Page 126 of Untempered
She’d be a soiree person if she had the right friends. She just thought that socializing had to be superficial. That’s what she’d been led to believe. Thanking the One for Kadan teaching me otherwise. But I didn’t interrupt, just nodded along.
“Well, La’Angi has been here a very long time.” She flicked her eyes toward me. “Since before Barloc.”
My mind skipped ahead, and the air caught in my lungs at the implication of what she was saying. She hadn’t just found something banned by the King for telling some truths he didn’t like. “You’ve got ancient texts?”
“They aren’tthatold,” she objected. Then, sheepishly, “Yes.”
I blew out a breath.
“They put the park in a very strange spot, you see. There’s this huge tree, and it’s just odd. It doesn’t make sense from a traffic perspective or in terms of drainage. The rest of the city makes sense. Why would it lead to apark?”
“Uh-huh.” Mayhap I shouldn’t have asked.
“I just wanted to knowwhy.”
“Did you find out?”
She paused. “Sort of. Did you know the Wife was actually based on an amalgamation of other goddesses who were worshipped? And when Barloc came here, he kind of took on some of the traits of the religion to make it more palatable for locals, so they could keep festival days and such like. That’s why we celebrate the birth of the One during the thaw. There was already a rebirth festival then.”
That Ihadknown, having traveled beyond lands Barloc had reached. What religions hadn’t reached the Steppes weren’t worth worrying about. “Galeah,” I said, then frowned. “Or was that one Irissi? Irissa?” I couldn’t remember. I’d heard alotof names prayed to. Seemed to me you prayed to an idea, not a person, but what did I know? It was my job to stick a sword in anyone who got too close, not to think. “Anyway, the park somehow led to you reading treasonous texts.”
“There was a rock in the park near the market,” she said, unfolding herself. “It was almost as tall as the inner wall. Before Barloc, they prayed to it. The citywasbuilt around it. It was magical, apparently, but the magic was evil.”
“According to Barloc,” I clarified dryly. “Who was known for his fair, even-handed assessment of such things.”
“Right,” she agreed. “Exactly. The people of the time didn’t accept it and kept praying to it on the sly. They whipped, tortured, imprisoned, and even killed a lot of worshippers. In the end, they ripped out the stone and threatened to kill anyone who prayed to it. Someone planted a tree where it was removed. They were killed and tossed in the hole, but they’ve never successfully killed the tree. It’s hundreds of years old.”
“Fertilized by its believers,” I mused. It suited La’Angi, but I didn’t tell her that.
She clapped her hands, grinning. “This is why I’m fascinated!” She bounced a little as she talked, and it was possibly the most animated I’d seen her. The flush in her cheeks made me burn. I pulled my mind firmly back to trees and ancient city planning. “But the people who hauled the stonekept dying,Chay. They would just up anddrop dead.”
A chill went through me. I listened to her talk about how many people’s hearts had stopped beating and the lengths the leader at the time went to, trying to shatter or otherwise dispose of this stone. I was skipping ahead, past the details that so fascinated her and made her burn so beautifully.
It was the stone Ylva had named as a meeting place.
“…and thereasonpeople prayed to it was because it was protective,” she went on. “So after they moved it, there were issues in the city. There was one time when the earth shook, and then a giant wave came and washed away big chunks of land, but it was turned back because of the stone.”
My unease grew. “That’s no magic I know of.” I didn’t trust Barloc to have made the best decisions, but the man wouldn’t have got rid of it if it was so wonderful. “You just told me all the ways itkilledpeople.”
She let out a huff. “When it’s threatened. We aren’t threatening it.”
The idea of a rock feeling threatened was just another layer of strange I didn’t know I was equipped for. I let her talk it through and tell me all the little pieces of the puzzle she’d been putting together recently. I had no doubt it felt very satisfying to have her focus from all that time ago rewarded so well. And it was really a joy to listen to her after so long in the silence. While I liked her quiet, her passion made my blood heat to witness. She got up, pacing, talking with her hands about how they’d tossed the stone into the sea, and had it haul back out, how a fire had ripped across the land and burned the crops to the ground, and the stone had made them spring back from the ashes. Big, far-reaching disaster stuff.
There was no mention of healing broken bones, prosperity, or births, as you’d often hear folks praying about.
“And I feel like the stonemustbe the same one Ylva mentioned. I looked up the name she said, and I’msureit’s almost the same as one of the names in one of the early post-Barloc texts, dated to approximately twenty years before Barloc’s arrival.”
My head ached. I didn’t want to burst her bubble, but the sun was coming up, and though her cheeks were pink with excitement now, I’d seen them deathly pale far too recently. “Embers, that stone isn’t magic you can just summon. Or have you been studying magework as well as old city planning?”
“That’s the thing,” she said excitedly. “It was used byeveryone.At first, I thought it must be some sort of cultural norm. Everyone might’ve just studied this magic as part of their day-to-day, so they had the skill to activate the item, the same way we all learn the skill to light a fire, right? Buttiny childrenprayed to it.”
That didn’t prove much. “Tiny children light fires.”
“You know what Imean.” She let out a huff. “Now I knowwhereit is and what it does. I just don’t knowhow.”
I shook my head. “You’re missing some key points, there. You don’t actually know what it does or what it costs. All magic has a cost.” I didn’t know much about magework, but I knew that.
“What if that mage we fought the other day was using the stone?” she asked, her eyes bright. “What if that’s how Ylva knew to go there?”
