Laelia

Laelia stood to one side, fidgeting as the Auld of Nefyti examined the now-vibrant weigh-line. Thibault had simply stood there for minutes, a thoughtful look on his face as he eyed the great span of aspens stretching across the land in all directions.

“My men said they burned this irreparably,” Laelia said, at his prolonged silence. Being near the weigh-line was making her skin itch uncomfortably and she wanted nothing more than to go back to the Spyre and a hot bath. “It looks like they got lazy.”

“Laziness does not account for it growing by a thousand times its original size,” Thibault said. He still had that contemplative look on his face, like he was seeing something amusing. Being this close to him, the lightning-strike scent of his magic was overwhelming all other smells, and Laelia felt like something was draining her, her body getting weaker and more feverish even as she stood there waiting for his response, and she wanted nothing more than to get back to her chambers in the Spyre and scrub her body with soap.

The problem, however, was that the Ganlin weigh-line had decided to spread across the world two weeks ago, swallowing up every road in the Realm, resisting all attempts to destroy it, and now it was headed towards the Spyre.

And that was what was leaving Laelia with goosebumps. It was unmistakably oozing Ganlin magic. So strong she could feel it from two miles off, from the balcony of her tower chambers. It shouldn’t have been possible, and yet, here it was, sprawling across the countryside where roads had once been.

“I don’t know what happened,” Laelia began, trying to find some way to ease the awful sense of fear clenching her stomach. She knew the stories of how the Auld of Nefyti had been created. A great injustice, a stalwart refusal to die, and an all-consuming need to right the wrongs done to his family…

What if the killings at Ganlin Hall had spawned another one? What if the aspens were growing with the veoh from their death-throes? What if there was another monster out there, one that could not rest until its murderers were all dead?

Failure. It all added up to failure. First the Pillar, now this… She hastily took a step back as a new aspen grew between her feet, headed down the main road towards the Spyre. On the other side of the overgrown highway, people and carts were nervously walking through a farmer’s vineyard nearby in order to continue to Siorus. The farmer, for his part, was standing nearby, still red-faced from yelling ineffectually at the steady stream of interlopers.

“I don’t know how this happened,” Laelia repeated, thinking maybe Thibault hadn’t heard her. “We put the protections in place before we killed them. I counted heads.” Only Nerys Ganlin had been unaccounted for, and Laelia was about ninety-eight percent sure she was dead. She had seen her die. Sure, she hadn’t seen the body afterwards, but in the chaos following their attack on Ganlin Hall, she was actually pleased that there had only been one body unaccounted for.

Besides, Nerys Ganlin was an eccentric old hag that could only work cloth. Wynfor tried for years to get Nerys’s veoh to work on anything else, and she’d failed enough times he’d given up. Wynfor Ganlin had given up. Even if she lived, she wasn’t a danger.

Thibault glanced over his shoulder at her. “Nerys escaped?” He said it slowly, with deceptive calm.

Laelia swallowed convulsively, having managed to keep that fact to herself until now. Not even Taebin knew, because she wasn’t sure of the headcount herself. Perhaps the body had been left elsewhere. Perhaps the old bat had crawled off to die in a puddle somewhere. Or perhaps Nerys had been buried before Laelia had taken the count. “I never said that,” she said evenly. Of everything she had read about the Auld of Nefyti, mind-reading hadn’t been on his list.

“You didn’t have to,” Thibault said, gesturing to the scar on her left palm. He was still smiling, but it made her cold. For an instant, Laelia could feel ice spread along her veins, searing the path his own magic had taken, over a year before.

“Nerys is nothing but a weaver’s bastard,” Laelia babbled, suddenly unnerved by the bargain she had entered into with the most dangerous man to have lived in the last two millennia. “Even if she escaped—which I’m not saying she did—she has no power. Nothing to be afraid of.” Then she remembered something about Nerys being key in destroying Thibault’s last body, a golem made of cedar three hundred years before, and she bit her lip.

“Nerys Ganlin,” Thibault said pleasantly, “created a dreadgate from a discarded shirt.” He turned toward her with a decidedly unpleasant smile. “Nerys Ganlin is the only Auldheist those writhing maggots have produced in over a thousand years, and you tell me now that you somehow forgot to kill her?”

Laelia’s mouth fell open. “Her? An Auldheist?” She had to laugh at that, because it was preposterous. “She knits. She sews. She’s spent the last three hundred years rotting in front of a loom, making tapestries for Ganlin Hall.”

“And I will bet you,” Thibault said, still sickly sweet, “she looks exactly as she did three hundred years ago.”

Laelia opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again, because she couldn’t remember Nerys ever looking any younger. From the couple times she had seen her without her deep hoods and drapes of cloth, she looked, now that Laelia was thinking about it, mid-twenties.

But everyone knew she was almost as old as Wynfor. Had been almost as old, Laelia reminded herself. Because she was dead.

“She’s just a weaver,” Laelia said lamely. “Besides. There’s a chance she was buried before I could count heads.”

“A chance,” Thibault said. He shook his head. “I honestly thought you were smarter than this, Laelia.”

“What’s she going to do?” Laelia blurted. “Enchant a sheet?” Nerys’s nickname, after all, was the Sheet-Charmer of Broketoe. Taebin had often joked with her that it was because the daughter of a weaver could only have earned her strange reverence from the Ganlins by spending her early years exploring rich men’s bedlinens.

“Clearly you underestimated her,” Thibault said, though his smile was fading. “Considering what’s at stake, I should make you go find her body and bring it to me, just to be sure.”

The thought of digging up a hundred and thirteen graves made Laelia nauseous.

“But lucky for you,” Thibault said, “I could recognize her veoh anywhere, and this definitely doesn’t belong to the cloth-witch.” He turned back to the massive weigh-line now clogging their roads with a curious look. “Which, I must say, is unexpected. I thought I had accounted for them all.”

“There’s a prophecy that our enemies would try to hide amongst us,” Laelia offered, trying to steer the conversation away from Nerys Ganlin and the possibility of being compelled to find her grave. “What if the Ganlins managed to disguise one of their own as one of our auldlings? What if Wynfor or Rees is alive and at the—”

“Did you know,” Thibault interrupted, “the roads of this country were laid down atop an ancient aspen grove that once spread across the entire continent?”

Laelia, who wasn’t used to being interrupted, nonetheless held her tongue. She narrowed her eyes at his back. “I wasn’t aware,” she said.

“It was over a millennia ago,” Thibault said, as if he were talking about yesterday’s weather. He continued to watch the grove expand with interest.

“So how do we stop it?” Laelia asked.

Thibault laughed as if he thought that were somehow funny.

Laelia frowned, realizing he brought her out here just to look, not because he was going to stop it. “We have to do something. It’s taking over our roads.”

“Did you not hear me?” Thibault asked, looking over at her curiously. “I said it’s taking back what once belonged to it.”

“The roads,” she fumed.

Thibault turned to cock his head at her. “Do you have any idea why the Ganlins survived the war? Out of the nine families, they were the poorest.”

“Still are,” Laelia snorted, before she realized they were dead. “I mean,” she said, reddening. “They were…”

Thibault waved off her words with another contemplative look at the trees. “They survived because they had this.” He patted the closest trunk, which immediately turned black and began to wither. Laelia took another hasty step back, despite herself.

“This,” Thibault said, “allowed them freedom that, before that time, only the Rockfarmers had.”

“But it’s blocking our roads,” Laelia said.

Thibault lowered his hand and turned to her, irritation in his face. “Go around them.”

Laelia could not believe it. “You actually mean to just leave it?”

“Show me an Auld powerful enough to stop it,” Thibault said, as the tree he had killed was replaced with a new one, “and I will show you the Auld who made it.”

Laelia flushed at his insinuation. “We killed all the Ganlins. I saw Nerys and Agathe and Icel and Wynfor take Taebin’s fire to the back of their heads. I saw them go down with holes in their skulls. I was there. Whatever this is, it’s not because any Ganlins are still alive.”

“Mmm.” Thibault stepped aside as another aspen grew before him, continuing its ever-present march across their country. Her country, since Cyriaca was a brainless puppet and Taebin did what he was told.

“In fact,” Laelia said, desperate to not have the blame for another failure cast at her feet, “this started near Ariod, after you had us send an expedition to Ariod to recover the Eye. Which wasn’t there. Not only that, but everyone we sent to Ariod died.”

Thibault turned to give her a long, calculating glance, his brown eyes unreadable. “Pity.”

Laelia’s heart stuttered as, meeting his utterly humorless gaze, she realized he had known what the outcome would be before he sent them.

“We sent some of our strongest on that expedition,” Laelia babbled. “At your request. Two of Cyriaca’s sons. Daegraf and Josue… Heirs to the throne…”

“Mere boys, rash and impulsive adolescents you should have vetted better before offering them as potential candidates for the expedition. I trusted your opinion and it almost ended life as we know it.”

Laelia’s face reddened, because she had been struggling with that knowledge since it had happened. One of the boys, having had access to the old texts growing up, had to have gotten cocky and triggered the Pillar… The shame of it was crushing her. Nerys unaccounted for, her cousins dead, the Needle’s Eye not where it was supposed to be, a tree eating their road system… Failure after failure. She had yet to explain to Cyriaca that her sons were dead, saying only that they were ‘away’ on a ‘research project.’

Gods, she needed a bath.

Thibault held her gaze a moment longer, then returned his attention to the trees. “Were there any Ganlins prone to…promiscuity?”

But Laelia brushed that aside, desperately trying to save face. “You knew they would die? You knew they would accidentally activate the Pillar and you allowed me to send them anyway?”

“The Pillar can’t be accidentally activated,” Thibault said, his back still to her. “And this actually works in our favor. It will take longer for the Auldhunds of the Spyre to realize those of the Citadel have perished if they can’t travel the roads. You will ride back to the Spyre and tell people that the Ganlins were doing an experiment up in the mountains and it went awry, and they called in all their Aulds to try and fix it. It should buy you some time.” He glanced over his shoulder at her pointedly. “Seeing how two hundred and eleven Auldhunds still survive in the Spyre, despite our agreement.”

“As it turns out,” Laelia growled, “it’s harder to kill two hundred and eleven beasts that are immune to veoh and regenerate than one might originally think.”

“Drop them all into a pit and set them on fire,” Thibault said, still sounding distracted. His eyes were fixed on an aspen sapling growing a few feet from him.

“And how do you suggest we do that?” Laelia growled. “Each one of them is stronger than six men.”

“It was your job to figure it out,” Thibault said. “As it was your job to execute all the Ganlins.”

Laelia scoffed, again being forced to step aside by a growing aspen. “You can’t blame this on me.”

“I suppose I can’t,” Thibault said. “Not completely.” He sniffed at the air and made a face. “This has the stink of Rale to it.” He stepped out of the way of a spreading limb. “Looks like toppling his statues and burning his devotees didn’t kill the fat bastard, after all.”

Laelia felt her skin break out in goosebumps. “Rale as in the god?”

Thibault snorted. “He’s no more a god than I am.”

Laelia opened her mouth to argue, since every text she had read said Thibault was a god—a god of wrath, vengeance, grudges, and betrayals—but then she bit her lip. He had, after all, started out as a mortal. Gingerly, she offered, “These Auldhunds… I’m not sure we can kill them. The ones we experimented on at the Citadel… They were incredibly hard to kill.”

Thibault whipped around to give her a disgusted look. “That’s because they were made to kill Aulds. Which they will be doing en masse if they figure out what happened at the Citadel before you get off your ass and strike.”

Laelia’s lips twisted. “If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?” She was becoming less and less enamored of the Auld of Nefyti as time went on, as it became clearer to her that, despite his interesting tricks, he relied on others to do his work for him. “You said your poison would kill them. It doesn’t. We hit the Citadel with your assurances the Unmade would fall like flies with your concoction. We had to use arrows.”

“And then you dumped them in the Idorion. Brilliant.” Thibault snorted.

“We retrieved them and killed the fishermen who found them,” Laelia retorted. “No one talked.”

“And for every fisherman who reported it, there were ten who didn’t, out of fear of what you did to those who did.” Thibault looked almost angry when he said, “Commoners are not as stupid as you think, Auldin.”

“No one will believe commoners when they talk of dead Auldhunds,” Laelia snapped. “They put their children to bed with tales of flying horses and talking forests.”

“Because such things are totally beyond the realm of possibility,” Thibault said, touching another tree that was swaying in a nonexistent wind. It, too, wilted and crumbled to dust before he removed his hand. “Besides,” he said, as a new one grew in its place, “All they need is to plant a seed, and the Auldhund commander will send a messenger to go find out the truth.”

Laelia got goosebumps again, because it was true.

“Kill the Auldhunds,” Thibault said pleasantly. “Or you will follow the Ganlins. I’ll make certain of it.” Then he vanished, leaving her standing there, awash in unease.

Once again, she wasn’t quite sure what side Thibault was on.

She’d started having her doubts when survivors of the expedition to Ariod had returned to her saying that Cyriaca’s eldest son Daegraf had activated the Pillar when they found it in the ruins. It had just seemed…wrong.

Laelia supposed Daegraf might have had the combined knowledge and brazenness to attempt to activate a tool that could only be controlled by an Auldheist, but she hadn’t thought the boy was that stupid. It certainly hadn’t been Josue—he was a happy, tittering follower just like his mother. But Daegraf… It bothered her that the boy could have been so stupid, mainly because, of all the Vethyle children, he was the one who reminded her most of herself.

It hadn’t even occurred to her that the boy could be that stupid, and the miscalculation was astronomical.

Something wasn’t right, and it was unnerving her that she didn’t know what it was.

Wiping away goosebumps, Laelia mounted her horse and went to go get a bath.