The Queen of Mages (60 page)

Liam scratched at his chin. “It looked as if
Edon’s mages were mostly men. And ours are mostly women. Perhaps we
have the advantage.”

“Do not count on it.” Dardan strode over to
the wall beside the door. “If they come in here, Liam and I will
wait by the door to strike whoever comes in.”

“They might guess it’s an ambush, if a mage
sees me through the walls here,” Amira pointed out. “And then if
they have a male mage, they might just blast the door open, which
would kill the both of you.”

Dardan ground his teeth. This new
strategizing drove him mad. “All right… perhaps we stay farther
back? Or perhaps you stay near the door? If Edon really wants you
alive, his mages can’t just try to attack any room they see that
has a mage in it. They’ll have to identify you first.”

“Pray to Sacrifice that they’ve thought it
through that far,” Liam said.

Amira tensed. “Someone’s coming.” Just then
they heard the first of several thunderclaps, followed by
indistinct shouting.

“Can you see where that’s happening?”

Amira’s head swiveled from side to side, up
and down. “There! Down… blasted black spirits! What’s in that
direction?” She pointed down through the floor. “I see beads flying
like mad.”

Liam closed his eyes a moment. “Kitchens.
Servants’ hall. Could be anyone.”

“They’re getting closer,” Amira said, her
voice rising a little. She’d backed against Razh’s desk, her hands
clamped white on the edge. Dardan could hear booted footsteps
approaching. “Up the stairs… the hall…” Amira’s eyes tracked along
until she looked straight out through the door. The footsteps came
to a halt.

A moment’s silence passed. Then the door
shook, but not from a mage’s blow; someone had kicked it. Another
strike, and another. Every muscle in Dardan’s body felt tensed.

“They’re blocking me!” Amira hissed, and
Dardan realized she was on the attack as well.

With a bang, the hinges splintered and the
door fell inward as Jack Penrose leapt into the room, sword
flashing.

Whoever the mage was behind Penrose, he was
intercepting Amira’s beads as fast as she could throw them. Warden
Penrose ignored her completely and swung his sword at Dardan
instead. Her husband barely parried the first strike. The second
one caught on his sword edge-on and sent him sprawling.

Liam darted in behind Penrose, but the
Warden seemed to sense him coming and spun to block the
valo
’s attack. When he did, Amira could finally see the mage
out in the hall: Lord Chyros, smirking as ever, his arms folded
before him. “Well, well.”

His nonchalance drove Amira into a fury. She
formed new beads as quickly as he intercepted them, but she could
not break through to him, or to Penrose. All it would take was a
moment’s inattention, and she could hit him
somewhere
, and
then her next bead would kill him. But he did not falter.

Amira scrabbled her hands on the desk behind
her. She found the smooth heavy starstone that Count Razh used as a
paperweight, and ran across the room toward Chyros. She heaved it
into the air just as Penrose noticed her approach and withdrew back
a step from Liam. The
valo
had taken at least one mailed
fist to the face, judging by his bloody nose.

The stone sailed through the air. Penrose
swatted at it and grazed it with his fist, changing its angle
enough to make it crack uselessly against the doorframe. Chyros
didn’t even have to duck aside, and his beads did not slow. He
could not detonate one, not in here, not without risking Amira’s
death, which might mean his own at Edon’s hand. But he seemed able
to hold her off indefinitely.

If Penrose cared for Amira’s health, he did
not show it, for he swung his fist back at her. She dodged away and
it scraped her cheek where she’d been cut by a flying chip of stone
up on the city wall. Pain blazed across the wound and she stumbled
back, falling onto her rear.

Dardan was on his feet again and shouted
incoherently as he swung his sword at Penrose. The Warden circled
around him, putting Dardan between him and Liam, and then with
three quick strokes forced Amira’s husband back. On the third
stroke he twisted low and hit the grip of Dardan’s sword. Dardan
shrieked as blood flew, and he dropped the sword, lurching away.
Liam leapt into the gap, half-crashing into Penrose and carrying
him back toward the wall. Penrose was bigger and heavier, but he
could not match Liam’s rage.

All the while, Chyros grinned down at Amira,
holding his bead ready whenever she paused in her attack.
“Surrender, my dear,” he chortled.

A perverse notion gripped her, and Amira
shoved to her feet. She picked up Dardan’s sword—he rolled on the
ground, clutching at his hand—Liam had slammed Penrose up against
the wall, and was trying to pummel his face—and she ran screaming
toward Chyros.

He blanched, and started to reach for his
own sword, but it tangled in his cloak. He backed down the hall,
away from Amira’s charge.

She hadn’t a tenth of the strength or
practice needed to wield it properly, but she didn’t need to hit
him with it. She just needed a distraction. She got it when Chyros
tripped over his feet while still trying to untangle his sword. He
cursed and put out an arm to stop his fall.

His concentration broke. Amira slipped her
bead under his and plunged it into his heart.

At the same instant a thunderclap sounded
above her, and she was knocked to the floor by an avalanche of
debris. When she regained her senses, she looked around. Chyros lay
motionless, eyes staring sightlessly upward, and the hall behind
her was half-choked with rubble.

She scrambled to her feet and looked past
the broken stones. A figure, armored in dented silver, dashed into
the hall, glanced in her direction, and ran off. Penrose. She
clambered over the debris—the corridor above had partly fallen in,
presumably from Chyros’s mis-aimed strike—and went back into Razh’s
office.

Dardan sat on the floor, his back against
the desk. Liam knelt beside him, huffing madly and wrapping a torn
length of curtain fabric around Dardan’s right hand.

“What happened?” Amira said, gulping down
air and coughing at the dust. Little phantoms flickered in her
vision. “I got Chyros, but I saw Penrose running off.”

“M’lord cracked him on the head with that
paperweight. That Warden must be made of stone. He knocked us both
down and ran off once he saw you and Chyros were gone.”

She knelt beside Dardan. “Are you all
right?” Somewhere in her mind she knew she should be watching for
another attack, but right now her husband needed her.

He held up his hand. The pale cream curtains
were already soaked red, and wrapped around his fingers oddly. “I
may need to learn to write with my left hand.”

Amira sobbed. She felt guilty at her dismay
over such a small wound, when so many men had died today. She
wanted to unwrap his hand, to see what Penrose had done to him, but
he began to lever himself to his feet. “What can you see out
there?” he said hoarsely.

She wiped away tears she hadn’t known were
present and looked at the walls. She saw sparks of silver here and
there. Not as many as she expected. “It’s hard to say. Perhaps we
should find allies and help them.”

“Better than staying here,” Liam said,
helping Dardan up. “Penrose might come back with
reinforcements.”

They went into the corridor, probing along.
Amira saw no silver light near, though it wouldn’t be hard to miss
someone in all this chaos. She heard more shouts and another
thunderclap in the distance. They came to the end of the corridor,
where there was a locked door. She could open it, but someone might
be hiding in there—maybe Penrose would ambush her when she went
through. She turned back toward the main hall.

From the stairs they could see down into the
entry hall and the vestibule beyond. Two large holes had been
smashed in the front wall of the castle, admitting shafts of sun
that illuminated the dust. Sprays of stone littered the floor
below. Someone covered in a black cloak sprinted across the hall
and disappeared through a servants’ door, but Amira could not tell
who it was, or even whether it was a man or woman.

Quick, booted steps sounded below. Amira
ducked down behind the balustrade. Dardan and Liam followed suit,
farther back and out of sight of whoever was below. She peered
between the uprights and saw three figures emerge into the hall at
a trot, from the same door the cloaked figure had exited. But one
of them glanced up and then came to a halt.

It was Edon.

His golden armor was dented, his hair
mussed, but he had no visible wounds, nor did the two women with
him. All three were mages, and two of them could kill without
bringing the room down around them.

“Come out,” Edon called. He could not know
who she was; the silver light looked the same for all mages, as far
as she or her students had been able to divine. But her blood froze
when Edon said, “I see you, Lady Amira. You cannot hide.” He
stopped at the foot of the stairs and clasped his hands
together.

Amira glanced back at Dardan. “They don’t
know you’re there,” she whispered. “Stay back. Surprise them.
Somehow.” If they’d had bows, they might be able to shoot the two
women, but Amira didn’t know where they’d find such weapons up
here.

She waited a pair of heartbeats and then
slowly stood. Edon was staring straight at her. “I’ve made peace
with the Caretaker,” she said, trying to sound convincing. She must
look an awful mess. “I did not expect to survive the day. Your
mages have nearly killed me three or four times already.”

“I should punish them for that, were it not
the ordinary course of battle.”

“There is nothing ordinary about this.”

“I suppose not.” He took a slow step onto
the lowest stair. Amira had a firm grip on her ember but had not
pushed it out into a bead yet. The two women below both had beads
at the ready, floating inches before their foreheads. They must
know who she is; they would only defend their king, not kill her.
But if they saw Dardan or Liam, Amira could not save them. She
could not fight three mages, not by herself.

Edon climbed another step. “I have moved
heaven and earth for you, my dear. You should never have run. The
realm cannot survive if its king allows rebellion to flourish.”

“Self-defense is not rebellion.” Amira had
to will her feet to hold still. She would not back away from him.
The two women stayed at the bottom of the stair, watching her
intently.

“Come with me and all will be forgiven. I
will even pardon that traitorous husband of yours as a gesture of
good will.”

“I don’t think you understand what ‘good
will’ means, your majesty,” she spat at him, unable to keep the
venom from her voice. She had always been able to charm any man,
but she would not waste an ounce of that on him.

Another step, and another. He was almost
halfway up to her landing. “You have no other mages up there. It is
only you. Surrender, and this can all end. You hold the fate of all
your friends in the palm of your hand. Why will you not save them?
Is your pride so much more important than their lives?”

She saw clearly now. He was not a man; he
was only a monster, pure and simple. Everything she had done, she
had done protecting herself from him. “On the contrary, it is your
pride that—”

The shape that unfurled from the shadows
below was no ghost in her vision. It moved with purpose, silent,
and then the black cloak slipped away, revealing a man wearing only
simple gray linen, clutching a pearl-pommelled sword in one hand,
and bearing a shock of white hair atop his head.

Mason Iris closed the distance so swiftly,
and swung so viciously, that the first mage’s head parted from her
body before she had even begun to turn at his whispered footsteps.
The second woman cursed aloud as she realized what had
happened.

Mason would never reach her in time. Amira
took one step down and leapt into the air, aiming to land squarely
on Edon.
Aspect of Sacrifice, Aspect of Courage, Aspect of
Wrath, guide me true.
Her body would hit the king, but her bead
shot forth and intercepted the other woman’s just before it reached
Mason’s chest. The woman squawked when the beads winked out, and
then grunted as Mason’s sword plunged into her stomach.

If she formed another bead before she died,
Amira didn’t see it, because she collided with Edon’s vambraces as
he held them up to fend her off. She grabbed onto him with all her
strength. She was only half his weight, if that, but gravity had
done the work for her: they tumbled down the stairs, alternating
which one of them impacted against the stone steps.

Pain struck at random across her body, but
she would not let go. They rolled to a stop at the bottom of the
stairs. He struggled to push her off, and almost succeeded, then
froze when the bloody tip of Mason’s sword came to rest against his
neck. “Your majesty,” Mason said flatly.

Edon huffed for breath, as did Amira, but
none of them moved. Edon could not use his power against either of
them without risking his own death. “Dardan!” Amira shouted, once
she had enough air in her lungs. She slapped a hand over Edon’s
eyes. He jerked at that, but then fell still again.

She heard her husband’s footfalls as he and
Liam came down the stair. “Black spirits,” Liam muttered.

“Are you not going to kill him, as you swore
you would?” Mason asked.

Amira realized that she could. Edon could
never stop her in time. But to murder a man, a king, even Edon, at
this close range, was suddenly a much greater burden than she’d
thought it would be.

Her contemplation was interrupted by Edon
speaking, so quietly that she hadn’t realized it was him. “If I
die, the city burns.”

“What?”

“I ordered my men to put the city to the
torch if I die. There are still hundreds of them out there.”

Liam glanced out the entry, half-hidden by
dust and rubble. “Even if we killed all his mages, we’d still never
be able to stop the soldiers in time.”

Perhaps they should kill Edon, and work up
some ruse to trick his men. Perhaps they could get him to order his
men to leave the city, and
then
kill him. There were too
many possibilities. “We need time to think. Dardan, Liam, find a
blindfold or a sack to cover his eyes, and something to bind his
hands with. And a gag.” They stumbled off to search.

While they were gone, two more people
arrived in the hall, emerging from the formal dining room: a mage
and a Warden Amira didn’t recognize. Mason shouted that they held
King Edon and that any attempt to rescue him would result in his
certain death. The mage and Warden stopped and stared. “Go outside,
or he dies, and then you die,” Mason said. The two men glanced at
each other, and slowly sidled out into the daylight before the
castle.

Amira’s arm hurt from twisting to cover
Edon’s eyes, on top of all the other pains up and down her body.
Nothing felt broken from the tumble down the stairs, but she’d look
one giant bruise tomorrow.
If I survive to tomorrow.
The
prospect seemed a little less bleak than it had a few minutes
earlier.

Dardan and Liam returned with an empty
potato sack, a roll of twine, and a rag. They stuffed the rag in
Edon’s mouth none too gently and tied twine around his head to hold
it in. Liam slid the sack over Edon’s head—it went halfway down his
torso—and rolled him over, tying the twine firmly around his
wrists, although they had to unbuckle and remove his vambraces
first. Liam suggested taking his armor entirely off, which was
accomplished with a great deal of clanking and cursing. Amira
reminded the king frequently that she was still right next to him,
lest he get the idea to lash out with his power in the hopes of
distracting or harming the other men.