“I’m sorry, Aunt Carlas.”
“Teressa, your father would never have permitted that scoundrel to run tame here, and it’s time you faced the truth.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow, Aunt Carlas. Here, drink this healing tea.”
Carlas swallowed the tea and then sank back onto the bed, her hands plucking at the silken sheets. Teressa had had her aunt brought up to the royal guest suite, even though her own apartments were nearby, but in those everything had been packed up for her planned return to Rhismordith lands the next day. Tears leaked from Aunt Carlas’s eyes. “If Fortian were alive, he never would have been permitted . . .”
Teressa sighed, as her aunt began all over again.
At last, the exhausted woman fell asleep, and Teressa left. She half expected Tyron or Garian to find her and report on what they’d done to right things, but curiously enough, neither was in sight as she crossed from the guest suite through the public rooms and to her own apartments. She even took the long way, in case there was a messenger or they were lingering somewhere to speak to her.
Instead, when she reached her main parlor, all she found was Hawk, sitting in the arm char.
She stared at him in surprise.
“Well?” He raised his hands. “I’ll quote: ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ It seems to be later.”
Teressa stood in the middle of her parlor, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. “How could you do that to my aunt?”
Hawk did not pretend not to understand, nor did he try to deny it. “Was not that drivel about cowardly blackbirds and traitors a challenge? A stupid one?”
“It was stupid,” Teressa said. “It was mean and stupid. But you’re smart enough to have said a line—a word, even—and got everyone past it. Now I have to deal with the gossip, the apologies, and the lies, to keep some semblance of what my mother used to call social balance.”
“Your old fool of an aunt didn’t get hurt.” Hawk’s smile twisted. “But she won’t cross me again.”
“You must be dreaming if you think dumping her over the side of the barge solves anything,” Teressa said, her voice strained.
He grinned. “It made her ridiculous. Next time she tries to get them to gang up against me, they’ll remember that fish flopping around in her hair.”
Teressa felt a pang behind her forehead.
Gang
up
. He did have a point, and his own perspective made him sound reasonable.
But the truth was this: despite his reasons and Aunt Carlas’s reasons, a line was dividing Teressa’s court right down the middle. Instead of working with her to negotiate, compromise, or work toward understanding, Hawk saw the division and laughed at it, because he didn’t care.
He
doesn’t care, because he has no respect for any of my people.
She pressed her palms against her forehead, sliding the heels over her eyes. “Hawk, what do you really want here?”
“You,” he said, roughly.
So simple, and she wanted him back, oh yes. She knew it in how that single word, and his black, steady gaze, sent sheets of fire right down to her toes.
So she did not look back at him, or touch him. Instead, she said, still with her hands pressed to her eyes, “What if I choose to follow my ancestor?
Our
ancestor, Queen Rhis. Who never chose a king, and refused to set up a second throne beside hers.”
Hawk was silent for a long time, and then said, “I thought I proved myself to you when I brought Idres. I’ve never done that for anyone else. Ever.”
Teressa dropped her hands. “Don’t you see? A good queen—a good king—goes on proving themselves for the rest of their lives. Or they end up despots.”
“A heartening philosophy that I’m sure your father comforted you with when you were little and full of ideals. And look how far it got him.”
Now anger shot through her, bright and scorching as lightning. She whispered, “How
dare
you.” She drew in a sick, shuddering breath, and then added nastily, “Just as far as it got your family, with their philosophy of selfish greed.”
Hawk rose to his feet, then prowled to the window and back. He kept his distance from her, his gaze out the windows, his hands on his narrow hips.
After a short pause he glanced over his shoulder, his old, derisive smile back. “True. My entire family managed to get rid of one another in an excess of ambition and greed, so no, there was no father to comfort me with any philosophy after I was . . . what, two? But mine did leave some writings, the gist of which was ‘Watch your back.’ I’ve taken that one to heart.” He turned to face her.
Teressa looked away, then forced herself to face him.
“So what now?” he asked, still with that smile, but his dark gaze was watchful. “A dramatic reconciliation? Are we fighting?”
Teressa gripped her elbows tightly in each hand. “I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t have the experience. I think I need to get the experience. And so I can’t. I won’t. Decide anything. Until then.” She paused, but further words would not come, and so the pause lengthened into silence.
“Right,” he said at last. And after another silence, even more painful than the first one, “Fare well.”
He walked out.
She stood where she was, teeth gritted. The pain would come later, oh, she knew that much. But she also knew that hearts did not break, they went right on beating, for the rest of one’s life. She knew that the kingdom’s work was waiting right outside her door, and that pretty soon she would be hungry, and tired, and life would gradually revert to normal, and she’d go to the Tamsal ball tomorrow and smile and dance and act as if nothing was wrong, and that hearts. Do. Not. Break.
The transfer spell was sudden and wrenching.
Wren had counted on that much. You don’t stick people in dark cells and leave them there in order to see to their comfort.
She’d eaten her food, munching the apple right down to the core, then curled up to sleep, figuring that whatever came next would be best faced with some rest behind her.
She landed, staggering. Light glared into her eyes.
The blurry silhouette resolved into Andreus, seated in a high-backed chair. He looked just as she remembered him, only a little older. His face was lined across the forehead and at the sides of his mouth, and silver stippled his yellow hair.
His eyes were very angry.
“We’ve met before,” he said. “It seems I underestimated you not once, but a couple of times.”
Keep
him
talking
, she thought.
“The first time, I think you mixed me up with Idres Rhiscarlan,” she said.
“I remember that. But it was not she who sprang the Rhisadel brat from Edrann.”
“No, I rescued Tess. Teressa, I mean,” Wren said.
With
some
help
,
but you’re not going to make them your next gargoyles.
Andreus sat back in his chair. At his side was a table, with a wine decanter and a goblet. Wren remembered the others talking about his drinking; the smell of stale wine was heavy on the air.
There were no other chairs.
He raised the goblet in salute. “What spell did you employ for that, by the way?”
“I didn’t,” Wren said. “That is, until the transfer. But I was a dog, and your people overlooked me.”
Did the floor just tremble slightly? Wren figured it must be thirst making her light-headed.
“So there was some truth in those rumors!”
“Not a rumor,” Wren said. “I really was a dog.”
“I wondered why Hawk insisted on employing the canine transformation for getting rid of Halfrid’s fool of an heir, a few years back,” Andreus went on. “Now I see the significance of the gesture.”
When Wren remembered Tyron kept sick and miserable in a cage that no real dog should ever suffer, much less a human, she burned with anger.
“You were not a dog when you brought down my mountains,” he said. His voice was still reflective, but that angry gaze scared her, and she did not hide her start of surprise. “Oh, I found out. You were seen, you and that fool of a Shaltar boy. What did you take
him
along for? To poke trees with a sword?”
“Connor would never poke a sword into a tree,” she muttered.
Connor’s astonishing ability to communicate with trees and other living things in the mountains had aided them at the end of the war. Connor, and not Wren, had tapped the power to overcome the ancient spells forcing those mountains to distort the land. Wren had helped a little.
But Wren was not about to betray Connor. So she shook her head.
Andreus looked disgusted. He seemed to realize that she was not going to answer, so he leaned over to pour more wine. The floor trembled again, accompanied by a low rumble of stone shifting. He looked around, frowning as if he wasn’t sure if the unsteadiness was him or the castle. Then he went on. “What did you possibly think you could accomplish by interfering with me here? You escaped my net earlier, and I was willing enough to let that be that.”
“Because you had worse plans for some kingdoms that never did you any harm,” she retorted. “I saw what you did to Senna Lirwan, when you were king. And I was not about to let you do that all over again.”
“Then you should have come to me with a better idea,” he replied. “That experiment, I admit, did not work. I wasn’t going to repeat it.” He set his goblet down with a clang. “As it is, you are going to repair the damage you did, by helping me. To be precise, you are going with me to Sveran Djur and you will employ whatever that magic was to bring down the emperor’s fortress on Ice Mountain.”
“No, I am not.”
“Oh, yes you are,” he replied. “Or you won’t just be watching every single one of my pet sorcerers fall off the wall and shatter, it will be your hand doing it. And making you do it will be quite entertaining. As will whatever retribution I decide to extract for your interference on behalf of fools who have never heard of you. But for now, that much magic means extra exertion. Go ahead. Try your magic.” He smiled in anticipation.
Wren shook her head, and then realized nothing was going to happen until she made some sort of effort, so she whispered, attempting to shape a harmless little illusion—and a horrible sensation gripped her, squeezing her breath right out of her.
She gasped, nearly falling down.
Andreus laughed. “The stronger the spell, the stronger the reaction. So I don’t have to trouble myself warding you whenever I need you: I will control when, and what, sort of magic you may perform.”
It was then that the building gave a long, grinding sort of groan. Wren’s heart thumped against her ribs.
Andreus looked around, angry and perplexed. “I think,” he said, “I had better investigate that. You will have to wait. But you may sit there in the dark and think about what I said.”
He murmured, signed, snapped his fingers—and Wren slammed back into the lightless cell.
A shadow flickered at the edge of Connor’s vision.
He paused in toiling up the mountainside, wiped his sleeve across his face, and looked around. He found nothing but very old, gnarled trees, and a thick undergrowth of flowering shrubs.
Another flicker.
He glanced upward, to see two black shapes against the sky.
The daws were back.
There was nothing he could do about them. Either they were friends or spies.
Biddiepeepers
—Wren’s favorite nickname for spies. Laughter and anguish twisted inside him when he remembered all Wren’s enthusiastic insults for villains.
Connor thrust his staff into the ground and launched up the narrow trail again, pausing only to help himself from occasional trickles of water dripping down rocks from streams higher on the mountainside.
When he got hungry, he pulled out the hefty sandwich Patka had made for him, unwrapped the cloth, and ate the sandwich as he worked his way up the steep trail. Occasional turns in the narrow path afforded him better and better views out to sea. The waters were empty, which was a little reassuring. The
Piper
had to be out there somewhere, but Wren’s spell still held.
For a long time, there were no sounds but his breathing, the trickle of water through the lush greenery, and the crunch of dirt and leaves under his boots. Overhead the daws still flew, back and forth, up and down. Occasionally he heard other birds, or glimpsed bright shapes darting from shrubs and winging skyward.
Up, up. Just past noon Connor paused for the first time. He felt different, somehow. The air was different, everything felt different. Perhaps he could dare a brush with the mountain’s life forms.
He spotted a huge, twisted tree, and stepped over its massive roots. He resisted the impulse to sit down. He had learned the danger of communicating like this: time passed so differently for trees that what had seemed a short time for him had once stretched into two weeks, and only the tree itself had saved his life.
So he stood on one foot, hoping that his own body would pull him back if his mind could not, then brushed his fingers over the tree, listening far down, down in the distant ground, on that plane that was impossible to describe in words.
The living things whose minds he found there did not use words. Their awareness was powerful, steady, and shaped not for eyes and mouths and ears, but for pressure, for touch, for the tremendous tidal shifts caused by the moons in the sky, and far, far distant, the beneficent pull of the sun.
Connor fought to keep his own awareness from spreading out and sinking down like water after a rain. He struggled to retain the limitations of identity—his sense of ‘I’—as he shifted his attention around. Below, the quiescent pool of hot lava, slowly cooling, but still exerting a gentle pressure upward through the immense weight of rock . . . above, ah, the distortion of magic, forcing root and rock into twisted forms, now with shoots of green running through, causing massive walls to shift and settle. Longface and the others were at work there!
When Connor attempted to explore farther his awareness began once again, like tree roots in good soil.
He forced his eyes to open. Awareness returned to his body with an inward jerk that sent him staggering back to sit down hard on a huge, rough tree root. He winced, massaging his leg, which tingled; around him, the shadows had shifted.