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.
Not bad for a few days’ work, he thought. Not bad at all.
Prince Karl had been the first to retire, as protocol demanded, and Falk had promised to come to his quarters later to provide him with a full briefing of everything that had happened in his absence. It doesn’t matter, he told himself again. It costs nothing to keep him thinking he’s really the Heir for the short time he has left, and if it keeps him placated, it’s worth the effort.
However humiliating it felt.
The other Councillors had left one by one after Karl’s departure, most congratulating Falk on his success in finding the Prince and his ward, and hoping that Brenna would soon be up to social calls so that they could renew her acquaintance. Falk was polite but noncommittal on that point.
Finally, only Mother Northwind was left, ostensibly remaining behind to ease the pain of a strained shoulder “suffered pulling poor Tagaza from the Spellchamber,” Falk said, which earned him, he hoped, at least a couple of sympathy points from the one or two Councillors who had actually liked Tagaza.
Mother Northwind had gotten up from her chair while he was saying his farewells, and was staring into the fire when he returned. He studied her, wondering what her reaction would be to the evening’s events. She had obviously known nothing about either Brenna or Karl being found, for all her vaunted connections among the Commoners. If their relationship were the chess game it sometimes felt like, he had just stolen a piece.
But when she turned to face him, she was smiling. “Well, my lord. That was a pleasant surprise, without a doubt. I’d made up my mind the whole lot of them was gone for good: Brenna, the Prince, and Anton. However did you find them?”