Deathcaster

by Cinda Williams Chima

  That was when the heat rising from Goat finally brought Jenna the wizard’s scent—wild, intoxicating, wolfish. An image came back to Jenna—a scene in the dungeon at Ardenscourt, the red-haired healer, Adam Wolf, carefully cutting away the bandages over her magically festering wound.

  “Wolf!” Jenna cried.

  Where? Cas said, pinning his ears and scanning the ship and the shoreline.

  “There!” Jenna said, and vaulted from the dragon’s back. That wasn’t a smart move, because they were higher off the deck than she’d expected. She plunged right through the failing magical barricade and hit the decking hard. She lay there trying to drag breath back into her body.

  Moments later, the entire ship shook and listed as Cas landed between her and the healer. She found herself peering out between the dragon’s legs. The healer stood, legs braced apart, his little knife extended in front of him, chin up, ready to do battle. She could see the copper hair peeking out from under his watch cap, the long, lupine face, the stubborn resolve in the blue-green eyes. Then his female companion pushed in front of him, brandishing her larger sword. Still, it was ludicrous, these two tiny humans with one big sword, confronting a nearly full-grown dragon.

  Cas’s muscles bunched, his head came forward, and Jenna knew he was seconds away from bathing them in flame.

  “No!” Jenna leapt between Cas and his targets, planting her hand firmly on the dragon’s snout. “The male is Lyssa Wolf’s littermate.”

  Cas inhaled sharply. Smells like wolf, he conceded. He cocked his head, grinning charmingly, exposing teeth the size of rock slabs. Flame female?

  Jenna knew this was dragon humor, but she still scowled at him and said, “No.”

  She turned back to Adam Wolf and his companion. The tip of the female’s sword had dropped so that it pointed at the deck. Adam Wolf stood frozen, unblinking. His knife slid from his hand and pinged on the planks by his feet. “Jenna?” he said hoarsely, taking one step forward, his body canted warily as if expecting disappointment.

  Jenna flew at the healer, slamming into him so hard that they both nearly toppled over backward. She pulled him close, feeling his heart pounding through those odd sailor’s clothes and her own leather armor. She traced his broad back with her fingers, walking them down to the base of his spine, squeezing his muscled ass, pulling him tightly into her body. He seemed even leaner, more weathered than before.

  She pressed her nose into his shoulder, breathing him in, reading his recent history. Back in Ardenscourt, he’d always smelled faintly of herbs, medicines, blood, and teas. Now, the scent of salt water, sea air, and sweat overlay his wolfish base. She tilted her face up and found that their lips were inches apart. Cradling his stubbled face between her hands, she kissed him savagely.

  Faintly, Jenna heard the beating of dragon wings overhead, felt the wind stirring her hair. She heard Cas’s voice in her head. Slayer! Splinter! Wait on shore. Jenna maybe mating with wolf.

  Cheeks flaming, Jenna stepped back, suddenly aware of being surrounded by an audience. Goat had crept forward on his belly until his head was practically touching them. Adam Wolf’s female companion was staring, openmouthed. Cas was hovering behind her, his hot, slightly sulfurous breath on the back of her neck. He resembled a scaled chaperone, ready to intervene.

  And then, finally, the spider leapt down from the rigging, both boots hitting the deck. It wasn’t until he doffed his watch cap and bowed that Jenna realized that it was the pirate Evan Strangward.

  “I told you she was alive,” he said to Adam Wolf.

  42

  BORDERLANDS

  Destin had been repulsed by the Darian Brothers during their brief partnership at Oden’s Ford. Repulsed and disappointed, since they’d failed to assassinate the Fellsian prince. He’d never dug too deeply into their history, because he intended it to be a one-off. He’d only used them because King Gerard had made it clear that he wanted the blame for violating the centuries-old Peace of Oden’s Ford to be deflected elsewhere.

  After that debacle, Destin had made a mental note—never, ever work with fanatics again.

  Easier said than done, it turned out. When Jarat assigned this murder of crows to Destin, he’d done some research in the cathedral library before he took the road north. There was plenty of information about Saint Darian, one of the patriarchs of the Church of Malthus a thousand years ago, and his followers, known as Darian Brothers, who were bent on eliminating the gifted from the Realms. But Darian and his henchmen seemed to have died out. Nothing had been written about them for centuries.

  Now, it seemed, the Darian brotherhood had been revived, with a new leader. Destin could find little on offer about the modern Lord Darian. The two bits of intelligence he could glean suggested that he was a mage himself, and that he lived somewhere in the north.

  I guess that makes him a wizard, not a mage, Destin thought. And he might be hard to find in a place where you cannot throw a rock without hitting a wizard. Which was a shame because Destin was more than happy to give the new Darian his disciples back.

  In the meantime, he served as the unwilling captain of an entire company of bloodthirsty priests. Literally bloodthirsty.

  “Your job is to collar the mages,” Destin told them, “not to suck them dry. Understood?” But threats made little impression to those with their eyes on paradise.

  Fortunately, aside from the few unlucky mages in the Delphian garrison, Destin found no gifted among the general population. After all, mages could live wherever they chose. That being the case, why would they choose Delphi? He had no doubt, however, that when Jarat’s army crossed into the Fells, they would find mages aplenty.

  While the Darians sniffed around, hunting for mages in hiding, Destin sniffed around, trying to learn what he could about the military situation in the north and the location of the missing thane families and the queen mother and princess of Arden.

  He also made inquiries about possible sightings of fugitive pirates along the wetland coast. There were plenty of pirate sightings, but they all seemed to be the ships belonging to the empress in the east. The fighting was reported to be fierce from Invaders Bay to the border town of Spiritgate, and as far west as the Alyssa Plateau.

  It was almost a blessing when the king sent word that they would march north on the morrow, and that Destin and his minions were ordered to march along.

  The day of marching dawned cold and nasty, like every other day in Delphi. Destin chose to ride, not march. For someone who’d gathered a great deal of intelligence about the Fells and its people, he’d spent little time north of the border once he was old enough to avoid the general’s grip.

  Though the Ardenine army had suffered losses in Delphi, it still numbered in the thousands as it climbed into Marisa Pines Pass, graveyard of so many southerners in the past. Mercenaries, marked by their striped scarves, comprised close to half of the soldiers. Destin wondered if his king was better at paying his mercenaries than at paying the regular troops. He hoped so.

  King Jarat was in high spirits, despite the weather, prancing about on a fine horse, his personal guard of collared mages struggling to keep up. He was dressed to kill—quite literally, in a general’s uniform with his father’s well-used sword in his saddle boot. At the end of the columns of infantry, trundled wagons carried whatever it was Jarat needed to feel at home in the Fellsian Court. There was one bright note—Destin’s friend and sometime operative, the seamstress Jocelyn Fournier, came along in the wagon train, in case Jarat needed some emergency alterations on the long road north.

  Destin positioned himself between the wagon train and the van of the army. He’d made an exception to his usual rule and had worn standard-issue military garb. Thanks to the general, he knew his way around a battlefield. It was best not to stand out in a country famous for hit-and-run ambushes. If you were a clan archer on the hillside, who would you aim at—a general, a despised spymaster, or an ordinary line soldier? If there were wizards on the heights, of course, he w
ould be picked out as gifted and picked off for sure.

  If he had to die for a cause, so be it, but, given a choice, he preferred not to die for the young king of Arden.

  Their slow climb into the pass was eerily uneventful. The veterans rode, shoulders hunched, faces grim, eyes scanning the hillsides and the trail ahead. New recruits and stripers nudged each other, nervously joking that the northerners must have slept in. General Bellamy and his officers seemed to be everywhere, tightening up formations, consulting with the scouts, directing the excavation of wagons that had become stuck in the mud. When they were nearly to Marisa Pines Camp, they came upon a huge rockfall in the road that made it impossible to go farther until it was cleared away.

  I have a bad feeling about this, Destin thought. He dismounted and helped in the effort to clear it, organizing the mages into a team to blast the barrier away. When they sleepwalked through that, Destin rigged up a makeshift block and tackle to lift debris from the path.

  Well, he thought, you always wanted to be an engineer.

  The road was still mostly blocked when he heard the first snap of bowstrings. Soldiers and officers alike dove for cover as arrows rained down on them from the heights on both sides of the trail. They were effectively pinned down by volleys of copperhead arrows, and prevented from moving forward and out of range by the blockage of the road.

  Their mages encircled the king, repeatedly sweeping the heights with flame. They charred the shrubbery and set trees on fire, but the copperheads seemed impervious to it.

  A contingent of soldiers had begun the climb up the slope, meaning to clear out the bowmen, but they would be lucky if any of them made it to the top.

  Destin approached Bellamy. “The copperheads must be wearing talismans, which makes direct magical attacks ineffective. If we can withdraw our forces a few hundred yards south of the pass, we can blast away the cliff face and dislodge them.”

  Bellamy studied Destin, hands on hips, then looked up at the cliff face. “We’d be running the risk of closing the pass completely,” he said.

  “It’s closed now,” Destin said, “and we can’t clear it under constant fire from above. You’ll lose the mages you have.”

  “It’ll be all but impossible to turn these wagons around,” Bellamy said. Which was true. The Ardenine army was like a giant Bruinswallow constrictor sliding through a rabbit burrow. It could not circle back on itself, but the segments could swivel and march back the way they’d come.

  “Leave the wagons for now. Move the men.”

  Bellamy shot a look at Jarat, enclosed in his magical bunker. He rubbed his chin, then turned away and sounded the order for retreat. The columns marched back the way they came, parting like a river around Jarat’s wagons, and flowing together beyond them.

  The king of Arden spurred toward them. “General Bellamy! What are you doing? We need to go forward, not back! We have a schedule to keep.”

  “This was my idea, Your Majesty,” Destin said, in an unusual act of gallantry. He expected that it would be beneficial to have the rising young star of the Ardenine military on his side. Also, he liked Bellamy. Also, it was true. “We need to clear the archers from the heights before we can go forward, or we’ll be lucky to have enough men left to form a brigade.”

  The king scowled. “You’d better hope this works,” he said. He stood in his stirrups and seethed, keeping a tight rein on his horse, while the fall zone was cleared of soldiers, leaving only the wagons behind. Destin lined up his mages behind a magical shield and ordered them to target the rock face just below the vantage point of the enemy archers.

  The mages blasted the cliffs to either side, sending shattered rock, gravel, and flailing bowmen cascading into the roadway. It didn’t take long for the archers to recognize the danger and withdraw.

  Unfortunately, a massive boulder made a direct hit on one of the king’s precious wagons, reducing it to mingled splinters, silks, and satins, all soaked in red Tamron wine.

  While Destin and the mages worked to clear away the debris and open the road, Jarat’s steward and servants salvaged what was salvageable from the mess. Four hours later, with the pass already in the shadow of the mountain, they were on their way again, determined to emerge on the other side before they had to camp for the night.

  The next morning they marched into a deserted Marisa Pines Camp. The camp had been raided, conquered, and burnt numerous times over the centuries. It just never stayed conquered. The residents probably have the evacuation thing down to a science, Destin thought. Hunching his shoulders, scanning the surrounding peaks, he imagined hundreds of pairs of eyes looking down at them.

  Seasoned soldiers met this disappointment stoically. Marisa Pines had been the scene of the shedding of vast quantities of southern blood in repeated assaults through the pass.

  On the other hand, Jarat’s frisky young underlords were crestfallen that there was no one to kill and little to plunder. They were in favor of burning everything to the ground, but Jarat took an almost proprietary interest in preserving the territory they’d “won.” The entire army camped overnight in the Vale north of the deserted village.

  Destin never once closed his eyes.

  The next day, they marched northward, unmolested, through the relatively flat Vale. Fields were planted, and orchards were in bloom, but the farmers were nowhere to be seen, nor was there fresh food or livestock to fill an army’s empty bellies. They’d brought provisions with them, but an extended siege could deplete them quickly.

  The way this “invasion” is going, Destin thought, the witch queen may throw open the gates and host a welcome party with the missing Ardenine hostages in attendance.

  Unless this is a massive trap and we are walking right into it.

  43

  KINGMAKER

  Fortunately, the bolt that had pierced Robert’s shoulder had passed through, leaving a clean wound behind. Though few mages in the south had much experience in healing, Marc DeJardin had spent some time in the healing halls at Ardenscourt. He treated Robert’s shoulder under strict instructions from his patient to be sure and leave a flashy scar.

  Hal was relieved, but his anger and disappointment had not abated. Robert could have been the first casualty in the battle for the crown.

  He fought down the urge to find the guilty archers and hang them from the walls. Soldiers are not the problem, he thought. No doubt they were acting under orders.

  Hal had hoped to rise in the military through his performance in the field, and he had—up to a point. Then he’d run straight into General Marin Karn, and realized that valor and skill and strategy would never win against Arden’s venomous politics.

  For more than three decades, the empire had been pinned under the boot of a ruthless king. After decades of war, and its cost in blood and treasure, Hal wanted more than an even swap—one despot for another. He’d seen a better system in the north, and he’d planned to support it by defending the Fells against the empress and whoever else threatened its survival.

  Yet, despite everything that had happened, he retained a loyalty to his homeland, if not the empire. Arden’s traditions, its language, and its customs were all engraved on his bones. As things stood, Arden seemed destined to descend into another civil war, which would mean easy pickings for Celestine. Somehow, he had to bring better government to his homeland, though he had no idea how to accomplish that in a realm that hadn’t known freedom in hundreds of years. But he knew it wouldn’t happen if he didn’t step up.

  Hal’s father was the only thane who accepted Hal’s invitation to come into the palace for a thane council. Most of the other thanes had already departed to their home keeps to seethe and plot vengeance.

  So it was that the Matelon men found themselves drinking the king’s wine and dining at the king’s table. Hal’s father was giddy with joy over the way that Hal had outmaneuvered their unsuspecting allies.

  Well, perhaps giddy was too strong a word. Lord Matelon was still grumbling about the fact that H
al insisted that he leave the White Oaks bannermen outside the gates, along with everyone else’s. His mood was rapidly improving with the help of the finest wine in the empire.

  “I understand that there was a need to keep up the appearance of impartiality,” Lord Matelon said, “but now there’s nothing wrong with driving it home that we’ve won.”

  “I came here to end a civil war,” Hal said, “not to launch another one.”

  “Exactly,” his father said. “How many times have I told you that in a civil war, nobody wins? The key to preventing a war is to let the rebels know from the outset that it’s hopeless. Overwhelming power will discourage any thoughts of toppling us. You saw how unwilling they were to sign on to go north after our families. They probably think it’s another trick to make them vulnerable to an attack from us.”

  Hal hadn’t really expected the other thanes to contribute to his venture in the north, but he was open to being pleasantly surprised. The only one who’d sent word was young Rafe Heresford, who likely knew that he hadn’t a chance to prevail in any contest for the throne. Not only that, the only family he had left was the family who’d been carried off north.

  “I’ll go with you, Hal,” Robert said, his cheeks flushed with triumph and a little too much wine. “I’m almost as good as new.”

  “Neither of you are going north,” Matelon said. “You’re needed here.”

  Hal and Robert stared at their father.

  For once, Hal spoke first. “When I agreed to lead the combined thane army, I told you that I meant to march north once we succeeded in taking Ardenscourt.” He paused, then forged ahead. “I kept my promise.”

  Lord Matelon tossed a bone to the dogs under the table, then tossed a bone to Hal. “I’m not saying that you can’t send an army north, Son,” he said. “I’m saying that someone else should take command of it. Heresford, maybe, since he seems willing to go.”

  “I am not sending Heresford to do the job that I swore to do,” Hal said. “If he wants to come with me, that’s fine.”