“The heart of the Wheel is hard to endure, even for a wrong-mage. The lady has been weakened of late. She has lost too many reflections to wait in Osheim without great risk. She would only run there if no other alternative presented—or at the end of things when little time remains to the world.
“While we knock on her wall her attention is kept here, her strength employed to maintain her defences. You will have to find and destroy her exit in Osheim. That will be the time to fracture her barricades—when she has nowhere to run. No bolthole. That is when we shall hold her to account.” The Red Queen’s jaw tightened as if she imagined that moment. “When you do it my sister will know, and we will act.”
“You haven’t seen Osheim—it’s huge—how can I hope to find one mirror?” As if turning off the Wheel’s engine wasn’t impossible enough, now I had a needle to find in a haystack five miles wide.
“It will be at the heart of things. You’ll find it.”
Having failed to give Grandmother the key, failed to get her to send someone else, and failed to have her send an army to protect me I only had one place left to run. “What if she’s right?” I summoned up Kara’s arguments. “If we’re all lost anyway, what does it matter if the world burns today or tomorrow? Why shouldn’t the strongest, the cleverest, save themselves if they can save no one else? Have you considered joining her?” I let the “and saving me” go unsaid.
The slap didn’t come as much of a surprise. Not even the force of it, which sent me to the ground clutching my face.
“We’re Kendeths, Jalan!” She loomed over me. “We fight. We fight when hope is gone. We fight while there’s blood left in us.” She dragged me to my feet as if I were a child rather than a man topping six foot. “We fight.” Her eyes fixed on mine, hard as flint. “That woman killed my grandfather. She spilled his lifeblood in my house. She tried to kill me and in defending me my brother and sister were changed . . . twisted into what they are now.” She lowered her voice, the anger fading, her grip on me still iron. “That woman has lived too long and she’ll sacrifice the tomorrows of a million to live herself lifetimes more. Yes, I want to save my city, my country, my people, and yes it’s worth my life, and yours to give them another year, or month, or day. But truly? In my secret heart, Jalan? What drives me is that I will not let that bitch win. She has raised her hand against me and mine. She will die by my own hands. There’s no life everlasting for that one. No new world. This is a war, boy. My war. I am the Red Queen—and I do not lose.”
She let me go and I sagged back on to my heels. I’d known what she would say. I’d known she was right too. Or at least more right than the Lady Blue. Old habits die hard, though, and I had to at least try every escape route.
“If I see her in Osheim I’ll kill her with the sword that killed my mother.” I had my own revenge to take, my own fire, and my own measure of the Red Queen’s blood.
“See that you do.” A rare smile on Grandmother’s lips.
I sighed and tightened my cloak about me. “Lucky I set off for Osheim with the key then. Or none of this would have worked.”
Grandmother turned her head, looking past me. I turned too and followed her gaze. The Silent Sister had been standing at my back, uncomfortably close. She met my glance with her strange stare, one eye blind white and full of mysteries, the other dark as any hole. “Luck? We save luck for the endgame,” the Red Queen said. “You’re going to need every scrap of it for the Wheel. Nobody sees into that future, not a glimpse.”
“I guess . . . I’ll be going then.” Bad as Osheim sounded I really didn’t want to stand there between those two terrifying old women a moment longer. “And if . . . if it all works? What then?”
Grandmother made another of her rare smiles, as grim as the first. “The world will keep on turning. This ending will have been averted, or more likely delayed. The Gilden Guard will arrive within the month to take me to Congression and the Hundred will repeat the same arguments that have rumbled on since my grandfather’s day. Perhaps this time we really will elect a new emperor and mend this broken empire of ours.”
It took a moment to realize that the dry hissing beside me was the Silent Sister’s laughter. I took it as my cue to leave.
Snorri and Kara were waiting for me with the horses by the largest of several supply dumps. The boy was nowhere to be seen. I envied his freedom to wander away.
“We’re going?” Snorri raised his voice over the din all around us. Red March soldiers laboured in ant-like chains under the direction of roaring store-masters to break up and distribute the heaped stocks of food and equipment.
I nodded. “Meet me on the main road, up by the big church. I just need a moment.”
“What?” Snorri cupped a hand to his ear but Kara was already pushing him away, her palm against his chest.
She looked back at me over her shoulder. “Don’t run off now!”
I didn’t reply but walked away wondering, and not for the first time, whether she could read my mind.
I wandered the ruins without direction, though remaining within the defensive perimeter. I’d no desire to explain myself to a vengeful Slovian mob. Grandmother had a strong position with a large number of seasoned troops but to hold this ground until I reached the Wheel of Osheim and sealed off the Lady Blue’s last escape would require tactical genius, not to mention all kinds of luck. Her only real hope was that King Lujan would mistake her purpose and hold his strength up at Julana thinking her to be readying an assault against his capital.
I ducked into the roofless shell of a building to get out of the fine rain, blown on a cold autumn wind in such a way that it coats your face and fills your eyes. Standing beneath the arch of the entrance I pondered my options and discovered them to be limited. Somehow I’d found myself headed for the north once more, still bound to the Viking, and by chains I understood no better than the first time. I’d almost been dragged into Hell by the singular force of Snorri’s good opinion of me, though it had taken the force of his arm to get me in there in the end. Now, somehow, the good opinions of many people—from the queen of Red March to that of a heathen child—were driving me into a hell on earth. Quite how so many people had sunk their hooks beneath my armour I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I didn’t like it one bit. The Jalan who had jumped from Lisa DeVeer’s balcony would have run and kept on running. Had a single year truly wrought that much change upon me?
Something drew my gaze into the sooty interior of the house. It had been a grand affair once. I started to identify objects among the clutter of black on black. The shattered bust of some family saint or elder, the jagged hulls of broken vases. I peered more closely—a sword broken into pieces as if it too had been ceramic. I moved the fragments with my boot, noting the bright edges. Stepping forward and leaning down for a better look, I saw that even the surviving pieces of wood, fallen roof timbers, flameblackened and acrid in the rain, were jagged-edged as if they also had shattered, the breaks ignoring the grain. I stood up, making a slow rotation. Everything around me lay in sharp-edged pieces beneath its black coating, as if the whole room had splintered like glass beneath a single blow.
A framed picture leaned against the wall by the door arch through which I’d entered. The only whole thing in the place. I walked to it, reaching a finger to wipe a clean spot. The soot fell away the instant my fingertip made contact. Not just a patch beneath my touch, but every part of it, flowing down like a piece of black silk sliding from a polished table. And beneath it . . . a man’s face, but not a portrait, my own, staring back at me in surprise from the smooth and unblemished surface of a large mirror.
“Hello, Jalan.” I said it. I saw my lips move around the words. But it wasn’t my voice.