Eiddwen had been a student of blood magic, raised in a cult of blood magic followers. She and her young protégé, Lucello, known as “the Warlock,” had used blood magic to terrorize various locales in Rosia in order to stir up civil unrest and draw the attention of the authorities, keep them occupied investigating grisly murders instead of reports of ships disappearing in the Breath and of towers collapsing.
Her plan had worked well, almost too well. The seduction of a nobleman’s daughter had attracted the attention of Father Jacob Northrop and he had nearly caught Lucello. The young man had managed to escape only by persuading the nobleman’s daughter to sacrifice herself, giving him time to flee. Eiddwen had shut down the operation.
Her thoughts went to what Brother Paul had been saying about unrest among Xavier’s subjects. Eiddwen was concerned. She had warned Xavier to keep his sacrifices to a minimum, otherwise he would start to frighten people and they would turn against him. As it was, Xavier was beginning to frighten her. A person could become addicted to the killing, just as one could become addicted to opium.
Eiddwen took off the mourning clothes she had worn to the service and hung them in the wardrobe. Although she was playing the part of a wealthy noblewoman, she employed no lady’s maid, much to the shock of every noblewoman in the palace. The notion that Eiddwen dressed and undressed herself was, to the pampered and powdered ladies of the court, quite appalling. The queen had almost fainted when she heard.
Eiddwen had concocted a story that her last lady’s maid had been an assassin employed by her political rivals in Estara. Given the volatility of Estaran politics, no one doubted this tale. She claimed the maid had tried to smother her with a pillow while she slept, and she said she had never been able to trust another maid since.
The idea of not trusting a servant was true, so far as it went. Servants were often employed as spies, and Eiddwen was in the palace on a dangerous mission. She could not risk being discovered. The deeper truth was that she could not stand having another person around her. She liked being alone. She had never had friends as a child in the orphanage where Xavier’s followers had discovered the exotically beautiful and highly intelligent little girl. A child with no parents to cause problems. They deemed her to be suitable for their purposes and had spirited her away, taken her to meet Xavier.
He had given the orphan child a name and had handed her over to his followers to raise. She had been unusual in that she had never wanted friends. She trusted no one, cared for no one. If she took a lover, she did so for reasons that had nothing to do with love.
Eiddwen arrayed herself in a beautiful silk chemise adorned with lace and a black silk dressing gown embroidered with flowers. She shook out her black curls and let her hair fall about her shoulders. Attired for her night’s work, she went to the bed, reached into a slit she had made in the mattress, and withdrew a large roll of paper. She spread this out on the bedroom floor, got down on her knees, and began studying the diagrams. A soft knock on the wall made her frown.
Rising to her feet with an exasperated sigh, she went over to the panel and passed her hand over a magical construct set in the wall. The secret door slid open and a young man entered. He was wearing a poet shirt, trousers that buckled just beneath the knee, shoes, and stockings. He was handsome with large brown eyes, a fine nose, and a strong jawline. His eyes and smile were both touched with a hint of melancholy. He seemed to be saying to every woman he met, “I have some secret sorrow that only you can understand.”
Eiddwen was proof against those sensuous eyes. She regarded him with annoyance.
“What are you doing here? I did not send for you.”
“No, you did not,” said the young man. He tried to take hold of her. “I’m lonely and you look ravishing.”
Eiddwen shoved him away. “Go back to your room, Lucello. You take far too great a risk coming here. Someone might have seen you.”
Lucello pouted. “Do not be so cruel to me, Eiddwen. It has been so long…” He tried to kiss her.
Eiddwen gave him a cold and glittering look. Lucello backed away. He walked over to the bed, sat down, and scowled.
“Why won’t you make love to me anymore?”
“Because you are here to make love to the princess,” said Eiddwen.
Kneeling again on the floor, she smoothed out a corner of the paper and bent down to study it more closely.
He shrugged. “I can do that in my sleep. She already adores me.”
“And she must go on adoring you,” said Eiddwen.
“Until when?” Lucello asked impatiently. “Living here is like living in a mausoleum! I shall go out of my head with boredom. Other women in this palace will be glad to have me in their beds if you won’t. I might go pay a visit to one right now.”
Eiddwen shifted her head slightly to look at him. “You will obey me, Lucello. You know what will happen if you don’t.”
“You may threaten me all you like, Eiddwen, but you need me to seduce the princess,” Lucello said with a shrug. “You can’t make this plot of yours work without me. I’ll do as I please.”
Eiddwen smiled at him. “Dear Lucello, if you were discovered in your bed with your throat slit from ear to ear, I would be very sorry. Mainly because I would have to make other arrangements with regard to the princess.”
Lucello tried to meet her eyes and failed.
“I wasn’t serious. You know that.”
Eiddwen resumed her perusal of the paper.
“What are you looking at that you find so damn fascinating?” Lucello asked in sulky tones.
“An architectural rendering of the ground floor of the palace,” she replied. Rolling up the paper briskly, she rose to her feet. “Or rather it would be the ground floor, if the palace were actually resting on the ground.”
“What are you plotting now?” He left the bed and came to stand close to her.
“I have work to do, Lucello,” she said.
“You know you want me,” he said.
His voice was soft, his eyes filled with longing, yearning. His voice, his eyes had seduced many young girls, luring them to his bed, to enslavement, to death.
He put his arms around her and tried to kiss her neck.
“I love you, Eiddwen.”
She turned away. “Be a good boy, Lucello. Go to your room and stay there.”
The young man flushed with rage and shame. His body trembled. He caught hold of her arm. “I know how to kill, Eiddwen! You taught me!”
“Don’t be a bore, Lucello,” she said.
He glared at her, his hands twitching as if he longed to put them around her throat. After a brief struggle with himself, he muttered a curse and left by way of the secret panel.
Eiddwen sat down at her dressing table in front of the mirror.
“He is starting to think too well of himself,” she said to her reflection. “He is becoming a nuisance.”
Yet, there wasn’t much she could do. Despite what she had said to the contrary, she needed him. She had to carry out this latest strange scheme of Xavier’s to abduct savants.
She could send Lucello away, leave without the princess, tell Xavier … Tell him what? That she refused to obey him?
Eiddwen shivered. She feared no one in this world and she didn’t believe in the next. But she went in awe of Xavier. He had guided her life from the time she was a child and although he had never harmed her, never spoken harshly to her, he had a way of shriveling her soul, making her feel small and helpless.
Once she had dealt with her original assignment, she would deal with the princes.
The clock chimed one. Eiddwen touched her lips with carnelian and her cheeks with rouge, smearing the rouge as though she had spent the night in pleasurable pursuits. To add to the fiction, she mussed her curls and unfastened some of the ribbon ties on her dressing gown. She pulled a silk mask—that staple of clandestine lovers—over her face.
The palace was dark, quiet. Eiddwen began the long trek down to the palace’s lowes
t level. What would be the ground floor—if the palace was on the ground.
20
The difficulty has not been in creating the magical metal, but in creating a viable way to use the metal on a gunboat. We have determined that a refitted merchantman will be better suited than a naval gunboat, providing the structure needed to support the weight of the steel plating. Having reached this conclusion, I am pleased to report that the work proceeds well. The gunboat will be ready as scheduled and on budget.
—Sir Henry Wallace, report to Queen Mary of Freya
The rain had stopped in Rosia. The gray clouds had moved on to drench Rosia’s enemy, the nation of Freya. The downpour had ceased for the moment, allowing Sir Henry and his friend of twenty years, Admiral Randolph Baker, to venture out to inspect Sir Henry’s invention.
Admiral Baker stared at it, walked around it, then said with a powerful snort, “I think the bloody boat looks god-awful.”
“I find her beautiful,” said Sir Henry.
Both men laughed. The admiral was a stout man of medium height, deeply tanned from his years of sailing. He wore a white periwig to conceal his baldness. Admiral Baker was a “thoroughgoing sailor” as the saying went, and despite his stern, dour demeanor, his men respected him. His nickname belowdecks was “Old Doom and Gloom” because he was a pessimist who anticipated the worst possible outcome. When something went right, the admiral would shake his head and mutter, “It is only temporary.”
The two men were in a salvage yard located on the outskirts of Haever. Sir Henry had purchased the yard because it was littered with the wooden hulks of wrecked ships, rusting lift tanks, wooden masts stacked like cordwood, piles of rope rigging, limp balloons, and rolls of canvas sails—the perfect cover for Sir Henry’s clandestine operations.
Salvage ships came and went, towing their prizes behind them. Men crawled over the ships, taking them apart. At the rear of the salvage yard in a fenced-off, restricted area, men worked on the construction of an experimental gunboat armored with the new magically enhanced steel invented by the genius, Pietro Alcazar.
The gunboat was surrounded by a fence reinforced with unseen, magical traps meant to deter invaders. One entered through a gate that was locked by ordinary locks requiring a key to open, as well as by magical locks requiring a magical key. Alcazar’s workshop was inside the fenced-off area. He labored here six days a week, assisted by a journeyman and his apprentice, as well as a blacksmith and his apprentice, assigned to build the steel panels for the gunboat currently being inspected by Sir Henry and Admiral Baker.
Despite Sir Henry’s praise, the gunboat was anything but beautiful, looking like no other gunboat that had ever set sail. Long sheets of the new steel angled down along the hull from the main deck. Lighter sheets of steel extended out from the keel along the underside of the hull. The prow, covered in the lighter weight steel, extended out from under the heavy armor.
A pair of steel-covered wings, each mounted with a large air screw, helped maneuver the heavy ship. Sir Henry had added bracings and lift tanks beneath the heavy upper armor. A pair of masts supported sails and ballast tanks.
“How have the tests gone?” Admiral Baker asked in a glum tone that implied he expected the worst.
“Exceedingly well,” said Sir Henry. “Bullets fired at point-blank range left a few marks on the steel, but that is all. We sailed the gunboat around the point and fired a twelve-pound cannonball at it. You can see here where it hit.”
Sir Henry indicated a small dent in one of the steel panels. Admiral Baker leaned close to inspect it. He stood up, gave a noncommittal grunt.
Sir Henry was annoyed. “By God, you are a hard man to impress, Randolph.”
“The way you carried on about this miraculous steel, Henry, I expected you to say the damn cannonball went up in a puff of smoke. Still, I suppose one could term it satisfactory,” Admiral Baker conceded grudgingly.
Sir Henry grinned. He was in a good mood, pleased with the experiments on the steel. Not even his friend’s gloomy aspect could ruin it.
Of the four friends at Grafton University, Henry had been the brainy schemer, Alan Northrop the smooth-talking cavalier, Simon Yates the analytical thinker, and Randolph Baker the dour pessimist. Though vastly different in personality, the four were inseparable. They had two things in common: They were all ambitious for power and wealth and they were all second sons, which meant they would have to find that power and wealth on their own. The four termed themselves “The Seconds.”
Simon Yates, now confined to a wheelchair by a bullet in his spine, worked in government intelligence. Randolph Baker had chosen a naval career after he graduated, as did Alan Northrop. The two had tried to persuade their friend Henry Wallace, whose father was a “red judge” on the high court, to join them in the navy. Sir Henry decided his path to glory lay in serving his country in a different way. A chance encounter with Crown Prince Godfrey landed Henry a job in the Office of Foreign Affairs. He had gone on to become one of the most powerful men in Freya.
Randolph Baker had risen to the rank of lord admiral in Her Majesty’s navy. Captain Alan Northrop would have undoubtedly attained high rank, but for a scandal involving his older brother, Jacob.
The truth of what happened between the brothers was known to only a few, Sir Henry among them. All the public knew was that Jacob had fled to Rosia and Alan had inherited the family fortune. Quitting the navy that would have left him a lieutenant all his life, he had purchased his own ship. Captain Alan Northrop was now an extremely successful privateer, so successful that his queen had thought fit to honor him with a knighthood. The rakish rogue was now Sir Alan Northrop, much to the amusement of his friends.
“I am convinced this magical steel will withstand a hit from the green fire those demons used to sink the Royal Lion,” Sir Henry continued. “Unfortunately we have no way of testing that. Too bad we don’t have that green beam weapon Eiddwen invented, the weapon that almost sank the Defiant. The weapon I paid for.”
“Damn female made a fool of you, Henry,” said Admiral Baker. “You aren’t the first man to fall for a pretty face. You won’t be the last.”
“It wasn’t Eiddwen’s pretty face I was after,” said Sir Henry drily. “I wanted that weapon. We saw what it did to the cutter. They’ve made improvements since. You should have seen King Alaric’s pride, the Royal Lion, go down. They sank her with one shot.”
“Wish I had seen it!” said Admiral Baker. “When is Alan coming to captain this marvel of yours?”
“His ship has only just docked,” said Sir Henry. “He has to remain with his ship to supervise some repairs and wait for some prize he captured to arrive. Speaking of prizes, when does the rest of the fleet sail for Braffa?”
“Day after tomorrow if the winds hold,” said Admiral Baker. “We’re almost finished provisioning. It’s a beautiful sight, the fleet. A dozen two-deck ships of the line, eight frigates, and ten sloops. The heavy frigates Griffon, Intruder, and Duke Edmond and the sloops Halian, Wartin, and Packford are already on the way east to meet with four ships of the line, then on to the Straits de Domcáido.
“I hope your bloody plan works, Henry,” the admiral added. “You’ve got me taking the main fleet south around the Star’s Feet and that will add at least seven days to the voyage. Damn war might be over by the time I get there.”
“Sending part of the fleet through the straits will keep the Estarans busy, make them think that the rest of the fleet is on the way. The rest of the fleet will be on the way, just not the way the Estarans, the Travians, and the Rosians expect. As for the extra time…” Sir Henry shrugged. “There won’t be a war. No one wants to offend Braffa by attacking it. The Braffans would shut down the refineries that make the Blood, which keeps the ships afloat. The standoff over Braffa will continue, while I conduct secret negotiations with the Braffan government. When those are concluded, the arrival of the Freyan fleet will assure the Braffans that we mean to support their determination for independenc
e.”
“That assumes your negotiations go well,” said Admiral Baker, gloomily shaking his head.
“I have no reason to think they won’t,” said Sir Henry, smiling.
Their conversation was interrupted by a man carrying a leather satchel, walking into the shipyard with a hurried stride.
“Ah, the inimitable Mr. Sloan,” said Sir Henry. “You appear to be bursting with news, Mr. Sloan. I can practically see it oozing out of your boots.”
“Indeed, my lord,” Mr. Sloan replied gravely. “A terrible tragedy has occurred in Rosia. Two days ago, the Crystal Market hall collapsed. The number of dead may never be known, but it must be well into the hundreds.”
“What was the cause?” Sir Henry asked sharply.
“Smitten by the hand of God,” suggested Admiral Baker.
“The cause is unknown, my lord,” said Mr. Sloan. “Our agents are trying to find out, but information is difficult to obtain. All the guild crafters who worked on the market have mysteriously disappeared. They were spirited away on orders of the grand bishop.”
“We know this for a fact?” Sir Henry asked.
“Yes, sir. I received this report from one of our agents in Evreux. She hastened to the scene the moment she heard about the disaster. She was wearing the guild emblem in order to obtain access to the site and was examining some of the glass bricks when she was seized by one of the church guards, who insisted that she accompany him. He put her in a carriage with other crafters and gave the driver orders to take them to the Asylum at Charenton. She jumped from the moving carriage and managed to escape. I have here her full report, my lord.”
Mr. Sloan indicated the leather satchel.
“How very strange,” said Sir Henry, thoughtful. “I wonder why the hall collapsed.”
“God’s balls, Henry, it’s a thousand dead Rosians!” said Admiral Baker explosively. “We should be celebrating. Who gives a damn how the bloody hall fell down.”
Sir Henry saw Mr. Sloan about to make some remark. He apparently changed his mind, however, for he remained silent.
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