Magebane (49 page)

Frustrated and beginning to be worried, she went to bed. In the morning, there did indeed come a knock on the door. She hobbled to it and opened it to find a liveried servant holding a silver tray with a card on it. “Your pardon, milady,” he said formally. “The Honorable Lord Falk, Minister of Public Safety, requests your presence at dinner tonight in the Prince's Banquet Hall. I am to tell you that the entire King's Council will also be present.”

Mother Northwind was astonished, and a little horrified.
What on Earth can Falk be thinking?
she thought.
He's always kept me in the shadows. Why is he dragging me out to a formal dinner with the King's Council, of all people?

Her first instinct was to say “No.” But . . . until she knew for certain where Brenna and the Prince were, she needed Falk, which meant putting up with his arrogance, his assumption that she was just a useful tool—a powerful, dangerous tool, but still a tool.
A tool
, she thought,
does not refuse to be used.

And then she smiled a little. Besides, it
would
be interesting to see the Councillors. They wouldn't recognize in her the much younger Healer Makala, who had once lived in the Palace and tended all of them at one time or another. She imagined herself, in the middle of the dinner, shouting, “I've seen you all naked!” Her smile turned to a chuckle. “Tell Lord Falk,” she said, still chuckling—the servant very carefully not reacting to that no-doubt unexpected response—“that I am honored by the invitation and will attend with pleasure.”

“Yes, milady.”

“And don't call me milady,” Mother Northwind said. “I'm not yours, and I'm definitely not a lady.” And then she shut the door on the servant's bemused face.

She knew a lot about those Councillors. It was while healing Lord Athol's hemorrhoids that she had found out about his son's “perversion” and supposedly tragic but actually most welcome suicide, and begun putting together the pieces that had led her to the oh-so-valuable Verdsmitt a few years later. She'd known enough about Lady Estra's under-the-table deals with merchants and suppliers to blackmail several dozen people, had she just wanted to be rich, and knew about the idiot, illegitimate son that Lady Vin kept locked in a basement room in her manor up by Berriton. But of course, all that information was long out of date now. Shaking a few hands, being helped to her seat and out of it again . . . she couldn't glean much in such short moments of contact, but she could probably at least, if she were to use Falk's terminology, “update her files” on them.

If her plan proved out, none of that information would likely matter, but you could never have too much information, Mother Northwind thought. Falk had once told her there was a saying in his trade that “ninety percent of the intelligence you collect is useless; the trouble is, you never know which ninety percent it is.”

And so it was that Mother Northwind allowed a young man—very interested in (much younger) ladies, but without much of anything else in his head—to take her arm and escort her to the Prince's Banquet Hall, a relatively small dining area near Karl's quarters on the fourth floor of the west wing. It was surprisingly tasteful for a formal Palace room: black-and-white tiled floor, white walls, a black fireplace, a long black table spread with snowy white linen, black sideboards with white marble tops. A silver chandelier sparkled overhead. They came in through large side doors; a swinging door at one end of the room led to a kitchen, from which good smells were emerging, while a closed door at the other end of the room led, she supposed, through a hidden hallway to the empty quarters of Prince Karl.

The Councillors milled about, talking in low voices, sipping from the glasses of sparkling wine and nibbling the appetizers the servants circulated among them on silver trays. Mother Northwind recognized all of the Councillors at once, though they hadn't, for the most part, aged well; too much time in the Palace, too many dinners like this one, had put too many pounds on some of them and gave the others a kind of . . . preserved look, like a corpse in stasis.

Of course, one Councillor was
literally
a preserved corpse: Tagaza, the First Mage, who would remain in stasis until a state funeral could be organized, after travel became easier in the spring. His death might have contributed to some of the somberness Mother Northwind detected in the room, but she suspected what contributed to it a lot more was the trouble in the Commons: the attack on the Prince, his disappearance, Falk's destruction of the Square, the sabotage of the MageFurnace. T
he MageLords
, Mother Northwind thought with some satisfaction,
are feeling a lot less sure of themselves than they are accustomed to.

She smiled.
Just wait until I'm finished with them.
She turned that smile on a servant who had approached her with wine. “Why, thank you, I believe I will.”

Falk was engaged in conversation with Lord Athol in the corner by the kitchen door; he saw her came in and detached himself from the Prime Adviser to greet her.

“Mother Northwind,” he said. “How good of you to come.” He nodded to the Councillors. “I told the King's Council of your tremendous, though sadly unsuccessful, attempt to save Tagaza's life, and they all wanted to meet you.”

“Well, I'm honored, my lord,” Northwind said, a little too loudly, as though she were slightly deaf. “It's not often a simple country Healer like me gets to hobnob with the great and powerful.”

Falk's smile seemed genuine, and she suspected she knew why. “Well, then,” he said. “Allow me to introduce you.”

She resisted the impish impulse to ask him to take her arm, knowing full well why he never had and never would, and instead hobbled on her own over to the first of the Councillors.

Half an hour later, as she sat down to dinner on Falk's left hand—Falk himself, as host, sitting at the table's head, and Lord Athol on his right—she knew a lot more about the Councillors, but none of it seemed very important. Lady Vin's idiot son had died, “cause unknown,” and been quietly buried on her estate. Lady Estra was still corrupt. Lord Athol had pretty much forgotten about his long-dead first son and was much more focused on his now tenyear-old replacement, although slightly worried by the boy's recently displayed tendency to torture small animals.

When they were all seated, one chair remained unfilled, between Athol and Falk. As the servants stepped back into their assigned places along the walls, ready to pour and serve and tidy away as required, Lord Falk tapped his glass with his spoon for quiet, then got to his feet.

“Lords and Ladies, Mother Northwind,” he said, “I know you must wonder why I have invited you to such a banquet after so many disturbing events. I'm sure you have said to each other, ‘What is there to celebrate?'

“To which I reply . . . this!” He turned toward the closed door Mother Northwind had assumed led to the Prince's quarters. It swung open . . .

. . . and Prince Karl, in full Royal finery, limping a little but otherwise apparently unharmed, stepped into the room.

The Councillors surged to their feet. Mother Northwind did not. She felt as though she'd been slapped. She glared at Falk, and saw him looking straight at her.
The bastard
, she thought.
Making a point that he knows a few things I don't. Putting me in my place.

She couldn't stay seated while the Prince made his way to his chair at the far end of the table. Protocol and prudence alike dictated that she climb to her feet. And so she did, while the Councillors applauded—actually applauded!—Prince Karl as he limped to his place.

Verdsmitt gave you a few pointers on stage-managing this, didn't he, Falk?
she thought.

Once the Prince sat down, Falk gestured for the others to do likewise, but he wasn't done yet. “My Lords and Ladies, Prince Karl was rescued from the Common Cause thugs holding him prisoner near Quillhill early this morning. We have captured the woman who ran what proved to be a quite substantial hideout and staging area for the Cause, and are questioning her.

“But that is not the only good news I have to share with you this evening. For obvious reasons I have not made it widely known, though some of you may have heard rumors, but my young ward, Brenna, whom many of you have met on her annual visits to the Palace, was also kidnapped . . . kidnapped from my manor and taken cross-country to the Great Lake, where she was temporarily held by savages. They sold her to the Common Cause, who perhaps hoped to blackmail me in some fashion. Fortunately, a Mounted Ranger spotted them, and she, too, has been rescued.

“She will not be joining us this evening, as she recovers from her ordeal, but it is also her return to my love and care that I wish to celebrate tonight.” He paused and looked around the table, smiling a smile Mother Northwind dearly wished she could personally rip from his face. “There is one more exciting development to report, but for that, I will wait until tomorrow morning's formal meeting. For now, let us eat and drink and enjoy ourselves in celebration of the safe return of both the Prince and my dear ward Brenna. Lords and Ladies, Mother Northwind, I give you a toast: Prince Karl!”

“Prince Karl!” the Councillors said, and then began talking in much more animated voices than before while the servants brought the onion soup.

It smelled wonderful, and Mother Northwind had eaten little all day, but after what she had just heard, she wanted nothing to do with it. Lord Falk continued to watch her, however, and so she forced herself to eat it, every spoonful, though each one tasted like sawdust, and slid down her throat and rested in her stomach like lead.

Karl ate mechanically, mouthed pleasantries to the Councillors, smiled, and felt dead and confused inside. Was it all over, then? Had everything that had begun with the assassination attempt by the lake boiled down to those few moments of bloody terror at Goodwife Beth's farm? The Common Cause, or at least their mysterious Patron, had at first wanted him dead. Then, fortunately, they had decided he might have some value alive after he obligingly handed himself over to them.

But now, just like that, he was back in the Palace. Goodwife Beth was in prison. Most of those who had held him were dead. And it sounded like Davydd Verdsmitt himself had pulled in his claws and was rubbing up against Falk like a house cat, purring and mewling for scraps from the MageLord's table.

His own vehemence surprised him. The Cause was his enemy, and now it had been removed. He had been returned to his former life of indolence and indulgence, awaiting the sad demise of his father some unguessable number of years in the future. He should be pleased; hell, he should be ecstatic.

And yet . . . the people he'd met in the Cause had seemed more real, more alive, more
important
, in fact, than the lords and ladies at table with him.

Except . . .
her
. He gazed down the length of the table at the strange old woman seated at Falk's left hand, across from Lord Athol (who had hurried down to offer his unctuous welcome as soon as the toast was finished). “Mother Northwind,” Falk had called her, some backcountry Healer from near his manor. He had offered no explanation as to why she was invited, when the First Healer himself had not been. But the dark eyes that peered back at him on either side of the prominent, blade-sharp nose did not seem to match the bent and wizened exterior. They did not look like the eyes of an old woman, they looked like the eyes of a hawk that had seen its prey, and Karl found himself profoundly uncomfortable under that gaze.

The other person notable by his absence was the First Mage, Tagaza. Karl wondered about that, and when Falk got up from his place at Karl's right side to have a word with the head server, Karl leaned over to Lord Athol, seated at his left, and said in a low voice, “Lord Athol, where is Tagaza? Surely the First Mage should be here.”

Athol's eyes widened. “Did you not hear, Your Highness?” he said, and perhaps he had had one too many glasses of wine, for his voice was loud enough that heads turned to look at him—including Falk. “The First Mage is dead. When the Common Cause sabotaged the MageFurnace, the spell he was attempting went fatally awry.”

Karl stared at him, shocked. Tagaza, dead? But—“What kind of spell?” he said. “What sabotage?” He felt anger rising in him, and turned his head toward Falk, now striding back in his direction. “Lord Falk, why was I not informed of these developments?”

“Your Highness,” said Falk, “you have barely been returned to us after a traumatic experience. I did not wish to trouble—”

“But I
wish
to be troubled, Falk,” Karl said, his voice rising. “I wish to be troubled with the affairs of the Kingdom I will one day rule!” He slammed his fist down onto the table. “You will not treat me like a child, my lord. You will treat me like the Prince and Heir I am, or when I am King, I assure you,
you
will no longer be Minister of Public Safety!”