He pulled her head back, pinched her nostrils, began giving her his own breath as Karl had begun to do moments, or ages, before. In. .. out… turning to watch the rise and fall of her chest…
… and then, suddenly, she coughed, gulped air, and started to choke.
He rolled her over on her side just as she spewed watery, yellowish, foul-smelling liquid across the bottom of the gondola. Karl scrambled back further to avoid it; Anton ignored it, but rolled her onto her back again… and was rewarded with her eyes opening. She blinked at him. “Anton?” she asked. “Are we safely away from the manor?” And then she frowned. “No… that was a long time ago… I…” She closed her eyes. “I’m confused,” she mumbled, and then she slept, but now her breathing was normal and her color was good, and Anton leaned back from her with relief.
Karl seemed to be slowly coming around, as well. “What… what happened?” he said. “Brenna… I tried to help her breathe, and then… light…” He shook his head. “I don’t…” And then his eyes widened. “Or…” He scrambled up, looked behind them at the fading yellow glow of New Cabora. “We have to go back.”
Anton gaped at him. “Are you crazy? They tried to kill you!”
“ Falk tried to kill us,” Karl said. “Falk’s dead. You shot him yourself.”
“Mother Northwind isn’t,” Anton said.
Karl shook his head. “Mother Northwind has no use for us anymore,” he said. “What she wanted us to do, we just did.”
It was Anton’s turn to stare. “You mean… that was the Keys? The King died, the Keys came to Brenna, and you…?”
“Do you have any other explanation?” Karl demanded.
Anton barked a laugh. “I didn’t even believe in magic two weeks ago. Of course I don’t have an explanation.”
“Take us back,” Karl insisted again. “We don’t have to land if there’s danger. They can’t do anything to us up here, even with magic, not while I’m aboard… take us back. We have to know.”
Anton glanced at Brenna. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go back.” He returned to the wheel, untied it, and spun it to bring the lumbering airship slowly around to head east again. He killed the engine, so they once more drifted with the wind. “Running short on fuel,” he explained. “And better for sneaking up on things.”
He aimed the airship’s prow toward the yellow glow of New Cabora. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Mother Northwind, holding onto life with all of her dwindling strength as the guards above her called for a Healer, did not see the blue flash that signaled the death of the King. But moments later, as the Keys attempted to transfer to the Heir, only to encounter the magic-killing force of the Magebane, she felt the surge of magic all around her as the intricate web of power built by the long-gone architects of Evrenfels was ripped apart.
Magic poured out of the guards, the MageLords in the Palace, the Mageborn in the enclave within the Barrier and the gated neighborhoods in New Cabora, in the Colleges in Berriton, in towns and villages all over the Kingdom. Mother Northwind could feel that magic rushing toward Brenna, as the Keys, as they had been designed to do, reached out for all the available power, attempting to accomplish a task suddenly made impossible.
A guard had been kneeling over her, holding a cloth to her shattered shoulder, trying to staunch the blood. He stiffened, gave an audible groan, and fell forward across her body, a heavy weight that made it even harder to breathe than it had been…
… but, she realized as she heard the clatter of armored Mageborn guards fainting throughout the Square, she wouldn’t need to breathe much longer.
She had always thought soft magic would survive the destruction of the Keys, and perhaps it would; she could still feel inside her the power she used to twist men’s minds into doing her will.
But Healing had always been intertwined with hard magic. Realigning bones, relieving pressure on nerves, excising tumors-all were exercises in the manipulation of matter and energy, just as the Lesser and Great Barrier were, however much smaller in scale.
And so, too, was the stopping of bleeding.
As she felt both her magic and her lifeblood pouring out of her, as a final, fading roar filled her ears, Mother Northwind’s last thought was for the Minik.
I wish I could be there when they discover the Wall of Tears is gone, she thought. I wish…
It was her last wish, and her last thought.
CHAPTER 33
Little rain trudged through the snow on unsteady feet. The wife of his brother Black Spruce had given birth to twin boys that day, and the celebration had gone on long into the night. His own wife would be worried about him, and he’d probably feel badly about that when he was sober. But for now he whistled the tune to the bawdy sea chantey Black Spruce’s Minik-na friend Thissen had brought back to the village from his recent trip to Wavehaven. He’d brought many other things with him in his fine new wagon, including some rich, strong Minik-na beer, which they had all enjoyed liberally and long.
It was a fine, moonlit night. Little Rain was only about halfway home, with still twenty minutes’ walk ahead of him, when it became urgently necessary for him to stop for a few minutes. He stepped off the path and faced east, toward the immovable fog of the Wall of Tears. He had just unbuttoned and begun to relieve himself when, between one blink and the next, the wall of fog that had stood unchanged for his entire life collapsed, rushing downward and vanishing into fading shreds that blew away eastward.
Though his people had long since settled in southernstyle houses and no longer moved from place to place as they once had, the valley he had been crossing had been a Minik winter campground for many centuries. And there, clear in the moonlight, not more than a mile away, he could see low round huts of the traditional kind, smoke rising from them into the clear, cold air.
He started forward, realized as cold stabbed at him that he had not buttoned himself, and sealed his clothing with trembling fingers as he stumbled forward through the snow, first walking, then trotting, then running.
And so it was that Little Rain became the first Minik to enter the Hidden Kingdom of Evrenfels in eight hundred years; and so it was that the Great Sundering of the Minik ended.
His wife eventually forgave him for not coming home at all that night.
In the streets of New Cabora, the fallen guards began to stir. Most of the Commoners knew nothing of what had happened; asleep in their beds or cowering in their houses if they were close to those neighborhoods Falk’s guards had swept through.
But other Commoners were abroad, agents of the Common Cause watching the guards and looking for an opportunity to strike at them. At the corner of Tanner Avenue and Palace View Road, a young guard named Tilden jerked awake and staggered to his feet even as two men rushed him from the shadows, bared blades gleaming. He flung up his hand to cast a spell that would solidify the air in front of them.. . and belatedly realized he didn’t know how.
Or rather, he remembered doing it, but now it seemed, somehow, impossible.
As did breathing a moment later, as one of the Commoner blades found his heart.
Most of the guards fared better. Bereft of magic though they quickly understood themselves to be, they still had armor, weapons, and horses. Rallying, they gathered their dead, Falk and Mother Northwind included, and galloped back to the gate.
Except there was no gate, and no need for one. The Lesser Barrier was gone. Already flowers were withering in the cold and ice forming on the edges of the lake that had not seen ice for eight hundred years. The Palace seethed like an overturned anthill, guards rushing out of it to defend it against any attack from the Commons, weeping Mageborn charging madly and uselessly about.