by Kyra Halland
She could barely stop looking around at the luxurious lobby long enough to do her business with the clerk, who stood behind a tall counter made of the same gleaming red wood as the rest of the furniture. “I’d like a room and stabling for two horses for a nineday,” she said. She hoped it wouldn’t take that long to rescue Silas, but she had learned from him that if things got complicated, it was better to not have to worry about things like staying paid up on your hotel room.
The clerk, who wore a plain black suit and no mage ring, raised an eyebrow and gave her a slow once-over. “I’m afraid the young lady has entered this establishment by mistake,” he said in a stuffy voice. “I believe she can find accomodations more suited to her circumstances in the Fishhouse district.”
After seeing the stuck-up attitudes of the mages’ Plain employees at the cattle market, Lainie wasn’t surprised by this response. She set down her bags and rested her hands on the counter, displaying the mage ring on her right hand. “I said, I want a room and stabling for two horses for a nineday.”
The clerk’s snootiness faded a bit, but there was still a slight smirk on his face as he said, “That will be sixty gildings.”
Lainie hid another wince at the amount; it was a lot, but she could afford it. She opened her saddlebags and took a big fat shiny gold hundred-gilding piece out from one of the money pouches. She laid it on the counter and said, “Put the extra on my account.”
The clerk’s eyes widened. “Of course, madam.” He sounded like he was strangling. She signed the registry as Lainie Banfrey, using a name-slip charm for all the good it would do here, and the clerk handed over a room key without further comment.
Having successfully dealt with the obstacle of the clerk, Lainie left her bags on one of the chairs in the lobby and took the horses to the stable. She watched the hostler and the stableboys for a few minutes to make sure they knew what they were doing; they were respectful but not cringing in their manner towards her, and knew their way well around horses. They were her kind of people, and she felt much more at ease dealing with them than she did with that stuck-up clerk.
She tipped the stableboys a handful of ten-drina pieces each and the hostler a gilding, then returned to the hotel. There, a man in a blue uniform helped her carry her bags up to the room. She tipped him a gilding, as well. It felt strange to be throwing around money like a rich person, but she couldn’t help enjoying it a little. At least for now, money was one thing she didn’t have to worry about.
The room was huge, four times the size of her and Silas’s cabin in Windy Valley, and filled with enough furniture for a house. The bed was twice as big as any hotel bed she and Silas had ever slept in, and there was also a private bathroom with an enormous tub. A table in the center of the room held a big bowl of fruit, apples and pears and round fruits with rough orange skins that she had never seen before. As promised by the name of the hotel, the windows looked out across the city to the bay. Lainie spent a moment admiring the view again. The sky and water were nearly completely dark by now, and lights in the windows of buildings and along the streets shone bright in the dusk like jewels draped across the hills.
Lainie poured water from the pitcher on the wash stand into the basin and washed her face and hands, then went downstairs for supper. The dining room was filled with shiny red wood furniture and plush blue carpet. The city being this close to so much water, there was a lot of fish on the menu. Lainie didn’t especially like fish, but she decided that while she was here in the great city of Sandostra, she should try what it had to offer. She ordered three different kinds of fish, fried and baked with different sauces, along with herbed roasted potatoes, cooked green beans with minced nuts, and dressed fresh greens. The waiter filled her glass with a kind of water that bubbled and fizzed and tickled her nose and mouth. Some of the fish she liked, and some she didn’t, but she was hungry enough that she ate every bit of it.
After the meal, she ordered a piece of dense white cake topped with fresh red and purple berries, and a cup of Island coffee. It didn’t really taste very much like chickroot brew; it was thin and bitter, while roasted chickroot had a rich, grainy, slightly sweet flavor. But after she mixed in some cream from a little white-and-blue pitcher and a spoonful of real white sugar – a luxury in the Wildings, but so common here there was a bowl of it on every table – the coffee tasted better. On the whole, though, she thought she preferred chickroot brew.
Back up in her room, she went into the bathroom and tried out the magical water pumps that were built into the wall over the big porcelain-coated bathtub. They were different from the mechanical faucets at the nice hotel in Bentwood Gulch where she and Silas had holed up after finding Brin Coltor’s daughter; it took a slight nudge of power to make them work. She supposed Plain people wouldn’t be able to use them at all.
She filled the tub, feeling slightly uneasy at the amount of water she was using, then undressed and settled into the water, hot enough to make her skin tingle. The tub was plenty big enough for two, and all at once she wished with everything she had that Silas was there to share the bath with her. They had done that a few times when they had stayed somewhere that had a bathtub big enough for two. They would wash each other’s hair and scrub each other’s backs and, well, everywhere else, and do things she had never thought you could do in a bathtub. Her heart squeezed painfully with longing and loneliness, her throat ached, and big, hot tears rolled down her cheeks. She let herself cry for just a moment, then she ducked herself all the way under the water to wash her hair.
After her bath, she put on clean drawers and chemise and washed out her clothes in the bathwater so as to not let the copious amount of water go to waste. Then she sat down on the bed, testing it. It was soft but with a good bounce to it, and her exhausted body just wanted to melt into it. Silas would like this bed, she thought.
She turned her mind to the problem of how to get him back. Until this afternoon, she had had a vague idea of somehow stealing into wherever the Mage Council was holding him prisoner and freeing him, but now that she had seen the Mage Council tower, her idea seemed impossible. And, anyhow, the thought of sneaking around just didn’t sit right with her. She shouldn’t have to sneak. She and Silas hadn’t done anything wrong; they had broken some rules that shouldn’t even be rules, but they weren’t hurting anyone. As well, if she did try to sneak in and got caught, that would only make things worse for both her and Silas.
What if she just went to the Mage Council and asked them to free Silas? She got an apple from the fruit bowl and ate it as she mulled this over. The Mage Council knew who she was, that was certain, but it was considerably less certain whether they knew about her unusual and illegal abilities. The hunter whose power she had tried to grab, when they were chasing Silas, had reacted as though he had expected her to try that – or it might have just been an instinctive defense against a magical attack. The hunters could have taken her while she was unconscious, but they hadn’t. And the mages on the drive through the Gap, though they seemed like sticklers for the law, had been entirely uninterested in taking her into custody. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that the Mage Council either didn’t know about what she could do, or, if they did know, they didn’t care.
Maybe this was the chance she’d been dreaming of, that she had finally almost given up on, to convince the Mage Council that she and Silas weren’t really criminals, they were just good people who had found a different way of doing the right thing. She could persuade them to free Silas, and pardon him, and maybe they would even approve their marriage and remove his fertility block…
She pulled herself back from the edge of getting her hopes up. First she should just focus on getting them to let Silas go, and not push her luck by asking for too much. Once Silas was free, she could think about bringing up those other things.
So, she decided, tomorrow she would go talk to the Mage Council. With any luck, this time tomorrow night she would have Silas safe with her in this room and on thi
s bed. Even if all he wanted to do was sleep after what he’d been through, getting shot and hauled on horseback through the Gap and all the way to Sandostra and being held prisoner, she would just be happy to have him back.
On the other hand, this was Silas. He never wanted to just sleep.
The ache of missing him sharpened. Lainie opened up his knapsack and took out his hat. She hadn’t touched it since the day he was taken by the hunters. Carefully, she unrolled it and pushed it into shape, then she set it on the pillow on one side of the bed and lay down next to it. “Hold on, baby,” she whispered to the hat, as though her words could get to Silas through it. She brushed the brim gently with her fingers, imagining that she was touching him. “I’m coming for you.”
* * *
AFTER A NIGHT of bad dreams and little sleep, Lainie was roused from bed by the early morning sunlight coming in her window. She dressed and went down to the dining room for breakfast. A long table was set up with food so that the guests could serve themselves. There were bread rolls shaped like bows and crescent moons with butter, honey, and jam, platters of eggs, bacon, ham, sweet pastries, and fruit, pitchers of fruit juice, and white porcelain pots of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, another rarity in the Wildings, which Lainie liked much better than coffee.
She was too nervous and excited to eat very much. When she was done, she returned to her room to prepare herself to go face the Mage Council. In between fitful bouts of nightmare-ridden sleep, she had tried to work out exactly what she would say and do to get them to let Silas go. It had occurred to her that if Silas’s family was so important, maybe he had a relative on the Mage Council. She knew that Silas and his family had parted ways years before, but still, kin was kin. Surely they wouldn’t want him imprisoned or Stripped or killed. So maybe all she had to do was appeal to Silas’s relative, and he would get the Council to let Silas go.
Chances were, though, it wouldn’t be that easy, and she would have to make more of an argument on Silas’s behalf. She would remind the Council of his record as a mage hunter; he had made a good living for several years hunting rogue mages, so he must have made some important captures. She would tell them how she and Silas had stopped a gang of renegades from disrupting the cattle drive, which would have caused problems for the mage families in the cattle and beef business. The beef brokers had to be rich and important enough to be represented on the Mage Council; maybe they would let Silas go out of gratitude for saving their business.
She could also explain why Silas had married her and why he hadn’t sent her to school in Granadaia. They had to understand that he was only trying to do what was best for her. Maybe she could convince them that he had only married her because her Pa made him, though it wasn’t true, and it was unlikely that anyone would believe that a Plain man could force Silas to do anything he didn’t want to do. Even mages had a hard time doing that.
The Council might be interested in knowing that someone connected with them had sent an assassin after some of their hunters. She could tell them everything she knew about Fazar, though there was no need to mention the Hidden Council connection. If the Mage Council hadn’t sent Fazar to purge hunters allied with the Hidden Council, there was no other reason to think they even knew about the secret group. Though something had happened with the Hidden Council, there was little doubt about that. As for the murder charge, the only person she could think of that Silas might be accused of murdering was Fazar. But Fazar had been killing the Council’s hunters and meant to kill Silas, which made him fair game and his own death completely justifiable.
And there was always money. If the Mage Council wanted fines or a ransom or for Lainie to repay the bounty, she would give them whatever they asked for. She counted out two thousand gildings from her and Silas’s funds, twice the bounty on him, leaving just enough for the two of them to travel home and live on until they could get more work. She divided the money among several pouches and tucked them in the pockets of her rose-dyed duster, along with the spare bandanas she had taken to carrying with her on the drive and a piece of rope a couple of arm-lengths long, another item she had learned to keep handy.
Finally, though she hoped and prayed it wouldn’t come to a fight, she had her gun. She made sure all six chambers were loaded and that the bullet loops on her gunbelt were filled. Just to be on the safe side, she dropped several more rounds into her duster pockets. As well, she had powers that no one on the Mage Council had, though, remembering the mages in the Gap holding back the flood and pushing the collapsed mountainside back into place, she wondered if she was capable of winning a fight against a group of fully-trained Granadaian mages. Revealing her powers in a magical battle would have to be a last-ditch, desperate move. If she lost, even if she survived, they would then know about her abilities and would have all the proof they needed to Strip her or put her to death.
With her plan in place, she sat down on the bed and made herself face the possibility she had been trying hard not to dwell on ever since Silas was captured. Even if the hunters had taken him alive, even if they wanted to keep him alive, he could have died from his gunshot wounds on the long and difficult journey here, or drowned in a flood or been crushed in a landslide. Or the Mage Council might have already executed him. There was a very good chance that when she went to the Mage Council and asked them to free Silas, they would tell her he was dead.
She made herself picture getting through the rest of her life without seeing him again or making love with him or hearing him laugh and call her darlin’. At the thought, she doubled over in a painful spasm, and sobs tore from her body. She didn’t fight it; she made herself face her grief and deal with it now so she wouldn’t break down in front of the people responsible for his death. If he was dead, she wouldn’t rest until she had had her revenge against them, and when she went to the Afterworld, she would search through all the heavens and all the hells until she found him.
Finally, when her emotions had worked themselves out, she felt ready to face whatever might come. She wiped her eyes and nose, checked again to make sure her revolver was fully loaded, then buckled on her gunbelt and set her hat firmly on her head. Silas would not approve if she went out to rescue him without wearing her hat. She could do it, she told herself. She would be polite and respectful, but she wouldn’t let them intimidate her, and she would do whatever it took to either get him back or avenge him.
Thus girded for the task ahead, she took one last look at Silas’s hat on the pillow next to where she had slept, willing herself to believe that he would be wearing it again soon, and left the room.
Chapter 5
OUTSIDE THE HOTEL, Lainie waved down one of the little black carriages. “I want to go to the Mage Council tower,” she said to the driver as she climbed in, making sure to display her mage ring.
The driver, dressed in a neat black uniform and cap, looked at her hat, her clothes, her duster coat, her boots, and, especially, the gun holstered at her right hip. “Yes, madam,” he said doubtfully, then added, “You do know that firearms are illegal, don’t you?”
“I’m a mage hunter for the Council,” she said. It wasn’t strictly true, but it might as well be; after all, she had helped stop Carden and those renegades who had tried to take over the herd. “It’s part of the job.”
He dipped his head respectfully. “Yes, madam. Begging your pardon.” He shook the reins to start the horse moving.
Like the day before, the city’s endless, winding streets, packed-in buildings, and crowds of people overwhelmed Lainie’s mind and senses. It was all too much to take in. Still, she tried to keep track of landmarks and the route the carriage followed, so she would know where she was and be able to make her own way back to the hotel if she had to. As the Mage Council tower loomed closer, her heart pounded harder and her breathing felt tight. Polite and respectful, she repeated to herself. She would settle this peacefully, and everything would be all right.
At the same time, though, a tiny, burning seed of anger came to life i
nside of her. She shouldn’t have to be doing this. She shouldn’t have to go begging before the Mage Council for Silas’s life and freedom. They had dared to put a price on her husband’s head, they had sent men to shoot him down in cold blood and take him prisoner, all because he had broken a few rules whose main purpose to give the Council complete control over people with magical power. They were the ones who were wrong, not her and Silas. The Council had other things she wanted besides Silas, she reminded herself, especially the power to remove his fertility block. She couldn’t lose her temper at them. She would be polite and respectful. But damned if she’d let them make her cower and crawl like some kind of criminal.
The carriage emerged from the tangle of streets into a large square paved with bricks. Stately stone buildings three and four stories tall bordered three sides of the square. In the middle of the square was a tall stone pillar with carvings of people around the base. About halfway up, several fish were carved in a ring to look like they were leaping out of the pillar. Water streamed from the fishes’ stone mouths and fell splashing into a pool around the base of the pillar.
The buildings were awe-inspiring and the statue with water was like nothing she had ever seen before, but what drew Lainie’s attention the most was the gray stone tower on the fourth side of the square, rising from the back of a flat one-story building of red bricks that squatted at its base like an afterthought. The tower reached so high into the sky that Lainie had to crane her neck all the way back to see the smaller towers bristling out at the top. Dozens of glass windows set into the tower’s walls sparkled in the morning sun. “The Hall of the Mage Council, madam,” the driver said.
