by Kali Wallace
Seawater in her hair, damp stone, air closed up too long—but nothing else. The Winter Blade didn’t smell like a place where anybody lived.
Mara stepped into a corridor so long it vanished into darkness in both directions. Her light cast a shy yellow circle around her. When she looked back, her heart skipped a beat. There was no door, only a blank wall.
She reached out, panic tightening her throat, and found the open doorway at once. She could feel the air drifting and hear the lap of water in the well.
The doorway was still there. It was hidden by magic. She could be the first person to pass this way in centuries.
She had to search the tower, but she didn’t know which way to go. She kept thinking about all the stories she had heard about the Winter Blade: the curses old masters had set upon the fortress to protect it, how many great mages had met their end in these very corridors, the sailors who claimed to hear the wails of ghosts in the tower on the darkest nights.
There were no wails now. The fortress was quiet.
It was eerily, profoundly quiet.
Creeping along the corridor, Mara heard no voices, no footsteps, no doors opening and closing. She heard nothing but her own breath. The Lady claimed the Lord of the Muck had only a few loyal servants, not an entire household, but even so, the quiet was unsettling. She tried to think of it as a good thing. If there wasn’t anybody awake at this late hour, there wasn’t anybody for her to run into. But she wasn’t quite reassured. The silence only meant she hadn’t found them yet.
Them, she thought, but she meant him.
The Lord of the Muck was somewhere in that tower. Every corner she turned, she risked meeting him. Every door she opened, he might be waiting behind it. She didn’t know what she would do if she found him. Would he remember her from Bindy’s shop? As much as she wanted to look him in the eye and tell him she knew what he’d done, she couldn’t get caught.
The Lady had insisted her most important task was to find the Lord of the Muck’s magical laboratory. If he had any more of the ancient animal bones, that’s where he would be keeping them. In this Mara’s goal coincided with the Lady’s: if he had any of Bindy’s journals, the written record of her spell-songs she had taken with her the night she died, those might be there as well.
Mara tried every door she passed. Most were locked, but a few were open; and every time a handle turned her heart thumped as she gathered her courage to open it. She found a kitchen that hadn’t been used in years, a pantry filled with wine casks, a closet full of dusty buckets and brooms. There was no sign anybody had lived in this part of the fortress for years, or even longer.
Three locked doors past the broom closet, she finally found something useful: an unlocked door leading to the sea cave and the island’s hidden docks. A short, crumbling staircase led down to the water.
Mara held her light high. It was shaped much like the sea cave under Tidewater Isle, with stone walls arching up to a buttressed ceiling over a long quay. But where Tidewater’s cave was decorated with a brilliant stone-and-glass mosaic depicting the landing of the first Sumanti explorers on Greenwood Island, the Winter Blade’s walls were covered with a vast frieze of roiling, toiling, embattled sea creatures: a kraken fighting a leviathan, sharks swarming a whale, serpents and octopuses dragging tall ships down from below. Most of the carvings were timeworn and faded, the details scrubbed away by storms and centuries, but here and there a creature’s jeweled eye glinted in the light, as though the stone itself were watching.
There were only two boats tied to the dock. One was a flat, old-fashioned pleasure boat draped with cobwebs; it had benches enough for twelve or fifteen people and long, age-cracked oars crossed over its prow. Much of its colorful paint was long since scoured away, but what remained showed a line of flowering vines all around the saxboard. The other was a rowboat. That one, at least, was in good repair.
So much for the rumors that the Muck flew from his tower on bird wings. He bumped over the waves like everybody else.
Mara stepped to the edge of the dock for a closer look. There were two sturdy oars tucked into the rowboat, and beneath them were a coil of rope and a woven sack.
And a single broken sandal.
Mara backed away quickly. The rope and sack were a good sign: they looked exactly like what had been used to sink the bones. But that one lonely sandal with its leather strap broken put a nervous quiver into her chest.
There was nothing else in the sea cave, so she continued her search. She counted twelve more doors, all locked, and one dark hallway sloping into the heart of the island. The stones of its arched entrance looked like vertebrae, as though a long backbone was marching up one side and down the other. Mara decided very quickly not to explore that corridor. The laboratory would surely be above water level, not far below it.
Just beyond that hallway was a staircase, which Mara ran up with relief. She was growing frustrated, and more than a little suspicious. There had to be something in the fortress besides empty rooms in empty corridors. The Muck wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of taking the Winter Blade from Gerrant of Greenwood if he wasn’t going to use it.
Mara was halfway up the stairs when she heard the singing.
It was so faint she thought it was the echo of a spell, but it didn’t repeat itself like a magical remnant would. Magical or not, it was being sung now. A woman’s voice, rasping, high, and thin. Mara didn’t recognize the song. It sounded like the Roughwater language, but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that somewhere in that great fortress, a woman was singing a song as soft and gentle as a sea breeze.
Then there was a loud shriek—metal grinding on metal—and the singing stopped.
Mara held her breath. The darkness was silent again.
Stone corridors could make sound bounce in tricky and untrustworthy ways. The song and the metallic shriek could have come from anywhere. Above or below, near or far. All it meant was that Mara had to work faster. She ran the rest of the way up the curving staircase, her hand sliding along the wooden banister until she realized it had been carved in the shape of a sea serpent, and the bumps racing under her fingertips were its scales.
At the top was another long hallway. She didn’t know which way to go. There was a set of broad balcony doors flanked by windows, every pane blacked with grease to block the light. The corridor was dark and silent in both directions. Mara looked to the left, looked to the right, frustrated by her indecision. The fortress was too massive for her to explore every room and every corridor. She needed to focus her search.
She was looking for the laboratory, because the laboratory was where the bones would be. She had found the bones before by singing her mother’s song. Mara took a breath.
Took a breath—and stopped. It was so quiet. The silence felt even more oppressive now. But she had to try something. The song was the only idea she had.
She began softly, so softly it was barely a whisper: “Over the sea and under the sky, my island home it waits for me.”
Nothing.
A few more lines, a little bit louder: “Over the waves and under the storms, my heart is bound but my dreams are free. Older I grow and—”
In the darkness, something groaned.
Mara stopped singing with an undignified squeak. She couldn’t tell where the sound had come from. It was nothing like the answer the bones had given to her when she was diving. It sounded more like the deep thrum of waves in a sea cave, and it faded quickly.
Gathering her courage, she finished the first stanza of her mother’s old song, and this time she didn’t stop when the creaking sound returned. She went into the second stanza: “The rich green slopes that haunt my dreams, they are beloved as treasure to me.”
Her father used to tease her mother for singing that song, in the playful way they had. It was an old-fashioned sailors’ song, for Greenwooders far from home and yearning for their green island. Dad would sweep Mum around in a circle and ask, What business did a stonemason who
couldn’t tell a jib from a mizzen have singing a song like that? “The trees and vines and flowers in bloom, the waterfalls spill like jewels to the sea.”
Mum had always laughed and said she might not be a sailor but she was a Greenwooder to her bones. With a wicked twinkle in her eye she would say if he didn’t like that song, she would pick another, maybe the one about the Lunderi captain and the blue-eyed boy. At which point Dad would clap his hands over Mara’s ears with mock horror and tell Mum to carry on, and Mum would, louder than before, so loud the goats in the neighbor’s pen bleated in reply, and Mara and Mum and Dad all fell over laughing.
It hurt to remember them like that, so happy and safe and alive. Mara’s voice trembled on the next lines: “The black-sand beaches and hearth fires alight, oh let me return, oh let me go home, to the waves I plea.”
The noise from the corridor never grew any louder, and when she stopped singing it faded into a tired sigh. But Mara knew now which direction it had come from. She turned right and marched down the corridor, more determined than ever.
She went back to trying doors. No light shone beneath any of them; there was no light at all except the one she carried. She heard no more singing, no clangs of metal. She began to wonder if she had imagined it.
It was no use thinking like that. Just because it was unexpected didn’t mean it hadn’t been real. She had to trust her own senses. The noises were a mystery, but it was one she could solve if she kept looking.
Seven locked doors from the staircase Mara reached an intersection with another corridor. She paused to count back every turn and step she had taken from the well room. When she was certain she could find her way out again, she peered around the corner.
Somebody was there, barely ten feet away.
Mara pulled back so quickly she stumbled over her own feet, just barely caught herself before she fell. She gulped around the terrified hammering of her heart.
There was somebody standing just around the corridor. A tall, broad-shouldered man. She had glimpsed him for only a second, but it seemed to her he had been facing her and unmoving, standing like a sentry or a guard. Had he been armed? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t noticed. Surely a guard would be armed.
She waited for a shout, for the sound of his footsteps. There was no way he hadn’t seen her. She was carrying a light. It filled the hallway. He had to see it.
But he made no sound.
Maybe he was waiting for her to move first.
Or he was creeping toward her ever so quietly.
Or he was just around the corner, and he was going to step forward, and he would catch her right where she cowered. She could imagine it so vividly she knew exactly what his hand would feel like on her arm.
In a moment it would be too late to run. Her hand was shaking and the murk-light swung on its rope, its light dancing on the stone walls. She squeezed her eyes shut. Opened them again.
She stepped around the corner.
The man hadn’t moved.
Mara inched closer.
He still didn’t move. With the light shining directly in his face, he didn’t even blink.
Mara swallowed. “Sir?”
He wore the heavy wool clothing and leather boots of a mountain-born Greenwooder, but they were oddly smooth and dark gray in color, without a trace of the dyed reds and greens and golds favored by the mountain villagers. There were deep lines and discolored spots of age on his face; his lips were turned in a frown. His hands were calloused, his knuckles knobby. His face beneath the brim of his hat was the same gray as his coat. His skin reminded Mara of a street performer who used to work on Quarantine Island during the busy market days, a woman who would cover herself with green-tinted paint and stand perfectly still in regal poses so that travelers new to the city would mistake her for a weathered copper statue. They only realized the difference when she spoke. It was considered great fun, a way to trick sailors and children.
Only the man’s eyes stood out. They were yellow, glassy, and bright.
“Sir?” Mara said again.
The man didn’t move. Not even his fingers twitched.
Mara reached for his hand. It was cold, unyielding stone. The man didn’t just look like a statue: he was a statue. His clothes had the look of wool and leather, with seams and laces carved so realistically they had fooled her, but they too were stone.
Mara looked at his face again.
His odd yellow eyes were watching her.
Mara jumped backward and knocked her elbow into the wall so hard she yelped. The sound bounded down the long corridor, and she held her breath until it faded. A shout like that could carry far in these empty stone halls.
But the tower was as silent as before.
The stone man was still watching her. It was a trick. It had to be a trick. The strange yellow stone had been spelled to look like real eyes. She was jumpy and nervous and he was a statue.
Only a statue.
A drop of water trickled from the corner of his eye and down the side of his face.
9
The Sorcerer’s Library
Mara’s sprinted away from the statue. Her feet slapped noisily on the stones, and her murk-light swung on its rope. She looked back, and she almost yelped to see somebody behind her—but it was only her own shadow, dancing wildly as she ran. Nobody was following her.
Of course nobody was following. Statues couldn’t move.
Or stare.
Or weep.
Once, twice, three times she ducked into a doorway to hold her breath and listen. For footsteps, for shouts, for the scrape of stone on stone. There was nothing. The hallway remained empty. There was no sign of the stone man.
It was easier to think of him as the stone man, even though she knew who it was.
Gerrant of Greenwood had disappeared when the Lord of the Muck had taken over the Winter Blade. Everybody assumed the Muck had killed him, although nobody knew for sure, and Gerrant had no family to demand the High Mage look into it. He had been considered an outsider since he had come down from the remote interior of Greenwood Island some twenty years ago to challenge the great storm-mage Lilia the Kind for control of the fortress. Lilia had surrendered after a brief, mostly symbolic battle; she said she was too old to fight for a drafty, bad-tempered fortress anyway. She moved to live with her daughters in the crafters’ quarter on Glassmaker Isle, and Gerrant of Greenwood became Lord of the Winter Blade.
Many mages in the city had never liked that a Greenwooder trained by mountain hedge witches held the fortress; they wanted a proper Citadel-trained city mage to have that honor. So everybody felt it was right that the Muck should seize the fortress. It wasn’t that they liked the Lord of the Muck, and they certainty didn’t approve of mages going about killing each other. But the Winter Blade had its own traditions, and at least the Muck wasn’t an outsider. Besides, they said, it was entirely possible the Muck had chased the defeated Greenwooder back to the mountains or sent him away on a merchant ship to the Pinnacle Isles, never to be seen again.
Now Mara knew the truth: Gerrant of Greenwood had never left the Winter Blade.
Mara leaned out from her current doorway to check the corridor one more time. Still empty. Her murk-light was fading, but she didn’t want to light the spare until it was time to leave. She didn’t know how long she had been in the fortress. She felt like she had crawled out of the well only moments ago, and at the same time she felt like she’d been in the dark for hours. Driftwood and Professor Kosta were still waiting outside. They had to be waiting. It hadn’t been that long. Driftwood wouldn’t leave her behind.
With renewed determination—and a strong desire to get as far from the stone man as she could—Mara ran up a second flight of stairs. As she was trying to decide which way to search, she felt a change in the air. It was so subtle she didn’t even realize what it was until she had taken a few cautious steps.
She could hear the sea.
She drew in a slow breath. She could smell it too.
<
br /> The murmur of the waves seemed to be louder to the left, so that’s where Mara went. She passed an alcove with a dusty bench beneath a bank of windows, but every casement was bolted shut. She kept searching. Another fifty steps along she found a pair of large doors. Every other door in the fortress had been plain, grimy with dust and sticky with spiderwebs, but these were polished to a shine. The hinges were clean, the handles gleaming, and the wood carved with elaborate scenes of ships and monsters and mages.
Mara pressed her ear to one door and heard the faint sound of surf on rocks far below. Nothing else. No voices, no footsteps, nothing. She grabbed the handle with both hands and pulled the door open.
The room was as dark as the corridor, but the air was different. Clean, fresh, salty on her tongue, and the rumble of waves was louder. She stepped over the threshold.
As soon as she was inside, light flared so bright Mara winced and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, flames were dancing in candles and lamps all around the room, but there was nobody in sight. Her surprise passed quickly. For a mage as powerful as the Lord of the Muck, a hundred candles lighting when he entered a room would be child’s play.
In the blazing warm light, Mara took a look around.
It wasn’t a laboratory. It was a library.
Books and scrolls and sheaves of brittle parchment crowded every shelf, and the shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, from one end of the room and back again, interrupted only by narrow windows open to the night. The sky through the windows shimmered faintly; Mara recognized the distortion as a simple veiling spell. That was the reason light never shone outside the fortress.
Mara couldn’t imagine how many great mages of the Winter Blade had left their libraries to be absorbed when the island was taken from them. Mara felt overwhelmed and a little breathless, trying to gape everywhere at once. She set down her murk-light. If the Muck had taken Bindy’s notes the night he killed her, they might be here. She had to look.
There were shelves stuffed with books written in a dozen different languages and others overflowing with maps from lands Mara had never even heard of before. There were piles of scrolls and towers of ledgers. She found a tottering stack of books about birds and animals from Sumant far to the east, and another with books about great forest predators in the Lunderi empire to the west. She found biographies of great mages, trade reports from fish merchants, farm records from Greenwood Island, and one book as tall as she was containing nothing but sprawling family trees. She paged through the Palisado family in hopes of identifying the mage who had found the underwater tunnel, but she didn’t know his name or even when he had lived.
