There was no light in the living chamber save a cluster of dull rubies that must be the dying embers in the hearth. Zanna, familiar with the placement of the furnishings, crossed over to the table and lit a candle—but what she saw there in the growing light sent her reeling backward with a stifled cry of horror. The once-smooth wood of the tabletop had been gouged and splintered, and its surface, like the floor below, was stained and spattered with rusty smears of blood. “No,” she whispered, stricken. “Oh, dear gods, no!” Surely, after everything that had happened—after all she’d been through—she couldn’t be too late?
Zanna fought the most difficult battle of her life not to run right then. She didn’t want to know, couldn’t bear to see what might await her in the next room. Yet she had to know: she couldn’t risk not knowing. “Don’t be a bloody fool,” she snarled angrily at herself. “Would the Lady Aurian turn tail like a coward and run?” Holding on to the thought of the Mage for courage, she picked up the candle—ignoring the stinging drops of hot wax that spilled across her shaking hand—and walked resolutely into the bedchamber.
He lay across the bed like a broken toy with limbs askew, his body limp and unmoving and his sunken face a ghastly, ashen gray. Blood streaked the green silk coverlet where it had seeped from a bundle of inexpertly wrapped rags that were bound around his right hand. Try as she would, Zanna could see no movement of breath beneath the gory ruin of his shirt. Try as she would, she could not make herself approach him. “Dad,” she tried to whisper, but the word could not struggle past the choking constriction in her throat. She took a hesitant step toward him, and another, but it seemed the very air had turned solid to resist her.
“Dad—oh, Dad!” With no memory of how she had come to be there, she found herself kneeling by the bed and sob bing brokenheartedly into the cool silk of the quilt. Once released, her tears could not be stemmed. Without a thought for her own danger, Zanna abandoned herself to her grief, her body shuddering with great, racking sobs as she mourned the father she had come too late to save.
“What… Who… Zanna?”
But it wasn’t the voice that first penetrated her grief—it was the cold, weak hand that stroked and rumpled her tousled hair. Zanna sprang backward with a yelp of shock, stumbled, and sat down hard on the floor. She looked up to see her father, propped weakly on one elbow, squinting blearily down at her.
“It is Zanna. What are you doing here?” he croaked. “I thought I was dreaming…”
“I thought you were dead!” Zanna cried, still half-afraid to approach him: not daring to believe that her dad was really there, and living, and talking to her.
The ghost of a smile softened the merchant’s haggard face. “No, love, I’m not—though the way I feel, I’d probably be better off.”
“Don’t say that!” Zanna felt a surge of anger. “Damn it, if only you knew …”
“I’m sorry.” He reached out to hug her—and fell back limply, his face blanching bone-white with agony as he moved the injured hand.
Zanna flew to his side, exerting all her strength to haul him up and prop him against the pillows. Sweat sprang out on his brow, and she saw him clench his teeth against crying out—so that, as he imagined, she wouldn’t realize how much the movement hurt him. She hugged him as hard as she dared, so glad to see him that she wanted to weep again—but now that she knew he was still alive, there were priorities more urgent than rejoicing, more important even than finding out just what the Mages had done to him. There was so little time to spare, and hurt as her father was, how the blazes could she manage to get them both out of the Academy?
“Is there any water?” Vannor whispered.
Zanna ran to fetch a goblet and, as an afterthought, added a dash of strong spirits that she found in a flask on the night-stand nearby. She held it for Vannor as he drank, noting with some relief that a little of the color was returning to his face. “Dad,” she told him urgently, “listen carefully. I’ve come to get you out of here—this is our one chance to escape, but we’ll have to hurry. I’ve—” But the words stuck in her throat. How could she tell her dad, who still thought of her as his little girl, that she had killed two men tonight, and they must escape before the bodies were found? “Look,” she temporized, “the Lady Eliseth has gone out into the city, but she could come back any minute, and we have no time to waste. If I helped you, do you think you could manage to walk?”
The old well-remembered gleam lit her father’s eyes. “To get out of this accursed pit of vipers? I’d crawl on my hands—” He swallowed the word as if it pained him. “Well, I’d crawl, anyway,” he finished lamely. “Come on, lass—help me up. And bring that brandy with you, if you can carry it. We might need it before we’re done, if only to keep me going.” He grinned at her as though she were another man, a comrade in arms, and Zanna’s heart swelled with pride. “I do take it,” he added, “that having achieved this much, you have a plan to get us out of here?”
“Blast it!” Zanna struck her forehead with her open palm. “I almost forgot about the bloody key!”
“Zanna!” Vannor’s reproof was a father’s instinctive reaction. “You never learned that kind of language from me!”
“Yes I did, though,” Zanna chuckled—but as her head was buried, at the time, in the depths of the Lady Aurian’s closet, she doubted that he’d hear her. She rummaged quickly through the folded clothing within, until she found a faded old gray robe, such as the Magefolk wore. Pulling it out of the stack, she dipped her hand into the pocket as the Lady Aurian had instructed her, and sighed with relief as her fingers closed around an intricate shape wrought of ice-cold metal. She pulled it out, and there it was, glittering in the candlelight—an intricate key that looked like a twisted filigree of polished silver. Aurian’s key to the archives—and Zanna’s key to freedom.
She thought she would never get her father down the twisting staircase of the tower. To Zanna’s overstrained nerves, the descent seemed to take forever. Even though he was clinging to the banister with his left hand and his daughter supported him with her shoulder beneath his arm on die other side, Vannor still stumbled occasionally, staggering like a drunken man. Time after time, she thought that he would send them both tumbling—and though the curve of the stairs would prevent them falling right to me bottom, she knew his injury would not withstand such a battering, and didn’t want him passing out from the pain. Added to that danger was the ever-present risk of meeting the Lady Eliseth, coming back from wherever she had been.
By the time they reached the bottom of the staircase, Zanna could have wept from a combination of relief and weariness. In addition to helping her father, she was hampered by the basket with its essential food, that she had picked up on the landing where she had left it beside the bodies—one sleeping, one dead—of the guards. It proved useful for carrying the two flasks, one of spirits and the other of water, that she’d dipped from the ewer in her father’s rooms—but even with the wicker handle hooked into the crook of her elbow, the basket was clumsy and awkward to carry, and it effectively tied up the hand that she needed to hold on with, should Vannor fall. Already she was trembling from the strain of supporting her father’s weight—and who knew how far they still had to go?
As they crossed the threshold, the cold night air seemed to revive her—that and the escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the tower itself. Fortunately the journey across the courtyard to the library was not a long one, though it took much longer than it should have, at the slow and halting pace that was all Vannor was able to manage. The moon was almost dark and, in any case, had set long ago, so there was no light to betray the fugitives. No guards appeared to stop them, and no Lady Eliseth, terrifying in her wrath, leapt out of the shadows to demand an accounting of the two escaping Mortals. It was almost too good to be true; but Zanna, shivering in the predawn chill, had a sinking feeling in her bones that she had already stretched her luck about as far as it would go. She could not rely on it forever—or for long.