The Empire's Ghost

by Isabelle Steiger

  “So it did, my lord.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “They’ll drink to you at Ibb’s Rest tonight.”

  He straightened up, puffing out his chest. “That’s right. They’ll drink to me, because it was my idea. If she’d had her way, you and I would still be counting clouds at Eldren Cael while she debated a thousand different outcomes with anyone who would listen.”

  The girl pressed her lips together unhappily. “My lord, you know your sister was only concerned for your—”

  “I know she was concerned, she’s always concerned, because gods forbid I do anything on my own initiative! ‘Oh, Feste, you’re always putting Rhia to such trouble. Why can’t you just calm down and do as you’re told—’”

  “My lord,” the girl said, “you told us that your wound had fully healed, which, judging by the way you’re hobbling right now, was certainly less than true. What do you think she’s going to say when she finds out you put yourself in so much danger all for the sake of—”

  “She’s not going to say anything,” the young man said, grinning, “because you’re not going to tell her.”

  She bit her lip. “I—I hardly think—”

  But he had already moved on, extricating the mysterious object from the cloak he’d wrapped around it. “Here, look what I pulled off one of our bandits! This is bowyer’s mulberry, I’d swear to it. I once saw one like this in my—”

  “It is bowyer’s mulberry,” Nasser said, stepping forward. “It’s also mine.” He extended his hand. “I’ll have it back now, if you please.”

  The young man looked from the bow to Nasser and back again; there was surprise in his face, but no hostility. “Easy there, good fellow,” he said, placing the bow in Nasser’s outstretched hand. “No need to look so grim. I didn’t know.” He turned to the girl. “Who’re this lot, then?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The man whose bow you grabbed is a damned fine shot, though.” To Nasser, she added, with a swift bow, “I don’t think I properly thanked you for that either. My apologies.”

  If Nasser had heard, he gave no sign. The instant the young man put the bow into his hand, he had torn the replacement from his shoulder, thrown it to the ground, and spat into the dirt where it lay. Then he ran his hand along the length of the other, a broad grin spreading across his face. “There’s my lovely,” he murmured. “And not a scratch on her, either.”

  Braddock sighed. “Now, if only my—”

  “Braddock,” Morgan said, “if you say one word about that bloody ax, I swear—”

  He held up his hands. “All right, all right! There’re a couple of things I’d rather know about anyway.” He rounded on the strangers. “You two. You’re the guests we were expecting?”

  They immediately looked guilty—like children once more, caught out in some mischief. The young man scratched the back of his neck. “Ah, right—forgot my manners again, it seems. I am Hephestion—er, Prince Hephestion would … not be incorrect of me to say.”

  Braddock frowned at him suspiciously. “That’s not what you called yourself a minute ago.”

  The young man winced. “You heard that, did you? That’s easy enough to explain, though my dignity won’t thank you.” He cleared his throat. “You see, when I was born, my brother still found long words rather difficult to say, and chose to shorten them by mysterious methods known only to him. Thus, without being consulted in the matter at all, I became Feste. My sister Adora, who has made it her life’s endeavor to imitate our brother in every way possible—I swear she only came out of our mother’s womb because he’d done it first—was only too happy to pick up the name. Unfortunately for me, it stuck, and my family has used it ever since.”

  That seemed to satisfy Braddock, if not humble him; he nodded at the girl. “And her?”

  He smiled at her. “This is Rhia, our captain of the guard at Eldren Cael.”

  Nasser raised an eyebrow at that. “She’s a bit young for that position, isn’t she?”

  The prince laughed. “You saw her fight just now, and you’re saying that?”

  But the girl—Rhia—ducked her head. “I’m sure I lack the experience I could wish—”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Hephestion said. “My sister’s only a few years older than you, and nobody says she’s too young to be queen, do they?” He waved at a nearby man carrying a torch. “Hey there, would you mind bringing some of that light this way?”

  As the man hurried over, Nasser asked, “The additional men were yours, then?”

  “They were,” Hephestion said proudly. “We’d been hearing about those damned bandits all the way back in Eldren Cael—and Eldren Cael’s got its fair share of bandits, let me tell you—so Rhia and I thought we’d do what we could to lure them out. It’s the crown’s duty to keep the roads safe for our people, after all.” He took the torch from his servant, then nodded at him. “Go on ahead, if you like; we’re doing quite well for ourselves here.” The man bowed and complied, and Hephestion lifted the torch aloft. The light picked out the flecks of gold in his warm brown eyes, while his captain’s glinted green. “We sent ahead to tell the keepers of Ibb’s Rest of our plans, so if you didn’t know of them, you must have chosen to help of your own accord. I must thank you for that—I hope you’ll tell me if there’s any way I can assist you.”

  Braddock was still looking at Rhia. “A Lanvald with an Aurnian sword in Issamira,” he said slowly. “There’s a story there, I’m sure.”

  Her eyes grew sad. “There is, but … I don’t know that it’s a very good one.”

  He hesitated, perhaps wary of overstepping, but Braddock had never been one for politeness. “Might I … see the blade?”

  She hesitated too, but finally drew it forth, holding it out to him with both hands. The steel glimmered magnificently in the torchlight, as smooth and clear as mirrorglass; the edge looked sharp enough to cut the wind in two. “That’s a beautiful sword,” Braddock said with feeling, weighing it in his hands. “Is that vardrath steel?”

  The girl couldn’t have looked more pleased if she’d received the compliment herself. “You have a good eye,” she said. “Yes, it is. It was my father’s.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Roger finished etching the third finger-sign next to the third tree branch of House Trevelyan, completing the pathway Morgan and Braddock had taken from the Citadel dungeon to the cave outside Valyanrend’s walls. He was slowly sketching out quite a sizable map of the tunnels, but it was also worthwhile to mark the tunnels themselves, for any future wanderers as well as to help him remember. He took a moment to admire his handiwork in the light of the torch: a thief’s finger-sign right beside the sigil of a man who had once been one of the most powerful people in the world. The sight made him oddly proud.

  However, now that he knew the sigil’s meaning, that mystery had taken him about as far as it could go. It meant the tunnels were old, certainly, if they had been in use since before the fall of Elesthene, but he doubted Trevelyan had known any more about them than Morgan and Braddock did. And that meant he had to devote himself to the second mystery, and figure out what it was that the ruby was reacting to down here.

  Once or twice, on his travels through Sheath and beyond it, he’d felt the ruby warm in his pocket, but it had always been in crowded places where he feared taking it out to check. But he doubted he’d encounter anyone else down here, which made it his best chance to test the thing. He’d tried to test the emerald, too, but it remained stubbornly inert no matter what he did.

  Yesterday he’d been down here for an hour, the ruby in one hand and the torch in the other, wandering the tunnels and looking for any changes. He’d finally found a tunnel mouth where the ruby would flicker slightly, but he’d been so tired by that point, he’d marked it to save for another day. Now that he’d marked everything else he’d discovered up to now, a final fail-safe against getting lost, he was ready to venture deeper into the tunnels than he ever had before.

  He found where he’d left off ye
sterday, and sure enough, the ruby flickered as he made his way down the tunnel, as if there were a tiny flame inside it. It didn’t seem to get any brighter as he walked, but it definitely wasn’t any dimmer, and when he got to the next fork, he noticed it flared up a bit more down the right path than the left.

  He put the ruby into his pocket for a moment so he could mark the wall, and set off again. The light wasn’t very bright, but it was holding steady, with hardly any flickering this time. It was also quite warm, so that Roger fumbled for a handkerchief to wad up between it and his fingers. There was no telling how hot it was going to get, and he wasn’t about to get burned for his curiosity.

  It went on like that for three more turns—stop at a crossroads, check where the ruby was brighter, mark the path—before the ruby started to heat his hand even through the cloth. Warmth was radiating out from it, like firelight against his face, and it was getting too bright to look at for very long. Did that mean he was getting close?

  He hit another crossroads, and started to check the left-hand path, but he hadn’t taken three steps when the ruby shuddered in his hand, pulsing with intense light and heat. A sharp noise echoed off the walls as the gem’s surface cracked, and Roger was so surprised, he dropped it without thinking. It hit the ground and bounced, rolling ahead of him down the tunnel, until suddenly—

  Roger was flung against the wall, something whizzing past his face fast enough to hurt. He threw up a hand to protect his eyes, and promptly lost his balance. He hit the floor hard, dropping the torch, which fizzled out.

  He lay there for what felt like an age, dazed and winded, the taste of blood in his mouth and bright spots dancing before his eyes. There was blood on his face, too, he realized, when he brought up a hand to trace the cut on his cheek. He fumbled in the dark for the torch, and struggled to light it again, to see if he could find the ruby.

  The light revealed it was lying all around him, in half a hundred fragments, littering the tunnel, dead and dull. Roger walked to the nearest one and picked it up; it was jagged and sharp, the last remnants of heat quickly fading away. Could he have been mistaken? Could it possibly have been a fake, made only of glass?

  But no, he knew the truth. It had been a pure gemstone, and something had exerted force enough to shatter it. And that something was here in these tunnels—for all he knew, it lay at the end of the one he was standing in now, somewhere down there in the dark.

  Did he really want to find out what it was? Or wasn’t it safer to flee these tunnels forever, and pretend he had never seen them?

  * * *

  “Well, that settles it,” Arianrod said, slapping the letter down on her desk. “It’s good to have at least one question definitively resolved, even if I had long suspected the answer.”

  Seren squinted at the letter, sliding it closer so she could read it. It was one of a bundle King Kelken had sent from Mist’s Edge. “What does it confirm? You always knew magic existed—you didn’t even have to look outside yourself for proof of it.”

  “I knew of the renewed existence of mages, yes—however imperfect that renewal might be. But wardrenfell are not mages, and the return of the one does not necessarily prove the return of the other.”

  “Wardrenfell aren’t mages?” Seren repeated. “But this makes it sound like a wardrenfell is a person who can use magic. Is that … not what a mage is?”

  Arianrod smiled. “I can use magic, Seren, because it is an essential part of my being, and could no more be extracted from me than could my heartbeat or the color of my eyes. It has always been this way, since the day that I was born. But just as a mage can only be born, a wardrenfell can only be created. They don’t innately possess magic: it … comes to inhabit them at some later point, though the how and why of it are poorly understood. Just one more thing I’ll have to figure out.”

  Seren was still looking over the letter. “All right, so you know wardrenfell exist. I assume that discovery has important implications for you?”

  Arianrod reached over, pointing at a cluster of words. “This soldier of Eira’s claimed he fought with this woman for an extended period, that her magic prevented him from ever getting close to her—that even when she had him at her mercy, she took her time deciding what to do with him. And this wound she inflicted on him, that remade itself over and over? That is no minor spell, Seren. Yet the man who fought her never observed that she grew tired or weak, that the use of all that magic ever harmed her in any way.”

  “So she … she doesn’t suffer like you do,” Seren realized. “She can use magic without pain?”

  “That’s what I think. And I think that is a gift common to all wardrenfell, not just this one.”

  That was certainly a crucial revelation, but part of Seren’s mind couldn’t fully focus on it, distracted by something in the way Arianrod had described the battle between the wardrenfell and Eira’s soldier. She searched her memory until she finally found it: I wasn’t able to manage so much as a scratch. That was what he had said, wasn’t it? “Wait. That man who attended the king at Mist’s Edge—the one with the scar on his face. We … had occasion to converse, and he told me his scar had been inflicted by a woman he believed had intended to kill him, a woman for whom he had been no match. We know he was from Lanvaldis, and though he denied being King Kelken’s servant, he said he had been a servant, once. Do you think he could be…?” But then she paused. “Oh, but I suppose … it sounds like this man of Eira’s died, doesn’t it?”

  Arianrod looked thoughtful. “This was the last letter Eira ever sent to Kelken’s father—or the last he could find, anyway. It must have been sent around the time of Lanvaldis’s fall. Perhaps Eira himself did not live long enough to learn the fate of his wounded soldier.” She smiled. “In fact, if the soldier really was that Cadfael, I might even know how he survived. A pity there’s no way to test the theory, not now that he’s disappeared.”

  “You don’t want to try to find him?”

  “That depends,” Arianrod said. “Do you think he knows where this woman is now?”

  Seren considered it, and shook her head. “I doubt it. I think he’d like to know, but that only makes me more certain that he doesn’t.”

  “Then it isn’t worth the time and resources it would take to find him. The details of his report to Eira are in the letter anyway.”

  Seren braced one hand on the desk, leaning against it. Though Arianrod seemed to have fully recovered from Elgar’s attack, Seren still felt shaken, off balance somehow. She had been drawn from Stonespire so easily; she had panicked like a novice when she realized Arianrod was in danger. She couldn’t stop lingering over those deficiencies, chastising herself for them in every idle moment.

  She couldn’t stop remembering that boy’s face, no matter how much she wanted to.

  She took a steadying breath. “What are you going to do, then?” she asked Arianrod. “What way forward do you see in all this?”

  Arianrod leaned back in her chair, threading her fingers together. “We are a continent at war, Seren, so of course we are all scrambling to outmaneuver one another, searching for any advantage that might give us an edge. This woman would serve that purpose even if she were the only one of her kind, and I strongly suspect she is not. This research, at least, suggests that when wardrenfell do appear, they appear in groups.” She tapped the cover of Wardrenfell of Historical Distinction, the book she had taken from the library at Mist’s Edge. “I doubt we shall find half a hundred of them, but even several would not be insignificant, if they held this woman’s share of power. Any country who could command their allegiance would possess a formidable asset, and that means no country can afford to ignore them. But for me and Elgar in particular, the stakes are even higher than that.”

  “Why in particular?”

  Arianrod grinned at her. “Because we’re the only two rulers I know of who are also mages.”

  “Elgar is a mage?” Seren asked. “Are you sure of that?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”
>
  “So … so when you met him, you sensed—”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” Arianrod said. “It’s not something you can detect in another person, like some kind of stain. But I am still certain of it, just as I’m sure he is certain of me.” She reached for a blank sheet of parchment, and started scribbling what looked like a list. “For mages, Seren, wardrenfell present a further opportunity. If I can find them, if I can figure out how they are able to cast without pain … it may be I can deduce the nature of magic itself—where it comes from, why it exists. If I can learn that, I know I’ll be able to figure out what causes my deficiency, and how it can be fixed. And if I can become the equal of the mages of old … well, defeating Elgar would be only the beginning of what I could do then.” She brushed the quill against her cheek. “Of course, if Elgar makes contact with the wardrenfell before I do, he will gain the same opportunity. And if he is able to seize it, things will become very unpleasant for a great number of people, me in particular.”

  Seren shifted uneasily. “But if the wardrenfell remain elusive, and Elgar has no way of increasing his power … then our chances are better?”

  Arianrod laughed. “Gods no, our chances are terrible. Half a glance at a map would convince even the dimmest peasant that we have no hope of defeating Elgar without aid. Our disadvantages are staggering … most would say insurmountable.”

  Seren hardly knew what she was supposed to say to that. “Yet you seem … content.”

  “Naturally.” Looking over the parchment, she made one last entry and set the quill down. Her smile was as imperturbable as ever. “A genius needs an impossible task, Seren. What else would pose a sufficient challenge?”

  * * *

  Roger hated admitting failure almost as much as he hated any and all kinds of danger, so it was hardly a comfort to tell himself that doing the first had helped him avoid the second. His scrapes were minor, but he wanted to see to them, and without the ruby’s guidance he had no idea how to navigate the tunnels anyway. That didn’t mean he was admitting defeat—just a minor and extremely temporary setback. He had tested all the fragments of the ruby that he could find, and none of them reacted to the tunnels; it seemed whatever had been done to it had broken or run out when the ruby shattered. And that damned emerald was still as useless as ever; it had never reacted to anything but the ruby.