Teran’s mother, a theoretical magician, spent her days researching in the Palace archives and writing long, learned papers of which Karl understood one word in ten. He had met her once or twice; she lived in the Mageborn Enclave. Teran’s father, though he had died when Teran was very young, had likewise been in the Magecorps, though his duties had been more practical: he had been killed in a cave-in while recharging the magelights in the Commoner-worked coal mine that provided fuel for the MageFurnace that burned day and night beneath the Palace to provide energy for the magic of all the Mageborn within the Lesser Barrier.
Like Karl, Teran had grown up in the Palace, and since they were almost of an age, the two boys had naturally fallen in with each other, roaming freely inside the Barrier, swimming in the lake, buying ice cream in the Enclave, chasing the geese, sneaking into the kitchen
… and one night when they were twelve, sneaking into the maids’ bathing room.
That had been memorable not only for the enlightenment and entertainment it had provided, but for revealing to Karl his own peculiar magical ability, an ability he had told no one about because it was too useful as a secret.
As Heir to the Keys, Karl wasn’t supposed to have any magic of his own. Certainly, he couldn’t light fires with a flick of his hand or move small objects without touching them, the way even the lowliest Mageborn could.
But that night, as the boys, passing through the hallways of the servants’ quarters after a snack in the kitchens, had passed the bathing rooms, Karl, laughing to Teran about how he’d love to sneak in there, had said, “Too bad they lock the doors with magic.” Then he had reached out and tugged on the handle…
… and the door had opened.
Nobody had seen them that evening, though they’d gotten a delightful eyeful themselves. Teran had said something about how lucky they’d been that the door had been unlocked, and left it at that.
Karl, though, knew very well that the door had not been unlocked, but had come unlocked at his touch. After that, he’d started touching other enchanted items just to see what would happen.
He only seemed to be able to deactivate small objects: locks, lights, heating stones. Near the Palace’s main entrance stood a famous magical timepiece that showed not only the time but also the positions of the stars and planets, as tiny whirling models inside a crystal dome. One day Karl had casually leaned against it for a while, then walked away. He’d been vaguely disappointed to see it still working.. but a day later he saw two mages working on it, muttering about it needing adjustment for the first time in half a century. Magecorps mages always seemed to be somewhere near his quarters, trying to fix something that had unexpectedly failed.
Once, when he was about sixteen, he’d even dared to touch the Lesser Barrier, though he’d been warned against it; people who had tried that before had suffered severe frostbite. No matter how cold it is, a quick touch won’t hurt anything, he’d thought… and so he’d reached out, ready to snatch his hand away again in an instant…
… and hadn’t felt any cold at all. In fact, the Barrier had felt almost springy to his touch, like soft rubber. He’d snatched his hand back and never tried again.
His best guess was that his strange power had something to do with his being Heir, but he’d never asked Tagaza about it nor mentioned it to anyone else… even Teran. The ability to de-magic small items, unlock locked doors, and turn out magelights seemed much more useful as a secret than something for Tagaza to research… and tell Falk about; the First Mage and Minister of Public Safety were close friends.
It was hardly the only secret he held close. He and Teran were still friends, but their relationship was very different now that Teran was in the guard and he was the confirmed Heir. I have many more secrets than I did as a child, Karl thought. Then a frown flicked across his face. I wonder if Teran does, too?
He shrugged aside that notion, and the whole mass of circling thoughts about Palace life and Kingdom politics that more and more filled his mind these days, put down his beer bottle, and got to his feet. Stretching, he looked around at the wide, tree-studded lawn that sloped up from the lake to the Barrier. This was one of his favorite places, with almost half a mile of water separating him from the Palace. Few Mageborn visited it, and it was off-limits to Commoners, which gave him the illusion of solitude… his bodyguard excepted, of course. On days when the weather inside and out of the Lesser Barrier was the same, he sometimes rested here and pretended that nothing separated him from the rest of the world, that the Barrier didn’t even exist.
He couldn’t pretend that today, with winter still clawing New Cabora and the “sunlight” within the Barrier cast not by the true sun but by the magesun, an enormous, intensely bright magelight that traversed the interior of the dome-shaped Barrier whenever clouds shrouded the outside world, but at least he could pretend to be a free man, not the near-prisoner his birth had made him.
He nudged the reclining Teran in the side with his bare foot. Teran opened one eye. “You called, Your Highness?”
“I’m going for a swim,” he said. “There’d better still be beer left when I come out.”
Teran grinned. “I’m sure most of it will still be here.” He sat up, put on his helmet, then got to his feet, leaned over and picked up his sword belt, and buckled it on. “But first, of course, I have to do my job.”
Drawing his sword, he walked down to the edge of the lake. He peered into the water, searched up and down the grassy shore with his hand shading his eyes, and made a show of poking his blade into all the nearby bushes. He came back and saluted. “Guardsmen Teran reporting, sir,” he said. “After a hard-fought battle, I have secured the beachhead.”
Karl touched his fingers to his forehead. “I salute you, sir. When I am King, you will have your just reward.”
“Actually, I’ll take it now,” Teran said. “If it’s all the same to Your Highness.” He bent down, took a full bottle of beer from the open chest, pulled out the cork with his teeth, then raised the bottle to Karl. “Enjoy your swim!” he said cheerfully, then took a swig.
Karl laughed, then strolled down to the lake, dropping his clothes as he went. Naked, he stood at the water’s edge for a moment, gazing across the lake at the Palace, glad to be here in the faux sunshine instead of locked in that den of greed, graft, and politics. Then he stepped forward. His foot touched the lapping waves…
… and thirty feet offshore, the lake erupted.
A cloud of steam exploded outward, driving a ring of spray across the water. Karl staggered as the blast slammed into him. He glimpsed someone, clad in black, face hidden, standing impossibly on the surface of the water. The figure raised its right hand, pointing something at him. Light brighter than the magesun flashed-and a far greater blast than the first hammered him to the ground. Ears ringing, blood running from his nose, acrid fumes burning his throat and eyes, he found himself on his back in the sand, staring up at a sky wreathed in smoke. Coughing and blinking away tears, he heaved himself up on one elbow.
For twenty feet in every direction, the grass around him had burned black. A bush that a moment before had been clothed in small white flowers now stood as naked, shattered, and charred as though struck by lightning. His discarded kilt smoldered where it lay. Water that seconds before had been calm, glittering blue now tossed brown, foam-flecked wavelets against the muddy bank.
A dozen feet from the shore bobbed something black and twisted.
Karl heard Teran’s booted feet thudding across the turf toward him, but the sound seemed to come from far away. He found himself standing without really remembering getting up, and then he was wading into the troubled water.
He looked down at what floated there.
Once, it might have been human, but now it was as charred and twisted as the blasted bush. He stared at grinning teeth in a noseless ruin of a face, blind white eyes bulging from sockets whose lids had been burned away. His gaze traveled lower.
The body was female.
When Teran reached him, he was kneeling in the shallow water, his back to the blackened corpse, retching sour beer into the filthy gray waves.
Beyond the shimmer of the Lesser Barrier, where falling and blowing snow mingled to conceal all in swirling curtains of white, Vinthor lowered his spyglass. He could no longer see through it anyway: tears had flooded his eyes and frozen on his eyelashes. Lying on a snowdrift, halfcovered with snow himself, he would have been invisible to anyone passing within a dozen feet, much less someone blinded by the magical sunshine beyond the Lesser Barrier.
Jenna! The name stabbed his heart like a knife.
Had the invisible Barrier not separated him as completely from the Palace grounds as a wall of steel, he would have rushed the naked Prince and strangled him with his bare hands, bodyguard be damned. That that decadent Mageborn fool should continue to live while beautiful Jenna, so young, so full of life, floated in the water as a withered, blackened corpse…
He had cursed himself for misjudging his distance and coming unexpectedly onto the very verge of the Barrier fifteen minutes earlier-practically on top of the Prince himself. He’d thought then that it didn’t matter, that even if the Prince and his guard, lolling at ease on the other side of the magical wall, did note his face well enough to later identify him, it would mean nothing, with Jenna ready to strike.
But the Prince and the bodyguard both lived, and Jenna, unthinkably, did not.
He scraped the freezing tears from his eyes, then snapped the spyglass closed. Clambering to his feet, he struggled through the snow away from the Barrier, back toward the shadowy, smoky streets of New Cabora. He wanted no one on the other side to see him now, for certain.
He would report what had happened to the Patron.
He did not think the Patron would be pleased.
Lord Falk, minister of public safety, emerged onto the front steps of the Palace after his daily audience with the King. As usual, he had reported on happenings within the Kingdom in extremely vague terms: “some unrest within the Commons… Royal Army continues to pursue Minik raiders… murmurings from Lord Santhorst’s estate of taxes being too high, and a shortage of coal…” If the King had been paying attention, even that should have been enough to alert him to the fact that the state of his Kingdom was not ideal, but of course the King had not been paying attention. He had a new favorite, a boy that looked to Falk to be no more than fifteen, a Commoner, of course, and had spent most of the audience whispering in the boy’s ear, the boy sipping wine and eating artfully crafted hors d’oeuvres on silver sticks and generally looking like a cat that had managed to swallow a goose.
Falk had hardly been surprised to see the boy there, since he had been the one to pluck him off the streets of New Cabora for the King’s pleasure. He had done it many times before, over the years, but it gave him no small amount of satisfaction to know that he would never have to do it again, if all went according to plan.
Keeping the King entertained, Falk had long since discovered, was the best way to keep him uninvolved in those matters Falk really preferred he remained uninvolved in, such as governing the Kingdom. I can do that a lot better without his interference, Falk thought, lips twitching, though not quite turning up in a smile: he made it a point to never smile in public.
Had he not had that public image to maintain, though, he would have been grinning from ear to ear. The day was fast approaching when he would no longer have to concern himself with keeping the King happy, for he would be the King.
As I should have been anyway, he thought. He stopped at the top of the broad staircase and looked across the cobblestoned drive to the ceremonial gardens stretching a hundred yards down to the lake. In the middle of the gardens, Queen Castilla on her favorite horse held up her hand in an eternally frozen wave to crowds that had been every bit as imaginary when she was alive as they were now that she was only a not-very-well-executed bronze. Falk’s lip curled. That statue goes first thing, he thought. It had been Castilla, grandmother of the current King, who had stolen the Kingship from his lineage.
The gardens-a riot of green, red, white, yellow, and blue-stretched beneath the bright light of the magesun to the red-tiled roof of the boathouse and the three sailboats and two rowboats tied to the long pier. Beyond them glittered Palace Lake. On the far side of the lake, half a mile away, a broad green lawn, dotted with trees, ran up until it encountered the Lesser Barrier. Beyond that, of course, all was white, wrapped in blizzard.
Falk shaded his eyes with one hand as he glimpsed movement on that lawn. Two men: one naked, walking down to the water, the other in the unmistakable blue of a Royal guard. Prince Karl, Falk thought. Someone else who has almost served his purpose.
He was about to start down the steps when something flashed. His head shot up, and then he heard a sound like a single clap of thunder
… but it never thundered inside the Barrier.