"Thank you."
Sabal looked up sharply from honing her blade. "Not words I ever expected to hear from a noble drow, I will admit," she said before raising an eyebrow. "I hope you do not intend to make a habit of it."
"Never," Alystin said before taking a seat on the stone shelf at small room's window. Ostensibly, Nedelyne shared the space, but she was so often amusing herself elsewhere with company that Sabal had it to herself more often than not. The mage cocked her head slightly. "Though I'm not sure what possessed you to do it."
The amber-eyed drowess frowned. "No one gets to beat on my mage but me."
Alystin laughed. "And here I figured you for the generous type. But I suppose we can't all be like Nedelyne. Shall I call you my sword-swinger, then?"
"As it pleases you," Sabal said without much of a change in expression. But the mage could have sworn there was just a hint of a smile.
One that was quick to vanish in favor of a furrowed brow at the next question. "You killed that faerie instead of bringing her back with us. Why?"
The wilder shrugged slightly before sliding the whetstone along the edge of her sword again. The rasping sound always brought peace to her with its calming rhythm and link to her mentor's daily maintenance of her own equipment. "I am not certain myself. To spite Ilivarra, in part. But more than that, for Xullae."
Even if Aly spoke so often to Sabal, it had rarely made her in a mood to share much in return. More often she would subtly redirect conversation or claim that there was nothing really to tell. This was the first time they had spoken of before she came to the Academy. "And who is that?" the mage asked.
"The person I owe all this to," the wilder said with a wry smile, waving her hand at the room and then herself. "She found me in the House of Abandonment and brought me to the Church. Why, I don't know for certain. I never saw her expend so much effort on behalf of anyone else. Xullae trained me, raised me. Sometimes I really did hate her, too. All those chores. And the way she always pushed."
Sabal made a face of displeasure, much to her friend's amusement. "So are you sparing elves to spite her now?"
The wilder shook her head. "Looking back, I understand more than I did then. I think she was one of the few people out there who wanted me to succeed. So she made life so hard that the Academy feels easy. Every time she thrashed me in training bouts, it was so I would never make that mistake again. But we talked too. There were a lot of times where I felt like she could do no wrong. Where I felt like she had taken me in because she really did think I was something special. I miss her now."
Alystin listened in silence, unfamiliar with the sort of relationship Sabal was describing. Her sisters had only been harsh. There were none of those softer moments to look forward to, at least with them. She'd had a precious few such moments in the company of the Patron, even if he was confused by the small girl who insisted upon waking him up when she had a bad dream. Her magic had distanced them even further, given the prejudice most fighters felt towards mages.
''She used to say she felt trapped. Perhaps it was why she preferred killing captives to dragging them back," the wilder finished with a shrug. "I don't know."
"Well, I'll remember her next time you beat me half to death in the ring," Alystin said. "I'll know who to thank for your teaching techniques."
"Works. I haven't seen you rush me for a while now. You learn. Perhaps someday you might even be able to give Sinjss a challenge."
Aly rolled her eyes. "Not that I have the opportunity. She still avoids you like the plague, so I'm free to do as I please. Of course, don't get me wrong. It's great to have something to hide behind."
The wilder had finished her task and slid the blade back into its sheath. "Good to know I've been promoted to flesh shield," Sabal said dryly. "Oh, and I'm going to hand your training off to Nedelyne for next cycle. I promised her that I would beat Trelgath into a pulp, but only if she would keep you preoccupied."
"Just what I wanted. Half a day spent dodging Nedelyne's spells and attempts to snag me a lover," the mage muttered darkly as she headed for the door.
Sabal just smiled a little bit and shook her head. Their friend was bad, but not that...she paused and considered the last conversation she'd had with Nede when they were walking back in the tunnels. No, she is that bad. Nevermind.
"Will you just hit me already and get this over with? I don't care what he did!" Aly groaned, wishing fervently that there was a spell for bleaching her brain. It was fine that the priestess liked being amused. But the compulsion to share very specific details that neither she nor Sabal had asked for was nauseating at times. It was another way for Nede to torment the mage, since their amber-eyed friend usually just seemed to let her mind wander away when the subject came up.
"I just think you should try it. Maybe you'd loosen up a little," Nedelyne said with a grin, her snakewhip curling around Alystin's staff. With a hard jerk of her arm, the weapon went flying and skittered across the floor. "You're worse than anyone I've ever met."
"You say worse about Sabal," the mage said defensively, throwing up a ward spell that Nedelyne's dulled blade bounced right off of.
"Well, that was at first. She's worked the stick out of her ass. Although only to beat people to death with it," Nede said. "Then again, that's how they are."
Alystin gritted her teeth and forced the ward forward, slamming the cleric off her feet. "Who are?"
"I forget how dense you are!" Nedelyne barely avoided the shard of ice that was whipped at her head in response to that comment. "Easy there, Aly. I'm not serious enough for you to get deadly. Now, noticed anything strange about Sabal in the past? Like how when she fights you it feels like she's holding back?"
Alystin frowned. "Of course she does. Why would she need to go all out if I'm learning?"
"That may be, but what do you remember from that fight where the faerie rang your bell? Because what I saw happen was sure as hell no magic. No one else noticed or thought much of it, but I saw an elf get ripped apart, and she didn't do it with her hands," Nedelyne said seriously. "Have you ever heard about the inquisitors?"
The mage searched her mind as their fight ground to a halt, brow furrowed in thought. "Only mentioned," she said, picking out a vague memory heard through a door. "I think Chardalyn threatened Sinjss with them once if she wouldn't learn her prayers right. But I doubt even she really understood what that meant. I think she was just repeating the Matron."
Nedelyne sat down on a bench along the side of the mostly empty training room and motioned the mage over. "If the Houses are so powerful, why do they have to bend knee to the Church?" she said quietly.
"Lloth," Aly said immediately, remembering the terrible dread that always filled priestesses at the mention of losing the Goddess's favor.
"But Matrons are priestesses too," Nede pointed out. "No, it's much less simple than that. The Church has a very large and powerful leverage that's solely under their control: the Yath'Abban. Agents and soldiers that answer only to the Goddess and each other. And the most powerful tool in their arsenal are the inquisitors. No cleric gets to their position because they're helpless. They spend all their life honing their skills to take down other priestesses and warriors and mages. But if their opponent could simply stop them from being able to lift a finger to defend themselves, they'd be of no more threat than a child."
Alystin's thoughts turned to her own mother, always surrounded by that air of invincibility and power. It wasn't possible to confront that woman and live without being a priestess with the full weight of a goddess's wrath behind you. "That's not possible."
"Unless you're psionic," Nedelyne said.
The mage shivered involuntarily at that. The only psionics she'd ever heard of were mind flayers and they were terrifying enough. The idea that Sabal could do something like that was like having a carpet jerked out from under her feet.
"Think about it. You can sense heretics without having to spend years waiting for them to make a mistake. The slightest lapse of faith in a priestess can be punished. An enemy caught totally off guard, powerless to do anything but submit. No one can read people like Sabal, we both know it. Do you really think that's just from looking at faces?" the cleric pressed.
Suddenly, the idea of Sinjss losing her confrontation with Sabal made so much more sense. But she didn't want to believe it. How much of what she experienced near their companion was genuinely her own feeling and how much was planted? It made her paranoid and she couldn't help it. "If she can read thoughts, she's going to know that we know," Aly whispered. "Or that I know, anyway. She probably can't hear anything in your head except those adventures of yours."
Nedelyne smirked. "It's a gift." She was more serious when she continued, "Look, I'd rather have a mind-reader on our side than not on our side. But I'm definitely keeping an eye on her, because it's not natural. You do whatever you have to as far as keeping the knowledge we have a secret. Just think about something else."
"I..." the mage began. But as soon as she started to think about someone else being able to strip everything away from her and turn her into a thrall, a husk, that horrible feeling of dread rose up and drove everything else out of her mind. "A secret, definitely."
