“You should have left the Peck to me,” Mohdri said.
She had a host of replies, but didn’t trust herself to give voice to a single one of them. Instead, she sat silent and still, staring. The radiance was easier to take, provided she closed her eyes to slits, as she would under the full desert sun or on a snowfield, but the cold was borderline unendurable. She could see pools of ice forming in the ruts and hollows; it wouldn’t be long before the ground itself turned hard as stone.
“We’ll need patrols, at the other gates, to see if anyone got out,” she said in a tone as unreal in its way as the night’s events.
“If you hadn’t joined me for an inspection of my encampment beyond the walls…”
At his words, Anakerie seemed to shrink in a little on herself, as though this was the moment of realization that if her worst fears came to pass and the other gates were closed, she was all alone. No family, no people, no home.
“Do you think this was Elora’s Ascension, then?”
She responded with a humorless chuckle. “Whether it is or no, Mohdri, there’ll be hell to pay. The Domains were at each other’s throats before; this won’t make things better. Like Tir Asleen, save that only one King and Court was consumed there; tonight claimed them all. The whole world’s just been turned upside down.”
“Forgive my presumption, Highness,” Mohdri told her gently, out of respect for her loss, “but I would remind you that you earned your place among the Maizan long ago. As you have in my own heart.” She swung a heavy head to face him. “Command us as you would your own, it is our pleasure to obey.”
“Let’s away from here first, my lord,” she replied formally, keeping as firm a grip on her emotions as on her reins. For all his seeming generosity, she had lost everything and both knew it. “We’ll wait for the sun; perhaps then we’ll be able to see what’s been done to my city.”
“And those others we saw, Keri?”
“Three horses,” she recalled aloud, “four riders: two men, two women. One man in Royal Angwyn colors. One Nelwyn.”
“Keen eyes.”
“I don’t know the man, I don’t know the woman—but before her on her saddle rode the one who called himself Drumheller. She carried Jalaby’s sword. The girl was Elora Danan.”
“Abducted, do you think?”
“Or a party to this holocaust. I want them, Mohdri.”
“I thought you might.”
“Alive.” It was a pointed command, not what was expected from someone whose city had just been consumed by magical flames. Some of the Maizan appeared visibly offended and even their Castellan stiffened under the lash of her tongue.
“As my lady commands,” he acknowledged in a neutral tone.
“Find a printer. There should be one in Bocamel, the village near where you’re bivouacked. I want flyers at every crossroads, posted at every inn and way station, heralds as well the length of the peninsula, with a shipment to go out to all the East Bay cities.”
“Reward?”
“One hundred thousand crowns.” That got everyone’s attention; it was literally a King’s ransom. “But only if they’re alive and substantially unharmed. They’re of no use dead.”
“You’ve seen what that damned sorcerer can do, Anakerie!”
“And I pray to see him undo it, Mohdri. They may not be slain within the walls, my father, the other Royals, the people; until I know better, I choose to hold to that hope. I need a place to work and one of your household sorcerers; I’ll also be sending word to the Realms Beyond. Whoever he is, that cunning little man, whatever he’s about, by morning I want him to find every hand turned against him. Wherever he runs or tries to hide, every door and pathway will be closed. Whatever the cost, Lord Castellan, I want Thorn Drumheller found.”
“Nobody followin’!” Geryn called as his weary horse labored the last stretch to the crest of the ridgeline.
“You don’t sound happy,” Thorn told him, from where he was hunkered down by Elora. She was still dead to the world and that was starting to worry him. It wasn’t a coma, nor injury of any kind that InSight could tell, but nothing like a normal sleep either. The best image he could find to describe her condition was a state of nonbeing that was too uncomfortably reminiscent of how he’d found Khory. The DemonChild was tending to the other horses, and that, too, was something of a surprise to him. By rights, the animals should have been in a sweat, responding to those elements of Self that made her native kind anathema to more stable physical forms. Yet they accepted her as they would any ordinary person.
He fished another carrot stick from his pouch and crunched absently.
“Plenty reasons for’t, I s’pose,” the Pathfinder grumped, taking a towel from under his saddlebags and using it to wipe the sweat from his horse’s neck and breast. “Prob’ly in a mess o’ their own, ’cause a’ what hap’n’d.”
“It’s all right, I don’t believe that either.” Thorn rose and stretched, his sore thigh muscles and backside provoking an exaggerated wince and reminding him why he preferred to walk. “If they’re not coming after us, it’s because they believe they don’t have to.”
“Can yeh not magic us on our way, then? We’ve pushed these poor bits hard as we dare for t’night. Fear ate ’em up as much as true runnin’.”
“Not that simple, my friend, I’m afraid. For one thing, we need to have a place to go.”
“Far from Angwyn, I’ll settle for that.”
They both turned heads to the north, and a glow that drowned the starshine overhead. It was a crisp, clear, lovely night, without a hint of haze or fog, and stars should have filled the sky, constellations readily marked and the majestic sweep of the nebular cloud spectacularly visible. But only the brightest now could be seen, even toward the far horizon.
“Never seen any forest fire cast up such a shine,” Geryn said, ending with a deep and breathy sigh. “Don’t seem so bright as it was, though. Maybe it’s run its course, d’yeh think?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“S’pose I don’t believe it either. Damnation, Peck, what the hell happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they all dead in Angwyn, d’yeh think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know much, do yeh?” Geryn didn’t wait for any answer. “I seen the pennants, weren’t only monarchs in attendance, but pretty much all the nobility as well. Not simply of Angwyn alone, neither, but the Realms Beyond. Heard talk in the barracks”—he sounded like he didn’t want to believe what he’d heard, the enormity was too great to comprehend, like trying to envision the world—“that the population of the city had doubled an’ more this Festival Week. Blessed Bride, both head and heart have been cut from the Kingdom.”
“Anakerie’s free,” Thorn noted in passing, rolling her hair clip between his fingers before putting it once more to use. He’d deliberately muted any awareness of her; the bond between them was mutual, and even if she wasn’t sensitive enough to follow it to him by herself, any wizard could do it for her.
Geryn nodded. “Aye. Saw her standard among tha’ troop o’ Maizan when we rode out from the city. D’yeh think she was party t’ what they did?”
“No.”
“Yet she rides with ’em.”
“You don’t need chains to be a prisoner. Circumstance can imprison you as easily. As cruelly.”
“Who are you?” challenged a girl’s voice, and the two men turned their eyes to the bedroll where Elora Danan lay. “This isn’t my tower, what have you done?” She wasn’t at all frightened, the dominant tone to her voice was outrage.
“You’re safe with us, Elora—” Thorn began, but she didn’t let him get any farther.
“I know you!”
He smiled, thinking of the way she burbled happily as a baby when he held her.
“You’re the Peck who bloodied my nose! Guard! Vizards!” Her cry was
shrill and demanding, cutting the night and their hearing like a knife, so keen the sheer noise of it was a right royal pain.
“There’s none about but us, girl,” said Geryn, who hadn’t yet twigged to her true identity.
“I am no girl, wretch.” She sneered with a haughtiness honed by a lifetime’s practice. “I am the Sacred Princess Elora Danan, and the proper way to address me is on your knees.”
“Bless my soul,” Geryn muttered in pure and absolute wonderment, something in the way she spoke making him take her words at face value, without the slightest question or doubt. He was on his knees before he finished speaking, dropping as though the locking pins had been summarily yanked from his joints, folding more neatly than an articulated puppet.
“The proper form,” she continued, “is ‘Your Most Serene Highness.’ And I’ll bless your soul when you’ve earned it. As for you”—and with that, she confronted Thorn, who didn’t appear anywhere near so impressed—“not a chance, not ever. Find me a gateway to hell, I’ll gladly push you in.”
Actually, Thorn was asking himself if he wasn’t already there.
“Don’t you remember?” he demanded of her.
“Yeh never told me, Peck,” from Geryn, with a sullen and resentful undertone.
“The Rite of Ascension? The Deceiver’s spells?”
“The only ‘Deceiver’ I know is the one I see before me.”
“Stealing the Sacred Princess, are yeh mad?”
“Your precious aerie’s gone, Elora,” Thorn said with flat brutality. “And the King’s city with it. And the Rulers of the Twelve Domains.”
“Blessed Bride, they’ll be hunting us t’ the ends o’ the earth an’ time t’gether.”
He rounded on Geryn. “Will you please be silent!”
“Only speakin’ my piece, is all.”
“Well, save it till later! And in the meanwhile, Geryn, consider, if you will, Elora’s fate if we hadn’t taken her!”
“Liar!” she cried, and caught Thorn across the face with her fist to send him sprawling. She was already in motion to leap atop him when the point of Khory’s sword persuaded her otherwise. The DemonChild straddled Thorn, features mostly shrouded in darkness, the blade held so steady she might have been cast from steel herself.
“Stop it,” Thorn cried, appalled as he heard the beginnings of a stammer he thought he’d lost years ago. “The both of you, I mean it, right this instant!”
He glared at Khory until she backed away, which she did with a sniff that told him he deserved whatever was coming. Thorn then climbed to his feet and right into Elora’s face, she surprising him by standing her ground.
“You don’t know me?” he challenged.
“From the tower,” she replied, with a slight stammer of her own, shaken by the intensity of his focus but starting to feel the cold as well. “You and those two awful little”—her mouth twisted in disgust, which didn’t do wonders for her appearance—“bug men.”
She wasn’t concentrating, and even if she was, her defenses were no match for him as he used InSight to peer within her memory.
“Bastard,” he said with a feral snarl that would have done justice to the most fearsome predator. It made Elora jump with self-conscious fright, as though she was expecting to be struck, which only made him all the more angry. He turned to the north and the horizon’s distant glow, to cry again, much more loudly, “Bastard!”
Her memory was a mess. Like a chalk pattern on a blackboard that some prankster had attacked with capricious abandon, erasing random swathes, so that while the structure as a whole remained substantially intact, there were arbitrary gaps among the connecting elements. Even if an image existed, the context was lost, as well as any means to properly access it. She might know his face of old, but have no idea where it came from. Remember an incident, but not who was involved.
“The Spell of Assumption,” he said, more calmly in voice if not in feeling.
“What?” from Elora, dismissively.
“Do you remember the flames?”
A breeze skirled across the ridge, with a bite all out of proportion to the season and its velocity, and Elora reflexively clutched her arms, finding bare skin where she expected layers of ornate cloth. She looked down at herself, and the ruin of her gown, and her face twisted into something ugly.
“You are in such trouble,” she announced, a judge passing final sentence.
“What I bin sayin’ all along, Most Serene Highness,” offered Geryn.
“Look at your hand,” Thorn said.
He’d bandaged the wound, the first time they rested their horses, pulling some medicinal herbs and powder from his pouch along with the pristine dressing.
“You did this!” Accusation, not question, and he knew she meant caused the wound in the first place.
“The Deceiver—” he began.
“What ‘Deceiver,’ Peck?”
“The creature who pretended to be Willow—”
“You lie and you lie and you lie and I won’t hear any of it! Willow Ufgood is my protector! My godfather! My friend!”
“The Spell of Assumption,” he told her harshly, “guts a person’s soul as a fisherman would his catch. It burns from you all that you were—every memory, every aspect of Self—leaving you a hollow and wholly empty vessel.” Of their own accord, his eyes sought Khory’s, to find her sitting apart from the others on an outcropping of rock, running a whetstone the length of her blade with a practiced hand.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t remember anything like that.” She spoke bravely, but her lower undertones broadcast the dissonances of a growing apprehension as she encountered more of the gaps in memory Thorn had spoken of.
“The Deceiver’s doing.” His tone moderated, he was thinking aloud. “He needs a host to anchor him to this world. Which means he isn’t at all what he appears; he was casting a glamour from the start. No grand revelation there, that was obvious the moment I saw him. But to ensnare everyone there…that doesn’t just betoken power, but skill. And knowledge, intimate knowledge, of how to beguile each in turn.”
“I’ve had enough of this,” Elora announced.
He faced her without really seeing, still enwrapped in his musings. “That has to be why he kept out of sight until the very end, when he was ready to strike. He had to know of your ability to see through falsehoods. But the same supposedly holds for spells. How could he know so much yet make such an obvious mistake?”
“You’re taking me back.”
The force of her demand broke his train of thought, which made his response more than a bit curt. “There’s nothing to go back to.”
“So you say. And I’m supposed to take your word for it?”
“Doesn’t really matter, one way or the other, truth is truth.”
She stuck out her tongue and turned to Geryn.
“You,” she announced. He straightened to attention. “I want to go home. You take me.”
The Pathfinder took on the air of someone offered a choice between impalement and being drawn and quartered.
“ ’S awful late, Highness.”
“Most Serene Highness!”
“Pardon, beg pardon, Most Serene Highness. But I gotta tell yeh, the horses can’t handle that ride, ’specially this late a’ night. There’s no track t’ speak of, they need their rest same as us an’ we need daylight.”
“I heard you ride, that’s what woke me.”
“I was born to it,” he told her with a shy, proud smile. “Were you?” He gathered strength from deep inside, and stood plain fact against her desire. “Yeh’ve not sat a saddle a day in your life, before t’night. Yeh haven’t the stamina yourself for a long ride, nor the muscles to stay mounted, much less properly control your animal. You’re sure to do yourself an injury before we go a league, or worse do one t’ your horse. Forgive me, Most Serene Highness, tomorrow may prove different, but
yeh’ll go nowhere in the dark. It’s not safe.”
It was the longest speech Thorn had ever heard the young man make, possibly the longest ever attempted in Geryn’s life, the words planted like bricks on a foundation, one after the other to form a neat, solid, unassailable wall.
“B’sides,” he finished, “the Peck’s right. Angwyn’s cursed.”
“You hateful creature,” she snarled, as if her words had the power to strike him down. “I hate you both!” Then, in an upspiraling shriek, “I hate you!” And she collapsed to her bedroll in tears.
“Good thing we weren’t followed,” Geryn noted as he shifted himself closer to Thorn, as uncomfortable in speech as posture by what was happening. “Way sound carries in the night, they’d be finding us for sure.”
* * *
—
“What have you done to me?”
Thorn barely registered the shriek of almost incoherent rage before the child was on him, flailing away with every limb and voice besides, smashing smashing smashing without the slightest sense of purpose other than to do him harm. He tried to defend himself, but that proved next to useless without the wits necessary to tell his body how to act. His mind was vaguely aware of what was happening, but all the wake-up connections hadn’t been made; the horses were hitched to the wagon, but he lacked the reins to direct them. Elora’s emotions didn’t make the task any easier. They pummeled him like mallets against a kettledrum, beating a fast-paced tattoo, adding bruises galore to the aches and pains left over from last night’s flight.
He knew what to do on a horse; he simply didn’t have the body for it. Sitting astride made him feel like a wishbone at the Solstice Feast, bowed near to breaking, and he was never sure which part of him would crack first, tail-bone or hips. He couldn’t reach the stirrups, which meant he couldn’t adapt himself to the movement of the beast, which meant a merciless pounding. Normally, a healing cast would have taken good care of it, and left him reasonably recovered when he woke. But Power exacted a physical toll, same as any other kind of exertion; he’d done too much, he didn’t have the energy to spare at the last for his own needs. The thought had occurred to him, accompanied by a wisp of desire, but only in the final, fleeting moment before sleep claimed him.
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