Standing outside the Delfier Gate, hearing it barred behind him forever, would he have thought it was worth Banishment to come here and see what he had seen?
Yes. But not worth all the lives of those people the High Council is going to make miserable by annexing their lands just to try to get at me.
That's the problem, really— I don't mind paying the price, but is it fair that another price should be extracted from people who don't even know me?
No. Not if the Wild Magic was involved. The Wild Magic could ask you to pay any price it chose, up to and including your own life, but it would never, never, ask you to pay another's life. You could not pay what you did not own, not in the Wild Magic.
But he hadn't asked to come here. He hadn't made any bargains with Wild Magic. So was their involvement due to Wild Magic, or was it only coincidence?
Or did Father plan to annex the Wildwood all along?
It was possible. It was more than possible. In retrospect, Kellen now recognized the seeds of greed and avarice in his father, a desperate need to be numbered among the great Arch-Mages. Perhaps, just as Idalia had said, Kellen's defection was only the excuse, not the cause.
He hoped so. All the grief and pain for others that had been and was being unleashed hung heavily on his heart.
And this strange drought, this dangerous weather—he wondered if the reason Idalia had brought them here was part of another price, for she surely hadn't been willing to come. He knew the Wild Magic was powerful, but he'd still barely begun to learn about it. Could it truly be powerful enough to bring an end to this terrible drought in time?
And if it was, what would be the price of that? And who would pay it?
LYCAELON TAVADON PACED irritably behind his throne in the Council Chamber, waiting for the twelve to arrive. This meeting was not of his calling, and he did not expect it to go well.
The news his agents had brought him over the last sennights had not been good. It had, in fact, been a catalogue of disasters, each more baffling than the last.
The Scouring Hunt had been called up and sent forth—at great cost to the Mages and their stores of hoarded energy. A handpicked troop of Militia and Lawspeakers had ridden out ahead—though the Hunt would overtake them and finish its cleansing work days before they arrived—to bring news of Armethalieh's will to its newly annexed dominions, stewards to govern them and assessors and tax gatherers to make sure that the crofts and villages were smoothly integrated into the great family of Armethaliehan lands. When they arrived in lands newly humbled by such an awe-inspiring display of Mageborn power, its inhabitants should be deeply grateful to receive the City's protection.
Even though the City itself had visited the terror of the Scouring Hunt upon them…
And The Outlaw would be taken, run to ground, with the just vengeance of the City exacted upon him at last. But that wasn't what had happened.
The first news to reach Lycaelon as the remains of the Scouring Hunt came limping home was the worst: The Outlaw had escaped once again. Somehow the miserable whelp had known the Hunt was coming and had fled before it, vanishing beyond the Hunt's power to follow, for by the laws of the magick that had given the Hounds life and power, they could not follow their prey outside Armethalieh's newly expanded borders.
And just as bad, so Lycaelon discovered from the minds of the stone Hounds—for with the proper spells, a Mage of sufficient power could see and hear all that a Hound had seen and heard while Hunting—the boy had help in his wickedness, an ally whose name Lycaelon had forgotten long ago, to his cost.
Idalia. His daughter. His treacherous Banished Wildmage daughter.
The Outlaw Hunt sent after her years before had returned, baffled, unable to find her. How that could be, he had not then, and did not now, have any idea. But when there was no word of her for two entire years, he had assumed that she must have died in that grace period between dusk and dawn. Even near the Delfler Gate, after all, the wilderness was dangerous, and there were rogues aplenty and wild animals who could have removed her from the world before the Hunt had been released. She might even have chosen to die by her own hand, rather than face the life of an Outlaw or the terror of the Hunt.
But clearly—so he saw now—she had not run afoul of misfortune. Somehow she had escaped, and not content with escaping justice, had obviously found some way to infect Kellen with her twisted madness from afar, and then claimed him for her own in the moment that the City's protection had been lifted from him.
Someday, girl, I will find you both. And when I do, I swear by the Eternal Light, there will come such a reckoning as will make even your Tainted soul tremble!
