Which meant she didn’t have to confine herself to moping around the manor grounds. She could safely go down to the lakeshore, or up the hill. It didn’t really matter. Just being out of the house for a while always made her feel better, freer…
The hill, she decided. She felt the need for an expansive view.
A small, heavy door opened through the wall next to the big padlocked freight gate. The door was bolted but not locked. The manor’s walls were more for show than anything else, since no one but another MageLord would dare to steal from a MageLord, and walls offered no protection against that sort of attack. Not that Brenna could imagine anyone, Commoner, Mageborn or another of the Twelve, daring to attack Lord Falk.
She unbolted the door and pushed it open, grunting a little as she forced it through the drifted snow on the other side. She slipped out and glanced up and down the blank expanse of the manor’s back wall. Except for the gate and door from which she had just emerged, there were no other openings in the wall on this side of the manor-which made it that much easier for her to escape unseen.
Around the front, the manor boasted ornamental shrubs, shrouded in canvas this time of year; statuary that, being mostly of the heroically nude variety, currently looked both silly and uncomfortable; and, most impressively, a magical, multicolored fire fountain that played one of a selection of tinkly musical tunes whenever someone passed by. Utterly impractical and an enormous waste of magical energy, it had been installed by one of Falk’s more ostentatious predecessors as a way of proclaiming that here dwelt a MageLord. Brenna had long wondered why Falk had not had it pulled out.
This side of the manor actually seemed to fit Falk’s personality better: a few distinctly nonornamental shrubs, a few winding graveled paths (all currently buried under snow, of course). Brenna grinned a little. All right, maybe that weird limestone sculpture of a giant frog doesn’t exactly say “Lord Falk,” she thought. But the rest of it: plain, direct, utilitarian. That was Falk to a tee.
Beyond the manor’s outer fence of black iron, perhaps fifty yards away, a forest of aspen, birch, and pine began, but it spread only halfway up the tall, round-shouldered hill that backed the manor before petering out into shrubs and then into undisturbed snow, the smooth white surface marred only by the occasional rocky outcropping.
Brenna trudged toward the fence, the snow, calf-deep everywhere and over her knees in spots, pulling at her legs. The newest layer, fluffy as eiderdown, covered the hard crust left behind by the recent thaw. Below that were layers of old snow, strata marking every storm of the long winter.
The wind, though it whipped long, ghostly tendrils of snow around her feet, lacked the bitter bite of midwinter: cold, certainly, but not the knifelike unbearable cold of winter’s depths, the life-stealing cold that could freeze exposed flesh in less than a minute. When that kind of cold settled over the land, no one went out any more than could be helped, and then only for short periods of time.
This, though… this she could bear all day, warmly dressed as she was. The relative warmth was the first whisper of spring, still weeks away, but drawing closer every day. It couldn’t come soon enough for Brenna, who loved watching the frozen landscape shake off its mantle of ice and come to new, green life… and she particularly loved the spring equinox, when the manor was full of life for one glorious evening as the leading citizens of the villages came to celebrate Springfest, one of only four occasions-the others being the Sun Ball on the summer solstice, the Moon Ball on the winter solstice, and the Harvestfest in fall-when the manor was filled with people. There would be music, dancing, dramatic readings, lectures, maybe even a play. She’d heard that Davydd Verdsmitt was about to premiere a new work at the Palace. What she wouldn’t give to see his players on the stage of the Great Hall! And no doubt Lord Falk could order it, if he so chose, she thought, but she couldn’t imagine asking him.
Springfest also offered something else in short supply in the manor of Lord Falk: young men.
At the Moon Ball, the son of the Reeve of Poplar Butte had asked her to dance. Just turned nineteen, he’d been a bit awkward, a bit shy, and definitely not much of a dancer…
… but he had also had a nice smile and the most beautiful brown eyes she had ever seen, and she really thought she’d like to dance with him again.
Although, to be completely honest, she would be glad to dance with anyone. Except possibly the baker’s son, who was fighting a two-front war against acne and overweight, and losing both.
Brenna reached the fence and clambered over it easily, then plunged in among the trees. The snow wasn’t as deep here, since some of it had been intercepted by the overhanging branches throughout the winter, although occasional deep drifts and deadwood, betraying its presence only by the slightest of bumps in the snow, made the footing precarious. But Brenna plunged ahead, knowing she was doing something she really shouldn’t, knowing it could even be dangerous-if she turned an ankle, it might be hours before anyone found her-but getting perverse pleasure out of that very fact.
The going got even harder as the land sloped up. The new snow was moist enough to compact under her feet as she climbed, turning icy. She had to hold onto bushes and branches to keep from sliding backward, but eventually she emerged from the forest onto the bare hillside. Up here the winter winds had driven most of the snow into drifts. By carefully picking her way, she could follow a path where dry grass still showed through the thin white blanket that covered it, providing some traction. Though the wind continued to snap slithering snakes of snow at her, she was working hard enough now that she felt too warm in her fur, and she unbuttoned it a little to let in some fresh air.
She had a specific destination in mind, an outcropping of rock to which she often climbed in the summer. It was a good deal easier to get to then, she thought, panting; but there it was now ahead of her, and a few minutes later she reached its broad, tablelike top and turned to survey the landscape.
Below her sprawled Falk Manor, the large main building with its white walls and red roof and multiple smokespewing chimneys surrounded by an untidy cluster of smaller structures. From the manor’s front gates, a road ran past the compound of the men-at-arms, white wooden barracks behind a stockade of peeled logs, through snow-covered fields down to the edge of the lazily meandering river, still frozen solid. To her left and right along the Grand Valley, the Seven Fish showed as broader, flat expanses of alternating dark gray ice and white snow.
The road ran alongside the river, eventually disappearing to her left around the shoulder of another hill. As she looked that way, Brenna saw a black dot roll into sight, trailing smoke, and recognized it at once as Lord Falk’s magical carriage. Once he had returned to the Palace after the Moon Ball, Brenna ordinarily didn’t see her guardian again until spring; since he had the option of living in the perpetual warmth of the Palace grounds, she could hardly blame him. But there he came. I wonder what’s happened?
And then she forgot all about Lord Falk and everything else as an enormous glowing blue something, roaring like a dragon, burst over the crest of the hill behind her.
CHAPTER 5
Five hundred feet above the ground, the downdraft became a powerful westerly wind, hurling the airship out over the snow-covered prairie, the straining propeller adding to its eastward momentum. Freezing wind roared through the gondola. The envelope fluttered and twisted. Anton, staring over the side, saw the ground both streaming past and growing larger at an alarming rate. He looked forward. And ahead…