Sartor (32 page)

“Yes,” Kessler said. “No report as yet. Probably
won’t be for days, unless you yourself want to track them down by magic. The
snow was very heavy, unremitting for most of that three days. My guess is they’re
mired somewhere north of the wood.”

Dejain hoped they were, but she didn’t trust it. That
answer was too easy. “There’s the possibility that she and her
brats have reached Eidervaen.”

Kessler said, “I sent half my detachment to lock the
city down. They’ll be searching every house. But we’ll need more
people there if we’re to guard the perimeter as well as the main city
routes.”

“The bindings have all disintegrated?”

“Not over the palace, I found out before I used this.”
He held out the contact token she had given him. “We sent a patrol in,
and they have not come out. No one has come out, either ours or the civs.”

“Detlev will have bound the palace even more
thoroughly than the city, and the smaller the boundary, the easier it is to
bind,” she said, her thoughts skipping from subject to subject—from
vexation to vexation. Why didn’t Detlev reappear and reestablish all his
old spells? His distance was sinister—oh, everything about him was
sinister. She’d had time to think about that abortive coup, and had come
to the conclusion that Detlev had wanted her to see what happened to Vatiora.
He didn’t need to make any verbal threats. His actions were more
effective than mere words would ever be, especially in a place like Norsunder,
where everyone lied whenever convenient and there was no such thing as trust.

But there was expedience.

She would not contact him. Neither would she try any moves
against him. The problem here was that she could not possibly recreate the
powerful, lethally intricate enchantment that had once bound Sartor. She did
not have nearly enough resources or capability to duplicate those spells—something
she would not admit unless forced to.

Maybe she couldn’t duplicate Detlev’s magic, but
she could try something different, beginning with some of the traps she’d
already concocted for Zydes. Why not recast those spells in Eidervaen, only set
the trap for the Landis brat?

Three days of snow meant winter. She loathed the idea of
submitting herself to the merciless bone-chill of weather unleashed after a
hundred years of binding.

There was no help for it, and she must not betray any sign
of weakness.

She said, “Organize whatever and whoever you need. We’ll
transfer directly into the city. Prepare a welcome for the brat whenever she
does show up.”

Julian Landis looked at all the serious faces bent over the
flat stone planning table, and then closed her eyes. She’d learned that
the most of the older kids thought she didn’t understand anything she heard,
especially when she played with her stick dolls or curled up with her eyes
closed.

Well, sometimes she
didn’t
understand them. Oh,
she knew what each word meant, but not what they meant altogether.

Like Before, when she was almost four. One morning her
mother suddenly pulled her hair. Julian remembered the smart, the sting of
tears in her eyes, her own gasp, and her mother saying in a low voice,
Do
not pick your nose. Princesses never put their hands near their faces
.

Am I a princess?
Julian had asked, thinking of her
cousins. Everyone called them ‘Prince’ or ‘Princess’.

No, but one day you will be
. Her mother had gripped
her chin, which also hurt, and smiled and said,
You’ve got the eyes
.

She’d known what every single one of those words meant
separately, but together they had not made sense, not until Cousin Atan came,
and Julian saw her eyes. They were the same funny shape that her own were, when
she peered into Irza’s little mirror.

It was the same another time, after one of the birthday
parties, in those Before days. It had been a better birthday party than most,
for Prince Iskandaer had not pushed her into a pond, or poked her when she was
about to eat a bite, or laughed when her food splashed, making Mother angry not
at him, but at her.

This time he’d bent down on hands and knees and let
them the little prince and princess cousins and Julian climb on his back. He
made horse noises, and everyone had fun. Cousin Atan had been a very tiny baby
then. Mother sat beside Aunt-the-Queen and laughed. Julian could still see
their hair outlined in the window, Mother’s light as a candle flame, and
Aunt-the-Queen’s dark, but otherwise they looked so alike, with their crinkled
eyes and their happy laughs. But after, when they went away, Mother had said,
You
will never have a sister to steal a throne from under you
.

Julian knew every one of those words, too, but not what they
meant together.

Except for this: whenever her mother had talked about
behaving like a princess, she had pinched and slapped and her voice was not
kind or sweet. Julian had decided, right then, after that last birthday party,
that she never wanted to be a princess.

“Here’s the palace,” Irza said, her hands
moving across the stone table. Her voice was pretty when she wasn’t
talking right
at
you, Julian thought. When she talked
at
you, she
sounded too much like Julian’s mother had. When she talked to Arlas, her
voice was pretty. She wasn’t talking
at
Atan right now. “The
drains go here, and here, and here. Now here are the grill-ways I remember...”

Julian lifted her eyelids for a longer peek. Irza was still
bent over the smooth stone, sketching with chalk. Her curling pale hair was
outlined in silver light from the cool white glowglobes overhead. It was the
same color as her mother’s hair. Irza had once said they were a kind of
cousin. She’d seemed very happy about that. Julian didn’t feel
happy or sad, even when both Irza and Arlas both called her Cousin, before Atan
came.

Julian looked at Atan. Butterfly wings tickled her heart. It
was a good feeling. She’d gotten butterfly feelings when her mother had
been happy with her, when the Landis cousins were all kind.

Besides words, there were things she didn’t understand,
like how Atan, who had been the baby cousin at the last party in the old days Before,
had come to Shendoral all tall and older, and Julian was still six.

Julian had been glad inside when Hinder whispered to her, “Do
you know what it means to have your cousin here? No one will try to make you be
a princess.”

How had he known she didn’t want to be a princess? She
hadn’t told anyone. But maybe he knew why she refused to learn to read
and to write, or to wear the pretty dresses that a proper princess would wear,
even when Irza got that sour mouth like her mother had gotten, and talked
at
Julian about duty. Except Irza had never ever hurt her or slapped her. Sometimes
she walked away, angry, but other times she’d smiled and said,
You’re
too little to worry about these things now. But I promise if you are brought to
the throne, I’ll be there to teach you. I will be your guardian and
teacher, just like I was to my own sister. I will be a big sister to you.

Irza hadn’t figured out that Julian did not want to
be a princess. How had Hinder done it? Was it because of his white hair? The
white haired people seemed to know things that others didn’t know. But
Atan did, too, and she didn’t have white hair. Maybe it was the way they
listened, with their gazes on you, not on the ceiling or the floor, or your
messy clothes and hair, or someone else.

“... and that is all I remember about those drains,”
Irza finished.

“Thank you,” Atan said. “These two
accesses near the tower are probably what we need. If the grills still lift.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Irza said. “The
city has been magic-bound until recently, and I would be surprised if the
Norsundrians would ever think of even looking at drains.”

Mendaen said in his soft voice, “If we can get into
them, we can cover you as far as the tower. We can use the decoy plan and leave
someone at each drain access to lead the enemy off, if necessary. We can also
begin raising the city if people are waking up. But we still cannot get you past
all the Norsundrians riding around outside the city.”

The others stilled. The new one, the big tall one called
Rel, had been silent all along. Julian took a quick peek at him without turning
her head. He reminded her of a walking mountain.

Then Merewen said, “Rel, you know what to do. Why do
you not speak?”

Julian was surprised. She hadn’t seen Merewen join the
group. Her voice came from behind, which would explain how she’d arrived
without Julian seeing. Merewen also knew things, and she listened not just with
her ears but with her whole body, like you were important, and your words were
your words, not the words somebody else wanted you to say. Merewen gave Julian
the butterfly-wing feeling inside.

Even at the very end, the last thing her mother ever said to
her, she hadn’t looked at Julian. Julian remembered her mother whispering
with someone at the door, and then she sat down in the old window seat at their
house, and she cried and laughed at the same time, and how frightening that had
been! Every day had been frightening, at the end of Before.

After she finished crying and laughing, Mama turned to
Julian, and though she talked right at Julian her eyes stared and stared, as
though Julian were a window, and Mama gazed somewhere Julian couldn’t see.
Dead! They’re both dead, but maybe there’s a throne to be
wrested from the chaos. Come, child, we are going to ride!

And then her fingers, hard as tree roots, yanked Julian—

Rel spoke. His voice was deep and quiet, and the terrible
memories whipped away like wind through old cobwebs. Julian thought Rel sounded
like a mountain as well as looked like one. “I hesitate to put myself
forward. But there’s a chance I might be able to trade on my past
encounters with Kessler and decoy him, if we can catch him near the city gates.
If he thinks I’m leading an attack, it might stir them up long enough for
your group to slip inside.”

“But we haven’t anyone to go on attack,” Atan
said.

And then, at last, Grandfather Lonender said, “Remember,
you have magic. All Norsunder needs is to
think
they are being attacked.”

“Ah. Illusion. That I can do,” Atan said,
smiling.

o0o

Dejain pulled her coat closer about her and retied the sash,
but it made no difference. Drifts of snow swept out of the low, iron-gray sky
and stung her face. Her nose and lips were nearly numb, making it almost
impossible to perform magic.

Kessler had permitted his guards to build a fire here atop
the sentinel station on the city gates. She bit the glove fingers, pulled her
hands free, and plunged them toward the fire, as close as she could bear. The prickles
of discomfort were stronger than the warmth, but she ignored them. Damn it
anyway, how one needed gesture and word in order to get the human brain to
compass magic and execute it. To mumble, to make a vague gesture, was to lose
control of ingathering power. With dark magic’s lack of safeguards, that
could kill you.

She bent her face down, hoping to thaw it. Through the
wavering smoke-wreathed air she studied the north. It was very irritating that
she had to stand on the city rampart, but the magic had not worked in any of
the sheltered places she’d chosen previously. She huffed a laugh and
watched her breath fog. It was gratifying to have discovered a weakness in
Detlev’s magic; the interlocking of his spells into the great enchantment
should not have negated other magic. But that did not help her now.

So she’d been forced to come up here, where there was
no lingering trace of Detlev’s spells, and where she would have an
unimpeded view of the progress of her workings; she knew she should probably be
closer to the tower, but she wanted the proximity of the fire.

No one, save Kessler’s pairs of riders, was in view. He’d
apparently established two perimeters, one outer, patrolled by riders, and the
inner one along the city walls. It was efficient. No one was going to get past
him. His efficiency, unfortunately, increased the sense of pressure. The weak link
in this chain of defense was magical.

Rubbing her still-tingling hands, she turned her head and
glanced down into the city, sloping away to the south. No one walked the
streets, except warriors at the two visible crossroads. Yellow lights glowed
between the shutters of some of the houses, but this wing of the old palace was
still dark, and Kessler couldn’t patrol that. At least, the people he’d
sent in had never come out. The ancient tower at the west end, the lower half
ivy-covered, the upper half made of bone-white stone, looked blank. It, too,
was unapproachable, lest one get bound in the still-powerful spell whose periphery
had diminished, but whose strength within those borders had not.

She had tried to approach the tower herself, but warning
magic caused a hasty retreat, and the unsettling awareness that Detlev’s
fading binding spell was, despite its limitations, despite its diminishment,
stronger than any new one she could cast.

Well, but how long had it taken him to lay this enchantment?
Maybe weeks—months. If she had enough time, she could layer plenty of
wards over this accursed place.

She had to lay the first one, and have it stick.

She clapped her hands, which were now warm enough. The faint
smell of singed wool accompanied the agreeable sting of heat as her clothes
shifted. She stood so close to the fire she was nearly in it, but at least it
had thawed her.

She straightened up, raised her hands, and performed the
ward-spell she’d prepared—

Bluish lightning flared, rippled over the rooftops, bounced
away from the white tower and dispersed like a spill of milk across the sky.