In her hand she clutched the instrument that had performed the deed. She didn’t want it; it burned her flesh, searing her soul. There was no greater act of treason in the kingdom than the one she’d just done. The courage she’d summoned to take his life was all she had left in her, turned out, for she could not will herself to stand, to walk out the open cell door and claim the freedom she’d won for herself.
Why hadn’t they come for her? Was it a trap? Were they waiting for her to step through the door, emboldened by false bravery, only to clap her into chains and drag her to the dais where they’d take her head?
In those long dark minutes that passed, it was Jesse whose face she saw in her mind, his rare, soft smile reminding her that everything would be fine. Ryan was there, somewhere, but time and distance had dulled his effect on her. More than these things, maybe, but rather everything that had passed since she last left his side in the stables of Warwicktown.
Thinking of Ravenna struck an even deeper nerve. Oh, how naively Esmerelda had promised to free her of the Langenacht, whispering into the night like girls spending a springtide holiday together. She would forever and ever remember Ravenna’s screams, which she had only heard but had not seen for she could not force herself to stand, to look. She’d lied to Ravenna and herself. What a fool she’d been. She hadn’t changed in the months since leaving home. She wasn’t stronger, or more capable. Her assault on the king would not have succeeded had anyone else been with him; had he foreseen that a small girl who had always done as others demanded could summon the mettle to harm him.
He was not at all what she’d expected. Her mind kept returning to the strange way he talked to her, as if readying himself for apology. He hadn’t come to harm her. She knew it then, even before sinking the blade into him. She knew it now. Still, she’d killed him, and it wasn’t regret she was feeling over the deed, but the muddled confusion of questions that would remain forever unanswered.
Esmerelda folded the bloody knife back into her dress. She stared down the door, challenging the empty void beyond to fill with faces who would get this over with, already, so she did not have to sit there, shaking, wondering.
Aye, and why do ye not just step through? Ye did more than any man before ever has. Why stop here?
“My strength was no more than what you gave me, Jesse,” she whispered to the empty cell, but as the words left her she knew they were a lie. Jesse had shown her the path, but it was she, Esmerelda Warwick, who had taken it. Who had stood her ground with the powerful sorcerer who might have struck her dead with the blink of his eyes. Who had faced down a tyrant king and emerged the victor.
“Esmerelda?”
Esmerelda looked up with a start, hand wound tight around the crumbling hilt of the knife. The face staring back gave her a shock. “Assana? Is that really you?”
Both of Assana’s hands flew to her mouth as she surveyed the situation in the cell. “Guardians, Esme. You did this?”
Esmerelda nodded, swallowing hard. “I... I know he was your husband, I—”
“Hold still,” Assana said quickly. She peeked back into the hall, then eased the cell door closed, leaving enough gap to reopen it. She slid shut the small window used to pass food to the prisoners. “How? How did you do it?”
Esmerelda held out the knife. “I found it in the pillow. Stitched in.”
“Do you know whose cell this was?”
Esmerelda shook her head. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t decide what emotion was driving the need.
“Darrick Rhiagain had a wife before Eoghan had him killed,” Assana said. She knelt by her husband’s body. “He kept her here. Her and her son.”
Esmerelda gasped. “A wife and child? And no one knew?”
“No one knew. Not until she fled in the middle of the night with the king’s sister and Lady Asherley.”
Esmerelda was stunned by this revelation. But Assana didn’t know everything. She still referred to Darrick as dead, so she didn’t know about the Wastelands, about the daring escape. For now, she’d keep this to herself. Her father had killed Esmerelda’s uncle. Assana’s intentions toward her were still unclear.
“Where’s Oldwin?” Esmerelda asked.
“Fuming somewhere. Could you see the ceremony from your cell?”
“Yes, in the beginning, but...”
Assana nodded at Eoghan. “He must have been so very surprised when you sprang that knife on him, cute little thing that you are. Did you know he’d come to rescue you?”
Esmerelda didn’t respond. The knot in her belly widened.
Assana glanced nervously at the door. “Oldwin has overstepped his authority in this kingdom, and he must be stopped. If he isn’t, then this kingdom will never again look the same.”
“But what about Ravenna? Where’s Ravenna?”
“Ravenna,” Assana said with a strange, musing look, “decided not to play his sick game any longer and turned into an orange bird and flew away.”
“What?”
“Let’s talk when we’re safe. Oldwin will be on his way for you, and for Eoghan. When he finds you’ve killed his pawn, he won’t exercise the same restraint he did before.”
Assana crossed the room, stepping over her dead husband with only a casual glance. She held out a hand to Esmerelda.
“Come, Esme. We don’t have much time. Oldwin may already be on his way here.”
Esmerelda hesitated. She didn’t trust Assana. She hardly knew her. They’d played together as girls, but from the enmity between the Quinlandens and the Warwicks grew a chasm that eventually became too great to pass.
She looked up, into the eyes of the one person who’d crossed the threshold of the cell. The one person who might be on her side. If she wasn’t, there was no one else. She was alone in Duncarrow with a terrible crime that would stain her name and her family’s name forever. The Book of All Things would not go easy on her just because the Rhiagains had reigned terror upon the realm. History had a way of softening the names of tyrants.
But the deed was done. She could remain here, cowering and indecisive, forever.
Or she could go boldly forth and accept the risk offered.
Esmerelda reached up and took her hand.
* * *
Oldwin felt it. Like a thousand tiny cuts across the surface of his flesh, and one fatal wound to the heart, he experienced the precise moment that Mortain was extricated from the world.
It wasn’t possible that Mortain was gone. Thousands of years wasted, snuffed out by a creature less than. For it could only be a creature less than, as there was none greater than a sorcerer of Ilynglass.
And now, he was alone. Mortain was the last of the great ones, the ones who saw the unflinching potential of possessing the great bounty just beyond their grasp, if they could only crack through the elusive magic the Medvedev used to keep them from it.
Once, there had been others who believed. Perhaps they still did, but they’d refused to leave Ilynglass, and so Oldwin, Mortain, Isdemus, and Lysanor had gone on alone, architecting a crown from nothing but the wonders of a magic unlike anything the kingdom had seen.
Isdemus had been the first to peel away. His vigor for the cause they’d all planned together, so many years before, waned, and it was only a matter of time before Lysanor followed. The two were intrinsically linked, just as Oldwin and Mortain had been. The power of dualities had been at the foundation of their magic since the beginning of time. No sorcerer possessed precisely the same combination of abilities. Mortain’s gift for flight was not shared by Oldwin, and Oldwin’s gift of persuasion was not Mortain’s. The complements in the dualities were meant to soften as much as to strengthen.
Had Ravenna known any of this, she would’ve grasped that it was Mortain, and not Oldwin, who was her father. Mortain who had given her the flight of the phoenix, mingling with her innate mysticism as a Ravenwood to form something new. She was Mortain’s child, through and through, in more ways even than she realized.
Mortai
n had been no great seer, so he could be forgiven for not foretelling his death, but Oldwin? Oldwin could see in the futures yet unwritten. He’d failed his brother in this and would not get the chance to atone for it. Mortain had the gift of restoring life to death, not him.
Did Ravenna also possess this gift of her father?
Ravenna. Had he miscalculated with her? One of his greatest gifts was the wisdom to precisely shape another into his own use. In his mind’s eye, he had seen that breaking her would bring her closer. The flicker of doubt first appeared in the way she welcomed the young Rhiagain, Gilford, to his task. She would have taken them all, if he had not introduced the brutal Thane so early in the ceremony. He had rushed his undoing of her. He’d forced her to flee, and now she was gone, and Mortain was gone, and he was alone in his fight.
Ah, well. He’d been alone for over a generation in the sky dungeon. He was no less the magician now.
Somehow, the men of the kingdom had discerned the importance of Mortain to the darkness spreading over the realm, and they’d ended him. They’d seen through the use of the king as a scapegoat. Not one ship lingered beyond Duncarrow, waiting to strike the crown that had pushed the kingdom into war.
There would be. Though it would not be Eoghan’s head they’d be coming for.
Oldwin quickened his pace as he moved through the cold and lifeless halls of Duncarrow, aimed toward the king’s apartments. He didn’t pause for pleasantries as the dazed Rhiagain courtesans offered their perfunctory nods, or their useless, trite exchanges about the weather that he refused to return. They whispered about the Langenacht, but that, too, would become ephemeral. As would they.
His dark blue robe caught wind as he rounded the corner to the final hall leading him to the king’s room.
“Sir Oldwin. I’m afraid the king isn’t here,” one of the guards said. The other guard looked terrified for him. Rightfully so.
Oldwin raised his hand in the air. The guard who had spoken fell dead. The other cowered against the door in fear. “Tell me, where is the king?”
“Please don’t kill me, sir!”
“Would you like to die quickly, or at my pleasure?”
“Sir—”
Oldwin slapped him. “Tell me, or it will not only be you but everyone you love.”
“He went... he went with Lady Assana...”
“Went? Where?” Oldwin mocked his timid speech.
“To the sky dungeon, sir.”
Oldwin groaned and lifted his hand once more. He was already on his way when he heard the second guard slump lifeless to the floor.
So Eoghan had gone to the dungeon after all. He’d seen this, of course, but his visions could not be trusted as they once could. The light had begun to die, and his gifts were failing him.
Had the rest of his vision come to pass? How lovely that would that be. For as much as he would enjoy his hands at the puny throat of the gnarled and broken boy king, he would surrender that gift to know his own yet had life in it.
There were important matters to be decided, and he would be the one to decide.
Esmerelda and Assana he would return to their homes—their heads, anyway.
And why not? He’d started this war. It was his fire to stoke or to starve.
Eoghan he’d stick upon the pikes lining the balustrades of Duncarrow. For the Rhiagains to look upon as they slumped through the motions of their strange and banal existence. For those passing by in their ships. There it would rot, a sickly reminder of how easily the power he’d given could be taken back.
“All these gifts I’ve given you,” Oldwin hissed as he rounded the crumbling spiral staircase to the sky dungeon. “All these things you’ve squandered.”
When he reached the top, he was surprisingly alone. No guards sitting at the top of the stairs playing their silly games, gossiping about things that did not matter beyond their limited, insular world. None at the end of the hall, and he suspected if he rounded the final corner, to where he’d lived for so long, he’d find the same.
“Is anyone there? Hello? Are we saved?” a voice called. Aiden Quinlanden. Oldwin stopped outside his cell.
“I’m here, Lord Quinlanden, but you will soon wish you did not call upon me.”
“Oldwin? Is it you?”
“When have we ever been on such familiar terms, Lord Quinlanden?”
“It is you!” Aiden shuffled across the cell. “You came to me, in a dream. It was so clear that I knew it was no ordinary dream. It was you who coerced me to go after Lord Byrne. To take the Westerlands. You showed me a future, but it was very different from the one I find myself in now.”
Oldwin had no patience for this. “Only men would commit atrocious deeds and retreat from the responsibility of them.”
“But you don’t deny you came to me! That you promised me a day when the kingdom would be mine.”
“You have spent your usefulness to me and this kingdom, Lord Quinlanden.”
Aiden approached the bars. He had the nerve to look arrogant. “I’m not afraid of you. I know what you are. I had another like you, but he was a pet. Mortain. He answered to me.”
“Mortain is dead.” Oldwin closed his eyes and inhaled an impatient breath. His hand shot out and Aiden was lifted into the air with an invisible hand. “Consider that I am doing you a great favor right now, you useless sack of flesh,” he snarled. He passed his arm across the air, as if throwing a ball, and Aiden went flying into the far wall, the bones in his body snapping in musical tandem as he connected with the stone. Oldwin waited long enough to watch his limp body fall to the floor before moving on.
The next cell was open. Ah, the lives that had passed time in those four walls. Anabella. Stefan. Ravenna. Esmerelda. If he was prone to nostalgia he might allow himself to pause and think back on the power and influence that had milled around at their pleasure, alive only because they allowed it.
But he was not. And the cell was empty. He knew this before he stepped inside.
Oldwin chuckled as he knelt by the already cooling corpse of the gnarled, pathetic Eoghan Rhiagain, last of his line. Had it transpired as he’d seen in his vision? Or was it Assana? Some other shadowy assassin, who had also managed to dispense of the guards without drawing an eye?
Oldwin lifted Eoghan into the stagnant air with magic and returned the way he came. He held his hand out, guiding a floating, dead Eoghan ahead of him, down the stairs, and back through the halls.
How he’d enjoy this part.
“The king is dead!” Oldwin boomed, as if this declaration was necessary. Mostly he enjoyed the way his voice sounded echoing off the undecorated stone. The words were only flourish, icing atop an overly sweetened cake. “He has named the great sorcerer Oldwin his successor! You will kneel before your king and witness his mercy toward those who serve with fealty!”
The sleepwalking Rhiagains came to life. Gasps of shock, dismay. Fear.
Of him.
Good.
“Find me the dowager princess and the Warwick girl!” The gathered Rhiagains all gaped in horror at him, rooted in place. “No... no, don’t you dare linger when I make a command. Don’t you dare refuse to answer to my call.”
One of them pointed down the hall.
Oldwin struck them dead.
“I did not ask where they went. I commanded you to find them. And for each minute that passes that they are not in my hands, one of you will die.”
The flurry of action that followed sent a welcome warmth to his belly.
He had always been exceptionally good at being whoever others needed him to be, but it would be a delight to—finally, once more—be himself.
50
The Exchange
A foul wind ripped off the Seven Sisters. Even out here, east of Parth, they felt the wrath of the storm descending off the mountains. Springtide beckoned, but it seemed winter still had more to say.
Holden’s men were restless. They’d had no word from east or west in a fortnight or more. The war could be ov
er and they wouldn’t know it, and the men had said as much, muttering to each other over their cups. They’d devolved to the part of the campaign where they spent more time musing about the things at home they missed rather than the bravery they’d spend when battle reached them.
That is the real business of war, Hadden Dereham was known to say, over the wintertide fires. The battle of an idle mind. But Hadden Dereham had never seen war; nor had any man in the Northerlands under a fair age. It was the favored topic of all men, who never let a lack of practical knowledge get in the way of hardened wisdom.
He wasn’t wrong, as it turned out. Holden had first cut his teeth on some stirring speeches to stay the edginess, but when those failed—earlier than he’d hoped—he had the men run drills. But the tight organization lasted mere nights before the men were content to curl up in their tents with the handspun spirits their wives had packed.
Holden missed his own wife. She was volatile and a puzzle he’d stopped attempting to solve, but he had gained in this marriage, not lost. He often thought the opposite was true for her. Clearly she thought so. But, in other ways, she showed her gratitude. His allowing her to act as most wives were forbidden gave her a freedom even she couldn’t deny. He’d never tried very hard to stem the passion in her; that sharp demand to be in control. If he’d tried harder, Lisbet might have been the last child to spring from their bed, for it would have gone ice cold. Instead of subduing his wife, he decided to allow her happiness, and in return, she helped grow his legacy.
But he’d been powerless to stop her children from being taken from her, one by one. He half-expected to find Nyssa and Torrin had also disappeared in his absence.
Holden’s belly clenched with pride every time he heard Christian speak commands to the men. He was so natural at it, in a way Holden had never been. He was meant to be the one to lead when Holden’s promise was spent, but he remained insistent upon abandoning his home for a cold life with the other Magi in their sky tower.
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