PRINCE ESTEBAN WAS waiting at Averil’s door in the morning. She would hardly call him the answer to her prayer, but he was all too welcome a distraction.
He was alone; no one else waited with him. “I sent them away,” he said.
“How enterprising of you,” said Averil.
He bowed to her irony. “There is a hunt,” he said, “in the Golden Wood, now that the rain has blown away.”
That caught her interest, but it would not be wise to let him see that. “A hunt? Indeed? Would that be the whole court or a judicious fraction thereof?”
“That would be for my lady to judge,” said Esteban. “Will you ride with us?”
Averil swallowed a yawn. She had roused before the sun, little enough refreshed after a night of sleeping like the dead. As the morning brightened, so had she, but she still felt heavy and slow.
A hunt would get her blood flowing. It might gratify her curiosity, too, as to what had driven Esteban to play the messenger.
“What do we hunt, then?” she asked. “Birds? Deer? Boar?”
“Lady,” he answered, “in the Golden Wood, we hunt our heart’s desire.”
Averil stared at him until he caught his breath and looked away. He knew better than to play courtiers’ games with her. She left him to wait while she dressed and armed herself for a hunt.
IN THE PLAINEST riding skirts that her maids would allow, with a bow fit for hunting deer—or men—and a quiver full of gold-fletched arrows, Averil rode out with Jennet and half a dozen guards and the prince from Moresca. The hunt was still gathering in the great court of the palace, a milling mob of huntsmen and courtiers, servants and hangers-on, with hounds baying and falcons screeching and a pair of stallions clashing in battle.
It was a fine fair morning, washed clean by the rain. A good portion of the court seemed to have decided that it would be a splendid day for a hunt. Any beast or bird that hung about to be chased by such a crowd deserved to find itself in a cookpot.
A handful of young men in more sensible hunting garb than the rest came to greet Esteban and bow to Averil. Most of them had Morescan faces and accents; one or two spoke with the lilt of Proensa.
“Shall we?” one of them asked as the mob showed no sign of departing before the morning was past.
Esteban slanted a glance at Averil. “My lady?”
All of these men but Esteban were strangers; but she had her guards and her maid. When she glanced at Jennet, the dark woman frowned, but she shrugged. She was not going to speak against it.
Averil inclined her head in assent. Esteban’s quick smile rewarded her.
They left the rest of the court to do as it pleased, claimed their horses and mounted and rode out of the court. The gate Esteban chose led through a maze of gardens to another, slightly larger gate and the bank of the river.
Esteban had a talent for finding hidden or little-used but convenient paths of escape. This one opened on a wide and well-kept but deserted road that ran beneath the palace walls to one of the twelve bridges of Lutèce: one for each of the twelve Paladins. The bridge they crossed was called Longinus for the First Paladin, which was rather apt. Averil was his descendant.
Past Longinus’ bridge they rode through fields stripped of the harvest, then turned toward a distant shimmer. The Golden Wood had lost some of its glory in the storm; its floor was strewn with gold but its canopy was still pale golden, with the silver trunks of the beeches holding up the roof.
In these glades and along these forest tracks, only the king and his favorites were permitted to go. A commoner caught poaching the deer here not only lost his life but saw his wife and children hanged as well.
That was the king’s right; the land was his, and whatever he chose to do with it, he could do. But Averil had been raised in another philosophy. She had not thought past preventing the king from rousing the Serpent; but if that could be done and Lys still survived, she could change the laws. She would make this world in a different image.
Those were dangerous thoughts in the world as it was, with serpent magic winding through it in unexpected places. She made herself focus on the slant of sunlight through the golden halls, and the turn of the track as they rode deeper into the Wood.
One of Esteban’s allies proved to be a huntsman of some skill. He found the spoor of a deer: a stag of no mean size, he said.
If Averil slanted her gaze just so, she could see where the beast had gone. The memory of his passing was written in the air as much as in the mould of leaves that rustled underfoot. The spread of his antlers was broad: branches were broken and trunks of trees scarred where he had polished the tines of his weaponry.
The men were keen to hunt him down. Averil lagged somewhat. The morning was glorious, cool and clear. She breathed deep of the sweet clean air and let her horse choose its own pace.
Her guards and her maid hung back with her. Esteban’s allies pounded off on the track of the stag. Averil was not surprised that he forbore to follow. He had not struck her as a man who lived for that kind of chase.
She had never ridden in the Wood before, but she knew where she was. It was a peculiar sensation, as if these tracks were as much a part of her as the whorls of her fingertips.
The last time she had felt this sense of the land had been in her own Quitaine. There was no wild magic here, no wildfolk flitting in and out of shadows or peering at her from the branches. Magic of the orders was too strong in this place for those airy spirits.
And yet the land remembered them. This grove had stood before the orders came, even before the Serpent fell. None of the trees that she saw was so ancient, but the heart of the Wood had been beating since the world was new.
Averil had hardly expected to find such a place in the very center of Lys. But then the Serpent’s magic should have been long gone and buried deep, yet the king had not only found it, he had learned how to wield it. This country had more secrets than the orders of mages had been willing to acknowledge.
The hunting of the stag had slipped from Averil’s mind. What she hunted now was deeper and stranger. She was looking for the heart of the Wood—which might be the heart of Lys.
THE GOLDEN WOOD stretched far over the rolling hills to the west of Lutèce, down along the river and up toward the low spine of a ridge that Averil had heard called the Dragon’s Back. She suspected that it had had another name once: the Serpent.
There was no spawn of old Night asleep under those tree-clad slopes. The earth’s bones were prominent here. One might have expected to find a castle perched on a jut of crag as castles were wont to do, but these hills had been cleansed of human habitation.
The royal hunting lodge lay deep in the Wood, sheltered in a valley beside a glassy jewel of a lake. It reminded Averil somewhat too keenly of the Ladies’ Isle: steep slopes all around it, the green bowl and the clear lake and the stone manor beside it.
The king had not built this. It was generations old, and the latest part of it had been raised in his father’s day: an airy confection of a tower with windows of colorless glass. They were deliberately not magical; the glass was so clear that nothing could catch or be held in it. All that came through it was light.
There were servants in the manor, discreet persons who welcomed the unexpected guests with grace and offered them food, drink, and rest. Averil was glad to accept. This was not quite the heart of the Wood, but close enough.
It was almost like being in Quitaine: the quiet; the peace. The absence of spies and whispers and intrigue. No one here wished her ill, or indeed cared who she was at all.
She dared not grow complacent in this sanctuary. Esteban was here with her, and he was not a comfortable presence.
He had brought her here for reasons of his own. She would do well not to trust them. As peaceful as the manor was and as benign as the Wood seemed to be, they still belonged to the king. And the king wanted nothing less than to overturn the world.
When she had eaten and drunk and rested, she found that her guards seemed to have melted away and Jennet nodded to sleep where she sat. The spell was subtle and masterfully wrought. She arched a brow at Esteban.
He stared blandly back. Even yet she felt no danger from him. “Messire,” she said, “if you think you have me in your power, I may beg to differ.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “There is something here that you might wish to see. May I escort you?”
“Another naked dance? Thank you, but no.”
“This may scandalize you less,” he said, “or shock you out of all sense. But I can promise that you won’t find it dull.”
Curiosity had always been Averil’s weakness. She rose, with a glance at Jennet. The maid was sound asleep, upright in her chair, snoring gently.
She would not wake soon. Averil caught herself wondering if she would wake at all.
Of course she would. Such spells were made to seem unbreakable until their casters broke them. Averil left Jennet sleeping and followed Esteban into the depths of the house.