Magebane (14 page)

A flying device like this one.

Falk turned back to Brenna. “You're filthy,” he said. “And you stink of vomit.”

“I'm not used to seeing—” she shot an involuntary glance at the body, just being rolled onto the new travois by the men-at-arms, “—such things.”

“Nor should you be,” Lord Falk said. “But I do not believe you contrived to vomit on your own head. That must have come from above. So, the boy was awake when you came upon the wreckage?”

“Yes,” Brenna said. Falk hadn't gotten where he was by being either dimwitted or unobservant.

“Did he speak?”

“Barely. I asked him how he was. He said something I couldn't understand. Then he threw up on me. And then he passed out.”

Falk's cold gray gaze was, as always, unnerving. Not for the first time, Brenna wondered if her guardian used a little magic at such times to ensure she spoke the truth. Not being Mageborn herself, she couldn't know.
What if he can read my mind?

But, no, Peska had told her that was impossible, at least for a mage like Falk. A powerful Healer, a master of soft magic, could possibly do it . . . but soft magic required touch.

She hoped Peska had been telling the truth, and hadn't simply been ordered to tell her that mind-reading was impossible so that Falk could then read her mind without her being aware of it . . .

She shook her head. Did all Commoners feel this paranoid around MageLords? She suspected they did, but it wasn't something she could ask anyone. Not even the Reeve's son at the Moon Ball.

“Get back to the manor. Get cleaned up,” Falk said abruptly. “I'll talk to you later.”

Brenna knew a command when she heard one, and this one she was only too happy to obey.

She desperately wanted a bath.

Falk watched Brenna trudge away through the snow. The girl—the young woman, he corrected himself—was bright and observant, and as he had expected, beginning to chafe under the restraints he had put on her life.

Well, no matter. He could certainly manage whatever willfulness she might muster in these final few weeks. No doubt the excitement of returning to the Palace with him would temper much of her rebelliousness. In any event, she was important not for what she did or didn't do, but simply for who she
was
.

He put Brenna out of his mind and instead turned his attention to the thing hanging in the tree over his head. Reaching up, he took hold of a fold of soft blue fabric. He held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment, concentrating fiercely. But no matter how deeply into its intricate structure he mentally delved, he could find no trace of magic about it.

He released it. It was a thing of artifice, then, its provenance Commoner, not Mageborn. What made that astonishing was that its creators had accomplished without magic something that the Mageborn could not with it.

To keep a man aloft was beyond the abilities of even the greatest mages, because the energy required could not be drawn from the surrounding air. Nor could it be accomplished with a coal burner like that in his carriage, because the added weight ate up most of the additional energy provided, leaving the mage no better off; worse, if he had somehow managed to get himself aloft before the energy ran out.

Of course, the fact that this device had crashed was proof enough that nonmagical solutions posed their own hazards. But what it represented . . .

Falk walked out from under the shadow of the flying device and looked once more up the hill. The disappearance of this flying device would probably mean that it would be a long time before anyone else from beyond the Barrier would risk the attempt, but where one had come, another would surely follow.

The one weak point in the Unbound's great plan to bring down the Barriers and move out into the world to rule as the SkyMage intended had always been, as Falk had long recognized, the fact they had no way of knowing what lay outside the Great Barrier. Eight hundred years ago it had been wilderness, inhabited only by the primitive Minik tribes, a thousand miles inland in a continent even the sailors of that day had never seen. But as the flying device testified, things had changed.

As I anticipated
, he thought with satisfaction. Since King Kravon had appointed him Minister of Public Safety twenty-five years ago, he had been expanding and strengthening the army, for most of Evrenfels' history only a tiny force used to put down the occasional minor Commoner uprising. His excuse, on those rare occasions he was questioned by other members of the King's Council (though never by King Kravon, who didn't care about such things and was probably not even aware of them), was the need to protect the northern villages from what he called “the increasing threat” from the Minik, scattered tribes of fur-clad savages who lurked among the lakes, rocks, and trees of the far north.

The Minik were the only surviving descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the wilderness into which the remnants of the Old Kingdom had been magically transported. Their ancestors had attacked shortly after the arrival of the MageLords and their followers in a burst of magical energy so great it had blackened and blasted an area some ten miles in diameter, larger than New Cabora now occupied. The southern tribes had been quickly routed, those savages who survived fleeing into the rocky, swampy forests of the north. Hunting them down in that difficult and essentially useless terrain was clearly a waste of resources, and so they had been allowed to remain there since. Mostly they kept to themselves, and even traded furs to some of the northern Commons villages for food, tools, or knives, but occasionally a group of hotheaded young warriors raided a village or farm. Falk had been very careful, though he certainly had his men attempt to track down and punish those responsible, not to put an end to those raids entirely, because if they stopped, why would he still need to grow the army?

Twenty-five years had been more than enough time to install those personally loyal to him as commanders; many, in fact, were members of the Unbound. The army now numbered about five thousand men, armed with both normal weapons and some of the magical weapons of old, resurrected by Tagaza from ancient scrolls.

Even five thousand men were too few to be everywhere at once around a Barrier more than 1,800 miles in circumference. So the army had been split into four divisions, each responsible for the regular patrol of the segment of the Barrier in their quadrant. As far as the soldiers knew, those patrols were simply training exercises, although occasionally they did lead to clashes with the Minik. When Falk had control of the Barrier and was ready to bring it down, those patrols would become crucial to planning the best way to move out of the Kingdom into the outside world.

Even if the Kingdom proved to be surrounded by Commoner communities when the Barrier came down, Falk had been confident his troops, trained not only in the use of sword and bow, but in the battlefield use of magic, would have no trouble overwhelming any opposition, which after all would be taken completely by surprise, since they surely would not expect a Barrier that had stood for centuries to simply vanish into thin air.

But if he had
accurate
information about what lay outside the Barrier before he brought it down . . . he smiled. The boy was a gift: a gift from the SkyMage himself.

Falk judged the boy badly wounded, but not mortally so, given the ministrations of a talented Healer such as Eddigar . . . who should already be examining him, down in the manor.

Falk turned on his heel and left the wreckage behind. He had already ordered his men-at-arms to free it from the trees and drag it down to the courtyard for further examination. He had no fear of anyone else attempting to salvage anything from it: the local villagers well knew that stealing from Lord Falk would have unpleasant consequences.

He needed to talk to Eddigar, to find out how soon he could question the boy.

And now, more than ever, he needed to talk to Mother Northwind.

While Brenna stripped off her filthy coat and clothes in her bedroom, two mageservants hauled in a bronze bathtub, placed it in front of the fireplace, filled it with steaming water and scented oils, then whisked her clothes away for cleaning as she lowered herself into it.

When she had been younger, Brenna had felt shy about disrobing around the mageservants; now she didn't give them a second thought as she settled with a sigh of pleasure into the warm embrace of the water. She plunged her head under, then scrubbed her dark curly hair furiously with soft lilac-scented soap from a bowl the mageservants had placed at the side of the tub.

Half an hour later—clean, dry, warm, and
much
bettersmelling—she donned a forest-green gown of soft velvet, buckled a belt of gold chain around her hips, brushed her hair until it shone, tied into it a bit of gold ribbon that set her hair off nicely and matched the belt, then examined herself in the full-length mirror on the bedroom side of the bathroom door. She wondered if perhaps she wasn't just a
little
overdressed to do what she intended to do next, which was to try to see the injured youth.

He's probably not even conscious
, she told herself.

But she didn't change her clothes.

Instead, she went into the corridor, and this time followed it past the staircase that curved down into the Great Hall and turned into the West Wing, where the guest quarters were located.

Two men-at-arms stood in front of one of the half-dozen closed doors on the right side of the hall. She strode up to them and stopped. “I'd like to greet our guest,” she said.

“Sorry, miss,” said the bigger of the two, a red-bearded giant she'd met before . . . Buff? Biff? Skiff? . . . something like that. “Lord Falk's orders. No one is allowed in.”

“He didn't mean
me
,” Brenna snapped, though she suspected that was a lie. “I've already seen the boy. I found him, remember?”

The big man's expression didn't change.
Kuff, that's his name
. “That's as may be, Miss Brenna. Lord Falk did not tell us of any exceptions.”

The other guardsman, whom she didn't know at all, kept his eyes focused on the opposite wall, as though he had never seen anything more fascinating.

“And what will you do if I simply push past your silly pikes?” Brenna said. “Skewer me?”

“No, ma'am. But we
will
restrain you and take you to Lord Falk.”

Bluff called, Brenna could do nothing but try to save face. “No need,” she said coolly. “I'll talk to him myself and see what he has to say about your impertinence.”

“Perhaps that would be best, ma'am,” Kuff said.

All her cards played and trumped, Brenna turned and not-quite-stomped (not wanting to appear childish, though it certainly would have felt good) back down the hall to her own room . . .

. . . where she promptly slipped out through the hidden entrance near the stove into the servants' corridors. She went down the same narrow stairs she had taken when she'd gone out through the coal shed earlier, but this time went past the entrance to the shed, into the servants' quarters themselves, plain rooms on the bottom floor of the West Wing, strung out along a corridor that ended in the kitchen but was punctuated by a series of staircases leading up.

Just as in her part of the manor, each of those stairways led to a corridor running between two guest rooms, providing hidden access for servicing stoves, changing linens, delivering food, retrieving dirty dishes, and all the other servantly functions. There were rooms for two-score servants, but they were mostly empty, the few living servants all clustering near the kitchens.

Brenna could hear noise from that direction as she entered the servants' wing, but there was no one in the hallway, lit sparingly by a magelight every ten feet or so. The stairway she wanted was the second one. She slipped up it without being seen. It doubled back on itself on a tiny landing halfway up, then delivered her into the corridor between the room where the boy lay and an empty room on the other side.