The Will of the Empress

19

Briar suddenly realized he was very glad it was Daja with him. She was solid in spirit and heart—he’d forgotten that. She didn’t have Tris’s temper, vexing even with its most dangerous aspects held under rigid control, and she wasn’t inclined to the kind of noble arrogance that Sandry kept displaying. Of course he wouldn’t tell Daja that, but it was good to be reminded.

They trotted downstairs. The inn’s staff was asleep in a private parlor. It looked as if they’d told themselves they’d just put their heads down for a moment, then fallen asleep at one table. The four other guests had not returned from the horse fair.

I bet Zhegorz was right. Maybe they were soldiers, but now they’re in the pay of whichever imperial favorite tricked us this time, thought Briar. Maybe they had charms to hold off the sleep spell, but old Zhegorz scared them into the woods to wait till we were snoring, instead of being all nice and snug in here. Briar spat on the tiles in disgust. Tris was right to send him, and I was a bleater.

Daja went outside and quickly came back. “Asleep, all of them.”

“Stables are through the kitchen,” Briar said, pointing. “They’ll have needed horses to take Sandry.”

Daja nodded grimly. They walked through the kitchen door together into a force that felt like hard jelly. It wrapped around them in an eyeblink, then pulled them apart, leaving a yard of space between them.

One man was still awake. Quen lounged at the cook’s big table, fiddling with pieces of chopped turnips and carrots obviously meant for soup tomorrow. “I’ll wager you’ve never walked into anything like that before, have you?” he asked casually, his brown eyes gleaming in triumph. “Don’t worry, you can breathe. In fact, inside that working, you can stay alive for weeks. I tested it on a criminal scheduled for execution. After three months, Her Imperial Majesty lost patience and had him executed anyway.” He yawned. “I can’t leave this inn and still hold you two like this, but I’ve had worse situations. I wish you could tell me how you broke my sleep spell. No one was supposed to wake from that for three days. And I shaped it so that it couldn’t be broken once you were asleep.” He scratched the side of his mouth. “You’ll tell me when I free you, perhaps. Or I could let the glove of air down enough to free your mouths, if you swear to behave. Or not. I suppose you’re a little more powerful than I expected.” He smirked. “So, what shall I talk about?”

Daja and Briar reached out at the same moment along their magical connection, withered as it was. It sprang to life as Daja said, He’ll bore us to death if he keeps talking.

It seems like that, Briar answered. While he natters, we still don’t know about Sandry.

Sandry! cried Daja, grabbing for their bond. Sandry!

I couldn’t reach her before, Briar said. At the same time, he added his call to hers. They still found no trace of their friend.

“I suppose you’re running through all the spell-breaking charms you know,” Quen observed. “But that’s the beauty of it, don’t you see? They’re layered shield spells, but some of them are reversed. My own design. No single charm possessed by any mage will work on this glove spell. Well, Isha broke out, but she’s even more powerful than I am. She just blasted it. She said I need to stay humble. She even thought she might not be the only one who could do it, but really, outside noble courts, or the universities and the Living Circle schools, you’re not likely to find that many great mages. People tend to dislike us. They think we’re conceited and high-handed. They never think that perhaps we just spend so much time trying to wrestle our magic into behaving that it makes us short-tempered with the everyday world. So we hide.”

Quen ate a chunk of carrot, his eyes alert as he watched them. “Frustrating, isn’t it? I had to spend plenty of time at Lightsbridge breaking out of trap spells as part of my specialization. Maybe you could do a double working that would get you out eventually, but that’s why I pulled you apart.” He studied his nails. “You really should consider employment with Berenene. She takes good care of her people. I’ll even teach you some tricks once Shan and Sandry are wed. Not this one, of course. But you’ll see I’m a decent enough fellow after that.”

He is starting to annoy me, complained Daja.

Let’s shut him up, then. Briar and Daja thrust at the spells with their own spells for destruction, Briar’s for decay and the destruction of parasites, Daja’s for rust. Nothing worked. Each suggested charms and tricks they had learned in the last three years, creating variations within their own specialties. These, too, failed. The glove spells slid around them, jelly-like, making Daja’s knees weak with distaste. Quen took a fiddle from the bench and played it, which made Briar crazy. He hated being laughed at.

Should we yell for Tris? Briar finally asked.

There’s a way we can do this, Daja said stubbornly. On our own, without Tris and her book learning. Besides, she’s probably still weak as a kitten.

Something caught Briar’s attention then. Tris. Book learning.

Daja waited to hear his thought.

When Briar worked it out, he was both jubilant and ashamed for not seeing it sooner. The solution lay in his own experience and his own teacher. Rosethorn had engaged in a constant battle with university-trained mages, over the difference between academic magic and ambient magic.

Stop playing his game and start playing ours! he said. He tapped into his shakkan and the plants around him, drawing their power through himself and turning it into vines. These he sent through the spells of the glove. Like all vines, they found each and every chink and opening, spaces no human being used, weaving their tendrils through to break into open air. Reaching Daja’s prison, they did the same thing all over again, finding the openings between the spells. At last they broke through to twine themselves around her, growing until they cupped her entire body.

Daja called to the metal on her hand and in her mage kit, the strange living metal that was always growing and absorbing new metal. She drew on the strength of the kitchen’s metal and fires as well, adding it to the liquid metal until she could spin wires of power out of herself. They twined with Briar’s vines, following the paths the magical plants had taken through the openings in Quen’s spells. Busily they worked themselves into Briar’s prison, encasing him as his vines had encased Daja.

Slowly, the spells that enclosed Daja and Briar began to melt, like thick ice under boiling water.

Quen dropped fiddle and bow and stretched a hand out to them, his lips moving as he tried to renew the spells. The mess around Briar and Daja struggled to rebuild, and collapsed completely.

Quen gestured. A fresh shield billowed toward them like a giant, thick bubble. Daja leaned forward and blew like a bellows, hard and long, forcing the heavy thing back toward Quen. He fought to hold it off. While he was occupied, Briar reached into an outer pocket of his mage kit and pulled out a small cloth ball. Deftly, he tossed it on the floor. It rolled to Quen’s feet.

Briar filled the seeds in the ball with green magic and called them to wakefulness. Weaving the shoots as they thrust up, he gripped them in an iron hold and kept them from sinking roots. All of their strength had to go into growing up, not down. He needed this cage to move.

The plants shot through the cloth of the ball that held them, weaving. They were as high as Quen’s knees before he saw the danger. He turned his shield on them, but Briar was ready. The vines, thick with thorns, spread out and over the shield, still growing.

Watching Quen’s sweaty face, Daja pulled a spool of fine wire out of her sack. She sent the wire’s end snaking toward the base of the vine cage, where it began to weave itself in among the vines. As it climbed she called light to it, making Quen blink and shield his eyes. It was a distraction, something he could not afford. While he tried to shield his vision, vines and wire finished a globe of a cage.

Briar had prepared the seed ball to withstand the magic of mages and hill shamans alike, both hazards of the road to Gyongxe. It was why he had brought it downstairs. Daja had made this spool of wire to handle and contain power, her own or that of others. Bearing down with their wills—Briar’s forged in the streets, in epidemics, and in war; Daja’s, in forges and mammoth blazes—they tightened their cage on Quenaill, crushing his last shield.

Briar and Daja joined hands and fed their cage a last surge of power. The gaps between wire and vines blazed, sealed against magic from within. The pair let go.

For a moment they could hardly see Quen inside the cage. Magical workings rayed out from the man like sunlight, connecting him to every spell he still had in place—those on the inn, and those that served Sandry’s kidnappers. They blazed with silver fire in Briar’s and Daja’s vision.

“Once more,” Daja said, panting. “Drain him, so his other spells break.” Her knees wobbled; her thighs felt loose. They touched fingers this time and hammered the cage with the last of their strength. At first they saw no difference. Then the first fiery strand vanished. Another followed, then three, then more. All winked out inside the cage. At last Quen stood inside, naked of power.

All around them, the inn stirred. Briar could hear the inn’s staff moving in the private room. He sat down on the kitchen table and began to eat chunks of carrot. Daja took a seat on a stool and leaned against the wall.

Will it be enough? she asked him wearily. Their bond to one another remained even when their power was as weak and floppy as a dead fish.

We cut off all he had. Sandry was at the end of some of it. We’ll hear her soon enough. “Can we get some food in here?” Briar yelled. “I’m starving!”

Sandry was moving. That was the first thing she noticed. The second was that a man sat with her in his arms, one easy tan hand holding a horse’s reins. She saw the reins, and the hand, when she opened her eyes just a crack. Little weights struck her lightly all over her body, clinking when they hit one another. All around her she heard men talking and joking. Someone asked if he could actually bring himself to wait three days, and the man who held her laughed.

“I want her in my little love nest, all nice and cozy, where I won’t need all these charms Quen put on her to keep her tame,” a too-familiar voice said.

Charms, Sandry thought. That’s what the little weights are, and the clinking noises. Someone has tied a basket full of charms all over me, as if I were some nomad’s bride to be protected from spirits.

“With the potions I have for her to drink, and the spell patterns he gave me, she won’t be able to lift a finger against me once we’re inside.” Lips kissed the back of her neck, making Sandry’s skin crawl. Shan added, “She’ll get accustomed. She was half in love with me before some idiot gossiped to her. I just have to convince her that Her Imperial Majesty was a relationship of convenience, while she is my own true love. Trust me, you tell a woman things like that, and she’s putty in your hands.”

“Her Imperial Majesty won’t kill you when she learns?” someone inquired.

“She needs every copper this lady’s lands provides. All that adventuring along the Yanjing border has stretched the imperial treasury very thin,” Shan explained. “If I make a big enough present to Her Imperial Majesty, she’ll let me be.” The confidence in Shan’s voice made Sandry want to scream. Instead, she continued to flop in front of him, limp and supposedly well asleep.

It’s morning, if not afternoon, she realized, hearing birdsong and feeling the sun’s heat on them as they rode. There’s a river nearby, and lots of echoes. We’re in the canyon people spoke of, I think.

They rode on for some time. Shan had just called for a break to rest and water the horses when a thin magical voice filtered through the spell that still lay on Sandry’s skin like a film. Can you hear? Daja asked. It’s taken hours for the workings to wear off enough for me to find you. We’ve been trying since dawn. Why do those charms even have magic still?

Maybe he bought them from someone else, Briar put in. We undid all his spells to keep us all under wraps, but it didn’t touch the extra charms he used.

I’m waking up, Sandry replied. Yes, there’s still a bit of power in these charms.

Shan let Sandry drop into another man’s arms. This captor placed her gently on a patch of grass. Don’t worry about me, she told Daja. The charms are on my outside, but I’ve all my magic still, and the pig-swiving bleat-brain tied the charms to me with ribbons. I suppose it didn’t occur to him ribbons are made of cloth. I’ll come to you when I’m done. Quen did all this magic?

Our little friend Quenaill, Briar said with contempt. He spelled us asleep. If I hadn’t been wary, thanks to Zhegorz ... We owe old Zhegorz a big apology. He tried to warn us, and just because he talked crazy, we didn’t listen. He paused for a moment, then asked gruffly, Do you need our help? We know you like Shan—

Used to, Sandry interrupted, I used to like him. She sank into her magic, and spoke a word of command. The knots that tied those carved-stone charms to her clothes and body came undone at once. They slid to the ground with a soft series of clinks.

She waited for a moment until she knew that she had the strength to stand, then did so, lashing out with her power. The six men and one woman lingering on the riverbank dropped whatever they held as their sleeves flew together and fused, binding their arms from wrist to elbows. Before they could do more than blink, their riding breeches did the same thing, the thread of each leg weaving itself with the opposite from knee to lower calf. They fell forward helplessly.

The woman and one of the men began to mutter. Silvery tendrils rose from their bodies.

Magic, Sandry thought disdainfully. Try mine.

Threads shot from the mages’ collars and jackets, darting into their wearers’ open mouths. Their upper garments continued to unravel into their mouths until they couldn’t even close their jaws. Sandry relented at the last minute, making sure that the thread inside their mouths simply wove itself into a tight ball rather than choke them. It then attached itself to a strap wound around the mages’ heads. She didn’t want to kill them. She just wanted them silent and out of her way. A hard gag would do the task.

Sandry heard a thud. Shan was fighting to get to the knife in his belt. A twist of her will sent his sleeves down over his hands and into the fabric of his breeches, weaving them together.

Sandry gathered up a blanket of her power and flung it over them all. It separated as it draped over each person, trickling down into that man’s or that woman’s clothes. Threads in their garments broke free and linked themselves together. With her magic to shape them, the fibers sped as garments unraveled and rewove. She was so angry that her will did not falter once, even when the people on the ground began to spin in place. Seeing that her cocoons were coming along nicely, Sandry looked for appropriate places to display them.

I have to be careful with the trees, she reminded herself. I don’t want a bough to drop someone on the head. And Briar would never forgive me if I hurt a tree. But I do want to make them the laughingstock of the empire when I’m done.

She chose her trees, and her display place for Shan, then checked the progress of her spinning. The two mages were done first, their shoulders and heads bare, the rest of them completely embraced in thread. Sandry called the man’s cocoon to her first, holding out her hand for the rope that trailed below his feet. Once she had it in her grip, she threw it at a solid oak’s branch. It whirled up and over the bough, drawing its human burden up until the man dangled several feet above the ground. She directed the rope to wind itself around the branch five times. Then she rewove the loose end into the human cocoon. The weavings and the cocoon itself were more than strong enough to hold the gagged mage until help should come. She appraised her work, hands on hips, testing it to make sure there were no fatal weaknesses in her work. Satisfied, she turned to do the same with Shan’s remaining companions. All along they tried to fight, as Shan did, but their efforts were useless. She had practiced her craft hard and long: They were gagged before they even knew to make a sound, secured before they understood she was awake. By the time Shan and his followers understood they were cocooned so tightly they could neither squeak nor move.

Shan himself she placed on a large, table-like rock near the spot where the horses were picketed. Using her power, she commanded the rope that ended in his cocoon to drag him onto the rock. As he bumped across the grass, she rewove three saddle blankets to make a second rope. Gently she placed one end on Shan’s chest as he cursed her to Blaze-Ice Bay and back—she had left his mouth and head uncovered—then gave both ropes their orders. They wove themselves together and went flying, as if they ran on invisible shuttles around the rock.

When she finished, Sandry patted Shan’s chest. “You can tell all Namorn this is what happens when I’m vexed,” she informed him softly.

“Little bitch,” he snapped.

Sandry looked him over soberly. “If you had understood that earlier, we could have avoided this unpleasantness,” she replied.

Ignoring his curses, she helped herself to apples, bread, and water from someone’s supplies. I’m coming back, she told Daja and Briar, who sent her a wave of relief in answer. She took Shan’s horse. The gelding was a fine animal that deserved a better master than Shan. Mounting it, she realized she was still wearing her nightgown. Cursing Shan for the indignity, she hauled the thin garment up around her thighs to get her feet in the stirrups and her behind where it should be.

It’s not how I envisioned the kidnapped woman’s return after triumphing over her would-be captors, she thought angrily. Why is the real thing always so much more ordinary than the vision?

She had no fear she would be lost. The tie that bound her to Briar and Daja stretched, thickly silver, down the road. There was one last thing to do before she followed it, however.

She urged the gelding over to Shan, whose face was purple with rage and helplessness. “Now you know,” she said hotly. “When I say I don’t like you, it really means I don’t like you!”

The empress of Namorn and her escort were always given the right-of-way on the roads. They passed Deepdene Road not long after Sandry and her party turned down it in search of the Canyon Inn. By the time Sandry had escaped Shan’s trap, recovered, and returned to the road for two days, Berenene had taken up residence in the imperial hunting lodge near the Olart border.

With the empress came imperial business, including her spies’ reports. Reading them, Ishabal learned that Quen had been left in a cage of wire and thorns, while the imperial Master of the Hunt had been found, with his companions, trapped in thread cocoons. She took these reports to Berenene, who had been a difficult companion since they had left Dancruan.

“So the children have power,” the empress snapped, tossing the papers to the floor. “We knew that. Do you know what the gossips will make of this? The wench spurned two of my favorites—never mind that Quen is no longer a favorite and he wasn’t trying to marry her. That’s what they’ll say. Two! And they’ll whisper that perhaps my favorites are not so devoted to the old woman as they pretend to be!”

“Imperial Majesty, I am old,” replied Isha gently. “You are in your prime.”

“I’m sure the Yanjingyi emperor will see it just that way!” retorted Berenene. “No, Isha. I cannot afford even the appearance of weakness. You of all people know that. When they get to the border, I want you to raise its defenses against them.”

Isha gathered up the reports, trying to think of a tactful way to speak her thoughts. She could think of none. “Imperial Majesty, what if the borders fail?”

Berenene’s eyes bulged. “What?”

“We must consider the possibility,” Isha went on. “Two of these children bested Quen, who has spent six years defending Your Imperial Majesty with his power. He has been tested by great mages and succeeded, but a girl and a boy wrapped him up in a neat bundle. Lady Sandrilene did the same with seven people, two of them mages. Not great mages, but good ones. The possibility of failure must be considered.”

“If you approach it with that attitude, you open the door to failure,” snapped the empress.

Ishabal sighed. “All of our work in recent years has gone to the barriers in the southeast and the east, where our greatest enemies are. We have had neither the funds nor the mages to reinforce everything. I know that, given time and preparation, Quen and I could walk through the protection wall at Olart. We must ask ourselves if these three young people might now manage it as well. Majesty, Quen could not break out of the cage Briar and Daja made without a mage’s help.” Isha watched nervously as Berenene took a chair and sat in it. Calmly she continued: “You are angry because you fear you’ll be seen as weak, Majesty, but it need not be so. All we need do is announce that your cousin and her friends are returning home. It is earlier than planned, to be sure, but stories can be spread that our court is far too sophisticated for them! There are still ways to make it seem as if they fled with their tails between their legs.” She took a deep breath. “But if you raise the border against them, and they break through, that will be far worse than stories that say they fled our men. All of your neighbors will know you tried to keep them, and failed. You will have exposed a weakness.”

“I do not believe the border will fail,” Berenene said flatly, her mouth a hard, tight line.

Isha shrugged. “Nor do I, but I must examine possibilities and damage if you will not. The chance of failure must be considered. I beg you, let them go.”

“I will not be defied.” The refusal was a quick one, but she had not ordered Isha out of her sight. There was an opening in the empress’s thinking.

Isha rushed through it. “Then let me go, alone, to do it,” she said. “You remain here. If they fail to break through the wall, I shall bring them here to you. If I fail to hold the wall against them, you can say I am weary from travel and the wall needs work. It has gone neglected and now it will be seen to. No one will know this was in any way a matter in which you were involved. They will speculate, no doubt, but they will not prove.”

Berenene looked down in thought at her perfectly cared for hands.

Isha pressed. “You have always said it is far better to appear innocent while others take the blame.”

Berenene rubbed her temples. “You ask me to surrender my pride.”

Isha bowed her head. “Only when it is a liability, Imperial Majesty.”

“You are willing to take the blame if the border fails.”

“If this traditionally safe border fails,” corrected Isha. “If this seldom renewed border fails. If older, weary me fails against three powerful young things who just tied my best assistant in a knot.”

Isha knew that remote look on Berenene’s face as the empress smoothed her fingers over her sleeve. She was always glad to see it, because it meant that her mistress was turning a thousand thoughts over in her mind, seeing a multitude of outcomes and weighing them all. Few people glimpsed this cold calculation on the empress’s beautiful features. She didn’t want them to. It suited her that people thought of her as a passionate creature delighting in love and money. Few realized that Berenene cooled off far sooner than she let on, and that she did nothing that would not enhance her standing in the eyes of her people and the world.

Finally Berenene shook out her cuffs and got to her feet. “Very well, Isha. Do what you must. And I’m going to change. I’ve a mind to ride along the lake today.”

Sandry refused to stay a second night in the Canyon Inn. I don’t trust them, she told Daja and Briar. If Shan had their help, I don’t want to punish them. I know how hard it is to refuse a noble. But I don’t want to stay here, either.

I have potions. I could find out, offered Briar.

They’ve had enough magic, said Daja, who had watched the staff skitter around the caged Quen. Let’s just go. If you’re feeling so energetic, grovel to Zhegorz some more.

Briar winced. All three of them were doing some serious apologizing to Zhegorz. Sandry even invited him to ride beside her as they left the Canyon Inn. Strangely, the whole mess seemed to have calmed Zhegorz down. Even when they passed the next imperial fort, he kept warnings about palace matters to himself. He was learning to sift images and his words more.

Since they were only two riders, Ambros and Tris had an easier time on the road in some ways, despite Tris’s weakness. When Tris felt she could stay in the saddle not another moment, she wove ropes of wind to bind her to it and her mare, and trapped two more pads of air to keep her upright. If she grew vexed at traffic, she sent winds ahead to drive those in the road to its sides until she and Ambros passed by. When those attending the horse fair did not respond to wind, she reddened and began to play with balls of lightning. The people scattered. She, Ambros, and Chime passed through the meeting of the highway and Deepdene Road far more quickly than had Sandry and her companions.

By then, Tris was able to sense Briar and Daja. Her strength returned with each day she rode, though her hips ached fiercely when she dismounted for the night. She said nothing about it. She also said nothing when Ambros paid for a private room for each of them at the inns when they halted. By the time they passed the fort beyond the Blendroad Inn, Tris had begun to ride part of the time at the trot. Briar, Daja, and Sandry were telling her that Zhegorz was in a bad state, babbling about walls of glass. Tris knew what he meant, just as her brother and sisters knew: There were magical walls ahead. Tris fidgeted when they rested the horses, and she slept badly, always wanting to get on the road at dawn. It was one thing to talk to her friends, another to shift power to them. She needed to be closer.

Ten days after they’d left Quen and Shan, Sandry, Briar, Daja, Gudruny, her children, and Zhegorz topped a rise in the Imperial Highway. Before them lay a great green plain dotted with villages, and a massive blue lake. The border fortress was on the far side of the gleaming water. To the east lay the smoky foothills of the Carakathy Mountains, where the empress was said to have a hunting lodge. According to Tris, Berenene and Ishabal Ladyhammer were there now.

“Out in the open,” muttered Zhegorz, staring at that broad emerald expanse. “No place to hide from watchers, no place to hide from the wind.”

“As long as my imperial cousin and her pawns do nothing but watch,” retorted Sandry. “As long as they keep out of the way.” She urged their company forward, down the slope to the plain.

It took them two days to cross it and skirt the lake. On the third day, Briar woke to find Zhegorz gone from his bed and his saddlebags missing. He was also missing from breakfast. “Now that’s a worry,” Briar told Sandry. “Zhegorz has lived hungry too long to miss any meals.”

Gudruny’s children searched the inn and its outbuildings, but there was no sign of their crazy man. They did find his saddlebags in the stable with his horse, but there was no trace of the man himself.

Sandry paced in the courtyard, working steadily more intricate cats’ cradles in her fingers. “I don’t want to leave him, and I don’t like not knowing where he is,” she complained. She had yet to give the order to saddle the horses or to hitch up Gudruny’s cart. “I didn’t know I’d need to put a leash on him. Who can scry among us?”

“Tris,” chorused Briar and Daja. They looked at each other and grinned. That was when knowledge struck Briar like one of Tris’s own lightning bolts.

“That’s what she’s been dancing around,” he told his sisters. “That’s why she took old Zhegorz aside. It’s not just sounds she’s hearing on the winds. She knows how to scry on them, too. She learned somehow.”

“She didn’t want you to know for silly reasons,” Zhegorz said reasonably. He had walked in the gate to the inn’s courtyard, his lean face glowing with sweat. “She said you’ll think she’s conceited if you knew she can do it.”

All three young mages traded exasperated looks. “Have you ever known such an annoying girl?” demanded Sandry.

“But she couldn’t do it before,” Daja said. “She learned? While she was away? But people go mad, trying to see things on the wind! No offense,” she told Zhegorz.

He shrugged. “I was born with it.”

“Yell at Tris later,” said Briar. “Yell at Zhegorz now. Where were you, Zhegorz? You had us all fretting.”

“I went to see,” Zhegorz said, wiping his face on his sleeve. “They look for Clehame Sandrilene and her escort, so I went to the border crossing to see who is looking. A white-haired mage who blazes like the sun waits on a platform by the arch. Three mages like stars and soldiers with the gold braid of the palace soldiers guard her on the platform.” He held up one of his ear beads. “The white-haired mage will raise the border magic to stop you three. Only you three. She is in charge. She tells her guards that, and she tells the border guards that. She is to deal with you and only you, and all others may pass.” Zhegorz rubbed the back of his neck. “She is not happy with her work. Why is she not happy?”

Daja shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours. Was there anything else?”

Zhegorz reported the gossip of merchants headed south, and of merchants on the far side of the border who waited for the gates to open so they could head north. When she realized that he had told everything he knew of their situation, Sandry kissed his stubbled cheek. “Go eat a good breakfast,” she told him affectionately. “And thank you.” She watched him walk into the inn, then looked for Gudruny.

“Gudruny, would you come with me, please?” she asked. She led her maid over to the cart and opened one of the trunks. The first thing she pulled out of it was a heavy canvas tarp with shifting patterns on it. Underneath it were four hooded cloaks, two large and two small. “You and Zhegorz each get one, and the children each get one,” she told the maid, handing the cloaks to her. “I thought we might need them. With these on, and the cart covered with the tarp, you won’t look like the people who traveled with me. Tell them you’re joining a merchant caravan in Leen, traveling south.”

“Clehame, this is silly,” protested Gudruny.

Sandry put her hand on the woman’s arm. “It’s going to be a mage fight at the border,” she explained gently. “If you leave right away, you can pass through long before we get there. We’ll meet you at Ratey’s Inn on the other side, once we’ve ... worked things out.” When Gudruny opened her mouth to argue again, Sandry shook her head. “Get the little ones and Zhegorz safely out of this, please,” she said firmly. “That’s Ishabal Ladyhammer who waits for us, Gudruny. You have our purse with you. If we fail, choose what you will do. I’d like you to take Zhegorz to Winding Circle temple in Emelan. They’ll be able to help him, and my great-uncle Vedris will look after you and the children. Or you can return to me in Namorn, if I can’t escape. I can’t choose for you, though I hope you’ll regard my wishes.”

Gudruny curtsied, a troubled look on her face. “I hope I’ll see you on the other side of the border, Clehame,” she murmured. “Then neither of us will have to choose.”

Sandry patted Gudruny’s arm, then went to see how successful Briar had been in explaining their plan to Zhegorz.

“I can’t,” Zhegorz protested when Sandry found them. “Tris said I must watch and listen for you.”

“And you have,” Sandry told him. “While we slept, you did. Now I need you to safeguard Gudruny and the children. Please, Zhegorz.”

He nodded, without meeting her eyes. Can I ask for anyone braver? she wondered. He’s terrified, and yet he has spied on the might of the empire that’s here for me. For us. Maybe it takes a coward more courage—not less—to do and not do things. Perhaps cowards understand the world so much better than brave folk.

Once Gudruny, Zhegorz, and the children had left with the cart, Sandry, Briar, and Daja settled into the common room to give them a couple of hours’ head start. As Briar drew strength from his shakkan and Daja mended a piece of tack, Sandry asked the sergeant who commanded their guards to come see her. When he arrived, he did not look at all comfortable.

“Forgive me, Clehame,” he said, “but word gets around. There’s imperial mages waiting at the border. I hear they mean to stop you. What does that mean for my lads and me?”

Sandry smiled at him. “You were only supposed to bring me to the border,” she told the man. “I would no more ask you to defy your empress than I would ask you to cook your own children. Please tell Cousin Ambros you guarded me well. And my thanks to you and your men.” She drew out the pouch of coins she had kept for this moment. “To buy some ... comforts ... on your way home.” She gave it to him with a wink.

The sergeant bowed and accepted the pouch. “You are always gracious, Clehame,” he said. “We thank you and ask Qunoc’s blessing on your journey home.”

“You’d be better off asking Sythuthan’s,” Briar muttered.

The sergeant grinned at the suggestion that they should appeal to the notorious trickster god. “Your gods bless and hold you evermore, Clehame Sandrilene,” he told Sandry. “We wish you and Viymese Daja and Viynain Briar a long life and much happiness.”

Watching through the common room door as the Landreg men-at-arms rode away, Sandry felt a weight fall from her shoulders. “It’s just us now,” she murmured. “We don’t have to be responsible for anyone else. What a relief.”