~I should make you swim.~

Kylar smirked and felt the stone dimple under his fingers and toes. He began climbing.

Any hopes he had that Terah Graesin wasn’t going to do something stupid died as he reached the top of the wall. With four hours until dawn, men were already preparing to attack the sa’ceurai. Most of the soldiers were still asleep, and the horses still in their stables, but a huge area had been cleared inside the south gate. Flags had been planted so that the regiments could find their positions first thing in the morning, and squires were scurrying around, making sure armor and weapons were in top condition. From the size of the area cleared, Kylar guessed that the queen was preparing an all-out attack at dawn, committing perhaps fifteen thousand men for the attack.

He squinted at the flags, doing the math. He wouldn’t have said she had so many men.

The answer was in the flags nearest the gate. More than one flag bore a rabbit. The queen had conscripted Rabbits—and put totally untrained peasants at the spearhead of the attack on the most highly trained sa’ceurai in the world? Genius. It was one thing to throw your peasants against the other side’s peasants when you had space to try to bring in cavalry from the side or something, but when the Cenarians came pouring out the gate, Garuwashi’s sa’ceurai would meet them immediately. The battle would be confined to one front—the peasants would find themselves all alone, getting slaughtered, unable to move forward because of the sa’ceurai, unable to move back because the rest of the army was trying to get out of the south gate.

It would probably only be minutes before they panicked, and then it was only a matter of how many people would be slaughtered before Luc Graesin called off the attack and tried to shut the gates before the sa’ceurai got into the city.

Kylar dropped into the great yard and stole a leather gambeson from a pile, along with trousers and a tunic. A minute later, he stepped out from behind a smithy as a boy hurried past pushing a cart filled with cheap swords and pole arms.

“So the Rabbits get to lead the attack? Hit ’em at dawn?” Kylar said, waving at the battle flags. “How’d that happen?”

The kid lit up. “We volunteered.”

“I know a man who volunteered to snort guri pepper sauce. It didn’t make it a good idea.”

“What are you saying?” the kid asked, offended.

“Why’s the queen letting them go first?”

“It’s not the queen. It’s her brother Luc. He’s Lord General now.”

“And?”

The kid scowled. “He said the uh, the casualties would be highest among the first ones out. You know, till we took out their archers. The Rabbits ain’t scared of nothing.”

So the new Lord General manages to cull his bravest citizens and ensure a crushing defeat, all at once. Brilliant.

“You mind? I got work to do,” the kid said.

Kylar stole a horse. He didn’t have the time to walk to the castle. As he mounted, a groom came toward him. “Hey, who are you? That horse belongs to—”

Kylar brought the mask of judgment to his face in a rush and whipped his head toward the man, snarling, blue flame leaping up in his eyes and mouth.

The groom leapt backward and tripped into a horse trough with a yell.

Kylar rode as fast as he could. He left the horse and the stolen clothes before he got to East Kingsbridge and went invisible. He ran the rest of the way, leaving guards with their heads swiveling, trying to find where the patter of running feet had come from. Rather than run through the twisting, illogical halls of the castle, he climbed the wall. In minutes, he dropped onto the queen’s balcony, which was still missing part of the railing where Kylar had freed Mags Drake’s corpse. He looked inside.

The queen wasn’t alone.

22

Before I sent you after Sister Jessie, you said you’d been studying something for two years,” Istariel Wyant, the Speaker of the Chantry, said. They were sitting in her office, high in the Seraph, sharing ootai and strategy. “What was it?”

“The ka’karifer,” Ariel said.

“The what? My Hyrillic isn’t what it used to be.”

A doubtful look crossed Ariel’s face. “Your Hyrillic was never what it used to be. If I recall correctly, your marks in all your language classes—”

“The question, Ariel,” Istariel snapped, with more vigor than she intended. Only perhaps a dozen Sisters in the Chantry would recall how poorly she had performed in a few of her classes, and none of them would dare correct the Speaker. None except Ariel, who was not correcting her because she thought being Istariel’s sister gave her license: Ariel would correct anyone.

“The bearers of the stones of stones,” Ariel said. “Colloquially that would have meant stones of greatest power. The original bearers were Jorsin’s Champions of Light: Trace Arvagulania—fascinating, I think you would have liked her. She was one of the foremost minds of the age in an age famous for great minds. Probably not matched even to the present day, though I know Rosserti argues that Milovian Period is as important, I personally find his contentions regarding the Alitaeran succession to be weak: I think there were complete breaks with Miletian traditions during the Interregnum. But I’m getting side-tracked. Trace, this brilliant but horribly ugly woman—in some accounts the ugliest woman of the age, though I think those legends are as greatly exaggerated as most of the others—was given a stone that conferred all beauty upon her. The poets couldn’t even agree what she looked like. I believe, in keeping with Hrambower’s paper Sententia—damn all Lodricari scholars and their clotted syntax but there you have it—that the confusion was because the ka’kari’s power was not that it shifted Trace’s appearance, but that it directly affected viewers’ perceptions of her, in each case making her what would be most attractive to them. Imagine the fortune Ezra could have made in cosmetics!” She waited for Istariel to laugh. She didn’t.

“Fascinating,” Istariel said, her tone flat.

“Of course that ka’kari disappeared and has never resurfaced. I imagine it would have, if it were anything but a legend. There is much stronger evidence in support of the red ka’kari’s existence. Originally, it was given to Corvaer Blackwell—ironically enough, Lord Blackwell would henceforth be known as Corvaer the Red—and after he died during the Battle of Jaeran Flats, it was taken by a man named Malak Mok’mazi, Malak Firehands in our tongue, though obviously that translation doesn’t preserve the alliteration. Accounts from both sides claimed that he fought from within the conflagration that swept the plain and broke the Gurvani army. Again, after his death—apparently fire isn’t much good against poison—” Ariel barked a laugh, which Istariel didn’t share. “Uh hmm, well, it seems to have reappeared in various hands throughout history. Some of those had credible witnesses. Herddios, whom we trust for all sorts of other stories that have checked out, claims to have personally—”

“Did you learn anything new?” Istariel said, doing to her best to feign interest. Limited interest.

Ariel licked her lips, her eyes flicking up to the ceiling as she thought. “I concluded that a review of all the currently available literature on the subject still left the most pertinent questions open. And most of the less pertinent ones as well.”

“So it took you two years to figure out that you weren’t going to figure anything out.” It was a graceless way to put it, but then, with Ariel, it paid to be blunt.

Ariel grimaced. “That’s why I was willing to go see about Jessie al’Gwaydin.”

And not because your Speaker asked you to. For a moment, Istariel was jealous of her oblivious older sister. Ariel was a rock and the waves of politics passed her with sound and fury and she didn’t even notice. She was a bore, but a useful one. Whenever Istariel had needed an expert opinion on the magical sides of dilemmas, Ariel could be loosed on the problem like a hound to scent. And she wouldn’t share her findings with anyone except the books she wrote and Istariel. All in all, Ariel was worth far more than the trouble she caused. But did she have to be so boring?