was not sipping wine with the matronly woman who had greeted Karl last night. In fact, he was nowhere to be seen. The woman was there, though, knitting by the fire; when she saw him she immediately put the needles and yarn aside. “And there you are, you poor frozen duckling,” she said. “I won’t ask if you slept well, since here it is getting dark again already and you just getting out of bed.” She reached out to tweak his rumpled clothes, tsking. “And you slept in your clothes. I should have undressed you while I was about it, poor lamb.”
Karl didn’t know how to respond to that. “I am grateful, Madame. ..?”
“Oh, don’t bother with the Madame, sweetie-pie.” The woman smiled. “Goodwife is good enough for me. Goodwife Beth.”
Karl blinked, not sure she was serious. Goodwife Beth was the name of a character from The Farmer’s Mother, a Verdsmitt one-act that was very popular with amateur actors because of its broadly comic characters. And now that he thought about it, Goodwife Beth in the play also called people “duckling” and “lamb” and “sweetie-pie.” Even the most inappropriate people, like powerful MageLords.
He laughed, suddenly. He couldn’t help it. And Princes, he thought.
Goodwife Beth-obviously that was no more her real name than Vinthor’s was Vinthor-smiled. “Does my heart good to hear you laugh, and you so pale and frozen when you came in last night. Well, it looks like no permanent harm was done, honeybuns. Are you hungry?”
“Starved,” Karl said. “But… I’d prefer some clean clothes, first. If there are any.”
Goodwife Beth looked him over with a critical eye. “I dare say I’ve got something your size. Come along.”
She led him into a main-floor bedroom whose most impressive feature was an enormous four-poster bed. She ignored the beat-up old wardrobe in the corner, instead moving aside a rug and pulling open a trapdoor beneath it. She disappeared down a ladder, and emerged a moment later with a handful of clothes. Stores for the Common Cause’s agents, he thought. I wonder what else is down there?
Goodwife Beth showed no inclination to give him a tour. She closed the door firmly behind her, then unrolled the rug over it again. She spread the clothes out on the bed; she’d brought up three shirts, two pairs of pants, even clean underwear-at least, he hoped it was clean. She held up the first shirt, tossed it aside, then held up the second and nodded. “There you are, moppet. Try that one on for size.”
She waited expectantly. Feeling a little awkward, Karl pulled his own sweat-stained shirt over his head. “My, what a well-built young man you are, chickadee,” Goodwife Beth said.
Karl felt himself blushing from forehead to navel, and quickly started pulling the shirt over his head. It was only half on when Vinthor stormed into the room. “That bloody bastard Falk has-” He stopped on seeing Karl, but only for an instant. “You’d better be worth it, you stupid, useless whelp!” Karl jerked the shirt down over his head and stepped back, bumping into the wardrobe, as Vinthor advanced on him. “Do you know what your rutting Minister of Public Safety has done?” He jabbed a finger at Karl. “Leveled New Cabora City Hall. And says he’ll destroy another building every day until someone tells him where you are. New Cabora City Hall has stood for almost two centuries. You’ve only been around for two decades. We should have killed you like poor Jenna tried to do. But, no, I went and asked the Patron!” He suddenly snarled and drew back his fist, and Karl threw his arms over his face… but the blow never landed.
“As you were required to do,” said Goodwife Beth, and she no longer sounded at all like the comic character from Verdsmitt’s play. Vinthor froze, fist cocked, as the tone registered. Then he dropped his hand and turned. Karl lowered his own arms and straightened, looking past him. Goodwife Beth seemed somehow to have gotten both taller and a lot… harder.
“Goodwife…”
“The Patron needs this young man alive more than the Patron does you,” Goodwife Beth said. “Which means you are to defend him to the death, if it comes to that. Do you have a problem with those orders?”
Vinthor’s face had gone somehow solid, as though it were carved out of marble. “No, ma’am.”
“I’m glad to hear it. And so will the Patron be, when next we speak.” And then, suddenly, the iron vanished, hidden away behind the smiling face of the simple farm woman who had welcomed Karl to her house the night before. “Now, then,” she said to Karl, “you just go ahead and try on those trousers and underwear. And don’t worry, mooncalf. I’m not going to stay and watch.” With a warm chuckle, Goodwife Beth bustled out of the room.
Vinthor gave Karl another hard look, but didn’t speak. Instead, he followed Goodwife Beth out.
Karl pulled off his trousers and drawers, and quickly pulled on the clean ones he’d been provided. They fit perfectly. Goodwife Beth, he’d wager, had sized up more than one young man in her life. Whatever she was, or had been, she was definitely not just a simple farm woman.
And a good thing, too, or he might be lying on the floor spitting out teeth… or worse.
Falk destroyed City Hall? Karl thought. That seemed extreme even for him. Especially since he had to know Karl had left his room of his own free will and certainly wasn’t “kidnapped,” whatever he was telling the Commoners. There’s something else going on. He’s worried about something… something big. Something I don’t know anything about.
He gazed around the simple room, so different from his grand quarters back in the Palace. And something I am unlikely to find out anything about.
He remembered thinking the Lesser Barrier was just one big prison, and longing to escape it. Now it seemed he had simply fled one prison for another, much smaller one.
But things were moving, out there in the big world. Falk was at the center of it, along with Davydd Verdsmitt… Tagaza…
… and this mysterious Patron.
It was like being buffeted from all directions by gusts of wind, seemingly unconnected… but all harbingers of a much greater storm to come.
Stuck in Goodwife Beth’s not-at-all-what-it-appeared farmhouse, it seemed all he could do was wait for the storm to break.
Well, he thought, at least there’s no reason to face it hungry; and off he went to find something to eat.
CHAPTER 16
Tagaza spent an almost-sleepless night in his cell after Falk left him. He’d known Falk was ruthless and utterly determined that his Plan succeed; he just had never really expected to be on the receiving end of that ruthlessness.
More than a quarter of a century we’ve known each other, he thought. I discovered how to bring down the Barrier. I brought him that information. I’ve helped him every step of the way. And yet on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, he was ready to believe I would throw all that away.
It was his own fault, he thought as he lay on the narrow cot, staring up into the dark. He had been honest with Falk when they were just starting out, and honest since. He’d made it clear his reasons for wanting the Barriers removed were not the same as the Unbound’s. He’d thought that didn’t matter, as long as they both shared that ultimate goal. But that was why Falk had been so quick to mistrust him. Falk doesn’t believe magic will fail if the Barriers remain, he thought bitterly. I explained everything I’ve found, but there is no room within the belief system of the Unbound for magic that is a limited resource, like… like coal, or lumber. They think they will always have magic, whenever they need it, as much as they need. They think they can count on using it to conquer the lands Outside the Great Barrier.
But they’re wrong. And now Tagaza was glad he had not been entirely honest with Falk. For there was one thing his research had uncovered that he had never shared with Falk, for fear Falk would be the one to decide the Barriers should remain in place: the First Twelve, while searching for the lode on which the Kingdom was centered, had found no other lodes of similar power anywhere else in the world.
Tagaza had a theory about that, too. The Unbound believed that the SkyMage had created the Mageborn to rule over the obviously inferior Commoners, that their ability to use magic was a sign that they were favored by the Creator.
But Tagaza did not believe in the SkyMage, or any other supernatural being. Tagaza believed that the Mageborn had appeared simply because their ancestors were the first people to settle the land above the great lode
