“No. And keep your voice down.” Brenna came and sat on the edge of the bed. He was suddenly acutely aware of her nearness, and of the fact he was nude beneath the blankets. “The guards are still outside.”
“All right, all right.” He stayed lying down, looking up at her as she turned her upper body toward him to look down at his face. “What is it?”
“You’re in terrible danger,” Brenna said. “You have to escape the manor within the next couple of days, before Lord Falk returns.” She held his gaze steady, her eyes wide black pools in the dim light. “And I have to come with you.”
“Danger?” Anton was certain that Lord Falk wouldn’t hesitate to harm him if he thought it would help the MageLord kingdom. But… “But I answered Lord Falk’s questions truthfully. Why would he harm me?”
“He already has,” Brenna said. “Mother Northwind-”
“The Healer?”
“She’s more than a Healer,” Brenna said. “She’s a powerful mage in her own right-soft magic, different than what Lord Falk uses. And she
… raped you.”
Anton blinked. “Um… I think I would have noticed.”
“Not that kind of rape,” Brenna said impatiently. “Mind-rape. She went inside your mind and stole your thoughts, stole them so she could give them to Falk. Things you didn’t think to tell Falk, or things he didn’t think to ask about, things that she had no business knowing, things no one should know about another person… she took them all. That’s why you’ve been sick. It’s the aftereffect.”
“I-” I don’t believe it, he intended to stay, but remembering how he had felt when Mother Northwind had touched him, and the strange way that horrible headache had come on afterward, he let the protest die unspoken. “How do you know?” he said instead.
“I heard them talking about it,” Brenna said. She looked down at her feet, cheeks flushed. “Maybe this will prove it to you. She mentioned a certain maid at an inn, twice your age, she said, who.. .” She left the sentence unfinished, and it was Anton’s turn to blush
… but hard on the heels of embarrassment-bad enough Mother Northwind had learned about that very-brief-but-messy encounter, but for Brenna to know, too!-came an emotion Anton had once known intimately when he lived on the streets of Hexton Down but had had little use for since the Professor took him under his wing: rage. Pure, unadulterated anger.
He sat up, the blankets falling to his waist. Brenna glanced at him, then averted her eyes again at once, but he hardly noticed. “I’ll kill her,” he said, and in that moment, he would have done it gladly, with a knife, with a gun, with his bare hands…
“No,” Brenna said. She still wouldn’t look at him. “You couldn’t. She’s protected.” She took a deep breath. “But that’s not all. Falk wants her to do… something else to you. Something worse.”
“Something worse than stealing my memories?” Anton snarled.
“Yes.” And now Brenna did look at him. “Falk wants her to twist your mind. To make you loyal to him, and him alone. To make you his puppet.”
Anton felt sick. “That can be done?”
“It can,” Brenna said. “It is the worst kind of violation, even worse than what that old witch has already done to you. The punishment is death… or would be, if Lord Falk weren’t the one tasked with enforcing the law forbidding such things!
“The worst of it is that after it is done, you would remember it being done and remember everything you knew and thought before it was done-but none of that would make any difference. You would be, now and forever, Falk’s creature, and would obey him to the death in all things.”
“But why?” Anton cried, forgetting to keep his voice down. Brenna shot a frightened look at the door, and he dropped it to an agonized whisper. “Why would he do that to me? What possible use could I be to him?”
“He wants you to fly that airship for him,” Brenna said. “And he thinks you might be useful later…” She shook her head. “It’s hard for me to believe this part, either, but I think Lord Falk is of the Unbound. They’re a… a cult that wants to destroy the Great Barrier. It’s impossible, of course, but I think he thinks he can do it. He wants the MageLords to rule your world as they do this one, as they did centuries ago.”
Anton would have said that was a fool’s hope, knowing what he did of the modern might of steamships and airships, of repeater guns and explosive shells… but he had seen too much already here in Evrenfels of what these MageLords could do, and knew he must have seen very little of what they were truly capable of. And on this whole continent, there were just a few troops and maybe a couple of cannon in Wavehaven, weeks away. The true military might was on the far side of the world, where the Union Republic squabbled with the Concatenation in a hundred ways, battling by surrogate in small, splintered countries or staring each other down along long, heavily fortified borders. If the Anomaly fell and the MageLords emerged, it could be weeks before word of it even got back to the Union Republic’s government, and quite a bit longer before any major military campaign could be launched. Who knew what deviltry the MageLords would have in place by then?
“But I don’t understand,” Anton said. “The Anomaly has stood for centuries. How can he bring it down?”
“I don’t know,” Brenna snapped. “It’s not like methods of destroying it were part of my education.” She paused. “I’m sorry,” she said more softly. “But time is short. You have to escape the manor.. . and you have to take me with you.”
Anton sat cross-legged on the bed, carefully arranging the blankets to preserve his modesty, though it sounded like he had already been stripped naked by Mother Northwind. “I’ll agree I need to escape,” he said. “But why do you?”
“I’m part of this Plan of Lord Falk’s, too,” Brenna said. “I don’t know how… but I don’t want anything to do with it. I can’t imagine I’m a crucial part, but maybe if I’m not here when he needs me, it will jam a tree branch into his spokes.”
“But this is your home. He’s your guardian.” Yes, he is, an inner voice whispered. How do you know this isn’t all some trick of Falk’s?
He mentally thrust the doubts away. He had to trust someone in this bizarre kingdom where wooden puppets walked and worked and a little old woman could rape your mind with a touch of her hand. Brenna was the only candidate.
“He’s my guardian, and I’m his ward. But he’s not my father, and I’m not his daughter,” Brenna said, her voice rising a little with emotion. “I’m his prisoner, and he’s a monster.” She held up the candle so that he could see her face more clearly as she met his eyes squarely. “So be a good fairy-story hero and rescue me.”
“But how?” Anton said. “How do we-”
There was a noise outside the door; very slight, but enough to tell them both that one of the guards had shifted position. Anton could almost picture it, the guard turning, putting his ear to the door…
“Airship,” Brenna whispered. “Fixed. Only hope.” And then she fled for the servants’ door in the corner, closing it silently behind her just as the door into Anton’s room opened.
By that time, of course, he was fast asleep again, though tossing and turning and even mumbling out loud. After a moment he stopped and lay still. A moment after that he heard the bedroom door close.
He sat up and waited to see if Brenna would come back. When she didn’t, he lay back down again. Putting his hands under his head, he stared up into the darkness.
The airship fixed! All well and good… but could he really fly it without the Professor? Could he even get it off the ground? How would they fill it with hot air? Where could they get rock gas for the burner and engine?
And even if they did get it airborne, as his own painful and tragic arrival here had proved, flying the airship wasn’t the problem: landing it was.
But Brenna was right. It was their only hope.
He just wished it was a brighter one.
Though Karl had been into New Cabora many times, as representative of the Crown, he had never been in this part of it, far away from City Hall and the other grand public buildings that were his usual venues for official appearances. At any other time he would have been fascinated by the narrow streets, the four- or five-story buildings leaning over them, the coal-oil streetlamps casting yellow circles of illumination on snow-covered cobblestones, but otherwise doing little to alleviate the gloom, the darkened shops with half-glimpsed goods, mysterious and alien to Karl, displayed in their windows…