And far away, far away to the north and east on the spacious plains of Skyrra, it was as Gilrain described it: a state of open war. Horns were blowing; villages burned, sending up clouds of sparks into the night; armies of horsemen and foot soldiers met on the plains under the stars and clashed, staining the long grass with their blood. Behind a veil of smoke and flying ash, the face of the moon turned red.
Midmorning found King Ristil’s capital at Lückenbörg in an uproar. Shortly after sundown, young Prince Kivik and his kinsman Skerry had ridden through one of the gates with a war-weary troop, bearing messages from the marshals fighting in the east: they needed more men, more supplies, more healers—more of everything.
“We had thought to win this war in a matter of months, our numbers being so far superior, but there are more of them than we ever imagined,” Kivik had said when he arrived at the Heldenhof, the King’s great house, sweaty, dusty, and trembling with exhaustion, but in such a fever to deliver his news that he turned aside all offers of food and drink, and flung himself through doorways and up long wooden staircases, heedless of the guards who rushed forward to demand his business (then recognizing him, stepped back again), until he came at last, breathless and emphatic, into the King’s very presence.
Ristil signed to the guards, to his companions of the hour—his Jarls and Thanes, his trusted counselors—and they all fell silent, so that the Prince might be heard.
“Again and again we’re obliged to revise our ideas about their numbers. We won two great battles at the beginning of spring, and we thought it was practically over. Yet a fortnight later they met us with forces even greater than before. We somehow prevailed, and again we thought the war was effectively ended, until eight days ago when we learned to our cost that it wasn’t so. We kill them, and there are always more of them…. How can this be? How can the rockywastes of Eisenlonde produce such an army?”
There was a confused muttering throughout the room. That the barbarians had even been able to produce an army worthy of the name—that had come as a shock at the very beginning, when Ristil’s commanders were still expecting the usual rabble of horse thieves and raiders. But an army that grew and grew, and continued to grow beyond all reasonable bounds or expectations, that was even harder to grasp.
“Where do they come from?” asked Kivik. He shifted his shoulders, where the weight of mail and padding had become almost unendurable. Half a hundred candles burned in the room, reflected off a floor of polished dark wood, glanced off the gilding on elaborately carved beams overhead. In that clear light his dirt and dishevelment were the more obvious: a mud-spattered cloak and boots; light brown hair plastered to his forehead.
“The conclusion is inevitable: they’re not all Eisenlonders!”
There was a collective gasp, followed by a feeble stir of protest among the King’s aged counselors. They looked at Kivik askance, not even trying to conceal their dismay, their reluctance to credit a word that he said.
“Impossible,” said one, the ancient Jarl Vetr. “Eisenlonde signs no treaties, maintains no alliances. They are so isolated there at the edge of the world, such a poor nation, what benefits could they possibly offer to potential allies?”
“It may be blackest magic,” another greybeard rasped out. “The barbarians have sorcerers, shamans they call them. They create phantom armies out of the air to confuse you.”
“It’s entirely possible,” answered young Skerry, who had arrived in Kivik’s footsteps, “that there are illusions in with the rest. It seems very likely. But illusions don’t set fire to the fields, they don’t poison wells, or rape our women. You can’t capture an illusion. We have taken prisoners who were strangely garbed, who bore strange weapons, men who could not understand our questions nor we their answers.”
Vetr locked his gnarled hands around the stick that supported most of his weight when he walked. “There are so many different clans and tribes in Eisenlonde, there may be one living out at the very edge of the edge of the world, whose dialect is unknown to us.”
“We think otherwise,” said Kivik. “We think there are foreign mercenaries along with them—a great many mercenary soldiers perhaps.”
And when the entire group assembled around the King began to protest, all the old men and hoary-headed counselors, he cried out: “We don’t know, we don’t know how the Lords of Eisenlonde are able to pay them. But these men we are fighting, they aren’t like the cattle thieves who make raids across the border after a bad year. These come to destroy rather than to steal. They’ve burned villages and crops throughout the Haestfilke, set fire to our forests. They slaughter our herds, then leave them to rot. The worst of it is, they can slaughter and burn far more than they ever carried off. But what do they gain by it? If they mean to expand their territories, claim herds and farmlands to feed their people, then why this wanton destruction?”
He turned toward the King, spoke with all the force and weary desperation that was in him. “Whatever we’ve been holding back, assuming that victories would come easily, it is time to throw as many men and horses into the field as we possibly can.”
King Ristil looked to Skerry. If that generally cool-headed and admirably reasonable young man came in all haste and added his voice to the vehement protestations of the more volatile Kivik, then Ristil was doubly willing to listen.
“It’s as my cousin tells you. We need more men, at least another two thousand. Three thousand if you can find them. Meanwhile, we need to arm and fortify the Westvalle, Herzenmark, and Autland. The Eisenlonders may come that far. We may not be able to hold them. As for our people in the farms and villages to the south, they might be wise to come together and repopulate some of the old cities, which are at least defensible.” Skerry threw a corner of his tattered green cloak over his shoulder, and took a step toward the King. Where Kivik was slender, he was stocky, with that raven-black hair uncommon in the northlands. It was ruffled now like the feathers of some storm-tossed bird of ill omen.
He lowered his voice—but not so much that the others could not hear him. “It might even be wise to consider the same thing yourself, to remove the court from Lückenbörg to…Kuningskallin.”
At this, there was an even louder protest than before. The town of Lückenbörg, which is built up around the venerable old timber fortress known as the Heldenhof, is the ancient seat of the Lords of Skyrra, but thirty miles to the south lies the vast stone city of Kuningskallin, where Kings of Skyrra reigned in great splendor for nearly two hundred years. Half of that city lies in ruins, devastated by one of the immense destructive shocks that passed through the earth when the moon changed course in the sky. The King then reigning fled from Kuningskallin along with the surviving members of his court, and neither he nor any of the heirs who followed after him had ever returned.
For that city—and others like it—was raised in part by wizardry, in the days when men of the north pledged friendship with the Empire of Alluinn. Since Alluinn’s fall, the great cities of stone, and the arts which had built them, had come to be regarded as presumptuous and unchancy by the men of these northern realms—Skyrra, Arkenfell, and Mistlewald. Let those in the former Empire lands do as they would, let them try to rebuild their mighty fortified houses, let them attempt to reclaim all that had been lost or broken by the catastrophe—the Northmen returned to older ways, to ancient traditions, which suited them better. They had never, perhaps, been entirely comfortable in the cities, anyway.
“Your Majesty,” said Vetr, with a hooded glance under wrinkled eyelids, “let us decide nothing in haste. These young princes, noble and valiant as they are, have ridden far on short rest and short rations, as it is readily apparent. In a state of exhaustion, a man is inclined to paint things much blacker than they actually are. In the morning, they may offer more reasonable advice, or at least give a less incredible account of events to the east.”
Kivik flushed to the roots of his hair. He glared at them, all the old men with their long grey beards and spindle shanks, their weak eyes and withered hearts.
Men grown coward with age, he thought, grown complacent and foolish, sitting at home by their own hearths. He opened his mouth to say so, but Skerry restrained him with a look and a touch on the arm, reminding him that these were also old men who had spent too many days and weeks in the saddle when they were younger, too many long cold nights patrolling the border. Scars shone white on many of their faces; others had wounds that still ached in damp weather. Peace they wanted now, and the world as they knew it—but peace was exactly what they could not have, and the world was changing.
“If you had been where we have been, Jarl Vetr, and seen what we have seen,” Skerry said evenly, “you would not doubt the truth of anything we tell you. You would hardly think any tale we brought you too incredible.”
He bowed to the assembly, deeply, ironically. It might have meant many things, respecting their relative ranks and ages; it might have been youth bowing to experience; it might have been deepest insult. No one mistook the gesture; bloodless faces went even whiter, thin lips grew even thinner.
“We don’t doubt you. I don’t doubt you,” said Ristil peaceably. “Why should I question messages from my own marshals, carried to me by my own son? That would be incredible.” His fingers curled around the arms of his chair, and he sat for a long time with his golden head bowed, profoundly in thought.
At last he looked up. “In this matter of removing to Kuningskallin, I must consider a while longer. But if Prince Kivik tells me that more men are needed to fight in the east, then more men he must and will have. Everything he asks for will be provided. Let it be done at once.”
By an hour after sunrise, the muster had already begun, for the King’s messengers had been busy all during the night.
Men and horses from the manors and farmhouses surrounding Lückenbörg came in through both gates, followed by wagons and sledges. Pigs squealed in their pens; ducks and geese pecked at each other and flapped their wings. Every forge in the town had been fired up since midnight, the swordsmiths and armorers hard at work. Elsewhere, fletchers, bowyers, coopers, chandlers, and bootmakers plied their separate crafts; sergeants and quartermasters reckoned men and materials on tally sticks; and in the mews at the Heldenhof, the King’s falconers debated which of the remaining hawks were best suited to see immediate service as messenger birds. Young men were hunting up and polishing their fathers’ and grandfathers’ swords, as well as odd bits and pieces of antique armor that had been in the family so many generations people had stopped counting; meanwhile, their wives and sisters and mothers were shaking the dust out of banners and surcoats rich with devices lovingly embroidered over the years. It took the efforts of many to get an army on the move, well armed and well victualed.
“Three hundred men will be ready to leave with you tomorrow,” King Ristil told Kivik, when he met him walking with Sigvith the Queen in her garden, among the neat rows of pansies, marigolds, and rampion, between the beds of new vegetables.
“Five or six hundred by next week, perhaps a thousand more by the end of the month. After that, it becomes difficult, if we don’t wish to leave the south and the west undefended. But I am sending an embassy to Arkenfell and another to Mistlewald, asking that they lend us what help they can. They have troubles of their own, as I know well, but we must make them understand: if we fall, can invasion of their lands be far behind?”
“But will they believe you, will they understand the need? When we could hardly convince those of our own jarls and thanes who offered their counsel?”
Ristil clapped his son on the shoulder, a rough touch but affectionate. “It is the nature of counselors to be cautious, to temporize, just as it falls on kings and princes to be decisive, most particularly during perilous times. Halfdan and Saerid are not fools; neither do I imagine they mistake me for one. They will send us as many men as they can—let us hope that will be as many as we are going to need.” He turned and strode out of the garden, with his head high and the weight of a kingdom on his shoulders.
Kivik and the Queen exchanged a rueful, affectionate glance.
They were much alike, brown-haired and hazel-eyed, with the same fine fair skin, alike in mind, too, though she had learned to moderate her impulses, to think before she spoke, which was a hard lesson. They looked enough alike to be brother and elder sister, not mother and son. She was not, in fact, his mother, and Kivik had been a boy of seven when Sigvith married his father. But she had haunted the royal nurseries for six months before that, a mournful young creature with a tragedy in her past she could neither remember nor entirely escape, quick to apply healing poultices and kisses to bruised shins and skinned knees, or to rock a little boy in her arms when he woke in the night weeping for his dead mother. Even when Ristil made her his queen and she began to bear children of her own, the bond she had formed with her three stepsons remained strong. Yet always there remained that elusive sorrow behind her eyes.
Now she brushed her fingertips across Kivik’s face. “Dear heart,” she said, “you must make up your mind to come back, whatever happens. We have lost too much already, how could your father and I bear it if we lost you, too?”
He took her soft hand and raised it briefly to his lips, then turned on his heel and followed the King out of the garden.
When the Prince left the Heldenhof, crossing one of the wooden bridges over the stream that divided the fortress from the town, he headed for the market at the center of Lückenbörg. On a patch of open ground between the market square and the guildhall, an area generally set aside for cattle and horse trading, someone had raised a banner, the golden oak of Skyrra on a green field, and they were recruiting men there. It was Kivik’s intention to handpick a dozen riders to add to his own troop.
The houses he passed along the way—of timber, or stone, or undressed logs—were of no great size, but they gave that illusion with roofs steeply pitched to shed snow during the winter. They all had brightly painted wooden shutters, decorated with an entire menagerie of fantastical beasts, lions and camel-leopards, winged stags and unicorns, along with objects both mundane and mysterious: hearts and hawkbells, leaves and acorns, the moon and the stars, the sun in glory—clan badges and family emblems many of them, but the symbolism of others was harder to trace. The householders repainted them every third or fourth year in the exact same patterns and colors they had used before. At this season, with the paint on many of them still fresh, the figures shone out brightly: red, yellow, blue, and green.
As Kivik neared the marketplace, following a narrow, unpaved lane scarred with wagon tracks, his cousin Winloki appeared out of a side street, and fell into step beside him.
“You leave at dawn?” She sounded breathless trying to keep up with him, though she was a tall girl, with a stride nearly as long as his own. Her grey silk gown, belted with a chain of bronze links shaped like crescent moons, showed dirt about the hem; her thick red-gold hair seemed to be working loose from a long, careless braid; and it was evident to Kivik she was in a passion about something.
He nodded, one short, preoccupied jerk of his head.
A stain of crimson flooded into her cheeks; her chin came up defiantly. “I want to go with you—why not?” she asked, forestalling a protest she obviously expected. “You asked for more healers.”
Kivik stopped at the edge of the square and spun to face her. At nineteen, she was inclined to be headstrong and impervious to argument, but even he (who thought her a little spoiled) was not immune to the charm and high spirits that sooner or later won all hearts to her. He ran a hand through his hair, rifled through a hundred disorganized thoughts, searching for the right words to say.
In the end he decided he might just as well be blunt, for he had nothing to tell her that she wanted to hear. “I asked for more healers, but my father has said you’re not to be one of them. Winloki, I have a thousand things to attend to today—”
“It’s folly that the King has forbidden me to go,” she flashed back at him, not to be deterred by his other concerns, his other preoccupations. “Other women will be going—others have gone before—girls much younger than I, and less powerful for healing. Why should I alone stay behind, like some bauble made of glass wrapped up in wool for safekeeping?”
“That,” he answered, as patiently as he was able—though not without a sidelong glance at the men congregating in the field across the square, “is for the King to decide, and not for me. If it were my decision, you would certainly come. I would gladly take you, we have such need of healers.”
But as soon as the words were out, Kivik knew he had spoken amiss. He saw her lovely face radiant, the leap of hope behind her grey eyes. And much as he hated to dash that hope, it had to be done. “If you might go with the King’s blessing, not otherwise,” he said sternly. “Not otherwise, Winloki!”
An hour later, she was pleading her case to the King, in the great audience chamber with its beautiful embroidered banners and tapestries, where he listened to petitions twice every fortnight. Knowing what she meant to ask him, what was likely to follow, Ristil sent his attendants away with a motion of his hand and a nod.
“I know why you keep me here,” said Winloki, as soon as the others filed out. “You do so against the day when some unknown kinsman arrives to claim me. But Uncle, Uncle, that day may never come. There may not be anyone living who knows my real name or to whom I belong.”
She dropped to her knees on the steps below the dais, urgent, vehement, trembling with the force of her desire. “And in the meantime, what must people think of me, when their own sons and daughters go to war, while I stay here in ease and comfort?”
“They will think what they have always thought: that you are a brave heart and an ardent spirit,” he answered—not unkindly, not unmoved by her plea. “They will understand that it is your duty to me that keeps you here.”
Winloki covered her face with her hands. “And would they understand the same thing if Kivik stayed behind…or Aesa, or Sigfrid, or Arinn?” she asked, envying her cousins and her brother their masculine privilege, their uncontested right to risk all in defense of their people.
She lowered her hands, looked up at him pleadingly. “Why won’t you allow me to do the work I was born to do? Why deny me, as you would never deny your own sons, my fair share of the danger?”
“My dear child,” said the King, reaching out to touch her bright head. “My beloved niece in all but blood, there may be peril in your future, and great deeds, too. But not in Skyrra. Your Wyrd—your fate for good or ill—is in the south.”
She sat back on her heels. “You know who I am,” she said softly, wonderingly. “You know more about me than you ever told me!”
And she remembered, suddenly, the southern wizard, Aethon, who had come during the winter, asked so many questions, then, abruptly, departed. “You have reason to believe that someone is on their way to claim me even now!”
Ristil shook his head; yet he looked troubled, uncertain. “I have no way of knowing when the summons will arrive, or how it will come, only that when it does come you must be here. I have promises to keep, and you have a duty far beyond Skyrra.”
But by then she was well and truly frightened. The King might not know anything about this Aethon, his reasons for coming to Skyrra; but that part of her which sometimes gave warning of things, the mysterious intuitive gift that was somehow tied up with the secret of her birth, did know.
Winloki rose slowly to her feet, her brain awhirl with wild surmises. They were coming for her, those unknown kinsmen who haunted her dreams, they would take her away from everyone and everything she loved, claim her at a time when the need for healers grew daily more desperate.
A cold stab of fear went through her; Winloki struggled for control. She had to think and to think clearly; she would not sit and wait with folded hands for events to sweep her away. She wondered, If I’m not here, how far would they go to seek me out? Into battle? Into danger—when they were content to forget me for so many years?
She made up her mind that they could wait a little longer.
If they come to Lückenbörg looking for me, she resolved, they can stay at Lückenbörg, while I go to war.
Visits to the Jarl Marshal, to several of the elder healers, and to the Queen were no more satisfactory.
“I don’t understand what you expect me to do,” said Sigvith, looking up from the fine needlework with which she beguiled her afternoons. “Do you think the King could possibly be made to accept my judgment in place of his own?”
Winloki sighed. It was only a variation on what she had been hearing all day. Still, there was that nervous beating in her blood, that pressure around her heart urging her so insistently to be gone.
She went in search of Skerry, finally running him to earth at the stable where he kept most of his horses. Kivik, she immediately realized, had already warned him; he greeted her appearance with something less than the ardor that might be expected of a young lover.
“What is it you want of me?” Skerry asked with a wary look, as he closed the gate of the stall that housed dapple-grey Grani and stepped out into the aisle.
She drew a long breath, inhaling the dusty sweet scents of wheat straw and oats, the earthier odors that came of the horses. “A place among your riders, disguised as a man. It would work. I am tall enough, and I ride well enough.”
“Madness,” he answered, latching the gate behind him. “Utter madness. You’d be discovered at once, if not much sooner. And how would we ever explain our disobedience to the King?”
She gnawed on her lower lip, clenched her hands into fists. “You were not so ready to bow to tyranny three years ago when we exchanged tokens!”
“We were children then, selfish and heedless. What we mistook for your uncle’s tyranny was merely his kindness…and his very good common sense! I hope that we’re wiser now.”
Winloki felt the world close in on her, a lump rise in her throat. Sensing her agitation, the horses grew restless in their stalls: grey stallion Grani, gentle mare Gisl, chestnut Arvak and his half brother Bavor, stamping their heavy hooves and whickering in protest. As they sensed her anger, Winloki knew their distress.
“Do you regret it, then, that secret pact we made between us?” she asked, stiffly, angrily, feeling betrayed where she had placed the most trust. “Do you wish we had waited for the King’s consent?”
“Do I regret pledging myself to you? No,” Skerry said emphatically. He reached out to lay a placating hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it away. “But this that you ask of me now—I can’t and won’t!”
She wanted to cry out: And what becomes of us if they take me away? Where is our pledge then? But that was the one argument she was too proud to use against him. She could only look at him, bewildered and angry. “I never took you for a coward, Skerry.”
Another man might have taken offense, but he knew her temper of old. He knew how it flared up suddenly and passed almost as quickly—that she did not hold grudges or take petty vengeance—but while the mood was on her there was simply no reasoning with her. He did not even attempt it; he merely folded her hands between both of his and turned on her a deep, clear glance.
There they stood for several long minutes: Skerry patient, silent, waiting her out; Winloki seething, and nursing her anger. She knew when she was being managed. In truth, they knew each other far too well, she often thought. This time she was determined not to yield to his wordless influence.
She snatched her hands away with a violent motion and turned her back on him. “If you have any respect for me at all—” she began.
“No,” said Skerry, gently but forcefully. “I do love you, Winloki, but I won’t go against the King in this, scold how you will.”
And so, after all, she was forced to take matters into her own hands. With a plan but half-formed in her mind, Winloki headed for the Healers’ Hall.
It was a large house three stories high, of split logs on a stone foundation, with runes of great virtue carved above the door. There as elsewhere, the activity was frantic: simples being brewed, herbs being ground up in mortars or dried in ovens, powders and compounds and salves sealed up in glass bottles or earthenware jars with blots of red wax, then packed away in chests to be transported in the morning.
She felt a brief twinge of guilt as she slipped past the stillroom, knowing that she ought to be in there helping. It was because she was expected to be with the healers that she had been able to move so freely all day, without her usual flock of attendants.
I have other business that is even more vital, she reminded herself, as she climbed two flights of narrow wooden stairs to the top of the house
In one of the dormitory bedchambers under the eaves, Winloki found Aija, the youngest healer, nervously packing for her journey on the morrow. “So you, too, are going. Every healer in the hall but the old, old women—and me!”
“There will be a need for healers here as well.” Aija looked up from rummaging through a clothes chest at the foot of her bed, where she had been sorting through woolen stockings, linen shifts, and bright woven hair ribbons. “Children will be sick. Women will deliver babies—”
“And there will be nursemaids and midwives to attend them,” Winloki finished for her, sitting down on a bench by an open dormer window, where the late-afternoon sun came through in a golden bar.
It was a long room, bright and airy, with five low wooden beds lined up in a row, a chest at the foot of each bed, and a beautifully carved clothespress of solid oak opposite the window. But Aija had it all to herself now; the other healers who used to sleep there had left with the army months ago.
“What use am I here,” asked Winloki bitterly, “making charms for colicky infants and hysterical mothers, when men are dying—men I might save?”
Aija found the thing she had been so desperately looking for: a little triskele amulet carved of ivory on a thin leather cord. She slipped it on over her head. “You could have my place in one of the wagons for all of me,” she muttered. “I’d trade places with you a thousand times over.”
But then—glancing up to see her companion glowing, triumphant—she cried out, “No, no, I didn’t mean that. Besides, my lady, you know that we can’t. They would never allow it.”
On Winloki’s face, the bright look died. “Yes, I know,” she said, with uncharacteristic meekness, as she left her seat on the bench and began to help the other girl pack up her things. “But it’s very hard luck for the colicky infants. You were always much better with them than I was.”
“Bad luck all around,” said Aija. Her breath came quickly, and she seemed close to tears. But when the princess commented on her agitation, she passed it off with a wave of her hand. “It’s just excitement, that is all that it is.”
In the evening, Winloki sent a message to her servants at the Heldenhof, telling them that she meant to spend the next few days working with the healers. No one would be surprised, no one would think anything amiss if she did not come back to her rooms during all of that time. There was work in plenty to be done in the Healers’ Hall, and after the coming morning very few hands to do it.
Then she went into the stillroom, knelt by the hearth, where the coals were still red, and stirred up the fire.
That was a pleasant room, fragrant with the herbs that hung drying from the ceiling, cluttered but still orderly, even after the recent spate of activity. As the flames rose, there was dazzle of light off of bottles on the shelves, crystal and alabaster and dark green glass; off jars of salt-glazed clay, and off boxes of cedarwood, ebony, and brass. There, too, were piles of brittle old papers or parchments bound together by cords or string, antique scrolls stored upright in brown jars, codices bound in crumbling leather: compendiums of herb lore and spells for healing, learned treatises writ down in Niadhélen—all of the books and most of the writing that remained in Lückenbörg. Books were a part of that discredited past abandoned along with the cities. Very few people could read anymore and fewer write—only the healers, the King and his family, and a handful of officers in Ristil’s army who sent messages back and forth, laboriously inscribed.
But Winloki had no need to consult those tattered old volumes. She knew what she had to do, and she had to work swiftly, lest anyone come in to ask awkward questions. She moved quickly around the room, gathering up the things she would need, trying not to drop or break anything in her haste.
Returning to the hearth, she heated milk in a pannikin over the fire. When it was warm, she poured it very carefully into a beaten copper cup with a wooden handle. With shaking hands, she took a small staghorn flask off one of the shelves, unstoppered it, and let three drops of a clear amber liquid fall, turning the milk a deep buttercup-yellow and scenting the air with honey and spring flowers.
“To help you rest—you’ll be calmer and stronger tomorrow, if you can sleep tonight,” she said a short while later, standing by Aija’s bed with the cup in one hand and her heart rattling against her ribs, wondering if such a transparent device could possibly succeed.
She thought she might compel Aija’s cooperation if the younger girl balked, her will being so much stronger—only that was a magic she had never tried, to enforce her desire on the mind of another. It was also a line she was reluctant to cross.
But Aija was caught up in her own fears, her own dread of the night still ahead, and of all the days and nights to follow. She accepted the potion with a grateful look. “I’m to rise before dawn,” she said, sniffing at the cup. “If I were to oversleep, to have trouble waking—”
“I measured it out with the greatest care. But if you would like—” Winloki pretended that the suggestion had suddenly occurred to her. “If you would like, I will sit by your bed, stay with you until the rest of the house wakes, make certain that nothing goes wrong.”
Aija lifted the cup and swallowed the potion in three short gulps. “You are kind, Princess. I don’t know how to thank you.”
Taking back the cup, Winloki put it down on the chest at the foot of the bed. She reached out to take the other girl’s hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “As to that,” she said, with the faintest blush, “I am doing no more than I ought. Rest now, my friend, and fear nothing.”
Already, Aija was growing drowsy; it seemed she could hardly hold her eyelids up, they had grown so heavy. She yawned, sat down on the bed. Without undressing, she laid her head down on the coarse woolen blankets and was almost immediately asleep. Winloki watched the hectic flush fade from her face, then bent down and loosened her laces and removed her shoes, that she might rest more comfortably.
True to her word, the princess remained by her friend’s bedside for many hours. But when the other healers in the house began to stir just before dawn, she did not wake Aija. Instead, she lit a stub of wax candle and stood over the bed, watching the other girl’s slow, steady breathing. She had indeed measured the potion most carefully. Aija was certain to sleep all through the day and into the night, nor was anyone likely to disturb her in this great empty house.
Moving swiftly by candlelight, Winloki bound up her red-gold hair and pinned it in place. She donned Aija’s cloak of plain brown wool, pulled the hood well forward. Then she took light from the candle into her hands and deftly shaped it into a mask to cover her face and blur her features. It would serve only so long as no one looked at her too closely or too steadily.
It was the simplest of spells: something she had been forced to teach herself as a child, finding no worthy teachers among the runestone readers and healers of Skyrra. She had employed it then to escape from nursemaids and servants, to slip out of the Heldenhof unattended, but never recently, thinking herself too old to play tricks on her attendants, accounting it a subterfuge unworthy of a princess.
But this was different. I am stronger than Aija, she reminded herself, and more fit for the work.
Picking up the bundle at the foot of the bed, Winloki extinguished the candle with a thought and went downstairs in the other girl’s place. But she paused on the threshold under the lintel inscribed with the runes, before going out to the yard where wagons were waiting.
She glanced up at the sky, sniffed at the wind, gathering omens. The stars were already fading, they told her nothing. But a breeze from the east smelled heavy with moisture, and if that was not precisely an omen, at least it was a very good thing. It would be foggy before the sun was well up, and the mist was an ally that would help to conceal her. She could hardly have arranged things better herself.