The Sleeping Life (Eferum Book 2) (3 page)

Before the dressmakers could do more than notice, Kendall had it unfastened and off, and then made herself scarce until the pair staggered out under their load of pricey cloth. She had no wish to have them tut over her again with all their comments about how adorable she'd look in a dress and what a shame it was she didn't grow her hair long. They could take their dainty and shove it up their petite.

Rennyn had made almost as many faces as Kendall while the dressmakers had been saying that, trying not to laugh. But right now she was expressionless, sitting staring out the window, one of her hands closed on the skirt of her new dress, creasing it. Kendall wondered if she could be nervous about her audience with the Queen, or just fretting because Captain Faille wasn't with her.

"Are you going to be able to go to this meeting?"

"Sitting down and drinking tea? I think I can manage that."

Kendall's shrug was an unspoken "don't say I didn't warn you", but she bent to help Rennyn with her shoes anyway. Rennyn's broken ribs hadn't healed properly, and she still had problems with bending and twisting. And laughing and sneezing and coughing and a surprising number of things. At least when she stood up she was steadier on her feet. No swaying as she turned, smoothing the line of her skirt.

"Tell me when you get done preening," Kendall said. "I'm sure Queen Astranelle won't mind the wait."

"You're planning on coming along?"

"There's a pair of guards hanging about to march you up there, but I'll go as far as the Old Palace with you." Been ordered to, more like. Whenever Captain Faille couldn't sit around watching Rennyn, he made everyone take turns following her about. Not that Kendall wouldn't have thought of it anyway. Rennyn would hate fainting somewhere on the way to see the Queen, and not having anyone she knew around.

"Is Seb still at the library?" Rennyn asked, making a snail's business of the stairs down to the main hall of the Sentene barracks.

"Be there all year," Kendall replied shortly. She had no interest in the spellbooks Rennyn was gifting to the Houses of Magic, and no patience for the endless fuss over the mouldy old things. Except for a couple, Rennyn had said there wasn't much in them which hadn't already been done by someone else, and done better. It was stupid for everyone in the Houses to get so excited just because Rennyn's family had had the only copies.

As they crossed the main hall, she searched again for some sign of life in the barracks. "Where is everyone? Sukata said she had to go to a big meeting."

"It wasn't a Sentene meeting," Rennyn replied, but then closed her mouth tight as they met up with the two black and gold-clad guards come to escort her to the Queen.

A Kellian meeting then. Kendall closed her own mouth as well, and kept it that way. She could guess well enough why the Kellian were meeting. People were really and truly afraid of them right now, and not just because the Black Queen had been able to control them so totally. They were a lot stronger and faster than normal people, and the pointy fingernails were harder to overlook now that a few people in Court had seen how easily they could be used to cut through flesh. The newssheets and people in the Council had turned into braying asses about the risk the Kellian posed, and totally ignored the fact that the people they wanted to get rid of were busy saving their lives. It was because they were strong and fast that they were so good at hunting down the monsters out of the Hells—the place the mages called the Eferum. And they hadn't done anything wrong by choice, had been totally under the control of the Black Queen, hadn't even hurt anyone except Rennyn. But it was as if this was the first time the majority of Tyrland had really noticed the Kellian, even though they'd been around working as Sentene for ages. So there was all this talk about whether the Kellian counted as real people when the first ones had been things called golems, made by the Black Queen. Whether they could be trusted. Whether they should be killed.

Whether Rennyn owned them.

None of the Kellian had been happy to learn descendants of the Black Queen existed, and though they put a good face on it, they still hadn't recovered from discovering that Rennyn had inherited an ability to command them. Most of them avoided coming near her.

Sukata, who had more to do with Rennyn because she was a rare Kellian mage, said they hated what she represented about themselves. And Sukata wouldn't even talk about what it had been like to be taken over by the Black Queen, but she'd had nightmares most every night she and Kendall had shared a room at Rennyn's old house, and the memory surely made Rennyn's lesser control harder to bear.

No-one had told Kendall it was a secret Kellian meeting. Probably Sukata wasn't allowed to. Obviously they were going to talk over the choices they had when their ungrateful country wanted them gone, and no doubt what to do about Rennyn and Sebastian and the Claires' evil uncle as well. Kendall was nobody who would get invited to that kind of thing, or told what was decided.

Frowning, Kendall checked Rennyn's colour. She was walking slower, and it would probably be best if she sat down and rested somewhere before going on. Villemar Palace wasn't a single building, but a mismatched clunch of them sitting on top of the central hill of Asentyr, with a big wall all around. The part called the Houses of Magic wasn't that far from the Old Palace, where the royal family lived, but Rennyn was useless at any kind of distance. Kendall had known ancient grandmothers who had more stamina.

Since they were running a little late, Kendall bet Rennyn didn't want to stop like any sensible person would, so she caught at the woman's hand and arranged it on her shoulder. The way the thin fingers tightened told Kendall just how well Rennyn was managing, but she'd stick to it anyway. After being so powerful she could pretty much do whatever she liked, Rennyn was just too stubborn to accept being so weak she couldn't get from one building to the next without help.

Kendall had only been intending to go as far as the entrance, but kept on until Rennyn was safely stowed in a flower-striped chair in a flower-striped room looking dubiously at the delicate flowery cups neatly laid out for tea. Kendall knew her teacher would be thinking of all the problems she'd had dropping things. Not often recently, but her hands still shook when she tired. Fortunately there was no sign of the Queen.

"Have you done your practice today?" Rennyn asked abruptly.

"Not yet," Kendall replied, annoyed. "The bowls aren't going anywhere." For a whole month now she'd been doing the same thing, and though it was far more than Kendall had ever expected to do, it was achingly dull and pointless. Putting five wooden bowls in a row and lifting and turning them one after another was enough to kill anyone's enthusiasm for magic, and Kendall hadn't had much to start with. No-one would pay her for turning bowls over.

"I've a different exercise for you then," Rennyn said, in the extra-reasonable tone Kendall distrusted. "Seb brought a small chest up to Illidian's quarters. The contents are in poor condition since it wasn't under any form of preservation—there's cloth gone rotten and turning to powder. Take it out to the Sentene practice ground and try unpacking it without touching it. You can toss the rotted cloth, and sort the rest into colours."

Kendall shrugged, but decided this meant Rennyn was feeling better now she was sitting down. "Do I have to do it out in the practice ground?"

"Since there doesn't seem to be any way to unpack it without getting everything in the vicinity filthy, yes."

"All right."

Suppressing her irritation, Kendall headed out, wishing she hadn't decided to stick out playing student while Rennyn was still sick. When Sukata's mother, Captain Sarana, had withdrawn her daughter from Tyrland's best school of magic and made formal arrangements with Rennyn for Sukata to be her student, Kendall hadn't resisted the same arrangement being made for her because she thought she'd learn more than she had staying in the annoying and useless Arkathan. Huge mistake.

Rennyn and Sebastian were both totally in love with how magic worked, and kept trying to get Kendall to understand how to create original spells, when all Kendall wanted to do was learn how to cast the common ones she could get paid for, like how to create the protective Circles around settlements, and make light and heat and cold stones. She was the wrong sort of student for Rennyn and everyone knew it. And felt the need to tell her.

A mage like Rennyn Claire deserves the best students the Arkathan can offer. Don't you see, the time she spends teaching you the basics could be put to better use? Such a pity. Such a waste.

Those were just the outright rude, but most of the conversations she'd been having lately hadn't been any more fun. Kendall had had more than enough of mages telling her how lucky she was, and to be properly grateful, and never once minding their own business. Maybe worst of all was Sebastian trying to make her catch his enthusiasm for how things worked, so that she could be a fancy-pants 'true' mage instead of what he called a 'rote' mage.

Rennyn at least didn't do that. She just said that Kendall could decide what kind of mage she wanted to be after she had a command of the basics, and that memorising a bunch of spells someone else had made up wasn't the basics. But so far that had meant absolutely nothing but boring lifting exercises and lectures, and if Rennyn hadn't been so sick, Kendall wouldn't have stayed a day. She'd already made plans to find a better fit of teacher after Rennyn had recovered some more. She'd miss Sukata doing that, but Sukata would understand, and it's not like they wouldn't be able to meet up. No, it was the smart thing to do. Kendall would grit her teeth and put up with being a charity case until then.

Back in Captain Faille quarters she changed out of her best clothes. Finding the chest behind a chair, Kendall carried it down to the sandy triangle where the Kellian came and danced around each other with swords, and their supporting Ferumguard sharpened their musket skills. Fortunately no-one was about, since Kendall hated practicing with an audience. Not only because it had taken her so long to get the things she was trying to move to do what she wanted, but because everyone was all too interested. Rennyn was—or had been—the most powerful mage in centuries. And not only that, she and Sebastian did magic differently from everyone else, using three methods instead of just the one that was safest. It was hard to concentrate when people watched you as if you were about to give away some great big secret.

Sighing, Kendall sat down cross-legged in front of the chest. Thought Magic—Force Magic as most people called it—wasn't taught because students kept accidentally hurting themselves when they were trying to learn it. Yet the first thing Sebastian Claire had done when he'd met Kendall was give her a Thought Magic exercise to do, just because he couldn't imagine being a mage without it.

It was simple to explain, if not to do: you willed things to move about and they did. It had taken Kendall a month to be able to pick up a pebble, and now after more than two months she could move things about and turn them over so long as they were light. She had no idea why it was so hard to turn something over, or how this was going to end up making her like Rennyn, who could do all sorts of unlikely things without having to spend loads of time writing out sigils like the other mages.

Unpacking a chest should be simple, though Kendall knew she'd end up feeling almost as tired as Rennyn for the rest of the day. Magical strength was something you built up through practice, and Sebastian had told her to think of herself as a two year-old trying to move furniture.

The chest had a catch, not a lock, and it was easy enough to turn this and then lift the lid, letting out a stink of dust and rot. Inside were little bags, and rolls of velvet that had once been dark blue and now were a faded and mottled grey. Kendall realised she should have brought something to sort it out
into
, but figured the lid would do. Unpacking the chest was going to be a bit more involved than she'd expected, since getting stuff out of little bags was more than just lifting and turning.

The rolls of velvet looked easier, but even just picking one up was a surprise. It sagged. Kendall sat for a while trying different ways of holding a sausage of cloth that shed little fragments of itself at each attempt to make it sit flat and still. It was a
lot
harder than making a rock turn over, but before Kendall could puzzle out what to do she caught it somehow by a corner and the whole thing unravelled.

A waterfall of colour. Ruby. Emerald. Sapphire. Necklaces tumbling from the roll of cloth to lie winking in the mid-morning sun. Kendall stared, stunned, then snorted.

"Sort it into colours? Bet you thought
that
was funny."

An entire chest of the Black Queen's jewels. The Claires had spent less effort looking after it than the stupid books they were donating to the Houses of Magic, which at least had been under some sort of spell not to fall apart. But what would you expect from a pair who'd never had to earn a coin in their lives?

From the looks of their home, the Claires had lived modestly. They hadn't kept any servants, had maintained an ordinary three-bedroom house in a smallish town. Sebastian said they owned four other similar houses in Tyrland, and moved between them to keep from becoming too known in one place. Owning five houses seemed a lot to Kendall, but a Duchess was supposed to live in mansions and have crowds of servants and things. Rennyn wouldn't get that kind of money out of the Duchy she had inherited, since everyone knew Surclere was chicken-scratch poor. Kendall wasn't entirely certain how much a mansion cost compared to a chest full of jewels, but it looked like Rennyn'd at least be able to pay the dressmaker.

Most of the necklaces were ugly, clunky things: the metals tarnished to black and green. It was hard to picture Rennyn or even the Black Queen wearing them. It didn't seem likely they were fake though, and it was going to take a while for Kendall to decide how much she didn't appreciate Rennyn giving her a chest full of jewels to see what she'd do with them.