“I do, Sudar Yadovír, I assure you. There is more. Vasyllia must be purified by fire. I believe Adonais has provided a refining fire in these invaders.”
“Otar Kalún, we do not yet know how the Dar’s troops fared against them in the open field. Is it not perhaps a bit early to speak of Vasyllia’s fall?”
Kalun smiled knowingly. “I have no doubt the Dar’s armies will be routed by the invader. It would not surprise me if Vasyllia itself would be under siege in a matter of days. And I intend to be the hand that wields the invaders as a tool for the purification of our great city.”
Yadovír’s blood froze. He had been mistaken. Kalún was no mere fanatic; he was a madman.
“Otar, what you suggest is brave, bold. But surely all other measures must be considered before such drastic action?”
Kalún’s manner snapped back to formal. The conversation was at an end.
Yadovír hardly remembered how he managed to walk back to his house in the second reach. He stood before his door with its gilded hinges and couldn’t bring himself to raise a hand to push it open. He shouldn’t be this disappointed. This was just one minor setback amid hundreds in his life. But he couldn’t help himself. He was devastated.
The door opened before him, as though of its own volition. Immediately, the scarlet hangings and golden braziers seemed to leap out of the house at his eyes, laughing at him. You can pretend all you like, they mocked, but you’ll never be a real noble. You can wear silver in your ears, drip lavender oil into your hair, collect painted chests from Negoda and ceramic tiled stoves from beyond the mountains to your heart’s content. Go ahead, hang that ancient Vasylli suit of armor in your bedchamber. Hang ten of them! What does it matter? You’ll always remain just outside the reach of real power.
“Yadovír? Are you ill?”
Yadovír was so lost in self-pity, he had actually thought that the doors opened themselves. He didn’t even see Otar Gleb there.
“What are you doing in my house? I’ve had enough of priests for today.”
“Ah,” whispered Otar Gleb with that crook in his smile that endeared so many. “You need to sit by the hearth with me, my friend. I’ve brought mead.”
“I don’t drink that first-reacher stuff, you know that.”
“Today, you do,” said Gleb, and dragged Yadovír into the house and slammed the door behind him. Gleb led him through the hallways like an invalid, with a hand as strong as a cohort elder’s. He passed all the smaller rooms, making his way to the end of the corridor, into the noble-sized hearth-hall, Yadovír’s pride and joy. It had more wall-sized Nebesti embroideries of High Beings than Otchigen’s famed collection. It had higher-backed oak chairs than the Dar himself. It even had a chimney, possibly the only one in Vasyllia. But today, it all had a sheen of falsity. Like a doll’s house magicked into abnormally large proportions.
But the two cushions on the stone floor, a hearth crackling and sparking, and a low table laden with a tankard of mead? That was perfection.
“How do you always know?” asked Yadovír.
Otar Gleb guffawed into his eagle-beak nose and said nothing, only pushed Yadovír by the shoulders down on the larger of the two velvet-lined cushions. Yadovír wanted to melt into it, to dissolve into nothingness. But there was mead to be had. Gleb knew how much Yadovír missed it. You could only bear so much of the wine of the rich.
“Gleb, what is wrong with your chief priest? Why does he have such a hard time being human?”
“Ahhhh,” Gleb shook his head as he exhaled a long, tired breath. “Poor Otar Kalún. Do you know what’s wrong with him? He never, not once, allowed himself to sit by the hearth on a cushion to sip the best mead in Vasyllia.”
Yadovír laughed, the first unforced laugh of the last month. It was like poison seeping out of a wound. “Is that it? Excessive strictness?”
“No, I’m afraid it’s more than that,” said Otar Gleb. “Our dear chief priest is a very righteous man. Very correct. Perhaps even holy, if we were to judge by externals alone. But he forgot a subtle truth long ago.”
“What’s that?”
Gleb half-closed his eyes at Yadovír, assessing. Yadovír’s mouth tasted bitter.
“The heart is what matters. That’s what Adonais wants. Your heart. If you spend your entire life cleansing yourself of impurity, and yet your heart does not expand in love for those around you… It’s like scouring all the rust off a pot. If you don’t stop, you’ll rub a hole in the iron.”
He shook his head again and clicked his tongue. He always did that when pensive. It was one of the things Yadovír loved most about him.
“But I didn’t come here to gossip about my betters,” said Gleb, smiling again.
“Why did you come?”
Again the slitted eyelids, the fire in the eyes probing behind pale-blond eyelashes.
“Stop it!” The bitterness in Yadovír’s mouth turned sour. “You won’t convert me. You’ve tried for as long as I’ve known you. It hasn’t worked yet.”
“Fifteen years. But it’s never too late, I say.” Gleb smiled again, but without his eyes. “I’m not here to convert you. I only want you to know that there are those who love you. Those who wish you would use your gifts…well, for a better purpose.”
Yadovír groaned aloud.
“You have an incredible talent, my friend. Can you imagine if you redirected your endless energy to the refugee problem? You could stop this plague that’s beginning to ravage the first reach. Not shut them up like rats in a cellar! You could find places for all the Nebesti. Build makeshift homes in the marketplace, for Sirin’s sake! Instead you waste yourself, trying to assimilate power that doesn’t belong to you. Why? Haven’t you forgotten that you’re dying?”
“Dying?” Yadovír almost jumped out of his cushion. “What are you talking about? I’m as healthy as a horse!”
“And yet, you’re going to die. We all are. Have you forgotten?”
“You priests are so morbid.”
“Yadovír, I have a premonition about you.”
“Oh dear, not one of your—”
“I’m not joking with you. I don’t know how or why. But I sense that you are on a cliff, and there are abysses to either side of you. There may even be another abyss ahead of you. Some difficult choice that you have to make, or not make.”
Gleb leaned toward Yadovír and grabbed him by the shoulders.