He led them to a small but well-appointed room behind several locked doors. An anxious-looking man who had to be King Gerald sat on stuffed chair. Another guard, looking equally anxious, hovered nearby. He put a hand on his sword as Serek and Calen walked in. “Stefan?” he asked, looking to the guard who had led them inside.
“It’s all right,” Stefan said again.
“Did you find Delana?” the king asked plaintively. “Where is she?”
Stefan knelt before the king’s chair. “These men can help, Sire,” he said gently. Then he rose and gave Serek a hard look. “I trust that you do mean to help,” he said. “If you try anything else, you won’t leave this room alive.”
Serek nodded impatiently and stepped toward the king. He placed one hand on the side of the king’s head and began to send out tendrils of white energy laced with blue, letting them flow from his hand and into the older man before him. After a moment, Serek drew in a sharp breath and then looked up at Calen.
“Do you see anything? Besides what I’m doing? Anything in or around King Gerald?”
“No,” Calen said. He squinted, trying to make sure. But he didn’t see anything unusual other than Serek’s own magic. “Is there something I should see?”
“I would have thought so, but maybe — maybe your sight only applies during the actual casting. This is something else. Something Sen Eva must have laid the groundwork for over time, then strengthened with new magic as needed.”
“What is it?” Stefan asked.
“A kind of persuasion spell. Something to make King Gerald trust his new advisor and make him believe she’d been here far longer than she had.” He looked at the guards. “She must have touched you with this as well,” he said. “Unless you can remember when she arrived — fairly recently?”
Stefan seemed to be struggling with something. “I — I would have sworn she had been here for years. But when I try to think of specific incidents or times . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know. She has felt . . . wrong to me, somehow, but I thought I just didn’t like her. King Gerald has held questionable company before, from time to time.” He took a breath. “Can you remove whatever spell we are under?”
“Yes,” Serek said. Again he touched the king, who had sat still and silent like a small, worried child during this conversation. A slow seeping of bright orange — neutralizing energy — left Serek’s hands. After a moment, the king started as though waking from an unintentional doze in his chair. He stared at Serek and Calen and then looked around at his guards.
“What . . . what is happening here?” he asked.
Serek raised and spread his arms, one hand in the direction of each guard, and sent a quick burst of the same quality of orange energy at each of them simultaneously. They both looked startled, and then dismayed.
“Sire,” Stefan said, “we have been the victims of magical treachery.”
The king looked suspiciously at Serek and Calen, and Stefan hastened to add, “Not by these mages, Majesty. A — a common enemy. The woman who called herself Delana.”
“Delana!” the king said indignantly. “Delana has been my . . .” he trailed off uncertainly. “No, that’s not right.” He looked again at Serek, and then at Stefan.
Serek stood. “I’ll leave you to explain. I must get the princess-heir back to Trelian.”
Now the king seemed to come fully back to himself. “The dragon-girl! No, I cannot allow —”
With the barest flick of his fingers, Serek cast again at the king and his guards — a version of the immobilization spell he’d used on Mage Brevera and the others. Calen stared; was Serek allowed to do that to a king?
“I apologize, King Gerald, to you and to your men,” Serek said. “But I have a duty to take the princess home, and you have been fed a great deal of misinformation that is still clouding your judgment. You will find yourself able to move again shortly; I trust you will think carefully and sort out the truth before taking any further action against Trelian.”
He turned to leave, and Calen hurried after him, glancing back only once to see the king staring furiously after them. They ran back outside to find Meg and Anders waiting, Tessel supported between them. Anders was holding some sort of blocking spell around them — intended, Calen could tell by the colors, to both protect them and make them less noticeable to anyone who might forget the dragon long enough to remember that the princess was still there.
“Can the dragon carry all of us, Your Highness?” Serek asked.
“I — I don’t know,” she said. “He only needs to get us a safe distance away from here, if he can’t make it all the way. Although . . . I don’t know how we’ll get to him while they’re still shooting at him. He’s already . . . it’s very difficult to keep him from fighting back. He’s so angry. . . .”
Calen was struck by the tension in Meg’s face. She shouldn’t be struggling with Jakl that way. He frowned. Now wasn’t the time, but he was clearly going to have to find out what was going on. If she was having trouble with the link . . . He hated that he hadn’t been here to help her.
“Can we stop the arrows somehow?” Calen asked Serek. “Give him a chance to come down and get us?”
The two mages looked at each other. Then Anders had Meg help him lower Tessel gently to the ground. He turned toward the confusion of people and guards and began sending clouds of blue energy spiraling out from his upraised hands.
“Sleep spell,” Serek said, adding his own casting to Anders’s. “Do you think you can join in, Calen? I know we haven’t practiced combined casting, but given that you can see what we’re doing . . . I think you’ll be able to match our progress. Just try to stay even with our levels. Don’t push; only follow. Do you understand?”
Calen nodded. He cleared his mind and then let his own casting begin, matching his own spell to what he could see of Serek’s and Anders’s. There was something he wasn’t quite getting, he could tell. . . . Serek and Anders had truly combined their casting somehow, and his own magic was only supplementing theirs, not really joining . . . but he thought it was enough. It felt . . . strange, almost as if the combined spell were pulling at his magic somehow, helping it flow from him more easily.
Around them, the people who were just beginning to come out of their disorientation from Anders’s last spell suddenly fell to the ground. People dropped in a widening circle as the spell grew outward. Calen trusted Meg wouldn’t count this as hurting them; the worst anyone would experience might be a bruise, or maybe a headache.
Anders sent additional tendrils of the spell outward, toward those outside the amphitheater. Calen followed him, and he could feel when his magic encountered the bowmen and dropped them as well. In moments, everything was quiet.
Jakl swooped down in a heartbeat, somehow managing not to squash any of the sleeping people as he did so. Serek released the spell and gently told Calen to do the same. “Anders will finish it,” he added.
Calen turned to Meg and helped her with Tessel. Between the two of them, they managed to help the barely responsive girl up and onto the dragon’s back.
Anders had finished off the spell but was watching the sleeping townspeople, probably checking for any signs of movement. Serek was stepping carefully among the slumped forms, looking at faces and clothing. Looking for Sen Eva, Calen realized. Well, of course. They couldn’t just leave her there, could they?
But after working his way through the entire crowd, Serek looked over at them and shook his head. Then he walked back toward them and climbed up behind Calen. Anders followed behind Serek.
“Where did she go?” Calen asked Serek over his shoulder.
“I don’t know. She had ample time to flee while we were with King Gerald. But we can’t risk staying here longer. We’ve got to get back and tell the king and queen what’s happened.” He sighed. “All of it. I’m afraid the situation is even more complicated and urgent than we’d feared.”
“Those really terrible things are already starting to happen, aren�
��t they?” Calen asked.
Serek didn’t answer. But he didn’t really need to, Calen supposed. It had kind of been a rhetorical question. The reappearance of Sen Eva alone was enough to qualify as terrible, and with this talk of war and Meg being held prisoner and the Magistratum chasing after them . . . Calen was afraid they were already well beyond terrible and onto . . . whatever was worse.
He was still trying to think of the right word for “more than terrible” as Jakl launched back into the sky and headed for home.
HER PARENTS WERE SO FURIOUS THEY couldn’t even look at her. Meg understood why they were angry. She didn’t blame them. Her father was pacing as he spoke, looking at Serek, Anders, and Calen in turn. Her mother followed the king with her eyes, her expression grim.
Jakl had been able to make it all the way back after all, though he’d needed what strength Meg could share with him toward the end. Which had meant that when they’d arrived, both she and Tessel had had to be half carried up into the castle. Tessel had been taken straight to the infirmary. Mage Anders had healed the worst of her cuts and bruises back in Lourin, but she had still kept slipping in and out of consciousness. He’d said she probably just needed some time to recover from the shock and pain of what had happened.
Meg hoped she’d be all right. If Tessel was all right, maybe there was a chance that Meg could forgive herself for what had happened.
She kept thinking back to what Tessel had said in the prison cell about duty and responsibility. It seemed obvious now that she had put her dragon first, ahead of everything and everyone else, no matter how she’d tried to justify it. Going to Lourin had seemed like a way to clear Jakl’s name . . . but Tessel was right that it probably hadn’t really been the only way. And had she bothered to try and think of alternatives? No. Not really.
Meg knew she could be impulsive. She knew she had to try to control her actions better. But she was also afraid that what was happening lately with Jakl was adding to the problem. She had thought at first that the nightmares were only affecting him while they were going on, but maybe they were staying with him in some way. Or maybe Jakl’s rages were causing the nightmares, and Sen Eva had nothing to do with it. Either way, she had to figure it out. Soon. When the crowd had been screaming for Tessel’s blood and she’d felt Jakl approaching, it had been very, very hard to hold on to herself and what she had to do. She’d kept slipping, losing herself in Jakl’s anger and her own, unable to separate the two. If Calen hadn’t been there to help her come back to herself . . .
But he had been. She just had to remember that as long as she had Calen, she would be all right. He would remind her who she was if she forgot again. And he was back home now, and he would stay with her and keep her . . . keep her herself. It would be all right. It had to be.
“We must send word to King Gerald at once,” her father was saying. “Before anything else, we must convince him that we are not at war.” He strode over to the door of the meeting room, opened it, and told the guard there to send for a steward and writing materials. Then he turned back to Serek. “You’re certain you removed the — the magic that Sen Eva was using to control him?”
“Influence, not control. But yes. And I would hope they would be on guard against her, now, so that she wouldn’t be able to get close enough to enspell him again. But he may still consider us to be the enemy, Sire. Even if Sen Eva does not return to him, his people will remember seeing the dragon attack, and he will remember that I left him immobile in his castle as we made our escape.”
“You had no choice,” King Tormon said. “And you were only trying to help clean up Meg’s mess. If Gerald declares war against us, you will not be the cause.”
Even now, Meg noted sadly, he didn’t look at her. Not even to accuse her.
“We must try to explain in our message just how insidious Sen Eva can be,” Serek said. “Convincing King Gerald will serve no purpose if she is still secretly in the kingdom, stirring his people into rebellion.”
“For all we know, she will convince the people to overthrow the king if he fails to act as she desires,” Anders added.
“For all we know, he may still decide we are to blame for everything that has been happening,” said the king.
“For all we know, our letter will never even reach him,” said the queen.
There was a moment of unhappy silence following this comment.
The steward arrived, and the king had them all wait while he penned a hasty letter, then had the queen sign it alongside his own name. He had the steward make two copies and signed both of them as well, then sealed them all with his ring and the wax the steward had brought and sent the steward to run the letters up to the Master of Birds. The birds flew fast; the message would arrive in Lourin in a few hours.
“A courier would be better,” the king said, “but the birds will be quicker, and given what happened to that poor girl . . . well, the birds will be safer, too. Although we should still send a courier to follow up. With soldiers, for protection. Bah! I never thought such a thing would be necessary, but it is clear we cannot be certain how far these people will go. Not with Sen Eva’s influence to be considered.” He ran a hand through his graying hair. “Damn. I thought we’d have more time than this.”
“We all did, Sire,” Serek said. “Or we hoped so, at any rate. I need to send word to the Magistratum at once and tell them what is happening. That events are already in motion.”
“What?” Calen asked. “Aren’t we hiding from them? Weren’t we just running away from them this morning?”
“They would certainly have come here looking for us regardless,” Serek said. “This was never a hiding place, only somewhere to come to regroup. And in any event, Sen Eva’s appearance changes everything. Until now all of our arguments have been speculation: what it will mean if she reappears, what we should do to prepare, what steps we should take now, and so on. But I can verify her presence in Lourin, and now it will be clear that she is actively trying once again to advance her goals.”
“What are her goals?” the queen asked. “Revenge? Or does she really believe in that prophecy about the war and that other mage’s return? Surely that’s not . . . that can’t actually happen, can it?”
“We are very afraid that it can, Your Majesty,” said Serek. “There are other mages who disagree —”
“Idiots,” muttered Anders.
“But the signs seem very clear to the rest of us that if certain elements are all in place, Krelig will indeed be able to cross back over to our world.”
“Why is the war so important?” Calen asked. “What does that have to do with his coming back?”
“We don’t really know,” Anders said. “We think he had a vision that told him he could not — or perhaps should not — return unless there was a war going on. It could be as simple as needing the rest of us to be distracted enough that we won’t be able to organize ourselves to stop him. Or there could be something more to it. . . . Again, we just can’t know for sure. Our divinations give us only hints. Mage Krelig’s vision may have told him more.” He shrugged. “Or not. If he’s like, ah . . . others . . . who have the Sight, he has probably learned to trust his visions even if he doesn’t understand them.”
“We do know that he must have someone’s assistance on this side, however,” Serek said. “The portal spell needs to be cast from both this world and the other. If we can only find Sen Eva again and get her into custody . . .”
“I can’t believe we let her get away!” Meg said. Then she realized how that might sound. “I don’t mean that you did anything wrong, Mage Serek. I just mean . . . she was right there. I should have done something earlier. Somehow. When I first realized who she was.”
“You have done quite enough,” said the queen, finally looking at Meg. Her eyes were cold and angry.
“Mother, I —”
“Enough,” said the king wearily. “Meg, I know how you feel about the accusations against Jakl, but you must understand how wrong it was
for you to go off on your own that way. We are lucky to have you back in one piece.”
“And it appears you have only made things worse in the meantime,” her mother added.
“Sen Eva made things worse!” Meg cried, jumping to her feet. “I’m not the one —”
“Enough, I said!” The king’s shout cut through the room. Meg stared. He hardly ever raised his voice that way. “Meg,” he went on, after a moment, “perhaps you should go and get some rest now.”
Meg wanted to object, but she didn’t have the heart to keep trying to defend actions she now regretted. And she didn’t want to provoke her father to yell at her like that again.
“I’ll walk with you,” Calen said. He looked quickly toward his master. “If that’s all right with you, Mage Serek.”
“Yes, go on,” Serek said, waving a hand toward the door. “The rest of us have much to discuss. I’ll find you when I need you.”
Grateful, Meg held the door for Calen, and they both stepped out into the hall.
“So,” Calen said, once the door had closed behind them, “what’s going on with the link?”
“Let’s go down to the garden,” she said. “Oh, Calen, there’s so much I need to tell you.”
They started down the stairs. When they reached the first landing, Pela suddenly popped up before them.
“Princess!” she said. “They told me you were back! Are you hurt? What happened? Why did you run off that way with that courier girl? They said she was in the infirmary. They said — oh!” She stopped abruptly and looked at Calen. “The mage’s apprentice. Hello.” Pela’s eyes darted quickly around — probably, Meg realized, looking for a chaperone. Meg tried not to smile.
“Hello, Pela. Yes, I’m fine. This is Calen. Calen, have you never met Pela, my lady-in-waiting?”
“Uh, hello,” said Calen.
“Can I do something for you, Princess?” Pela went on. “Help you change into a dress, perhaps?” She looked meaningfully at Meg’s clothing. Meg glanced down and was astonished to realize just how dirty and disheveled she was.
The Princess of Trelian Page 16
