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The answer came back to her with welcome speed. "Yes, Your Majesty, I believe that."
That night, after visiting Aaden and singing healing into his sleeping form, Cori
Her feet did not exactly touch the floor in the room, but she did reach stillness at the foot of a sleeping man's bed. His face was hidden beneath a cushion, his arms thrown wide. He looked like a man recently suffocated, but the nasal grinding of his breathing testified to his continued life.
"Wake," she said.
A form rolled in the sheets and then settled, still again. Nothing more.
"Wake!"
Cori
"Queen Cori
She did not answer. She looked around the room. She could not have said what she would have expected, but a grand bed was not part of it. Nor a chamber with finely constructed furniture, wall hangings, rugs so thick they must suck at the toes of one walking across them. Rialus had no finer quarters in Acacia!
Her eyes settled back on him. "This I find very strange," she said.
His head snapped around from side to side, taking in the same sights she just had at double the speed. "This is-ah-difficult to explain."
Cori
"Rialus Neptos," she said, cutting into his stammering explanation, wanting to be direct and calm so that he would be as well, "is Dariel alive?"
"Dariel? Ah-"
"Just answer each question I ask you. Do no more or less. Just answer. Is Dariel alive?"
"I don't know." Rialus thought for a moment. "I-don't think so. There was a terrible battle at-"
"You can tell me nothing of him?"
"No. I wish I could, but-"
Cori
"How did you know that?"
"Answer!"
"Yes," Rialus said. "Yes. They're brutes, Your Majesty. Not like the Numrek. I mean, not really. They're more… dignified. Do you know they keep beasts like white lions in their palaces? Just let them walk around like they own-"
"Rialus, in the Giver's name, do no more than answer my questions!" She gave him a moment of staring intensity to come to terms with this, and then asked, "How great a threat are they?"
"Very, I'd say."
"They have a large army?"
"Yes, but it's not just size that matters. They have some terrible creatures. Antoks and things worse. And the Auldek ca
"Ca
"Well, not exactly 'ca
Cori
"What do you mean?"
"Think it. Make a picture of the things you have seen and things you imagine you will see. Make all those things in your mind's eye and I will take them from you."
He did, and she did. The images were blurry, shadowed, overlapping, and without context or explanation. But she saw vast numbers of soldiers in animal guise. She saw beings similar to Numrek being chopped down and then rising again and again, as if impervious to mortal injury. She saw the ranks of an army of men and creatures, giants and winged things. She saw tramping feet and hulking forms unlike anything in the Known World. She heard the bellowing of angry beasts and rhythmic chants of war songs. So many of them that they faded into shadow in the distance, like a neverending parade of demons finally escaped from entrapment and hungry for plunder. It was all that she needed to see.
"One more thing, Rialus Neptos," she said, once she had drawn back and could speak again. "Have you betrayed us?"
The man could hardly have conveyed as much shocked indignation with his real body as he did with contortions of his spirit face. "No! Never!"
"You must prove the truth of that. If you have any honor, Rialus Neptos, you will find a way to serve me. If you wish to see your wife again, you will find a way to serve me. Understand?" Cori
Early the next morning, Cori
"Ah, so she's a prisoner," Rhre
Cori
"Prepare your people." She paused, looking over the bent heads of the scribes, listening to the scratch of so many styluses against parchment.
A few of them completed writing and lifted their tools. Rhre
Cori