Now that she had also calmed herself-though she had no desire to smile-she wondered why Brenna had fled. Had she somehow figured out what was planned for her?
She snorted. Hardly. She’s eighteen years old and a handsome young man just literally dropped into her lap… right where she wants him, I’d wager.
And who could blame her for that? But whether she had meant to disrupt Mother Northwind’s plan-or Falk’s-or not, that was what she had done, in as thorough and potentially disastrous fashion as she could have managed short of committing suicide.
She has to be found, Mother Northwind thought with an unfamiliar hint of desperation. Verdsmitt is in the Palace. The Magebane is safely tucked away. I need only get Brenna and the Magebane together. Verdsmitt will strike. The Keys will pass to Brenna… but the Magebane will intercept and destroy them. And since the Barrier is bound up intimately with magic in this kingdom, its power drawn from every hard mage, not only will the Barrier fall, it will drag hard magic down with it.
They’ll all be Commoners then. And we’ll see how they like it, when the Commoners are running the show.
But none of that could happen without Brenna. So once again, it seemed, her needs and Falk’s ran in tandem, however different the outcomes they desired. Karl’s disappearance would be a nuisance for Falk, and he would have to act forcefully against the Commoners- not that he’s at all loath to do so, and I can’t wait until he faces his erstwhile victims without the protection of magic. But Brenna… for his Plan, as for hers, Brenna was essential.
He has to find her, she thought. And only one man knows how to do that, how to locate the Heir.
Tagaza.
He’ll turn to Tagaza for help. Tagaza will locate Brenna. Falk will bring Brenna back to the Palace. I have to be there to spirit her away to where the Magebane waits.
She had anticipated Falk returning to the manor in a day or two, and then traveling back to the Palace with him, Brenna, and Anton, once she had molded the boy from Outside as Falk had asked (or not precisely as he had asked; she had had her own thoughts about the best way to twist the boy’s mind, turning him into her weapon instead of Falk’s tool, but that was all moot now). Falk would not be coming now, of course, but she was confident he would still want her in the Palace
… to interrogate Verdsmitt for him, if nothing else. He’ll send men for me, she thought. Well, it never hurts to be thought omniscient.
Which was why, when four men-at-arms came quick-marching behind their sergeant up the gully to her door, perhaps two hours after dark, they found her sitting on her front step, a flowered carpet bag containing a few clothes and other essentials on her lap. She reached for her cane and got to her feet as the sergeant called the men-at-arms to a rather startled halt.
“Took you long enough,” she said cheerfully. “Well, come on, Sergeant. I’ve grown tired of the cold and the dark. I think it’s time I paid a visit to the Palace, don’t you? Always spring inside the Lesser Barrier, they do say.” And she set off down the gully at such a pace, despite her cane, that the men-at-arms had to resume quick-marching in order to give her a proper escort.
CHAPTER 15
Brenna had never imagined anything like the sensation that hurtling skyward in the airship produced. It felt as if she had left her insides behind on the ground, and at the same time was being pushed downward by some strange force. Magic! she thought, but, no, there was no magic in that entire incredible device: no magic in the enormous blue silk envelope above them, no magic in the rush of cold air as they soared above Falk’s manor. Within seconds she found herself gasping for breath, both from the cold, which had become even more intense, and because she just couldn’t seem to get enough air into her lungs…
“Air… thins… with altitude,” Anton said, panting as though he had run a race. “Good thing we… didn’t go much higher or… might have passed out.” He was peering over the side. “We’ve found… a fast wind… making fifty miles an hour, I think.”
Thin air? Brenna had never imagined such a thing. Surely air was air, and stretched all the way to the stars. But then, Brenna had never imagined being in the sky before, either, except in dreams of flying. And as for the speed… the fastest magecarriage-Falk’s-could do twenty miles an hour (though few of the roads allowed that for more than a few minutes), and she found that terrifyingly fast. And yet, up here, she didn’t feel like they were moving at all.
With a great effort she heaved herself up and peered over the side of the gondola. What she saw made her gasp anew, not from lack of air, but from the sheer shock of seeing her world in a whole new way.
The manor was little more than a dot far below and far behind, almost lost in the glare off of the vast snow-covered plain that slipped steadily beneath them and stretched away as far as she could see… or almost as far: to the west, her view ended in the Great Barrier. It looked even more immense from up here than it did from the ground, a vast wall of fog disappearing into the distance to north and south… but not above.
In fact, she realized with an almost superstitious thrill, she was above the top edge of the Great Barrier. Which meant the distant land she could see over there, identical as far as she could tell to the land stretching out to the east, flat and snow-covered, with only occasional copses of trees, was outside the Barrier, out in the world she had never even wondered about until Anton had arrived so precipitously in her life.
Anton was looking that way, too. “If only… the wind were from the east,” he said despairingly, between heaving gasps of air. “Or we had fuel… we could… fly out.” He looked away from the Barrier, and deeper into Evrenfels. “But we’re… bound northeast. We might make… a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles… if the stove works… what’s… out there?”
Brenna still couldn’t tear her eyes from the Barrier and the immense sweep of land beyond it. A whole world free from the likes of Falk and Mother Northwind, she thought. A world where no one even believes in magic, much less uses it to terrorize and destroy…
She wished for a moment with all her heart that she could fly out of Evrenfels with Anton, leave Falk and his ilk to rot inside the Great Barrier. But they were at the mercy of the wind, and, blowing from the southwest, it was bearing them steadily northeast.
Already they were not quite as high, either, she realized. She could see less of that land beyond the Barrier. Slowly but surely, it was vanishing.
She glanced at Anton. “A scattering of villages,” she said. “And then the Great Lake.”
“A lake?” Anton was peering ahead. “How big?”
“Enormous. Like an inland sea.”
“We could be over the lake when we run out of altitude,” he said, a note of worry in his voice.
Brenna thought what that would mean, descending onto the frozen lake, miles of ice between them and any possibility of shelter or help, and the air suddenly felt even colder.
But there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. They had literally cast their fate to the winds when they launched the airship, and now they could do nothing but wait and see how their cast played out.
Within a few minutes, they were breathing more easily. “We’ll be on the ground in less than half an hour if this doesn’t work,” Anton said, indicating the magecarriage stove. “Guess we’d better find out.” He knelt in the bottom of the gondola, gripped the bellows attached to the side of the stove’s round belly, and began to pump.
Smoke belched from the chimney and poured up into the gondola. The stove began to roar. Anton, sweat starting on his face even in the cold, kept working the bellows. After a few minutes, the stove began to glow a dull red. Brenna could feel the heat radiating from it where she stood, and only hoped enough was going into the envelope to make a difference.