Magebane (57 page)

And Teran, the bodyguard I thought was also my friend, will help him
, he snarled silently, remembering what Mother Northwind had said about
him
.

I could flee
, he thought.
Flee through the Lesser Barrier, just walk right through it and disappear into the Commons . . .

. . . bringing down the wrath of Falk once more on the city of New Cabora,
he realized sickly.

How many innocent people would suffer then because of him?

Suddenly Karl couldn't stand still any longer. He turned and strode back into his bedroom, dressed in a hurry, and went out, Teran leaping to attention and following him as he passed through the hallways of the Palace almost at a run.

At the top of the Palace steps, Karl paused, staring down at the ornamental gardens, the statue of Queen Castilla, the lake, and the Barrier, and beyond the lake at the snow-choked, smoky city of New Cabora.

“I'm going across the lake,” Karl said to Teran, without looking at him, as the bodyguard caught up to him. “To the place where I like to swim.”

“Your Highness? Where the assassin—”

“Yes, where the assassination attempt was made,” Karl snapped. “Come.” And without another word he strode down the steps, toward the boathouse at the far end of the gardens.

There, he climbed into the same white-and-gold boat he had used to follow Jopps and Denson in the dark the night of Verdsmitt's arrest. Teran climbed in behind him, picked up the oars, and began rowing them steadily, mechanically, across the lake. With only one or two glances over his shoulder, he drove the boat to within a few feet of where the assassin had died.

Karl jumped out, and strode up the grass to the Lesser Barrier. There he stopped. He reached out a hand to the barrier.

“Careful, Your Highness,” said Teran.

Karl ignored him. He leaned in with his outstretched hand . . .

. . . and it passed through shimmering Barrier as though it wasn't there. He felt the icy nip of the outside air on his fingers.

Behind him, Teran gasped. “How . . .”

Karl withdrew his hand and studied New Cabora. Sunshine streamed down on the snow in the park today, which cast it back in a million diamond sparkles. The city, buildings black from decades of smoke, squatted on the other side of the parkland beneath a pall of ice fog, the contrast between its dark structures and the pure-white parkland making it look a dark and dangerous place indeed.

He turned around and studied the Palace. It shone like a jewel, white against the green of the lawns, windows sparkling, gardens awash in riotous flower colors. Karl listened. He could hear birds singing, insects chirping in the grass, even a distant, haunting snatch of music, though whether it came from living musicians or enchanted instruments, he had no way of knowing.

A butterfly, its wings iridescent blue, rested on the bright-red petals of a waist-high flower a few steps away. Karl knelt and examined the insect. It reminded him of the Palace in its beauty. Crushing such a thing would be an act of senseless destruction.

But there was one difference between the butterfly and the Palace. The butterfly was natural. Though it was out of season, in the real spring that would soon break winter's grip on the world outside a million more just like it would appear. Its beauty owed nothing to magic.

Karl stood and gazed at the Palace again. Unlike the butterfly, there was nothing natural about it at all. It would not exist if not for magic. And yet, it too was beautiful.

Did he destroy it? Destroy all the wonderful things magic could do because some of those who wielded it used it for evil?

He turned and gazed at the Barrier again, and New Cabora beyond it. The city, black and ugly, was no more natural than the Palace. It had been built by men bending Nature to their will, just as the Palace had been, the only difference being the tools used. The Commoners' tools were crude. Therefore, the city was crude and ugly. The MageLords' tools were refined and powerful. Therefore, the Palace was refined and beautiful. But Commoners and Mageborn alike strove to impose their will on Nature.

The difference
, Karl thought,
is that the MageLords also seek to impose their will on others. But would Commoner rule really be any better?

Turning his back on the Palace, he stared out at the city again, pulled at by the desire to flee, to deny what he was—what Mother Northwind had made him—and simply refuse to act...

. . . except that by refusing to act he
would
be acting, and those actions would have consequences: for the Commoners, among whom Falk would surely seek him; for the MageLords, who would find Falk their King; and for the Outsiders, who would soon find themselves fighting the MageLords for their own freedom.

He remembered standing in this place the day of the assassination attempt, thinking how much he longed to be free of his imprisonment in the Palace. Now he
was
free; he could walk out on everything . . .

. . . and yet he felt less free than ever, for he had been given the unwanted power to decide the future of the Kingdom and the world.

It was too much. He put his hand through the Barrier again, held it there so long his fingers stung with cold by the time he pulled them back; but when he turned back toward the boat, he still had not made up his mind what to do.

But he did know one thing he had to do. Teran was staring at him, hand on his belt: not on his sword, but on one of the enchanted spellstones set into his guard belt. Karl glanced down, then up at Teran's pale face. “Were you planning to use that on me?”

“Your Highness . . .” Teran licked his lips. “I thought . . . you put your hand through the Lesser Barrier . . . I . . .
how?
”

“I could walk through it right now, Teran,” Karl said. “The Lesser Barrier is no barrier to me. It's as open as that door into the maids' bathing chambers.” He softened his voice. “Do you remember that door, Teran?”

A flicker of a smile on Teran's face. “Of course I do.” The smile faded. “But I can't let you do that, Your Highness.”

“Why?” Karl said.

“I am sworn to protect you—”

“Sworn to protect me?” Karl took a step closer to him and spoke his next words as though he were snapping a whip. “Or sworn to spy on me for Falk?”

Teran stepped back. “Your Highness—”

“Don't bother protesting,” Karl said. “I know the truth.”

“You don't understand,” Teran said. “Your Highness . . . Karl . . . Falk . . . he's got my mother, my sister, they're prisoners in a house in the Mageborn enclave . . .”

Karl remembered Teran's sister, three years younger, as a laughing child with golden hair, playing with a ball in the Fountain Garden, and the hatred he had begun to feel for Falk flared higher. “Teran,” he said. “Falk's days are numbered. You won't need to fear him much longer.”

“Your Highness . . .”

“Don't call me that,” Karl snapped, surprised by his own vehemence. But he didn't deserve the title, had never deserved the title. He was not the Heir. He wasn't even Mageborn. He was Commoner: Commoner, and something more.

Magebane.

“Forget I'm the Prince,” he said. “Forget you are a guardsman. Forget Falk. I'm Karl. You're Teran. I've always counted you as my friend. I hope you have counted me as yours.”

Teran licked his lips, but his voice was steady as he said, “I have . . . Karl.”

“Then I ask you, as a friend, not to tell Falk what you just saw me do.” Karl nodded at the Lesser Barrier. “And to remember our friendship when next Falk gives you orders.”

Teran licked his lips again. “But, Your Highness . . . Karl . . . my mother, my sister . . .”

Karl smiled. “I am still the Prince. Falk is not in the Palace. Do you know where in the enclave they are being held?”

Teran nodded.

“If I order them freed from the house, can you get them out through the Barrier to somewhere safe, somewhere Falk can't find them?”

Teran nodded again.

“Consider it done.” Karl held out his hand. “Now, old friend . . . will you keep my secrets? Will you serve me as loyally as I've already thought you were?”

Teran looked at the hand for a long moment, then turned to look toward the roofs of the Mageborn enclave, just visible through the trees past the bridge. He gazed in that direction for a long moment, then snapped his eyes back to Karl, grabbed his hand, and shook it. “I will, old friend. And beg your forgiveness that I have ever done anything else.”

Karl clapped him on the shoulder. “Then let's go back to the Palace. I have orders to give.”

He looked back at the city himself one last time.
And then
, he thought,
I have a decision to make
.

FOR MOST OF THREE DAYS Falk's magecarriage rolled northward, and Brenna sat in silence within it. Her guard was obviously under orders not to talk to her, and when they stopped along the way for meals, at first at towns, then, as they rolled into the northern forest, at the Royal way stations built at regular intervals, Falk did not speak to her, either. The driver, Robinton, would give her a “Good morning, miss,” and even a “Good night,” but that was the most conversation she had over the course of the journey.

The first night they spent in an inn in Berriton, the largest town in the Kingdom outside New Cabora, where the Colleges of Mages and Healers seemed to frown at each other on opposite banks of the North Evrenfels River. In the morning they were joined in the inn common room by a thin, sallow-faced mage, who climbed into the cabin of the magecarriage with her and the guard. He gave Brenna an appraising look, as though she were an unusual species of beetle, then pulled the hood of his coat around his head and promptly fell asleep.

Left with nothing else to do, Brenna stared out the window.

She had never realized, before flying across much of it west to east and now riding through it from north to south, how truly huge the Kingdom of Evrenfels was.

Huge—and underpopulated. The towns, except for New Cabora and Berriton, were very small. Each would announce its presence by the sudden appearance of cultivated fields instead of virgin prairie, and the occasional farmhouse, which ran from the snug to the ramshackle to, rather frequently, nothing more than rude sod huts. Brenna tried to imagine living for a winter in a house made of nothing but dirt, and shuddered. Those would be Commoners, of course, and they were typically only tenants of a Mageborn landlord, whose much bigger house of stone or wood would soon enough roll by. South of Berriton they had passed through Lord Athol's land, and Brenna, spotting his manor in the distance, had seen that it rivaled Falk's in size.
I wonder if he's got a singing fountain, too,
she thought bitterly, as, with the multiple chimneys of the manor visible in the distance, they passed a sod hut where an old woman struggled through the snow carrying a load of firewood on her back.

On the second day, well north of Berriton, they left all signs of humanity behind except for the road and the Royal shelters. Flat, tall-grass prairie gave way to rolling hills covered with naked aspen, poplar, and birch; gradually, dark spruce became more abundant; and finally there was only black evergreen forest all around, stretching to the horizon, punctuated by the white sheets of frozen lakes that were visible whenever they topped a rise high enough to give a view over the treetops. Then they would plunge back into the forest again, and into cold, gray gloom.

On the second night, as Brenna climbed wearily down from the carriage, glad to stretch her legs, she noticed something. About noon the cold blue skies had given way to gray cloud; and now, as she gazed around her, she saw that the shelter they were to spend the night in, a large cabin made of unpeeled logs, stood on a bit of a hill; and that to the north, the cloud cover glowed a fitful red, waxing and waning in a slow, erratic cycle.

Brenna didn't have to ask what it was. There could be only one thing this far north that could give the clouds that bloody tint: the Cauldron. If not for the cloud, she would surely be able to see the Barrier Range, and despite everything, she felt a pang of sorrow that it was hidden. She had always wanted to see mountains.

Brenna spent a restless night, that red glow finding its way into her dreams even through the sealed shutters. In the morning they were on their way again before any light crept through the lowering clouds, which now hung so close overhead that the glow of the Cauldron could no longer be seen. Robinton gave those clouds a worried look, and made certain that the coal furnace on the back of the carriage, which both heated the interior and provided energy for the spell that drove the carriage, was fully stoked—and the big coal bin below it packed to the brim—from the Royal shelter's stores.