Magebane (35 page)

“You sentenced her to death when you crafted the spell to bring down the Barriers,” Falk said harshly.

Tagaza nodded slowly. He stared at the floor for a moment, as if thinking, then raised his head again, met Falk's gaze, and said, “I will find her. Whatever you may think, Falk, I have never betrayed you. The Barriers must fall. Our reasons for wanting that have always differed. But we still share that goal.” His eyes narrowed. “I had thought perhaps we shared a friendship as well,” he said softly. “I see I was wrong.”

“I don't need friends,” Falk said, steel in his voice. “All I need are results.” He went to the door, unlocked it, went out, then turned to face Tagaza through it. “I will send for you when I'm ready. Find Brenna, and you will be a free man again . . . and I will keep Mother Northwind out of your mind.”

“I eagerly await your summons, Lord Falk,” Tagaza said, and his voice was as cold as the air in the hallway.

Falk closed the cell door, locked it, and strode away.

In the cell across from Tagaza's, the man called Davydd Verdsmitt sat quietly. He was not supposed to be able to hear anything from inside his magically soundproofed cell, certainly not supposed to be able to hear a conversation carried on inside another magically soundproofed cell . . . but Davydd Verdsmitt had a great many capabilities he was not supposed to have, and he heard every word.

When Falk had left, he opened his eyes and frowned. His entire purpose in getting arrested had been to position himself inside the Palace, ready to strike when the moment came. But that moment would not come until Brenna was also in the Palace. He had expected Falk to bring her within a day or two. If she were missing . . .

Verdsmitt believed deeply in what he had been sent into the Palace to do, both for noble reasons—he truly did want to see the MageLords overthrown, the Barrier cast down, and the Commoners free at last to choose their own destiny—and for far more personal ones. But he would not throw his life away. If Mother Northwind's plan failed, the Common Cause would still need his peculiar skills.

He would wait, he decided, but not indefinitely. He had always had in the back of his mind a secondary plan, one that would not accomplish the great goal of destroying the MageLord's rule, but one that would certainly create havoc enough. If Brenna could not be found, he could still strike hard at the MageLords—one MageLord in particular—and live to carry on the struggle in some other way.

He lay down on his bed again and closed his eyes. Anyone looking in would have thought he was asleep. In reality, he was writing the first act of a new play, though he had to admit the odds were stacked against it ever being performed.

It didn't matter. Davydd Verdsmitt was not his real name, and very little else that everyone thought they knew about him was real, either, but one thing was absolutely true: Verdsmitt was a writer, and a damn good one.

And a good writer never lightly passed over
any
opportunity to work for a long period of time without interruption.

By the time the guards came to Mother Northwind's door, she was ready for them.

She had known, of course, almost as soon as it happened, that Brenna had fled the manor with the boy from Outside. Why she had chosen to run, Mother Northwind didn't know. She had never been inside Brenna's mind, something which suddenly seemed an incredible oversight: why hadn't she insisted, why hadn't Falk insisted, that she make the changes in the girl's mind that would have rendered her absolutely compliant to Falk's wishes?

Because she always seemed compliant without that
, Mother Northwind told herself angrily.
Because she was only a little girl. Because I'm a senile old fool and Falk is an idiot. Because . . .

She took a deep, calming breath.

And also, she reminded herself, because there seemed a risk, however slight, that such manipulation might sever the link between Brenna and the Keys, rendering her an ordinary girl, and not the Heir at all.

She reached inside her own mind to cleanse it of the useless anger aimed at herself, while holding onto the core of cold fury that she had lovingly maintained like a prize rosebush, one with very long thorns, since the long-ago day she watched the MageLords massacre the Minik men, women, and children she had grown to love.

Little girls like Brenna
, she thought. And that was another reason she'd never tried to manipulate Brenna's mind. Even though she knew Brenna's life was forfeit to the need to destroy the Barriers, she'd wanted her to at least have her childhood to enjoy, unlike the little Minik girls the Mageborn raped and slaughtered.

The scullery maid who had run all the way from Falk's manor to tell her of Brenna's escape had quailed before her fury that morning, when for a moment it had slipped through the kindly mask Mother Northwind perpetually wore. But she had hidden it at once, and reassured the poor girl that she had done the right thing. Then she had asked after the maid's invalid father, whose heart Mother Northwind had kept going far longer than it would have without her ministrations, and her pregnant sister, and had soon had the girl calmed down and smiling.

Now that she had also calmed herself—though she had no desire to smile—she wondered why Brenna had fled. Had she somehow figured out what was planned for her?

She snorted.
Hardly. She's eighteen years old and a handsome young man just literally dropped into her lap . . . right where she wants him, I'd wager
.

And who could blame her for that? But whether she had meant to disrupt Mother Northwind's plan—or Falk's—or not, that was what she had done, in as thorough and potentially disastrous fashion as she could have managed short of committing suicide.

She
has
to be found
, Mother Northwind thought with an unfamiliar hint of desperation.
Verdsmitt is in the Palace. The Magebane is safely tucked away. I need only get Brenna and the Magebane together. Verdsmitt will strike. The Keys will pass to Brenna . . . but the Magebane will intercept and destroy them. And since the Barrier is bound up intimately with magic in this kingdom, its power drawn from every hard mage, not only will the Barrier fall, it will drag hard magic down with it.

They'll
all
be Commoners then. And we'll see how they like it, when the Commoners are running the show.

But none of that could happen without Brenna. So once again, it seemed, her needs and Falk's ran in tandem, however different the outcomes they desired. Karl's disappearance would be a nuisance for Falk, and he would have to act forcefully against the Commoners—
not that he's at all loath to do so, and I can't wait until he faces his erstwhile victims without the protection of magic
. But Brenna . . . for his Plan, as for hers, Brenna was
essential
.

He has to find her
, she thought.
And only one man knows how to do that, how to locate the Heir
.

Tagaza
.

He'll turn to Tagaza for help. Tagaza will locate Brenna. Falk will bring Brenna back to the Palace. I have to be there to spirit her away to where the Magebane waits
.

She had anticipated Falk returning to the manor in a day or two, and then traveling back to the Palace with him, Brenna, and Anton, once she had molded the boy from Outside as Falk had asked (or not
precisely
as he had asked; she had had her own thoughts about the best way to twist the boy's mind, turning him into her weapon instead of Falk's tool, but that was all moot now). Falk would not be coming now, of course, but she was confident he would still want her in the Palace . . . to interrogate Verdsmitt for him, if nothing else.
He'll send men for me
, she thought.
Well, it never hurts to be thought omniscient
.

Which was why, when four men-at-arms came quick-marching behind their sergeant up the gully to her door, perhaps two hours after dark, they found her sitting on her front step, a flowered carpet bag containing a few clothes and other essentials on her lap. She reached for her cane and got to her feet as the sergeant called the men-at-arms to a rather startled halt.

“Took you long enough,” she said cheerfully. “Well, come on, Sergeant. I've grown tired of the cold and the dark. I think it's time I paid a visit to the Palace, don't you? Always spring inside the Lesser Barrier, they do say.” And she set off down the gully at such a pace, despite her cane, that the men-at-arms had to resume quick-marching in order to give her a proper escort.

BRENNA HAD NEVER IMAGINED ANYTHING like the sensation that hurtling skyward in the airship produced. It felt as if she had left her insides behind on the ground, and at the same time was being pushed downward by some strange force.
Magic!
she thought, but, no, there was no magic in that entire incredible device: no magic in the enormous blue silk envelope above them, no magic in the rush of cold air as they soared above Falk's manor. Within seconds she found herself gasping for breath, both from the cold, which had become even more intense, and because she just couldn't seem to get enough air into her lungs . . .

“Air . . . thins . . . with altitude,” Anton said, panting as though he had run a race. “Good thing we . . . didn't go much higher or . . . might have passed out.” He was peering over the side. “We've found . . . a fast wind . . . making fifty miles an hour, I think.”

Thin air? Brenna had never imagined such a thing. Surely air was air, and stretched all the way to the stars. But then, Brenna had never imagined being in the sky before, either, except in dreams of flying. And as for the speed . . . the fastest magecarriage—Falk's—could do twenty miles an hour (though few of the roads allowed that for more than a few minutes), and she found that terrifyingly fast. And yet, up here, she didn't feel like they were moving at all.

With a great effort she heaved herself up and peered over the side of the gondola. What she saw made her gasp anew, not from lack of air, but from the sheer shock of seeing her world in a whole new way.

The manor was little more than a dot far below and far behind, almost lost in the glare off of the vast snow-covered plain that slipped steadily beneath them and stretched away as far as she could see . . . or almost as far: to the west, her view ended in the Great Barrier. It looked even more immense from up here than it did from the ground, a vast wall of fog disappearing into the distance to north and south . . . but not above.

In fact, she realized with an almost superstitious thrill, she was
above
the top edge of the Great Barrier. Which meant the distant land she could see over there, identical as far as she could tell to the land stretching out to the east, flat and snow-covered, with only occasional copses of trees, was
outside
the Barrier, out in the world she had never even wondered about until Anton had arrived so precipitously in her life.