by James Wyatt
I could escape, she thought. If I can’t find Gaven, perhaps he can find me.
Sheathing Maelstrom, she bent down and unfastened the slender chain around her ankle and held it up in the sunlight. She could almost feel the magic contained in its fine silver links, promising freedom.
“Rienne!” Lissa appeared in the doorway, more footsteps resounding behind her.
“I have to go, Lissa,” Rienne said.
Three more guards crowded behind Lissa, but she held up a hand to stop them. Her voice was tender and calm when she addressed Rienne.
Tears sprang to Rienne’s eyes. “Promise me that if you find him, you’ll tell him where I’ve gone.” There was no way the dragonborn could have understood her words, but there was understanding in her eyes, and sympathy, and grief.
Rienne snapped the chain. She blinked as one of the tiny links broke, and when she opened her eyes she was in a green courtyard surrounded by orange trees. The citrus smell was intoxicating, but it was carried on a sea wind that told her she was home.
The courtyard was part of a stately house with a blue-tiled roof and white plaster walls. A fountain burbled against one wall, opposite a hall leading to the front door. Rienne looked around nervously. Jordhan had not told her where he got the magic chains, though she trusted his discretion. Presumably, this place belonged to whatever artificer had crafted them.
The roof framed a square of dark sky, dawn just beginning to light one side—or evening fading in the west. It had been morning when she entered the dragon-king’s palace in Argonnessen, far to the east. Morning to the east meant that dawn was still approaching in Stormhome, and the house’s owner was probably still asleep. She crept to the hall, then stopped short.
If Gaven had already broken his chain, he would have come here as well, and the artificer might have seen him appear. If he hadn’t yet, the house’s owner could tell him that she’d been there and give him some message, some idea of how to find her.
But that would mean she’d have to know where she was going. At the moment, she had no idea. She crossed the courtyard again and settled herself on a stone bench beside the fountain to plan and wait.
Stormhome was not a safe place for her. She could go to her own family, but the Sentinel Marshals had come to her house when Gaven first escaped. Thordren’s house had been watched the last time she and Gaven appeared there. Would they still be watching it? Gaven and Rienne had been gone for months. How badly did House Kundarak and the Sentinel Marshals want to find him?
Stormhome had no poorer neighborhoods where Rienne could remain anonymous and unseen. House Lyrandar controlled who lived and worked there. Anyone who couldn’t afford the rather steep price of a place to live in Stormhome went back to the mainland, one way or another. Rienne had no place to hide. She couldn’t linger there, waiting for Gaven to appear.
She had struck out on her own once before—she’d flown to Vathirond, found Gaven, and rescued him from his pursuers. She could do it again.
On the other hand, leaving Stormhome presented its own set of challenges. House Lyrandar operated the only ships passing to and from the mainland, and it would be hard to find a captain who didn’t know her, at least by reputation. Jordhan would have helped, of course, but he might still be half the world away, as far as she knew. What, then?
She had called in plenty of favors before leaving in search of Gaven the first time, but that was no longer an option. She had also turned much of her wealth into a more portable form, a small bag of tiny, perfect gemstones she kept next to her skin. Selling a single stone would provide her with living expenses for weeks. The money, at least, would serve her well.
If she only had some idea of where to look for Gaven.
Her thoughts were going in circles, running through every possibility she could imagine of finding help, departing the city, and leaving word for Gaven. She replayed the last few days in her mind, from her arrival in Rav Magar to Gaven’s sudden disappearance and Lissa’s farewell. Her dream in the shrine of the Prophecy played itself over and over in her mind—Maelstrom in her hand, portentous words describing the Blasphemer, and the tumult of a battlefield.
A battlefield where she, in her dream, had played a decisive role. Perhaps Gaven had been right and Maelstrom was indeed a sword of legend, the weapon of a champion. In her dream, she had faced the demon at the heart of an army. Could it be that her destiny was to kill that demon, thus preventing or at least putting an end to the devastation described in the Prophecy? The idea turned her stomach. She didn’t want the crowning accomplishment of her life to be ending another life. Any other life.
Her eyes drooped and her head nodded, and she slept where she sat beside the fountain.
Maelstrom clashed against a sword that burned red, a ceramic urn shattered on the cobblestones, and a girl’s shriek jolted Rienne from her sleep.
The sky was a little brighter, and sounds indoors suggested that the household was beginning to stir. A girl of perhaps thirteen cowered behind a pillar, peering out at Rienne with round eyes, pieces of the urn littering the floor around her bare feet. She must have been a serving girl, sent to fetch water for the kitchen or bath, shocked to find a stranger sleeping by the fountain.
“I’m sorry,” Rienne said, and the girl stood a little straighter. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“What are you doing here?” the girl said, but her voice was more curious than frightened.
“I need to speak to the master of the house. But first let me help you clean up that mess.”
“No no, I’ll do it, Lady. After I take you inside.”
Rienne grimaced. Her accent betrayed her noble birth, despite the dirt and dust of travel matted in her hair and plastered to her skin, after months at sea and weeks spent slogging across a distant continent.
“Please,” she said, “it’s my fault. I’ll help you.”
She crouched down and started gathering the larger fragments, stacking them carefully and setting them aside. Hesitantly, the girl joined her, working from the other side.
“What’s your name?” Rienne asked.
“Ava.”
“I’m Rienne.” She smiled at the girl, and Ava finally seemed at ease. “Is the master of this house an artificer, Ava? Working with magic?”
“Not the master, Lady. But my mistress is very skilled.”
The mistress, of course. Why had Rienne assumed it was the man? A thought jolted her to her feet. A female artificer in Stormhome—“Is this Chanda’s house? Chanda ir’Selden?” Chanda and Rienne had been childhood friends and stayed close up until the time that Rienne fell in love with Gaven. Chanda disapproved of Gaven’s adventuring lifestyle, prospecting for dragonshards. Rienne had made a few efforts to get back in touch with her after Gaven’s imprisonment, but she had always been rebuffed.
Ava looked puzzled, but she nodded. “Shall I take you to her, Lady?”
Would Chanda help her now? Not if word had spread that Rienne had helped Gaven after he escaped from Dreadhold. For the sake of their old friendship, Chanda might refrain from summoning the Sentinel Marshals immediately, but she would not help.
“Actually, Ava, it’s probably best if I just get on my way.”
“Should I tell her you were here?”
“Will she punish you for the broken urn?”
Ava shrugged. “She’ll take it out of my wages.”
Rienne produced a silver coin and pressed it into Ava’s hand. “Best not to tell her I was here. Thank you.”
Ava stood gaping at the coin as Rienne slipped out the front door and into the quiet morning street.
As a girl, Rienne had practiced her sword play on a bluff just outside Stormhome, overlooking the crashing waves of the sea. Under the city’s perpetually crystal blue sky, she learned to still her mind and harness the energy flowing through her body. In her adolescence, she came to the same spot to find quiet and search for some sense of peace. She hadn’t been back there in years.
So she
slipped out of the city before the streets grew crowded and noisy and retreated there, seeking the same stillness and solitude she had found there in her youth. As the sun cleared the horizon, she drew Maelstrom and moved through the forms of her fencing style, quieting her racing thoughts and focusing in on the still point at her core.
She froze, Maelstrom’s blade before her face, her sword hand pressed against her other palm. “We balance on the razor edge between past and future,” she had said to Gaven, “but that edge is what matters.” She saw Maelstrom’s sharp edge and it became clear.
On one side of the blade, eternity. The unchanging landscape of Argonnessen’s wilds, untouched by the passage of time except the cyclical turning of the seasons. On the other side, history, the constant churn of events, wars, nations, people, and relationships—motion with progress, destination. She felt she stood on the razor edge between, not past and future, but history and eternity. The edge was her destiny, the intrusion of history into the eternity of the world. It was not a foreordained destination, but the result of her action. Her destiny, she realized, was the ultimate consequence of her actions.
What did she want that consequence to be?
She swung Maelstrom in a circle around her. It caught the sun, surrounding her in a ring of blazing light. Sliding the blade back into its sheath, she walked back to the city, a plan forming in her mind.
Leaving the city was a challenge, but one she could overcome. She couldn’t buy passage on a ship to the mainland, so she’d have to stow away. She knew the routines of the harbor well enough to sneak aboard a galleon bound for Thaliost, and she knew the galleons well enough to find hiding places aboard. It was risky, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle, nothing she needed Gaven’s or anyone’s help to accomplish.
She made her way to the harbor, her bedraggled appearance drawing some stares. Among the sailors and merchants at the wharves, she blended in to the crowds. A few inquiries revealed that a galleon would be sailing for Thaliost in a week’s time. She would have liked to leave sooner, but in the meantime she could enjoy a taste of life in the city again. She sold one of the small gemstones she used as a portable form of wealth, since she could no longer access her Kundarak accounts, and spent freely. She savored the taste of anything that wasn’t journeybread. She slept in a bed, on a filthy mattress under scratchy blankets, grateful to be out of her bedroll and off the floor. She bathed and bought new clothes, with the unfortunate consequence that she drew more attention as she walked in the streets. But the sword at her belt frightened off the lonely sailors and drunken revelers who might otherwise have accosted her.
Finally, the night before the Windborn was to sail, she slipped down to the galleon’s berth, dodged the guards, slunk past the sailors on deck, and disappeared into the hold. There among the barrels and crates, she made herself as comfortable as she could and settled in for the journey, clutching Maelstrom to her chest.
Getting off the ship would be more difficult, she knew. They’d dock in Thaliost sometime on the third day of their journey, probably early in the morning. Passengers would disembark, then the sailors would unload the cargo and there would be no place left to hide. Rienne’s best hope was to sneak back up to the deck amid the bustle of their arrival and mingle among the passengers. It would be easier to mingle, she thought ruefully, if she looked like she could afford the hundred and fifty galifar fare. The clothes she’d bought in Stormhome were those of a street vendor or laborer, not a noblewoman.
Still, she knew from experience that adventurers who made their fortune by pillaging ancient ruins and selling dragonshards sometimes bought extravagant fares on Lyrandar vessels, so that was the role she adopted. When the morning of the third day broke, she stole out of the cargo hold and up on deck, and scanned the other passengers. One human woman wore a necklace that looked like a relic of the Dhakaani empire, so Rienne approached her and struck up a conversation about the jewelry.
The woman was an instructor at Morgrave University in Sharn, Rienne learned, and had retrieved the necklace herself from a goblin ruin near Tranthus, in Zil’argo. Goblin history was not one of Rienne’s strengths, but she kept asking questions, drawing long responses from the instructor. When the ship docked at the cliffs below Thaliost, they strolled together off the ship, lost amid the other passengers, to all appearances a pair of friends traveling together.
The docks of Thaliost were down at sea level, over the waters of Scions Sound. Overhead, the crumbled remains of White Arch Bridge jutted out from the cliff where the city perched, stretching out across the sound toward Rekkenmark in Karrnath. The bridge had been a sign of the united Galifar before the war, joining two of the Five Nations, but it quickly became one of the casualties of the Last War. One by one the passengers grew silent as they crossed the docks, looking up at the shattered bridge and remembering what it meant.
Before they could board the magical lifts that would carry them from the docks to the city itself, the passengers had to file through a checkpoint where Thrane soldiers checked their identification and traveling papers. Rienne had no traveling papers, but she was not concerned—the identification papers that showed her to be a member of the nobility, combined with a “processing fee,” would certainly be enough to get her where she wanted to go.
“Papers, please.” The soldier stuck out his hand without looking at her, listening to the soldier on his right tell a story about his mother-in-law. Rienne put her identification papers in his hand, and he glanced down at them momentarily. “And your traveling papers?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have traveling papers.”
That got the full attention of the soldier and the man with the mother-in-law. “You don’t have traveling papers? What do you think you’re doing?”
“I was called away from my family estate in rather a hurry,” Rienne said, adopting the tone of a noblewoman faced with impertinence from the lower classes. It had the desired effect—the soldier examined her identification, raised his eyebrows at her family name, and compared the portrait on the papers to Rienne’s own face. As he did that, Rienne placed three galifars on the table in front of him. “This will cover the cost of processing the papers,” she added.
“I’m very sorry, Lady Alastra,” the soldier said, and as his eyes fell on the gold coins his face showed deep sorrow indeed, “but there’s no way I can let you into Thrane without traveling papers. Not these days.”
“Ever since Aundair attacked up north,” the other soldier added, “we have to be a lot more careful.” He, too, eyed the gold coins with regret and longing. “On the lookout for spies and such.”
Rienne drew herself up in outrage. “Are you suggesting that I am a spy?” This was a disaster. She was already drawing some stares. Her erstwhile companion, already past the soldiers, lingered to see what the problem was, and other soldiers were looking up from their own tables to find the source of the disturbance. She had left Khorvaire almost immediately after the battle at Starcrag Plain—she’d had no idea of the political repercussions of Haldren’s aborted attack.
“Of course not, Lady,” the soldier with the mother-in-law said, holding his hands up to shield himself from her wrath. “It’s just that the rules are so much stricter now—”
“The rules do not apply to me, soldier.” That was an attitude Rienne encountered all too often among the nobility—one she despised. If she could have followed the rules, if there had been any way she could get traveling papers, she would have.
The first soldier seemed to take offense at that. “The rules apply to everyone, Lady.” He sneered. “We’re all equal before the Flame.”
The other soldier shuffled out from behind the table as Rienne’s mind raced through her options. Arguing with the soldiers was getting her nowhere, and she suspected that her appeal to her birth had hurt her cause more than helped it. With the magical lifts between her and the city, breaking past the soldiers and fleeing into the streets and alleys wasn’t an option. She couldn’t return to th
e ship without showing her papers there, where the Lyrandars who crewed it would know who she was.
Two other soldiers stood at her shoulders, and the one with the mother-in-law stood in front of her, looking down severely. “I’m sorry, Lady, but we’re going to have to take you into custody until we can sort through this matter.”
That was the fourth option, and it was the only one that seemed viable. She gave herself up to the soldiers, who escorted her into the city, into a guard tower, and into a bare stone cell with iron bars.
CHAPTER
38
Despairing of finding Frostburn Cut or any other pass through the Shadowcrags, Aunn staggered through the foothills, trying always to make his way to higher ground. The mountains rebuffed him, spilling him back out onto the plateau above the Labyrinth, and leading him much farther south than he would have liked. From time to time he saw shadows in the clefts of the hills—stalking creatures watching him, waiting for him to tire and falter. Sevren’s words echoed in his thoughts, warning of predators making their way out of the mountains—bears, panthers, and girallons. And flying predators as well, griffons and wyverns.
Flying predators … Aunn looked up at the sky, glowing red with sunset. At first he saw nothing, but then a dark shape rose just above the line of the mountains before swooping back down. The shape was miles away to the south, but a flying predator needed prey. And the most likely place to find prey in the mountains was in a pass. He scanned the mountains as the sky darkened, hoping to see something closer, but all he saw was another flap of mighty wings in the same general area. That had to be his destination, his gateway back to the Eldeen Reaches and the civilized world beyond.
He walked in that direction until his legs threatened to give out beneath him, then he staggered into a crevice and dozed, clutching his mace and jolting awake at every sound. A tingle on his neck made him leap out of the crevice, swatting at what proved to be a scorpion the size of his fist. After smashing it with his weapon, he tried to sleep with his back against the cliff wall, but sleep evaded him.