Five hundred feet above the ground, the downdraft became a powerful westerly wind, hurling the airship out over the snow-covered prairie, the straining propeller adding to its eastward momentum. Freezing wind roared through the gondola. The envelope fluttered and twisted. Anton, staring over the side, saw the ground both streaming past and growing larger at an alarming rate. He looked forward. And ahead…
… hills. Not very big hills, but big enough. Anton watched the clump of trees on the hill in front of them grow rapidly nearer. It would be a very near thing, but he thought they might just…
Another loud tearing sound. The hole in the envelope grew larger. The airship lurched downward and twisted, and the tip of a towering pine, the tallest tree on the hilltop, tore through the side of the gondola like a blunt knife. The impact threw Anton forward; only a frantic grab at the rigging saved him from being tossed out.
In the stern, the tip of the pine slammed into the Professor’s left leg. Anton heard the bone break, a sickening sound, then the wind flowing over the hill tossed the airship skyward again, ripping the tree free of the gondola.
The Professor dropped to the bottom of the gondola, eyes wide with shock. Anton scrambled toward him. The burner continued to roar, but Anton knew it couldn’t last much longer. At the Professor’s side, he peered out through the splintered hole in the wickerwork. Forest, a river… a road? A house? “Professor, there are people down there!”
The Professor’s eyes, which had closed, fluttered open. “Inhabitants? Inside the Anomaly?” He tried to roll over and look, but groaned with pain and flopped back. A sheen of sweat covered his white face.
“Maybe they can help us!”
The Professor closed his eyes. “If the gas won’t lift us and the ballast is gone, lad, no one can help us but God.” He coughed and smiled weakly. “Too bad I don’t believe in Him.”
The torch flared hugely and went out. The Professor’s eyes fluttered open, and he looked up at the envelope’s torn blue silk. “It appears He doesn’t believe in me, either,” he said softly.
With the roaring of the burner gone, the only sounds Anton could hear were the creaking of ropes and the rush of wind in the treetops below… and not very far below, at that. “Hold on, Professor,” he said desperately. “I think we’re almost down.” He guided the Professor’s hands to one of the rope-loop handholds in the gondola wall and seized one himself. He closed his eyes. “Any second now.. .”
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. And then…
They struck.
Crunching, tearing, ripping sounds; tumbling, no up or down; a flash of green, then white; violent blows to his body; a horrible stabbing pain in his leg… it all happened in an instant.
For a timeless period, nothing… and then Anton abruptly opened his eyes to find himself hanging headdown, tangled in ropes, six feet above the snowy ground. The gondola hung upside down above him. The burner had ripped out of it and lay steaming in the snow. Folds of blue silk hung like a stage curtain all around.
Something dropped past his nose. Where it struck the ground, the snow turned red. As he watched, another red drop fell, then another. It took him a long, dazed moment to realize the drops were blood… his blood.
He felt suddenly dizzy and sick and swallowed hard, fighting not to vomit yet again. “Professor?” he called weakly, but heard no answer.
Instead he heard footsteps, crunching through the snow, coming nearer at a run. And then a girl appeared beneath him. She wore an enormous fur coat, its hood thrown back to reveal tumbling curls of dark brown hair. Her eyes, just as dark, peered up at him from a pale, heart-shaped face. She said something to him. It sounded like a question, but he couldn’t quite understand the words…
“I need… help…” he said, and then promptly threw up all over her. The retching seemed to tear something loose inside him, and agonizing pain bludgeoned him once more into darkness.
Brenna gaped at the… thing… that had appeared from nowhere in the ragged gray sky. It was a huge bag of blue cloth, shaped like a loaf of bread, with a round opening at the bottom. A kind of giant wicker basket, badly broken, hung from it on ropes, and as it swept away from her, she glimpsed a white face inside that basket. A tall chimney rose from something like a heating stove in the center of the basket, but instead of belching smoke, it shot a roaring tongue of blue flame, like the manor’s Magefire, into the interior of the blue loaf-shape, lighting it up like a lantern but somehow not setting it on fire. At the back something like an overgrown version of a child’s whirligig spun lazily.
She took all of that in in an instant as the thing shot past. She heard shouts from inside the basket-there had to be a second passenger she couldn’t see-and then, suddenly, the fire turned orange and went out. For a few seconds the thing flew down the slope in eerie silence, lower and lower…
… and then it crashed into the forest at the bottom of the hill.
The big blue loaf-shape, which she now realized was made of cloth, collapsed in on itself. The basket upended. The Magefire-like burner ripped free with a tremendous noise and smashed into the ground, releasing a huge cloud of steam that obscured everything even before the blue cloth settled over the scene like a shroud. Yet even as the thin fabric drifted into place, Brenna was scrambling down the slope as fast as she could. There had been people in that basket. They must be hurt… or worse.
But even with that horrible thought in her head, another part of her jumped up and down like a little girl at her first Moon Ball. They were flying! she thought. Like birds… well, like dandelion seeds, anyway. But still, they were flying!
No one that she had ever heard of-not Lord Falk, not First Mage Tagaza, not even the First Twelve-had ever been able to use magic to fly. I’d give half my life to fly like that, she thought. Fly right out of Falk Manor. Fly right over the Great Barrier, even…
Over the Barrier…
Could it be…?
The possibility, if it were a possibility, both thrilled and horrified her. If people from outside the Barrier could fly over it, then Brenna’s whole world-the whole kingdom of Evrenfels!-was about to change forever.
All this time she had been hurrying down the slope, slipping and half-falling more than once, catching herself with her hands, sliding a few feet, then running once again. Ahead she could see the blue tentlike canopy the loaf-shape had made as it deflated and settled over the treetops. A confused heap of metal, ropes, and crates lay beneath it. She pushed through the undergrowth and cautiously stepped under the hanging fabric. She looked up to see a young man, her own age or slightly younger, tangled in a mass of ropes like a fish in a net. Blood dripped from him, flowing steadily from a hole in his leg. It wasn’t spurting, though-she knew enough to know that would have quickly meant his death. Punctured the muscle but no major blood vessels, she though clinically, pushing the horror of the blood and the wound into the back of her mind by concentrating on what her tutor, Peska, had taught her of anatomy. He might have a permanent limp.
His eyes were open. He was looking at her, though he seemed to be having some trouble focusing.
She opened her mouth, not sure what to say to him. She didn’t even know if he spoke her language. Maybe that was why what actually came out was quite possibly the most inane thing she had ever said to another human being. “Are you all right?”
He didn’t seem to understand her. He said something, his voice a hoarse croak-and then he groaned, his eyes rolled back, his mouth opened, and bloody vomit poured down on her head.
She ducked at the last instant to keep it out of her face, but she felt the hot stickiness foul her hair and dribble down the back of her neck. Screaming, she threw herself backward and promptly tripped over something in the snow.
When she saw what it was, she spun away and threw up her own breakfast.
The glazed, open eyes of the body on the ground watched her dispassionately, the viscera and pooled blood that had spilled from the enormous gash in its belly still steaming in the cold air.
After several minutes of cleansing her mouth and hair with snow, she regained her composure enough to go back under the blue canopy and look up at the surviving passenger of the… flying device.
He remained unconscious, and still dripped blood, not only from his leg, now, but also from his mouth and nose. I’ve got to get him down from there, she thought, but she knew she couldn’t do it alone.
Fortunately or unfortunately-she had a feeling she wouldn’t know for some time-she didn’t have to. While she still dithered, Lord Falk and a half-dozen men-at-arms came crashing through the wood, swords drawn.
Her guardian skidded to a halt, his lean, sharp-angled face so startled he looked almost comical-well, as comical as the supremely non comical Falk ever could. “Come away from there!”
“Lord Falk, there’s someone hurt!” She pointed up at the dangling youth. “Look!”
Lord Falk looked, then turned to the men-at-arms and began snapping commands. In short order they had cut the boy down, laid him on a travois made of spruce boughs, bound up his wounds, and begun dragging him toward the manor. Brenna doubted that was the best way to treat someone who might have internal injuries, but on the other hand, what choice did they have? One of the men-at-arms had already been dispatched to fetch Healer Eddigar. With luck, the Healer would reach the manor at almost the same moment as the boy.
Falk turned his attention to the dead man. Brenna forced herself to look at the corpse. At least someone had had the decency to close his staring eyes and drape a cloak across his ruined torso, and with that dreadful wound hidden, the man might almost have been asleep.. . if not for the red slush that surrounded his body. Falk knelt beside the corpse, fingering the strangely cut suit of leather it wore. A blood-spattered white scarf of some incredibly fine material was wrapped around the dead man’s neck, and he wore a close-fitting leather helmet. Round glass lenses, framed in copper, had been shoved up on his forehead. One of the lenses had shattered in the impact.
Two men-at-arms remained at hand; Falk stood and ordered them to build a second travois and transport the body to the manor for closer examination. “Put him in the coal shed,” he said. “He’ll keep well enough in there. No need to waste energy on a stasis spell.”
Brenna had to swallow hard to keep her gorge down again. As the axes of the men-at-arms rang among the trees, Falk gazed up at the wrecked flying device. “Astonishing,” he said. He spotted something in the snow, and leaned down to pick it up; when he straightened, he held a leather, glass-goggled helmet like the one the dead man had worn. The boy’s, Brenna thought.
And then Lord Falk turned his ice-gray eyes toward her, and she quailed.
Lord Falk might be the closest thing she had to a father, but that wasn’t very close at all. He never called himself that; he simply said he was her “guardian.” He was not at all cruel to her. In fact, he was quite generous, frequently bringing her presents from the city, and of course once a year he even took her there. He had introduced her to the other MageLords, even the King and the Heir; sent her shopping (with an armed escort, of course) in New Cabora. But she never sensed any personal warmth from him. He seemed to regard caring for her as a duty, a not particularly onerous duty but not a particularly pleasant one, either. And, of course, most of the time, he simply wasn’t there at all, and she was left to her own devices.
When she had been very small, she had been tended to by a woman from the village, affectionate enough in her own way, but always taciturn and withdrawn. She had died “of an influenza,” in Falk’s words, when Brenna was eight.
Her current tutor, Peska, spoke to her only about her schooling, but at least she wasn’t entirely uninformed about events in the rest of the kingdom, even during the long months Falk left her alone.
The manor had a mageletter, a large sheet of enchanted parchment that filled each day with brief stories about the latest happenings at the Palace. Brenna devoured every word of it, even though it focused almost entirely on court gossip, with events involving Commoners mentioned only when they, in some way, impacted life inside the Lesser Barrier.
The Commoners of New Cabora kept themselves informed through a nonmagical thing called a newssheet, printed daily on cheap paper by the use of a clever mechanical device, and distributed on street corners by a network of children who kept a portion of the price of each newssheet sold for themselves. That was what Brenna really longed to read each day, but unless Falk chose to send copies to his manor she had no way to obtain one, and Falk did not so choose. And so Brenna had to be content with reading about who had worn what to the latest ball, speculation as to which highborn young lady would wed Prince Karl, and the excruciatingly boring details of the latest shuffling of the undersecretaries of the Council.
Commoner though she was herself, she rarely got to visit the local villages. Twice a year she accompanied Falk to Overbridge, enjoined to sit in strict silence while he heard whatever grievances had accumulated in the months since his last visit.
Falk would dispense justice-and, Brenna had to admit, did so thoughtfully and fairly-then bring her back to the manor. He said the trips were part of her education into the political system of the Kingdom, but sometimes she wondered if they were really meant as a simple but forceful reminder that Lord Falk held absolute sway over this corner of the Kingdom.
And over her. Rescuing the boy and having the corpse hauled away had distracted him for a few minutes, but now he frowned at her. “Brenna. Why are you out here by yourself?”
“I often take a walk in the woods near the manor, Lord Falk,” she said. “I did not know you were coming home today, or I would have been there to greet you.” Almost true… “I was up on the hill, enjoying the view, when that… whatever-it-is… suddenly appeared.”
“From the other side of the hill?” Falk gazed west, up the slope to the rock formation she had climbed to earlier. “From the direction of the Barrier? You’re certain?”
“It almost knocked me off the rock,” Brenna said.
Falk squinted up at the crest of the hill, and Brenna knew what he was thinking, because she had thought it herself. On a clear day, when you climbed to the top of that hill, you could actually see the Great Barrier, a wall of fog, ten miles away across the bare prairie. To left and right the Barrier dwindled away in the distance. How tall is it? Brenna suddenly wondered. A mile? Two? She’d never heard.
She had never been to the Barrier herself, of course, but she had been told what it was like to come too close. Despite drawing its energy from the great lava-filled Cauldron almost three hundred miles north, it greedily sucked heat from the air as well, creating a chill that deepened to bitter cold within twenty-five feet of it and became unbearable to the point of agony within ten. The cold created the everpresent fog that both hid it from view and revealed its location. You could walk into that fog, until the cold drove you back. If you were dressed warmly enough, you might even get right up to the Barrier itself-but you would still see nothing but fog until the moment your outstretched hand touched it and the excruciating pain of having that hand instantly frozen drove you back.
After which, of course, the resulting amputation would keep you too occupied with your own misery to think much more about the incredible feat of magic the Barrier represented.
The Lesser Barrier was more like a nearly invisible glass wall in the air, or so Brenna had been told. Cold enough to freeze bare skin, but if you touched it with a gloved hand, all you felt was a sensation like running your hand over a sheet of ice. But the Great Barrier was, literally, untouchable. And, of course, impenetrable.
But the Lesser Barrier was a dome, whereas the Great Barrier was only a very tall wall… which meant a flying device could, conceivably, pass safely over it.
A flying device like this one.
Falk turned back to Brenna. “You’re filthy,” he said. “And you stink of vomit.”
“I’m not used to seeing-” she shot an involuntary glance at the body, just being rolled onto the new travois by the men-at-arms, “-such things.”
“Nor should you be,” Lord Falk said. “But I do not believe you contrived to vomit on your own head. That must have come from above. So, the boy was awake when you came upon the wreckage?”
“Yes,” Brenna said. Falk hadn’t gotten where he was by being either dimwitted or unobservant.
“Did he speak?”
“Barely. I asked him how he was. He said something I couldn’t understand. Then he threw up on me. And then he passed out.”
Falk’s cold gray gaze was, as always, unnerving. Not for the first time, Brenna wondered if her guardian used a little magic at such times to ensure she spoke the truth. Not being Mageborn herself, she couldn’t know. What if he can read my mind?
But, no, Peska had told her that was impossible, at least for a mage like Falk. A powerful Healer, a master of soft magic, could possibly do it… but soft magic required touch.
She hoped Peska had been telling the truth, and hadn’t simply been ordered to tell her that mind-reading was impossible so that Falk could then read her mind without her being aware of it…
She shook her head. Did all Commoners feel this paranoid around MageLords? She suspected they did, but it wasn’t something she could ask anyone. Not even the Reeve’s son at the Moon Ball.
“Get back to the manor. Get cleaned up,” Falk said abruptly. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Brenna knew a command when she heard one, and this one she was only too happy to obey.
She desperately wanted a bath.
Falk watched Brenna trudge away through the snow. The girl-the young woman, he corrected himself-was bright and observant, and as he had expected, beginning to chafe under the restraints he had put on her life.
Well, no matter. He could certainly manage whatever willfulness she might muster in these final few weeks. No doubt the excitement of returning to the Palace with him would temper much of her rebelliousness. In any event, she was important not for what she did or didn’t do, but simply for who she was.
He put Brenna out of his mind and instead turned his attention to the thing hanging in the tree over his head. Reaching up, he took hold of a fold of soft blue fabric. He held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment, concentrating fiercely. But no matter how deeply into its intricate structure he mentally delved, he could find no trace of magic about it.
He released it. It was a thing of artifice, then, its provenance Commoner, not Mageborn. What made that astonishing was that its creators had accomplished without magic something that the Mageborn could not with it.
To keep a man aloft was beyond the abilities of even the greatest mages, because the energy required could not be drawn from the surrounding air. Nor could it be accomplished with a coal burner like that in his carriage, because the added weight ate up most of the additional energy provided, leaving the mage no better off; worse, if he had somehow managed to get himself aloft before the energy ran out.
Of course, the fact that this device had crashed was proof enough that nonmagical solutions posed their own hazards. But what it represented…
Falk walked out from under the shadow of the flying device and looked once more up the hill. The disappearance of this flying device would probably mean that it would be a long time before anyone else from beyond the Barrier would risk the attempt, but where one had come, another would surely follow.
The one weak point in the Unbound’s great plan to bring down the Barriers and move out into the world to rule as the SkyMage intended had always been, as Falk had long recognized, the fact they had no way of knowing what lay outside the Great Barrier. Eight hundred years ago it had been wilderness, inhabited only by the primitive Minik tribes, a thousand miles inland in a continent even the sailors of that day had never seen. But as the flying device testified, things had changed.
As I anticipated, he thought with satisfaction. Since King Kravon had appointed him Minister of Public Safety twenty-five years ago, he had been expanding and strengthening the army, for most of Evrenfels’ history only a tiny force used to put down the occasional minor Commoner uprising. His excuse, on those rare occasions he was questioned by other members of the King’s Council (though never by King Kravon, who didn’t care about such things and was probably not even aware of them), was the need to protect the northern villages from what he called “the increasing threat” from the Minik, scattered tribes of fur-clad savages who lurked among the lakes, rocks, and trees of the far north.
The Minik were the only surviving descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the wilderness into which the remnants of the Old Kingdom had been magically transported. Their ancestors had attacked shortly after the arrival of the MageLords and their followers in a burst of magical energy so great it had blackened and blasted an area some ten miles in diameter, larger than New Cabora now occupied. The southern tribes had been quickly routed, those savages who survived fleeing into the rocky, swampy forests of the north. Hunting them down in that difficult and essentially useless terrain was clearly a waste of resources, and so they had been allowed to remain there since. Mostly they kept to themselves, and even traded furs to some of the northern Commons villages for food, tools, or knives, but occasionally a group of hotheaded young warriors raided a village or farm. Falk had been very careful, though he certainly had his men attempt to track down and punish those responsible, not to put an end to those raids entirely, because if they stopped, why would he still need to grow the army?
Twenty-five years had been more than enough time to install those personally loyal to him as commanders; many, in fact, were members of the Unbound. The army now numbered about five thousand men, armed with both normal weapons and some of the magical weapons of old, resurrected by Tagaza from ancient scrolls.
Even five thousand men were too few to be everywhere at once around a Barrier more than 1,800 miles in circumference. So the army had been split into four divisions, each responsible for the regular patrol of the segment of the Barrier in their quadrant. As far as the soldiers knew, those patrols were simply training exercises, although occasionally they did lead to clashes with the Minik. When Falk had control of the Barrier and was ready to bring it down, those patrols would become crucial to planning the best way to move out of the Kingdom into the outside world.
Even if the Kingdom proved to be surrounded by Commoner communities when the Barrier came down, Falk had been confident his troops, trained not only in the use of sword and bow, but in the battlefield use of magic, would have no trouble overwhelming any opposition, which after all would be taken completely by surprise, since they surely would not expect a Barrier that had stood for centuries to simply vanish into thin air.
But if he had accurate information about what lay outside the Barrier before he brought it down… he smiled. The boy was a gift: a gift from the SkyMage himself.
Falk judged the boy badly wounded, but not mortally so, given the ministrations of a talented Healer such as Eddigar… who should already be examining him, down in the manor.
Falk turned on his heel and left the wreckage behind. He had already ordered his men-at-arms to free it from the trees and drag it down to the courtyard for further examination. He had no fear of anyone else attempting to salvage anything from it: the local villagers well knew that stealing from Lord Falk would have unpleasant consequences.
He needed to talk to Eddigar, to find out how soon he could question the boy.
And now, more than ever, he needed to talk to Mother Northwind.
While Brenna stripped off her filthy coat and clothes in her bedroom, two mageservants hauled in a bronze bathtub, placed it in front of the fireplace, filled it with steaming water and scented oils, then whisked her clothes away for cleaning as she lowered herself into it.
When she had been younger, Brenna had felt shy about disrobing around the mageservants; now she didn’t give them a second thought as she settled with a sigh of pleasure into the warm embrace of the water. She plunged her head under, then scrubbed her dark curly hair furiously with soft lilac-scented soap from a bowl the mageservants had placed at the side of the tub.
Half an hour later-clean, dry, warm, and much bettersmelling-she donned a forest-green gown of soft velvet, buckled a belt of gold chain around her hips, brushed her hair until it shone, tied into it a bit of gold ribbon that set her hair off nicely and matched the belt, then examined herself in the full-length mirror on the bedroom side of the bathroom door. She wondered if perhaps she wasn’t just a little overdressed to do what she intended to do next, which was to try to see the injured youth.
He’s probably not even conscious, she told herself.
But she didn’t change her clothes.
Instead, she went into the corridor, and this time followed it past the staircase that curved down into the Great Hall and turned into the West Wing, where the guest quarters were located.
Two men-at-arms stood in front of one of the half-dozen closed doors on the right side of the hall. She strode up to them and stopped. “I’d like to greet our guest,” she said.
“Sorry, miss,” said the bigger of the two, a red-bearded giant she’d met before… Buff? Biff? Skiff?… something like that. “Lord Falk’s orders. No one is allowed in.”
“He didn’t mean me,” Brenna snapped, though she suspected that was a lie. “I’ve already seen the boy. I found him, remember?”
The big man’s expression didn’t change. Kuff, that’s his name. “That’s as may be, Miss Brenna. Lord Falk did not tell us of any exceptions.”
The other guardsman, whom she didn’t know at all, kept his eyes focused on the opposite wall, as though he had never seen anything more fascinating.
“And what will you do if I simply push past your silly pikes?” Brenna said. “Skewer me?”
“No, ma’am. But we will restrain you and take you to Lord Falk.”
Bluff called, Brenna could do nothing but try to save face. “No need,” she said coolly. “I’ll talk to him myself and see what he has to say about your impertinence.”
“Perhaps that would be best, ma’am,” Kuff said.
All her cards played and trumped, Brenna turned and not-quite-stomped (not wanting to appear childish, though it certainly would have felt good) back down the hall to her own room…
… where she promptly slipped out through the hidden entrance near the stove into the servants’ corridors. She went down the same narrow stairs she had taken when she’d gone out through the coal shed earlier, but this time went past the entrance to the shed, into the servants’ quarters themselves, plain rooms on the bottom floor of the West Wing, strung out along a corridor that ended in the kitchen but was punctuated by a series of staircases leading up.
Just as in her part of the manor, each of those stairways led to a corridor running between two guest rooms, providing hidden access for servicing stoves, changing linens, delivering food, retrieving dirty dishes, and all the other servantly functions. There were rooms for two-score servants, but they were mostly empty, the few living servants all clustering near the kitchens.
Brenna could hear noise from that direction as she entered the servants’ wing, but there was no one in the hallway, lit sparingly by a magelight every ten feet or so. The stairway she wanted was the second one. She slipped up it without being seen. It doubled back on itself on a tiny landing halfway up, then delivered her into the corridor between the room where the boy lay and an empty room on the other side.
As Brenna reached the top of the stairs, she heard voices. At the same instant the pine planks of the floor creaked beneath her feet. She froze. But, after all, the old house was full of creaks and groans, and the owners of the voices took no apparent notice.
Brenna couldn’t make out any words, but recognized the bass growl of Lord Falk. Very slowly, she crept over to the door to the boy’s room, and put her ear against it.
“… wake?” That was Lord Falk.
“I have put a sleep on him to keep him unconscious until morning,” said a voice she now recognized as that of Healer Eddigar, whom she’d met many times through the usual sicknesses and mishaps of childhood, the last time just a few months ago when she’d cracked a rib after a slip in the tub. She’d been black and blue for days, but he’d knitted the bone and taken away most of the pain in short order.
“When he wakes,” Eddigar continued, “he will be very weak and very hungry. However, I have stopped the internal bleeding and sped the healing of the wound in his leg. I have also cleaned that wound and his various scrapes and cuts. There should be no infection. I expect him to make a full recovery.”
“As long as he is able to answer questions,” said Falk.
“He will be able to answer them,” Eddigar said. “Whether he will answer them is of course beyond my control.”
Footsteps receded, and when Falk spoke again, his voice was more muffled. He must have gone to the door, Brenna thought. “When will he awake?”
“I cannot be more precise than I have been, my lord,” Eddigar said. His voice, too, was more distant. “Sometime in the morning, but whether early or late, I cannot say. It depends not only on my magic but on his body’s powers of recuperation… and level of fatigue.”
“Hmm. Well, I’ll leave the guards. It wouldn’t do for him to wake and wander off, would it?”
“Those decisions are yours, my lord.”
Brenna heard the two men go out and the door close behind them. Falk’s voice rumbled indistinctly for a moment; presumably he was speaking to the guards. Then, silence.
Brenna waited a moment for her racing heart to slow a little, then opened the servants’ door and entered the room.
The curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows, twins of those in her own room, were drawn tight, so that the only light in the room came from the lamp-an oil lamp, not a magelight-barely aglow on the table beside the bed. At first all Brenna could see of the bed’s occupant was an indistinct lump, but as her eyes adjusted she recognized that the young man she had last seen hanging upside down and bleeding from a tree outside the manor grounds now lay on his back beneath a thick red comforter, his head on a feather pillow and his bare shoulders exposed. Brenna stepped farther into the room and closed the concealed door behind her.
She took one step, and a floorboard creaked. The boy stirred, his head turning slightly. His breathing had become faster and louder. Brenna froze, watching, but after a moment the boy’s breathing settled, and he was once again as quiet and motionless as when she had first seen him.
He’s in a magic-induced sleep, she reminded herself. He’s not going to wake up because of a creaky floor.
But there were also guards outside the door, and so she took the remaining few steps toward the bed as carefully as though she were walking on eggshells instead of pine.
Finally she stood beside the bed and could look down on the sleeping youth’s face. He appeared younger than she’d first thought, now that his face was cleaned of grime and blood, but whether he was younger or older than she, she could not tell; she was not a good judge of the ages of young men, having met so few of them.
Remembering the blood dripping from the wound on his leg, and curious to see how Eddigar had dealt with the wound, she moved around to the other side of the bed and lifted the comforter to take a look.
Beneath the blanket, he was naked.
Brenna blinked, stared, realized she was staring, and dropped the comforter in confusion. Even though she was alone, she felt her face flush. I didn’t mean-I never thought-
Her thoughts stammered to a stop inside her head, and a cooler, sardonic voice said, And if you had known, you would have looked on purpose, wouldn’t you?
She couldn’t answer that question. But then, she hadn’t really seen what condition his leg was in. And she wasn’t hurting anything by taking another look. He was asleep, he’d never know-
Her hand was on the comforter again when, horrified by her own thoughts, she decided she’d seen enough. (More than enough, that sardonic inner voice commented.) There was no point risking discovery when the boy wasn’t even able to talk to-
And then his head tossed right and left, his eyes opened-and he looked straight at her.