She delivered her response and felt him flinch away.
What do you think? she returned. Those were her only words, but there was more to her reply.
Telesthesia was an art form more akin to dreaming than speaking. The sender entwined sensory threads, with or without words, to form a message that keyed to the receivers mind at every level: sound and image, taste, touch, smell, and memory. Evenif they were very good at itemotion. A sending from a master telesthete was an experience fuller than reality: a waking dream delivered on a thought. Scarab was not a master telesthete by any stretch, but she could twine several threads into her sending, and she did now. The flexion of cats claws and the sting of nettlesEidolon had taught her that onedeclared to Carnassial: Back off .
Did he think that because she had made him the gift of her body for her first dream season, he could touch her mind uninvited?
Men.
A single dream season was a single dream season. If she chose him again next year, that might begin to mean something, but she didnt suppose she would. Not because he hadnt pleased her, but
simply this: How could she know his worth if she had no one to compare him to?
Forgive me, my queen.
From a respectable remove came this sending, more like an approximation of his physical distance, and it was stripped of scent and stir, as was right. She could feel a wisp of penitence, though, and that was a fine flourish. Carnassial wasnt a master telesthete, eitherit would be a long time before either of them could hope to achieve mastery; they were both very youngbut he had the makings of one. Not for nothing had Scarab chosen him for her honor guardand not for his lutenist fingers, either, that had learned to play her with such ardor in the spring, or for his deep bell laughter, or for his hunger that understood her own and spoke to it, not unlike a sending, at every level.
He was a fine magus, as were the rest of her guard, but none of themnone of thempulsed raw power like the seraph before her now. Her eyes swept down his bare back, and she felt the tug of surprise. It was a warriors back, muscled and scarred, and a pair of swords hung crossed in their harness from a jut of stone to his right. He was a soldier. She had gleaned this much in Astrae, where the folk spoke of him with acid fear, but she hadnt fully believed it until now. It didnt fit. Magi didnt use steel; they didnt need it. When a magus killed, no blood flowed. When she killed him , as she had come here to do, he would simply stop living.
Life is only a thread tethering soul to body, and once you know how to find it, it is as easily plucked as a flower.
So do it , she told herself, and she reached for his thread, conscious of Carnassial behind her, waiting. Will you do it or shall I? he had asked her, and it galled. He doubted that she could, because she never had. In training, she had touched life threads and let them sing between her fingersthe fingers of her anima , that is, her incorporeal self. It was the equivalent of laying a blade to an opponents throat in sparring. I win, you die, better luck next time. But she had never severed one, and doing so would be the difference between laying a blade to an opponents throat and laying his throat open .
It was a very great difference.
But she could do it. To prove herself to Carnassial, she had an inspiration to perform ez vash , the clean slash of execution. An instant and it would be done. She wouldnt feel the strangers thread or pause to read anything of it, but only scythe it with her anima , and he would be dead without her ever having seen his face or touched his life.
She thought of the yoraya then, and a feeling of reckless might flowed through her.
It was only a legend. Probably. In the First Age of her people, which had been far, far longer than this the Second Age and had been ended with such brutality, Stelians had been very different than they were now. Surrounded by powerful enemies, they had lived ever at war, and so a great deal of their magic had been concentrated on the war arts. Tales were told of the mystical yoraya , a harp strung with the life threads of slain foes. It was a weapon of the anima and had no substance in the material world; it could not be found like a relic or passed on as an inheritance. A magus made his own, and it died with him. It was said to be a reservoir of deepest power, but darkest, too, achievable only by killing on a staggering scale, and the playing of it was as likely to drive its maker mad as it was to strengthen him.
When she was a little girl, Scarab used to scandalize her nursemaids by plotting her own yoraya . You will be my first string, she had once said, wickedly, to an aya who had dared to bathe her against her will.
The same words came into her head now. You will be my first string , she thought to the scarred and muscled back of the unknown magus before her. She reached out with her anima to perform the execution, and a horror washed through her, because she had meant it, just for a moment.