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In Konradstadt, at the last postrider station, Moira finally had to make a decision about her route. She chose to go northeast into Cruedrua, rather than going around through Myrcia. On a map, this appeared to be the shorter of the two possible routes. It essentially followed a straight line, whereas the Myrcian route was like traveling around three sides of a square. But no good roads crossed the southwestern end of the Cruedruan Plateau, and so the difference in travel time was not so great as it might have seemed.
What made up her mind was the thought that the hillichmagnar assassins working for the Sigors were more likely to find her in Myrcia than if she was out in the trackless wilderness. She had no idea who might have volunteered for such work, but Moira didn’t fancy getting into a magysk battle. She had seen what magy could do during the Loshadnarodski War and when she and Faustinus had tracked down and killed Daryna Olekovna. There were hundreds of combat spells, and many of them offered spectacularly dreadful ways to die.
Riding alone, in the saddle sixteen or eighteen hours a day, Moira had plenty of time to think. Sometimes she thought about the assassins, or what she would say when she met the Gramirens. But mostly she found herself thinking about Hamon. She missed him, and often at night, she would dream about him, doing things to her that in real life she hadn’t even tried to teach him yet. Things like advanced, acrobatic positions and acts of baroque obscenity that she only knew because Faustinus had introduced her to them.
When awake, though, her thoughts were much less pleasant. She had no doubt about it now—she was falling for the former monk. So, she couldn’t help feeling guilty that she had used him, and was in fact still using him, for the sake of the Empire and for her soon-to-be-ex-husband. She had managed to tell Hamon that she and Faustinus had once been lovers, but for some reason she hadn’t mentioned that they were, technically, still man and wife.
She ought to have told him immediately, and now, after weeks had gone by, it would be far more awkward to mention. He would be angry with her. He would suspect that she had concealed this fact from him in order to more easily draw him into the banking scheme that she and Faustinus had concocted together. And he would be entirely right in thinking so.
“How is it that I’ve become such an awful, manipulative person?” she wondered.
But she knew the answer. She had learned that the same way she had learned to enjoy the most perverted sorts of sex: at the feet (and other lower extremities) of a master.
“In the future,” she decided, “I will be more careful about that. And I will tell Hamon everything when I get home.”
Late one morning, along the banks of the Corlewinn Afon, the major Cruedruan tributary of the River Lebenfluss, she suddenly felt a light throbbing in her jaw, and she knew there was magy nearby. She tried half a dozen different detection spells, of varying intensity, but the feeling faded away as quickly as it had come.
She tried to reassure herself that it had been a false alarm; many places in the world had latent background magy. Perhaps this was one of them.
But then the next day she felt the spell again briefly. And yet again that afternoon. And by nighttime, the slight pressure in her jaw was almost constant. She spotted a small sparrow hawk circling high above, and she realized the spell was radiating from the bird.
Hillichmagnars could use animals to carry spells. At Diernemynster, everyone learned how to use birds to send messages. But they could be used as spies, too. She had done it herself, and she had seen Faustinus do it hundreds of times. There was no doubt in her mind—this bird was being used by some hillichmagnar to follow her. She tried a series of detection spells again, but she couldn’t feel anyone nearby. They could be concealing their magy from her, though. She tried to call the bird down with a spell, but it resisted. Not wanting to take any chances, she sent up a quick cutting spell and sliced the poor creature in two. It was a merciful death, but she felt bad about it, anyway.
As it turned out, she need not have bothered. The next morning another little hawk started following her, and even though she tried covering herself with a concealment spell, the bird continued to turn up, with increasing frequency, as the day wore on. The fact that this new bird appeared more often seemed ominous to Moira. It probably meant that whoever had sent the birds was getting closer.
She was riding through a stark and forbidding landscape, rocky hills and little winding canyons, all dusted with snow and ice. Almost no trees grew here, and the few that did were stunted and twisted by the wind into odd, claw-like shapes. Higher hills and massive, snow-capped mountains loomed in the distance. Moira had an uncomfortable sense of how completely exposed she was whenever she reached high ground, and an unnerving feeling of being surrounded whenever she rode down into a valley. There was no cover at all, anywhere, and she had to camp in the open that night.
Despite her best efforts to stay awake and alert, she fell asleep sometime in the early hours of the morning, and she only woke when a surge of magy washed over her, making her teeth ache. She tried to scramble to her feet, but before she could get out of her bedroll, a pressure spell knocked her down and a cutting spell tore her little tent into ribbons. Her attempt at a protection charm was blocked by two powerful termination spells—two at once. So, she was trapped, and she was outnumbered, as well.
“Fuck it all to the Void,” she thought.
Straining every muscle, she managed to move, despite the pressure spell, and pull a knife from her saddlebags. But another spell shattered the little blade and dissolved it into a gray mist.
“Who are you?” she croaked, barely able to speak with the pressure on her chest.
“If you stop resisting,” came a high female voice, “then we’ll stop hurting you.”
She lay still, and sure enough, the pressure spell lifted.
Moira turned to see a pair of women walking down a nearby hill. Both were wrapped in heavy furs and thick riding trousers, but both of them were still very slim. The one in front looked Sahasran. She had black hair and dark eyes. The other woman had pale skin and hazel, almond-shaped eyes and dark hair pulled back from her high forehead. She was rather pretty, even with the angry set to her jaw.
Glowering down at Moira, the pale woman asked, “Is Faustinus following you?”
“Um...no.” She could have lied and pretended she had reinforcements nearby, but if they had birds up spying for them, the woman probably already knew the answer to her own question.
“So you came by yourself, Moira Darrow,” said the Sahasran woman. “I would normally say that was unwise, but since we’re talking of Servius Faustinus, you are probably better off without him.”
Moira started to get to her feet, but the pale woman put out a hand and pushed her back down, gently but firmly. “We will be leaving in a few minutes, but first some questions. Where are you going?”
“I’m sorry,” said Moira, “but you obviously have me at a disadvantage. How do you know my name? I’ve never seen either of you before.”
“We were never at Diernemynster at the same time,” said the Sahasran woman. “My name is Shyama Kanti. This,” she pointed at her companion, “is Tatiana Zielenska. I suspect you know our names, at least.”
Moira shivered. She certainly knew the names. Shyama Kanti had been the teacher and mentor of Daryna Olekovna, the Loshadnarodski hillichmagnar whom Moira and Faustinus had killed. And Tatiana had been Faustinus’s first great love.
“What do you want with me?” she asked.
“We suspected one of you, either you or...him, would eventually come east,” said Tatiana. “We’ve been following you since Konradstadt. You’re going to meet the pretender, Broderick Gramiren, aren’t you?”
“No,” said Moira. She told them that she was in Cruedrua helping to set up a new postrider system for the new bank she and Faustinus were starting.
“Yes, one hears rumors of this new bank,” said Shyama. “You seem to have secured some kind of mysterious Myrcian funding right after the Gramirens left Myrcia with their stolen treasure. I don’t know what you and Faustinus are up to, but you must know where the Gramirens are hiding.”
“Where are they?” demanded Tatiana. “You seem to be riding to Terminium. Are they there?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Moira.
She braced herself for some sort of torture, or at least a severe beating, but though Shyama and Tatiana were clearly annoyed with her, they seemed reluctant to hurt her. They seemed unusually solicitous of her comfort, considering they were assassins now, but Moira wasn’t complaining.
By mid-morning, after making every kind of appeal and threat they could think of, they seemed to accept that Moira wasn’t going to tell them anything.
“Very well,” said Shyama, throwing up her hands with exasperation. “Stay loyal to that pig if you want to.”
Tatiana held out a hand to help Moira to her feet. Warily, Moira accepted the hand up, but then Tatiana’s other hand swung around. There was a quick flash of bright metal and a soft “click,” and Moira felt a bracelet snap shut round her wrist.
She knew precisely what it was—a limiter. The Sahasrans had used one on Faustinus during the war. It confined her magy to her body, so she could not perform any spells. Just in case, she tried a detection spell, but it didn’t work.
“Sorry about that,” said Tatiana with a cold smile. “If you won’t talk to us, we’ll take you somewhere you will have to talk.”
They tied her to her saddle, and they all rode off to the southeast at a much faster pace than Moira had been riding so far. Nearly at a gallop, in fact. The horses foamed and gasped, but Shyama used spells to keep them going. The afternoon passed, and high mountains loomed closer, ahead and to their right.
“They’re taking me to the Styrung Pass,” she thought. “They’re taking me to Myrcia.”
Were they taking her to Wealdan Castle? To a dungeon where the Sigors would torture her until she revealed where Broderick was? With the limiter on her arm, she was defenseless. They could hurt her in all sorts of nasty ways, and there was nothing she could do about it. They wouldn’t even need magy.
Moira tried to think of something she could say to convince the Sigors that she was on their side. Surely they remembered how she had helped them over the years, didn’t they? She had sent Lily Serrana to protect them when Broderick the elder seized the throne. Her Emissariae had spied for them, had even saved their lives. During King Edwin’s invasion, she had sent Lily and Callista to ensure the safety of his little sister, Alice, and Alice’s best friend, Jennifer Stansted. She had given Robert Tynsdale, Edwin’s best assassin, a magysk ring that helped him kill Broderick the elder, for Finster’s sake.
Even before all that, before she had run off with Faustinus, she had been popular at court. She had been a favorite of Edwin’s mother, Queen Rohesia, and his older sister, Princess Elwyn. But Elwyn had left her family and now lived outside Albus Magnus with her husband. And there was no telling if Rohesia still cared about what she owed to Moira and Faustinus and all their agents.
Rohesia might bear a grudge, in fact, for some of the things that had happened in between the various acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. Lily had slept with Elwyn. Rossana had slept with Edwin. Callista had slept with both of them. From a certain point of view, it might seem as if Moira and her Emissariae had done more harm than good where the Sigor family was concerned.
And now the crown, book, and sword were missing. If Shyama and Tatiana could make the connection between the disappearance of the Gramiren treasure and creation of the Verrus Bank, then the Sigors could, too. All those years of friendship might mean nothing if Queen Rohesia and her son decided not to take a generous view of the situation. Moira could be charged with treason, now that she thought of it. She was a Myrcian subject by birth, after all.
Hours after nightfall, they reached the top of the pass. A small village nestled there, with a little fort marking the Myrcian border. At a corral outside a wretched, foul-smelling tavern, Shyama paid for new horses. All three of the beasts they had been riding fell over the moment the spell sustaining them lifted, and Moira suspected they would not last the night.
Snow started falling as they headed down the pass, and in places the road was slick with ice and treacherous, but Shyama and Tatiana refused to slacken their pace. At one point, high above a half-frozen stream, Moira’s horse lost its footing, and as she teetered on the edge, facing down into the dark abyss, it looked as if she and the poor animal were about to fall to their deaths. But Tatiana turned in her saddle and shouted a levitation spell, stopping them in mid-air and hauling them back over the edge. In seconds, Moira and the horse were safely back on the path, and they all carried on as if nothing had happened.
Hours later, they reached the bottom of the pass, where they changed horses at another Myrcian fort. It might have been close to dawn, but the snow was coming down so thick now that everything still looked gloomy and dark. Tatiana used a spell to call over a dove that had taken refuge from the storm under the eaves of the fort’s stable, and then sent it off into the howling wind.
“We need to let them know you’re coming,” she told Moira.
Surprisingly, instead of continuing south from the fort, in the direction of Formacaster, they made a sharp left turn, to the east, following an old, snow-covered road along the southern foothills of the grim Sothebeorg range.
“Oh, Earstien,” thought Moira. “I know where they’re taking me.” And it was much, much worse than going to Wealdan Castle. She was going to Diernemynster.
The snow stopped soon afterward, though the wind still howled down at them from the mountains. Even so, the sky slowly brightened, and after another hour or so, the clouds began to part, and Moira could see the sun, straight ahead.
At last, they reached a tiny valley, a mere notch in the towering wall of stone to their left, where a little stream called the Ledrith flowed down. They turned here and rode up, following the stream, and rounded a bend to find themselves at a snowy meadow, dotted here and there with little frozen pools and ponds. Ahead, the valley rose steeply, and a well-tended road followed it up.
A solitary figure waited for them in the meadow, swaddled in a massive robe and sitting in the lee of a miserable-looking horse for some minimal shelter from the wind. As they approached, the figure stood and threw back its hood, revealing a short, sturdy, weathered woman with braided gray hair that still showed, here and there, streaks of its former blonde color.
“Oh, shit. Of course,” sighed Moira under her breath.
It was Astrid of Haydon, right hand of the Freagast, and the woman who had decreed Moira’s banishment from Diernemynster for the crime of killing Daryna.
“Prefect Countess Moira Lepida Faustina,” Astrid said. “You return sooner than I ever expected. But forgive me, have you gone back to calling yourself Moira Darrow? I cannot say I was surprised to learn that you were divorcing that...man.”
“I’m touched by your concern,” said Moira.
“My only concern,” said Astrid, “is what you might know about the whereabouts of Broderick Gramiren the younger and the treasures he stole from Wealdan Castle. I have long since given up hope of seeing any remorse from you for what you have done.”
She waved a hand around the valley and muttered a long, complicated incantation. Even with the limiter on, Moira could still feel the magysk barrier lifting—a barrier that would have prevented her from passing this point on the road up to Diernemynster. Moira had never been sure whether the banishment spells would have killed her if she tried to go up there, or if they would simply have stopped her in her tracks. She hadn’t ever intended to find out, one way or another. But now, here she was.
“I appreciate you coming down to do that personally, Astrid,” said Moira. She kept her voice steady, but she hadn’t been this scared since the war.
The older hillichmagnar gave her a nasty grin. “I would say that we will do our best to make you comfortable. But I think you know that would be a lie.”