Treacherous Witch

9. The Scholar

"So... you're saying that you've ignored over a thousand years of teaching and learning to write your own book even though you've never practised magic yourself?"

He looked taken aback. "Dear me, that's an unflattering way to put it. No, it isn't through lack of trying. Most priestesses refused to talk to me, but over the years I've conducted dozens of interviews with petty sorcerers of all kinds and gathered a great deal of information."

"What kind of information?" she asked at once. Here, at last, they might be getting somewhere.

"Well, that was the problem." He waved his hands. "It was all contradictory. A complete mess. I realised later that some of my interviewees were frauds or lying, but I had no idea who was genuine and who wasn't. I almost gave up on my book. Then I met her."

"Met who?"

"Queen Shikra."

A shiver ran up her spine. He'd met the queen. Valerie sat up straight. At this point she wanted to know everything, whether or not it would help her.

"What was she like?"

"Wonderful. Terrifying. I've never seen anyone do what she could do. I remember one spring we had terrible thunderstorms in Jairah. The western quarter was flooded, then one of the temples was struck by lightning and caught fire. The queen was away, I forget why, some royal visit or other, but she came riding back the very next night, and I'll never forget what I saw."

Valerie was enraptured, drinking in every word. The old man was misty-eyed as he recounted his tale.

"She raised her hands and the rain stopped. The heavens cleared. She had a crown on her head, and she was holding a golden sceptre. Well, she pointed that staff at a building that had collapsed on the temple and blasted it to smithereens. Then she rebuilt the temple out of the ruins, raised it up good as new."

"She built the temple?"

"Not only that," Anwen answered gravely, "but every single place damaged by the flooding, she rebuilt in one night. Then she walked around and tended to the injured."

She tried to imagine what it must have been like. This solitary figure, the queen in her silks and crown, wielding the power of the sceptre. The clouds parting. Sunlight touching the bricks and mortar of the city as it was miraculously repaired. The people grateful, eager for a glimpse of the queen as she walked among them to heal their wounds.

"Every year, the royal family would travel the country to bless the harvest," she said softly. "I wish I'd seen it for myself."

The queen had visited her village once, when she was a small child. She didn't remember it.

"Yes," said Anwen, "and have you noticed that since the queen's death, the crops have failed? Two poor years in a row, and I'd never seen a bad year before. If we didn't import food from Drakon, half the country would be suffering a famine. We've had heavy snow in the west, flooding in the south. Queen Shikra didn't just save the capital from disaster. She was central to the entire ecosystem."

"You think all of that happened because the queen is gone?"

The scholar shrugged. "We can only speculate. But my prediction is that it will get worse."

"Then how do we fix it? I thought that if we restored the silvertrees..."

Then magic would return. She'd visited a town in one of these dead zones once, a part of Maskamere that was bereft of magic. Her cloak of warming had turned into a cloak of shivering, and she'd gotten blisters on her feet from pushing a cart up a muddy hill. She'd suffered with that all day before they got back home. Koel had not been sympathetic.