Cook commandeered an upstairs maid to take Meg by way of the servants’ stairs to the king’s keep. Cook found Meg a long-sleeved apron, scrubbed her face and hands and put a cap over her hair, and the girl carried a tray of berries and cream while Meg carried a bottle of whiskey. Cook warned Meg as she wrapped her own shawl over her shoulders, she had no idea how a magiel with capricious skin and no proper livery would convince the guards she was one of the servants, nor how Meg would ever get out. King Artem and his magiel had taken quarters in the keep very close by King Larin’s.
But getting away was not top of mind; once Meg was under King Larin’s protection, the difficulty would lie in retrieving Janat and Rennika. She could not afford to entertain other possibilities.
Meg followed the girl up the back stairs, seeing but not seeing the flagstones beneath her feet. If the king would only give her refuge. The cook’s comment about him capitulating with no siege repeated in her mind despite all she could do to shove it aside. Was she walking to her own execution?
Uncle Chirles.
A guard stood back by one of the double doors but scrutinized her closely as she followed the maid into an antechamber. A desk and chair near a glass-paned window, and a narrow servant’s bed with attendant wardrobe, table, and chest, occupied the other side of the room. Tapestries covered the walls and narrowed the window, and only a few wavering candles fought back the gloom of the overcast day. A page waited at a large door opposite the double doors to the corridor.
The maid was just approaching the page to be admitted to King Larin’s private chamber when a tumult of footsteps preceded a half-dozen men spilling into the room.
King Artem, a powerfully built military man with a full mane of silver-streaked lank hair, strode in at their head, followed by a handful of guards. A tall magiel lined with age, white haired, and wearing unbleached robes scurried at the king’s heel, speaking in an insistent but restrained voice. “Sire, magiels do not require prayer stones to see the future.”
Meg and the maid, bowing, backed away swiftly, as far as they could toward the wall.
This magiel. Meg remembered. Papa had fled King Artem last summer and was replaced by a new magiel. She'd heard a rumor that Papa was dead.
Where was King Larin?
“By your reasoning we should kill all magiels.” The king stopped in the center of the room to glare at him, and the others halted as well.
What?
“Can you come up with no other solutions, Wenid? If restricting them to certain streets, certain markets isn’t enough, what about this potion you mentioned? Glim. Use that.”
“No.”
“No?”
The magiel’s voice took on an odd tone, less confident. “That is going too far. I was wrong to mention it.”
Meg couldn’t help herself. She peered up at the tableau from beneath her bowed head. Wenid. Had she heard the name before? And...glim.
“You saw the crowd’s reaction to today’s events,” the king snapped. “Killing magiels only fuels resentment. The message is lost.”
“And who rules Shangril?” Wenid’s boldness returned, and he spoke as if he addressed merely another man, not a king. “You, or the rabble?”
Shangril. All seven countries? How could—
“I’ve already decreed death to magiels of the Great Houses,” the king said. “I will not condemn every magiel in the empire.”
Empire. Meg caught her breath. Death? All magiels of the Great Houses?
The House of Amber. Mama.
Janat and Rennika. Her.
“Magiels and Holders are symbols about which the mobs rally,” Wenid persisted. “You must end their influence, once and for all.”
Artem waved his hand in dismissal. “Magiel magic is weak compared to prayer stone magic. Common village magiels are no threat.”
“Common village magiels have decided battles by breaking horses’ legs. Even trusted magiels in our own ranks have turned traitors.” Wenid took a step toward the king and lowered his voice. “And we can’t pray to the One God to intervene in every skirmish. The cost would be too great.”
Artem shot him a black look but did not step back.
“We must establish the authority of the One God.” The magiel watched the king’s face. “And the authority of the one true king. Now, and beyond question.”
“The petty nobles have no ability to mount opposition.”
“On the contrary. Magiels lead a hidden blasphemy,” the shimmering man clipped, his voice still constrained. “As long as every village has a magiel, the people will continue to go to them, at night, in secret, prayer stones or no. The Many Gods will still be worshipped.”
The king flicked his finger at the page and the boy opened the door. “I said I would bring these uprisers to heel,” he said to the magiel. “And I will. Now, leave it be, Sieur. I would meet with my sons.”
Wenid opened his mouth as if he would speak, his dark eyes boring into the king. But he grudgingly bowed his head.
The king swept into the chamber, the page following, closing the door behind.
By Kyaju, all magiels? Killed? It brought bile to the back of Meg’s throat.
But this was only Wenid’s plan. The king had not yet agreed.
The maid gave her a bewildered, frightened look.
“Leave,” one of the soldiers said to them. “The king will send his page if he requires aught.”
Yes. Leave. Now.
Meg followed the maid to the double doors.
A mailed arm extended a spear between her and the maid. “Stop.”
Meg stopped, her heart stopping as well.
The maid made good her exit, casting a quick glance of pity at Meg before she disappeared down the corridor.
“We have no magiels for servants.”
Meg felt the eyes of the guards—and the king’s magiel—on her. “I—I’m new, Sieur.” She prayed to the Many that the accent she’d worked so hard to perfect would not betray her. “In t’ kitchen.”
Wenid approached, and she lowered her head. “Explain yourself.”
The door. Only a few feet from her. With the guard blocking it. Could she use magic? Not against Wenid. Her breath fluttered in her chest and she felt faint.
That was it. What Cook said, about her being dim. She let fear flood her, poke tears to the back of her eyes and allowed her lips to tremble. “I—I—”
Wenid tilted his head back as if the curse of her dull-wittedness was contagious.
She swallowed and licked her lips. “Me Ma’s village magiel t’Big Hill,” she sniveled, looking from the magiel to the guard and back. “T’ village burnt—”
Wenid snorted. “The basement cell will suffice until I can come.” He waved a hand at the guard and went into the corridor, muttering. “And the king wants the likes of this in Shangril.”
The guard narrowed his eyes at her and she lowered her head again. “Come with me.”
She shrank back. “Please, Sieur! Ask Cook!”
There were two guards.
Artem had attacked every country in Shangril.
They manhandled her roughly into a cold and dank room in a small complex of half a dozen cells beneath the guard tower, reached down a short flight of stone steps from the bailey. Coldridge castle wasn’t big, and though rebuilding over the centuries had turned parts of it into a warren, this once–cold cellar was uncomplicated, thank the Gods, and located near the main gate. Its locks would be simple to circumvent once the castle slept. If she had that long.
Artem’s magiel would have him outlaw—kill—every magiel in Shangril. Gods, there must be thousands. Tens of thousands. More.
One guard released her, standing ready, while the other swiftly manacled her to the wall. Thereafter, they kept their distance. Clearly, they knew better than to let a magiel touch them. Even a simpleton.
Unlike lowborn magiels, Meg was a daughter of one of the Great Houses of magic wielders reaching back to the Goddess Kyaju, and she had some limited ability to throw a spell—to cast with words at a short distance, without ingredients. But, shivering with fright and regret in the cell’s manacles, she could see nothing, in the dim light filtering from the waning afternoon, to cast upon. Raising a flagstone to trip one of them would get her nowhere but a deeper dungeon.
Smash the Amber. Kill Mama. Deprive the people of their death tokens. Their access to Heaven.
Could she—did she have the stomach—to close the throat of one of them, hold it closed until he died? Open a blood vessel in his brain?
Even if she did, the other would raise the alarm. Her options fled, one after the other.
“What’s your name?” The wary one asked. The other lit a handful of candle stubs fixed to a rickety wooden table.
Dull. Common. She must appear a half-wit. She looked from one to the other and let her fright take deeper hold of her. In the dim brilliance and flickering shadows, the questioner produced a thick leather strap. “Meg!” she yelped, cringing.
“Where you from?” He slapped the leather across his gloved palm, the thwack a promise.
“Big Hill!”
“Sieur.”
“Sieur! Big Hill, Sieur!“
He slapped the leather again.
A third guard arrived, carrying a small cask, and the second grinned. “Does your thirst never end, Dunn?”
“Could be a long night.” Dunn reasoned, and even in this light, Meg could see his complexion was florid. “Could get dry.”
Ale? Or—Sulwyn said in Teshe they drank whiskey, and she’d seen how it made Sulwyn, and Janat the one time she tried it, silly and sleepy.
The Gods were with her. Something on which to cast a spell.
Meg willed the unfermented barley wort in the whiskey to find a time when it became alcohol. She cast a second, and a third spell to strengthen the brew, every minute apprehensive that one of them would become suspicious of her before the liquor had taken full effect.
But the charm worked. The tipple made the florid guard drowsy and the second stupid. It made the wary guard belligerent, and she felt the sting of his thong across her arms and thighs and face more than once before his arm weakened and he joined the others in incoherence.
By then she’d released the locks on her manacles, and when the cruel guard began to stumble, she darted from his witless attempts to grab her and out of the cell, closing—and locking—the door behind her.
Stars spangled the sky when she emerged from the dungeon.
Every magiel. Dead.
But the king hadn’t agreed. He’d argued with Wenid. Told him to use something else. Glim.
The main gate. With a colossal effort she found a moment when the portcullis was raised, and stepped through that doorway in time to her freedom.
Her escape was a confession. They would know she’d overheard. Was dangerous.
But she’d barely stumbled across the city square, its bloody platform motionless in the starlight, into a narrow lane, when the world...left her.
She sat by a campfire in the snow in watery winter daylight. She was still dirty and hungry, but she wore a warm cloak. Horses were tethered in a rude corral and rough linen tents were scattered in a thick forest. Flakes fell from a dull morning sky. Colm—the same man she’d met in Spruce Falls, but thinner now, with dark rings circling his eyes—sat across from her, and a score of other men slept, talked in hushed tones, or silently polished swords. Curious. But she was grateful: none seemed to take more notice of her, than of one another.
She opened her eyes.
Now, she was warm and lying in a soft bed beneath a velvet canopy. Mama’s room. Mama sat by her, waiting. It was the night Mama had made her do magic.
“When are you?” Mama took her hand.
“A dozen weeks...I think.” Meg wondered at the magic, yet understood her momentary window. “From when we left Archwood.”
Mama caressed her cheek. “My poor daughter. Are Janatelle and Rennikala—”
“They’re well. Alive, anyway.” She sat up and took Mama’s two forearms in her hands. “Mama, tell me—”
“I will curse this valley.” Mama nodded firmly in the dark. “If Artem takes it, I will curse it. I’ve been preparing the spells—”
Not madness! Not obsession, by the Gods! “Mama! What do I need to know? What’s glim?”
“You can release the curse I set, Meg. Only—”
And she was gone.
Lying awake in a summer field. Alone beneath a cerulean sky on grasses redolent with clover and marigolds, humming with bees. She wondered...
She’d stood so close to Wenid. He was the key, whispering in the king’s ear. Should she have killed him? Reached out with her magic and pinched a blood vessel in his heart?
Gods, too dangerous.
But did her life matter, really? If she could save the magiels. Mama. Her sisters.
Could she kill?
The thought made her feel weak. No...no.
Yet...
Killing. Power. Might taking that life, that miserable life, be good?
Gods, no! She shook the thought back and rolled onto her stomach, heaving with nothing to disgorge.