Magebane (50 page)

All the Councillors were staring at him, almost comically frozen in place by his outburst. Mother Northwind's expression remained unreadable. Nor was she watching him: she was watching Falk, and a moment later, every head turned in his direction as the Councillors awaited his response.
They're all terrified of him
, Karl thought.
He probably knows things about all of them that would prove embarrassing or worse if he released them. They will never support his ouster, if it really comes to that.

But at that moment, Karl didn't care—didn't care that all the careful political instruction Tagaza had given him over the years told him he was being a fool. He had been attacked, kidnapped, imprisoned, and almost killed by one of his own guards. Either he was the Prince, or he wasn't: and if he was, then it was about damn time he acted like it.

Falk's face was doing a very credible imitation of a thunderstorm. “Your Highness, this is neither the time nor the—”

“Then we will discuss it immediately following this dinner, Lord Falk,” Karl said with all the hauteur he could manage. “We will discuss it in detail. I want to know everything that has happened since I was kidnapped. I have heard some of what you have done in the Commons, and I have many questions about that, as well: such as how you expect me to rule a kingdom you seem determined to plunge into civil war, Mageborn against Commoners.” He gave Falk his coldest stare, though his heart was racing in his chest and he knew if he took his hands off the table they would be trembling. “I hope you have answers.” And then he turned his head away from Falk to Lord Athol, and said, “And how has the ice-fishing been this winter, my lord?”

It had to be his imagination, but he could almost swear he felt Falk's gaze burning into him like a pair of hot pokers.

ANTON KNEW MOTHER NORTHWIND had done something terrible to him the first time they met, and he knew Brenna thought Lord Falk wanted Mother Northwind to do something more terrible yet, but though he was getting better at accepting the impossible things he saw everywhere around him in this strange country, the notion that someone could reach inside his brain and change everything he believed was so far outside his experience that he couldn't take the threat as seriously as Brenna obviously wanted him to.

Like her, he had been shocked when High Raven handed them over to the Commoners who had come north to return them to Mother Northwind, but he understood Minik culture better than Brenna and knew that High Raven literally had no choice: Mother Northwind was obviously considered a member of the clan for all she had done for them years earlier, and the request of a clan member would always outweigh the needs or desires of someone outside the clan—another Minik, even, let alone Minik-na.

The ride south on the dogsled had been unpleasantly cold, and the sleds on the ice had made too much noise for easy talking—not that the men who had taken them showed much interest in playing tour guide, and Brenna had no more been to this part of the Kingdom than he had—but even without knowing what he was seeing, he had found it fascinating, watching the changing shoreline to his left and the unchanging ice to his right: not for the scenery, which after all wasn't much, but simply because he knew he was the first person from the Union Republic to see it.
The Professor would have loved this
, he thought sadly.

The sudden violence on the shoreline horrified him as it had Brenna, but maybe not quite as much—it had been a while, but he was not exactly a virgin when it came to violence. You didn't live as long as he had on the streets of Hexton Down without seeing things that Brenna had no concept of in her sheltered existence. It was so obviously terrifying for her, though, that almost without thinking he drew her to him for comfort—and was inordinately pleased when she returned the embrace.

But then had come her cryptic warning about the men who had been killed being Mother Northwind's, and the men who had killed them being Falk's, even though Falk and Mother Northwind were supposed to be allies in a plan to bring down the Anomaly . . .

Anton was way out of his depth. He didn't know enough about, well,
anything
to guess who could be an ally and who an enemy. And since that hurried exchange in the blood-soaked camp, he had not even been able to talk to Brenna.

The carriage they had climbed aboard near the village of Foam River had its windows sealed against prying eyes, and so Anton had seen nothing of their approach to New Cabora. Now he heard the rumble of wheels on dirt change to the clatter of wheels on cobblestones, and felt the accompanying change in motion. He smelled smells he knew from cities back home, horses—lots of horses—wood smoke, coal smoke, outhouses and bakeries, frying meat and rotting meat, sweat and sweets, a cacophony of odors that suddenly made him feel homesick for the crowded, dirty streets where he had grown up.

There was something different about the sound that made him think they were crossing a bridge, and then . . .

The smells changed. From city to country, and even more astonishingly, from the cold, harsh smells of winter to the warm, soft smells of spring: water, and marshland, green growing things, flowers.

At the same time, he realized it was warming up. Not just a little, either, but a lot. In moments he felt far too warm in his heavy winter clothing.

And then they rolled to a halt, and an armed man in a blue uniform, wearing a silver breastplate and helmet, opened the door to the carriage, and Anton stepped out into a whole new world.

It had been cloudy when they'd been loaded on the carriage, and looking up, he could still see the clouds, but they were
behind
the sun, or, he supposed, some magical facsimile thereof, a brilliant beacon that cast bright sparkles off the lake he was facing and brought the greens and reds and yellows and purples and whites of the ornamental garden that stretched between him and the lake into vibrant, glowing life.

Beyond the lake . . . snow. And, shimmering strangely as though seen through heat haze, though surely it wasn't that warm, the city of New Cabora, stone buildings black from burning coal, smoke rising from a thousand fires . . . a proper city.
A real city
.
Almost like home.

His new guard pulled him around the corner of the carriage, and he stared up in awe.
Unlike this
!

Stretching more than a hundred yards in both directions from the central block, itself at least a hundred feet wide, a palace glowed in the false sunlight. Sheathed in white limestone, four stories high on each wing, with six stories on the central block and a giant dome above that, it wasn't the largest building he'd ever seen—the railrunner station in Hexton Down was probably bigger—but it was easily the most beautiful.

Again, he wished he could have asked Brenna about it, but though she was not far away, their paths were already diverging. She, too, had a blue-uniformed guard, who was handing her over to two women, servants by the look of them. He only had time to exchange the briefest glance with her (and not a very meaningful one, at that) before she was taken away, once more the ward of Lord Falk, and Anton was taken in the opposite direction to . . . what?

A cell, it turned out. In the same cell where, though Anton didn't know it, Davydd Verdsmitt had sat just three days earlier, he sat on the bed, stared at the wall, and waited for Lord Falk to decide his fate.

I hope
, he thought,
that at least he takes good care of the airship.

Brenna's quarters were more palatial than, but every bit as much a prison as, Anton's cell. As usual when she came to the Palace, she was placed in a guest suite next to Lord Falk's apartment, with a luxurious four-poster bed, a bathroom with hot and cold running water, a toilet with a constant stream of water running through it to whisk away any waste, a sumptuously furnished private living/dining room with an enormous fireplace and ceiling-high windows overlooking the lake . . .

. . . and a few things that had not been there on her previous visits: a magical lock on the door and windows, two Royal guards outside the door, and a maidservant named Hilary whose nervous demeanor made it clear to Brenna she had stringent instructions from Falk to keep an eye on her as well as help her dress and bathe.

Brenna never would have believed it, but she thought she would have preferred a mageservant. She had asked another maid about the lack of mageservants in the Palace on her first visit, when she was just ten years old, and the girl had explained that most MageLords didn't like them. “They prefer to hire Commoners,” the girl had said. ‘They're everywhere, might as well make use of them' is what my previous employer said to me once.”

Remembering that now, Brenna thought how much of the MageLords' contemptuous attitude toward Commoners—Commoners like me!—was summed up in that phrase. And she knew well enough that there were some MageLords who treated their human servants with exactly the same amount of respect they would show to a mageservant—none.

With no indication of when, or if, she might be summoned to talk to Falk, or he might come to talk to her—though surely that would happen—and unable to leave her prison, she decided to make the most of it and do something for which she'd been pining for days:

She took a long, hot bath.

Lord Falk kept his fury at Prince Karl's public insolence tamped down well beneath the icy crust of his exterior as he showed the members of the Council out one by one.
It doesn't matter what the brat thinks or says
, he reminded himself.
Everything is in hand
.

It galled him, all the same. Tonight had been intended as his opportunity to reinforce in the Councillors' eyes just how effective and, indeed, dangerous a Minister of Public Safety he was; to remind them who was the real power in this kingdom. After all, in the course of a few days he'd defused a Commons rebellion, rescued his ward, found out who was responsible for the attempt on Prince Karl's life, and returned the Prince to his rightful place in the Palace.

The Prince—
the false Prince
, Falk thought savagely—had taken some of the bloom off of that rose—but again, it didn't matter. Because the accomplishments the Councillors did not know about were even greater. He had also lucked into information about the outside world, retrieved an amazing flying device, and finally put all the pieces together for the great moment when he would seize control of the Keys for himself.

Soon now
, he told himself as he smiled at Athol and sent the Prime Adviser on his way,
the wrong done to my family will be righted, and I will return the Kingship to our line. And I will be a King such as Evrenfels has never had, freeing us from our self-imposed prison, eventually reclaiming the Old Kingdom stolen from us by Commoners.

Commoners. They would fall in line. They had no choice. He had decapitated their precious Common Cause. Their attempt at sabotaging the MageFurnace had been futile (even the coup of killing the First Mage had ultimately meant nothing), and he had already demonstrated to them, as should have been done long since, what it really meant to defy the MageLords: that what they claimed was oppression and exploitation was nothing compared to what could be done to them if the MageLords chose to do it.