The constellation of Ranuat’s seven murderers westered in a paling pre-dawn sky. A hint of wind skimming across the snow crust bore the scent of glacier. Sulwyn peed by a tree, a steaming hole in the snow. He buttoned his pants and, gazing up the valley toward the ghostly peaks, crunched back toward the group of yak hide tents. He was thirsty. A dipperful of ice water before breakfast would be welcome.
Eight weeks, they’d been on this campaign. His passion to broker a place for the wisdom of men at the kings’ councils, and to do so, peacefully had failed. Artem had betrayed them. Beorn...Beorn had been a good man, and the soldier had died on Artem’s spike. The soldier’s death had sealed the uprisers’ resolve, but now they talked of war. Sulwyn had wanted nothing more than to return to Wildbrook, then, to Janat, and leave such bitterness behind. Heal. Live. Let others carry on the work of freeing Shangril’s people.
And yet, returning to Janat had gone wrong, too.
Janat’d been unhappy for some time. Sulwyn knew that. He’d intended to stay with her and make things right, but the distance between them had grown too great. Uncharacteristically, she'd left.
Hunt as he might, he could find no trace of her. At first, Meg took this news with angry denial, grilling him about his search and launching out to undertake her own. He accompanied her. But once realization that Janat was gone—actually gone—crept home, there was no reason, for either of them, to stay in Wildbrook. Meg had a commitment to Dwyn, and Sulwyn, too, was drawn back into the conflict.
They’d followed Dwyn from battle to battle, harrying Artem’s troops, directing rebellions, recruiting men, refining Orville’s steam machines, working out a plan to end what had become a civil war, but the glamour was gone. Cold and mud and death was all there was.
And for his hurt and guilt, there was whiskey.
Snow crystals crunched unevenly under his limp now as Sulwyn followed the path along the ridge. A movement, black against the gray of the valley, caught his eye.
In a gap in the trees, Meg, swathed in thin furs and silhouetted against the growing dawn, gazed out over the snow-filled Orumon valley. She turned at his footsteps. “Sulwyn.”
She was not beautiful the way Janat was, but she had grown, under Dwyn’s trust, into a confident, intense young woman. Sulwyn nodded his respect. Since they’d rejoined Dwyn’s camp, he’d tried to keep his distance from her. He should get back to camp.
“Four thousand of King Artem’s men.” She indicated the valley.
Her words arrested his steps.
“But only two hundred, up on the shoulder where King Artem camps below the city gates.” She turned back to her study of the siege’s defenses. “Our spies are good.”
“Fearghus is in charge of this campaign.” Dwyn’s guard, promoted now to his right-hand man. Dwyn had ridden, light and swift with only a handful of men, to Big Hill just north of Coldridge, to meet with a delegation of Teshe uprisers.
Her voice became edged. “How can he not see how vulnerable the king is?”
“You were at the council last night.” Had she even slept? Or had she stayed up all night on a waft of Heartspeed, thinking? To be fair, he’d seen Meg try to voice her objections—good ones—at the council, only to be shut down. Fearghus was old-fashioned, and she was a woman. Without Dwyn at the council to listen, her words fell on deaf ears. Finn, Orville—even Colm—had not opposed Fearghus’s plan.
“Harry their flanks in the lower valley? Nothing more?” she asked derisively. “If Dwyn does not express a certain course of action to take, Fearghus only repeats the same tactics over and over.”
He had a headache from last night’s beer and no stomach to rehash the arguments. “We don’t have the manpower, training, or weapons to confront them, army to army.”
“We need to attack the heart of their power. The king.”
“We attack from safety, then melt into the woods. Deplete their ranks and lose as few of our own as possible.” He wasn’t sure why he was defending Fearghus. “Draw Artem’s attention and resources from the siege.”
“Flies about a horse’s head.” She snorted. “How many battles have you and Fearghus and the others fought? On and on and on, this civil war limps. A year! Artem’s beheaded or imprisoned every aristocrat or magiel who’s threatened to oppose him—any man who would lead us. He’s cut off our head. We must do the same to him. Can’t Fearghus see? Our assassins killed King Larin.”
Despite himself, Sulwyn crunched through the snow to where she stood at the edge of the ridge and looked up the valley. “It’s a fine idea, Meg. But Larin is not Artem.”
“No.” She drew her threadbare furs more tightly around her throat and he was conscious of their closeness. “The Many Gods won’t permit Archwood to fall as long as the Amber remains in my mother’s hand. We go in while the king is absorbed by his hopeless siege.”
“Can you imagine the complexity of such a strike?”
She grasped his hand with hers in supplication. “Listen! I’ve lain awake. I’ve gone through the contingencies. The king’s not in a fortress. He’s in a flimsy pavilion, or at best, a stone house. No city wall. No castle wall.”
He tried to pull back, her touch too warm, too inviting.
Her grip tightened. “I can deliver a curse under the dark of night. Especially if our men draw attention in the valley. I’ve climbed these hills.”
A stealthy strike. “You didn’t say all of that last night.”
“Fearghus wouldn’t hear me. Listen, Sulwyn. I could—”
“No. Not you. You’re a Falkyn, for the sake of the Many!” He disengaged her hold.
“Fearghus has to let me use my magic for more than a curse on a horse’s legs or a cloud of confusion in battle, instead of hiding me back here in the woods!”
“—which makes you too valuable to risk.” Sulwyn could not lose her, as well as Janat. “Act as though you understand your importance.”
She snapped her jaw closed. “The king thinks my sisters and I are trapped in Archwood. His men wouldn’t be looking for me.”
“He’s not sure. Your sister was seen.”
“That was over a year ago, and unconfirmed.”
“If we have no royal spies in our own camps!” Sometimes, Sulwyn wanted to wring her neck. Sometimes...“We can’t risk Artem becoming certain. Now, pretend you’ve heard and understood that.”
She breathed contempt from her nostrils.
“I know your tricks, Meg. You take decisions into your own hands. I’m saying, don’t do it this time. You took an oath to follow Dwyn. That means following his captains.”
“You agree with Fearghus?” Her whisper was incredulous. She looked away in exasperation.
“Come on.” He had to get out of her presence. “I’ll start the fire. Sun’ll be up soon.”
However, her idea was good enough for Sulwyn to run it past Colm.
“You don’t have to deliver the curse,” Colm told Meg. “Have Sulwyn deliver it.” Colm shoveled gruel into his mouth. “I don’t see how Fearghus can object to that.”
“Sulwyn?” That wasn’t the response she wanted.
“Sure. He’s too lame to fight.”
Sulwyn pushed the stump he sat on back from the smoke that wafted his way from the fire. “Meaning, I’m expendable. You should talk.” He nodded at Colm’s arm—workable, but not strong enough for a sword.
Colm shrugged. “We’re all expendable. Except our magiel.” He pointed his biscuit at Meg.
“I have to be the one to go,” Meg argued. “There are spell words.”
“Teach him.” Colm pushed a shank of hair out of his eyes and kept eating. “You infuse your curses with magiel magic when you create them, don’t you? Not at the time they’re used.”
It was true. And she paid for her use of magiel magic at the time of creating the spell, too, which meant she could use them later without fear of suddenly finding herself in another fragment of her life. But— “Sulwyn couldn’t get close enough,” she insisted. She wanted to do something, not hide in the woods. “He’d have to administer the curse to the king directly.”
“And you could?” Colm washed his breakfast down from a steaming cup.
She pressed her lips closed, frustrated.
“Your skin is erratic,” Colm said. “Not only is it impossible for you to blend in, there are no women in those camps. You’d be spotted before you got ten feet inside their perimeter.” He waved his cup at Sulwyn. “Send him. He can say he’s a—I don’t know. Messenger.”
“They’d watch for spies.” Sulwyn touched the death token in the band at his neck.
He was right. Talking his way into the king’s tent would be next to impossible.
“Yes. But this siege has been going on for over a year. They won’t be as vigilant as they should. That’s one of the strengths of Meg’s plan. We harry them, pick off a few soldiers, drive them back, and steal a uniform from the battlefield.” Colm filled his bowl with gruel from the pot by the fire. “There. Messenger.”
“King Artem uses his bastard son, Uther Tangel, as his messenger—and for personal communication, his only messenger.” Meg shook her head. “Sulwyn can’t impersonate the boy, and if he poses as another messenger, he’d have to pass the potion on to Uther. He couldn’t deliver it directly to the king.”
“All right,” Colm said slowly, considering. “But with a uniform, Sulwyn could at least get into the camp.” He turned to Sulwyn. “You know the high-born accent already. You used it for the merchant trade. What other duties could bring a man in uniform into the king’s presence?”
“Servants,” Meg said. “If we can steal a soldier’s uniform, maybe we can steal a servant’s livery.”
“Good,” Colm said. “That idea, at least, could work.”
Sulwyn cradled a cup of water in his lap. “We don’t often recover the bodies of servants on the battlefield.”
“Livery can be the mission of one of our harrying raids.” Gods. They could do this.
Sulwyn tilted his head thoughtfully. “Appearance is important, but I won’t get far without knowing the protocols.”
Meg nodded sharply with decision. “I can teach you royal protocols, and I can create a subtle spell that will only kill the king over days or weeks. So you have time to escape.”
“Talk to Fearghus.” Colm wiped the last of his porridge from his plate with a crust and put it in his mouth.
Meg had discovered that curses often exacted more of her than other spells; a curse that killed, especially so. She knew of none that left no trace, though perhaps some existed—she hadn’t been practicing long enough to know any. And a curse that showed no effects for a period of days or weeks...each requirement added to the complexity of her work. This, on top of finding ingredients in winter, far from an apothecary or even a trade center, and with limited celestial alignments. For days, she wracked her brain, visiting and revisiting her same dozen death spells, delayed magic spells, and concealment spells simple enough for a worldling to administer. But she’d boasted to Fearghus that she could do this. And Sulwyn’s safety depended on her.
In the end, she’d had to rely more deeply on magiel magic than her combination of spells would normally have warranted, reaching through time to find the day her dried spider web had been fresh, to find the drops of bat venom that had been collected under Sashcarnala’s single star, to age the owl tears gathered under a noonday sun to increase their potency. She had to hold all the strands in balance and combine them in a far future when Kyaju’s Arrow and the wandering star of the Blue Orum were aligned on either side of the One God’s star.
She had done it.
Then crawled into the sleeping furs in her tent, dreading the payment.
Morning. Bright sunlight streamed through a glassed window, and the air was soft with summer heat. Meg knew this room. King Ean’s castle in Archwood. Oh, Gods, she was home.
“When are you?” Mama’s voice was sharp.
Meg turned her head. Mama sat on a couch beside her, holding her hands.
She was clean and dressed in a brocade robe, dainty shoes pinching her toes. The room smelled of sweet summer air and far away she caught a whiff of roasting meat.
The day Mama had called her to her room, and given her a spell to perform. A week before she and her sisters had fled the castle, running for their lives. She saw for the first time Mama’s worried frown and hollow eyes. Her mother’s strain. Oh, what a different world Meg had lived in. Blind.
“Meg. We only have few moments.”
“When—”
“When are you?”
She snapped to attention. “The equinox will be in twelve weeks. I know to go to the tarn.”
Mama’s eyes closed briefly in relief. “Good.” Mama gripped her hands. “You will meet a prince there.”
This would change everything. “How can you know—”
“Nothing is certain, but I have—will have—” A look of confusion flicked across her face. “I have put the pieces in place. The importance of this is far greater than you can know, Meg. Do not be the link in this chain that fails.”
Time could snap any instant. “I won’t, Mama. But—”
Mama took her hands. “Train Rennika. I bore her to have the most power. She might—she might—even have the ability to reach the seventh Heaven, the Heaven of the Ruby and the One God. I pray she will.”
“Rennika?” Shock rippled through her. “I thought—”
“Any of the three of you can use the Amber. If Rennika can’t do it, do it yourself or call on Janat, but go beyond the sixth level. Do you understand? You must go all the way to the seventh Heaven. Pray to the One, not to Kyaju. You must—”
Wind slammed into the tent, shaking it.
Meg sat up in the dark, her heart thumping as if she’d just run a great distance, sweating beneath her woollen cloak. She was back in the uprisers’ camp.
One discontinuity? Only one?
Rennika...
Mama had found a prince...
Huwen? No. Huwen was training at his father’s side, doing everything he could to destroy Orumon. To destroy magiels. To destroy the prayer stones. He would never bring her the Amber.
Eamon?
She knew little or nothing about the king’s second son. He was a recluse, and had been ever since he’d almost died, just before King Artem began his mad attack on his neighbors. Meg could not believe he would find his way to a hidden lake in some distant hinterland, a mere twelve weeks from now.
That left Jace. What did she know of him? He was younger than her, Rennika’s age. Meg had only seen him a few times and paid little attention. He’d run around after his older brothers, stick in hand, brandishing it like a sword. So, he would be about twelve now. Again, how would he get away from Holderford to come to Coldridge without a retinue? Perhaps, Mama meant one of the deposed kings? They were dead or in hiding, except Dwyn Gramaret.
But King Gramaret was no prince, and hadn’t been, when the war began.
And Rennika. Mama had borne her, gifted her with the most power. This fact held no surprise for Meg. Mama had gifted their youngest sister with stable skin, and she could easily disguise herself among the worldlings. Mama had foreseen a day when the beautiful complexion of a magiel would become a liability.
Rennika.