He’d only wanted the scepter, though, and she’d planned to bring the other things back the next morning. But then there was no next morning . . .so she’d hidden them about. The crown lay in her traveling valise, wrapped up in her clothing and tucked between an extra pair of boots.
Now she laid one of Ian’s regular blankets on the floor, folded the stiff robe over top of it, and placed another blanket over both. Having seen the way the garment had shivered into suppleness when Abramm had donned it during his coronation, she hoped it would undergo a similar transformation when it enwrapped his son. Of course, Ian was not king nor even crown prince, so she had no real reason to think it would. But he is Abramm’s son, Father Eidon, and surely that counts for something.
Pansy stepped out of the room and closed the door. Maddie heard her higher tones intermingled with those of a man—Count Blackwell, she thought. Quickly now she took the still-screaming baby from his bed and wrapped him in the blankets, disappointed to note no change in the robe’s stiffness. However, it did seem to work a comfort over Ian, as for the first time in hours he fell silent. It was that alone that convinced her to keep things as they were and hope no one noticed the odd fabric tucked between his blankets.
Now the door was opening again. She snatched up Ian, arranging the material around him as best she could, and was just pulling her own cloak around the right side of the bundle when Pansy stuck her head in. “They’re ready for you, ma’am.”
“Very good, Pansy. I’ll be right there.” She smiled down at Ian, who was sucking his thumb drowsily, ready to drift off now that they were about to move, an answer to prayers she had offered all afternoon. Pulling the left margin of her cloak over her shoulder and her precious burden, she stepped into the outer room. Carissa stood with Felmen and Elayne Cooper, Jared at her side, the young man holding Simon’s hand. The boy was cloaked in heavy wool, the head of his stuffed horse poking out between the garment’s front edges, and he fingered the poor thing’s straggly yarn mane as he looked around uneasily. Seeing her, he brightened, let go of Jared, and ran to cling to her skirts as he had not in months.
Still holding Ian, she squatted awkwardly to bring herself eye to eye with her son and laid her free hand on his shoulder.
“Master Jared says we’re going on a journey, Mama,” he said.
“That’s right, Simon, we are.”
“To meet Papa?”
She hesitated, then smiled. “Yes. An exciting journey that might also be a little scary. You must be brave and strong. Can you do that, Simon?”
He nodded.
“And when we go down the dark stairs pretty soon we must all be very quiet. Especially when we come out in the forest. You must not ask any questions or say anything, no matter what happens. Do you remember what I told you about Father Eidon and the little bunny?”
“When the big wolf comes,” Simon said, “the bunny runs right into the bunny hole that Father Eidon has made for him.”
“Yes. If a big wolf or anything else scary comes and Jared doesn’t have you anymore and no one’s there to help, then you look for Father Eidon’s bunny hole. Because he will always make one for you, no matter where you go. Do you understand?”
Simon nodded very soberly.
“So what are you going to do, then,” Maddie asked, “if things get too scary?”
“Look for the bunny hole.”
She smiled at him. “That’s right.”
“But, Mama, how will I know where to look for it?”
“Eidon will show you, poppet. And Mama—or maybe Papa—will come find you as soon as we can.”
“Papa?” Simon’s eyes brightened, and he looked around the room. And even though he didn’t find what he was looking for, he nodded. “Papa will come,” he said.
Trap stepped out of the opened wall panel and started to speak, cut off by Liza, over by the window, exclaiming, “Oh! The guardstar’s just gone out.”
Everyone looked around at her and then past to the darkness outside, where only red embers glowed in the near ground and nothing beyond. For a moment Maddie thought she might dissolve into tears of despair, holding Ian to her so tightly he began to whimper and squirm. Then Simon slid his small hand into hers and she pulled herself together.
“There was no guardstar when Abramm came here,” Trap said grimly. “Yet we survived. We’ll survive now. But we must go now.”
They threaded a series of long, narrow stairways without incident, then put out their kelistars and emerged into the dark underbelly of an abandoned building on the fringes of Portside. Jared swung Simon up into his arms as Trap led them eastward away from the dock, then up through a dark copse of trees and finally to a slender trail that ran along the base of the sheer white cliffs on which the palace perched. It was full dark by then, but they dared not risk using a light to see by, so the journey became abruptly more exciting. The path was dry, narrow, and heart-thumpingly exposed in places where the terrain grew too steep for the trees, swooping sickeningly downward toward a narrow, rocky strand and then sea. Then the trail would reach another fold of land and the forest would shelter them again.
They were almost around the main cliff and had just come onto a flattening out of the landscape when a small light ahead brought them to a stop. Trap stole forward to reconnoiter, then waved them to come on. It was Byron Blackwell. He stood in a clearing bounded by cliff on one side and thick dark forest of small oaks on the other, a shuttered lantern in his hand.
Trap strode to meet him as the others followed after him. “What’s wrong?” he said quietly. “Why are you here?”
“There’s been a change of plans,” said the count. Then he lifted the suddenly unshuttered lantern up between them so that its light shone straight into Trap’s night-adjusted eyes and at the same time swung a long, sausageshaped sandclub with his free hand into the side of Meridon’s head, dropping him instantly.
Carissa cried out in horror while Cooper and Ames and the other guards drew their blades even as the men who had been waiting in the woods charged into the clearing to subdue them.
Jared, still holding Simon, dashed through an opening in the scuffle, and was about to win free when he was tackled, knocked forward so that both he and Simon fell rolling across the ground. Horsey was flung from Simon’s grasp just as he himself had been flung from Jared’s. Simon leaped instantly to his feet, but to Maddie’s horror, instead of fleeing he looked round for his toy.
“Never mind Horsey, Simon!” Maddie screamed. “Find the bunny hole!”
But already he had spotted the rotund toy and darted back to snatch it as Jared yelled for him to run and the men closed in. By then Jared had regained his feet enough to tackle one of them, catching the man at the knees and taking him down in a tumble of limbs and cloaks. Simon darted into the darkness, and Maddie started after him.
Only to be caught and yanked around. A tall, dark-haired man in a gray tunic with a tiny red tongue of flame on his breast loomed over her. Grinning, he ripped Ian from her arms, wrappings and all. She screamed and flung herself upon him, trying to get her son back, but he easily knocked her aside and danced back, laughing now, as Ian screamed in earnest, his tiny voice a song of terror. She threw herself after him again, but this time something slammed out of nowhere into her temple, and all the strength left her.
As the forest swooped wildly up around her, she saw the man hurl his screaming bundle into the pale rock wall some five strides away, saw it hit and bounce off in a burst of white and a fluttering of dark blankets. The thin, hysterical wailing silenced abruptly, and with it went all the other sounds, so that Maddie watched in horror as the bundle drifted slowly to the earth, the ends of the blankets moving sinuously after it, then fluttering down over top of it until all had come to still and silent rest.
She lay half on her side, propped up by her left arm, staring at the pile of blankets, dark and light layers intermingled. Her body seemed to have turned to a husk, as if all that was living and vital had drained out of
her and she might, if there had been the slightest breeze at all, simply float away. There was no thought, no sound, no feeling . . . Nothing.
Then she lurched up and flung herself toward her child, desperate to get to him, only to be seized again and jerked around to face a slender man with long white hair and narrow, hawkish features that bore an unsettling resemblance to Abramm’s. Gillard. He grinned at her, and she attacked him like a wild woman, punching and slapping his face in a frenzy until she was pulled off and dragged away to a safe distance, both her arms pulled painfully behind her back.
As she gasped back her breath, she realized the rest of the fighting had ended. Cooper lay motionless on the needle-covered ground, blood blooming darkly across his jerkin. Jared, deathly pale, half lay, half sat on the rock wall under sword point. Trap lay where he’d fallen, just beginning to stir now as one of their captors approached to bind his wrists with a pair of iron manacles. Carissa stood nearby, holding on to Peri, with Liza, Pansy, and Maddie’s ladies-in-waiting clustered about them, all under guard. Elayne was nowhere to be seen, and out in the forest, lanterns glowed as the men who searched called out loudly to one another.
She realized then, with a flutter of relief, that it wasn’t just Elayne for whom they searched, but Simon, too.
In all her inspection of the situation, however, not once did her gaze even brush over the silent pile of blankets she knew was still lying at the foot of the rock wall.
Gillard stood with his gray-tunicked squadron, smaller than all of them but still imperious. They were Gadrielites, she understood. Blackwell, the traitor who had set the whole thing up, was nowhere to be seen.
She glared at Gillard. “Don’t think it will end here,” she grated.
“Oh, I’m counting on that, ma’am.” He grinned at her from that thin little face of his, then turned to one of his subordinates. “When you find the boy, bring him to the Keep.”
“Yes, sir. What about the babe?”
“Isn’t he dead?”
“How could he not be, sir.”
“Make sure of it. Then leave the body for the birds.”
The scream that burst from Maddie was more animal than human, a product of too much grief and fear and fury. She twisted and stomped and kicked her way free of her captors, all emotion now, for thinking had grown as impossible as it was unbearable. She had to act or she would burst apart with the pressure, so she flung herself at Gillard, her momentum carrying him over backward and driving him into the ground.
She must have hit her head again, for the world exploded into scarlet and hurled her into blackness.
CHAPTER
38
Broken glass crunched under Abramm’s feet, the sound seeming loud, though he knew it wasn’t. He followed Seth Tarker into the burned-out first floor of the building, trailed by his uncle Simon, Oswain Nott, and Philip Meridon. Smoke drifted in layers around them, clinging to the charred posts and fallen rafters and rising from the dark mouth of a now freestanding stone hearth. An acrid stink burned his nostrils and the back of his throat, despite the cloth he had tied across his face. Again he pressed on his Adam’s apple to keep himself from coughing.
The rubble-strewn streets of this portion of Springerlan reminded him eerily of Hur, save there weren’t as many spawn. Yet.
When he and Simon had arrived on the city’s outskirts yesterday and found it under heavy guard, they’d corralled their horses in an abandoned barn once used by the Terstan underground, and there happened upon Tarker and his men. Having fled the palace when it had fallen, they’d taken to the old underground routes, as well, hoping to launch some sort of rescue. The meeting had no doubt been Eidon’s doing, for the timing couldn’t have been better.
From them, Abramm had learned what had happened since he’d left to ride north. How his enemies had risen up before dawn that same day and moved simultaneously on various Terstan strongholds, including Southdock and the palace. They had gone after Kesrin that first night, and no one knew what had become of him—if not dead then surely taken away for rehabilitation. . . .
Terstans had fought a fierce resistance in both Southdock and at the palace. Southdock had fallen first and Whitehill shortly thereafter, the queen and her party apprehended while attempting escape. The little princes had disappeared, but Maddie, Carissa, and Trap had been arrested to be tried tomorrow as servants of the Shadow, four days now after their capture. If they did not renounce their shields and embrace Mataian ways, they would be brought to Execution Square. Or else taken to a remote keep where their captors would seek to change their minds. Abramm had little hope of the latter. Not so long as he was still at large with an army of loyal supporters. They had to be counting on the fact that a public execution would draw him in, frantic to stop the deaths of his loved ones.
What they didn’t know was that his army had been disbanded. With the Gadrielite forces that had defeated Rennalf approaching from the north, and the rest of them ensconced in Springerlan to the south, Abramm had reorganized his forces right there on the road back from Sterlen, breaking them into small squadrons under the command of independent officers, each of whom had their own set of orders. Some were camped now in the caves along the River Hennepen, waiting for the dawn, when they would come down to hit the defensive lines along the city’s boundaries, providing the diversion Abramm needed for his primary operation to succeed. Others were even now using the old ways of the Terstan Underground to infiltrate the city. By morning most would be secreted along the route down which the prisoners would be taken from the High Court Chamber to the Execution Square tomorrow.
That square was the objective of their current reconnaissance, Tarker now leading them up a charred stairway to a second-floor window overlooking it. Dating back to the reign of Alaric the Bold some six hundred years ago, it was one of the oldest parts of the city. A low stone wall surrounded a square plaza flanked with two opposing sets of stone risers. Buildings surrounded it on three sides, and a busy street ran across its uphill boundary. On the downhill side, the wall was set with a fence of vertical iron bars, beyond which lay a small second yard where more spectators could gather. At the center of the plaza, between the risers, a stone platform stood holding a wooden block where the condemned would rest his head. Iron staples pounded into the stone around it provided means for securing the prisoners, and a groove cut into both wood and stone served to channel the blood.
It had not been used for centuries, the beheading of condemned criminals having been replaced by hanging. Most public executions now took place to the north of the city at the Riverbend Hanging Tree, leaving this square to the washerwomen. For some reason the Mataians seemed to think executions should be bloody again and had reinstated the beheadings, many of which had been preformed in recent days. None, however, had drawn the crowds that tomorrow’s killings would, and Abramm could see the place was scurrying with guards.
In a low voice Tarker noted the potential dangers, obstacles, hiding places, and escape routes in the scene before them.
When he finished, Abramm regarded the square for a moment, then turned away. “It’ll be heavily guarded . . . and it’s too open. There’ll be a crowd, too. . . .” He paused a moment more, then decided. “We’ll do it along the route from the Court Chamber. On the third switchback, which is not only the shortest but also the narrowest.”
“We won’t have much room to work.”
“No, but we won’t need it. And if we can get a riot going in the square it leads into, it’ll be the perfect excuse for the coach to go around by way of Southdock.” Where his own men, uniformed as prison guards and having replaced the driver at the outset of the attack, would stop the coach long enough to let its cargo out. Then they’d drive on up to Execution Square, park the empty coach, and if all went as planned, be well away before events settled enough that anyone thought to look inside. By then Maddie and the rest of them should be safely aboard the waiting galley and gliding toward the mouth of Kalladorne Bay. “Meanwhile we’ll l
ead the guards away up the hill.”
He was counting on his face and form to do the leading. Once the men realized whom they were chasing, he was pretty sure nothing else would matter.
“I don’t know,” said Simon. “If we go up the hill, we’ll be heading directly into the greatest concentration of troops. It’s not going to give us much of an escape route.”
“It’ll be enough,” Abramm said, starting back down the stair.
They went round to the various sites where his small squadrons had set themselves up for tomorrow, and Abramm explained to each of them precisely what he wanted done and when. It was deep into the night when he finally returned to his hiding place in a cellar between the High Court Chamber and the Holy Keep.
“I don’t like this plan to reveal yourself, sir,” said Simon over a quick meal of smoke-tainted bread and cheese. “I’d be more comfortable knowing you were far away when the action started.”
“My face is too valuable an asset not to use.”
“It’ll set them into a frenzy, though. And you know it won’t be common soldiers guarding that street. It’ll be Gadrielites, men who see you as Moroq in the flesh.”
“Frenzied men are more easily led.”
“We’ll be outnumbered.”
“Aye.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I know, Uncle. I’m not too wild about any of it myself. But we have no other choice.” He fingered the crust of bread that remained on his plate. “Have you heard anything about my boys?”
“So far, no. It may be they don’t have them. . . .”
“Or else they’re keeping them hidden so we don’t try to rescue them, as well.”
“That’s possible, of course.” Simon sighed and they fell silent, contemplating the dreadful outcomes of such a situation.
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