At malanëos, the hour of utter darkness, the Princess died. From one moment to the next she simply stopped breathing; the white face on the pillow went utterly still.
Yet the death of any great wizard before his or her time is no small event. It shatters the pattern of cause and effect, it alters the flow of time and sends shock after shock through the world of matter, subtly changing all things so they can never again be what they were before. The three wizards standing vigil at Nimenoë’s bedside felt her passing as a disturbance in the air, a voiceless wind that swept through the chamber, circled the room a dozen times, and then escaped through one of the arrow-slit windows. Over their heads, right under the rugged roof beams, a series of discordant notes split the air like a jangling of harp strings as Nimenoë’s bindings broke, one after the other.
But other magicians, in far-distant places, experienced her death, too. In the High King’s great house at Pentheirie, the wizard Elidûc felt the marble floor buckling and sliding beneath his feet, as if in an earthquake. At the Scholia on Leal, spells that warded the college fragmented in rainbow bursts of color, startling apprentices, journeymen, and Masters alike. In the underground realm of Nederhemlichreisch, a Dwarf alchemist watched the gold he had spent seven years transmuting change back into base metal; and in the groves of a fairy queen, far to the south, all the swallows and starlings she had raised to speak prophecy, as one bird gave a single heartrending shriek, then fell silent forever. Spaewives on Erios, runestone readers on Skyrra, astrologers in Nephuar and Mirizandi, half a world away, paused in the midst of their divinations, dazed, uncertain.
In Apharos on Phaôrax, two priests of the Devouring Moon saw the sacred fire on their altar go out as they performed their abominable rites. A violent pulse of energy passed through the entire temple edifice, rattling the carven doors, causing hundreds of brass oil lamps to swing on their chains, but the foundations held. And in her palace across the city, the Empress Ouriána, self-proclaimed goddess, was shocked out of sleep and into the knowledge that her twin sister was dead. She rolled out of bed and sprang to her feet, sweating and shivering. She had not expected this; the aniffath was more than a decade old, and Nimenoë’s death had been no part of her intention.
Moving lightly in her white silk bedgown, she stepped into a pool of wan moonlight, shook back her long, auburn hair, and sent her thoughts questing across the miles, searching for answers: Why and how? But everywhere there was chaos, confusion. Magic mirrors cracked, stone circles danced, enchanted sleepers woke momentarily, looked around them with bewildered eyes, then slid back into slumber.
Running barefoot across cold tiles, Ouriána left her bedchamber, surprising the two sleepy guards keeping watch by her door when she erupted into the corridor. With a Word, she lit a dozen torches in ornate iron sconces along one wall; with another, she roused every slave and servant in the palace. They all came running: with wine, with embroidered slippers, with velvet robes and fur-lined mantles to stop her convulsive shivering. She scarcely noticed. Her mind still reeled with questions, and the answers were nowhere to be found.
But in the tower of Cuirglaes, a thick cloak of silence enveloped the upstairs bedchamber, heavy with portent. Stationed at the foot of the high oak bedstead where the body of the Princess rested, Faolein waited. Beside him, Curóide waited, his fair broad face and his light blue eyes intent, watchful. To their left, Éireamhóine stood alert, anxious, listening. For this was the moment, as the soul takes flight, when inspiration descends on those who watch; when prophecies blossom in the mind like rare, brilliant flowers unfurling their petals and revelation strikes like lightning from a clear sky.
Nothing happened. The thoughts of the three wizards remained dark, unenlightened. With a sigh and a small impatient gesture, Éireamhóine brought Faolein and Curóide back to the present. Making the sign of the Seven Fates over the body, he began to chant an eirias, a prayer to the Light, and the others joined in.
While the wizards chanted, a pale wraith in an earth-colored gown crept into the room and stationed herself across from Éireamhóine. Bending to impress a final kiss on one colorless long-fingered hand, Sindérian dropped bitter tears on the clay-cold flesh, on the linen bedsheets.
As the last mournful phrase trembled in the air, there rose, as if in counterpoint, a high, tuneless wailing from the motherless infant.
“Sindérian,” said Faolein gently, “look to your foster sister. She has need of you.”
The child nodded, scrubbed at her eyes with one rough woolen sleeve, and turned away from the bed. Crossing to the wicker basket where the swaddled infant lay whimpering, she bent down, lifted the baby in her thin, wiry arms, and cradled it competently against her narrow chest. Her father could not repress a faint smile at her obvious expertise.
Éireamhóine’s voice spoke in his mind: The infant is in deadly danger. We must reset the wards around the tower. And even then—
Together, the two Master Wizards wove a spell of binding and blinding; they cast a charm of silence, so that no word thought or spoken within those walls of stacked stone could be carried on the wind or travel the ley lines under the earth to be detected by their enemy.
Éireamhóine knelt by the bed and took the Princess’s hand in his for the last time. A wide ivory band that she wore as a thumb-ring passed from her hand to his. He held it in his palm for a moment, then closed his fingers around the ring and rose to his feet. Leaving Rionnagh and the two midwives to wash and prepare the body for burial, the men slipped quietly out of the room and took the steep circular stone staircase down to the ground floor. Sindérian and the now peaceful infant followed close behind them.
Once downstairs, Faolein threw open the door and stood on the threshold under the weathered lintel, scanning the heavens for portents. They were not long in coming. A comet streaked across the sky, trailing glory. To his wizard’s sight, the very firmament seemed to reel, planets and constellations invisible to ordinary eyes to dance madly. Nydra the dragon rose in the east, a red star shining in his forehead like a jewel; across the sky, Qwilidan the watchman passed over the western horizon, swinging his starry lantern. Thaga the bat, Brüac the badger spun in place, and the swan plucked at her breast until feathers flew across the sky and the heavens ran crimson with blood. If the signs had been ambiguous when Faolein looked for them before, they were dangerously obvious now.
He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him, and half turned. Curóide had joined him at the door. Peering over Faolein’s shoulder, the younger wizard watched the giddy revolution of the stars. “It’s no wonder the Princess was so fatally weary. She must have deranged the whole course of nature to keep her secret all these months.”
Faolein nodded, stepped back inside the room, and Éireamhóine took his place under the lintel. “A tremendous effort to conceal the truth from any astrologer able to read a message in the stars—how much greater an effort to deceive the woman who commands the Dragonstones, the Talir en Nydra.”
He sat down again on the three-legged stool he had used earlier, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “But what Ouriána did not know before, she surely knows now. Her sister has just given birth to a prodigy, a child of prophecy. Can anyone question what she will do next?”
“There is no doubt at all,” said Éireamhóine, gazing into the night. “Even now, across the miles, Ouriána will be plotting the infant’s death.”
A distant rumor of men and horses announced the coming of the High King. Éireamhóine’s message, sent arrowing through the night on wings of starlight to Elidûc at the palace, shortly after sunset, had alerted King Réodan to Nimenoë’s peril. Assembling a troop of trusted warriors to serve as his escort, he had traveled at great speed, changing horses often, and arrived at Cuirglaes much sooner than anyone expected to see him.
Riding into the village on a damp predawn wind, Réodan and his men clattered up the street and dismounted outside the tower.
The battered oak door flew open; Curóide appeared on the threshold, bowing low before the King. Réodan left orders for his men to walk and water the horses, then followed the wizard inside.
He entered the building in a swirl of sky-blue cloak, a tall, vigorous man, though no longer young, broad-shouldered and tawny-haired. His gaze swept the room, taking in everything at once: the disordered furnishings and smoldering fire; the stumps of yellow candles, standing in pools of melted wax; a scattering of broken crusts and empty wine cups—all evidence of a long night’s vigil.
One glance at the weary, grief-stricken faces of the three wizards, and Réodan’s first question was answered before he spoke it aloud. “She is gone, then?”
Éireamhóine bowed his head.
“And her child?”
“A princess, Lord King,” said Faolein, indicating with a gesture the bench in the wall, where a sleepy Sindérian sat rocking the baby.
Réodan crossed the floor with a jingling of spurs and the faint ching, ching of chain mail against plate armor. There was not much of the infant to be seen: just a tiny wrinkled face and a fuzz of pale reddish hair, inside a nest of wool and linen and squirrel-skin blankets. But the light eyes blinked at him; the tiny mouth moved, soundlessly, and that was enough to reassure him.
“I will take her back to Pentheirie with me,” he said heavily.
He felt a sudden constriction in his throat; for a moment, his sight blurred. He was only just beginning to comprehend Nimenoë’s loss. They had been allies more than friends, distant cousins raised side by side but never playfellows—for even as a child her gifts had set her apart—yet for as long as he could remember he had relied on her strength. It was, he realized now, the rock on which his own granite determination and stubborn will had been built. And had it never occurred to him—not once, in all his long years—that the woman who had remained beautiful, vital, ageless, while streaks of silver appeared in his own hair and beard, and his eyesight dimmed, could possibly die before him, could leave him as he was now, so terribly and shockingly bereft?
“The daughter of the woman who warded this island for so many years, who fought our battles against the Dark, deserves all that we have to give,” said Réodan, turning abruptly to face the other men. “She will live in the Great House with me, share the same nurses and tutors as my own grandchildren.”
There was a faint stir of protest from the wizards. “But can you keep her safe?” asked Faolein. “Among the hundreds who live at the palace, the hundreds more who visit there every day, it would take but one traitor, one act of betrayal, to endanger her life.”
For a moment, indignation flared in Réodan’s heavy-lidded hazel eyes. Stripping off his soft leather gloves and thrusting them into his belt, his hard swordsman’s hands clenched and unclenched. “What would you have me do? If she will not be safe in my house, then where can she be safe at all?”
“In utter anonymity,” said Curóide, “and as far from any place where Ouriána will be looking for her as it is possible to take her.”
There was a tense, waiting silence in the room while Réodan considered the wizard’s words. Faolein trimmed the candles, which were beginning to smoke; Curóide knelt by the hearth in his sage-green robe and mended the fire; Éireamhóine stood quietly with his arms crossed and his hands inside his dusky purple sleeves, watching the King with his night-dark eyes.
Very softly, under her breath, Sindérian began to sing to the baby, a lullaby in the Old Tongue, the language of magic:
Shenana, beichlin
Shenana, beich ilthanen
Shenana, beich-sin
Shenanar uiléthani sillüer.
At last Réodan spoke. “You have already discussed this, the three of you. You have reached a decision without me.”
“Any decision must be yours, Lord King,” said Éireamhóine, shaking his head. “With your permission, I will take the infant to some distant part of the world and raise her there in secret. No one will know where I am headed; I’ll send no word when I arrive. But when she is old enough, when she has grown strong enough and wise enough to claim whatever power is in her, I will bring her back to you here on Thäerie, to fulfill her destiny.”
There was a murmur of approbation and assent from the other wizards. Still, Réodan hesitated. “Even from me you intend to keep your destination a secret? Even from these, your fellow wizards?”
Faolein took a step in his direction, made a half bow of deference. “Lord King,” he said, “we have warded this tower: ringed it round with powerful runes and spells. What we say here remains private among us. But we none of us live our entire lives in warded rooms. One slip, one careless speech could prove fatal to the little princess’s chances.” He made a weary gesture. “It will be far better for her if we all remain ignorant.”
Réodan began to pace the floor, causing the candles to flicker, the coarse wall hangings to stir faintly as he passed. Three times he circled the room, then stopped and whirled around to face the wizards. “Be it so, then. Take the infant, Éireamhóine, but if you’re unable to keep her safe—” He passed a hand over his eyes. “What am I saying? If you can’t protect her, then no one can.”
“And yet your fears are reasonable,” answered Éireamhóine, reaching out to touch him lightly. Some of the wizard’s serenity, his calm acceptance of the world in all its troublesome complexity, seemed to flow into Réodan with that touch, though his words were far from reassuring. “It may be there is no place of safety for this child, not in all the world. I will do what I can…but it may not be enough.”
“We are forgetting something,” Curóide said quietly. “Protect her he may, but Éireamhóine can hardly care for an infant himself. It requires a woman: a wet nurse.”
There followed several moments of baffled silence, as the four men wrestled with this intractable fact.
“I suppose,” said Réodan, his broad forehead creased in thought, “there is no other way to provide for her nourishment?”
“No way that lends itself to a difficult and possibly dangerous journey,” answered Faolein. “Moreover, a man and a woman traveling with a newborn child will be far less conspicuous than the man and the infant alone.”
In the end, they decided to send for Rionnagh. Knowing her to be devoted to the Princess, the King confided the plan to her, presented their dilemma. She listened patiently, standing with her hands clasped in front of her, her head tilted to one side. But there was a faint curl to her lips, a look of cool amusement in her grey eyes, and Faolein had an idea she had recognized the problem long before Réodan explained it.
When he had finished, she shook her head, as though wondering at the opacity of the male mind. “You would need a wet nurse in any case. There is a girl in the village who gave birth to a stillborn child seven days ago. According to one of the midwives, she still has milk.”
Réodan frowned, as though doubting so easy a solution could possibly exist. “There would be more required of her than just suckling the young princess. She must abandon her home and all her family, undertake a perilous journey into foreign lands. I wonder if she would even understand—”
“Luenil is no simple village maiden,” said Rionnagh, with a small, tight smile. “She arrived in Cuirglaes only six weeks ago, a young widow with a tragic past. I think she would be willing to begin her life over again in a far country. I suggest that you speak to her, Lord King, Master Wizards. I think you’ll find she is exactly what you need.”
“Whatever we decide,” said Faolein, “it must be soon.”