holdings in complete chaos?”
“Why, everything,” he told her in mild surprise. “Ma’ar had a dozen agents in the Court, didn’t you know that? Their job was to spread rumors, create dissension, make things as difficult as possible for the High King to get anything accomplished. I don’t know their names, but Cinnabar does; she was instrumental in winkling them out and dealing with them after the King collapsed. But the major thing was that once Ma’ar believed that his agents had done everything they could to get the Court just below the boiling point, he sent one of them into the Palace with a little ‘present’ for the King and his supporters.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “Treachery of the worst sort. Have you ever heard of something called a dyrstaf?”
“No,” she said, blankly.
“Skan could tell you more about it. He was there at the time, in Urtho’s Tower, and he found out about everything pretty much as it happened. For that matter, so was Lady Cinnabar, but she’s not a mage, and Skan is.” He tried to recall everything that Cinnabar and Skan had told him. “It’s a rather nasty little thing. It’s an object, usually a rod or a staff of some kind, that holds a very insidious version of a fear-spell. It looks perfectly ordinary until it’s been triggered, and even then it doesn’t show to anything but Magesight. It starts out just creating low-level anxiety, and works up to a full panic over the course of a day and a night. And since it isn’t precisely attacking anyone or anything, most protective spells won’t shield from it. And of course, since it wasn’t active when the agent brought it into the Palace, no one knew it was there, and it didn’t trip any of the protections laid around the King.”
“A fear spell?” she asked softly. “But why didn’t the Palace shields—oh. Never mind, it was inside the shields when it started to work. So of course the shields wouldn’t keep anything out.”
“And by the time anyone realized what was going on, it was too late to do anything about it,” Amberdrake replied. “In fact, it did most of its worst work after dark, at a time when people are most subject to their fears anyway. The mages always slept under all kinds of personal shielding, so of course they weren’t affected. Anyone with Healer training would also sleep under shields; remember, most Healers have some degree of Empathy, and this was an emotion. They would also have been protected against it.”
“But anyone else—” She shuddered.
“And what most people did was simply to run away.” Amberdrake sighed. “By morning, the Palace was deserted, and it wasn’t only the nobles who ran, no matter what you might have heard to the contrary. It was everyone. Cinnabar said that the only ones left were the mages and Healers; there wasn’t a horse, donkey, or mule fit to ride left in the stables, the servants and the Palace guards had deserted their posts, and the King was in a virtual state of collapse. She and the others called Urtho from his Tower. By the time that Urtho found the dyrstaf, it was too late; the worst damage had been done.”
“But they didn’t come back.” No mistake about it; Winterhart’s tone was incredibly bitter and full of self- accusation. “They could have returned, but they didn’t. They were cowards, all of them.”
“No.” He made his voice firm, his answer unequivocal. “No, they didn’t come back, not because they were cowards, but because they were hurt. The dyrstaf inflicts a wound on the heart and soul as deep as any weapon of steel can inflict on the body; an invisible wound of terror that is all the worse because it can’t be seen and doesn’t bleed. They weren’t cowards, they were so badly wounded that most of them had gone beyond thinking of anything but their fear and their shame. Some of them, like the King, died of that wound.”
“He—died?” she faltered. “I didn’t know that.”
Amberdrake sighed. “His heart was never that strong, and he was an old man; being found by Urtho hiding in his own wardrobe shamed him past telling. It broke his spirit, and he simply faded away over the course of the next month. Since he was childless, and everyone else in direct line had fled past recalling, Urtho thought it better just to let people think he’d gone into exile.”
“What about Cinnabar?” she demanded sharply. “Why didn’t she run? Doesn’t that just prove that everyone who did really is a coward?”
“Cinnabar was already a trained Healer, dear-heart,” he said. Not like you, little one. You might have had the Gift, but your family didn’t indulge you enough to let you get it trained. “You’ve worked with her, you know how powerful she is, and her Empathy is only a little weaker than her Healing powers. She was shielded against outside emotions and didn’t even know what was going on. Then in the morning, she was able to tell that the fear was coming from outside, and she was one of the ones who got Urtho and helped him in a search for the dyrstaf. They all came in by way of Urtho’s private Gate into the throne room—all but Skan, he was too big to fit. Unfortunately, by the time Urtho and the mages found it, it was too late to do any good.”
“They always said her family was eccentric,” Winterhart said, as if to herself. “Letting the children get training, as if they were ever going to have to actually be Healers and mages and all. I envied her—” A gasp told him she had realized too late that she had let that clue to her past slip.
“If your parents had allowed you to have Healer training, instead of forcing you to learn what you could on your own, you probably wouldn’t be here right now,” he told her quietly. “Don’t you realize that if you’d been properly trained, you’d have been standing beside Cinnabar, helping her, on that day? There is nothing more vulnerable than an untrained Empath. You were perhaps the single most vulnerable person in the entire Palace when the dyrstaf started working. Didn’t you ever realize that? If Ma’ar’s spell of fear wounded others, I am truly surprised that it didn’t strike you dead.”
