The Will of the Empress

by Tamora Pierce

  By then, Tris was able to sense Briar and Daja. Her strength returned with each day she rode, though her hips ached fiercely when she dismounted for the night. She said nothing about it. She also said nothing when Ambros paid for a private room for each of them at the inns when they halted. By the time they passed the fort beyond the Blendroad Inn, Tris had begun to ride part of the time at the trot. Briar, Daja, and Sandry were telling her that Zhegorz was in a bad state, babbling about walls of glass. Tris knew what he meant, just as her brother and sisters knew: There were magical walls ahead. Tris fidgeted when they rested the horses, and she slept badly, always wanting to get on the road at dawn. It was one thing to talk to her friends, another to shift power to them. She needed to be closer.

  Ten days after they’d left Quen and Shan, Sandry, Briar, Daja, Gudruny, her children, and Zhegorz topped a rise in the Imperial Highway. Before them lay a great green plain dotted with villages, and a massive blue lake. The border fortress was on the far side of the gleaming water. To the east lay the smoky foothills of the Carakathy Mountains, where the empress was said to have a hunting lodge. According to Tris, Berenene and Ishabal Ladyhammer were there now.

  “Out in the open,” muttered Zhegorz, staring at that broad emerald expanse. “No place to hide from watchers, no place to hide from the wind.”

  “As long as my imperial cousin and her pawns do nothing but watch,” retorted Sandry. “As long as they keep out of the way.” She urged their company forward, down the slope to the plain.

  It took them two days to cross it and skirt the lake. On the third day, Briar woke to find Zhegorz gone from his bed and his saddlebags missing. He was also missing from breakfast. “Now that’s a worry,” Briar told Sandry. “Zhegorz has lived hungry too long to miss any meals.”

  Gudruny’s children searched the inn and its outbuildings, but there was no sign of their crazy man. They did find his saddlebags in the stable with his horse, but there was no trace of the man himself.

  Sandry paced in the courtyard, working steadily more intricate cats’ cradles in her fingers. “I don’t want to leave him, and I don’t like not knowing where he is,” she complained. She had yet to give the order to saddle the horses or to hitch up Gudruny’s cart. “I didn’t know I’d need to put a leash on him. Who can scry among us?”

  “Tris,” chorused Briar and Daja. They looked at each other and grinned. That was when knowledge struck Briar like one of Tris’s own lightning bolts.

  “That’s what she’s been dancing around,” he told his sisters. “That’s why she took old Zhegorz aside. It’s not just sounds she’s hearing on the winds. She knows how to scry on them, too. She learned somehow.”

  “She didn’t want you to know for silly reasons,” Zhegorz said reasonably. He had walked in the gate to the inn’s courtyard, his lean face glowing with sweat. “She said you’ll think she’s conceited if you knew she can do it.”

  All three young mages traded exasperated looks. “Have you ever known such an annoying girl?” demanded Sandry.

  “But she couldn’t do it before,” Daja said. “She learned? While she was away? But people go mad, trying to see things on the wind! No offense,” she told Zhegorz.

  He shrugged. “I was born with it.”

  “Yell at Tris later,” said Briar. “Yell at Zhegorz now. Where were you, Zhegorz? You had us all fretting.”

  “I went to see,” Zhegorz said, wiping his face on his sleeve. “They look for Clehame Sandrilene and her escort, so I went to the border crossing to see who is looking. A white-haired mage who blazes like the sun waits on a platform by the arch. Three mages like stars and soldiers with the gold braid of the palace soldiers guard her on the platform.” He held up one of his ear beads. “The white-haired mage will raise the border magic to stop you three. Only you three. She is in charge. She tells her guards that, and she tells the border guards that. She is to deal with you and only you, and all others may pass.” Zhegorz rubbed the back of his neck. “She is not happy with her work. Why is she not happy?”

  Daja shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours. Was there anything else?”

  Zhegorz reported the gossip of merchants headed south, and of merchants on the far side of the border who waited for the gates to open so they could head north. When she realized that he had told everything he knew of their situation, Sandry kissed his stubbled cheek. “Go eat a good breakfast, ” she told him affectionately. “And thank you.” She watched him walk into the inn, then looked for Gudruny.

  “Gudruny, would you come with me, please?” she asked. She led her maid over to the cart and opened one of the trunks. The first thing she pulled out of it was a heavy canvas tarp with shifting patterns on it. Underneath it were four hooded cloaks, two large and two small. “You and Zhegorz each get one, and the children each get one,” she told the maid, handing the cloaks to her. “I thought we might need them. With these on, and the cart covered with the tarp, you won’t look like the people who traveled with me. Tell them you’re joining a merchant caravan in Leen, traveling south.”

  “Clehame, this is silly,” protested Gudruny.

  Sandry put her hand on the woman’s arm. “It’s going to be a mage fight at the border,” she explained gently. “If you leave right away, you can pass through long before we get there. We’ll meet you at Ratey’s Inn on the other side, once we’ve…worked things out.” When Gudruny opened her mouth to argue again, Sandry shook her head. “Get the little ones and Zhegorz safely out of this, please,” she said firmly. “That’s Ishabal Ladyhammer who waits for us, Gudruny. You have our purse with you. If we fail, choose what you will do. I’d like you to take Zhegorz to Winding Circle temple in Emelan. They’ll be able to help him, and my great-uncle Vedris will look after you and the children. Or you can return to me in Namorn, if I can’t escape. I can’t choose for you, though I hope you’ll regard my wishes.”

  Gudruny curtsied, a troubled look on her face. “I hope I’ll see you on the other side of the border, Clehame,” she murmured. “Then neither of us will have to choose.”

  Sandry patted Gudruny’s arm, then went to see how successful Briar had been in explaining their plan to Zhegorz.

  “I can’t,” Zhegorz protested when Sandry found them. “Tris said I must watch and listen for you.”

  “And you have,” Sandry told him. “While we slept, you did. Now I need you to safeguard Gudruny and the children. Please, Zhegorz.”

  He nodded, without meeting her eyes. Can I ask for anyone braver? she wondered. He’s terrified, and yet he has spied on the might of the empire that’s here for me. For us. Maybe it takes a coward more courage—not less—to do and not do things. Perhaps cowards understand the world so much better than brave folk.

  Once Gudruny, Zhegorz, and the children had left with the cart, Sandry, Briar, and Daja settled into the common room to give them a couple of hours’ head start. As Briar drew strength from his shakkan and Daja mended a piece of tack, Sandry asked the sergeant who commanded their guards to come see her. When he arrived, he did not look at all comfortable.

  “Forgive me, Clehame,” he said, “but word gets around. There’s imperial mages waiting at the border. I hear they mean to stop you. What does that mean for my lads and me?”

  Sandry smiled at him. “You were only supposed to bring me to the border,” she told the man. “I would no more ask you to defy your empress than I would ask you to cook your own children. Please tell Cousin Ambros you guarded me well. And my thanks to you and your men.” She drew out the pouch of coins she had kept for this moment. “To buy some…comforts…on your way home.” She gave it to him with a wink.

  The sergeant bowed and accepted the pouch. “You are always gracious, Clehame,” he said. “We thank you and ask Qunoc’s blessing on your journey home.”

  “You’d be better off asking Sythuthan’s,” Briar muttered.

  The sergeant grinned at the suggestion that they should appeal to the notorious trickster god. “Your gods bless and hold
you evermore, Clehame Sandrilene,” he told Sandry. “We wish you and Viymese Daja and Viynain Briar a long life and much happiness.”

  Watching through the common room door as the Landreg men-at-arms rode away, Sandry felt a weight fall from her shoulders. “It’s just us now,” she murmured. “We don’t have to be responsible for anyone else. What a relief.”

  20

  The 11th day of Mead, 1043 K. F.

  The Olart border crossing, the Imperial Highway South, Namorn to Ratey’s Inn, Olart

  Two hours before noon, the three young mages approached the border crossing. By then, all those who had bunched up to pass through at dawn had gone on their way. Gudruny and Zhegorz and the children had passed through hours before, disguised as a common family. Sandry, Daja, and Briar now rode with a few remaining packhorses since they had not wanted to let their mage kits go in the cart. Briar in particular did not trust Gudruny’s rowdy son to not sit on his shakkan.

  As they approached the great stone arch that marked the crossing, Sandry said abruptly, “Ishabal sad? Zhegorz said she’s unhappy. Why on earth would she be unhappy? Could it be she doesn’t want a fight?”

  Briar shrugged. “That’s a bit of a reach, don’t you think? Maybe she just wasn’t awake. Maybe she had mush for breakfast instead of bliny. That would depress me.”

  “Because your best love is your belly,” Sandry told him, her voice dry. “Did they starve you in Gyongxe, too?”

  His face turned somber. “They starved us all. Some they starved to death. I tell you, it was enough to put a fellow off emperors. Once they start thinking they’re bigger than kings, they don’t just ruin the lives of a couple dozen folk here and there. They ruin thousands of lives at a twitch.”

  Daja had been studying a miniature portrait of Rizu she carried in her belt purse. Hurriedly, she put it away. “It doesn’t matter why Ishabal’s unhappy,” she said abruptly. “If she wants a fight with us or not. I heard plenty of stories about her in Kugisko, and from Rizu and her friends. They call Ishabal ‘the imperial will.’ What the empress wants, Ishabal gets done.”

  “Not this time,” said Briar.

  “People shouldn’t always get what they want,” Sandry replied grimly. “It’s very bad for their character.”

  As the three approached the crossing, they could see the wooden platform built on the western side of the arch. There were the mages, just as Zhegorz had said. Their own suspicions were correct: The white-haired mage was Ishabal Ladyhammer. When they were about one hundred yards away, Ishabal sprinkled something on the platform. On the ground, a captain of the soldiers who manned the crossing stepped into the road. Twenty of his men trotted out to form a line at his back, leveling crossbows at the three.

  “Halt!” cried the captain. “You will halt and submit yourselves for imperial inquiry!”

  Briar lobbed a cloth-covered ball at the man. A mage who stood with Ishabal burned it from the air. He didn’t see the cloth ball that Daja rolled forward until it stopped at the captain’s feet. Once she had tossed it, she drew heat from the summer air, concentrating it in the crossbows. The metal fittings smoked, then got hot. The archers were disciplined; they fought to keep their grip on their weapons. Daja got cross, and dragged the heat from the stones around them into the metal of the bows and of the bowmen’s armor. They shouted in pain and dropped their weapons.

  Vines sprouted from the cloth ball at the captain’s feet, slithering up and around his legs like snakes to hold him in place. He drew his sword and tried to hack at them, only to have the weapon suddenly grow hot in his hand. He dropped it. Daja summoned more heat to the men who faced her, running her fingers over the living metal on her hand as she tried to hold the line between too hot for comfort and hot enough to do permanent damage. The border guards yelped and shed belts, helms, swords, and daggers, any metal on their bodies as Daja called heat to it all.

  “If you want a fight, have it with us,” Briar called to Isha. “Leave these soldiers out of it. They’ll get hurt.”

  He felt something like a shiver in his bones. It was a swell of power on the far side of the stone gate. With it rose plants, stones, even trees, all things that had been growing in the track where the spell anchors for the magical barrier had been set centuries before.

  Sandry rode up to the gate and tried to go through. She met a force there like a solid, invisible wall. Her mount shied when it struck it, spooked by a barrier that it could not see. Sandry fought her mare to a stand, then dismounted. She walked up and found the barrier was every bit as solid as stone, for all that is was completely invisible. It was as if the air had gone hard.

  She turned to look up at the people on the platform. “How does my cousin intend to keep me, Viymese Ladyhammer?” she demanded. “In a cage like this?” She struck the barrier with her fists. “Married off and locked up in some country estate, my name signed in blood and magic to a promise to be a good little sheep? Can you people afford to keep me long? All magic has limits. There is no way you can force me never to use my power again. You know power must be used, or it goes wrong. And when I have the chance to use my power…You all wear clothes. You all stitch things together.” She tried to pinch some of the wall, to twirl it. If she could make thread of it, she could unravel the wall.

  She could not even scratch it.

  “You might well spend your life in a cage, if you will not sign a vow of obedience to the imperial throne,” Ishabal said calmly. “You cannot be so foolish as to think the powers of the world might allow you to pursue your own selfish desires all your days. Wake up, children. It is time to learn to live in the real world. What the empire wants, the empire keeps.”

  Briar walked up next to Sandry, carrying his shakkan on one hip. “She doesn’t know anything about us,” he murmured in Sandry’s ear. “Me and Daja wrapped up Quen like he was fish from the market. Her ‘real world’ is just more dead fish.” He held out his hand.

  Sandry hesitated, then put her hand in his. Daja dismounted and took her staff from its sling. With it in her grasp, she came over to join hands with Sandry.

  They let their combined magics pull and tug at the barrier. Daja dragged more heat up from lava flowing far underground. Sandry borrowed part of it and a length of magicalvine from Briar. Fixing the image of a drop spindle—like a top with a long stem and flat disk—in her mind’s eye, she wrapped the heat-soaked magical vine around the spindle and twirled it back and forth like a handmade auger, trying to bore an opening through the wall. It made not a dent.

  For an hour or more they struggled. They sought the top of the barrier and its roots, unable to crack it. Daja hammered. Briar spread himself as a vine, seeking even hair-thin cracks into which he could insert a tendril, as he had in Quen’s glove spells. Sandry hunted for loose threads, with no luck.

  “Are you quite finished?” called Ishabal from her platform. “I am impressed—most collapse long before this—but it changes nothing. Better mages than you have pitted themselves against our barriers and lost. You will not be permitted to leave the empire.”

  Briar glared up at Ishabal. “You think I’m scared of empires?” he yelled. “Here’s what I think of empires!”

  He drew on his shakkan, flinging that power at the wooden platform on which Isha and her companions stood. The mages who stood with Isha were there to guard against attacks on her. They were prepared for a mage to turn fire or wind against the platform. They were not prepared for the wooden boards to shift, and groan, and sprout branches. Whole new trees suddenly exploded from dead wood. The mages dropped to the ground, bruising themselves on knobby roots that dug into the earth around them. Sandry and Daja as well as Briar felt the shakkan’s glee at creating so many new lives.

  “Maul us all you like,” cried Isha, staggering to her feet. “You will get not one whit closer to home! This is your home, and you will bend the knee to your new mistress!”

  Why not name her? Daja wanted to know, exasperated. Everyone knows who has commanded her to d
o this—why be so festering delicate with Berenene’s name? The rude jokes told in the forges of the empire aren’t so polite about keeping her name out of the conversation!

  Sandry wiped sweat from her cheeks with a handkerchief. Normally I’d say it’s because she wants to keep Berenene’s name out of it if this fails, but it’s not like we’re succeeding. She nibbled a lip in thought. Unless it might still fail? What else can we do?

  Daja grabbed Sandry. “The thread! Our circle!”

  Sandry reached into her neck pouch and produced the thread circle once more. “I don’t know if it will work without Tris,” she protested. “It’s got some of our strength, but this is a nasty barrier.”

  I suppose it is, Tris said through their magic. But while I may be a day’s ride from you, I still can hold my part.

  Silver fire bloomed in the vague shape of a hand in the air. It wrapped itself around Tris’s lump in the thread circle. Sandry grabbed hers. Daja did the same and smacked Briar on the back of the head. He whirled, then saw what they held.

  “Keep growing,” he muttered under his breath to the trees. Then he grabbed the knot that stood for him.

  Sandry anchored herself in the thread with a feeling of stepping into her own skin. This was also her first leader thread, in part, the one on which she first spun wool. Over the years, she’d placed a great deal of strength in this symbol of the union between them. Now it was also a symbol of what had happened on this trip. At last they were one again. She still had them, and they still had her.

  That never changed, Briar told her before he took the shakkan’s remaining magic and dove into a forest of roots underground, spreading out through the land to draw on some of the power of its plants and trees. He drew it from the algae on Lake Glaise, the forests on the mountains around it, and the vast plain of grass on which they stood. Brambles and pear trees fed him, as did wildflowers and ancient pines. With their green fire running through his veins he felt better than he had since the battles in Gyongxe. He blazed with it.