Chapter 32

More magic than Rasim had ever felt a single person use surged through Desimi, and a wall of water slammed upward through the marble floor.

Chunks of stone broke and slid on it like a wet avalanche. Smaller shards flew high and rained back down, making the water deadly. The throne room audience screamed and scattered, running for the doors. Roscord flew backward, slammed across the width of the room by a forceful bolt that Desimi channeled with immense confidence. A second, narrower bolt of water crashed into Taishm's chest and shoved him halfway back to his throne, putting him well out of danger.

Desimi collapsed. Rasim caught some of his weight, and Kisia slid around them to help get Desimi to the floor gently. She put her fingers at his throat, then snapped her gaze to Rasim. "He's alive. Go!"

For a bewildering instant Rasim still didn't know what had happened, much less where he should go. Then he followed the trail of wet destruction to the room's far side. Roscord was gone already, not defeated, just running through a door nearby. Lorens, the Northern prince, was already after him, his own sword drawn and long legs eating the distance. Taishm, abandoned by both his counselors, stood where he was, purely astonished.

Rasim was running before he was fully upright, fingertips scrabbling for purchase on the wet floor. The marble was cold, wet, slippery under his bare feet: dangerous. Rasim reached for magic, shoving water away to make a clear path and drying his feet with witchery as well. He slipped once, but then had his feet under him. He was half a room's length behind Lorens when the Northern prince reached the door. Rasim raced into the next room, then, following wet footsteps, into the room beyond, and came to a shocked stop.

Roscord lay in a pool of his own blood with Lorens kneeling over him.

Lorens looked up, icy calculation in his blue eyes. That slid away in an instant, leaving regret and horror so profound Rasim doubted what he'd seen in the first place. "I had to," Lorens said grimly. "We'll get no answers from him now, but he was a master swordsman. I had no choice."

Rasim nodded frantically, a tiny scared action that had no thought behind it. He wanted to believe Lorens. He had loathed and feared Roscord, and he liked the yellow-haired Northern prince very much. But cold trickled through his chest, then lodged in his belly, growing larger by the moment.

Roscord had no weapon in hand. His sword wasn't even within sight, and Rasim had the faintest recollection of seeing it against the throne room wall, probably dropped when Desimi smashed him. And one of Roscord's hands was sliced open like he'd thrust out his hands to stop a knife and had failed. His expression, too, was one of wide-eyed shock, as if he'd never anticipated the blow that took his life.

Lorens took in Rasim's expression, and, without speaking, crawled beneath a nearby table. He emerged with a long knife in his free hand. It was unbloodied, but clearly deadly. "I kicked it away," he said quietly. "You don't trust me anymore, do you?"

Sick exhaustion rose in Rasim's stomach. "I'm sorry. It's been a bad day. Are you all right? What are you doing here? Why are the Northern ships barricading the harbor if you're here? What have you told the king?"

"I stowed away on Derek's ship," Lorens said cheerfully, though his humor faded quickly. "When I realized he was working with Roscord I thought I should go along with the story. I hoped if I seemed to be one of them, some of the other conspirators might betray themselves to me."

"You almost let Guildmaster Isidri die for that!"

The Northman's blue eyes became icy. "This may be war, Rasim. There are casualties in war. One guildmaster is nothing to the safety of a city."

Rasim's stomach lurched with sickness again. He could see Lorens's point, though he didn't like it at all. Lorens waited a moment, then got to his feet and offered a cautious hand of friendship. "I'm glad to see you, Rasim. I thought you were dead, in that moment."

Still uncertain, Rasim took Lorens's hand. "I thought so too. Desimi saved me. I can't believe he saved me. The whole idea was to get Roscord to do something stupid, but..."

But Rasim hadn't really thought about what it would be like for the island warlord to actually attack him in cold blood. He hadn't thought about how to survive that, and he knew that without Desimi's help, he wouldn't have. "I have to go see if he's all right. He used way too much magic."

"He'll recover." Taishm spoke from the doorway, startling Rasim. He came in, dry and tidy despite Desimi's deluge. Water witchery, Rasim thought: any water witch could at least dry himself, and the king seemed to have more power than he was generally believed to. He went to Roscord's body, crouching beside him in silence before finally asking, "What did you suspect him of, Rasim? Why did he strike rather than let you speak?"

There was no one else in the room. Only a king, a prince, and a journeyman, and the prince already knew Rasim's suspicions. Rasim slumped against the same table Roscord's knife had been under, and spoke mostly to his own feet. "I didn't have any kind of proof it was Roscord, your majesty. It's just that the fire last month didn't look like an accident. We were afraid if it wasn't, then neither was the Great Fire. And if it wasn't, then maybe Queen Annaken had had been murdered, not died accidentally, and...Guildmaster Isidri thought we needed support from outside if we were going to find out. The Northmen seemed like good allies. She was their princess too, after all."

Taishm's eyebrows quirked upward a little. "And you now think Roscord may have been the mastermind?"

Rasim shook his head. "I don't know, your majesty, except why else would he have tried to kill me? He fought hard to gain power in the islands. Maybe he was even more ambitious than that. The Northmen have been under attack, too. Their water supplies are being poisoned by witchery. If Roscord has been behind all of this, he's..."

"Thorough," Lorens supplied dryly. Both Rasim and Taishm made sounds in their throats. Not quite laughter, but a sort of raw humor regardless. Lorens half smiled, then stepped forward. "Your majesty, I haven't been entirely forthcoming with you. It became clear to me on my journey here that my captain was in league with Roscord. I allowed them to continue their charade, even to the point of encouraging you to dismantle the Seamasters' Guild, in hopes of exposing more of their brethren. We have offered an alliance to the Seamasters, but it's not represented by those ships out there. They're a faction we're eager to rid ourselves of."

Taishm's expression grew increasingly grim as Lorens spoke. "You ought to have included me in your plotting, Prince Lorens. Arson and murder aren't new thoughts to any of us. Your guildmaster should have come to me."

"Your majesty," Rasim said in a small, painful voice, "I'm sorry, your majesty, but you stood to gain from arson and murder."

Taishm went very still. His voice was strange when he spoke. "Is that what my people think of me? That I would murder my cousin's wife and child, and hope grief poisoned him to his grave, so that I could have the throne?"

"No!" Embarrassment brought scalding tears to Rasim's eyes. "No, your majesty, it's just that once I started thinking about who could gain from murder, there were so many possibilities, and you were one of them. That's why we thought we needed to go to the north. We thought they would have spies here who might be able to tell us something. Only it all went...wrong." He gestured at Roscord's body, then rubbed his hand over his eyes. "And the Northern ships out there in the harbor have magic, and—oh, goddess, the ships! Isidri! We have to—!"

He was running before he'd finished the thought, much less the sentence. Running back the way he'd come, only this time with a king and a prince in his wake. They tore back through the throne room, stragglers from the crowd gaping and clearing the way.

Kisia, unchained now, still knelt beside Desimi, who was half-conscious. She watched Rasim race by, and over the pounding of his own footsteps he heard her say, "Get up, Desimi. We don't want to miss this."

It was astonishing how much easier it was to run out of the palace with a king in tow than it had been to run into it. A dozen steps outside the doors, Rasim knew already that his half-considered fears were right: the air was freezing, as cold as it had been in the north, and the harbor's blue was all wrong, icy and cold.

A vast weight of magic rolled in from the Northern ships. Rasim remembered Masira's belief that they controlled cold and heat the same way Ilyaran witches might control air or water, and was convinced. The Northerners were freezing the harbor, icing the air, killing crops and fish with their magic. There would be nothing to feed the city, and it would be weakened for years to come. Roscord's ambitions had known no end.

Rasim stumbled, looking back over his shoulder as he ran. There, and there, within the palace windows: light glinting brilliantly, but away from the setting sun. More than one person in Roscord's pay was signaling to the Northern ships, ordering them to act. Rasim had known it in his gut from the moment he had seen the Northern ships: they had only waited on a signal to tear the city apart. The Ilyaran fleet had backed down, not providing the excuse, but the chaos within the palace had been more than enough.

The king, Rasim thought with cold certainty, had been meant to end up dead. Desimi had saved not only Rasim, but also Taishm. That should be heroics enough for a lifetime.

A flare of magic dragged Rasim's attention back to the harbor. He staggered to a stop, astonished at the view. He could see the entire slope of the city from the palace grounds, all of it lit red and gold as evening came on. The whole curve of the docks and harbor lay below them, easily visible.

A single woman stood on the docks, a point of warmth against the cold. Guildmaster Isidri, her hands uplifted and magic stronger than even Desimi had used pouring out of her.

In front of her, the sea melted. Crystal blue came back into the water, its white sheen fading. It crept forward inches at a time, one woman fighting against the strength of five ships.

Someone else joined her, someone broad-shouldered but female. Masira, Rasim guessed, and with Masira came others. All the disgraced guild members, from apprentices to shipwrights and seamasters, all of them who had been left in the city and who had hidden near the guildhalls to protect their home. They all came to join Isidri, and the weight of their magic grew greater yet. Now the ice melted feet and yards at a time, crackling and snapping as it ran back toward the Northern ships.

"Come on," someone whispered, and Rasim discovered Kisia and Desimi at his side. "Come on," Kisia whispered again. "The harbor life will die if they don't win, and fast. Ilyara will be destroyed. Come on!" she cried aloud, tears running down her face. "Come on, Isidri!"

Taishm stepped up to Rasim's other side, glancing beyond Rasim at Kisia. He nodded once, seeming to accept or understand something, and then his voice cracked and rumbled, louder than thunder. Rasim staggered with its weight, at the domination of sky magic allowing a single man's words to be heard across the breadth of Ilyara: "Seamasters, fight!"