Lord Falk, alone and on foot, walked out through the manor’s front gate.
He strode past the stockade of the men-at-arms without slowing. He needed no escort. He had no fear of the darkness or anyone who dwelt in the valley. Not all of the Commoners loved him, but that hardly mattered. Certainly they all feared him, and none would dare test his magical defenses by attempting to harm him in any way… a wise choice.
Mother Northwind lived alone, in a hut not too near the village but not too far from it either, up one of the wooded draws that wound into the high, steep slopes of the Grand Valley. He was not the first to walk that way since the snowfall, nor had he expected to be, but he did take a moment to study the footprints to assure himself that those who had gone ahead of him with their heavy load had returned the same way.
He smelled the smoke of Mother Northwind’s fire before he saw her cabin, almost invisible in a copse of poplar and ash at the very back of a long, narrow draw. In warmer weather a stream ran down into the draw from the hillside above, but now it existed only as a series of icicles hanging from the rounded rocks that defined its bed above the cottage.
The cottage itself was nondescript, a simple structure of logs caulked with clay, roofed with slate. It might have been there forever, but Lord Falk knew it had been built new, magically, literally overnight just eighteen years before: knew, because he had had it built, when Mother Northwind had entered his service (if that was quite the right phrase for it) and set him on the path that would shortly lead to the destruction of the Barrier…
… if the attempt to assassinate Prince Karl did not upset everything.
Well. That was why he was here. He strode forward, boots crunching through the crusted snow.
As he came nearer to the cottage, he heard singing. The tune was a well-worn old folk tune, but the words described the improbable adventures of one Axnay the Well-Hung. She’s home, then, Falk thought wryly, as he stepped up onto the low porch and knocked three times.
The tune cut off in mid-verse, “leaving poor Axnay embarrassingly unsatisfied. “Enter, then,” said a woman’s voice, and Lord Falk pulled the door open and stepped into the warm yellow glow of the cabin’s interior.
Mother Northwind sat in a rocking chair by the cheerily crackling fire, a sky-blue shawl drawn around her shoulders and a bright red scarf covering most of her gray curls. She looked pretty much exactly how someone raised on children’s stories and the skits of traveling players would expect someone named Mother Northwind to look. Lord Falk, however, knew that her image as a harmless old hedge-mage living in a storybook cottage in the wood was very carefully crafted. It endeared her to the Commoners of his demesne, who saw her as “their” Healer far more than they did Eddigar (especially the women), while keeping her accessible to Falk when he had need of her more… exotic services.
Mother Northwind was, in fact, the most powerful practitioner of soft magic in the Kingdom, a Healer without equal. But that was not why Falk valued her. For Healing, he had Eddigar. Much of Healing was actually a form of hard magic, anyway: the knitting of a broken bone was no different in principle from the welding together of rock to make a wall. What set Healers apart was the ability to soothe troubled minds, relieve pain, erase nightmares. The other difference between the two branches of magic was that while hard magic required an outside source of energy (heat from the air, from the Palace’s MageFurnace, from the Magefire in the manor’s basement), the energy for soft magic came from the body of the mage him- or herself. Falk recalled how exhausted Eddigar had been after dealing with a series of serious injuries following the collapse of a granary under construction in Overbridge. Only one man had died, thanks to the Healer, but Falk had feared Eddigar would be the second.
But Eddigar was to Mother Northwind in his abilities as a Mageborn child who had just learned to illuminate a magelight was to Lord Falk. And it was from Mother Northwind that Falk had learned the other way in which a powerful soft mage could obtain the energy for her work-not from herself, but from the person she touched.
Mother Northwind could heal with a touch, and so she did. But Mother Northwind could also kill with a touch, willing a man’s heart to stop. She could alleviate pain, but she could also, without leaving a visible mark, cause pain so great that a man’s throat might be ripped to bloody shreds by his screaming.
More, Mother Northwind could get inside a man’s mind without his knowing she had violated it, and recover nuggets of information he would much rather have kept hidden: nuggets suitable for blackmail, nuggets providing evidence of treason or graft, nuggets that might betray his dearest friends to their blackest enemies.
Supposedly such magic required touch, and for that reason Falk never allowed Mother Northwind close enough to touch him. Of course, “supposedly” was not the same as assuredly. But Mother Northwind also knew that if Falk ever suspected she had been inside his mind, he would blow her into shreds of bloody meat with a flick of his hand.
In such mutual fear and respect, they had become something almost like friends.
Well, perhaps not friends, Falk amended. Coconspirators.
Twenty-five years ago, shortly after he had become Minister of Public Safety, and he and Tagaza had begun to despair of arranging the complex circumstances for bringing down the Barriers, Mother Northwind had come to him one night at the manor, presenting herself as a Commoner from Overbridge with a grievance. He had had her ushered in, and in the privacy of his office, she had revealed that she knew exactly what he wanted to do (though she had never explained how she knew), and just how impossible it seemed. And then she had offered a solution. “The King,” she said, “needs an Heir. The necessary act has appeared to be beyond his capabilities, but I have it on good authority… a Healer within the Palace… that that is about to change.
“There will be an Heir, Lord Falk. Nine months from, oh, this time next week. And he-or she-can be yours.”
“Why?” he had asked her. “Why would you help me in this?”
“Why do you care?” she had said. “Suffice it to say I want the Barrier down as much as you do. And you cannot accomplish that task without my help.”
Falk had not pressed more deeply; he dared not, with the solution to his problem delivered so neatly to his doorstep.
Nine months later, as Mother Northwind had promised, King Kravon’s wife had given birth. The baby had lived; she had died. The Royal Midwife, apparently distraught at having failed her Queen, committed suicide that same night. And a week after that, while the Mageborn were still both mourning the death of the Queen and celebrating the birth of Prince Karl, Heir Apparent to the throne of Evrenfels, Mother Northwind had brought to Falk, waiting in his manor, a squalling female bundle which he had given over into the care of a woman from the village. “Call the child Brenna,” Mother Northwind had told him. “And now let us discuss the cottage you are going to build for me.. .”
Now Falk stood inside the door of that same cottage, looking at Mother Northwind in her chair by the fire. The flames struck sharp red sparks from her eyes, bright and hard as a crow’s. “Lord Falk,” she said. “So nice to see you again. Did you have a pleasant trip from the Palace last night?”
“There’s nothing pleasant about spending most of twenty-four hours in a magecarriage,” Falk said. “But all that matters is that I am here
… although I trust I am not the first visitor from the Palace you have had today.”
Mother Northwind laughed, a hearty, fruity laugh, not at all like the thin cackle she normally affected, which better suited her carefully crafted appearance. “Indeed you are not,” she said. “Your men dropped off my other… guest… a couple of hours ago. She wasn’t nearly as lively as you, though. Dead on her feet, you might say. Charry, but not cheery.”
Lord Falk sighed. Mother Northwind had an… iconoclastic… sense of humor. “But did she have anything to say?”
Mother Northwind’s smile widened. “She did, indeed! You did well to get her into stasis so quickly. I was able to retrieve more than I expected when you first sent word.”
Falk leaned forward. “And?”
Mother Northwind tsked. “So eager,” she said. “Rushing to fulfillment is no way to please a woman.”
“ And? ” Falk repeated, putting an edge into his voice.
Mother Northwind spread her hands. “And,” she said, “she went to her death firmly convinced that she was carrying out the wishes of.. . the Master of the Unbound.
“ I am the Master of the Unbound!” Falk snarled.
Mother Northwind’s eyes widened. “Really? And you are the Minister of Public Safety. It’s a scandal!”
“ I did not give an order to attempt to assassinate the Prince. What purpose would it serve? Especially now?”
Mother Northwind shrugged. “You hardly have to convince me. But I haven’t finished telling you what I learned.”
“Go on.”
“She believed she was carrying out the wishes of the Master of the Unbound… in alliance with the Common Cause.”
That was so unexpected Falk was struck speechless for a moment. “The Unbound in alliance with Commoner rabble-rousers?” he said at last. “Who could believe that?”
“Our would-be assassin, apparently. A Commoner herself, and a-call her a foot soldier-of the Common Cause, she was acting on orders from the Cause… but had been told that the magic that made her attack possible had come from the Unbound. What she thought of that, I cannot tell. There are limits to what may be retrieved from the dead.” She smiled sweetly. “But perhaps, Lord Falk, you are not as fully in control of the Unbound as you think.”
Falk’s eyes narrowed. “You have personally vetted every member of the Unbound, have you not?”
“Every member you identified to me,” Mother Northwind said. “But there could be others you do not know of. A secret cult within a secret cult.”
Falk considered that, then shook his head. “Unlikely. Something would have come to my attention, through any of a hundred different channels.”
“And yet… someone provided this Commoner with the means to assassinate the Prince,” Mother Northwind pointed out. “Someone who wanted the Unbound blamed for it.”
“Someone who wanted to hide their own tracks,” Falk said. “Someone with their own reasons to want the Prince eliminated.”
Mother Northwind held out her hands to the fire. An enormous tabby cat that had been snoozing on the hearth stood up, stretched, and walked over to her. She rubbed its head, and even from across the room Falk could hear the animal’s purring. “And who would that be, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Falk admitted. “You say the assassin was a “foot soldier” of the Common Cause, but I do not understand why the Cause would want to kill the Prince any more than the Unbound. Even Commoners would know that would accomplish nothing, that the Keys would simply be passed on to someone else. And Karl… at Tagaza’s urging… has spent a lot of time representing the Crown in the Commons. They know him. Why risk bringing to power a King who might be less sympathetic to Commoners?” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “The only reason I can think of is the one I told Karl: that the Cause might have wanted to kill him simply as an act of terror, to show they can strike inside the Barrier. But my dungeons are already filling with those arrested in response, and they must have known that would be the response. So what did they hope to accomplish?”
“It’s a quandary,” Mother Northwind said. “I wish you luck in figuring it out.” She patted her lap, and the cat leaped up, turned itself around, and settled down happily, kneading her leg with its claws as she continued to pet it.
Falk tapped his fingers on the table. “I suppose it could be a.. . bargaining tactic,” he said slowly. “Perhaps they believe if they cause the MageLords enough pain, we will negotiate more self-rule for them.” He shook his head. “They talk about the ‘will of the people,’ as if you could choose a leader just by letting everyone have a say in the process… as if it that would not inevitably lead to chaos and anarchy, with so many conflicting interests in play.”
“Not nearly as neat and tidy as now,” Mother Northwind said, and he shot a glance at her, uncertain whether she was being sarcastic. She gazed back blandly. After a moment, he went on.
“They’re mad, but still… that could be their motivation. But why did they involve magic in their attack? And how? What mage would work with them? And why tell their assassin the Unbound were supposedly in alliance with them? Why not carry out the attempt through nonmagical means, and then claim full responsibility? As I said, Karl is often in the Commons. They could have killed him at any time.”
“All good questions, Lord Falk.”
Falk grunted. “Well, then, here’s another. Why did the attack fail? The corpse in your cellar isn’t Karl’s. The magic intended to kill him killed his would-be assassin instead.”
“Very mysterious,” Mother Northwind said. “But I do not understand the workings of hard magic as well as I do soft.” She scratched the cat behind the ears. “It is all beyond me.” The cat had suddenly had enough; it got up, stretched, and jumped onto the floor. “Oh, I almost forgot. I did… acquire… one other piece of information. A name, prominent in the girl’s mind.”
Falk sat very still. “And you ‘almost forgot’ to mention it?” he said, his voice dangerously soft.
Mother Northwind smiled, brushing cat hair from her apron. “I’m mentioning it now, aren’t I? Besides, it’s hardly a name one should be surprised to find in the mind of someone living in New Cabora.”
“Someone well-known?”
“Extremely.” Mother Northwind met his eyes. “The playwright, Davydd Verdsmitt.”
Falk felt a kind of… pleasure… at hearing that name. He had long suspected Verdsmitt of being involved with the radical side of the Cause. “Why would she be thinking of Verdsmitt at the moment of the attack?”
“Another good question, Lord Falk.”
Falk snorted. “You give me more questions than answers, Mother Northwind.”
“I am a simple country healer and midwife,” Mother Northwind said. “What answers could I possibly offer someone as highly placed and powerful as you?”
Falk let that pass. “Well, as always, I thank you for the information you have provided. I will send my men to remove your… guest… in the morning.”
“Always happy to serve,” Mother Northwind said. She smiled again. “And now, I suspect, you intend to ask my help in the matter of your unexpected visitor from beyond the Barrier.”
I shouldn’t be surprised she knows about that, Falk thought. But I wish I knew how she knew. “Yes,” he said. “I cannot simply rely on what he might freely tell me-”
“Or Brenna?”
“Or Brenna,” Falk said, again startled by Mother Northwind’s knowledge, though he let nothing of it show on his face. “I need to know… everything he knows.”
“My humble abilities are entirely at your command,” Mother Northwind said. “But as you know, Lord Falk, ‘everything’ is a very great deal indeed. I can strip his mind of all knowledge, but you know what that would do to him.”
Indeed, Lord Falk knew. Among those publically executed as members of the Unbound, to demonstrate his hatred of the cult, were the drooling, blank-eyed results of that kind of questioning.
“We need not go that far,” Falk said. “Not to start with, at least. The boy may have other uses. But whatever you can find out without harming him, I must know. In particular, how that flying device of his operates.”
Mother Northwind nodded. “I would be interested to know that myself. Very well, Lord Falk. When would you like me to call on you?”
“Let’s say… an hour after sunrise. In my study in the manor. “
“I am not an early riser, Lord Falk, but for you… I suppose I can make an exception.”
Falk stood. “Thank you,” he said. “Until the morrow, then. Good night, Mother Northwind.”
“Good night, Lord Falk.”
Falk let himself out and, deep in thought, walked back toward the manor. So the assassin had had Davydd Verdsmitt front and center in her mind… and shortly the playwright himself would be inside the Barrier, presenting his new play at the Palace. Falk needed to be there. He would have to leave on the morrow… after Mother Northwind had extracted whatever information she could from the boy from Outside, and he had decided what to do with him… and with his flying machine.
A great deal would depend on whether the machine could be made to fly again. If so, then until others could be trained in its operation-and more of the machines could be constructed-he would need the boy as a pilot. Even if the machine could not be fixed, the boy would continue to be useful as a source of information and even, possibly, a hostage once the Barrier was down.
More useful if he’s loyal to me, Falk thought. Tomorrow I’ll speak to Mother Northwind about taking care of that, too.
He turned his thoughts back to the matter of the Common Cause. Tomorrow he would magespeak Brich and find out what, if anything, his interrogators had learned from those he had ordered arrested. He needed to know the exact nature of the plot he was certain was afoot, and whether it posed any real danger to the Plan. And if he could not find out from those arrested thus far, he could certainly get the truth from Verdsmitt.
Could Verdsmitt even be the elusive “Patron”?
Maybe. At the very least he would likely be the most highly placed member of the Cause Falk had yet had the chance-or reason-to question
… and whatever Verdsmitt knew, he would tell. Falk was very good at extracting information, even without Mother Northwind’s unique talents.
He felt a surge of anger at the unknown conspirators who had chosen this moment to attack the Prince. For more than thirty years he had been preparing, ever since he had first met Tagaza at the College of Mages and learned that the Barriers could, indeed, be lowered, though it involved an extremely complex spell… and, of course, the simultaneous murders of the Ruler and Heir.
Tagaza claimed he had spent many sleepless nights when he had first discovered that fact, had claimed he had worked weeks longer looking for some other way, with no success. Despite his insistence that he felt the Barriers must fall (though Falk didn’t believe his claim that magic would fail if they did not; the SkyMage would not permit such a thing), he had told Falk over and over how much he regretted the awful necessity of that double murder. It was almost as tiresome a constant in his conversation as his harping on the topic of Commoners, and how the Mageborn had to treat them more fairly if the Kingdom were to survive.
Falk had felt no regret or horror at learning that the only way for him to obtain the power to lower the Barriers required two deaths. For him, there had been only a feeling of exaltation; the thing could be done. It would be difficult, but it could be done.
How difficult had become clearer as Tagaza had further studied the spell. The energy required was so enormous that the spell could only be performed on the very edge of the Cauldron, the vast open lake of lava that provided the energy for the Barriers. One of the two, either King or Heir, would have to be slain on its blackened shore.
Nor could it be done while the Heir was still a child, since the Keys would not transfer to an Heir who was not yet an adult, and intercepting the transfer of the Keys, in effect grabbing them away from the Heir at the very moment they attempted to leap from dying Ruler to future Ruler, was the whole point of the spell.
The logistics were almost as complicated as the spell itself. Killing the Ruler and Heir at once within the Lesser Barrier would have been a simple matter-especially when the one who wanted them dead was the Minister of Public Safety, whose duty was supposedly to protect them, and who commanded the Royal guard-but getting either to the Cauldron had seemed an insurmountable task, exacerbated by the simple fact that King Kravon, at the time Falk ascended to the King’s Council, had not yet produced any heir at all.
And then Mother Northwind had come forward and offered her invaluable help.
Falk reached the edge of the trees and began walking along the much better marked road that led to his manor. Almost two decades had passed. Brenna and Karl had both turned eighteen six months ago. No one had ever expressed doubt that Karl was both the true son of King Kravon and the Heir to the Keys. Why should they? After all, the First Mage himself had Confirmed Karl as Heir.
But, in truth, Brenna was Heir to the Keys and Karl the orphaned Commoner.
He sighed, thinking of Brenna. He was rather fond of the girl, despite having done his best to keep his distance from her over the years. He’d been amused by her determination to sneak in and see the boy, impressed by her willingness to do so against his wishes, and impressed again by how quickly she had realized Mother Northwind must be the one he had come see, even though she had no inkling of Mother Northwind’s true powers. He thought she would probably have made quite a good Queen-certainly a better Queen than her father Kravon had made a King-but, nevertheless, when the moment came, he would kill her without a qualm. It was a shame, but there was no help for it.
So she sacrifices her life for the greater glory of the Kingdom and to fulfill the will of the SkyMage, he thought. I have already sacrificed mine. He had forgone marriage, children, the many pleasures prestige and power provided for other MageLords, focusing always on the Plan, which would culminate with him becoming King: the first King of Evrenfels with the ability to lower the Barriers at will.
It was all so close, now. He had a man in place ready to kill the King. He had long made it his practice in early spring to travel to the Lake of Fire with the First Mage on an “inspection trip”-no one would remark when he did so again. This time he would take Brenna; the ward he’d have recently brought to the Palace to live permanently, to “further her education.” No one would remark on that, either.
Once there, using a magelink with his operatives in the Palace, he would order the King murdered-and at the moment of that death, Falk, with Tagaza’s help, drawing on the vast energy of the Cauldron, would strip the Keys-and her life-from Brenna, transferring the Keys to himself, and transforming those Keys to give him power over the Barriers.
With the army and Royal guard already loyal to him and his plans twenty-years matured, and now with the information he hoped to get from the boy from Outside about what awaited them on the other side of the Great Barrier, he would prepare for the moment when the Mageborn would all be Unbound, free from their self-imposed prison, and ready to take their place once again as rulers in the world Outside, as the SkyMage willed.
And he, at last, would erase the family shame-the failure of their dynasty, two generations before, when Kravon’s grandmother had received the Keys instead of Falk’s grandfather. He would be King, as he always should have been.
The vision was as clear and sharp and rainbow-hued in his mind as a crystal goblet lit by the sun, and had been for years, but the attempt on the Prince’s life had cast a shadow across it.
He stopped on a footbridge that crossed a tiny creek, its summertime burbling stilled by months of deep winter cold, and gazed down at the ice-covered rocks. If the Prince were to die, leaving the current King apparently Heirless, there would be demands for Tagaza to conduct a magical search for the new Heir. The First Mage before Tagaza had developed the spell, and its existence was unfortunately well known to the King’s Council and the rest of the Twelve. There would be no way to refuse. But such a search, if carried out fairly, would, without fail, point to Brenna, exposing all Falk’s machinations.
If it were carried out fairly. The search would of course be led by Tagaza, who would certainly not expose Falk’s-
Falk’s eyes narrowed. Or would he?
Whoever had arranged the attack on the Prince, if it had indeed been intended to disrupt the Plan, had to be someone with intimate knowledge of that Plan.
Someone like Tagaza.
Tagaza, Falk well knew, did not share the Unbound’s belief. He had always been open about his reasons for wanting the Barriers to fall, with his preposterous claim that they were eating up the Kingdom’s magic. Falk was prepared to overlook that as long as Tagaza continued to work toward their shared goal, and so far, he had.
But Tagaza also had a soft spot in his heart for the Commoners. In fact, some of the things he’d said to Falk over the years about improving the lot of Commoners could have come straight from the Common Cause’s manifesto. Falk had never believed Tagaza would actually act on those beliefs… but what if he had? What if Tagaza had arranged the assassination attempt, hoping to bring about the search that he would lead-and which he could then use to reveal Brenna as Heir, expose Falk, and halt the Plan?
It made some kind of sense, if Tagaza had finally realized that his theory of magic failing if the Barriers remained in place was the nonsense Falk had always believed it to be. If he no longer believed the Barriers had to come down, then he might very well want to prevent Falk from becoming King, knowing that King Falk would certainly never negotiate the reforms with the Commoners Tagaza supported.
He must know I would kill him for it, Falk thought. Whether I became King or not.
Unless he thinks he could be protected somehow by… the Cause?
Falk turned around and looked out over the snow-covered fields to the few flickering lights of the nearest village. Smoke rose into the starlit sky in tall, unbroken streams from a hundred chimneys.
To craft the magic that could hide an assassin in a bubble of ice on the bottom of a lake, and another that could blast the Prince to oblivion, and enchant objects so that even a Commoner could use that magic… it was the work of a master mage.
Maybe even the First Mage.
Then why did the spell fail? Falk thought, frowning-and thinking-furiously. Because it was being used by a Commoner?
Or… had Tagaza always meant the assassination to fail? He was fond of Karl… too fond, Falk had often thought. By staging the attempt on Karl’s life, and planting the Unbound symbol on the assassin, he might have been aiming to sabotage Falk’s Plan, deflect suspicion from himself, and save Brenna’s and the King’s life, all at once.
Which would also mean he had sacrificed a Commoner, but Falk didn’t believe even Tagaza would flinch at that when the stakes were so high. He might want them treated better, but he was still Mageborn, and they were just Commoners, their lack of magic bearing unimpeachable witness to their inferiority. Falk treated his own Commoners well, judging their disputes, ensuring the villages had clean water, access to Healers, farm equipment, etc. But he treated his animals well, too, and he still wouldn’t hesitate to butcher one if he needed the meat.
Fury was starting to burn in Falk’s chest like a tiny, redhot coal. He sucked in a lungful of freezing air, as if that would cool it, then let it out in an explosion of white steam. He and Tagaza had been friends and coconspirators, but lately the friendship had faded. And as for the latter…
Tagaza had crafted the spell that would transfer the Keys from Brenna at the moment of her and the King’s deaths, and transform them to give power over the Barriers. Falk could hold it perfectly in his mind, but could not use it and receive the Keys at the same time. The plan had always been for Tagaza to perform the spell. But Falk had taken the precaution of teaching it to another mage, as well, someone who could step in if something happened to Tagaza.
Which meant Tagaza was no longer necessary to the Plan, and had not been for some time.
Falk turned and walked the last few feet to the gates of his manor. A pity, he thought. But we must all live or die with the consequences of our choices. If Tagaza has betrayed me… then his choice is made.
Mother Northwind listened to the sound of Falk’s footsteps crunching away through the snow, then, chuckling, hauled herself to her feet.
So easy to manipulate, she thought. So unable to see the truth.
She shuffled into the kitchen, her knees stiff after sitting so long in her chair, and stoked the fire, then placed another log on the coals. A wheel of cloth-wrapped hard cheese lay on the lovingly polished table of golden oak, next to half a loaf of crusty bread. She took a knife from the counter and sliced two pieces of the bread, then hung them on a toasting fork, pulled the table’s sole accompanying chair close to the fire, sat down with a grunt, and held the slices over the flames.
It was true enough, as Falk believed, that she and he shared a goal: both wanted the Barrier to fall. What Falk had never known, never guessed, she suspected, for he could not imagine a Mageborn would even think of it, was that she wanted the Barrier to fall, not for the greater glory of the MageLords, but to destroy them utterly.
Staring into the fire, she saw, as she always did, another fire from long ago: the flames of a burning Minik village, as men, women, and children she had come to help were slaughtered by a MageLord and his men, and she stood helpless on the hillside.
Lord Starkind had been one of the Twelve, but not of the King’s Council. He had come north with his entourage on a hunting trip, but their prey had not been deer, moose, or bear.
He had come to hunt the Minik.
He had set up camp on the outskirts of Stony Creek, the Commoner village where Mother Northwind lived (though that had not been her name then). He had ordered the Commoners to act as forest guides for him and his drunken companions. The locals were on good terms with the Minik and did everything they could to prevent Starkind from finding them, but he soon caught on to what they were up to-and in retaliation executed the village mayor, splitting him in two from head to crotch with a blue-white blade of ice conjured from thin air. Terrified, the guides took him to the Minik village the next day.
When Starkind and his men, blood-spattered and smelling of smoke, grinning, drunk, and laughing, rode back into Stony Creek, the villagers begged him to let them flee south with him and his men. But Lord Starkind jeered at them and rode away, forbidding them to follow. They waited until he was out of sight, then began their own desperate journey south, abandoning everything but what they could carry, the men, women, and children struggling along the forest trails on foot.
By sunset that first day of their journey, none were left alive. .. except Mother Northwind, spared by the vengeful kin of the slaughtered Minik for the Healing help she had always provided them. Taken prisoner, she served the next ten years as Healer to the Black Bear Clan, and as his last action before he died, the old chief set her free. She had set out south at once.
Lord Starkind, grown too fat to ride to any kind of hunt in the ten years since the massacre, shortly thereafter went violently insane, servants rushing into his room when they heard him screaming in the middle of the night, watching in horror as he plucked out his own eyes, chewed, and swallowed them. He had eaten all the fingers off his left hand, his own cock, and was halfway through his second testicle when he finally expired.
Every one of the Mageborn who had accompanied him on his hunting trip north soon met similarly unpleasant fates.
And meanwhile, a new Healer, Mother Northwind, settled down to a quiet life in New Cabora, where she was very welcome, since so few Healers were willing to devote themselves to the care of Commoners.. . and regularly visited the city’s library, repository of the documents the Commoners had thought most important down through the centuries. Ostensibly she was researching the ailments of Commoners; in truth, she sought to learn everything she could about the Magebane, the antimagical force that had supposedly helped the Commoners defeat the MageLords of the Old Kingdom.
The toast was done. She pulled it out of the fire, cut a slice of cheese, laid it on top of one of the bread pieces, and munched contentedly. Mother Northwind’s hatred of the Mageborn had only intensified during her years in New Cabora. She had seen too many lives torn apart by the casual cruelty of the MageLords: too many abused children, pregnant teenagers, Palace servants crippled by multiple beatings, released prisoners bearing the marks of torture, though with no memory of how it had happened or what they had said to their interrogators in their distress. Even with her extraordinary skills, she could do nothing to help some of those who came to her; ease the pain of their bodies, perhaps, but not their scarred minds.
Oh, she understood perfectly why the subjects of the ancient MageLords had risen up. And she knew that the Magebane, by counteracting magic, had given them the victory. But where had the Magebane come from?
Though she found hints in the Commoners’ official library, she finally discovered the answers she sought in what she thought of as the unofficial library: books, scrolls, letters, songs, and legends, passed down within families, and above all, kept hidden from the Mageborn (for early in the Kingdom’s history all talk of the Magebane had been ruthlessly suppressed). From one crumbling scroll an old woman showed her, Mother Northwind learned that the Magebane had been the bastard offspring of a MageLord and a Commoner. From a book hidden beneath a floorboard in a grateful father’s kitchen, she learned that the Magebane had not been born, but made. Like a crow collecting shiny things, she pecked and scratched and hid away the fragmented and sometimes contradictory bits of information she uncovered, until at last she thought she could detect the shape of the truth.
The Magebane had been the creation of a great Healer named Vell, who had forced the conception of that bastard child, then molded the fetus within the womb, melding its Mageborn and Commoner halves, creating a very special whole: a man who, though he could not use magic, could counteract it-and not just counteract it, but turn it back on its source.
Vell had raised the child as his own, while secretly fomenting rebellion among the Commoners and a few renegade Mageborn. When the time at last came for open revolution, he had placed that child, then a young man, at the head of an army of Commoners, and when the MageLords contemptuously called down magical fire on the Commoners’ heads, it was they who died instead, blasted apart by their own magic.
Without magic, the Mageborn had been hopelessly outnumbered. With the myth of their invincibility so thoroughly shattered, Mageborn began to die even in places where the Magebane had never been seen. They were poisoned, arrow-shot from hiding, burned alive in their homes while they slept. From every corner of the island Kingdom, panicked Mageborn had fled to the capital of Stromencor. There the twelve surviving MageLords of the Great Council had drawn on all their knowledge and resources to find, on the far side of the world, another lode of magic to rival that of the Old Kingdom. They would use the connection between that lode and their own to magically transport themselves to what was now Evrenfels, along with the surviving Mageborn and the Commoners who were supposedly loyal to them, but were in fact, Mother Northwind believed, simply trapped.
As they had been trapped ever since, inside the Great Barrier the First Twelve had crafted to protect their fledgling kingdom from the Commoners and their cursed Magebane, who they feared would pursue them even here.
Mother Northwind knew her abilities well. What Vell had done, she could do. To understand how he had crafted the Magebane, though, she had needed access to the libraries of the Colleges of Mages and Healers, and the archives of the Palace, and so she had changed her appearance and her name and offered her services to First Healer Jimson, predecessor to Hannik, as “Healer Makala.” Jimson had tested her and, astounded by her abilities, welcomed her. For the next few years, while she tended to the complaints of the mages she secretly detested, she had also delved into ancient magical lore. She had learned a great deal that had made her own magic even stronger… and eventually, she had learned enough to be confident she could do what Vell had done.
She, too, could make a Magebane.
Mother Northwind brushed crumbs off her apron, decided not to eat the second piece of toast, and instead heaved herself to her feet, picked up the lantern from the kitchen table, and went to the door that opened onto the stairs into the basement. Holding onto the wall with one hand, the lantern in the other, she descended into the dim depths. The crate in which the body of the dead assassin had arrived leaned against one wall. The corpse itself lay on a wooden trestle table in the middle of the dirt floor. The lantern’s flickering yellow light played over the blackened, skull-grinning face, the bulging white eyes, cooked in their sockets. Falk had removed the stasis field on his arrival, and a faint odor of cooked meat, with a hint of beginning corruption, hung around the body.
The grisly sight didn’t faze Mother Northwind, who had seen much worse, some of it at her own hands. She set the lantern on the edge of the table, went to the head of the casket, then reached out and laid both hands on the corpse’s forehead. Exerting just a little of her will, she reached into the rapidly decaying brain and purged it of the fragments of memories still lingering in its tangled, crumbling pathways. She did not believe Lord Falk would have another Healer check her work, or that there would be enough left of the brain for it to matter if he did, but there was no point in taking chances; not when there was, in fact, not a hint in the dead girl’s mind that she’d even heard of the Unbound, much less thought she was following orders from it. She was Common Cause, through and through. Nor, of course, had she had a thought about Verdsmitt, whom she knew only as a playwright.
There. Mother Northwind took a deep breath as a wave of fatigue flowed over her. Once she would hardly have felt such a minor outlay of energy, but she could not deny that she was getting old.
Well, she thought, at least I’ll last long enough to see the MageLords brought low. She wiped her hands on her apron, picked up the lantern, and climbed back out of the cellar.
She regretted the death of the assassin-Jenna, she thought; the least she could do was remember the girl’s name-but there had been no other way. For two reasons, Karl had to face an attack, a potentially fatal attack involving magic. First, it was the only way she could be certain she had succeeded in creating a Magebane. If he survived the attack then, without question, the half-breed boy whose existence she had shepherded from coerced conception to birth was indeed what she hoped.
But there was a second, even more important reason. The Magebane had to face a lethal magical attack in order to become the Magebane. Only when faced with mortal peril would his power fully awaken.
She suspected Karl had had flashes of power as a child: spells going awry in his presence, enchanted objects failing to work, that sort of thing. But such things could and would be written off as coincidence, especially in an era when no one believed the first Magebane had ever existed.
Neither the Mageborn father nor the Commoner mother had ever understood why they were so consumed by lust one day in a horse barn near Berriton. Nor had they had much time to wonder at it. She had arranged for the father’s “accidental” death shortly thereafter, and watched over the mother during her pregnancy and eased her into the netherworld during the birth.
She had molded the child in the womb in the manner Vell had first perfected all those centuries ago. But to activate his power, the Magebane had to be attacked. And so she had arranged for just such an attack, through the other thing she had so carefully nurtured through the decades: the Common Cause. If the attack had succeeded, and the supposed Prince had been slain, it would have been proof of her failure, but at least it would have still been a heavy blow against the MageLords.
But the attack had failed; the magic directed against Prince Karl had rebounded on Jenna. Which meant she had succeeded: Prince Karl was a Magebane. And that meant Mother Northwind’s own great Plan was, like Falk’s, moving rapidly toward fruition.
Mother Northwind set about tidying the kitchen, though there was little enough to tidy. She’d learned of Falk’s Plan during those years she worked in the Palace, every healing laying-on-of-hands on every Mageborn allowing her a glimpse of the contents of his or her mind. Falk himself had come to her for ministrations in those days, though she had had a different name and a different face and she was certain he had never made the connection between mousy Healer Makala and herself. And that was when she realized how her Plan could be realized, under the ironic and unintended cover of his.
The Magebane, her research and her own knowledge had convinced her, could do far more than just counter the magic hurled at him: he could destroy magic entirely.
To do so, he had to be present when the Keys were transferred from Ruler to Heir. That magic, the greatest ever worked, drew from every living mage, each providing one of the threads from which the fabric of the Great Barrier was woven.
If the Magebane were there when the Keys transferred, touching the Heir at that moment, the Keys would not only fail to transfer, they would shatter. The Barrier would fall-and the magic it contained would rebound through every living Mageborn.
She didn’t think it would kill them. Not all of them. But Mother Northwind was convinced that not one of them would be able to use magic thereafter…
… except, possibly, those who practiced soft magic. Healers, who drew energy from within themselves rather than without, might-she hoped, though she could not be certain-retain their powers to help and heal the mind, if not the body. But the hard mages, those who used their powers to manipulate and destroy, would find themselves reduced to mere Commoners. And the true Commoners, led by the Common Cause, outnumbered them.
The Kingdom would fall. A new country, free of the tyranny of magic, would take its place.
Falk also wanted the Barrier to fall, Mother Northwind had learned as she eased the pain of his sprained wrist one day in the Palace. And he knew how it could be done without the Magebane, but his scheme needed an Heir to sacrifice, and the King showed no interest in producing one.
Mother Northwind also needed the Heir, not to sacrifice, but to bring into contact with the Magebane at the crucial moment. So up to a point, her agenda was compatible with Falk’s; and, of course, she’d never told him about the part that wasn’t.
From there, everything had advanced like clockwork. Trusted by the Palace, she had managed, through one of my greatest feats of magic, she thought sardonically, to temporarily turn King Kravon into enough of a man to father a child on the Queen. Shedding her guise as Makala, she had gone in her own person to Falk to offer him the Heir to raise.
Back in the Palace, she had disposed of both Queen and Royal Midwife, switched the infants, left Prince Karl, her hoped-for Magebane, in the Palace… and then Makala had disappeared forever and Mother Northwind had arrived at Falk’s manor with Brenna. He had built this cottage for her. And since then… she had waited.
Foul deeds, she freely admitted, to slay innocents… but deeds, she firmly believed, justified by the great end toward which she worked.
Now, that great end was very near. Falk also had to wait until Tagaza could confirm Brenna was the Heir, which he had done secretly during her last visit to the Palace. Now he was through waiting. He had set the spring equinox, when he would normally travel north to inspect the Cauldron with Tagaza, as the date he would attempt to seize the Kingship and control of the Barrier. That had forced her hand: she dared wait no longer to discover if Karl were a Magebane, and so, in her guise as the Patron of the Common Cause, she had sent Jenna to test the Prince.
She took a last look around the kitchen and, satisfied, picked up the lantern and moved through the sitting room toward her bedroom. A dark shape flashed through the flickering light, right across her feet, and she gasped, then laughed. “Mousebreath, you did give me a fright.”
The cat meowed and vanished into the shadows, no doubt to slip out into the night through the swinging catsized door she had made for him, to terrorize field mice in their tunnels beneath the snow.
Falk would take Brenna back to the Palace. He would arrest Davydd Verdsmitt-even if her dropping his name hadn’t been enough to arrange that, Verdsmitt’s play would certainly do the trick. With Verdsmitt, the Heir, and the Magebane all in place, only one more piece in her great game needed to be positioned: herself.
It was time for Makala to return to the Palace.
Mother Northwind blew out her lantern, undressed in the darkness, pulled a warm flannel nightgown over her head, and lay down on her bed. It was a pity, because she really liked the cottage Falk had built for her, but it couldn’t be helped.
Mother Northwind was not one to lie awake worrying about things, but she did spend a few extra moments that night thinking about the unexpected appearance of the boy from outside the Kingdom. Did he change anything?
She couldn’t see how. He was only one boy, and it was hardly a surprise that there were people on the other side of the Great Barrier, after all these years. Soon enough, the Barrier would fall and the people of Evrenfels would once more be part of that world. It didn’t much matter to her what that world was like, as long as it didn’t include MageLords or Mageborn… and she intended to make certain of that.
In any event, in the morning she’d know as much as the boy about that outside world. If any adjustments to her plan were necessary, she could decide on them then.
She closed her eyes, and within two minutes was fast asleep.
As the winter night wore away, she stirred only once, when Mousebreath returned from his nighttime perambulations, jumped onto the bed, and curled up against her, purring loudly.