Oh, she understood perfectly why the subjects of the ancient MageLords had risen up. And she knew that the Magebane, by counteracting magic, had given them the victory. But where had the Magebane come from?
Though she found hints in the Commoners’ official library, she finally discovered the answers she sought in what she thought of as the unofficial library: books, scrolls, letters, songs, and legends, passed down within families, and above all, kept hidden from the Mageborn (for early in the Kingdom’s history all talk of the Magebane had been ruthlessly suppressed). From one crumbling scroll an old woman showed her, Mother Northwind learned that the Magebane had been the bastard offspring of a MageLord and a Commoner. From a book hidden beneath a floorboard in a grateful father’s kitchen, she learned that the Magebane had not been born, but made. Like a crow collecting shiny things, she pecked and scratched and hid away the fragmented and sometimes contradictory bits of information she uncovered, until at last she thought she could detect the shape of the truth.
The Magebane had been the creation of a great Healer named Vell, who had forced the conception of that bastard child, then molded the fetus within the womb, melding its Mageborn and Commoner halves, creating a very special whole: a man who, though he could not use magic, could counteract it-and not just counteract it, but turn it back on its source.
Vell had raised the child as his own, while secretly fomenting rebellion among the Commoners and a few renegade Mageborn. When the time at last came for open revolution, he had placed that child, then a young man, at the head of an army of Commoners, and when the MageLords contemptuously called down magical fire on the Commoners’ heads, it was they who died instead, blasted apart by their own magic.
Without magic, the Mageborn had been hopelessly outnumbered. With the myth of their invincibility so thoroughly shattered, Mageborn began to die even in places where the Magebane had never been seen. They were poisoned, arrow-shot from hiding, burned alive in their homes while they slept. From every corner of the island Kingdom, panicked Mageborn had fled to the capital of Stromencor. There the twelve surviving MageLords of the Great Council had drawn on all their knowledge and resources to find, on the far side of the world, another lode of magic to rival that of the Old Kingdom. They would use the connection between that lode and their own to magically transport themselves to what was now Evrenfels, along with the surviving Mageborn and the Commoners who were supposedly loyal to them, but were in fact, Mother Northwind believed, simply trapped.
As they had been trapped ever since, inside the Great Barrier the First Twelve had crafted to protect their fledgling kingdom from the Commoners and their cursed Magebane, who they feared would pursue them even here.
Mother Northwind knew her abilities well. What Vell had done, she could do. To understand how he had crafted the Magebane, though, she had needed access to the libraries of the Colleges of Mages and Healers, and the archives of the Palace, and so she had changed her appearance and her name and offered her services to First Healer Jimson, predecessor to Hannik, as “Healer Makala.” Jimson had tested her and, astounded by her abilities, welcomed her. For the next few years, while she tended to the complaints of the mages she secretly detested, she had also delved into ancient magical lore. She had learned a great deal that had made her own magic even stronger… and eventually, she had learned enough to be confident she could do what Vell had done.
She, too, could make a Magebane.
Mother Northwind brushed crumbs off her apron, decided not to eat the second piece of toast, and instead heaved herself to her feet, picked up the lantern from the kitchen table, and went to the door that opened onto the stairs into the basement. Holding onto the wall with one hand, the lantern in the other, she descended into the dim depths. The crate in which the body of the dead assassin had arrived leaned against one wall. The corpse itself lay on a wooden trestle table in the middle of the dirt floor. The lantern’s flickering yellow light played over the blackened, skull-grinning face, the bulging white eyes, cooked in their sockets. Falk had removed the stasis field on his arrival, and a faint odor of cooked meat, with a hint of beginning corruption, hung around the body.
The grisly sight didn’t faze Mother Northwind, who had seen much worse, some of it at her own hands. She set the lantern on the edge of the table, went to the head of the casket, then reached out and laid both hands on the corpse’s forehead. Exerting just a little of her will, she reached into the rapidly decaying brain and purged it of the fragments of memories still lingering in its tangled, crumbling pathways. She did not believe Lord Falk would have another Healer check her work, or that there would be enough left of the brain for it to matter if he did, but there was no point in taking chances; not when there was, in fact, not a hint in the dead girl’s mind that she’d even heard of the Unbound, much less thought she was following orders from it. She was Common Cause, through and through. Nor, of course, had she had a thought about Verdsmitt, whom she knew only as a playwright.
There. Mother Northwind took a deep breath as a wave of fatigue flowed over her. Once she would hardly have felt such a minor outlay of energy, but she could not deny that she was getting old.
Well, she thought, at least I’ll last long enough to see the MageLords brought low. She wiped her hands on her apron, picked up the lantern, and climbed back out of the cellar.
She regretted the death of the assassin-Jenna, she thought; the least she could do was remember the girl’s name-but there had been no other way. For two reasons, Karl had to face an attack, a potentially fatal attack involving magic. First, it was the only way she could be certain she had succeeded in creating a Magebane. If he survived the attack then, without question, the half-breed boy whose existence she had shepherded from coerced conception to birth was indeed what she hoped.
But there was a second, even more important reason. The Magebane had to face a lethal magical attack in order to become the Magebane. Only when faced with mortal peril would his power fully awaken.
She suspected Karl had had flashes of power as a child: spells going awry in his presence, enchanted objects failing to work, that sort of thing. But such things could and would be written off as coincidence, especially in an era when no one believed the first Magebane had ever existed.
Neither the Mageborn father nor the Commoner mother had ever understood why they were so consumed by lust one day in a horse barn near Berriton. Nor had they had much time to wonder at it. She had arranged for the father’s “accidental” death shortly thereafter, and watched over the mother during her pregnancy and eased her into the netherworld during the birth.
She had molded the child in the womb in the manner Vell had first perfected all those centuries ago. But to activate his power, the Magebane had to be attacked. And so she had arranged for just such an attack, through the other thing she had so carefully nurtured through the decades: the Common Cause. If the attack had succeeded, and the supposed Prince had been slain, it would have been proof of her failure, but at least it would have still been a heavy blow against the MageLords.
But the attack had failed; the magic directed against Prince Karl had rebounded on Jenna. Which meant she had succeeded: Prince Karl was a Magebane. And that meant Mother Northwind’s own great Plan was, like Falk’s, moving rapidly toward fruition.
Mother Northwind set about tidying the kitchen, though there was little enough to tidy. She’d learned of Falk’s Plan during those years she worked in the Palace, every healing laying-on-of-hands on every Mageborn allowing her a glimpse of the contents of his or her mind. Falk himself had come to her for ministrations in those days, though she had had a different name and a different face and she was certain he had never made the connection between mousy Healer Makala and herself. And that was when she realized how her Plan could be realized, under the ironic and unintended cover of his.