Emily blinked. “Is he a magician?”
“Subtle magic works on magicians too,” Lady Barb reminded her, rather sarcastically. “You ought to know that, Mille.”
Emily felt her face heat.
Lady Barb’s face hardened. “As far as I can tell, they should have worked. Perhaps the runes affecting Lord Gorham pushed him into trying to force his son into compliance, which made it harder for the runes targeted on Rudolf to work.”
It sounded plausible, Emily decided. Subtle magic worked best when it was unnoticed and unquestioned. If someone didn’t ask the right questions, they wouldn’t even get a sniff of the framework the magic had made for them, let alone manage to break out. If Lady Barb was right, Rudolf had reacted badly enough to his father’s orders to override the runes.
“There were quite a few different ones too,” Lady Barb continued. “One of them was designed to hide all traces of magic – I think it was partly to ensure that the mystery magician’s activities went unnoticed. Another was designed to make him listen to his advisor. I had a look around, but the man seems to have vanished. The guards said he left the castle as soon as the lord collapsed.”
A Wormtongue, Emily thought. It had been years since she’d read The Lord of the Rings, but the principle of an evil advisor manipulating his monarch was far from uncommon. But is he the necromancer?
“I couldn’t find anything magical in his rooms, not even a trace of magic,” Lady Barb said, when Emily asked. “But that means he might well have been working for someone else.”
“Shadye had at least one ally in Dragon’s Den,” Emily said, remembering the Dark Wizard who’d helped to steal some of her blood. “Why can’t another necromancer have an ally?”
Lady Barb shrugged. “Call the servants and get them to bring in some blankets,” she ordered, instead of trying to answer the question. “We may as well make him comfortable.”
Emily nodded and obeyed. When she returned, she saw Lady Barb holding one hand against Lord Gorham’s forehead, as if she were feeling his temperature. The man’s eyes were open, staring up at the sorceress. His face was twisted in a confused grimace, as if he didn’t quite know where he was. Emily rubbed her own forehead in sympathy. The bruise from where she’d hit her head had yet to fade, even if it wasn’t sore.
“My son,” he said, between gasps. “Call him.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Lady Barb said. She shot Emily a questioning glance, but Emily shook her head. “He could be anywhere by now.”
Emily nodded. It hadn’t occurred to her until too late that Rudolf probably knew the forest like the back of his hand. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could easily have led her into a trap or circled around and attacked her from behind. Or he might just have lit out for the next little kingdom and hidden until his father’s madness faded away. Now the runes were gone, it would start to abate.
But Rudolf won’t know that, she reminded herself. How will he know to come home?
“The runes won’t be pushing on his mind anymore,” Lady Barb said after Emily asked her. “But I find myself caught between two problems. Do we stay here and look after him, or do we start looking for the necromancer?”
Emily shrugged. She’d faced one necromancer and she didn’t want to face another one, certainly not away from Whitehall. They might well not want to find the necromancer, if they searched for him. But their best chance of removing the threat was to find him before he started the transformation into an eldritch abomination. She felt the metal bracelet at her wrist and smiled, inwardly. Perhaps she could just let the necromancer take the bracelet and find that he was holding a poisonous snake.
Lady Barb cleared her throat. “Well?”
“We wait for a day or two,” Emily said, realizing that Lady Barb expected her to try to answer the question. No doubt it was a Secret Test of Character or something like it. “If he recovers, or if Rudolf returns, we can move onwards and try to find the necromancer.”
She scowled. Aristocrats had very firm ideas about who should be in charge. Even if there was a trusted subordinate around, he couldn’t be left in charge for very long. Emily privately thought the whole concept absurd, but it was Tradition. If something happened to her, she had no idea what would happen to her Barony. It wasn’t as if she had a child to take over in her place.
“Good thinking,” Lady Barb said. She gave Emily a tight smile. “Go organize the servants into making up some new rooms, but check the beds first – carefully. I will be very annoyed with you if you miss a single rune.”
Emily nodded. “This is what you meant, isn’t it?”
Lady Barb lifted her eyebrows.
“About magic being feared out here,” Emily explained. “Someone was working magic, and no one even noticed until we arrived.”
Lady Barb nodded. “Too many odd things have happened,” she said. “Lords building up their armies, preparing for war. A necromancer who doesn’t seem to have gone completely insane, one capable of using subtle magic. An aristocrat trying to make a match that would shatter the balance of power and unite his enemies against him; a son who seems immune to the runes pressing his father on towards disaster. Missing children...and no one seems to have noticed.”
“There were rumors,” Emily reminded her. “We heard them during the Faire.”
“True,” Lady Barb agreed. “But if the children vanished from the town, someone would have noticed. Wouldn’t they?”
Emily nodded, mutely. Maybe her stepfather and mother hadn’t noticed her disappearance, but not all parents were so careless. King Randor might have raised Alassa as a spoilt brat, yet he clearly loved her. And Imaiqah’s father loved her, too. They would have noticed if either of their children had gone missing.
But she remembered the abused boy, and grimaced. Perhaps, if the children had been unloved, they would have been taken and no one would have cared.
But she had a hard time imagining that no one had noticed.
“It would be hard for even subtle magic to make them forget,” Lady Barb added. “A child is terrifyingly important to the parents.”
“I forgot the bodies,” Emily said. In hindsight, it was easy to tell that magic had worked its will on her mind. If she hadn’t been asked for a full explanation, the bodies might have vanished from her memory completely. “Could magic have made them forget their children anyway?”
“I very much hope not,” Lady Barb said. “Go organize the servants. I’ll stay with Lord Gorham.”
Emily nodded and obeyed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
BEING AN APPRENTICE, JADE HAD TOLD Emily in one of his infrequent letters, meant taking on some of the mistress’s power and position. She hadn’t really understood what that meant until she’d found herself issuing orders – and being obeyed. A sorceress was, to all intents and purposes, an aristocrat, and the social equal of almost any mundane aristocrat. “Millie” might not be an entitled aristocrat, but she could issue orders and everyone assumed she spoke with Lady Barb’s voice.
“I want you to sew these patterns,” she told the maids, once they had assembled in a large meeting room. Unlike Emily herself, the serving girls knew how to sew properly. “Sew them into cloth, then make sure everyone in the castle is carrying at least one.”
She watched the maids go to work, sewing protective runes into pieces of cloth. If she recalled correctly, it didn’t take much effort to counteract the dangerous runes, once they were actually detected. Subtle Magic runes were only dangerous when they were unseen; once they were noticed, their influence could be easily countered. Lord Gorham and his men would question everything they’d done for weeks, exposing the less sensible and logical decisions for what they were.
Lady Barb took care of Lord Gorham, leaving Emily to roam the castle looking for additional runes. They were scattered everywhere, blindingly obvious once people knew to look for them, as if the advisor had carved them into every last room. Emily was unwillingly impressed. Even a Runecarver mi
ght have been unable to achieve such thorough saturation of a castle. But then, he would have been carving defensive runes.
“My Lady,” one of the guards said, breaking into her thoughts. “We found a body at the bottom of the abyss. The Advisor is dead.”
Emily winced. One thing she hoped she would never get used to was how cheap life was in the countryside – and everywhere else in this world. The guard didn’t seem concerned by the body, no matter who it was. No doubt the mystery necromancer had killed the Advisor when he had outlived his usefulness – or included a suicide command in whatever instructions he’d been given, if he hadn’t acted of his own free will. There was no way to know.
“Thank you,” she said, carefully. “Where there any wounds on the body?”
“Merely a broken neck,” the guard informed her. “What do you wish to be done with the body?”
Lady Barb would want to take a look, Emily knew. “Put the body in storage for the moment,” she ordered. She didn’t want to look herself. “Once my mistress has looked, it can be cremated.”
She watched the guard go before resuming her wanderings through the castle. They eventually led her into the tiny library. There were only a couple of dozen books in the room, stacked on one shelf. Emily couldn’t help thinking that her quarters in Whitehall deserved the title of library far more than the castle’s library, at least if one went by sheer volume of books. She’d bought more books than she cared to think about over the last year, storing them in her trunk. Clearly, the Cairngorm Lords were not great readers.
One of the books was a genealogical table, tracking the bloodlines of the different aristocratic families in the area. Emily had seen something like it in Zangaria, owned by the Royal Family, but this one was different. It took her several moments to work out that while King Randor and his family had never acknowledged anyone as their equals, the mountainside lords accepted their fellows as being on the same level as themselves. The wider the range of potential mates, the greater the chance of healthy children. She couldn’t help wondering if it gave them a greater chance of breeding strong sons and daughters, especially considering the problems Zangaria had had with their own Royal Bloodline.
According to the tables, Lord Gorham only had one son and no daughters. That made him unique among the mountainside lords; the second smallest brood consisted of three children, all sons. She wondered, absently, why Lord Gorham had never married again. It wasn’t as if there would be any question over who would succeed him to the lordship.
Or was there? What would happen to the younger sons and daughters once their father died?
Earth’s history provided several examples, none of them good. The Ottoman Sultans had butchered all other possible heirs, preventing civil war at the cost of mass slaughter. Europe had tried to find uses for younger sons, marrying them off to the right girls or sending them into the army. But how many of those were possibilities here? She traced the lines of descent and swore, inwardly. Lord Gorham’s plan to marry his son to Lady Easter’s daughter would definitely spark off a war. A daughter couldn’t inherit power, so it would fall naturally to her husband.
He needed a second son, Emily thought, morbidly. King Randor had tried hard to produce more children, but Lord Gorham, it seemed, had just abandoned the thought after producing Rudolf. He would have been a safer choice...
A thought struck her Or was that deliberate? Was he urged to have only one son?
It was impossible to tell. There were risks, after all, in having too many heirs.
She put the book to one side and looked through the other titles. None of them seemed interesting, apart from a couple of dusty history books. Emily pulled one of them off the shelf, marveling at just how old it was, and placed it carefully on the table. There were ancient books at Whitehall, but they were touched with preservation spells. These books were steadily decaying into dust. She briefly considered taking them with her before resolving to ask Lord Gorham to take better care of his books. Reading would only become more and more important as the New Learning spread through the Allied Lands.
Deciphering the book’s text was difficult. Emily had learned to speak the common tongue shared by the Allied Lands, but reading it was another matter. She had to cast a translation spell to make any headway at all, yet half of the words still didn’t quite make sense. Gritting her teeth, she started to read what she could, only to wind up more and more puzzled. The author didn’t seem to be aware of the difference between writing history and historical fiction. It was difficult to tell when any of the events had actually taken place – and almost all of the credit for gallant deeds went to a single family. Emily guessed that the writer had been paid by them to rewrite history in their favor.
Even so, it was an interesting read. The writer talked about the wars with the Faerie, of the days when monsters roamed the lands and hordes of dragons flew through the skies, breathing fire on all who dared to oppose them. Emily smiled as she read an account of a young boy taking on a giant and beating him through trickery, as it sounded like David and Goliath. Other accounts talked about fighting strange monsters that remained unnamed and unrecognized.
Sometimes, the writing became completely illegible, no matter what spells she used. Perhaps the writer might not have dared write everything down, or had thought better of it afterward?
She toyed with the snake-bracelet as she returned the book to the shelf, then walked out of the library, through a series of dark stone corridors. The castle didn’t have mounted torches, let alone lanterns, to light its interior. Emily wondered, as she used a light-spell to find her way back to the bedroom, if it was intended as a defensive measure or if servants were simply expected to carry lights everywhere they went. Either one made sense.
Lady Barb looked up as Emily slipped into the master bedroom. Lord Gorham lay on the mattress, sweating heavily. Emily didn’t recall feeling such effects when she’d realized just how badly she’d been influenced by Lin’s runes, but then she’d been trapped as a stone statue for much of the time. It still chilled her to realize just how close she’d come to being petrified forever.
“He’s recovering, but very slowly,” Lady Barb said. “It may take some time before he’s completely healed.”
Emily nodded. She’d been shocked when she’d first discovered how easy it was to use magic to manipulate a person’s mind, but she’d been at Whitehall, where help had been on hand if necessary. Here, there was no one to help Lord Gorham...and he wouldn’t want to admit, even to himself, just how easily he’d been manipulated. His pride wouldn’t let him. It reminded her of a lecture from her professor, months ago.
“The mind exists within a framework – and if that framework is warped by subtle magic, it is impossible to tell from the inside that it has been warped,” the Professor had said. “A person on the outside might notice odd behavior, but a person on the inside will accept it as completely normal. Given time, they will betray everything they hold dear, still convinced they are doing the right thing.”
She shivered. Or, as a philosopher on Earth had put it, if the universe was shrinking, and all the tools one used to measure it were shrinking as well, how would anyone know the universe was shrinking?
“Get some sleep, then go down to the town and speak to the headman,” Lady Barb added. Emily glanced at her watch and realized, to her shock, that it was three bells in the morning; she’d quite lost track of time. “Ask him if the dead children came from his town – and if Rudolf is still around. Someone must have known he was there.”
She smiled. “And post the letters at the same time,” she ordered. “We need to alert the White Council.”
Emily yawned as she walked into the next room. The maids had set up a small bed for her and a larger one for Lady Barb, but considering the castle, she cast wards and checked for runes before climbing into bed. If nothing else, she told herself, she could have a proper wash in the morning.
When she awoke, she discovered that the maids had to carry in a la
rge bathtub, followed by buckets of water, just to make sure she could have a bath. Guiltily, she cursed her own oversight, tipping the maids with coins from her pouch. Of course they didn’t have hot running water in the castle.
She washed herself thoroughly and wrapped one of the cloths around her wrist. The rune the maids had sewn into it looked to be firmly in place, but she checked it anyway, just to be sure. She’d been told that a sewn rune would start to unpick itself if it was on the verge of being overwhelmed, yet there had been so many runes in the castle that she wasn’t sure if that would still hold true. Perhaps there had been so many runes in this place that the runes intended for Rudolf had been drained of power by the ones affecting his father. But, as far as she knew, there was no limit on how many runes a magician could use.
Lady Barb was still sitting next to Lord Gorham, asleep in a solid wooden chair. A protective ward spat sparks at her as she approached, so she left Lady Barb alone and walked into the main hall. The maids had already set out breakfast, which – thankfully – looked more appetizing than the meat from the previous night. Emily ate quickly, thanked the maids – they seemed astonished to be thanked for anything – and walked to the castle gates.
“I can escort you down to the town, Lady Sorceress,” the Captain of the Guard said, bowing low. “It isn’t safe down there.”
“No, thank you,” Emily said. “I want a chance to clear my head.”
And Rudolf won’t show himself, she added in the privacy of her own thoughts, if he sees me surrounded by guards.
She regretted her decision almost as soon as she started to walk. The road was narrower than she’d realized, with plunging cliffs on both sides. It was easy to imagine accidentally walking over the edge in the darkness – or being thrown off the road, if she was trying to attack the castle. She couldn’t help thinking of some of the pictures she’d seen of homes built by mighty sorcerers, sorcerers with more power than sense. They’d balanced castles on tiny threads of land or sculpted them out of clouds. But it didn’t take much magic to disrupt the spells holding them together, allowing gravity to reassert itself. Void’s tower was far simpler, she remembered, and safer for him.
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