She fell asleep and woke a few hours later. The room was dark, the new logs having burned low, and everything outside the covers felt chilled.
It was Mercy who had woken her. She was kicking and twisting in the covers, her eyes still closed. She wrestled, her arms twitching, her eyes darting fretfully under her lids. From her mouth came fearful utterances like the cries of terror from one gagged.
“What’s wrong with her?” Allie asked with a sleepy face and matted hair.
“Bad dream, I suspect.” Modina took hold of Mercy’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Mercy?” she said. “Mercy, wake up.”
The little girl kicked once more, then lay still. Her eyes fluttered open and then shifted left and right nervously.
“It’s okay. It was just a bad dream.” Mercy clutched at Modina, shaking. “It’s all right, everything is okay now.”
“No,” the little girl replied with a hitching voice. “It’s not. I saw them. I saw the elves coming into the city. Nothing stopped them.”
Modina patted her head. “It was just a dream, a nightmare brought on because of what we were saying just before you fell asleep. I told you I won’t let them hurt us.”
“But you couldn’t stop them—no one could. The walls fell down and flying monsters burned the houses. I heard the men screaming in the fog. There was lightning, the ground broke, and the walls fell. They poured in riding white horses all dressed in gold and blue.”
“Gold and blue?” Modina asked.
She nodded.
Modina’s heart felt as if it skipped a beat. “Did you see the elves when you escaped the university?”
“No, just the flying monsters. They were really scary.”
“How did you know they dressed in gold and blue?”
“I saw them in my dream.”
“What else did you see? Which way did they come?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said they were on horses. Did they arrive here on horses or did they come by boat?”
“I don’t know. I just saw them on horses coming into the city.”
“Do you know which gate?”
She shook her head, looking more frightened as Modina quizzed her. The empress tried to calm down, tried to smile, but she could not. Instead, she stood up. The floor was cold, but she barely noticed. She paced, thinking.
It’s not possible for a child to see the future in a dream—is it? But that’s what the Patriarch said when he was quoting at the meeting. “They came on brilliant white horses, wearing shining gold and shimmering blue.” Still, that ancient account might not apply to these elves.
“Can you remember where you were when you saw them enter the gate?”
Mercy thought a moment. “We were on the wall out front of the courtyard, where Allie and I play with Mr. Rings.”
“Was it day or night?”
“Morning.”
“Could you see the sun?”
She shook her head and Modina sighed. If only she—
“It was cloudy,” Mercy told her.
“Could you tell which side the sea was on while looking at the gate?”
“Ah—this side, I think,” she said, taking her right hand out of the covers and shaking it for her.
“Are you sure?”
The girl nodded.
“You were looking at the southern gate,” Modina said.
“You two get back to sleep,” she told the girls, and left them staring as she rushed out of the bedroom, pulling on a robe. The guard outside spun around, startled.
“Wake up the chancellor and tell him I want to see that scout Entwistle right now. I will meet them in the chancellor’s office. Go.”
She closed the door and ran down the steps to the fourth floor without bothering to get dressed.
“You there!” She caught a guard yawning. He snapped to attention. “Get a light on in the chancellor’s office.”
By the time Nimbus and the scout arrived, she had the map of the kingdom of Warric off the shelf and spread out over the desk.
“What’s going on?” the chancellor asked.
“You are from the south, aren’t you, Nimbus?”
“I am from Vernes, Your Eminence.”
“That’s down here at the mouth of the Bernum?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know of any place south of Colnora to cross the Bernum River?”
“No, Your Eminence.”
She looked back at the map for a moment and the two men waited patiently. “So the elves can’t get at us from the west unless they have seaworthy ships, and they can’t approach us from the north because of the mountains?”
She looked up, this time at the scout.
“Yes, Your Eminence, we started an avalanche on the Glouston road and it won’t be clear until late spring. The bridges in Colnora were destroyed as well.”
“And they can’t come at us from the east or the south because of the Bernum. What about the Rilan Valley? Can’t they get through there?”
“No, the snow is too deep in the fields. An elf might be able to walk over it with proper shoes, but he won’t be able to bring horses or wagons. And even if they did, they would still have to cross the Farendel Durat, and those passes are closed.”
She looked again at the map, studying the little lines on it.