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  Kordas acknowledged him with a nod, and made his way through the bowing pages to join his family.

  “Well?” Hakkon asked, as he took his seat.

  “Well, the foaling was successful thanks to Delia, plus there was a second Sweetfoot born last night. I gave Delia the Gold foal because she earned it, so she will be starting her filly’s early training today, and yes, please put Restil in the pages, he’s old enough.” Having gotten that out of the way, he turned to his breakfast, listening in to Delia and Isla’s conversation. As he had expected, it was about Delia’s filly, who apparently had been named “Daystar.” Isla was giving her advice on the filly’s early training, and Delia was doing more listening than talking. Kordas buttered some bread with a broad knife imprinted with the white and blue winged horse of Valdemar, and turned back to Hakkon.

  “I expect to hear from the Emperor that he wants his tribute quite soon,” he continued, “since the fact that I was doing my own foaling last night is bound to come to his ears as a hilarious anecdote.”

  Hakkon snorted. “I don’t know how you put up with being thought a clown. I’d have broken some noses over it if I was in your shoes.” Then he laughed. “So it’s just as well I never wanted your shoes.”

  “I put up with it by reminding myself constantly that it’s better to be thought a clown and be dismissed as harmless than to be a target for the Emperor’s suspicions. The more of a fool he thinks I am, the less likely he is to think of me at all.” He shrugged. “Anything you need to tell me about the pages, the squires, or the state of the Duchy?” All the servants ultimately reported to Hakkon, and were given their orders by him. The various lords of the other fourteen Valdemar manors also reported directly to him. He was in charge of the Exchequer, who managed the Treasury, the Housekeeper and Head Cook, and of course the pages and squires.

  “Squire Brianta. I want her placed with a knight. She’s more than ready for the position, but you don’t have any lady-knights here,” Hakkon told him. “What do you want to do?”

  That was a good question. Who am I certain enough of to trust a female squire to? Wait . . .

  “You don’t have a squire at present,” he pointed out.

  “I . . . don’t,” Hakkon admitted, after hesitating a moment. “That’s not a bad thought.”

  “Is she smart enough to consider training for a Seneschal position?” he persisted. “Two birds, one stone, as it were.”

  “We’ll see. I like where this is going, though,” Hakkon replied, and speared an apple with his knife. “Brianta is too good a squire to waste on a dolt, or worse, someone who would try to take advantage of the situation. And I do need a squire.”

  “Then assign her to yourself. If her parents object, send them to me.”

  Hakkon grinned. “They won’t. They prefer to think about Brianta as little as possible. Oh, they’ll be happy enough when she’s knighted, I am sure, since she’ll have a proper position in the world, but right now, she’s just the odd girl that isn’t much of a marriage prospect. Awkward for everyone. So am I correct in thinking you want Restil as Isla’s personal page?”

  “Yes, sir, you are correct!” Kordas laughed, getting Isla’s side-glance. “It’s about time she had her own page.”

  “It’s about time she had more than that, but your lady wife is the most difficult person I have ever met to get her to sit back and let other people do things for her,” Hakkon grumbled. “She’d be out there in the kitchen garden troweling herbs if I let her.”

  The twinkle in Isla’s eyes told Kordas that she’d heard every word of that and was greatly amused by it, but she chose to turn back to her sister rather than address it.

  Kordas and Hakkon continued to talk through the meal, though much of it was coded. It was fairly safe to talk openly here, but Kordas was not taking any chances that someone might decide to try Farseeing or a scrying spell on them as they ate. Unlikely—but possible. Besides, he and Hakkon had gotten used to phrasing their conversations with double-meanings, and in the Empire, that was a good habit to keep.

  Although Kordas did not know Hakkon’s full story—that had died with Kordas’s mother, the Lady Lyantha, and Hakkon himself didn’t know most of it—he knew enough. Lyantha’s sister had run off with someone in a situation almost exactly like the popular song “Black Jack Davy.” Unfortunately their idyll had not lasted very long. She turned up with a toddler in tow about two years after Lyantha had married Lord Valdemar. She had come here, to the manor, knowing she was not welcome back home. Lord and Lady Valdemar would have taken her in, no questions asked, no shaming and no blaming, but she had merely begged them to take Hakkon into their household, and vanished again. Had she gone back to her lover, once she no longer had a child to worry about? No one knew; she had never been heard from again.

  Lyantha had added Hakkon to the household pod of children, then taken him as her page. Lord Valdemar might have been considering legitimizing Hakkon as his heir, but while Hakkon was still among the pages, Kordas had been born.

  And from that point, there had never been any question but that Hakkon was going to become Kordas’s protector and guide once the Emperor summoned him.

  “You know,” he said thoughtfully, as Hakkon carefully peeled his apple in one single strip, “I’ve never asked you if you resented being made my watchdog for all those years at Court.”

  Hakkon snorted. “You could not pay me enough to put up with the never-ending stream of garbage that comes out of the Court,” he said immediately. “There is no title high enough to compensate for having to deal with that conniving toad on the Conquest Throne. Besides—”

  He put the knife and the apple down, and half-turned to stare directly into Kordas’s eyes.

  “—your sainted mother and your kind father took me in and treated me like their own. They never allowed anyone to shame me for what I was. Your father knighted me in secret, did you know that? When you knighted me, it was actually for the second time. When we came home because he was dying, he took me aside, and told me that if I wanted to stay at Valdemar, he’d order you to make me your Seneschal, but if I wanted to be on my own, he’d make a provision in his will to have the income from one of the manor farms and three of the Chargers, so I could go take up arms anywhere I cared to, or I could settle down with someone of my choice. And he said someone, not ‘a lady.’ So . . . you know, he knew.”

  “He told me.”

  “Well, I never knew for certain if he had or not.” Hakkon picked up the apple again, and started slicing bits off, eating them carefully. “We’re family, Kordas. You’re my brother. You’ve never treated me as anything less, not even when we were at the Court and you could have ingratiated yourself with those entitled brats and used me as your pet attack-dog.” He cracked a crooked smile. “Besides, this means that these days you get to stand between me and Imperial trouble. I call that fair.”

  “Good point.” He finished the last oatcake and waved off the page offering more. “If you’re done murdering that apple with a thousand cuts, want to climb Jonaton’s tower with me?”

  “But of course.” Hakkon got up first, but Kordas wasn’t far behind him. It was going to be a very long walk. Jonaton had his lair in the very top of the tallest of the Valdemar manor towers. And only those who were close enough to the Emperor’s favor were permitted the smaller, local Portals that would enable them to walk from the ground floor into the top of a tower.

  There were three other mages in this tower, but Jonaton was the most powerful and had seniority, and got the set of rooms with the best view. That also meant there were two other mages between him and trouble, should trouble decide to come looking for him. He had been the first mage that Kordas had ever met as a child just out of the nursery, and he vividly recalled running into the man in a hallway and being startled half out of his wits by the apparition that had blown by him in a flurry of ruffle and lace-trimmed, embroid
ered robes all in colors that had never been found in nature.

  The staircase here was contained, to give the inhabitants of the tower as much privacy as possible. It was lit by day by tiny slit windows, and by night by mage-lights that came alight when the staircase darkened. They ran into the first tenant on the stairs themselves; the youngest mage in the manor and once Jonaton’s apprentice. The lad did not copy his mentor’s sartorial splendor; long gray half-robes, gray tunic, and gray hose. Pelias squeezed himself against the wall so they could pass. “Are there oatcakes for breakfast?” the teenager asked, hopefully.

  “With clotted cream and jam,” Kordas told him, and the young man pelted down the stairs they had just taken with an energy and enthusiasm that made Hakkon sigh.

  “If only youth could be bottled,” his cousin said. “No, wait, the Emperor can—”

  “But would you want it at that price?” Kordas countered.

  “Hrrm. Youth siphoned off young criminals? Depends on the criminal, I suppose,” Hakkon replied. “A murderer, I’d be fine with that. A pickpocket, not so much.”

  “Sooner or later you run out of murderers,” Kordas pointed out, as they encountered the second inhabitant of the tower, who had paused at the entrance to the stairs. “Morning, Siman.”

  “Good morning, my lord.” Siman was old, but still vigorous, and was dressed. “I intuit by the rapidly fading footsteps of young Pelias that there are oatcakes for breakfast.”

  “Your intuition is correct, as ever.” Kordas made space for the elder mage to pass. “There were still plenty when we left.”

  “Good. If the sounds I heard at an unholy hour this morning are anything to go by, I believe Jonaton has good news for you, and the rest of us are about to put your father’s plan into action.”

  Kordas felt his eyes widen with surprise, and he put out a hand to stop Siman and ask him more, but the mage was already out of sight and reach around the turn of the stair.

  “Do you know anything about this?” he demanded of Hakkon.

  His cousin shrugged. “You know me. Once I’m asleep, you could hold a battle on top of me and I’d never know it till I found the hoof prints in the morning.”

  Well, there was only one thing for it. He whirled and began taking the steps upward two at a time.

  They found Jonaton awake and feverishly scribbling figures on sheets of reused parchment. He looked up as he heard them enter.

  “I have it!” he crowed, waving a handful of papers over his head. “I have it! I tried it last night and it worked!”

  Jonaton was not in his usual garb; garb that would have gotten him mistaken for a woman except for his lantern jaw. Kordas suspected him of jumping out of bed as an idea hit him and coming straight down here to his workroom, because the plain, baggy linen breeches and oversized silk shirt he was wearing looked like things he usually slept in. He snapped his fingers twice, manically remembering protocol, and said, “We’re good, here, now. All warded up. You know,” and twirled his bony, frequently bandaged fingers.

  His mouse-brown hair was a tangled mess, and with the dark circles under his eyes, he looked as if he had been working all night. Kordas glanced over at Hakkon, who seemed bemused. “I know you went to bed last night,” Hakkon said.

  “Yes, but I suddenly had an idea!” Jonaton waved his fistful of papers again. “I need more power, but it will definitely work! Let me tell you!”

  Since by now Kordas was well aware that nothing would stop Jonaton when he was in full flow, he just looked around for a place to sit, spotted an empty bucket, and turned it over to sit on it. Hakkon leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed. Jonaton launched into his explanation without a pause.

  “My problem has been how to identify a good spot to Gate far enough away from the Empire that we’ll have a long head start on anyone who chases us. Right?”

  “Wait, I thought the problem was that Gates only go so far—” Hakkon interrupted.

  “No, no, or the Emperor wouldn’t have his private Gates that can go wherever he wants them to,” Jonaton replied, shaking his head vigorously. “It just takes a lot more power to operate them than the static Gates we use. That’s easy, we have plenty of mages here to punch one through for a good long distance. I mean, not from up here, but where the big ones could be made. Because. I swear, you never listen to me.”

  “I listen to you—” Hakkon began.

  Jonaton interrupted him. “So, we know about a thousand years ago, something cataclysmic to magic swept over, well, everything, right?” he said.

  “We do?” Hakkon whispered to Kordas.

  “And that’s why it takes a lot of effort to gather the magic energy to do things, unless you are doing demonic pacts or blood magic, or something else Abyssal. Or maybe Elemental, but you have to have a lot of energy to bind Elementals.” Jonaton had the bit in his teeth now, and there was going to be no slowing him down. “But that’s not important right now. What is important is that the same—I’ll call them Mage-Storms, because they act like heavy weather—created Change-Circles.”

  “What are—”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Kordas promised, his eyes on Jonaton and his excitement growing.

  “Now one of those Change-Circles south of us, in the Barony of Lepodal, brought in a tree with a trunk big enough to drive a wagon through it. Well, it would have, except it didn’t bring the whole tree. It brought a crescent-shaped bite of the tree. And that was so fantastic that Baron Lepodal got a cabinetmaker to make as many tables out of that tree trunk as he could. People competed to buy them. They’re scattered all over the Empire, family heirlooms. And I happened to be in the same manor as one of them a few years ago, and while no one was looking, I thought, ‘Jonaton, old sport, it might be handy to have a splinter of that thing some day, because you never know.’”

  “You never know what, exactly?” Kordas asked.

  “That’s what I’m getting to!” Jonaton shouted impatiently. “So I made sure no one was around, and I got down on the floor under the table, and I carved off a little sliver from the underside. I made sure to get it from the trunk, because I wasn’t sure what the legs were made of. And I put it in a box, and put it in my collection, and then never thought about it.” Jonaton waved backhandedly at the overstuffed shelves and stands that could start a museum all on their own.

  Becoming a mage of high quality meant suffering through a long list of pain- and senses-shocking experiences just to learn the craft. An exploratory mage, well, they were rare, and every one known was recorded as eccentric. Kordas knew that it changed some mages beyond reasoning, but Kordas knew that one trait about Jonaton was that he compulsively acquired things. As vices go, it wasn’t the worst possible—but just the same, Kordas knew it was probably best that he never officially learned where Jonaton’s collections originated, or there would be no small sum of reparations money going out of the Duchy.

  “How you keep track of all that—stuff—” Hakkon began.

  Jonaton ignored the jibe. “Until last night! When I realized, that tree must have come from the West! Far to the West, way beyond where the Empire’s borders are, because otherwise someone would have found it and made matching tables and made a fortune! So last night I gathered up all my spare energy crystals and that sliver and decided to see if I could punch through to where that tree is—or was, anyway. And I did it! I did it!”

  “So . . . you saw where the tree used to stand?” Kordas asked hesitantly. Jonaton used a lot of eccentric language, and he wasn’t quite sure just what “punched through” meant.

  “More than just saw! I got a momentary window there! Like—if I get enough power behind me, I can open a temporary, really temporary Gate-like-thing—I call it a Snatch-Portal!—for long enough that Delia can pick up something from there, I can make a Gate-anchor out of it, we can open one again, and she can throw it back! Then I use the same bearing
I figured out, in the cave, and sight in on it good and strong, and even better, the rest of that tree is still alive! So it’ll make it easier to get a lock, and if I can, I can burn in a searchable sigil. Which means—”

  “We can open a Gate, a real Gate, out far beyond the border of the Empire,” Kordas said slowly. “Exactly what my father wanted. What he planned for. What we’ve been working for.”

  Kordas felt the hair on the back of his neck standing up, and he grew hot and cold at once. After all this time, and all this effort—here it was. The Plan. It was no longer just a plan. They could make it a reality.

  He and his family and anyone who wanted to come with them could escape the Empire. Forever.

  “Are you sure of this?” he asked.

  “Well, of course I’m not sure,” Jonaton said crossly. “It’s magic. It has built-in fuckery. Other mages could stop us—and will, if they’re in the Emperor’s service. But I am willing to make that Gate and use that Gate, and if that’s not good enough for you—”

  “No, no, no, I understand!” Kordas hastened to tell him, as he rose to his feet and strode across the room to take Jonaton’s hand in his. “Good Gods, Jonaton, this is brilliant! You’re a genius! But—”

  Jonaton stopped him before he could say anything. “Yes, I know, I know, and you’re right, the site is not on a body of water, much less a river of the size you want. But the thing is, the first Gate will just be temporary. You’ll send someone across to find a lake or a river, or even a swamp would do at a pinch—”

  “Not a swamp. I do not even want to think about sheep in a swamp.” Kordas shuddered.

  “Hah! Bad for the sheep, but you have to admit, it’d be so funny it’d be worth it! But. Yes. No. All right, not a swamp, then. But you just send some hardy, over-muscled, over-eager lad who loves nothing more than to hack his way through howling wilderness and eight million leagues of wait-a-minute bushes and bears and Gods only know what else to find a river, and we can put a proper water-Gate on it, and there you go! Well, first we go through and build a durable Gate frame under shelter, and bring through parts for a bigger one. Obviously. But that’s tomorrow!” Jonaton grinned into Kordas’s face. “Easy peasy nice and breezy. You’ll finally have a use for that manor-sized barn full of hulls. Among other things.” Jonaton gently pulled his hand loose from Kordas’s and yawned, covering his mouth with his sleeve. “I’m going back to bed now.”