Palanthas to find them.”
She hesitated, undecided. A pair of young women came along, giggling, and they gave her amused glances before they turned and passed the short man into his dark entry. He winked at them, and they laughed easily.
Why not? Selinda asked herself, and there was no good answer. She had come out to experience the life that was banished from her royal palace, and why shouldn’t she do just that?
“All right,” she said with more confidence than she felt.
“Right this way,” said the man, who walked with a pronounced limp. He turned back into the doorway, and she followed him into the shadows.
Jaymes put down the letter from General Dayr. His head hurt-that had been happening a lot lately-and he suddenly felt very tired. Leaving the parchment on his desk, he rose and went to the window, looking out over the city of Palanthas. It was night, but there was light everywhere, from the streetlamps, the windows of homes and inns, even silver moonlight reflecting on the bay.
But he didn’t see any of it.
It seemed even Dram had betrayed him. The dwarf refused-he outright refused — to build the bombards that Jaymes required. “The emperor can build them himself” had been the phrase in General Dayr’s letter, and Jaymes could almost hear the gruff old campaigner issuing the challenge in his gravelly voice.
But why? What could possibly have happened to cause the dwarf to turn against him like that, acting just like… like the foolish rulers of Vingaard! The person he trusted the most in the world, the one he knew he could count on in every extreme, the dwarf who had become very, very rich because of his service to Jaymes Markham-his old friend Dram had refused his duty to the emperor.
Had the treachery been perpetrated by anyone else, Jaymes would have been consumed by terrible rage, obsessed with the need for quick, severe retribution. Why, when it was Dram who betrayed him, did he feel only a consuming weariness, a darkness that even the sparkling illumination of his beautiful city could not dispel. He felt a tightening in his throat he didn’t recognize, so long had it been since he had given way to any such effeminate emotions.
As he had been doing more and more, he admitted to himself that he missed-really missed — Selinda. Her appeal for him had been born in her beauty, and in the unattainability of her position as the daughter of the Lord Regent of Palanthas. Later he had been drawn to the power she represented, which he knew would augment his own power, and the nearly inexhaustible funds that would become his to share by right of empire and marriage.
Yet in the too few years of their marriage, he had come to appreciate her for her intelligence, her wit, and her wisdom even more than for those surface traits that had first drawn his attention and his interest. Her fierce independence, he remembered wryly, had also been attractive once: she had confronted him alone, in a ruined basement, all the while suspecting that he was a desperate assassin. And she had fooled him with her girlish enthusiasm, leading him into a trap so her father’s knights could capture him with ease.
How ironic, then, that those knights served him now, but the woman who had lured him into chains was lost to him… lost at least as a partner, as a helper, as an ally. She would bear his child, true, and that meant something. But he was enough of a realist to know there would be no more children, that he would never again take her to bed. Even that, which he desired, was beside the point in his moment of darkness. He simply wanted to talk to her.
Making up his mind, he left the office and quickly climbed the two flights of stairs to the floor where she lived in her suite of rooms. Surprisingly, he found himself taking the steps two at a time and forcing himself to slow to a natural walking pace as he approached her chambers. Stopping outside her door, he breathed deeply a few times before knocking. There came no answer. He hesitated a moment then knocked again, listening carefully.
The silence beyond the door was complete, utterly undisturbed. He tried the knob and found it locked. His hand tightened on the latch, knuckles whitening, and for a moment he was possessed by an almost irresistible urge to smash the barrier down, to splinter it into a hundred pieces.
But immediately that urge passed. He released the doorknob almost gently, turned, and walked back to the stairs. He descended them slowly, deliberately, going back into his office, seeing the letter on his desk. Contemptuously he swept the parchment onto the floor and stepped onto it with the heel of his boot. Forcing thoughts of his wife into a corner of his mind, he thought back to Dram.
So the dwarf, too, would dare defy and betray him? Well, there was only one way to treat such a betrayal. He sat down at the desk again, thinking furiously. The Palanthian Legion was still in camp at Vingaard. The emperor could ride there with the Freemen and put that fast, mobile force on the march. He could cross the plains and reach New Compound with five thousand men within another week. If he needed to, he could draw reinforcements from the Crown Army for as he marched, he would pass Thelgaard Keep.
He knew Dram had not fortified his mountain town. Would he do so since he had thumbed his nose at Jaymes? It didn’t matter: once the emperor and his troops got there…
Once he got there… what?
Jaymes leaned back in his chair, pressing a hand to his eyes. The missive from General Dayr, the letter that respectfully reported the dwarf’s refusal to work on any more bombards, lay on the floor, a dark heel print smudged onto the back.
And the thought kept hissing like a snake in his ear: Where was Selinda? Where was his wife?
Too many questions and, for the moment, too few answers.
Jaymes rose and paced around the spacious room. It was his usual way of thinking and planning, but just then it seemed aimless, leading him nowhere, offering nothing in the way of insight or decision. He was almost relieved to be interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Come!” he snapped.
It was General Weaver, and one look at the ashen face of the veteran Knight of the Rose drove all other concerns from the emperor’s mind. “What is it?” Jaymes demanded.
“My lord, grave news,” replied Weaver, coming into the room. By all the gods, was the man trembling?
“What?” repeated Jaymes.
“Word from the Lemish frontier. The message was sent magically from our Kingfishers in Solanthus. It… it seems that Ankhar has attacked again. He’s come from the forest with a new horde-thousands upon thousands of ogres. They wiped out our border defenses in a single attack. Now he’s on the march into the plains.”
“Come with me, my dear,” Hoarst said to Sirene. With a sly glance at the other women, all of them seated around the breakfast table, the albino rose and followed her wizard out of the kitchen.
“Yes, my lord,” she whispered at the door, allowing her long fingers to trail down the back of his smooth cloak.
“Alas, I need you for serious work,” he said, giving her a playful squeeze as he opened the door to his small laboratory. Barely more than a poorly furnished closet-a very poor cousin to the vast installation Hoarst had created in the great hall of his own castle-the gray wizard used the place as his workshop while he remained there with the Black Army.
“I need to make a potion,” he explained. Dutifully she held out one of those slender fingers as he picked up a sharp lancet. His hands caressed hers, and he smiled kindly as he shifted a small glass vial on the table. He pricked her finger lightly, and she smiled at the gentleness of his ministrations even as several drops of crimson blood dripped from her finger into the vial.
“That is all,” he said, releasing her. “You go rest, now. I’ll have the other girls bring you some broth or tea.”
He was already busy as she departed, crushing herbs with a mortar and pestle and magically igniting the burner on a small stove. Within half an hour, he had a small vial of potion, chilled from boiling to moderate temperature by the quick murmur of a cooling cantrip. With the vial in his hand, he went to find Captain Blackgaard.
With the potion tucked into a pocket of his robe, Hoarst mounted a spirited gelding beside the Black Army commander on his stallion. The two men cantered across the valley and up the road that was being chiseled through the jagged crest of the mountain ridge. At the top they halted, and Hoarst handed the vial to the captain.
With a mock toast, Blackgaard gulped down the contents. Immediately he released the reins of his horse, kicked his feet out of the stirrup, and rose from the saddle, gliding aloft.
“It works-I can fly!” he declared.
