“Your Highness…”
“Don’t call me that,” Karl snapped, surprised by his own vehemence. But he didn’t deserve the title, had never deserved the title. He was not the Heir. He wasn’t even Mageborn. He was Commoner: Commoner, and something more.
Magebane.
“Forget I’m the Prince,” he said. “Forget you are a guardsman. Forget Falk. I’m Karl. You’re Teran. I’ve always counted you as my friend. I hope you have counted me as yours.”
Teran licked his lips, but his voice was steady as he said, “I have… Karl.”
“Then I ask you, as a friend, not to tell Falk what you just saw me do.” Karl nodded at the Lesser Barrier. “And to remember our friendship when next Falk gives you orders.”
Teran licked his lips again. “But, Your Highness… Karl… my mother, my sister…”
Karl smiled. “I am still the Prince. Falk is not in the Palace. Do you know where in the enclave they are being held?”
Teran nodded.
“If I order them freed from the house, can you get them out through the Barrier to somewhere safe, somewhere Falk can’t find them?”
Teran nodded again.
“Consider it done.” Karl held out his hand. “Now, old friend… will you keep my secrets? Will you serve me as loyally as I’ve already thought you were?”
Teran looked at the hand for a long moment, then turned to look toward the roofs of the Mageborn enclave, just visible through the trees past the bridge. He gazed in that direction for a long moment, then snapped his eyes back to Karl, grabbed his hand, and shook it. “I will, old friend. And beg your forgiveness that I have ever done anything else.”
Karl clapped him on the shoulder. “Then let’s go back to the Palace. I have orders to give.”
He looked back at the city himself one last time. And then, he thought, I have a decision to make.
CHAPTER 26
For most of three days Falk’s magecarriage rolled northward, and Brenna sat in silence within it. Her guard was obviously under orders not to talk to her, and when they stopped along the way for meals, at first at towns, then, as they rolled into the northern forest, at the Royal way stations built at regular intervals, Falk did not speak to her, either. The driver, Robinton, would give her a “Good morning, miss,” and even a “Good night,” but that was the most conversation she had over the course of the journey.
The first night they spent in an inn in Berriton, the largest town in the Kingdom outside New Cabora, where the Colleges of Mages and Healers seemed to frown at each other on opposite banks of the North Evrenfels River. In the morning they were joined in the inn common room by a thin, sallow-faced mage, who climbed into the cabin of the magecarriage with her and the guard. He gave Brenna an appraising look, as though she were an unusual species of beetle, then pulled the hood of his coat around his head and promptly fell asleep.
Left with nothing else to do, Brenna stared out the window.
She had never realized, before flying across much of it west to east and now riding through it from north to south, how truly huge the Kingdom of Evrenfels was.
Huge-and underpopulated. The towns, except for New Cabora and Berriton, were very small. Each would announce its presence by the sudden appearance of cultivated fields instead of virgin prairie, and the occasional farmhouse, which ran from the snug to the ramshackle to, rather frequently, nothing more than rude sod huts. Brenna tried to imagine living for a winter in a house made of nothing but dirt, and shuddered. Those would be Commoners, of course, and they were typically only tenants of a Mageborn landlord, whose much bigger house of stone or wood would soon enough roll by. South of Berriton they had passed through Lord Athol’s land, and Brenna, spotting his manor in the distance, had seen that it rivaled Falk’s in size. I wonder if he’s got a singing fountain, too, she thought bitterly, as, with the multiple chimneys of the manor visible in the distance, they passed a sod hut where an old woman struggled through the snow carrying a load of firewood on her back.
On the second day, well north of Berriton, they left all signs of humanity behind except for the road and the Royal shelters. Flat, tall-grass prairie gave way to rolling hills covered with naked aspen, poplar, and birch; gradually, dark spruce became more abundant; and finally there was only black evergreen forest all around, stretching to the horizon, punctuated by the white sheets of frozen lakes that were visible whenever they topped a rise high enough to give a view over the treetops. Then they would plunge back into the forest again, and into cold, gray gloom.
On the second night, as Brenna climbed wearily down from the carriage, glad to stretch her legs, she noticed something. About noon the cold blue skies had given way to gray cloud; and now, as she gazed around her, she saw that the shelter they were to spend the night in, a large cabin made of unpeeled logs, stood on a bit of a hill; and that to the north, the cloud cover glowed a fitful red, waxing and waning in a slow, erratic cycle.
Brenna didn’t have to ask what it was. There could be only one thing this far north that could give the clouds that bloody tint: the Cauldron. If not for the cloud, she would surely be able to see the Barrier Range, and despite everything, she felt a pang of sorrow that it was hidden. She had always wanted to see mountains.
Brenna spent a restless night, that red glow finding its way into her dreams even through the sealed shutters. In the morning they were on their way again before any light crept through the lowering clouds, which now hung so close overhead that the glow of the Cauldron could no longer be seen. Robinton gave those clouds a worried look, and made certain that the coal furnace on the back of the carriage, which both heated the interior and provided energy for the spell that drove the carriage, was fully stoked-and the big coal bin below it packed to the brim-from the Royal shelter’s stores.
The terrain changed again, from flat forest to rocky hills and sudden cliffs, and even more lakes. The road wound and dipped and rose again, rounding vast sheets of ice, running alongside rivers, climbing hills, plunging into dark valleys. About noon it began to snow, at first lightly, but more and more heavily as they drove.
Brenna began to see bright flashes of blue light reflected off the snow outside. “Lightning?” she said out loud.
The cadaverous mage they had collected in Berriton, whose name she had gathered was Anniska, grunted. “Lord Falk clearing the way,” he said.
Brenna glanced over her shoulder at the wall, covered in plush red velvet, from which the carriage’s welcome warmth radiated. “Will the coal last?”
Anniska laughed. “I doubt he’s drawn on it at all. I know you can’t feel it, but we can.” He inclined his head at the guard, who nodded back.
“Feel what?” Brenna was just glad to finally have someone who would talk to her.
“The Cauldron,” Anniska said. “We’re close enough to draw on it directly. We can save our coal for the return trip.”
“Oh.” Brenna felt a chill that the warm wall behind her could do nothing to lift, and hoped she would be making that trip with them.
The snow slowed their travel, so that it had grown dark again by the time they reached the last shelter; dark, but not as dark as it would have been anywhere else, because now even the snow could not hide the glow of the Cauldron. When Brenna got out, the whole sky was red, a sullen, sulky red that flickered and flowed disturbingly.
She looked north. The road climbed, zigzagging, up a steep ridge. At its crest, the spruce trees were black cutouts against the bloody glow.
Inside the shelter, the driver and guard busied themselves with making food. Falk and Anniska sat talking together in low voices in one corner of the high-ceilinged main room, in chairs made of branches lashed together, upholstered in deerskin. Brenna sat in another near the huge fireplace, staring at the flames. No one made any move to prepare sleeping quarters. Instead, they waited.