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Jayla pretended to be thinking something over. “If it is so urgent for her to be producing children, I would think she would have been married off when she was quite young. But the woman I met looked like she was at least twenty or twenty-two.”
“She is twenty-four,” Pietro said. When they both glanced at him, startled, he responded with a painful smile. “I knew her. Back in my former life.”
“That must make this hard for you,” Cody said.
“It makes it unendurable,” Pietro replied quietly.
“So why isn’t she married?” Jayla asked. Silently she added,Yet.
“Oh, the requirements of the mechanism are so very precisely calibrated!” Pietro exclaimed. “For the blood to turn the lever, it must be present in a specific quantity, and it must include a compound that apparently does not develop in a woman’s body until she has reached a certain maturity. Any children she bears before that time will never have the chemicals in their blood, so they are useless to the temple—which is why Madeleine has not been encouraged to marry sooner. Generally, a woman’s blood will reach the desired composition when she is about twenty-five, unless her development is inhibited by certain external factors.”
So much information. Jayla was starting to feel like she was drowning in awful details, but she forced herself to focus and asked, “What factors?”
“How healthy she was as a child, whether she ever had certain illnesses. But the biggest factor is whether or not she has been exposed to cherloshe.”
Jayla fixed her eyes on him. “Cherloshe,” she repeated. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Oh, but you do,” he said with another painful smile. “It’s what Zessaya’s followers use to make the chazissas they wear to honor her. You saw a cherloshe charm on the necklace I gave to Aussen.”
“Wait,” said Cody, wrinkling his forehead.
Jayla was just as confused. “I don’t understand.”
“Cordelan and Dar banded together to rule the continent that he had made—but Zessaya still had plenty of power of her own. She threatened to rip the islands from their seam along the mainland if Cordelan didn’t promise that he would never harm her people. So he agreed that anyone would be safe from his justice if they wore an amulet crafted from her body—that is, made from the cherloshe stone that forms the bedrock of the islands. And it turns out that if any of Cordelan’s descendants are exposed to too much cherloshe, their blood does not develop the necessary compound until the influence is removed.”
Cherloshe,Jayla thought.That’s what I’ll do. I’ll get a chazissa for Madeleine.Out loud she said, “So when you gave the necklace to Aussen—”
“I was hoping to make her invisible to Cordelan,” he said, nodding.
“But that means—do you think thatAussenis—”
He spread his hands. “No one except one of his descendants has ever been able to do that particular trick of picking up a fistful of soil and turning it into a beacon of light. No one.”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Cody asked. “She’s an islander. I don’t see how Aussen’s mother could have taken a lover who was descended from Cordelan. Not if all the boys are sacrificed the minute they’re old enough to give enough blood.”
“I know. I was shocked myself when Aussen managed that feat. But I am convinced she comes from Cordelan’s stock.” He shrugged. “Maybe, decades ago, when there were still plenty of heirs, the priests lost track of someone. A young woman escaped their close attention and ran away to the islands. And generations later, Aussen is the result.”
Jayla fixed him with a hard stare. “You said you had powerful friends and they would want to hurt Aussen. You said you didn’t want to help them, but that they might persuade you to change your mind. That’s why you told me to take her. That’s why you told me to keep her away from you.”
Cody looked between the two of them but kept his mouth shut. Pietro sighed and rubbed his eyes with his finger and his thumb. “And all of that is still true,” he said quietly. “Just the other day I had a visit from one of them, and he is so desperate that if he knew of Aussen’s existence—”
She was on her feet with a knife in her hand before he could finish the sentence. “Maybe I should kill you first,” she said. “Before you can tell anyone anything.”
She heard Cody’s shocked voice pronounce her name, but Pietro just looked up at her, weary and somber. “Maybe you should,” he said. “It’s not like I’m loving any part of my life right now.”
“Jayla,” Cody said again.
She turned to him, the blade still in her hand. “I don’t trust him.”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
“All he has to know is that Aussen exists. All he has to do is tell someone.” She gave Pietro another cold look. “Maybe he already has.”
Pietro shook his head. “If my word means anything to you, I can swear I haven’t. And my intention is to never speak of it to anyone.” He closed his eyes. “But I still recommend that you never tell me where she is.”
“But what happens now?” Cody demanded. “What if the quakes keep getting worse? What if the device gets crushed? How do we stop that?”
Pietro shook his head again, the slow, hopeless movement of a man who saw absolutely no options. “I have no idea. The priests could take Madeleine and throw her body to the god, but then what? Unless they truly have another descendant stashed somewhere in the city, they have only bought themselves a few years. They could sacrifice Aussen—”
