“Down!” he heard Denson shout in the tunnel, then Riddler’s voice, “They’re underneath us, too!” and then an inferno of blue flame roared up from the tunnel behind him, followed by a plume of greasy black smoke… and then silence.
Someone was putting a heavy fur-lined leather cloak around Karl’s shoulders, someone else had found him boots, but Karl barely noticed. All he could see was the dead guard lying in blood-soaked snow just the other side of the secret exit, his headless body encircled by grisly bits of red, white, and gray.
Mother Northwind spent the day after Tagaza’s tragic death in her quarters, pleading fatigue. In fact, she was waiting: waiting for the magelink to come to life, with news of Brenna’s progress toward Goodwife Beth’s. Once Brenna was in the safe house, Mother Northwind thought with something approaching smugness, she could at last bid farewell for good to Lord Falk. After Kravon was dead, Verdsmitt was welcome to kill Falk, too, if he still wanted to-and she was pretty sure, after the speech Falk had “made” him make, that he still wanted to. Of course, by that time, if all went well, the Barriers would have collapsed and magic with them, and without his enchanted toys to help him, Verdsmitt would have to strangle Falk with his bare hands, but again, she thought he’d be willing to try.
As night fell, she began anticipating the call from the team collecting Brenna and Anton at Foam River. But the magelink did not activate.
Midnight came and went with no word, and at last, reluctantly, she decided she would risk magelinking to Goodwife Beth directly. She summoned the glowing blue globe, sent out the call… and got nothing in return. No link could be made.
She left the globe active so long that the temperature in the room dropped noticeably; then, shivering a little, she snapped it out of existence and moved closer to the fire.
What could have happened? Had they been forced to flee, move to a different safe house, Beth somehow prevented from taking the magelink-bracelet provided by Verdsmitt with her?
If that were the case, she might not hear anything for days, until someone managed to get a message to her through the Common Cause network of cells and sympathizers. She might get a knock in the middle of the night, a scrawled note slipped under her door… or she might not, if the message or messenger went awry. She’d be right where Falk was, wondering where Karl and Brenna were.
Frustrated and beginning to be worried, she went to bed. In the morning, there did indeed come a knock on the door. She hobbled to it and opened it to find a liveried servant holding a silver tray with a card on it. “Your pardon, milady,” he said formally. “The Honorable Lord Falk, Minister of Public Safety, requests your presence at dinner tonight in the Prince’s Banquet Hall. I am to tell you that the entire King’s Council will also be present.”
Mother Northwind was astonished, and a little horrified. What on Earth can Falk be thinking? she thought. He’s always kept me in the shadows. Why is he dragging me out to a formal dinner with the King’s Council, of all people?
Her first instinct was to say “No.” But… until she knew for certain where Brenna and the Prince were, she needed Falk, which meant putting up with his arrogance, his assumption that she was just a useful tool-a powerful, dangerous tool, but still a tool. A tool, she thought, does not refuse to be used.
And then she smiled a little. Besides, it would be interesting to see the Councillors. They wouldn’t recognize in her the much younger Healer Makala, who had once lived in the Palace and tended all of them at one time or another. She imagined herself, in the middle of the dinner, shouting, “I’ve seen you all naked!” Her smile turned to a chuckle. “Tell Lord Falk,” she said, still chuckling-the servant very carefully not reacting to that no-doubt unexpected response-“that I am honored by the invitation and will attend with pleasure.”
“Yes, milady.”
“And don’t call me milady,” Mother Northwind said. “I’m not yours, and I’m definitely not a lady.” And then she shut the door on the servant’s bemused face.
She knew a lot about those Councillors. It was while healing Lord Athol’s hemorrhoids that she had found out about his son’s “perversion” and supposedly tragic but actually most welcome suicide, and begun putting together the pieces that had led her to the oh-so-valuable Verdsmitt a few years later. She’d known enough about Lady Estra’s under-the-table deals with merchants and suppliers to blackmail several dozen people, had she just wanted to be rich, and knew about the idiot, illegitimate son that Lady Vin kept locked in a basement room in her manor up by Berriton. But of course, all that information was long out of date now. Shaking a few hands, being helped to her seat and out of it again… she couldn’t glean much in such short moments of contact, but she could probably at least, if she were to use Falk’s terminology, “update her files” on them.
If her plan proved out, none of that information would likely matter, but you could never have too much information, Mother Northwind thought. Falk had once told her there was a saying in his trade that “ninety percent of the intelligence you collect is useless; the trouble is, you never know which ninety percent it is.”
And so it was that Mother Northwind allowed a young man-very interested in (much younger) ladies, but without much of anything else in his head-to take her arm and escort her to the Prince’s Banquet Hall, a relatively small dining area near Karl’s quarters on the fourth floor of the west wing. It was surprisingly tasteful for a formal Palace room: black-and-white tiled floor, white walls, a black fireplace, a long black table spread with snowy white linen, black sideboards with white marble tops. A silver chandelier sparkled overhead. They came in through large side doors; a swinging door at one end of the room led to a kitchen, from which good smells were emerging, while a closed door at the other end of the room led, she supposed, through a hidden hallway to the empty quarters of Prince Karl.
The Councillors milled about, talking in low voices, sipping from the glasses of sparkling wine and nibbling the appetizers the servants circulated among them on silver trays. Mother Northwind recognized all of the Councillors at once, though they hadn’t, for the most part, aged well; too much time in the Palace, too many dinners like this one, had put too many pounds on some of them and gave the others a kind of… preserved look, like a corpse in stasis.
Of course, one Councillor was literally a preserved corpse: Tagaza, the First Mage, who would remain in stasis until a state funeral could be organized, after travel became easier in the spring. His death might have contributed to some of the somberness Mother Northwind detected in the room, but she suspected what contributed to it a lot more was the trouble in the Commons: the attack on the Prince, his disappearance, Falk’s destruction of the Square, the sabotage of the MageFurnace. T he MageLords, Mother Northwind thought with some satisfaction, are feeling a lot less sure of themselves than they are accustomed to.
She smiled. Just wait until I’m finished with them. She turned that smile on a servant who had approached her with wine. “Why, thank you, I believe I will.”
Falk was engaged in conversation with Lord Athol in the corner by the kitchen door; he saw her came in and detached himself from the Prime Adviser to greet her.
“Mother Northwind,” he said. “How good of you to come.” He nodded to the Councillors. “I told the King’s Council of your tremendous, though sadly unsuccessful, attempt to save Tagaza’s life, and they all wanted to meet you.”
“Well, I’m honored, my lord,” Northwind said, a little too loudly, as though she were slightly deaf. “It’s not often a simple country Healer like me gets to hobnob with the great and powerful.”
Falk’s smile seemed genuine, and she suspected she knew why. “Well, then,” he said. “Allow me to introduce you.”
She resisted the impish impulse to ask him to take her arm, knowing full well why he never had and never would, and instead hobbled on her own over to the first of the Councillors.
Half an hour later, as she sat down to dinner on Falk’s left hand-Falk himself, as host, sitting at the table’s head, and Lord Athol on his right-she knew a lot more about the Councillors, but none of it seemed very important. Lady Vin’s idiot son had died, “cause unknown,” and been quietly buried on her estate. Lady Estra was still corrupt. Lord Athol had pretty much forgotten about his long-dead first son and was much more focused on his now tenyear-old replacement, although slightly worried by the boy’s recently displayed tendency to torture small animals.
When they were all seated, one chair remained unfilled, between Athol and Falk. As the servants stepped back into their assigned places along the walls, ready to pour and serve and tidy away as required, Lord Falk tapped his glass with his spoon for quiet, then got to his feet.
“Lords and Ladies, Mother Northwind,” he said, “I know you must wonder why I have invited you to such a banquet after so many disturbing events. I’m sure you have said to each other, ‘What is there to celebrate?’
