stairs into the basement. Holding onto the wall with one hand, the lantern in the other, she descended into the dim depths. The crate in which the body of the dead assassin had arrived leaned against one wall. The corpse itself lay on a wooden trestle table in the middle of the dirt floor. The lantern’s flickering yellow light played over the blackened, skull-grinning face, the bulging white eyes, cooked in their sockets. Falk had removed the stasis field on his arrival, and a faint odor of cooked meat, with a hint of beginning corruption, hung around the body.
The grisly sight didn’t faze Mother Northwind, who had seen much worse, some of it at her own hands. She set the lantern on the edge of the table, went to the head of the casket, then reached out and laid both hands on the corpse’s forehead. Exerting just a little of her will, she reached into the rapidly decaying brain and purged it of the fragments of memories still lingering in its tangled, crumbling pathways. She did not believe Lord Falk would have another Healer check her work, or that there would be enough left of the brain for it to matter if he did, but there was no point in taking chances; not when there was, in fact, not a hint in the dead girl’s mind that she’d even heard of the Unbound, much less thought she was following orders from it. She was Common Cause, through and through. Nor, of course, had she had a thought about Verdsmitt, whom she knew only as a playwright.
There. Mother Northwind took a deep breath as a wave of fatigue flowed over her. Once she would hardly have felt such a minor outlay of energy, but she could not deny that she was getting old.
Well, she thought, at least I’ll last long enough to see the MageLords brought low. She wiped her hands on her apron, picked up the lantern, and climbed back out of the cellar.
She regretted the death of the assassin-Jenna, she thought; the least she could do was remember the girl’s name-but there had been no other way. For two reasons, Karl had to face an attack, a potentially fatal attack involving magic. First, it was the only way she could be certain she had succeeded in creating a Magebane. If he survived the attack then, without question, the half-breed boy whose existence she had shepherded from coerced conception to birth was indeed what she hoped.
But there was a second, even more important reason. The Magebane had to face a lethal magical attack in order to become the Magebane. Only when faced with mortal peril would his power fully awaken.
She suspected Karl had had flashes of power as a child: spells going awry in his presence, enchanted objects failing to work, that sort of thing. But such things could and would be written off as coincidence, especially in an era when no one believed the first Magebane had ever existed.
Neither the Mageborn father nor the Commoner mother had ever understood why they were so consumed by lust one day in a horse barn near Berriton. Nor had they had much time to wonder at it. She had arranged for the father’s “accidental” death shortly thereafter, and watched over the mother during her pregnancy and eased her into the netherworld during the birth.
She had molded the child in the womb in the manner Vell had first perfected all those centuries ago. But to activate his power, the Magebane had to be attacked. And so she had arranged for just such an attack, through the other thing she had so carefully nurtured through the decades: the Common Cause. If the attack had succeeded, and the supposed Prince had been slain, it would have been proof of her failure, but at least it would have still been a heavy blow against the MageLords.
But the attack had failed; the magic directed against Prince Karl had rebounded on Jenna. Which meant she had succeeded: Prince Karl was a Magebane. And that meant Mother Northwind’s own great Plan was, like Falk’s, moving rapidly toward fruition.
Mother Northwind set about tidying the kitchen, though there was little enough to tidy. She’d learned of Falk’s Plan during those years she worked in the Palace, every healing laying-on-of-hands on every Mageborn allowing her a glimpse of the contents of his or her mind. Falk himself had come to her for ministrations in those days, though she had had a different name and a different face and she was certain he had never made the connection between mousy Healer Makala and herself. And that was when she realized how her Plan could be realized, under the ironic and unintended cover of his.
The Magebane, her research and her own knowledge had convinced her, could do far more than just counter the magic hurled at him: he could destroy magic entirely.
To do so, he had to be present when the Keys were transferred from Ruler to Heir. That magic, the greatest ever worked, drew from every living mage, each providing one of the threads from which the fabric of the Great Barrier was woven.
If the Magebane were there when the Keys transferred, touching the Heir at that moment, the Keys would not only fail to transfer, they would shatter. The Barrier would fall-and the magic it contained would rebound through every living Mageborn.
She didn’t think it would kill them. Not all of them. But Mother Northwind was convinced that not one of them would be able to use magic thereafter…
… except, possibly, those who practiced soft magic. Healers, who drew energy from within themselves rather than without, might-she hoped, though she could not be certain-retain their powers to help and heal the mind, if not the body. But the hard mages, those who used their powers to manipulate and destroy, would find themselves reduced to mere Commoners. And the true Commoners, led by the Common Cause, outnumbered them.
The Kingdom would fall. A new country, free of the tyranny of magic, would take its place.
Falk also wanted the Barrier to fall, Mother Northwind had learned as she eased the pain of his sprained wrist one day in the Palace. And he knew how it could be done without the Magebane, but his scheme needed an Heir to sacrifice, and the King showed no interest in producing one.
Mother Northwind also needed the Heir, not to sacrifice, but to bring into contact with the Magebane at the crucial moment. So up to a point, her agenda was compatible with Falk’s; and, of course, she’d never told him about the part that wasn’t.
From there, everything had advanced like clockwork. Trusted by the Palace, she had managed, through one of my greatest feats of magic, she thought sardonically, to temporarily turn King Kravon into enough of a man to father a child on the Queen. Shedding her guise as Makala, she had gone in her own person to Falk to offer him the Heir to raise.
Back in the Palace, she had disposed of both Queen and Royal Midwife, switched the infants, left Prince Karl, her hoped-for Magebane, in the Palace… and then Makala had disappeared forever and Mother Northwind had arrived at Falk’s manor with Brenna. He had built this cottage for her. And since then… she had waited.
Foul deeds, she freely admitted, to slay innocents… but deeds, she firmly believed, justified by the great end toward which she worked.
Now, that great end was very near. Falk also had to wait until Tagaza could confirm Brenna was the Heir, which he had done secretly during her last visit to the Palace. Now he was through waiting. He had set the spring equinox, when he would normally travel north to inspect the Cauldron with Tagaza, as the date he would attempt to seize the Kingship and control of the Barrier. That had forced her hand: she dared wait no longer to discover if Karl were a Magebane, and so, in her guise as the Patron of the Common Cause, she had sent Jenna to test the Prince.
She took a last look around the kitchen and, satisfied, picked up the lantern and moved through the sitting room toward her bedroom. A dark shape flashed through the flickering light, right across her feet, and she gasped, then laughed. “Mousebreath, you did give me a fright.”
The cat meowed and vanished into the shadows, no doubt to slip out into the night through the swinging catsized door she had made for him, to terrorize field mice in their tunnels beneath the snow.
Falk would take Brenna back to the Palace. He would arrest Davydd Verdsmitt-even if her dropping his name hadn’t been enough to arrange that, Verdsmitt’s play would certainly do the trick. With Verdsmitt, the Heir, and the Magebane all in place, only one more piece in her great game needed to be positioned: herself.
It was time for Makala to return to the Palace.
Mother Northwind blew out her lantern, undressed in the darkness, pulled a warm flannel nightgown over her head, and lay down on her bed. It was a pity, because she really liked the cottage Falk had built for her, but it couldn’t be helped.
Mother Northwind was not one to lie awake worrying about things, but she did spend a few extra moments that night thinking about the unexpected appearance of the boy from outside the Kingdom. Did he change anything?
She couldn’t see how. He was only one boy, and it was hardly a surprise that there were people on the other side of the Great Barrier, after all these years. Soon enough, the Barrier would fall and the people of Evrenfels would once more be part of that world. It didn’t much matter to her what that world was like, as long as it didn’t
