The Winds of Khalakovo - Bradley P. Beaulieu [87]
“I don’t remember,” she admitted.
Victania took her in, from her bare feet to her head, a prim look of disgust on her face. “Think.”
She tried. She recalled the last few moments in the aether, as well as a strong feeling of discomfort, of grief, but the more she tried to pin the memories down, the more focused she became on the simple act of wakening.
“My mother, the Matra, asked you here to take the dark. Did they teach you so little—”
“Stop,” Atiana said. That one word, mother, had brought about the glimmer of memories.
“—the first thing you do—”
“Silence!”
Atiana glanced around the room, struggling to hold on to the faint memory of a mother holding her child. “There was a babe”—her words were practically a whisper—“in Volgorod.”
Victania watched carefully, but held her tongue.
Atiana shivered. Her eyes watered. She had not known the woman, but the aether made things seem more personal and emotional than they would have been under the light of the sun. She had felt, not that she was the woman, but that she had as much at stake in that child as the mother did. It was personal, and stepping out from under the aether’s spell had done nothing to lessen the feelings.
She told Victania the story, slowly, for the words came in fits and starts, and she feared if she spoke too quickly, it would all come out in one tearful gout. When she was done, she was finally able to meet Victania’s eyes. There was no shock in Victania’s expression, no sense that anything Atiana had said was new information.
“You know of this...” Atiana said softly.
“It has been happening for months.”
“To babes?”
“Nyet. To the old, to the sick. It was only a matter of time before the young were affected too. Children will be next. And then...”
Victania didn’t have to finish. They both knew what was at stake. The blight had started by affecting the health of their crops, their game. Why wouldn’t it move on to the very people that inhabited the islands?
“Does my mother know this?”
“Of course.”
“Then why hasn’t she told me?”
“Because this news cannot be spread. The people look to us for protection.
There are already weekly disturbances in Volgorod, and scattered incidents in Tuyal and Erotsk and Izhny. How long do you think it would be before there are riots in the streets? How long before they march on Radiskoye to demand that we shelter them?”
Not long at all, Atiana thought, but it still hurt to be marked as an untrustworthy by her own mother. Then again, she had never shown the least bit of interest in taking the dark, nor in matters of politics—why would Mother trust her with the information?
Why would Saphia?
It was a clear sign of just how desperate things had become when the Matra of Khalakovo had been forced into depending on Atiana for the protection of her Duchy.
“There must be something we can do,” Atiana said.
Victania shook her head. “There is nothing, nothing save coming here to lend us your strength, to continue to give the Matra her needed rest during these troubled times.”
CHAPTER 24
Nikandr trudged up the stairs, fighting off another yawn, as crisp footsteps rose in volume behind him. “You didn’t think you’d be allowed to lay your head down, did you?”
Nikandr turned and found Ranos on the stairs below him. He looked to his left, to his room near the end of the long hall, dearly wishing he could just ignore his brother and get some sleep. The last few days felt jumbled, like all the minutes of all the hours spent in the donjon with Ashan and Nasim were piled on top of one another, none of them distinguishable from the others. It didn’t help that he and Jahalan had made no real progress. Ashan claimed that Nasim couldn’t have been involved in the summoning of the suurahezhan, though he also admitted that he hadn’t been there when it happened. Nikandr’s focus had been to find ways to reach Nasim, to find out what might have happened that day, and though Ashan was forthcoming about the tricks he used to reach Nasim, none of them had