by Carol Berg
“Good enough.”
He locked the gates and led me through a strange courtyard filled with stone tables and columns and water troughs, through a bedraggled prometheum, and into a small burial ground. “Here,” he said, and pointed to a small, snow-covered grave with a simple headstone marked Ysabel. From the back of the headstone, he removed a piece that revealed a deep cavity. “It’s where I kept the spindle after I dug it up and before the Danae woman fetched me. The girl child kept it safe.”
“The girl child,” I said. “Fallon’s sister.”
“Aye.”
Curious how the world ran in circles. If ever I needed a reminder of how small works of justice could change everything, I had but to come here.
I pulled a canvas packet from my rucksack and stuffed it in the hole. It held a slip of purple silk and a gold medallion. “If Serena Fortuna is kind, these will never see the light of day,” I said, as he replaced the stones and I sealed it with magic. “As to our work . . . Damon, the Hand of Magrog, convinced the Sitting of the Three Hundred to dissolve the Pureblood Registry. He was well on his way to installing a sorcerer on Eodward’s throne, when his Pretender—legitimate blood-kin of Caedmon and a halfblood mage—was proved worse than the three aspirants we’ve got. He tried to force someone he liked better into the role, but the stubborn prig he chose didn’t like the idea . . .”
As we climbed the stair to the chamber beneath the dueling gods and between the blazing cauldrons, I told him of the strife among purebloods.
“. . . and so your commanders sent you here to do what you could to dissolve the Registry.”
“Works of justice,” I said. “Some not exactly small. Those who want to go backward have made the Registry Tower their headquarters. At some time in this coming year, the One-Who-Waits is going to bring that Tower down. When it falls, a piece of this will come to light”—I pulled the stola from my jaque—“and as Benedik and Signé return Xancheira to glory, another piece, and then another. Someone once told me that perfection was ephemeral, but if the person who sits Eodward’s throne thinks to take up wicked habits of whatever kind, his dreams might take such turns as he cannot imagine.”
Bastien poured two mugs of new ale. We toasted our partnership and talked late. Neither of us could sleep. It was the night of the winter solstice and the world seemed restless. Yet even surrounded by the unquiet dead, I was at peace. I knew who I was—a man with such friends and such purpose as could fill a lifetime of magic. If I needed to don the mask again, I would, but for now I would watch and work and hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Berg is a former software engineer with degrees in mathematics from Rice University and computer science from the University of Colorado. Since her 2000 debut, her epic fantasy novels have won multiple Colorado Book Awards, the Geffen Award, the Prism Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Carol lives in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies with her Exceptional Spouse, and on the Web at carolberg.com.
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