Raven's Strike

CHAPTER 10

“You should have gone out fishing with the children,” Tier observed mildly, without looking up from his carving.

That of the “children”—Hennea, Phoran, his guardsmen, and Rinnie—only Rinnie really still qualified—didn’t make them any less his children, Seraph knew. Everyone Tier cared about, he took under his wing, up to and including Ciro, who was a contemporary of Tier’s grandfather.

“You’re as anxious as I am,” she told him, turning to pace the other direction. “That’s the only time you ever carve.”

Tier held up the unrecognizable object he’d spent the better part of the morning shaping with his knife. “Obviously a good decision on my part,” he said.

Seraph sat down next to him on the porch bench and rested her head against his arm. She sighed. “It has two eyes, but the right one is too big and a little lower than the other.”

“That’s the mouth,” he said. He set the carving on his lap and ruffled her hair. “They should have been back by now—even if they were bringing the whole clan here.”

“According to the map,” she reminded him. “None of us have ever been that way. Maps are unreliable.”

They’d had several variations of this conversation over the past week. This was the second one that morning, and it was her turn to point out the harmless things that might have delayed the boys—at least, she assumed Jes had gone off with Lehr.

At their feet, Gura lifted his head and turned his head to look at the trail that Lehr had taken away from the house. Seraph felt Tier’s pulse speed up to match hers, but then Gura flopped over on his back to expose his belly to the late-morning sun.

Tier sighed. “At least Hennea took everyone else, so Phoran’s not pacing the floor, too. For a man with a reputation as a lazy womanizer, he sure doesn’t sit still for long. I thought the two of you were going to start colliding.”

“When he’s still, he manages to look as though he’ll never move again,” Seraph said.

Tier laughed. “I’ll grant you—”

Gura rolled to his feet and gave a soft woof, staring at the trail. Seraph looked with him, but couldn’t see very far down the trail because it curved back and forth up the forested hillside.

Tier set his carving aside and walked to the end of the porch. He put his hand up to shadow his eyes as if that would improve his chances of seeing around corners. Gura’s tail began to wag.

“It’s the boys,” said Seraph.

“Or the others returning from fishing by a roundabout way.” Despite the laconic words, Seraph heard the eagerness in her husband’s voice.

Gura’s tail wagging doubled in speed, and he let out a series of thunderous barks.

“Go get them,” said Tier.

Gura didn’t wait for a second invitation before he took off up the trail as fast as he could run. Tier gave Seraph a wide, relieved grin and waited for the boys to appear around the corner.

But they didn’t.

“Too long,” said Tier, echoing Seraph’s thoughts.

“Go ahead,” she said.

He leapt off the porch with much the same speed as Gura had exhibited, and ran up the trail with the wolfish gait that she’d seen him use to eat up miles in the woods. There was no sign of his limp, and she hoped he’d been truthful about how much better his knees were doing. Knees or no, he’d not stop running until he found them.

Seraph went into the house and got out the bread she’d baked last night and began to slice and butter it. The boys would be hungry; her boys were always hungry.

They would be fine. She repeated it to herself like a mantra.

The front door opened at last, and instead of the cool greeting she’d composed to cover her pleasure, Seraph said, “Lay him on the bed. Did you carry him all the way down the hill?”

She stripped Lehr’s bedding down so her grim-faced, sweat-drenched husband could lay their son in his bed.

“No, the horse did that,” Tier said as he helped her strip boots and dirty clothing off Lehr, who didn’t even twitch. “Jes is out tending the mare.”

When they were through, Tier helped Seraph tug the bedding around Lehr.

“I’ll go out and finish taking care of the horse,” Tier said. “Jes doesn’t look much better than Lehr—though he’s still on his feet—but he wouldn’t leave that damned mare to wait on me.”

“Someone taught him to be stubborn,” Seraph said coolly.

Tier grinned at her tiredly and touched her cheek. “They’re all right, Empress,” he told her. “Worn-out, not hurt. Relax.”

Seraph waited until Jes finished the stew and bread she’d warmed for him before she folded her arms, and said, “Tell me.”

Jes smiled faintly in her direction, the expression making him look even more exhausted. It made her feel guilty for pushing him. Guilt always made her angry. Even when she had no cause. She raised her eyebrows.

“Don’t know where to start,” he said, the smile dying more quickly than it had come. “Rongier’s clan is dead. So is the town of Colbern. Lehr sealed the walls so that no one will go in there until it’s safe again.”

Seraph sat down, careful to keep her back straight and her face controlled. Control was important.

“You found the entire city dead?” asked Tier. “Of plague? There aren’t many diseases that will kill that many.”

Lehr groaned from the bed, then sat up. “Gods take it,” he swore—a common Rederni oath, though Seraph had never heard him use it. “If I let Jes tell it, you’ll never figure out what happened—but when I’m finished I get to go back to sleep.”

He sat up cross-legged, put his elbows on his knees, and rested his head on his hands as if it ached. “Jes showed up before I was a full day out. We followed the map, and it was a shortcut to Colbern.”

In concise, tired sentences Lehr described what they had found. Seraph listened without interrupting as he told them about Brewydd and shadow plague.

“I think she thought she’d made us immune to it,” Lehr mumbled. “But we caught it right enough, both Jes and I. I don’t know why we didn’t die like everyone else.”

“The Guardian thinks that Brewydd saved us,” added Jes. “I’m not a healer, but I could drive the shadow away—he says that if—if it were buried in illness, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. So we got shadow-sick, but not the actual illness that the Shadowed used to carry the taint.” He took a bag off his belt and handed it to Seraph. “Brewydd told me to give you this.”

She could feel them though the leather of the bag. Mermori. Each one standing for death and more death. Benroln had had five, he’d said.

“Both of you go to sleep, now,” said Tier, his eyes on her face. “Your mother and I are going for a walk. Lehr, do you want food? Jes has put enough food away for any four men. You have to be hungry.”

Lehr shook his head, once, very firmly, rolled back flat, and pulled his bedding over his head.

Seraph left the bag on the table when she got up to go to the door. It wouldn’t matter. If she threw them in the sea, they would still come back to her. She couldn’t escape them. The symbols of her dying people and of her guilt.

Seraph let her grief-fed anger power her strides as she walked up the steep path that the boys had ridden down. As she walked, she remembered the faces of the people of Rongier’s clan. They were all dead, as her own clan was dead. As Tier would be dead. All her fault.

Control, she thought.

It was dangerous to be angry when you were a Raven. Ravens don’t cry. Tears don’t solve anything. Angrily, she wiped her eyes.

She was aware that Tier followed behind her, letting her set the pace, letting her keep a little distance between them.

If we hadn’t been in such a hurry to get home, she thought. If we’d gone with Benroln, then there would have been Jes and Lehr to see the shadow and Hennea and me to help fight it. A Traveler shouldn’t have a home—it was just one more distraction from their job of fighting the Stalker and his minions.

“What’s done is gone, lass,” said Tier. She didn’t know if she’d spoken her thoughts out loud, or if he just knew what she was thinking. “Your clan had Raven and Eagle and assorted other Orders, and no one was able to stop the plague that killed them. If we’d gone with Benroln, like as not, we’d only have died, too. Of all the people in the city, Brewydd managed only to save our sons. If I die from this problem with my Order, that won’t be your fault either. You didn’t put the spells on me—the Path’s wizards did.”

Seraph stopped. The thought of Tier’s possible danger had put an odd icy calm between her and her anger. It was soothing to feel nothing.

“You’re right,” she said. “The plagues that killed my clan and so many others—and allowed the Path to sew its minions amongst the Septs like poison weeds—it was all shadow-driven. The Shadowed is… has destroyed my people apurpose. Is trying to destroy you.”

Pain flared through her as she spoke the last sentence.

A pain that was buried behind ice, she reminded herself swiftly. She didn’t feel anything now. She was Raven. She was in control.

“That’s how I see it,” Tier said, his voice wary.

The tone surprised her: she was calm now, why was he worried? She turned but before her eyes fell upon him there was a loud crackling pop beside her.

A rock on the trail beside her exploded into powder. Bits sliced by her, leaving small cuts in her Rederni skirts and the skin within them. Had she done that? The shock of it broke through the ice.

“Emotion and magic don’t mix,” said Tier softly, taking her hand. “Burying the anger and grief just makes it worse—haven’t you learned that much from Jes?”

She closed her eyes. “I can’t be angry. I can’t grieve. I can’t—” She bit her lip. “Whining doesn’t seem to help either.”

Hard arms closed around her and surrounded her with his scent and his warmth. “Let me help,” he said. “And I’ll let you help me, too.”

He led her off the trail and through the trees to a small clearing with a small creek, soft grass, and shade. In that small private place he took her anger and his own, turning it to something else with touch and soft murmured words—something warm and alive and triumphant.

Afterward, naked, breathless, sweaty, and temporarily at peace, Seraph said, “We are going to Colossae to find the wizards’ great library. Brewydd thought that was the advice she’d stayed alive to give us—such things have their own power. We’ll find what we need to fix what the Path has done to you. We’ll find the means to combat this new Shadowed. Then we’ll destroy him so that he will cause no more harm.”

She didn’t tell him they didn’t know where Colossae was. She didn’t tell him that even if they managed to find the library, it was unlikely either she or Hennea would be able to find what they needed or even read it if they did. She didn’t tell him that even if they found everything Brewydd had told Lehr they might find, the chances that she could help Tier with it were poor. She didn’t tell him a Shadowed who had lived almost two centuries was unlikely to be easily dealt with. She didn’t have to—he already knew.

“All right,” said Tier, his voice a comforting rumble under her ear. “Where do we start?”

Jes was sitting on the bench on the porch when she and Tier returned. Although his face was still grey and drawn, he all but vibrated with repressed energy.

“They’re all here,” he said. “Hennea, Phoran, and his guardsmen. Lehr woke up long enough to tell them about Colbern and Benroln’s clan, but he went back to sleep.”

“Are you all right?” Tier asked. “Are you getting sick?”

Jes shook his head. “Lehr got it first, and the Guardian cleaned the shadow from me when he cared for Lehr. Just tired. Too many people inside.”

“You can stay outside,” Seraph told him. “Brewydd told us we needed to find Colossae, so we’re going to get out those maps and see if we can figure out where it is.”

“I’ll come in,” he said. “The Guardian sometimes knows things that I don’t.”

Seraph opened the case and, with the help of a dozen rocks to weigh down the corners, laid the maps out on the table where everyone could see them.

Brewydd had told the boys that they needed to find Colossae if they wanted to save Tier and Phoran, though she hadn’t been certain just what it was in the city that would help them.

Looking at the maps, Seraph was less optimistic than she had been. Other than the city map, there were four maps that had Colossae on them in the satchel Rinnie had found. Three of them were normal-looking, but the fourth was covered with so many lines it was hard to tell what was road and what was city. Even on the maps that were easily read, the roads and landmarks were a thousand years out-of-date.

Tier surveyed his troops.

“Between all of us,” he told them, “we’ve ridden over most of the Empire. We’re going to study these maps and see if anyone finds something familiar.”

Jes sat down next to Hennea, but rose almost immediately to pace behind Hennea’s side of the table until Rinnie recruited him to help her make dinner. She gave him a few things to do, but when he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, she let him be. Good girl, thought Seraph.

Lehr had retreated to the loft, and not even the noise of all the people in the room below him seemed to disturb his slumber.

Phoran and his men argued quietly over the resemblance of a hill near Taela though nothing else on the map seemed to fit.

Hennea, who had spent much of the last week searching through these maps, was composed and silent, much like Seraph herself, but Jes hadn’t been able to stay near her. Seraph wondered if the death of Benroln’s clan made her angry, too.

Rinnie, who knew the Travelers only from stories, kept her eye on the boys while she cooked. She’d just gotten her brothers back and wasn’t going to chance losing them again.

Seraph turned her attention to the map Tier had. After a while, with a few glances at the other maps, she picked out the slightly thicker lines that were the roads.

“Maybe if we used Willon’s map,” said Tier. “It doesn’t have the whole of the Empire, but it covers a good two-thirds. And it’s mostly accurate as far as we’ve used it.”

“What if this city isn’t in the Empire?” asked Rufort, the older of Phoran’s two guards.

He was, perhaps, a year younger than Jes, and nearly as big as Toarsen’s comrade Kissel. Like Kissel, he gave the impression of a life hard-lived, but Seraph could see why Tier liked him so much.

There was something solid about Rufort, as if he were a person who, once having given his word, would keep it at considerable cost to himself. This past week, he’d turned a willing hand to any of the farm chores Tier had give him.

“Tradition places Colossae in the Empire,” said Hennea, without looking up from her map. “Unfortunately, there’s at least a six-century gap between the time when the Elder Wizards left the city and the founding of the Empire, so we can’t count on that.”

The younger guard, Ielian, looked at the maps and shook his head. “What is this supposed to accomplish? Phoran came to you for help. Not to be dragged around the Empire on a seek-and-find game looking for a city that might never have existed. You don’t even know that there is still a city—or ever was one for that matter. It is just a story on the tongues of a couple of women.” He didn’t add the adjective silly to women, but it was in his voice.

His eye caught Seraph’s, and he saw what she thought of his disparagement. Instead of backing down, he just got angrier. Since Seraph always did the same thing when she said something stupid, she had a certain amount of sympathy for him.

“I thought we were waiting for the healer—” He aimed his accusation at Seraph. “But now your son says she is dead. If we do find Colossae, I suppose you will want us all to go there. But how does that help us kill this Shadowed, who needs to die to free the Emperor from your Traveler’s curse?”

He knew a little more about Phoran’s problem than Phoran had thought—or maybe Phoran had explained it to Ielian and Rufort sometime this week.

“It’s not a Traveler’s curse,” Seraph told him in an almost-gentle voice. “I could demonstrate the difference for you if you’d like.”

“Behave, Seraph,” Tier said, and she was certain she was the only one who heard the amusement in his voice. He didn’t think she was serious. Perhaps he was right.

“Ielian has reason for his worries.” Tier pushed his stool a little back from the table so he could see Seraph and Ielian at the same time—like a referee at one of the Harvest festival wrestling matches. “He doesn’t know Brewydd or Traveler magic, and we haven’t taken the time to explain them.”

Seraph tapped her foot, but Tier had a point. She just wasn’t used to justifying herself—or being referred to as “silly” even if only by implication.

“Fine,” she said. “First, the city exists beyond the legends. I am Raven, Ielian, and one of the things I can do is touch an item and get a feel for its history.”

Behind Ielian, Phoran was watching her with vague eyes. She’d been learning that the expression really meant he was thinking very hard.

“When we found these maps—”

“I found the maps—” said Rinnie, who was efficiently chopping up greens.

“When Rinnie found the maps,” Seraph corrected herself, “I read them with my magic and found these maps are from the time of Colossae. Moreover, that around two centuries ago a wizard held the city map in his hands as he stood outside the gates of Colossae. That is not legend, or women’s stories. My own magic told me this.”

“The city exists,” agreed Phoran, leaning his elbows on the table and bracing his chin on his folded hands.

“Maybe it’s near here,” said Rinnie. “That could be the reason that the Path built its temple here.”

“Volis told me that it was because of Shadow’s Fall,” Hennea said.

“He told me that, too,” Seraph agreed.

“Fine,” said Ielian, throwing up his hands. “The city exists. How is finding the city going to help the Emperor?”

Seraph wondered if he realized that Jes had unobtrusively moved until he was leaning against the wall just behind Ielian.

“I don’t know. But if Brewydd, Lark of the Clan of Rongier the Librarian, tells me if we don’t go to Colossae, Phoran will lose not only his throne, but his head as well—then I will go to Colossae. If something in Colossae can help us rid this world of the Shadowed, then I will go to Colossae.”

“On the word of this bird woman?”

“Lark,” said Seraph, biting off the ends of her words. “A healer who dedicated her life trying to save people in need. She died to save the people who killed her.”

Hennea’s sharp “Control, Raven” and Tier’s “Easy, love” came one atop the other, followed by a thump as the heavy slab table lifted a handspan off the floor, then slammed down hard enough to vibrate the floorboards.

Seraph took a deep breath and fought to calm herself.

Ielian’s next question was considerably more respectful. “Finding the city is the easiest way to discover who this shadow-man is?”

“He’s not a man, not anymore,” Hennea told him. “No wizard who drinks at the Stalker’s well stays human for long.”

“Mother, did the wizard have to go to Colossae to become Shadowed?” said Jes suddenly, and Ielian jerked—answering Seraph’s questions about whether or not he’d noticed her son creeping up behind him.

“I don’t know.” Seraph was grateful to him for asking the question, though. This wasn’t a subject likely to stretch her ability to control her temper. “I’ve learned a lot this summer from working with Hennea and Brewydd. They knew different things than I did—but some of the information we shared was contradictory. There are things we just don’t know and others we disagreed on. A lot of Travelers believe that the Unnamed King was the Stalker of our oldest stories.”

“Only stupid Travelers,” murmured Hennea.

Seraph continued blandly, “I can tell you my grandfather was certain that the Unnamed King had never walked the stones of Colossae—something supposedly passed down Isolde’s line, on my grandfather’s mother’s side, all the way from Kerine, who fought at Red Ernave’s side at Shadow’s Fall.”

Ielian made a disbelieving sound.

“Ielian.” Phoran’s command was quiet, but Ielian nodded and subsided.

Seraph shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what you believe, Ielian. Phoran came to us for help, and we’ll do whatever we can for him. I believe finding Colossae is the best thing that we can do, both for Phoran and for my husband. I believe it because that’s what an old, dying woman told my son.” She looked at Phoran and softened. Ielian was doing his duty and trying to protect Phoran. She was glad that his men were that loyal.

“What I can tell you, Ielian,” she said, “is that we will do our best to find the Shadowed and kill him or die trying.”

Something, maybe the truth in her last statement, at last satisfied Ielian.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

“Is Willon’s map still in the packs you boys took?” Tier asked Jes, breaking the small silence.

Jes bestirred himself and went to his still-full pack and unearthed the map, set it on the table, and retreated to a wall nearer Rinnie than the people crowded around the table.

“Can’t you go sleep, Jes?” Rinnie asked, not for the first time. “I can make dinner by myself.” She tactfully refrained from pointing out that he was getting in her way more than he was helping.

“Go use our bed, son,” said Tier, an invitation that held the force of an order. “There’s room next to Lehr. If you can’t sleep, you can at least lie down for a while.”

Jes stiffened. “There are too many people here. I can’t sleep with everyone awake.”

That was probably true as well; Seraph looked thoughtfully at her son. “Would it be easier outside?” she asked. “Or does the sun bother you?”

Jes shook his head. She could tell he was feeling bad because his gaze carefully avoided touching anyone in the room.

“He’s too tired,” Hennea said suddenly. “If he goes to sleep, he’ll sleep too deeply. He can’t protect himself in the forest, and the Guardian won’t allow him to try.” She pushed aside the map she’d been looking at and continued briskly. “But he’ll allow me to stand guard.”

“Yes,” said Jes, very softly.

“Get a blanket or two then, Jes.” Hennea stood up and cast a sharp look at Tier, then Seraph—perhaps waiting for them to object.

Seraph thought a walk in the woods might do Hennea as much good as it had earlier done for Seraph. She’d noticed that the collected expression on Hennea’s face was beginning to fail her. She needed someplace private to grieve for Benroln’s clan—and Jes needed rest.

“I’m not doing any good here,” Hennea told Seraph, almost angrily. “Whoever drew these maps knew less about mapmaking than I do. They don’t even agree with each other.”

“We’ll keep working on it while you’re gone,” said Seraph steadily. In the Traveler tongue, she added. “I entrust my son to your keeping, Raven.”

A wild spectrum of emotion flashed over Hennea’s face. “You trust too much,” she said in the same tongue.

“I don’t think so.”

Tier opened the door for them. “Jes?”

Their son turned, so obviously operating on the last of his reserves of strength that Seraph had to fight the need to go to him. Her touch would only hurt him, though, so she stayed where she was.

“Thank you for going with Lehr to Colbern, son,” Tier said. “If you had not been there, he would have died.”

Jes clutched his blankets a little tighter and nodded.

Hennea let Jes choose his own path, and walked far enough behind him there was no chance of accidentally touching him. He was too tired to deal with her lack of control.

Time was such an odd thing. One moment you could talk to someone, then, suddenly, they were gone. Somehow it always seemed to her that there ought to be a way to turn back time and change the events. An hour, a minute, they were so simple in passing… reversing them should not be impossible. But she’d never found a way to do it.

Another clan was dead. More people that she had known and would never see again. She felt… empty.

Jes was silent as he walked. With his shambling gait, he should have been stumbling all over, but somehow his foot always seemed to land on the other side of fallen debris, rocks, or holes.

Hennea kept quiet as well. She didn’t know if she could have spoken to him if she’d tried.

She understood what Seraph had just done, though she rather suspected neither Jes nor Tier knew Seraph had chosen the last words of a Traveler marriage ceremony. The ceremony where parents turned the care of their son to his spouse.

Hennea didn’t want to think about it, or about death, or the Shadowed.

She tilted her face into the sun and let her mind go blank, as if there were nothing more than this moment: the sun in her face, the smell of trees and grasses, the sound of birds and insects, and the sense that told her where Jes was that had nothing more to do with magic than the power of the ties between a woman and her man.

He stopped on a gentle slope covered in yellowing grasses that looked no different to her eyes than several other places he’d passed without a pause. He shook one blanket out, handed her the other, then lay down on his face, leaving his back to absorb the late-afternoon, summer sun.

Rather than shaking her blanket out, she folded it and set it on an unoccupied corner of his. Sitting on its soft folds, she pulled her legs up to her chest and settled her chin on her knees, prepared to watch over him while he slept.

“I remember when Papa used to have nightmares almost every night.”

Jes’s voice was so soft it could almost have been the breeze that rustled the leaves on the trees.

Hennea didn’t say anything.

“He still has them, from his time as a soldier, I think. Though maybe some of them now are from being a prisoner of the Path.”

“I’ll watch over your dreams.” Hennea almost touched his shoulder, which was so close she could feel the warmth of his body. “I’ll wake you before they get too bad.”

“Thank you,” he said, and slept.

Sitting in the sun, trying to think of nothing, Hennea instead thought about what Seraph had said about all the strange coincidences that had shaped her family’s life.

It had angered Seraph, the thought of someone meddling in her life, someone she had no control over. But Hennea found it to be a curiously uplifting thought. If there was such evil in the world, was it possible that there was good, too?

The gods are dead, she reminded herself fiercely. But she couldn’t, quite, kill the hope that Seraph had given her.

After an hour or so, Jes began to stir restlessly. She’d been avoiding watching him sleep, because some people could feel when they were watched—and, given Jes’s abilities, she assumed that he belonged to that group. But a soft sound drew her eyes, and she watched the subtle motions of muscle in his face, searching for a clue to his dreams. Slowly his face hardened into that otherness that told her the Guardian had come. She’d never seen that happen to an Eagle while he slept before.

“Jes,” she said softly. “Guardian, wake up. You’re dreaming.”

He rolled so fast she almost hit him by reflex. Two arms, strong and hard wrapped around her hips so tightly she knew she’d have bruises tomorrow. His head burrowed against her midriff, and the rest of him curled around her.

“Shh.” She touched his hair lightly, but then decided if her touch were bothering him, he wouldn’t have wrapped himself as close as he could get, and she let fingers sink through the dark strands in a caress. “Can you talk about it?”

He shook his head firmly.

She leaned over him and put her arms around him as best she could, given the awkwardness of moving while he was still wrapped around her middle.

“Shh,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“He remembers,” said Jes hesitantly after a while. He’d relaxed somewhat, and she’d thought he was sleeping again.

“What does he remember?” she whispered.

Jes shook his head. “I don’t know, but it frightens him.”

Phoran watched Jes and Hennea leave the house. He knew that something had happened, but, not speaking the Traveler tongue himself, he wasn’t certain what. Later he could ask Toarsen, who like quite a few of the former Passerines could speak a little Traveler.

For some reason, he thought, as he turned back to the map in front of him, he’d expected Tier to solve his problem overnight. Instead, he’d spent the better part of a week working on the farm. He suspected many of the tasks Tier had given him were merely to keep him busy—but not all of them. Survival, he’d discovered this week, took time and effort even when you weren’t the Emperor. A farmer didn’t have to worry about assassinations and political maneuvers, but Phoran found cutting wood, gardening, and washing required as much time and effort.

Toarsen hadn’t been best pleased when Seraph sent them all to weed the kitchen garden—Phoran savored the memory of the expression on his captain’s face—but since Phoran had gone out without a murmur, Toarsen had to do the same.

Now, he thought wryly, when Rinnie had had to show them all what to do—her eyes wide at the thought of someone who couldn’t tell the difference between dill and reaverslace—that had stung Phoran’s pride. But she hadn’t laughed at them—at least not openly—and the memory of Toarsen’s face had kept Phoran’s sense of humor stronger than his sense of pride. Kissel hadn’t needed supervision: he said his family’s cook had taught him how to garden when he was a boy.

He’d learned a lot; but when Lehr and Jes returned, somewhere in his heart of hearts, Phoran had expected his trials to be over.

Lehr should have come back with the old healer in tow. She’d take one look at Phoran and give him a mysterious potion or tell him to turn around three times while wailing some unpronounceable word—like half the doctors in Taela. The Memory would leave him, and he could race home to rule in peace. He smiled to himself. At least until someone decided on a more effective method of assassination sometime when he wasn’t guarded by his men. His men.

He cast a quick glance at Ielian. The man had surprised him with his passionate attack on Seraph as Phoran’s advocate.

It seemed that the Emperor’s total number of loyal followers was growing. At this rate, in ten years they might number over—say—twenty. Phoran was amused at himself for the pleasure he found in knowing that Ielian, at least, served him out of something more than desire for gainful employment.

He turned his attention back to the map, but it looked the same as it had earlier. Sighing, he gave up. “If you have a sheet of paper, I’ll start making lists of places this might be. There’s nothing unusual about the placement of the roads. Maybe Master Willon will have more maps we can use for comparison.”

“I’ll do it, Mother,” said Rinnie as she wiped her hands clean on a rough cloth.

She rummaged around, then set a sheet of paper, an ink pot and a well-trimmed pen beside him with a smile—she’d been shy of him at first. That day in the garden, though, had robbed her of any awe she might once have felt.

“Good idea,” agreed Tier. “We might see if Willon will take a look at these maps, himself, if we don’t come up with anything. He’s had more than half a century running all over the Empire. Maybe he’ll see something that we’ve missed.”

“Dinner will be done soon,” Rinnie announced.

“As long as you used dill instead of reaverslace, we’ll not flog the cook.” Phoran started scratching out place names. He wished that at least one of the maps had some kind of scale so he knew whether he was looking at ten-leagues mapped in great detail or a hundred leagues.

“If it’s reaverslace, it’s because someone weeded out the dill,” returned Rinnie complacently. “You can try it first. If you don’t go into convulsions, the rest of us will eat.”

“Threatening your emperor is treason.” Phoran scratched out a place he’d written because it was too near the coast. If Colossae had been that near the sea, certainly one of the maps would have shown it. “Kissel, should we string this girl up?”

“Not until she finishes our dinner,” rumbled Kissel. “I’ll even eat reaperslace if it tastes as good as that fish smells.”

Tier stood up and stretched. “I’ll bring some water for washing to the porch,” he said. He took a step away from the table, glanced back at his map—the one covered in fine lines that seemed to be meaningless—and he froze.

“Seraph, can you hold that map up?” he said.

Phoran looked at Tier’s map as Seraph pulled it from the table, but it hadn’t changed. It still looked as though someone had, very carefully, drawn hundreds of meaningless lines all over the parchment.

It was big and had been in a roll for a long time and kept trying to curl up. Phoran got up and helped Seraph hold it flat while Tier took slow steps away from it without taking his eyes off whatever had caught his attention.

“Lehr?” he said. “Son, I need you to get up and help me a minute.”

Lehr groaned and muttered something that sounded rude to Phoran, but he rolled out of the bed in the loft and dropped to the main floor without bothering with the ladder. Staggering across the room, he stood next to his father and rubbed his eyes.

“Look at that map,” Tier said. “Tell me what you see.”

“Lines,” said Lehr grumpily. “What am I suppose to…” He frowned, coming to alertness just as Tier had.

“It’s the distance that helped me see what it was,” Tier explained.

He walked over to the map and put his finger on the lower left-hand corner. “The lines are elevations,” he said. “I bet they used to be different colors, but age turned them all dark.”

“What do you see?” asked Phoran. “Can you tell where it is?”

“It’s here,” said Tier simply. “Not Colossae,” he brushed his hand over the star that marked the wizards’ city. He dropped his hand until he pointed to the lower left-hand corner again. “Right here, this is Redern Mountain and the Silver River. Here’s our valley.” He ran his hand up to a section about the size of his palm that had a single thick line running through the middle of it, but none of the thinner lines. “This must be…”

“Shadow’s Fall,” said Lehr. “If the distances are right for Redern and this valley, then that’s right where Shadow’s Fall would be.”

Tier let his finger follow the line that bisected the flat plain of the battlefield. It connected to a second road, then took an abrupt turn north. About a finger length from Shadow’s Fall, Tier’s finger stopped and rested on the strange symbols that Hennea told them represented the ancient wizards’ city of Colossae.

“I can take us there,” he said.