The Women's War Read online

  It was a time Brynna never spoke about with her daughter, and Alys was happy to keep the silence. She was also glad that when she’d visited her mother in the Abbey as a child, she hadn’t understood what those women in the pavilion were selling.

  Now, after more than three decades as an abigail, Brynna was the abbess, the highest authority within the Abbey. Queen of the Unwanted Women, as it were. It was small comfort to the woman who’d once been the Queen of Aaltah.

  Alys was expected, and her carriage was met by a young abigail whose face was marred by an enormous wine-colored stain over the pale gold skin of her right cheek and the bridge of her nose. The deep crimson robes emphasized the mark, and Alys noticed the girl stood at a slight angle to greet her, as if trying to keep that side of her face in shadow.

  “The abbess is ready for you, my lady,” the girl said in a voice barely above a whisper, her body still canted as she dropped a curtsy.

  Alys wanted to tell the poor child that the mark was not a cause for shame—or at least that it should not be—but doubted it would do much good. Odds were high the girl had been relegated to the Abbey precisely because her family had been ashamed of her appearance and deemed her unmarriageable. At least the stain meant she didn’t have to work the pavilion.

  The shy abigail led Alys to the abbess’s office, within the Abbey’s highest tower. The room was large by the Abbey’s standards, and even relatively comfortable. Small windows on three walls provided more natural light than in other parts of the Abbey, and a candelabra fitted with large luminants made the room even brighter. The luminants were an indulgence, which Alys had gifted to the Abbey so that her mother and the abigails did not have to live in gloom. But while the abbess was in charge of the Abbey’s day-to-day working, she had to answer to the king and the king’s council—including the lord high treasurer, who’d declared Alys’s gift fully taxable. Over Alys’s strenuous objections, the treasury had seized all the luminants but five, allowing the abbess to keep them as long as she used them only for herself as a personal gift from her daughter.

  The cold stone floor was covered with a warm red rug that was growing threadbare in patches, and there was a cozy seating area with a ragtag collection of mismatched chairs situated before the fireplace. More evidence of the treasurer’s greed, allowing the women of the Abbey no more than the bare minimum of comfort while they debased themselves to fill the Crown’s coffers.

  The abbess was sitting in one of those chairs, sipping from a steaming cup of tea, when Alys was shown in. She set the tea aside when Alys entered, rising slowly to her feet and mustering a wan smile as she held out her hands to her daughter.

  Brynna Rah-Malrye had once been a stunning beauty, with perfectly smooth tawny skin, a cascade of raven-black curls, and deep brown eyes that radiated warmth. The Abbey—and time—had stolen much of that beauty. Stress and austere living had etched her face in lines and wrinkles, and her glorious hair, now iron-gray, was perpetually hidden under a red wimple. Even her eyes had lost their luster as cataracts encroached.

  Alys took her mother’s gnarled hands and gave them a squeeze. Ordinarily, the abbess’s dull eyes came to life when Alys visited, reminding her of the vibrant woman she’d once known. Today, the abbess managed a smile, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes, and Alys could see the tension written on her face in bold print.

  “Mama, what’s wrong?” Alys asked as the two women hugged.

  “Nothing, my child,” the abbess said, though she held the embrace for longer than usual.

  Alys shook her head and peered into her mother’s face. She was not imagining those shadows under her mother’s eyes or the sharp crease between her brows.

  The door squeaked as the young abigail closed it, and Alys could hear the soft shuffle of the girl’s footsteps as she retreated. She watched the door and waited until she could no longer hear footsteps before turning to her mother once more.

  “What is it?” she demanded.

  Her mother gave her another wan smile and gestured toward one of the chairs. “Please sit. And have some tea.”

  Alys sat on the very edge of the chair but didn’t even glance at the tea set. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  The abbess slowly resumed her seat, the slight tightening around the corners of her eyes telling Alys that her arthritis was giving her trouble again. There were potions that could ease her symptoms, but they were pricey imports and beyond the Abbey’s meager budget. Alys didn’t like to think of her mother as an old woman, but the abbess was sixty-two, and today she looked more like eighty.

  “There is truly nothing wrong, my child,” the abbess said. “I am fine.”

  “But—”

  The abbess held up her hand to interrupt Alys’s protest. “I am fine, all is well, but I have something important I must speak to you about.” She sighed and shook her head. “I have struggled to figure out how to start.”

  Alys smoothed her skirts just so her hands would have something to do. All was clearly not well, no matter what her mother said. But her mother never spoke without thinking long and hard about her words, and there was no use getting impatient with her. Even if patience was a trait Alys herself lacked.

  The abbess sighed heavily, and a corner of her mouth lifted in a wry smile. “I must apologize in advance for the incomplete information I am about to give you. I know you will have questions, and most of them I will not be able to answer.”

  Alys almost groaned at that, holding back the sound with an effort. Her mother spouted off cryptic, nearly unintelligible warnings and advice all the time, and never seemed to notice or care that Alys didn’t understand. If she was apologizing in advance, this was going to be far worse than usual.

  Alys must have made a face, because her mother chuckled, the sadness momentarily lifting. “Yes, I know I often say things you don’t understand. You’re just going to have to trust me when I say it’s for a good reason.”

  Alys arched a brow. “You mean other than because you enjoy tormenting me?”

  “Well, there’s that, too.” Unexpectedly, she reached out and squeezed Alys’s hand. “I can never adequately convey how much it’s meant to me that you’ve continued to visit me all these years.”

  Alys shook that off. “I don’t understand how anyone can just pretend you don’t exist.” As the king did. As Alys’s brother did. As all her mother’s old friends did.

  Her mother shrugged. “It’s the custom, and most people don’t have the courage to defy custom.”

  Alys would hardly label her own defiance as courage. Everyone knew she was the king’s favorite—if only because she alone withheld her affection. And the king’s favorite could flout some of the most rigid customs without undue hardship. Of course her father wouldn’t be around forever, and her relationship with his heir—her half-brother, Delnamal—was nowhere near as cordial. He had more than once promised to bring her to heel when he became king.

  “You’re my mother,” Alys said simply. “You will always be my mother, no matter what happens.”

  “Yes, and that may well cause you some…difficulties in the days to come.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something is going to happen tonight. Something…momentous. Something that will change the world in ways I can’t entirely foresee.”

  Alys’s stomach knotted, and her chest felt tight. Her mother was not prone to hyperbole—much the opposite, in fact—and if she said something world-changing was going to happen, she meant it literally. “What is it?” Alys asked, her voice coming out high and breathless.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Alys let out a sound between a sigh and a growl, bunching her skirts up in her fists to keep from grabbing her mother by the shoulders and giving her a good shake. “You can’t do that! You can’t tell me something momentous is going to happen and refuse to tell me what!”
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br />   “Of course I can,” her mother responded with an incongruous half-smile. “I’m a seer. It’s what we do.”

  Alys had never been able to determine whether her mother could genuinely foresee the future or whether she meant that in a more figurative manner. There were rumors of spells that allowed women to see the future, but conventional wisdom labeled those rumors false. Alys was not so sure. “Mama—”

  “There’s a reason I can’t tell you, Alysoon. Trust me.”

  Alys jumped up from her chair and started pacing before the unlit fireplace, unable to contain the angry energy that coursed through her blood.

  She loved her mother, she really did. But did she trust her? Even before her mother had been banished to the Abbey, she’d had a hard streak in her, a level of brutal practicality that Alys could never match. Life in the Abbey had certainly not softened her, and though she was not unkind, she was not especially kind, either. It was all too easy to imagine the reason she “couldn’t” tell Alys what was going to happen was that she knew Alys would not like it.

  “It makes no sense to give me a vague and ominous warning when you have no intention of explaining,” Alys snapped.

  The abbess pushed to her feet once more, drawing herself up to her full height and putting on her sternest, most repressive expression. “You’ll understand soon enough, and throwing a tantrum won’t aid your cause.”

  “I don’t have a cause,” Alys said petulantly, but she knew continuing the argument was pointless. Her mother was an immovable object when she wanted to be.

  The abbess reached into the folds of her crimson robes and pulled out a small book bound in blood-red leather and stamped with gold leaf. Some of the gold leaf had been worn off, as if from too much handling, and the spine was cracked almost to the point of coming apart. She held the book out to Alys, who took it from her and frowned at it.

  Heart of My Heart, the title declared, and Alys’s lip curled in distaste. She’d known at once from the red binding that it was a book meant for women, but the title declared it was some kind of romantic drivel, with which Alys had no patience. She quickly thumbed through the pages, just to confirm her initial impression, and saw it was even worse than she’d thought—not just a love story, but love poems. She tried to hand the book back to her mother, but the abbess didn’t take it.

  “It’s for you,” her mother said.

  Alys rolled her eyes. “I might read love poems if someone held a sword to my throat and threatened me with death, but there’s no guarantee.” She was much more apt to read about adventures on the high seas, or accounts of great battles, or biographies of kings past. Anything that wasn’t considered appropriate reading material for a woman, she found intensely intriguing.

  The abbess smiled with genuine humor. “Alysoon, my child, I have known you for quite a long time, and I’m not expecting you to develop a sudden passion for love poetry.”

  Alys frowned and peered more closely at the book, scanning through a few lines on a random page. It was definitely love poetry, of just the treacly sweet flavor that set her teeth on edge. She couldn’t see her mother reading it, much less herself. And yet the book was worn and clearly well-loved.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But you will. After tonight’s events, feed three motes of Rho into the book and you will see why I’ve given it to you.”

  Her mother was telling her to use magic? All Alys’s life, her mother had warned her to keep her Mindseye firmly closed, to resist the temptation to explore. To the point that Alys could practically recite the lectures word for word. (Which, come to think of it, she had, though Jinnell was so painfully proper by nature it had never seemed necessary.)

  What had changed?

  Alys opened her Mindseye, sure it was safe here in the abbess’s closed office. She expected to see the book teeming with elements, all bound together in some complex spell that required only Rho to complete it. Instead, what she saw was…a plain book of love poetry. Perhaps not surprising, as paper was considered nearly useless as a spell vessel, but feeding Rho into an ordinary book would have no effect whatsoever.

  Alys looked at her mother, just to make sure her Mindseye hadn’t suddenly gone blind, and there was indeed a halo of Rho surrounding the older woman. The luminants in the candelabra were filled with some red-orange element Alys didn’t recognize, and the air in the room was swimming with motes like dust in the sunlight. Either the book was filled with elements beyond Alys’s ability to see, or it was exactly what it looked like.

  “I can’t see any elements in it,” Alys said, closing her Mindseye so she could see her mother’s face more clearly.

  “That’s rather the point, my child. No one looking at it would have any reason to suspect it isn’t exactly what it appears.”

  Alys shivered. “Why?” she asked, knowing full well she would not get an answer. At least not a satisfactory one. “Why don’t you want anyone to know it’s a magic item?”

  “That’s another question you will learn the answer to before the sun next rises.”

  Alys was tempted to throw the book to the floor and stomp on it. Of all the mysterious and frustrating conversations she’d ever had with her mother, this was by far the worst.

  “Would it kill you to give me a straight, clear answer?”

  “No, but it might change things that must not be changed. What will happen tonight will be difficult for a great many people—especially for you—but it is for the greater good, and I can’t risk altering what I’ve foreseen.”

  Alys sank back down into the chair, her anger draining as dread pooled in the pit of her stomach. What was going to happen tonight?

  Her mother laid the back of her hand against Alys’s cheek, a comforting gesture that did nothing to soothe the turmoil that roiled within her.

  “I love you very much,” her mother said, and there was a catch in her voice that made Alys’s eyes sting with tears. “Never doubt that.”

  Alys looked up at her mother’s face, shivering to see and hear so many unguarded emotions from a woman so determinedly stoic. “Is something going to happen to you tonight?” Because in light of all the ominous warnings, the sadness in her mother’s eyes suddenly looked very like a goodbye.

  The abbess didn’t answer. But perhaps her silence was an answer in and of itself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Nadeen Rai-Brynna awoke with a start, shocked she’d managed to fall asleep at all, if only for a few minutes. A glance out her narrow window showed the moon high in the sky.

  The time had come, Nadeen realized with a potent mixture of excitement and terror, hope and dread.

  The bed creaked as, beside her, Kamlee stirred sleepily, missing her warmth. She held her breath, hoping she hadn’t made a tragic mistake by letting him spend the night. He ordinarily slept like the dead, and she’d been sure she could slip out without waking him. Fully aware that she was taking an unacceptable risk by spending the night with her forbidden lover, Nadeen had done it anyway. If she woke him and he somehow interfered…But she couldn’t face what she had to do tonight without showing him one more time how much she loved him. It was all she could do not to dive back under the covers and snuggle up to the man who’d made the last few years of her life the happiest she’d ever known. Her mother, the abbess, would be livid if she knew, would pile on the shame and guilt until Nadeen staggered under the weight of it.

  Nadeen let out a slow, shuddering breath as she slid out of the bed. A moonbeam provided just enough light for her to find her robes and pull them on. How she wanted to light a candle so she could look at Kamlee’s face one last time, but that might make this night even harder.

  She hesitated in the doorway, dizzy and disbelieving, her mind repeating the sentence the time has come in an endless, echoing loop. A part of her had never truly believed this was going to happen, had been sure something would
stop them. Surely the Wellspring would rise up to prevent their assault on its very essence. Maybe someone would wonder at the coincidence that both the abbess and her daughter conceived and bore children in the Abbey, despite the easy access to contraceptive potions that were almost always effective. Or maybe Vondeen, Nadeen’s daughter, would lose her virginity before they had a chance to perform the ritual. Such was not uncommon in the Abbey, where a pretty girl was expected to begin working the pavilion the moment she became a woman. But of course the abbess had planned for that and declared they would perform the ritual on the night Vondeen shed her first woman’s blood. Tonight.

  Tears stung Nadeen’s eyes as she made her way through the Abbey’s dark and silent halls toward the abbess’s office. Vondeen was only fourteen years old, and Nadeen had never known a kinder, purer soul. It was her sacred duty as a mother to protect her daughter, and in that most vital of all women’s duties, she was about to fail.

  Both the abbess and Vondeen were already present when Nadeen entered the office, which was brightly lit with luminants. She had blinked the tears out of her eyes before stepping inside, but they welled again the moment she caught sight of her daughter, with the pale skin and green-gray eyes she’d inherited from her Nandel-born father. Today, the girl had donned her red abigail’s robes for the first time, but she looked to Nadeen like a child playing dress-up. Certainly too young to give her life, even for a great cause. It was all Nadeen could do not to burst into sobs.

  Vondeen leapt from her chair and hurried to embrace her.

  “It’s all right, Mama,” the girl said, hugging her tight. “I’m ready, and I’m not afraid.”

  Nadeen hugged her daughter back fiercely, not sure she could bear to let go. The spell they were set to cast tonight had been generations in the making, built by a succession of gifted abbesses who’d seen what no one else had seen—and who’d had the courage to act on it. It was well known that magical aptitude ran in certain families. In the Abbeys, it was similarly well known that the rarer feminine gift of foresight also ran in families, though only women who inherited that gift from both sides of their families could use it. And so the abbesses of Aaltah had set about manipulating bloodlines based on what they saw, strengthening and concentrating the abilities they needed. A love potion slipped into a client’s drink. A contraceptive potion withheld. A marriage falsely predicted to be unfruitful when the bloodlines were analyzed…The fate of the world rested on these small acts of feminine defiance.