When Lord Falk returned from the Square, grim-faced, the heart of New Cabora lay in ruins, the Courthouse and the Grand Theater (where many of Verdsmitt’s plays had shown in triumph) having both suffered the same fate as City Hall. Falk had made it clear that the fault lay with the Common Cause, “common vandals,” he called them, who had murdered other Commoners with their foolish and futile sabotage of the MageFurnace, and who had now brought down just retribution on their city. “Why are you protecting them?” Falk shouted to the white-faced, staring crowds, silent except for sobbing children too young to understand why they had been forced out into the frozen streets at sword point. “Give me their leaders! Give me their Patron! Give me Prince Karl! There is someone within the sound of my voice who has the power to do all these things. There is someone else who knows who that person is. If they will not act, force them to! For the sake of your livelihoods, your homes, your families. Tell me who they are!”
His voice might have been falling on deaf ears, for all the reaction it got, but he knew he was speaking the truth. There were people in that crowd who knew the leaders of the Cause, or knew how to get to them, and Falk was confident they would not let their city be reduced to rubble over some petty concern about so-called freedom. Freedom to live in squalor and chaos, Falk thought, looking around at the Commoners in disgust. Poor. Benighted. Powerless. Did they not realize how much the MageLords had done for them? Did they think they would have survived, prospered to build New Cabora at all, if the MageLords had not made it possible to survive in this frozen northland in the first place?
Falk was tempted to leave it at that, but he knew the importance of mixing a little honey with the bitter vinegar. “These buildings can be rebuilt,” he said. “Not in one year, or five years, or ten years, but in one day, one week, one month. The magic that destroyed them can build them up again. Your city can be what it was… if you cooperate with me.” He scanned the faces again. “And if it is me you hate,” he said, “don’t think of it as cooperating with me. I serve King Kravon. Serve him in turn as duty demands, and I will be as pleased on his order to build up your city as I am sorrowful at having to tear it down.”
Still nothing. Falk found the crowd’s silent, steady regard slightly unnerving, as though they were measuring him against something and finding him wanting. But he shrugged off the feeling, turned, and jumped down from the statue’s pedestal. “Get me out of here,” he said to the guards. They formed a tight phalanx of blue and steel around him and marched him through the crowd, which parted in front of him and closed in behind him like water passing under a boat.
Back in the Palace, he first checked on the MageFurnace. As he had expected, the Mageborn had driven the water away as clouds of steam, sent out through the Chimneys. The fires were being stoked, the heat returning. The interruption in power had been minute, and if a few magelights had gone out, a few magelinks cut in mid-conversation, a few breakfasts left uncooked, and a few MageLords left unwashed, well, what of it? The Lesser Barrier had not been touched, for like the Great Barrier, it drew its power, via the King’s Keys, from the great fiery Cauldron in the north.
Where, if everything had gone as planned, Falk thought bitterly, he would soon have been traveling with that little vixen Brenna.
Had Tagaza located her? Tagaza couldn’t tell him. He had remained unconscious since the eruption of steam from the MageFurnace had interrupted his spell. No Healer had yet been able to wake him, or even figure out why he still slept.
No Healer currently in the Palace, at any rate. But Falk had another Healer to call on. If anyone could Heal Tagaza, it would be Mother Northwind.
And then he turned onto the broad boulevard leading up to the Palace from the bridge, and saw a carriage bearing his coat of arms being driven away from the main entrance, and quickened his pace, knowing that she had arrived.
He found her in the rooms he had set aside for her, not far from his own, sitting by the fire, knitting, as though she had never left her cottage. “Well, Lord Falk,” she said as he came in, before he could say anything at all, “I must thank you for sending your men-at-arms for me last evening. It saved me that long walk down to the manor to demand they take me to the Palace.”
“Good day to you, too, Mother Northwind,” Falk said dryly. “I hope you had a pleasant journey.”
Mother Northwind snorted. “Too old for small talk,” she said. “We both know why I’m here. You need me to question Davydd Verdsmitt for you. And I want to be here when you find Brenna and the Prince… poor lambs.”
“You are quite correct in the former,” Falk said. “Verdsmitt, if he is not the mysterious Patron, is at least very high up in the Common Cause. He can name names, people we can arrest and question in turn, until the whole foul web unravels. You heard what they did to the MageFurnace.”
“I heard,” Mother Northwind said sympathetically. “You poor MageLords. No running water for a whole morning!”
“The inconvenience was minor,” Falk said, refusing to be baited. “And the only people killed were Commoners. But as a symbol of rebellion… it could not be allowed to stand.”
“Rather like the buildings in New Cabora Square?” Mother Northwind chuckled. “I hear you’ve been making some ‘forceful’ speeches there.”
“Someone will give me information,” Falk said. “I don’t care how popular the Common Cause, there are those who will betray them to stop the destruction.”
“People can be funny about things like that,” Mother Northwind said. “Don’t count your hawks before they’re fledged, as they say.” She put aside her knitting, glanced around, and laughed. “I’ll be thinking I’m old, next. Here I am looking for my cat to jump in my lap, and I left him behind with one of your scullery maids. Well.” She smoothed her dress, then reached for her cane. “Hadn’t you better take me to Verdsmitt, then?”
Falk cocked an eyebrow at her. “Why so anxious?”
Mother Northwind sighed. “Lord Falk, I have many friends among the Commoners. If there is anything I can do to stop this destruction of New Cabora, I want to do it as soon as possible.” Then she chuckled. “Besides,” she said, “a chance to rummage around in the head of the famous Davydd Verdsmitt? How often does a girl get an opportunity like that?”
She struggled a bit getting to her feet-probably stiff after her long carriage ride, he thought-but he made no move to help her; no power on Earth could have compelled him to get close enough to Mother Northwind for her to touch him. As she heaved herself up, he said, “You haven’t asked me about Brenna.”
“You obviously haven’t found her,” Mother Northwind said. “What is there to ask about?” She took a deep breath. “Don’t ever grow old, Lord Falk. It is a terrible thing.”
“Considering the alternative, I think I’d like to risk it.” Falk said. “You’re right, Mother Northwind, I haven’t found her. The last confirmed sighting of the airship was several miles west of the lake. After that, nothing. They had lost a lot of height since fleeing the manor. I don’t think they could have cleared the lake. But where they went after that…” He shook his head. “We’ll find her. That is the other thing I need you here for, Mother Northwind.”
She had hobbled closer, and he carefully, while trying to avoid the appearance of haste, backed into the hallway in front of her. “Me, Lord Falk? I have no magic with which to find Brenna.”
“No, but Tagaza does,” Falk said. “He would have found her already if not for the sabotage of the MageFurnace. And now he is unconscious. The Palace Healers don’t understand what is wrong with him. But you. ..”
Mother Northwind sighed. “I will examine him for you, Lord Falk. In both ways, if you like.”
Falk was tempted… very tempted… but he had given Tagaza his word that if he cooperated, he would not let Mother Northwind into his mind. For the sake of honor, as well as for the many years they had known each other and whatever friendship that had entailed, he would keep that promise… for the moment, at least.
“No, Mother Northwind. Just heal him so he can perform the spell again.”
“As you wish.” She had stopped, and for a moment he wondered why, until she said, “Well, are you going to take me to Verdsmitt or not? I don’t know where he is!”
“Of course.” Falk led the way, reminding himself again that Mother Northwind was only a talented soft mage, neither omniscient nor omnipotent… and, ultimately, his servant.
Soon, he thought, to be my subject.
It was useful to remind himself of those things, because Mother Northwind had a knack for keeping him off-balance.
Davydd Verdsmitt sat in his cell, writing. He had asked for, and to his surprise received pen, ink, and paper. The new play was going well, all the mental writing he had done paying off in an almost seamless flow of words onto the page.
Not that it was any more likely than it had been that the play would ever be produced, but that didn’t matter. Verdsmitt was a writer, and so, he wrote.
But he was also much more, and even while he wrote, he was aware of what was happening outside his cell. He had felt Tagaza’s effort to build some powerful spell in the Spellchamber high atop the Palace.. . and the sudden lessening of power all around as the MageFurnace had been doused with lake water. At that moment, he could have broken out of his cell, instituted his own backup plan, and added to the chaos-but he did not.
He did not, because he knew that the Patron was on her way to the Palace, and that could only mean that her Plan was still in effect.
He felt her arrival and, a short time later, felt her approaching with Falk. As the Minister of Public Safety and Mother Northwind approached his door, he tidied away his manuscript and stood to greet them.
A guard opened the door, and Lord Falk stepped in first. He glanced from Verdsmitt to the stacked papers. “So glad to see your stay with us hasn’t been wasted,” he said. “Davydd Verdsmitt, allow me to present Mother Northwind, a Healer of great renown. I have asked her to examine you so that we can assure the Commons you are unharmed. It might go some way to lessening tensions brought on by… recent events.”
He thinks I don’t know anything of what has happened, Verdsmitt thought, that I don’t know what he has done in the Commons, or what the Commoners did here. Well, no need to set him right. “I believe I am quite well, but of course I would be glad of a second opinion.” He nodded politely. “Mother Northwind. An interesting name. Do you mind if I use it in some future play? Perhaps you could be a friend to Goodwife Beth.”
Mother Northwind’s mouth quirked. “I would be honored.” She looked at Falk. “There’s no need for you to stay. I know how busy you are this morning.”
“There are, indeed, things I must attend to,” Falk said. “I’ll await the results of your examination in my office.” He nodded to Mother Northwind, inclined his head slightly to Verdsmitt, and went out.
The guard closed the door behind him.
“Welcome, Patron,” Verdsmitt said.
“Mother Northwind, please,” she said. “I realize no one can eavesdrop on us while I wear this,” she lifted her arm, showing a silver bracelet fogged with condensation that he himself had enchanted for her some months previously, and whose presence he had sensed the moment she entered, “but it is still best to be discreet. It’s simply a good habit. We Healers are very big on encouraging good habits, you know.” She looked him up and down, and smiled a little. “In my professional opinion, you look well, Davydd.”
“As do you, Pa… Mother Northwind.”
“Ah, I may look like a young girl still, but my knees are those of an old woman,” Mother Northwind said. “Sit with me.”
They sat side by side on the narrow bed. “How stands the Plan?” Verdsmitt said.
“Better than I had hoped, when Brenna and that dolt of a boy from Outside took it on themselves to fly away from Falk’s manor.”
Verdsmitt cocked his head to one side. “That sentence,” he said slowly, “almost makes sense…”
“Never mind,” Mother Northwind said. “Better you don’t know of it so you cannot accidentally let slip something about something you don’t know about.”
Verdsmitt started to protest both her sentence construction and her warning, then thought better of both. “Good habits,” he said instead.
“Exactly,” said Mother Northwind. “But there are some things by rights you shouldn’t know that you must know. So: Brenna ran away from home, but I have located her and she is being brought to the city. And Prince Karl, shortly after you were arrested, was… kidnapped by the Common Cause.”
Verdsmitt shot her a look, an exaggerated “take” that on stage would almost certainly have gotten a laugh. It elicited a chuckle even from Mother Northwind. “A surprise to us all, I’m sure. But not to worry. I know where he is, and he’s safe… he’s at Goodwife Beth’s.”
Verdsmitt snorted. “Depends on what you mean by ‘safe.’ ”
“Anyway, he’s out of the city. No one but the members of Vinthor’s cell know where… and they’re all at Beth’s as well. There is no one to betray him in New Cabora, no matter what… incentives… Falk may provide.”
“That is one of the things I should not know, and so I can say nothing of it to Falk,” Verdsmitt said softly, “but I know what he has done to my city. He has brought to it what the MageLords always, sooner or later, bring to the lives of Commoners: wreck, ruin, and destruction.” He lowered his voice, even though he knew no one could hear. “Give me leave to kill him, too, Patron.”
This time Mother Northwind did not rebuke him for using that title. Instead she studied him thoughtfully. “You are remarkably bloodthirsty for a playwright,” she said. “And remarkably set against the MageLords for one who is, after all, one of them.”
“I haven’t considered myself a MageLord since I was sixteen years old,” Verdsmitt snarled. “As you well know.”
He instantly regretted losing his temper. As a man who had led a double life for a very long time, and as a professional actor, he prided himself on being able to school his emotions. But he hated to be reminded of the accident of birth that had made him MageLord, even though without it he would not have the unique skills that made him so valuable to Mother Northwind’s plan now.
And she, of all people, knew that.
He clearly remembered the rainy night, more than two decades gone, when she had presented herself at his door in the slightly shabby-but-still-respectable neighborhood of New Cabora where he had lived at that time. He hadn’t been Davydd Verdsmitt, famous playwright, then, but Davydd Verdsmitt, barely-making-ends-meetby-sweeping-floors playwright.
His first play was just then about to take the boards at the Paragon, whose name was a better joke than anything he’d written. A bat-infested old firetrap that mostly staged ancient farces-interspersed with equally ancient strippers-it had had the undeniable attraction of being cheap to rent.
He’d been so young then. Only half a dozen years had passed since he had so violently removed himself from the ranks of the MageLords, “drowning” in a tragic boating accident on the Great Lake, body never recovered. Not that he supposed his father, Lord Athol, now Prime Adviser to the King, had looked very hard. After all, a few days before he had all but suggested to his son that he quietly commit suicide.
Mother Northwind must have been younger then, too, but in his memory she looked the same as she did now, leaning on her stick, standing in the rain. “Aren’t you going to ask an old woman in?” she’d said.
And then she had offered him her grand bargain.
Before he could even ask her who she was or where she came from, she said, “I know about you and Kravon.”
He had physically started. “How-?” And then, belatedly, had attempted to recover. “The King? I’m a Commoner. What is there to know about me and the King?”
“Let us dispense with these games right now,” Mother Northwind had said. “You cannot deny anything to me, you cannot hide anything; I know everything you and Kravon did together. I know what your feelings for him were, and his for you. And I know how much it devastated you when he renounced you, renounced the love you thought he felt for you, and revealed and reviled you as a homosexual.”
Verdsmitt remembered how the blood had drained away from his face and head, making him so dizzy he’d had to collapse into the nearest chair to keep from falling to his knees. “That’s-”
“I don’t care in the slightest that you prefer your own sex,” Mother Northwind said. “If it would amuse you, sometime, I will tell you just how many of the MageLords who shunned and laughed at you after King Kravon made the truth known are also bedding boys-and each other-in the privacy of their own estates, usually with their poor wives none the wiser.” A flicker of anger had touched her face, quickly smoothed away. “But you have something I need, Davydd Verdsmitt: magical ability of a kind that comes just once a century, if that.”
He couldn’t deny being a MageLord; why deny that? “Much good it has done me.”
“Your skill as an enchanter, while you were still a boy, awed your tutors,” Mother Northwind said. “It was so great, so extraordinary, that had you not chosen so precipitously to drown in the Great Lake, the scandal would soon have been forgotten, papered over as such things are for MageLords.” She shook her head. “Well, it is too late for you to return to your father’s estate…”
“I would die first,” Verdsmitt growled. “My father threw me out, told me to-”
“I know,” Mother Northwind said, though again, she didn’t say how . “But listen to me, Davydd Verdsmitt. It is not too late for you to take revenge.”
He had stared blankly at her. “Revenge?”
“On your father. On all the MageLords who laughed at you, scorned you, made you an object of ridicule in taverns and manor halls around the kingdom.” She poked at him with a bony finger. “But especially.. . revenge on King Kravon.”
And then she had explained something of her plan, her grand scheme to grow a Magebane-Verdsmitt still found it hard to believe such a thing even existed, much less could be created, like a play or a piece of pottery-and with him bring down the entire rotten edifice of Evrenfels… a scheme that required only one thing: a way to kill the King at the precise moment he needed to die.
“An ordinary mage couldn’t do it,” Mother Northwind said. “The magical defenses woven around the King are too strong. I could do it, were I in physical contact with him… but I must be elsewhere when the deed is done. A simple physical attack such as Commoners might launch would be thwarted by the same defenses that protect him from a magical one. But an enchanted device, so subtly made, so carefully constructed that it leaks nothing of its magical nature to those searching for such things, one that looks like an ordinary, unthreatening object, something the King might even carry on his person, something that can be triggered at just the right time… such a device could do the trick. But to create it would take the greatest enchanter the Kingdom has ever known.” She cocked her head, eyes on his, and said softly, “You.”
The appeal to his pride had helped to lure him in. The chance to take revenge on the MageLords, and on the man he had once loved but now hated with even more passion, might have been enough for him to agree. But what had really sealed the deal was the final offer from Mother Northwind: if he agreed to help her, she would fill the Paragon with paying patrons for a week.
“A week is all I can give you,” she said. “I have contacts enough to arrange for that. After that… your play must stand on its own merits.”
“It will,” Verdsmitt had said fiercely. “It will. Give me an audience, Mother Northwind, and I will do the rest…” He’d stood and held out his hand to her. “ All of the rest.”
She’d smiled, and taken his hand. She’d held it for a long moment, squeezed it hard to support him as a brief bout of dizziness made his knees inexplicably sag. “I am confident of it, my boy,” she’d said, and as the dizziness passed, she’d disappeared once more into the wet night.
Since then he had never wavered, never doubted that what he and Mother Northwind planned had to be done… and never let dim or waver the bright flame of his hatred of his one-time friend and lover Kravon, now King.
Which was why, he told himself, he had reacted with anger to Mother Northwind’s naming of him as a MageLord. So he had been, but so he was no longer. And if their plan succeeded, as they both hoped, soon there would be no MageLords or Mageborn: all would be equal, all would have to face the vagaries of the world without magic and the arrogance it bred.
“Sorry, Davydd,” Mother Northwind said now. “I cannot help baiting people. It is a bad habit and will land me in trouble someday, I fear.”
Verdsmitt snorted. “As opposed to plotting to murder the King, tear down the Great Barrier, and destroy magic forever?”
“I suppose there is some possibility that that will land me trouble, as well,” Mother Northwind said serenely. “But it hasn’t yet.”
She leaned forward. “Listen to me, Davydd. I regret things did not come together as smoothly as we had hoped, but the pieces of the plan are still in play and still under my control. Brenna and Karl will soon be together. The moment for you to strike Kravon is still close at hand… very close. Can you sense the devices of yours we have smuggled into the Palace?”
“Yes,” Verdsmitt said. “I know much of what has been happening in the Palace. And if more disruption is called for… those devices, too, are within range of my will.”
“Not yet,” Mother Northwind said. “But the time may come.” She studied him. “I did not answer your request for leave to kill Falk. Does he, too, carry one of your devices?”
“No,” Verdsmitt admitted. “And he is powerfully protected. I don’t know how I could kill him, Mother Northwind, but I would find a way.”
“Hmmm. Well, I’d rather he stayed alive for now. While he pursues his Plan with such fervor, he gives me space to pursue mine. But to return to these devices. Can you activate them from within the cell?”
“No,” Verdsmitt said. “I can sense them, but these cells carry their own enchantments.”
“How close do you have to be?”
“Anywhere within the Palace, as long as I am free of this cell. The original plan was for me to use the enchantments woven into my clothing to escape when the time comes-”
“There is a better way,” Mother Northwind said.
Davydd Verdsmitt waited for her to go on.
She smiled. “Just how good an actor are you, Davydd?”
Falk, signing what seemed like the thousandth document in the last hour-the worst part about a crackdown on the Commons was the amount of paperwork it generated-paused to clench and unclench his cramped right hand, and then realized that Mother Northwind had just entered the room.
“Ah,” he said. “At last.” He gestured to one of the chairs on the other side of his desk; Mother Northwind seated herself with an audible creaking of joints. “Well?”
“Your hunch was correct, Lord Falk,” she said. “I did not believe it until I saw it in his mind, but Davydd Verdsmitt… is the Patron. Well, one of them.”
Falk felt a rush of pleasure. “I knew it!” He leaned forward. “And who was the mage who helped him?”
Mother Northwind shook her head sadly. “Here is another thing I would not have believed, Lord Falk,” she said. “His accomplice was.. . the First Mage himself, Tagaza. Who also sometimes acted as the Patron. Again, as I think you suspected.”
There was no rush of pleasure at hearing that suspicion confirmed. “I am not surprised,” Falk said grimly, “but I am pained. What else did you glean from Verdsmitt’s mind?”
Mother Northwind laughed. “Much about the sexual proclivities of various members of the acting profession. A great deal more than I wanted to know about the technical aspects of producing a play. But about the Common Cause… less than I had hoped.”
Falk’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Tagaza, again,” Mother Northwind said. “He is, of course, a master of hard magic, but he is also not completely unskilled at certain elements of soft… or rather, of some of those forms of magic that straddle the realms of hard and soft.” She sighed. “His meddling in Verdsmitt’s mind was clumsy but unmistakable. He created a
… wall, a wall that I cannot breach. To do so would kill Verdsmitt, and still I would not gain the information I want. And this wall not only keeps me from accessing information about the Common Cause in detail, it keeps Verdsmitt from consciously knowing it himself.”
“And yet you confirmed he gave orders as the Patron.”
“Only because my skill exceeds Tagaza’s,” Mother Northwind said acerbically. “He has built a wall, but it is rough and unfinished enough that here and there light seeps through the cracks.”
“If Verdsmitt has no knowledge we can access, if he doesn’t even remember that he is the Patron, then he is useless to me except as an example,” Falk said. “I will hang him from the statue in the Square so that the Common Cause and all their sympathizers know their leader has been arrested and condemned. Even if no one has come forward by then to tell me where Prince Karl is being held, that will open the store-hold of information on their sinking ship and send the rats scurrying out to save themselves.”
“A colorful metaphor,” Mother Northwind said. “Have you thought of writing plays?”
Falk was already opening a drawer on the left-hand side of his desk, in which he kept execution forms. He had pulled one out and was reaching for a pen when Mother Northwind’s next words stopped him.
“But would it not be better, Lord Falk, to have the Patron alive. .. but loyal to you? To turn Davydd Verdsmitt’s gift for propaganda against the Common Cause, instead of serving it? The confusion in the ranks of the Cause would be the same, seeing him alive at your right hand, supporting you, as it would be if he were dead… no, worse; because if you kill him, he becomes a martyr. Save him, and the leader of the Common Cause, the man most devoted to its perverse ideology, becomes nothing more than a turncoat, a sniveling coward who saved his own skin. How’s that for a symbol?”
Falk put down the pen he had just picked up. “You can do this?”
Mother Northwind smiled a little shamefacedly, like a child caught with her hand in the sugar jar. “It’s already done. Once I realized how little information I could retrieve from Verdsmitt, I… well. I confess I may have acted in haste, Lord Falk. I beg forgiveness if so.”
Falk had never heard Mother Northwind beg forgiveness for anything.
“I… was angry. And since I could not take what I wanted from Verdsmitt’s mind, instead I… twisted it. To serve you, and the MageLords, and especially King Kravon.” She shook her head. “I should have asked for your permission and advice first, of course. I cannot undo it, but you can still kill him, or I can, if you’d like him dead due to natural causes-”
“Kill him?” Lord Falk laughed. “Mother Northwind, your skills continue to amaze me. Of course I won’t kill him.” He stood. “I want to see him.”
“And he wants to see you,” Mother Northwind said. “To beg your forgiveness.”
“Which he shall most certainly have, Mother Northwind,” said Falk. “Which he shall most certainly have.”
Mother Northwind had been as good as her word, Falk thought, as he watched the stiff-necked playwright, so cool and arrogant the last time they had met, kneel before him and beg for forgiveness and mercy, tears streaming down his face: beg to be allowed to make a public statement to the Commons renouncing the Cause. He promised to burn his seditious play in the center of the Square. He offered to write another extolling the grandeur of the MageLords. He pleaded for an audience with King Kravon himself.
He begged so much that Falk soon got tired of it. “Of course, of course,” he said. “All of that can be done. But there is no need to make any plans now, Verdsmitt. Come with me, and I’ll have Brich find some more… suitable quarters for you. And if there’s anything you need from your quarters in the city…” Which had, of course, already been completely searched and stripped, which meant it was all in Falk’s storage rooms somewhere, but no need to tell him that, “just let Brich know.”
Mother Northwind had waited in Falk’s office throughout the exchange. She raised an eyebrow at him as he came in, and he laughed. “I say it again, Mother Northwind. You are a wonder.” He sat down at the desk once more. “Now, Tagaza. The other Patron.”
“Do you still want me to stay out of his mind?”
“Yes,” Falk said firmly; then amended “… for now.” He spread his hands. “My focus is on his completing the spell to find Brenna. Once he has done that, then I want you to strip his skull of everything he has ever seen, heard, thought, or smelled. Promise be damned. The man is a traitor.”
“I take it you will be executing him,” Mother Northwind said quietly.
“I will chain him to the Rock of Execution myself,” Falk snarled, “and it will be my will that makes it burn hotter than it ever has before.”
“Very well. Take me to him, and I will see what I can do… as a Healer.” She sighed. “I confess I’m a little weary after my dealings with Verdsmitt, but a simple Healing should not take much more out of me.”
“You will have the finest dinner the Palace chefs can create after your work today,” Falk said.
Mother Northwind laughed. “No, no,” she said. “A simple meal is all I ask. A simple meal for a simple woman.”
But as she heaved herself up on her cane and made her way out of Falk’s office, he smiled to himself. There’s nothing simple about you, old woman, he thought.
And then the smile faded. Many have underestimated Mother Northwind, he thought… and wondered, just a little, if there were a risk he had just done the same.