Tollan shook his head, then realized the street was too dark for Wince to see him. “None whatsoever,” he groaned, listening to the silence.
They passed slowly through a pool of light, and Tollan saw a glint of gold running across Wince’s knuckles. Wince only ever played with the ancient Vagan coin when he was truly nervous. He called it Uri’s Blessing, and he believed that the gold piece she’d given him as a girl still held some of the luck that she had wished on him.
“I think we’re going to have to retrace our steps,” Wince said. “I don’t see any other way to get back to some semblance of civilization.” The heavy, uneven clopping of the horse’s hooves on the cobblestone street was the only sound they heard until the sudden crystalline ping of a coin hitting the street.
“Oh, balls!” Wince stammered. He pulled the horse to a stop. “Prickling Void!”
Tollan heard Wince fumble in his pouch for a long moment, then he lit the nub of candle they’d salvaged from their race through the tunnels with Gemma.
“I have to find it,” he said. “It’s the only part of her I’m ever going to get to keep.” The panic and pain in Wince’s voice shook something loose within Tollan, something that he should have seen long ago. The coin, which Wince had always associated with Uri, had become his only connection to her, and the grief in his words wasn’t a friend’s grief. It was so much more.
“Of course,” Tollan replied. And it was suddenly as if he’d never really looked at Wince before. There was a distant wound there that would not heal—an injury he didn’t want to examine too closely. How could I have been so blind?
They scoured the street in search of the lucky coin to no avail. Wince had gone stonily silent, and Tollan tried desperately to ignore the tracks of wetness he saw running down Wince’s face. This wasn’t about a coin. This was about a girl who would never be coming back.
Goddess, what a mess I make of everything.
When they’d exhausted their search of the street, they started to look through the scrubby grass that surrounded the homes that lined it. Tollan continued to run his hand along the ground. More than once he encountered a thorny weed that left his hand stinging and itching, but the hunch of Wince’s shoulders and the trembling of his chin kept Tollan searching.
There was an alley between two buildings that was mostly bare of vegetation. As they moved into the narrow passage, Tollan prayed silently to Aegos for a small miracle. The path was full of refuse and the overwhelming smell of human waste.
Tollan was nearly overcome by the odor, but Wince seized a long piece of wood and began sweeping aside garbage in search of his talisman with a seemingly single-minded focus. Sighing, Tollan bent to look along the edge of the bedraggled wooden house, brushing aside the sparse foliage in search of the glitter of gold.
If he had not been bent over, nearly crawling on his hands and knees, he never would have found the coin. And if he hadn’t been on his knees in the alley looking for the coin, he’d never have seen the mage mark, burned into the rough shingle of the house. His breath was a trembling thing as he pointed it out to Wince.
“Thank Aegos,” Wince said, knees in the muck as he snatched up the coin. His damp eyes clung to it for a moment, and a small sound escaped his throat before he remembered himself. He shoved the coin into his pocket. “And thank you, Toll.”
Tollan nodded, afraid his voice might betray his guilt over Uri and his sudden realization that Wince could have been the true father of her child. If that were the case, he had failed both of his best friends. Desperate to change his train of thought, he gestured to the mage mark. “What the prick do you make of that?”
Wince’s fingers traced the charred edges of the symbol.
Tollan had also touched it and could feel the mage work tingling. The mark was working, though what it was made to do he couldn’t imagine. In all of his life in the palace, Tollan could almost count the number of marks he’d ever seen. To find one on a random dilapidated home in the middle of Shadowtown made no sense to him.
Wince stood. “Toll, I don’t think you should go home.”
Tollan watched as Wince shoved all of his emotions into his pocket along with the coin. His expression went blank, his voice no longer trembled. It was as if he had put on a mask to cover over his pain. “All of this feels …”—he ran his filthy hand over his face—“wrong isn’t a strong enough word. Maybe we should find a place to stay close to the ground for a few days, see how things play out? Maybe find a ship to take you to Far Coast? If something happened to you I’d probably hate myself for a month or two.” He winked.
What Wince said made logical sense, but his brother was at the palace in the clutches of a Vagan princess and four mage women. “I can’t abandon Iven,” he replied and sighed. Even as he said the words, he pictured his mother. She’d had no problem abandoning any of them. “But I think you’re right. Even if I could somehow make it into the palace without being killed by mage women, the guards won’t follow my commands. They think I killed my father. They’d probably just hang me.” Tollan had grown up a prince in a place ruled by men. Acknowledging that he’d lost access to that privilege was more difficult than he would have thought.
He sat still, thinking, whispering a quiet prayer to Aegos. When they had fled the Canticle Center, a priest had stood atop the base of a large stone statue preaching about Aegos’s loving, protective arms and the safety she provided for all who were faithful, but Tollan had his doubts. He didn’t believe that this night was being watched by Aegos the Merciful. This night reeked of blood and violence—the realm of Aegos the Victorious. The goddess, like most women, wore many faces, and tonight she prepared Yigris for war.
The Ain had been there, assembled in ranks, their red-and-gold armor glittering in the light of the flames. Tollan could picture the steel glinting in the hands of each of the two hundred men and women who made up the exclusive fighting force. It had been so long before Tollan was born that the Ain had last been sent out to defend Yigris that the soldiers had fallen into legend, but Tollan had seen them with his own eyes, just before he’d gone chasing after Gemma. Perhaps they were the answer to his problem. Perhaps they could get him into the palace and closer to his brother.
Just as quickly as the idea came to him, he remembered that the Ain’s loyalty lay with Gemma Antos and the Under. He would need her, if he were to gain access to the Ain, and getting her to listen to him might take a kind of diplomacy that he’d never been taught.
It had been a long time since he’d wished for his mother’s return from the sea, but now he fervently longed to see the mast of the Heart’s Desire rising above Dockside. If there was anyone who would know how to deal with this situation, it would be Queen Isbit.
As Tollan was dreaming of the miraculous return of his swashbuckling mother, Wince approached the building to the west, which nearly butted up against the marked one. Tollan heard him hiss, “Prick’s sake.”
Tollan approached. There, not three paces farther, was another mage mark. The same mark.
“Come on,” Wince growled.
It didn’t take them long to conclude that every building in the area bore the same mark. “Goddess!” Tollan hated the self-pity he heard in his own voice. “Are we looking at a whole army of mages?”
Wince took his elbow and guided him back toward the cart. “I won’t be party to you going back to the palace. Whatever we’d be walking into, it’s more than we’re prepared for. If you won’t leave Yigris, then we need to find a place to hide.”