He trailed off. He couldn’t quite bring himself to promise that he’d turn in his son. Evlan would have marshals watch the house.
“Thank you. I have just one more question for you. Do you know where I might find Rienne ir’Alastra?”
The shadows pooled and thickened in a corner of the little room. A sword blade took shape out of the darkness, glinting dully in the dim light that filtered through the shutters of the room. Then the hand that held it appeared, covered in a black glove. Phaine d’Thuranni stepped out of the shadows, lowering his sword as his eyes swept the empty room. Another form took shape in the dark corner, and Phaine made a hand signal: Stand down.
Either they had received bad information, or they had arrived too late. Phaine shifted his sword to his left hand and used his teeth to pull the glove off his right hand. He bent over the bed beside the window, placing his palm on the mattress. A trace of a circle rumpling the blankets showed that someone had been sitting there not long before. Very recently, in fact-Phaine could still feel the heat.
Phaine shot Leina another hand signal, and she stepped to the door, pressed an ear to it, and shook her head. Then something on the door caught her eye, and she examined it. She knelt and looked at the floor, then stepped away from the door, signaling to Phaine: Look here. She pointed at the door and the floor.
Phaine crossed the room in two steps and looked where Leina had pointed. There was a mark on the door as if something had struck it. Perhaps the metal head of a mace, but not a hard blow. The floor was scuffed.
“A warforged,” he whispered. “Pacing here beside the door, and the door hit him when it opened.” The other elf nodded. Search it, Phaine told her.
Phaine pressed his own ear to the door then opened it silently. There was no one in the hall, and the opposite door stood open. Taking his sword in his right hand again, he stepped quickly across to the other room. Empty. The two beds were pushed together, their blankets piled on the floor. He found white hairs on the bed-presumably ir’Brassek’s-and curly black hairs that must have belonged to the woman the innkeeper had described, the beautiful elf. Phaine snorted. He didn’t like to imagine an elf dallying with an old human like ir’Brassek.
He stepped back across the hall, no longer making an effort at silence. “What did you find?” he asked Leina, who knelt on the floor beside the window.
“Come have a look,” she said.
Phaine crossed the room and looked over her shoulder. The window sill was thick with grime-except where a fingertip had traced patterns in the dirt.
Without thinking about it, Phaine reverted to hand signals: Over there. Leina got out of the way, and Phaine knelt on the floor to study the patterns. At first, they were incomprehensible, but he knew there was something-the shapes hinted at letters, in the ornate Draconic script. But they’d been written on top of each other, and he found it almost impossible to distinguish them. He breathed the words of a simple spell, and the letters slowly resolved themselves in his mind.
He read them aloud, translating them from Draconic to Elven. “The Bronze Serpent seeks the face of the first of sixteen.”
“What?” Leina said.
“The Prophecy. Come. Let’s get out of here.”
The shadows in the corner darkened again, and Phaine stepped into them. When he vanished, Leina took one last look around the room, then followed.
Rienne ir’Alastra whirled on Evlan, a picture of righteous fury. “I assure you, Sentinel Marshal,” she said, “if I had any idea where Gaven was, I’d tell you, just as I did all those years ago.”
She set her jaw, trying to make herself believe the words she spoke. Back then, she had honestly believed that she was helping Gaven by leading the Sentinels to him-she thought they would help him, restore him to his right mind. Instead, they had locked him in Dreadhold, and she had spent two and a half decades blaming herself for all the tortures she imagined him enduring there. Now he had escaped, and this Evlan d’Deneith seemed a little too skilled at reading the ambivalence she felt.
“I am sure you will do what’s right,” Evlan said. He smiled slightly, but his eyes fixed on her like a hawk.
She turned her back on him again. “I appreciate your confidence,” she said.
“I spoke to his father this morning,” Evlan said. The sound of his voice drew a little closer. “Master d’Lyrandar does not believe that Gaven is mad.”
“Love blinds him.”
“Perhaps. Although he was careful to remind me that, technically, he has only one son.”
“The censure of House Lyrandar means little to Arnoth.”
“And what about you, Lady?” he whispered, uncomfortably close now. She could feel him behind her.
Rienne stepped forward and whirled on him again, resting a hand on the hilt of a dagger in her belt as she did so. “What about me, Sentinel Marshal?”
“You were engaged to be married. Gaven has been in Dread-hold for twenty-six years, and you have not married anyone else. Might love be blinding you as well?”
“My marriage to Gaven would have been advantageous both to my family and to House Lyrandar. It was a political allegiance. After Gaven’s arrest, my value in such a bargain diminished significantly. House Lyrandar has made other alliances with other noble families, and the ir’Alastras have waned in influence. Surely you, a scion of House Deneith, can appreciate what is involved in such an alliance.”
Evlan raised his palms as if to deflect the force of her anger. “I married a woman I loved.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky?”
Evlan met her glare and held it for a long moment. “Very well,” he said at last. “If you hear from Gaven, please contact me immediately. I don’t imagine that I need to remind you of the consequences if you do not.”
“I would hate to imagine that a Sentinel Marshal is leveling petty threats at a member of Aundair’s nobility, however much my family’s influence has fallen.”
“Farewell, Lady.” Evlan turned and strode out of the hall.
Rienne watched his back until the servants had ushered him out the front door and closed it behind him. Only when she heard the satisfying slam of the door did she turn and run to her chambers.
Bordan looked up through the shattered ceiling of Dreadhold’s tower to the dazzling arc of the Ring of Siberys overhead. He tried to imagine the force it must have taken to break through the thick stone, the size and sheer strength of the dragon that had done it. Blinking several times to clear the dust and drowsiness from his eyes, he set a thick sheaf of papers down on the bed beside him and stood up to stretch his back.
He walked around Gaven’s tiny cell, reading whatever words his eyes fell on, hoping that something would leap out at him that would help him understand. He could certainly see why so many people thought Gaven was at least halfway across the Sea of Rage, practically lost to madness. Disjointed fragments full of strange imagery and obscure descriptions covered the walls. Bordan had been wrestling for hours with numbers: twice thirteen years, the first of sixteen, shards of three dragons, thirteen cycles of the Battleground, nineteen turns of the thirteenth moon.
The thirteenth moon? Bordan thought. To the best of his knowledge, there were only twelve. And he could only guess at references for most of the rest of these numbers.
His eyes fell on a scrap of writing at his eye level, and he read the words aloud. “The cauldron of the thirteen dragons boils until one of the five beasts fighting over a single bone becomes a thing of desolation.” Bordan stroked his beard. “Very well, Gaven, let’s play this game. Five beasts fighting over a single bone-is that your code for the Five Nations? Are we talking about the Last War here? And Cyre, bless it, has become a thing of desolation. So Galifar is the boiling cauldron of the thirteen dragons? It’s a boiling cauldron because of the war. Thirteen dragons- thirteen dragonmarked houses!”
He looked up at the Ring of Siberys again. “But there were only twelve dragons before House Phiarlan split, Gaven. Is that why you conspired against them? Did you orchestrate the schism so there would be thirteen dragons and your precious Prophecy would make sense?”
He looked around the room again, at all the writing on the walls, the rubble on the floor, the crack in the ceiling through which Gaven, formerly of House Lyrandar, had escaped.
“So your Prophecy would come true?”
