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Skree rose and shepherded everyone out, going with them, and closing the door
behind him.
"I'm all out of magical solutions," Josiah said as he took the chair. "You
have to do this one on your own. You died first last time too." Josiah sat
down in the chair, leaning forward so that his elbow rested on the bed and his
left hand was free to stroke her face and hair. "I've pulled you back from
death twice, damn it. I'm supposed to get to keep you this time. Third time's
a charm  or a curse, depends, I guess. We were so young. You never would
delegate. If the mission was dangerous, you took it. But you always seemed to
come back. Everyone started saying you had a charmed life. Maybe that's what
jinxed it.
"What is it with you stubborn, pig-headed Sharani anyway? We had a loving
triad, Nariya was nearly to term with our first children, and then you had to
take one more mission. You just had to go after Hoon. I will always believe
that Nariya died of grief when you didn't come back. I raised the twins alone.
Never remarried..."
He struggled to maintain his indignation and anger, but it was fading. He was
tired and losing it badly. Aejys Rowan could not hear him. She would not have
been able to make sense of it even if she could hear him. She did not remember
her past life the way he did. He kissed her lips, pressed his face into her
hair. "I'll be here when Tamlestari returns. I'll protect her and your
children, dearest. That I swear."
Josiah took two more swigs of whiskey, laid his head over on her shoulder,
and passed out.
* * * *
"Idiot god! He called me an idiot god!" Dynanna paced back and forth in the
little courtyard, muttering and exclaiming at intervals. The godling had light
red hair, almost red-blond. She was boyishly slender with modest well-shaped
breasts. She wore an oversized longshoremyn's shirt that tended to slip off
her shoulder, revealing the top of her breasts and soft black knee pants. Her
face with its delicate structure could be very waif like at times, which was
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often the only thing that saved her on those rare occasions that one of the
elder gods managed to catch her. She hated getting caught because they always
extracted payment in some way, some pleasant, some not. And then there were a
couple of elder gods who simply wanted to seal her up in a cave and forget
about her, luckily they had never even gotten close to her.
"Idiot god," she screamed at the top of her lungs, making her twin brother
flinch.
"Will you please stop fuming? Or take it somewhere else, I'm trying to scry."
Dynarien bent over a mossy rock-lined artificial pool. He held up a small
bottle containing a tiny bit of sapphire liquid, just barely enough to cover
the bottom of the bottle. He could see Josiah fall asleep, still weeping about
Aejys. "You need to pillage Kalirion's garden again. This is the last of the
Sapphire Elixir. There isn't enough to heal a rat."
The thought of the sun god's garden yanked Dynanna from her rant. She and her
paladins had gotten away with everything they needed and would have gotten
away clean, except that at the last minute she decided to go back alone after
a lovely red flower she had seen but did not know what it did. Kalirion caught
her. She never told her brother, but that was why her youngest son, LorenRain,
had such beautiful white-blond hair. She always told Dynarien that she was not
sure who the father was  she was in a promiscuous phase at the time  but she
knew quite well who he belonged to: He was Kalirion's. Kalirion knew it too.
He had sent her notes and presents for a long time afterwards, nearly two
centuries, as well as taking an active interest in his child. LorenRain saw
his father regularly, wheedling from him the things that Dynanna could not
get. She stopped to peer over Dynarien's shoulder. "Still watching
Vorgensburg?"
"Yes." He waggled the bottle at her to point out again, in an annoyingly
repetitive manner, that this was the last of it. "We owe Josiah big time for
screwing his life up."
"We did not screw his life up. It just happened."
"Sis. He was our first effort. We should have kept a closer eye on him when
he was a child or put a paladin down there with him."
She ignored that and tried to change the direction of the conversation. "You
going down there?"
"Yes. I think you ought to help too. After all the one that did this to Aejys
called you an idiot god."
Dynanna looked annoyed. It was bad enough that most of the Big Nine regarded
her as an idiot, hearing it from a mortal, a bloodmage like that stupid
sa'necari, was even worse. Furthermore, although Dynarien had never said it,
she frequently suspected him of thinking it. She definitely was not getting
any respect from anyone or anything and she had no idea how to change it.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked crossly.
"Find an oracle. Find out what the images meant when Aejys scryed more than a
month ago. I have come up with absolutely no clues. Find out what we can do to
help get things moving. And don't forget that in three days we are meeting
Hadjys and Talons in Creeya to divvy up the take from that last soul vault. I
promised her you know."
Dynanna turned to reply, but her twin was already fading out. She sighed a
bit, and then mustered her resolve. Dynarien would not like it if he knew
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where and to whom she would have to go for answers, but she would not tell him
this time either.
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