Teran nodded. “Yes, Your Highness.” He gave a small grin. “Karl.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve had word. My sister and mother are safe. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Teran.” Karl returned the grin. “And I’m glad I can trust you again.”
“I’m glad you can trust me again, too,” Teran said. “I’ll have Brenna at the boathouse within ten minutes.”
Karl watched Teran go down the corridor. When his bodyguard was out of sight around the corner, he stepped out and went the other way, down the main stairs to the grand entrance hall of the Palace, down the front steps, through the ornamental garden. He waited by the boathouse, standing next to the same tethered rowboat he’d now used twice, and staring out over the water.
Five minutes later, Teran said behind him, “Your Highness?”
Karl turned. Brenna stood beside Teran, her face pale, her dark eyes bloodshot and deeply shadowed. “Your Highness,” she said dully. “How may I serve you?”
Karl glanced at Teran. “Brenna and I are going to row across the lake. Would you be so good as to meet us on the far side, at the usual place?”
“Of course, Your Highness,” said Teran. As Karl stepped down into the rowboat and turned to help Brenna down with him, Teran started walking along the shore toward the bridge.
Karl put his back to the oars, but when they were far enough from the shore so he felt certain they could not be overheard, he shipped them and let the boat drift. “Your Highness,” Brenna said cautiously. “To what do I owe the-”
“Mother Northwind,” Karl said in a soft voice, “has recently spoken to me. Has she also spoken to you?”
Brenna went absolutely still, so still he thought she had stopped breathing. Then she said, “She has.”
“And what did she tell you?”
Again that absolute stillness. “We spoke of… my childhood,” Brenna said at last. “Her cottage is not far from Lord Falk’s manor, where I grew up.”
It seemed that if they were to break out of this careful courtly dance of noncommittal conversation, he would have to do it. “I see,” he said. “And did she tell you the truth of your childhood… that you are the true Heir of King Kravon, not I?”
Another moment of stillness, then, “Your Highness, I-”
“I’m not Your Highness,” Karl snapped. “You’re mine. Now listen, we can drift here only a few more minutes. I know what Falk had planned for you, and that Mother Northwind thwarted it. But now I must know… do you know what she has planned for you? Do you know what she has planned for us?” He paused, took his own deep breath, and asked the most important question of all. “Do you know who-what-I am. .. what Mother Northwind, if she speaks truth, has made me?”
Brenna licked her lips. “Your Highness-”
“I told you, I’m a Commoner.” And as he said that, out loud for the first time, he suddenly felt a sense of relief. Yes, he thought, I am. And glad of it!
“Your… Karl. She said that she had learned how to create a Magebane. Are you saying… you are it? Him?”
“So she has told me. And I must believe it, having twice seen magic… bounce… off of my person and rebound on the mage who cast it.”
Brenna leaned forward suddenly and took his hands. “Then do it!” she said fiercely. “Do it now! Break the Keys! Now, at a time of our choosing, not Mother Northwind’s!”
Karl felt a surge of hope, then, and relief that Brenna did not mean to hang onto the Kingdom whose rule she seemed to want no more than he did. He squeezed her hands, waiting for something to happen. ..
… but nothing did, except that his hands grew warm. “I don’t know how,” he said at last. “Mother Northwind hasn’t told me everything… she’s closemouthed, that one.”
“She’s a witch,” Brenna snarled. “A horrible hag who talks about setting the Commoners free but who is every bit as willing as Falk or any other MageLord to use and discard them as it suits her purposes.” She pulled her hands free-Karl felt a strange pang of regret as she did so-and sat back again. “But she has us where she wants us. We both want the MageLords cast down-or at least I do-”
“So do I,” Karl said.
“-but she has not told us everything we need to know to make it happen. Which means we must await her pleasure.” She suddenly clenched her fists and banged them hard against her knees. “I hate her!” she burst out. “As much as I hate Lord Falk.”
Karl, glancing over his shoulder, saw that Teran had almost reached their intended landing spot. He turned back to Brenna. “Our conversation is almost over,” he said urgently. “What do we do?”
“What can we do, but wait to be told what to do by Mother Northwind?” Brenna squeezed her eyes shut. “If she survives to tell us.”
Karl stared at her. “What?”
She opened her eyes, and he was struck by how very brown they were, a shining brown like polished wood. “I have told Falk that she has been working at cross-purposes to him. I think he must even now be confronting her in the Palace.”
“Why?” Karl cried. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I hate her!” Brenna screamed at him, and then closed her eyes and hung her head. “And I let my hatred get the better of my reason.” Her voice dropped so low he could hardly hear it. “I may have ruined everything. Handed the Kingdom to Falk, and signed my own death warrant. If he gets the better of Mother Northwind-”
And at that moment, as perfectly timed as if her line had been a cue in a Verdsmitt play, blue light flashed behind two of the windows at the eastern end of the Palace, and those windows exploded outward with a blast that echoed around the Lesser Barrier. An instant later the limestone facade covering the walls around those windows slid away like snow falling in an avalanche, peeling more of the facade with it as it fell, stripping one whole end of the palace down to bare wood. The rumbling of the facade’s fall chased the echoes of the original blast around the Palace grounds, and dust rose up to obscure the gaping holes where the windows of Mother Northwind’s rooms had been an instant before.
The blast seemed to have frightened every living thing in the Palace grounds into silence. Karl had been looking at the Palace already; Brenna had flinched, then spun around as the facade crumbled. Now she turned back to him. “He did it!” she gasped. “Falk has killed Mother Northwind!”
“And that means you’re next!” Karl shot a look over his shoulder. Teran was gesturing frantically to them to get to shore. Karl grabbed the oars, gave a sharp tug with his left and backwatered with the right, and then began rowing as if in a race.
“Where are we going?” Brenna cried.
“Out of here,” Karl panted. “Before Falk realizes you’re gone and comes after you, too.”
“But the Barrier-”
Karl said nothing, but kept rowing. Moments later he was floating just offshore from where Teran was. “Get in,” he said.
“What?” Teran said. “No… there’s been another attack… you’ve got to…”
“It wasn’t aimed at me,” Karl said. “It was aimed at Mother Northwind.”
Teran’s eyes widened. “Falk?”
“Who else? Now get in!”
Teran splashed off the shore and into the water, wading out and tumbling over the gunwale, almost upsetting the boat. Brenna fastidiously pulled her feet away as he splashed mud and water across the bottom boards.
The light was fading fast. Karl could hear shouting from the direction of the Palace, and glimpsed guards dashing through the pools of magelight, no doubt fearing some additional attack. Down by the boathouse, men were scrambling into another of the rowboats. They’ve seen us, Karl thought. Was that Falk himself, emerging through the massive front doors? Karl couldn’t be sure in the uncertain light.
Karl drove the boat as far in among the reeds as he could. Teran jumped out and pulled it up farther, then held out his hand to help Karl and Brenna out of it. Karl took Brenna’s hand, and together they staggered through the mud and pushed through the screen of bushes toward the shimmer of the Lesser Barrier and the drifted snow behind it. Teran hung back, watching the Palace. “That boat’s coming fast.”