The Will of the Empress (43 page)

“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.”

The 11th day of Mead, 1043 K. F.

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

T
wo 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 do 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.

Daja sank into veins of metal ore below. She followed some to the mountains and others down through the dense part of the earth, until she found the immense hot soup in which they were born. The lava’s heat bubbled through her, driving up to her body, seeking a way to break free into the world. She laughed at the strength of molten stone and metal, feeling it inhabit her skin, making her indifferent to the petty fire marshaled by Ishabal.

Tris swept up into the rapid winds high above the mountains, where birds couldn’t even fly. She dove down to draw up the power in the movement of lava and the pressure of water channeled through cracks in the ground. Despite her physical distance from her sisters and brother, she saw them in her magical vision, their images carried to her by the warm air that raced from Daja’s smoking body. They turned, the three of them, with Tris’s insubstantial form just behind, and walked into the barrier.

Magic inside it, built up over centuries, flew at them. Daja and Tris burned it away. Briar and Sandry wove nets of green and thread magic that snared the lattices of power that made the barrier. Slowly they dragged at the nets, forcing the barrier open.

As they walked into the open air on the Olart side of the border, the magical barrier shattered for over a mile in each direction. It was gone, as if it had never existed.

“I feel like I just walked through a glacier,” grumbled Daja, rubbing her arms. She bumped the palm that was not covered in metal and yelped. “
Now
what?”

“Good thing we didn’t get frozen, if it was a glacier,” Briar remarked with a shrug.

“Where’s the circle?” Sandry wanted to know. “Did I lose it?” she asked, looking at the ground, then at the hand in which she’d held it. “Mila, what’s this?”

There was a slight lump at the center of her palm, covered by shiny scar tissue. She pressed it and gasped at a sting of pain. Then the lump sank into her palm completely, leaving only the scar.

Briar also felt pain. He and Daja eyed the hands that had clasped the thread circle. Daja’s creamy brown palm showed a scarred lump like Sandry’s. When she tapped it, the lump also sank into her flesh, leaving only a round scar. Briar’s had burned a circle among the plants that grew under his skin, but the lump itself was gone. The plants were blooming in extravagant reds, purples, and blues all around the newest scar. It had fitted itself right between the deep pockmarks where a protective briar had bitten into his hand years before.

Tris, miles away, watched as a tiny sun shone and faded where a lump sank into her palm. Instant warmth spread
from it like wildfire, easing some of the aches in her newly healed bones. “Every time I think I understand magic, I learn that I don’t understand anything at all,” she murmured, and looked at Ambros with a broad smile. “I like that.”

Sandry took a few steps back through the gate to look at Ishabal. “We did warn you it wouldn’t go well.” The empress’s mage sat gray-faced at the foot of one of the trees that had sprouted from the platform. “What’s the matter with you,
Viymese
Ladyhammer?” she asked.

“Backlash,” muttered Ishabal. “I was still bound to the barrier from raising it. When you…did what you did…the barrier took much of me with it.” She looked up, her dark eyes glinting. “I will recover,” she said grimly. “In time.”

Sandry saw only a feeble silver glow under the older woman’s skin. “It’s going to be a while before you make any magic, particularly any curses,” she observed. “That can only be to the good. I only wish I were willing to incur the shadow on my heart I could get by arranging for you to practice tumbling on a long flight of stairs, like you did Tris. You really should be punished specially for that.”

Ishabal met Sandry’s cold eyes. “Go ahead,” she said. “Do it.”

“No,” retorted Sandry. “I like to keep my magic clean.”

Ishabal sighed. “So, young mage. What will you do now? Take the throne? You’re powerful enough, you’ve
shown us that.” The mages and guards who had shared the platform with her had retreated up the road into Namorn, away from the three young people. Their faces were as ashen as Ishabal’s.