek agreed. “I cannot say.”
“Neither can I,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe, from the look of you, your family just bred true that ancient blood. But what do you know now?”
It was such a strange question that Derek nearly missed it, and then he said, “I know that someone is coming. Because I have dreamed of him. And I know that when he comes it will be time for us all to leave. We were here for a time, not to make home. That is what I know.”
A few mornings later, when Derek awoke in a tangle with Tobin and Lorne and gingerly separated himself, pulling on his blue hooded robe, he went down the seven flights to the Black Door, the door of admission. The sun was barely up and the sky grey white when he pulled open the wide doors and saw. coming toward them, a tall, hooded figure in gauzy red, swirling about him in the morning breeze. He stood before Derek, then lowered his hood, and it was some moments before Derek took in the jewel bright almond eyes with their dark eyeliner, the unshaven face, sensuous mouth and spiky hair, or the blink of the two gold earrings.
“Pol Kurusagan!”
“Greetings, Derek Annakar,” Pol said in a voice that was the same, merry as it had always been, but somehow different.
“I am now a Red Priest, sent from the Red Priests on the Hidden Isle, and I have come to tell you and yours that the time for resting has ended, and the time to sojourn is upon us once more.”
