Honor-Bound [ Lore of Penrua: Book... - Chapter 7: Chapter 7

The discovery of another slain guard in the kitchen courtyard not a quarter-hour into the search for the princess revealed that Uarria must no longer be on the palace grounds. Still, the search parties left no stone unturned. As Uachi turned his attention to standing up patrols to sweep the streets of the Holy City, dividing to search each of the quarters for signs of night-time disturbances, Danya ensured that the palace and its grounds were thoroughly searched. Guards combed through each and every room from the dungeons to the highest chamber in the Lorekeeper's Tower: every courtyard; every store room; every stall in the Imperial Stables; every bush and bench in the Imperial Garden.
There was no sign of the princess, and there was no sign of Ealin.
It was night yet, and the city gates were closed fast. They would remain closed until Uarria was found. Men and women of the guard would be stationed all throughout the city when the sun rose, ready to question any who passed and alert for a dark-haired, dark-eyed maiden of uncommon beauty.
In the earliest hours of the next morning, after a fruitless night of searching, the first shift of searchers went to their beds, dispirited and exhausted. The unspoken fear among everyone was that Ealin, being a mage, had traveled by the blood.
There was no way to know. Uachi had not felt so helpless in a very, very long time.
He knew that he should sleep. After his journey, his consultation with the sovereigns, and his evening with Ealin, he had not rested. It had been nigh on two days since he'd slept, but he could not bring himself to retire. There was something he needed to do first.
For a small eternity, Uachi stood in the hall that led to the royal apartments. He was trying to work up the courage to face the conversation to come. He knew that Mhera had gone to her rest not long ago—he had seen her enter her apartments, and she could not yet be asleep. Still, part of him ached to let her be. He could leave her for the day and put off what he had to say.
In the end, it was the very idea of shying away from the damage he had wrought that gave him the strength to go. He was, after all, the man who had gone to the emperor the morning after he'd first lain with Ealin—gone to confess his indiscretion and beg forgiveness for breaking Matei's trust.
He could not in good conscience avoid this conversation.
He strode down the hall to Mhera's chamber without giving himself the chance to think twice and there, sparing a glance for the guards who stood flanking the doorway, he quietly knocked.
No one came to answer him. Uachi exchanged a look with one of the guards, a man he knew by the name of Farlas. Uachi knocked again, and again, the silence stretched out, unsettling him.
"I'll go in," he said, "if you've no objection."
The guards looked at one another, and Farlas shook his head. He reached for the door handle and pulled the door open. Uachi laid a hand on his dagger and stepped into the room, Farlas following him for a couple of steps.
It was quiet in Mhera's chambers; the parlor was empty, the hearth cold and a tray laden with a forgotten tea service standing on the low table. He crept across the parlor, feeling like the intruder he was; after all, it was not the first time he had come seeking Mhera on his own, and she had chided him before for creeping in.
She was in her bedchamber, on her knees in front of the mirror, and although Uachi had never seen Mhera in her vision-trance, he knew by her posture and her distant, expressionless visage that she was scrying.
He glanced over his shoulder and shook his head at Farlas, who nodded and withdrew, closing the door. Uachi took his hand off his dagger and loitered there just on the other side of the threshold, wondering what the protocol was for disturbing a Seer. He was half-inclined to creep away again, and let Mhera be none the wiser to his intrusion, but he could not quite bring himself to do that; he had come here to face her wrath, and he would not spare himself that gauntlet. So, without much choice, he cleared his throat and knocked on the interior door of her chambers.
It was as if he had touched her back with a cold hand. She stiffened, and awareness came back into her face. She seemed to catch a glance at him in the mirror, for she turned quickly toward him, as if he had frightened her.
Uachi had not spoken to Mhera, had not seen her face to face since the previous evening when he'd met them both in their parlor to deliver the news of impending war in the south. He whispered her name.
As she met his gaze, Mhera's expression crumpled, and she put her hands over her face.
Cold shame and anguish swept over him. In a few quick strides, he was kneeling at her side, his arms around her. "Don't cry. Don't cry."
She fell against him, sobbing, and clutched the sleeves of his tunic. "Uachi, where is she?" she sobbed.
"I don't know, but we're going to find her."
For a moment, the only sound was Mhera's tears, but her weeping was short-lived. Perhaps she had few tears left in her. Still, she knelt in his arms, clinging to him, and he heard her sniffling and trying to steady her breaths.
"They say Ealin took her," Uachi said at last. He had been kneeling at Mhera's side and now he slid back, putting his hands on Mhera's shoulders so that he could look into her face. He wanted her to know he wasn't shying away from it. He needed her to know he realized the role he had played in the way things had happened. "I cannot express to you how sorry I am that I...betrayed your trust."
Mhera narrowed her eyes in confusion. She shook her head. "Trust?" she echoed, as if she had not heard of the word.
Uachi found it difficult to look at her. Her face was red and blotchy; she looked unwell, half-mad. He grasped for something to say, but before he could speak, Mhera reached up and placed her hands gently on his cheeks. He closed his eyes at once.
"Listen to me, Uachi," Mhera said. "And try to believe me. This is not your fault."
He shook his head, lifting a hand to her wrist to pull her fingers away from his cheek. "She's my woman—she and I shared a bed. I kept her here, trusted her—"
"Loved her. Look at me."
Uachi opened his eyes. His heart pounded in his chest as he met Mhera's gray gaze. Her eyes were uncannily calm, for all she'd been weeping only a moment before. "You can't know how much I regret it," he whispered, and his voice was raw with emotion he would have done much to conceal.
"If Ealin took my daughter, her actions were her own. You would never harm Uarria."
There had been a time when Uachi thought Ealin would not harm Uarria, either. She had been sweet and deferential to the princess; there had been nothing, no clue, no suspicion, that could ever have warned Uachi of what was to come. And, wildly, Mhera's words—"If Ealin took my daughter," as if there were a chance still that the truth was different—gave Uachi a desperate sense of hope.
"I swear it on my own life," he said. "I will find her."
Mhera drew back from Uachi, folding her hands. The conviction fading away from her expression, she said, "I Saw something. And it frightens me, Uachi." She hesitated. "It frightens me more than anything in my life ever has."
A chill swept down Uachi's spine at Mhera's words. "Tell me," he whispered.
She shook her head, gazing at something past him. Through him.
"Please, Mhera. If you have anything that could help us, you must tell me. I'm organizing the men to search the city, but it's..."
He could not put into words how vast the task was, how impossible it seemed: to find a small girl in a city as vast as Karelin. And if Ealin could escape the city limits, what then?
Mhera met Uachi's gaze, seeming to consider whether to tell him what she had Seen. At last, she dropped her eyes and spoke, her voice a haunted whisper. "It was a road of blood. A road of blood I have seen before. The vision that warned me of the Empire's attack on Hanpe...It is like that...except I am standing on the high wall of Karelin, and the river of blood flows toward us from somewhere far away. And far in the distance, so far that I cannot possibly see him, but I can, all the same, is the archmage."
A cold hand gripped Uachi's entrails.
"He looks toward us, and there is the river of blood, and that's all. There's nothing else."
"Uarria?"
She shook her head, raising her hand to shield her eyes. "I did not see her. Perhaps this is—perhaps it has nothing to do with what's happened, I just..."
"No," Uachi said. "I think it does. Ealin was an apprentice to the archmage, Mhera. It may be that she's gone back to him, somehow."
"Not by the blood," Mhera whispered. "Can she have—?"
"I pray to the goddess that she didn't. I do not think it likely, unless she hid a trove of bloodstones from us here in the palace."
Uachi knew what others did not: that Ealin was Arcborn, that she had power in her blood...but even so, she could not have made it so far alone. To travel by the blood was one of the most taxing spells an Arcborn person born into power could practice, and even short distances left the traveler sick and weak. When Uachi, Aun, and some others had come from the forests of Hanpe to witness Matei and Mhera's execution at the conclusion of the Arcborn Rebellion, they had gone under the touch of nearly three dozen Arcborn hands.
No...Uachi was certain Ealin had left the palace on her own two feet, the princess in tow, but she had of yet evaded capture. She had fooled him for years, and he knew now that she must be a mistress of deception such as he never would have anticipated.