Shadow's Edge (nat-2) (23 page)

Y
ou want us to flee, and you won’t say why? Is that supposed to impress me?” Lord Vass asked.

Three hundred soldiers had gathered in the dark courtyard, the moon a sliver in a night sky aflame with stars. Three hundred soldiers dressed for battle, bundled against the fierce cold that had already descended on these mountains, though summer’s heat had barely lost its edge in Cenaria City. Three hundred soldiers and their commander—who wasn’t Solon. Three hundred men who were watching the exchange between Solon and Lehros Vass.

“I admit,” Solon said quietly, “that it sounds weak. But I only ask for a day. We leave for one day, and then we come back. If I’m wrong, it’s not like there are any looters who will have taken anything. We’re the only people in these godforsaken mountains aside from the highlanders, and they haven’t raided the wall in three years.”

“It’s abandoning our post,” the young lord said. “We’re sworn to hold this wall.”

“We have no post,” Solon snapped. “We have no king, we have no lord. We have three hundred men and an occupied country. Our oaths were to men now dead. Our duty is to keep these men alive so they can fight when we have a chance. This isn’t the kind of war where we gloriously charge the enemy lines with our swords waving.”

Lord Vass was young enough that he flushed with anger and embarrassment. Of course, that was exactly the kind of war he had in mind, and it had been a mistake to belittle it. How long had it been since Solon had lost those illusions of war?

The men weren’t moving a muscle, but they all saw the anger on Lord Vass’s face, the red made redder in the flickering torchlight.

“If you would have us leave, I demand to know why,” Lord Vass said.

“A contingent of Khalidoran elites known as the Soulsworn is coming. They’re bringing the Khalidoran goddess Khali to Cenaria. They’ll attack the wall at the wytching hour.”

“And you want to leave?” Vass asked, incredulous. “Do you know what it will mean when we capture the Khalidoran’s goddess? It will destroy them. It will give our countrymen hope. We’ll be heroes. This is the place to stop them. We have the walls, the traps, the men. This is our chance. This is just what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Son, this goddess …” Solon gritted his teeth. “We’re not talking about capturing a statue. I think she’s real.”

Lehros Vass looked at Solon, first incredulous, then indulgent. “If you need to run away, you go ahead. You know where the road is.” He chuckled, giddy with his own grandeur. “Of course, I can’t let you go until you give me my gold back.”

If Solon told him where his gold was now, Vass would have his men go get it immediately. Dorian would be left helpless.

“To hell with you,” Solon said. “And to hell with me too. We’ll die together.”

Sister Ariel Wyant sat five paces from the first magical boundary that separated the Iaosian Forest from the oak grove. For the past six days, she’d had her eye on what appeared to be a plaque twenty feet inside the forest. It didn’t look like it had been there long: undergrowth hadn’t covered it yet.

Her first hope in all her examinations of the ward had been that Ezra had made the ward hundreds of years ago. With another magus, she would have expected the weaves to disintegrate after so much time. Weaves always disintegrated. But with Ezra
always
didn’t mean always. The proof shimmered just beyond mundane sight before her.

The second hope was that, given Ezra’s power and the power of the other magi of his era, he would be defending himself against opponents far more powerful than any alive today. Sister Ariel didn’t have the arrogance to think herself equal to those Ezra would have expected. She could only hope that her light touches against the weaves would be beneath notice. Termites were tiny, but they’d destroyed many a mighty house.

So for six days, she’d examined and reexamined the weaves that divided the Iaosian Forest from the oak grove. It was as beautiful as a black widow’s web. There were traps both large and small. There were weaves that were meant to tear apart with the faintest touch, weaves that were meant to be unraveled, weaves that couldn’t be broken with double Ariel’s strength. And each had a trap.

Ariel could guess exactly what Sister Jessie had done. She’d probably tried to conceal her Talent. For the first day, it looked like a perfect strategy. It was a strategy that would have worked, had Ezra been simple. Sister Jessie was weak enough that she could compress her Talent and then shield it. That would make her Talent invisible to other Sisters or to male Seers—now there was a strange thought, how many times had Talented women used exactly that strategy to hide themselves or their talented daughers from Sisters who came to recruit for the Chantry? Ariel shook her head. It wasn’t time to get distracted. The problem was that Ezra’s weaves didn’t just register Talent. As nearly as Ariel could tell—and she had to guess because of the complexity and delicacy of the weaves—Ezra’s weaves detected mages’ bodies.

Everyone knew that mages were different from regular people, but not even Healers today understood exactly how magic changed a mage’s flesh. That it did so was undeniable. Mages aged differently, sometimes more slowly the more Talented they were, but sometimes not. Regardless, their very flesh was altered in subtle ways by their constant interactions with magic. Apparently Ezra knew exactly what those ways were. Sister Ariel should have guessed that. Among no few other achievements, he had been a Sa’salar, a Lord of Healing. He had created the Dark Hunter—created a living being!

Oh, Sister Jessie, did you walk right through this wall of magic? Did you really think yourself cleverer than Ezra himself? How many mages’ bones litter this damned forest?

She was letting her mind get off the problem at hand. She was still alive. She had made it past the first barrier. Now she needed to do something with that accomplishment. She needed to get that damned gold plaque. It was stuck, twenty feet away, just at the top of a small hillock. It was so close, and yet she had no hope of getting it. Her examination of Ezra’s traps had left her convinced of it. It would take her years to dismantle his traps. Years, if ever. Even if she had the time, she would never be sure that she hadn’t missed something. She could never be sure how many other layers of protection were left. Ezra might have spun this ward in a few days. He might have intended that this layer be penetrated by weak mages. Sister Ariel could spend her whole life dismantling traps and never uncover Ezra’s real secrets.

If she’d come here as a younger woman, she might have thought it a worthy use of her life. But as a younger woman, she’d been much more idealistic. She’d believed in the Chantry with the kind of foolish faith that most people reserve for their religion. If Ezra did possess devastatingly powerful artifacts, would Ariel really want to deliver those to the Speaker? Would she trust Istariel with something that would multiply her power ten times?

Stop it. Ariel, you’re letting your mind wander again.

She looked at the plaque. Then she started laughing. It was so simple. She stood and started walking back to the village.

She returned an hour later with a full stomach and a rope. Master Zoralat had been kind enough to show her how to make and throw a lasso. For the last two days she’d wondered how to get the plaque—and for two days she’d thought of only magical means. Stupid stupid stupid.

The next several hours proved her clumsy as well. How many times in her life had she sneered at the men who worked the Chantry’s stables? This was the kind of exercise every Sister should be exposed to—in front of all the stable hands in the Chantry.

The day ended and she still hadn’t lassoed the plaque. She did her cursing in the forest and went home. The next day she returned, her arm and shoulder aching. It took her another three hours, during which she cursed herself, cursed the rope, cursed Ezra, cursed her lack of exercise, and just cursed—but all silently.

When the lasso finally dropped around the plaque, she could swear the gold glowed briefly. She wanted to extend her senses to see what had just happened, but it was too far away. She decided there was nothing to do but pull the damned thing in.

At first, the plaque wouldn’t move. It was somehow stuck. Then, as Ariel pulled, part of the hillock shifted and rolled over, freeing the plaque. It wasn’t a hillock; it was Sister Jessie’s body. She’d been dead for weeks. Mold grew over her bright robes, obscuring the bloodstains. It looked like a claw had torn away half of her head in a single terrible swipe. Since her death, no animals had disturbed her body: there were no bears or coyotes or ravens or other carrion feeders in Ezra’s Wood, but the worms were well into their work.

Sister Ariel looked away, allowing herself a moment to be a woman confronting an acquaintance’s mutilated body. She breathed slowly, glad that Jessie’s body was as far away as it was. She’d been this close for days, and she’d never even smelled decay. Was that a trick of the wind, or magic?

The plaque had been clutched in Sister Jessie’s hands.

Sister Ariel carefully walled up all the emotions she felt and set them aside. She would examine them later, allow herself tears if tears must come. For now, she might be in danger. She looked at the plaque. It was too far away to tell what symbols if any were on its surface, but there was something about it that chilled her to the bone.

The square plaque had hooks embedded in the rope. They looked as if they had formed when the lasso had landed to help her pull it out.

She pulled the plaque close to the ward but kept it on the far side. There was no telling what pulling something that might be magical through the barrier would do. The script was Gamitic, but Ariel found she remembered it surprisingly well.

“If this is the fourth day, take your time. If it’s the seventh, pull this through the ward now,” the script said.

The runes went on, but Ariel stopped and scowled. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing someone would usually write on a plaque. She wondered to whom the words could possibly have been addressed. Perhaps this plaque had been part of some ancient test? A rite of passage for mages? How had Sister Jessie interpreted it? Why had she thought it was so important?

She read on: “Days at the ward, Horse Face. You’re a lousy throw, by the way.”

Ariel dropped the rope from nerveless fingers. She’d been called Horse Face when she was a tyro. She tried to translate the words another way, but the Gamitic runes made it clear that it was a personal name, a specific insult, not generic.

Looking at the way the plaque had caught on the rope now, she was suddenly sure that it had
grabbed
the rope. As if it was sentient. The hooks weren’t equally placed on opposite sides of the plaque. Instead, it was as if they had grown in response to the lasso’s touch.

The plaque glowed and Sister Ariel stumbled backward in fright.

It was a mistake. Her foot caught in a loop of the rope and as she fell, she yanked the plaque through the ward.

She scrambled to her feet as quickly as her fat limbs would lift her. The plaque was no longer glowing. She picked it up.

“Prophecy,” it said, the Gamitic runes dissolving into common as she touched the plaque. “Not sentience.”

She swallowed, not sure she believed it. The script continued to appear before her, as if written by an invisible quill. “If this is the seventh day, look two stadia south.”

Stadia? Perhaps units of measure didn’t translate. How far was two stadia? Three hundred paces? Four hundred?

Fear paralyzed Sister Ariel. She’d never been the type for adventures. She was a scholar, and a damned good one. She was one of the more powerful sisters, but she didn’t like charging into things she didn’t understand. She turned the plaque over.

“Wards in trees,” Jessie al’Gwaydin had written in a panicked hand. “Don’t trust him.”

Oh, perfect.

Sister Ariel was rooted to the ground. The words Sister Jessie had written could only have been written with magic. Surely Sister Jessie wouldn’t have used magic inside the wood. It would have been suicide.

She
is
dead.

It could all be a trap. The plaque might have triggered something as it was pulled through the ward. There might be a trap in the trees to the south where the plaque was trying to get her to go. Maybe she should go write down everything, ignore the trap, play by her own rules.

But Sister Ariel didn’t go back to Torras Bend to write in her journal. She’d studied the ward to the south. If there had been a trap, she’d already triggered it.

There was a time and a place for haste. Apparently, that was now and here.

S
o you’re kind of a pain in the ass. Why’d Kylar take you in?” Vi asked.

They’d been on the trail for a week, and if Uly wasn’t the best company, at least she was more interesting than the horses and the trees and the little villages they had to avoid. Vi wasn’t making conversation, she was gathering much information. Kylar was coming to kill her.

“He did it because he loves me,” Uly said, as defiant as usual. “Someday he’s going to marry me.”

She’d said such things before, and it had immediately aroused Vi’s suspicions, but after asking a few questions that left Uly puzzled, Vi had realized her suspicions were wrong. Kylar wasn’t a pedophile.

“Yes, yes, I know. But he couldn’t have loved you before he knew you, could he? You said that when he took you out of the castle was the first time you saw him.”

“I thought he was my real father at first,” Uly said.

“Hmm,” Vi said, as if she weren’t very interested. “Who are your real parents?”

“My father’s name was Durzo but he’s dead now. Kylar won’t talk about him. I think my mother is Momma K. She always looked at me funny when we stayed with her.”

Vi had to grab the back of her saddle to steady herself. Nysos, that was it! She knew Uly looked familiar. Uly was Durzo and Momma K’s daughter! No wonder they’d concealed her. It also explained why Kylar had taken her in.

Inexplicably, the thought made her ache. She couldn’t imagine taking in one of Hu’s bastards. For that matter, she couldn’t imagine Hu caring about one of them. Suddenly Uly was twice as valuable to the Godking. Holding Uly would mean controlling Momma K.

Maybe it would be enough to free Vi from his clutches. But Vi knew better. The Godking rewarded his servants well. Any vice she had, she would be allowed to indulge to satiety. He’d give her gold, clothes, slaves, whatever she wanted. But he’d never give her freedom. She’d proven herself too valuable for that.

The more Vi learned about Kylar, the more she despaired. She needed Uly to talk, because she needed to know everything about her enemy she could. Everything she learned was from a twelve-year-old girl who had a crush on the man, but Vi was good at sifting truth from opinion. Still, Kylar was sounding more and more—fuck!

She wasn’t going to think about that again. It just left her feeling worse. Damn this trail. Damn this long trip. One more week and she could wash her hands of this. Maybe she wouldn’t even stick around for her payday, much as she deserved it. She’d drop off the girl with a note about what she’d done, and she’d disappear. She’d killed Jarl. She’d deliver Kylar and Momma K to the Godking. Surely he wouldn’t waste his resources sending someone after her then. Even if he did, he wouldn’t come after her with the fury he would have if she betrayed him. She could disappear. There were only a few people she feared, and all of them were too valuable to be sent after her.

One of them was Kylar, but he wouldn’t survive long. Maybe he’d killed Roth Ursuul, thirty elite highlanders, and some wytches—Uly seemed to know a lot about that—but he’d never survive the Godking.

Vi would head to Seth or Ladesh or deep into the mountains of Ceura where her red hair wouldn’t be so unusual. She’d never spread her legs for another man, and she’d never take another contract. She didn’t know what a normal life looked like, but she’d give herself time to figure it out. After this.

She pulled the scrap of note she’d taken from Kylar’s house and read it again. “Elene, I’m sorry. I tried. I swear I tried. Some things are worth more than my happiness. Some things only I can do. Sell these to Master Bourary and move the family to a better part of town. I will always love you.”

“Hey, ugly.” Vi said, “what did Elene and Kylar fight about?”

“I think it was about how the bed wasn’t creaking.”

Vi furrowed her brow. What? Then she burst out laughing. “Well, that’s normal enough. Was that all?”

“Why, what’s it mean?” Uly asked.

“Fucking. Men and women fight about it all the time.”

“What’s fucking?” Uly asked.

So Vi told her as explicitly as possible, and Uly looked more and more horrified.

“Does it hurt?” Uly asked.

“Sometimes.”

“It sounds gross!”

“It is. It’s messy and sticky and sweaty and smelly and gross. Sometimes it even makes you bleed.”

“Why do girls let them do that?” Uly asked.

“Because men make them. That’s why they fight about it.”

“Kylar wouldn’t do that,” Uly said. “He wouldn’t hurt Elene.”

“Then why’d they fight about it?”

Uly looked sick. “He wouldn’t do that,” she said. “He wouldn’t. I don’t think they ever did it anyway ’cause the bed never creaked and Aunt Mea said it would. But Aunt Mea said it was fun.”

The bed never creaked? “Whatever. Is that all they fought about?” Vi asked.

“She wanted him to sell his sword, the sword Durzo gave him. He didn’t want to, but she said it proved he still wanted to be a wetboy. But he didn’t. He really wanted to be with us. It made him really mad when she said that.”

So he wanted out, too. That’s what he meant in the note when he said he tried. He tried to leave.

Nysos! Kylar might not even know she’d taken Uly. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. It did explain why he’d gone charging past them in the fog that morning, though. He would have been sure she’d return to Cenaria as quickly as possible.

Several hundred paces ahead, Vi saw the forest change. No, not change. It transformed as abruptly as if the earth had been split with an axe. On the near side, the forest was like what they’d been riding in for days. On the far side, enormous sequoys grew. They must be near Torras Bend. It didn’t mean much to her, but it looked like the riding would be easier under those great trees. There was almost no undergrowth in a forest that old.

They were only fifty paces from the sequoys when an old woman stepped out from the trees in front and to one side of them. She looked as startled as Vi felt. She was holding a glowing sheet of gold in her hands.

Glowing gold could only mean magic. The woman was a mage.

“Stop!” the old woman yelled.

Vi snapped her body back in the saddle and yanked the reins of Uly’s horse out of her hands. As she sat back up, she jabbed her heels in and looked toward the mage. The woman was running heavily, awkwardly—and not toward Vi and Uly. She was running away from the old forest and she had flung aside the glowing gold sheet.

What the hell? It was strange, but not so strange that Vi stopped. In all the world, the only people she had to fear were wetboys, wytches, and mages.

The horses charged for the forest, almost throwing Uly out of the saddle.

The mage was only thirty paces away now, almost even with them. She ran a few more steps, and Vi could have sworn that the woman was emerging from something like a vast, nearly invisible bubble covering the forest.

The woman brought up her hands and spoke. Something crackled and whipped forward. Vi dropped her body as far on the opposite side of her horse as she could. There was a concussion nearby and Uly flew off the horse.

Vi didn’t stop to look. She grabbed a throwing knife from an ankle sheath and threw it as she brought herself back up into the saddle. It was a long throw—twenty paces at a target she couldn’t see before the she released the knife—but it was really only meant as a distraction. Vi looked back.

Uly was lying on the ground, unconscious.

There was no hesitation. A wetboy doesn’t hesitate. A wetboy acts, even if it’s the wrong action. Vi couldn’t stay still, it made her a target. She dug her heels into her horse’s flanks again. The horse lunged forward—

And promptly crashed into the ground, its front legs cut out from under it.

Vi pulled her feet from the stirrups. She would land in a ball, roll free of the horse, draw throwing knives— except the horse fell faster than she expected. She slapped into the ground hard, her body flipping over as she skidded on her back. Her head kissed an iron-hard root and black spots swam before her eyes.

Up, damn you! Get up!
She got on her hands and knees and tried to stand, eyes watering, head ringing.

“I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that,” the old woman said. She looked like she actually meant it.

No. It can’t end like this.

The beefy old woman raised a hand and spoke. Vi tried to throw herself to one side, but she didn’t make it.