Book II. Chapter 128. Fable

Ardan scooped up some of the thick, rich soup with a small camp ladle, its metal slightly darkened. Above the fire, a nearly black pot swung from a slightly dented tripod. Ardi didn’t even know exactly how old his camp gear was. He’d bought it from a cowboy on the farm. The man had picked it up when he was Ardi’s age, at a flea market west of Evergale, while traveling with the cowboys to a cattle auction.

People on the farm joked that Ard’s camping kit, repaired time and again either by Ard himself or by the blacksmith, might well date back to the Birth of the Empire. That didn’t make it any worse, though. If anything, perhaps the food only tasted better for it.

At any rate, the soup, made with roots and wild boar ribs and spiced with a whole array of Ard’s favorite seasonings, smelled so good you could have filled the tin camp mug waiting its turn with drool. And not Ard’s alone.

Nearby, Taisia sat on a block of wood, huddling slightly against the evening wind. A full day had already passed since they had left Yellik. They had even made it past Wolf’s Blanket (a plateau in what had once been the outlying territories of Shangra’Ar, where northern orcs sometimes raided anyone who set foot on their “ancestral lands”). And fortunately, they had made it past without any trouble. Ahead, all that remained was Bear’s Rift, a gorge between two rocky hills, followed by a swift stream and a small pine grove, with First Station beyond the grove.

Calling a settlement with a population of nearly twenty thousand a Station was no longer entirely accurate. What had once been a waystation frequented only by the Hunters’ Guild had long since grown into a settlement with many thousands of residents. After all, the park didn’t cover the entire forest surrounding Cold Lake.

So the coal mines in the rocky hills, the logging industry, and fishing in Cold Lake all enabled the Station to grow and prosper.

“I’m starting to think skipping the communal kitchen was the right call,” Taisia said, drawing the words out with hungry relish, all but licking her lips.

The field kitchen had been set up several stagecoaches ahead of Ard and Taisia. Several hunters from the Guild expedition stirred stew in enormous cauldrons that held about twenty-five liters each, ladling it into bowls for hungry people as they came up in turn. Along with the stew, which smelled like... everything at once, the cooks handed each person a thick slab of bread and told them not to hold up the line.

Apart from the fire Ard had kindled on the steppe that night, only three small campfires flickered, each with cooks gathered around it.

“I’m starting to understand how you ended up with a wife like that,” Taisia said. Her eyes shone, and she never took them off the pot. “They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but believe me, Skofsky, that goes for women too.”

Miss Shpritz had changed clothes. Her city dress and dainty boots had given way to thigh-high boots. Taisia had tucked loose trousers into their tops, the heavy cloth patched with leather at the thighs and knees. She had tucked a plain shirt beneath her belt. Over it, she wore a knitted vest and a scuffed jacket made not of pigskin or cowhide but of bison leather.

If even Ard envied her for it, he could imagine how badly the other hunters wanted one. Bison leather blocked the wind better than anything and kept it from wicking moisture away from the wearer’s skin. It was reliable, tough enough for the worst conditions, and insanely expensive because of it.

The whole outfit, which made Taisia look a little ridiculous as she alternately tugged her jacket into place and adjusted her belt, had probably set her back around seventy exes. So, despite wearing clothes very well suited to an expedition, she still looked like a city lady lost in the steppe. Which, in essence, was exactly what she was.

Ardi, meanwhile, kept stirring the soup, trying not to get drawn into another round of sarcasm and needling. The single most important part of making this dish is keeping the ladle moving. If you don’t stir constantly, the root vegetables settle against the bones, and the meat doesn’t stay bathed in broth; it dries out and shrivels so badly that rubber would be easier to chew.

Ardan scooped up another ladleful and lifted the ladle to his lips.

“Eternal Angels, Captain!” Taisia exclaimed, tapping her spoon against the wooden bowl. “You aren’t the only hungry one here! Or have you decided to eat all the soup yourself?”

Ardi gave Taisia a bewildered look.

“Actually, this is my soup,” he replied. “Made with my supplies. You asked me to share, and I agreed. So have some patience.”

Taisia rolled her eyes and threw up her hands.

“What a bore... This isn’t the trip I imagined, Captain.” Taisia heaved a sigh. “No adventures... And what am I supposed to write my article about? Your soup and how an elderly mage-bureaucrat is trying to get into my panties? I’ve had all sorts of hands in them, of course, but they always belonged to someone young and beautiful. Not... this...”

Ardan felt the blood rush to his face. Why did most people he knew completely ignore the rules of common decency?

“Miss Shpritz!” he protested.

“Yes, yes, Captain, I know, I know.” Taisia rolled her eyes again. “Your delicate ears can’t bear my descriptions.”

“I’d prefer not to hear them at all,” Ardi added.

Meanwhile, the Senior Magister himself was in the stagecoach with two Yellow mages, the expedition’s other senior researchers. So Taisia could finally take a break from playing the naive little fool, an act that wore down both her and Ard.

“As if you’ve never slipped those rather elegant fingers of yours, I have to say, into anyone’s panties.” Taisia’s lips curled into a predatory smile once more. She clearly enjoyed making Ard squirm. “Or is your relationship with your wife purely spiritual, far removed from the flesh? I’ve heard, by the way, that half-bloods from large-bodied races often exhibit perfectly natural anomalies in the size of their—”

“Taisia!” Ard roared. He swung the ladle so hard he nearly overturned the pot.

“Don’t spill it!” Taisia cried in alarm.

The tripod creaked plaintively, the pot tilted at a dangerous angle, and Taisia and Ard froze like stone statues. A second ticked by, then another, and the soup stayed safely inside the iron pot.

“Eternal Angels!”

“Sleeping Spirits!”

Taisia and Ard spoke in unison, then fell silent together. Overhead, the stars shone. Funny little lights, like rents in the black velvet draped around the endless universe. Lately, even the non-Star scholars had begun to claim that the cosmos was not so much infinite as endlessly expanding.

An expanding cosmos...

For some reason, Ardi didn’t like the thought. Nor, for that matter, did he like anything to do with what lay beyond their sky. Somewhere out there. In the interstellar void. It seemed distant to him, meaningless and alien. A space without air. Without anything at all. An absolute emptiness filled with darkness and cold. Not the real cold brought by the winds of the north and the tread of the Mistress of Winter, but cold born of the absence of anything whatsoever.

Perhaps that was why Ardi never much liked listening to Tess’s retellings of science fiction books about space pirates and other civilizations. Those books had always unsettled him, much as the little grass snake unsettled Taisia now while it calmly went about its business.

“Damn it!” Taisia cried, grabbing the holster that held her small, lightweight revolver. “It’s a viper!”

“It’s a grass snake,” Ardi corrected her, then looked back up at the night sky.

He loved the stars. From a distance. Like beautiful exhibits in a museum. But the thought of finding himself among them... No. Human progress here on earth was quite enough for him, he thought. Iron behemoths that did not sink in water and their counterparts that plowed through the clouds were enough of a spectacle for Ardi, a young man raised on Aror’s fairy tales.

Ardi tasted the soup again, then finally held out a hand to Taisia.

“Pass me your bow—”

Before he could even finish, the wooden bowl was thrust right into his hand. Ardi sighed and filled it to the brim.

“Just be careful. It’s hot,” Ardan urged.

Taisia accepted her dinner gratefully, set the bowl on its stand, and attacked the food like a starving prisoner. She scalded herself, blew on the spoon, and scalded herself again. Meanwhile, Ardi took a piece of salted beef from his bag and started on his own dinner.

Once the first helping was gone, the two of them polished off a second, then divided what remained in the pot. Their entire “feast” took less than a quarter of an hour; they were both that hungry. Once he had finished eating, Ardi pulled up a handful of grass and carefully wiped out the bowl. Then he dampened a rag and cleaned away the green streaks and fibers left behind by his makeshift “scrubber.”

The cowboys had taught him the cardinal rule of camp cookware: always keep it clean.

Watching Ard, Taisia followed the same steps, though without quite his skill or speed.

Ardan folded up the tripod and left it to cool on the grass, then returned to his mare, patted her neck, and packed everything back into the saddlebags. When he came back to the fire, he plucked a blade of grass and tossed it into his mouth for its astringent tang, which cleared away the lingering taste of the meal. Then he lay back with his hands behind his head. He sorely wished he could pull his hat down over his eyes and doze.

For one thing, he no longer had a hat. For another, he still had to put up a stationary shield before going to sleep. No matter how peaceful the steppes looked, they could still hold surprises.

“Even so, it’s lonely,” Taisia repeated.

“How many of you are warriors? Fifteen men? I’ve got almost fifty with me. Or do you think these wanderers hiding behind their wagons can do us any serious harm?”

“Well, they’ll kill a couple, at least.”

Ardi shivered slightly. He would have preferred the whole journey to be completely uneventful, with the Puppeteers showing not the slightest interest in the Northern National Park.

“Tell me something, Captain.”

Ardi looked at Taisia. She was smoking and looking up at the stars too. The way she stared told him the star-bright sky, thick with constellations, was as new to her as the black canopy over the Metropolis had once been to Ard.

“What, exactly?”

Shpritz said nothing for a moment, then shrugged.

“Something about the Park. Some kind of legend.”

“A legend?”

“Well, you’re a wizard, after all, Captain,” Taisia added. “And in the old tales, wizards are always telling travelers stories that mean something. Prophecies, or stories that give a glimpse of the road ahead and what waits at the heart of it.”

“I doubt I’m that kind of wizard, Miss Shpritz.”

“Yes.” Taisia nodded. “But tell me one anyway. Please.”

Ardi looked back up at the stars and spent several minutes searching his memory. Aror’s stories rarely touched on the north, apparently because his great-grandfather had seldom come this way. But there was one story. Or rather, one of many linked to one particular name. Erti had always liked that one. And now, after all these years, Ardan thought he might understand why.

Ardan remained silent a little longer, letting the silence settle between them the way snow settles over a forest path. Then he began his story, trying to retell exactly what he had heard from his grandfather... his great-grandfather, in the same slightly halting, old-fashioned turns of phrase Aror used in his stories.

“Once there lived a knight of the Winter Fae. No mortal knew the name he had borne before his exile, and none ever will, because the Fae give their true names only to those they love. But the knight fell in love with a mortal. A girl of humankind, whose life, by the reckoning of the Fae, lasted no longer than morning dew on the petal of a wild rose. He loved her for the same reasons all Fae both love and despise this world: its fragility, its brevity, and the fact that each breath we take may be our last.”

The campfire crackled, shooting tiny sparks into the darkness. The bright flecks rose and went out before they could reach the stars.

“The Winter Queen of the City on the Hill learned of his love and flew into a rage because, to the Winter Fae, loving a mortal is like a river loving a handful of sand in its bed. The sand wears away, but the river remains, and the pain the river bears in its waters will poison everything it touches. Winter believes that love for mortals breeds darkness. So the Queen banished the knight from the City and took his memory from him, the way time steals the color from a well-worn cloak or dulls a sword’s edge. The knight was cast into the depths of the forest. Naked, without a name and without a past, he lay on the frozen ground, not knowing who he was, where he had come from, or why his heart beat with such longing, as though it had lost something that mattered beyond measure but had forgotten exactly what it was.”

The cigarette smoldered forlornly between Taisia’s fingers until she stubbed it out on a chunk of wood.

“But the knight had a mother,” Ardan continued, his voice growing softer. “A Sidhe of the Snowbound Peaks. She could not disobey the Queen’s command, nor did she dare restore her son’s memory, for even among the Winter folk, a mother’s love was no stronger than the Queen’s law. But she could return his sword to him. The knight’s sword. The Sidhe came to the thicket where her enchanted son lay and placed the blade beside him. Engraved on its blade was one word, and one word only. A name. Not his true name, for the weight of its magic would have killed him. A new name. The name the knight would bear as he traveled the road back to himself. Marenir. In the language of the Fae, it means ‘lost traveler.’”

Ard glanced over at Taisia to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep yet. Taisia listened intently. In the firelight, her blue eyes seemed almost violet.

“Marenir picked up the sword, read his own name, and set out. Not knowing where, not knowing why. Only the longing in his chest showed him the way, more surely than any compass could. He traveled through steppes and mountains, through human cities and orc camps, through the ruins of the high elves and the dwarven caves of Alcade. And one day he came here. To the north. To a place where the forest rises so high that its treetops scratch the clouds, and the clouds, offended, drift lower to take revenge on the upstart green giants.”

Ardan smiled faintly, remembering how Erti always laughed at this exact point in the story.

“And here, among the clouds, Marenir met a people humans, orcs, and even the Winter Fae of his native City had never heard of. They lived on the clouds. Not ‘among’ them, not ‘near’ them, but on them. They wove bricks from mist and moonlight, as strong as stone and as light as feathers, and on those bricks they built houses of hardened wind and frozen songs. Their children grew up never knowing what the earth was, and their elders died looking not down at the mortal world but up at the stars they talked with every evening, the way good neighbors talk over a fence.”

“And they raised the Oatoan’Anue,” Ardan said even more softly. “The Feathers of the Sky. That was their name in the language of the Fae. Winged, horned horses whose manes shimmered with the northern lights and whose hooves struck sparks from the storm winds. The cloud people herded them among the high clouds, where neither the moon nor the sun ever leaves the sky. Their horses knew every constellation by name and every star by its voice.”

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Ard held his hand out over the fire and let the sparks lick his palm.

“One day, a young man of the cloud tribe fell from a stallion he was breaking near the edge of a cloud. He plummeted toward the earth, toward the forest, toward certain death, and none of his kin could descend after him in time. But Marenir, wandering along a forest path below at that very hour, saw the falling shadow and raced to meet it. He caught him in his arms and lowered him to the ground. When he turned, he found a man in a Black cloak standing before him, his eyes made of liquid fire. An evil sorcerer who had long been hunting the cloud tribe, dreaming of discovering the secret of how they lived among the heavens. He wanted to carry the young man off, pry open his mind as one pries open a chest, and steal what belonged to the clouds.”

Ardi held his palm above the sparks and murmured a few words to them. They flared brighter and danced on his skin like tiny people. Ardi looked at them and smiled. Could that be why he disliked stories about distant, empty space? Because out there, unlike here in the middle of a windswept steppe, campfire sparks do not dance on a wizard’s palm.

“Marenir couldn’t remember who he was,” Ardan continued. “He didn’t know where his skill at fighting came from or why his body moved as though the sword and his hand were brothers. But he didn’t need to remember. Some things live not in memory but somewhere deeper, and the sword that bore the name ‘Marenir’ on its blade knew its master better than its master knew himself. The knight struck down the sorcerer and returned the young man to his family. In gratitude, the cloud people gave him one of their stallions. Young and bold, with a mane the color of dawn and horns like crystal bells ringing in the wind. The stallion went with Marenir on every adventure, through battles and storms, through mountains and rivers, through the years and across vast distances, right up to Marenir’s death. And they say that when the Lost Wanderer found his final rest, his faithful friend rose into the sky for the last time and returned to the cloud people.”

The fire was burning down. A film of gray ash covered the coals, and beneath it they smoldered with a dark orange glow, almost burgundy. Ardi released the little Sparks. They melted away against the backdrop of their elder sisters, frozen in the distant sky.

Taisia stared into the fire for a long while without speaking. At last she looked up.

“What happened to the cloud tribe?” she asked softly.

Ardan shrugged, plucked another blade of grass, and tossed it into his mouth.

“They never existed in the first place, Taisia. The ‘cloud people’ themselves were apparently just a breakaway tribe of Northern Elves who built their huts in the uppermost branches of the tallest trees.” Ardi stood and brushed the dust from his clothes. “Because local weather conditions regularly shrouded them in fog, it looked from a distance as though they lived in the clouds. And as for their horses, they probably kept them somewhere among the rocky hills, so once again, from a distance, it looked as though they were grazing on those same clouds.”

Taisia snorted and made a vague gesture with one hand.

“You’ve just killed a beautiful fairy tale, Captain.”

“I just answered your question,” Ard replied. “Besides, that’s only the beginning of the tale.”

“Exactly.” Taisia pulled the blanket over her shoulders and closed her eyes. “That’s exactly why people don’t like magicians.”

“Because we answer the very questions you ask?”

“Because you answer them honestly,” Taisia corrected him. “Good night, Captain.”

She snorted yet again, got up from the log, and headed for the ladder propped against the stagecoach. She pulled the curtain shut behind her, then made the kind of mistake only someone new to adventures makes. Taisia lit a candle and began changing clothes, and several of the hunters stopped what they were doing to watch the free shadow show.

Very erotic shadows.

Ardan shook his head, picked up his staff, and pulled several small stones from his jacket pocket. Several runic arrays enclosed in simple contours had been neatly carved into each stone with a diamond-tipped cutter (he had paid a fortune in exes for the tool and therefore never even took it out of the Stables). There seemed to be nothing extraordinary about them, at least at first glance.

Ardi made a circuit of their stagecoach, which Senior Magister Nalensky had been visiting a little too often, and set the stones atop stakes driven into the ground beforehand. When he was done, he stood in the center beside the fire and struck the ground hard with his staff.

A bright blue seal flared beneath his feet. The stones atop the stakes began to sparkle, and for a moment an icy wind whirled around the stagecoach. It swept fine snow across the grass and made the fire shudder like a frightened girl. A few snowflakes glittered in the air but soon melted away, leaving a faint, glasslike veil around Ard, Taisia, the four horses, the piebald mare, the stagecoach itself, and the now slightly shrunken fire.

Ardan had given the seal what he considered a rather poetic and highly metaphorical name: “Ice Dome.” A stationary shield requiring four Red rays, six Green rays, and six Blue rays to cast. Not to mention the upkeep: two Green rays for every three hours of operation.

“It works,” Ardi breathed. Relief loosened in him as he confirmed that the structure was sound and untouched by the Paarlax Field.

Testing his new creation on the practice grounds at the Stables was one thing. Testing it under actual conditions was something else entirely. And yes, it was fair to say Ardan had overdone it. The thing had turned out too cumbersome and too ravenous, but experience had taught him that a few extra rays were cheaper than frayed nerves or blood.

The “Ice Dome” could stop any one of the following in a single instant: a military Blue spell up to the peak of the second triad; two light-artillery shots; or a volley from ten military rifles. More than enough breathing room for those sheltering within its protective boundary to get their bearings and begin to act.

And then there were the additions: woven illusions that showed an outside observer something altogether different from what was really happening beneath the dome, as well as the isolation and distortion of sound waves. These were not so much a whim of Ard’s as the first signs that his profession was beginning to warp his thinking.

He returned to the fire and this time sprawled out on his own sleeping bag instead of the grass. It smelled of smoke and the Alcade steppes.

Unfortunately, increasing a mage’s number of Stars did not make the rays within them regenerate any faster. The Stars continued to draw their rays back from the Paarlax Field at the same crawl: one ray every few hours. Granted, the exact rate varied from mage to mage, but the Mages’ Guild had never documented anyone capable of regenerating a single ray in a Star in less than ninety-seven minutes and forty-three seconds. That record, set by someone whose first or last name Ard couldn’t remember, remained unbroken to this day.

What did change with each newly lit Star was the amount of attention a mage had to devote to the process. From the Blue Star onward, that amount dropped to zero. The rays regenerated on their own, without any further mental effort or concentration.

For anyone unwilling to wait, household accumulators were readily available on the open market. There were variables here as well: the purity of the crystal, how well it had been worked and cut, and the accumulator’s initial capacity. If all of that was about average, though, the rate was roughly one ray every twelve minutes. If you paid an astronomical price for an accumulator of unimaginable quality, that interval fell to seven minutes or even six, though usually no one needed that kind of speed.

It was worth remembering that military mages accounted for no more than eleven percent of the mage population. The percentage varied by Star rank, of course; the higher the rank, the greater the share of military mages and, naturally, healers. Everyone else simply had no need to master a great many Stars for their profession. Professors at the Grand were the exception to that rule, since they were the Empire’s top specialists.

All of which meant that the overwhelming majority of mages simply had no reason to restore their rays any faster than the natural process of regeneration or household accumulators allowed.

For some time now, the pommel of Ard’s staff had been home to one such accumulator, a blue one. Ard opened his grimoire and checked his notes. It still held another twenty-seven rays.

True, by their very nature, household accumulators weren’t subject to the same restrictions as military ones. So if a mage felt like it, had no brains (which was odd enough in itself), and had a wallet bulging with banknotes, he could lug around kilograms’ worth of them.

It wouldn’t do much good, though: between the recharge rate of the accumulators themselves and the Saturation effect, there was only so fast a mage could refill his Stars. The latest scientific papers from researchers working in the field made it clear that it all came down to nervous-system overload and something else Ard didn’t understand.

At least, not yet.

But apparently, because of Driba and those same damned Tazidahian materials, he would have to figure it out.

So, cumbersome as the dome looked, it would barely dent the supply of rays in the household accumulator set into the staff’s pommel. The Red Star would recover on its own, while the Green Star, which he’d have to spend to sustain the dome, would recharge by tomorrow. If Ard, Sleeping Spirits forbid, did need to replenish his reserve, he’d use the military accumulators.

Overhead, an especially plump cloud shifted aside, making the moon wink at Ard as he lay on the ground. He smiled. It was probably only natural that the sight of the night sky had set him thinking about his own stars.

He was grateful no one could breach the boundary of the “Ice Dome.” That left him free to sleep peacefully beneath the open sky, with the view above him and the wind whistling freely across the steppe.

***

Ardan snatched up his staff and was on the verge of casting the quickened version of the “Ice Artillery Core” when he stopped himself just in time. Someone stood beside him, resting one shoulder against the stagecoach wheel and sipping fresh milk from a tiny flask. It was none other than Poplar.

He was half ordinary forest cat and half Vila. He walked upright, could speak, and of course could create unseen paths that carried him incredible distances in an instant. That was his inheritance as a Fae half-blood.

Curiously, the Fae could produce offspring with animals, but not with Firstborns or humans. This had given rise to some quasi-scientific speculation, but that was beside the point for now.

As always, Poplar was in military uniform, with a rapier at his hip, tall boots, and tin medals on his chest. He stared at Ard without blinking.

“Mr. Ard,” he said, giving him a courtly bow.

“Mr. Poplar,” Ard replied, then looked toward the pebble nearest him. The stationary shield was still in place. Poplar had simply ignored the protective Star Magic altogether.

Fae...

“You’ve traveled a long way this time.” Poplar looked around, then stepped away from the wheel and came over to Ard.

He removed one glove and held out his little right paw. Ardi gave it a light squeeze.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for a chance to catch you,” Poplar added.

Even the Fae were subject to certain limitations. Poplar, for example, couldn’t open his path to an object in motion. It was a bit like Star Magic: you couldn’t cast it while you were inside something that was moving.

Poplar screwed the cap back onto his flask. Ard had always marveled at Poplar’s ability to use his paws like human hands. Then Poplar drew a letter from the inner pocket of his uniform, and it nearly covered his entire little chest.

“I’m glad you’ve finally rid yourself of the Princess’s mark,” Poplar remarked, glancing at Ard’s wrist, where a mark shaped like Allane’Eari’s lips had been visible until quite recently.

“Yes... I suppose I am too...” Ardan replied, not sounding entirely sure as he felt the ring on his ring finger.

“Mr. Ard, one thing in our legends has always amazed me: how easily Aror made friends among my mother’s people,” Poplar said suddenly. “I don’t know what you did to make the Princess of the Cold Summer Night relinquish her claim on you, much less persuade her to forge such powerful protection against the Fae for you, but perhaps I don’t want to know. In any case, I am once again ready to honor our agreement. And if you have a reply, I’ll deliver it at once.”

Ardan pulled his focus away from the ring on his finger. For some reason, thoughts of the Princess of Winter, born in the midst of Summer, always stirred a touch of sadness in him.

“Yes, Mr. Poplar.” Ardan reached for the bag he was using as a pillow and pulled out an envelope for Anastasia.

“Thank you.” Poplar bowed again and took the letter. He looked at Ard, twitched his long whiskers ever so slightly, and said tersely, “I’m glad to see you in good health, Mr. Ard.”

Then he clicked his heels and vanished. Exactly the way a spot of reflected sunlight vanishes beneath a sudden shadow. One moment he was there; the next, he wasn’t. Poplar didn’t give a damn about the “Ice Dome” or the defenses of the Palace of the Kings of the Past, which were monstrous in both scale and appetite. If anyone gave Poplar their blood of their own free will, he would find them anywhere and cut a path through anything.

The Fae were like that, the very essence of their world’s magic. Or rather, not magic but enchantment. Magic, after all, was a science, capable of explaining if not everything, then a great deal. But enchantment... Enchantment, like the Fae themselves, remained pure fairy tale.

Ardi shook his head glumly and used his father’s knife to cut through the wax seal.

“Dear Ardi,

“I’m immeasurably pleased to call once again on the services of our shared postman, whose unfailing composure and fondness for milk from farmhouse cellars still inspire in me equal measures of admiration and mild envy. Poplar delivered your latest message, now six months old, at the very moment I was finishing a paragraph on the differentiation of Ley-flows in the cortical structures of the frontal lobe, and, I confess, the transition from neuromagical terminology to your warm, spare prose proved a kind of contrast bath for my mind, the sort whose benefits my attending healer never tires of extolling.

“I still regret spending so shamefully little time with you both at your wedding to Tess. Atura and Davenport quite literally dragged me out of the hall before I could hug you both at least ten more times. I hope that next time, if the chance presents itself, the palace watchdogs will prove less nimble and I’ll manage to hide from them behind your magnificent friends’ backs.

“Of all the events of the past few weeks, the most noteworthy was my latest defeat in the battle with Mother. The Empress Consort was leaving for the Broad Peninsula to attend the opening of a new naval hospital, and with considerable persistence and a touch of diplomatic cunning, I tried to secure permission to accompany her on the trip. My motives were, of course, entirely educational: as far as I know, the hospital is equipped with the latest Ley-equipment for regenerative therapy, and its chief healer published a monograph last quarter on the use of Blue magic in surgery for wounds involving body cavities. I read it twice. My request was denied. Quickly, politely, and with the sort of unyielding resolve the palace masks with smiles and phrases like “perhaps next time, Your Imperial Highness.”

“Naturally, I immediately made a scene.

“I’m not proud of it, but neither am I ashamed, because I believe someone who is fourteen, even if saddled with a title, has every right to act her age at least once in a while. The scene, however, made not the slightest impression on anyone. The ladies-in-waiting went right on embroidering, the chamberlain never stopped drawing up tomorrow’s schedule, not even for a second, and the head of the palace guard, General-Lord Shchukin, stood at the doors to my chambers wearing the expression of a man watching a thunderstorm through the window of a warm room.

“So, about a quarter of an hour later, I found myself back in the Library, poring over books on Star Magic, in the company of the one creature who truly cared about my mood: the Library cat, Feofan, whose gift for purring has, I am convinced, healing properties science has yet to describe.

“Just don’t tell Poplar.

“He and Feofan are feuding.

“Senior Magister Urnosov hasn’t been very pleased with my progress these past few months, though he believes the issue is not a lack of ability but an excess of diligence. He thinks I’m pushing myself too hard, and there may be some truth in that, though I don’t like admitting it.”

Ardan looked up from the letter for a moment and regarded the campfire’s dying embers. Urnosov. Yes, he and Ard had never managed to get along and probably never would, but that didn’t make the Senior Magister a bad man. Quite the opposite. From the few mentions of her mentor in Anastasia’s letters, Ard had formed the impression that Urnosov genuinely cared for his student, though he expressed that care with all the warmth of a granite boulder.

Ard went back to the letter.

“At court, as usual, nothing happens and everything happens at once. Last week, Baron Strigel, chamberlain of the east-wing apartments, arrived at the morning reception wearing two different shoes and remained oblivious until lunch, when Countess Malitskaya, whose tongue is every bit as sharp as a rifle bayonet, pointed them out to everyone present. The baron went crimson, spilled soup on the Confederation ambassador’s vest, and was escorted from the hall on the pretext of a ‘sudden indisposition.’

“Countess Malitskaya received a stern reprimand and a bouquet of peonies from Mother. In the language of palace diplomacy, that translates as... I refuse to remember exactly what that means.

“And the day before yesterday, Lord Kestrel, my father’s adjutant, fell asleep right in the middle of a report on the status of the Transportation Reform in the capital of Foothill Province. He fell asleep standing up, no less, with a pointer in his hand, its tip aimed at the map. They say Father didn’t wake him. He simply carried on with the meeting, occasionally using Kestrel’s motionless arm, pointer and all, as an additional reference point on the map. When Kestrel awoke, the meeting was already over, and he never found out that he’d slept for an hour and a half in the presence of His Imperial Majesty. Naturally, no one told him.

“Despite his youth, Kestrel commands tremendous respect at the Palace, and everyone knows that he works tirelessly to bring my father’s ideas and those of his coalition to life.

“I watch it all from the fortress of my library, and at times I feel like a spectator at a play in which all the actors play their parts with the utmost seriousness, never suspecting that the sets are made of cardboard and the audience has long since gone home.

“I don’t like courtiers, Ardi.

“It isn’t because they’re bad people; some of them are perfectly decent. It’s because the air around them always smells of something false. Like the silk flowers standing in vases on every table in the palace. Beautiful, flawless, and utterly dead.

“And finally, there’s the thing that weighs on me most, the thing I must write about, though I know you’ll frown when you read these lines.

“I understand, Ardi, why you oppose my friendship with Erti. I understand that you’re protecting him, just as you always have, and that your caution is born not of cruelty but of love.

“And you probably think you’re protecting me, too.

“But please, Ardi. Please soften your heart. Don’t take away this little piece of sunlight I have in this dark cage of a palace. Erti writes to me about simple things: his walks, the things Kena makes out of clay, the car Kelly broke again and then fixed again. And every one of his letters, Ardi, every one, is a window onto a world where people live as their own hearts tell them to, not as loathsome protocol dictates. I need it. I need it the way I need air or light, and I promise you, I swear by everything I hold sacred, that I’ll be careful.

“Sending you a hug, my dear friend.

“A tight hug, though you’re far away and my arms are too short and the distance too long.

“Write to me soon.

“I miss you and Tess, and I hope the next year and a half flies by. Very soon I’ll be able to take the entrance exam for the Imperial Magical University, and then we’ll see each other so often that you’ll be the first to beg for a break.

“I treasure our friendship, Ardi. And I love you as if we’d been born brother and sister. Maybe that’s exactly what we are, because I’ve never had friends or brothers or sisters and, I confess, I still don’t really understand the difference between them. But perhaps there is no difference.

“Maybe they’re all just different words for the same feeling.

“Your loyal and dependable friend,

“Anastasia.”

Ardan folded the letter and sat silent for a long time, watching the coals. By now they had almost gone out again beneath a veil of ash as white and light as the first snow. Then he slipped the envelope into his jacket’s inner pocket, close to his heart, beside the unfinished letter to Tess, and lay back down on his sleeping bag.

A sky full of stars stretched above him, and if the cloud people in Aror’s tale were to be believed, each star had its own name and its own voice.

If it were only a matter of friendship. If Anastasia and Erti had simply become friends, everything would be fine. But Ardi heard their hearts, saw their eyes, and caught their scents. And the feeling that bound his younger brother to the heir to the Empire’s throne didn’t quite fit that word.

“Thoughts for tomorrow,” Ardi reminded himself.

Perhaps his view of the matter really had been too harsh and one-sided.

Ardan closed his eyes and made up his mind: tomorrow, he would write not one letter but two. Too bad he didn’t know how to express his thoughts with the same grace and flourish as his distant friend, who lived in the Palace of the Kings of the Past.

***

The caravan stopped dead. That day, the stagecoach carrying Taisia and Ard rode near the back of the procession, just ahead of the five hunters on rear guard, so the news reached them last.

Or rather, it galloped to them.

Senior Magister Chaz Nalensky rode up on a big horse, pale-faced, and offered nothing reassuring:

“They’re asking for you, Captain Skofsky. We’ve got problems.”

Ardan didn’t even bother with his “favorite” curse.

What was the point?