"You’ve been hiding all day?"
"Sleeping in a warded room. I can’t hide the focus completely, since it’s too powerful a thing, but wards make it difficult to track. Presuming my Wicked Uncle is even bothering to try."
"So you’re safe until you leave this room?"
"No ward is guaranteed safety." Rennyn turned the focus over in her lap, the chain clinking softly. "They just make attacks and divinations harder. There is no ward which cannot be overcome, no spell which cannot be countered, no defence which can’t be breached. Strength can be overcome by imagination. Imagination can be defeated by strength."
"Still giving lessons?"
"Still–"
"What in the Hells is that?!"
Power. Power of the kind Kendall had only felt at the dome around Falk, monumental, beyond the scale of people. Rennyn stood up, obviously startled, and took a step to the window.
"Is it the Black Queen come early?"
"No." Rennyn was gazing out over the city, searching. "My Wicked Uncle is making his move. Strength and imagination combined."
"I thought he was supposed to be weak!" Kendall protested, as Rennyn started drawing power of her own.
"Was." A shield began to shimmer around Rennyn, but she looked more resigned than alarmed.
"It’s coming!" Kendall gasped, as the bloom of power roared into something larger. Far away, all the way down by the river, a wave was flowing toward them.
"Sit down."
"What?"
Rennyn reached out and put a hand on Kendall’s shoulder, pressing until she sat down on the bed. And then the power reached them and everything went black.
"Wake up."
A man’s voice. As Kendall fought her way through groggy layers of darkness, a cold finger moved away from her temple. Upside-down. She was hanging upside-down. Someone was carrying her over their shoulder.
She stiffened, lifting her head, then tried to go limp again. Whoever was carrying her didn’t slow down, but a man laughed, and then a hand gripped Kendall painfully by the hair and lifted her head.
"Little fledgling mage," the person said, in a pleased, purring voice. "Have you by chance seen my nephew?"
"Wha–?" Kendall managed.
"What kind of answer is that?" the man chided, letting go. "Well, the question will keep. Hold her there."
Kendall was upended, her arms trapped behind her back, but this gave her a better look at the room she’d been carried into. The Hall of Summoning. There were bodies scattered on the black and white floor. Sentene mages, Hand members, palace guards with their swords and pistols fallen from their hands. Unable to hold back a gasp of dismay, Kendall jerked forward, but the person who had been carrying her didn’t move an inch, and her arms twisted painfully. Kendall looked back.
"Sukata."
The Kellian girl didn’t react, wasn’t even looking at her. Her face was impassive in a way that made Kendall realise that Kellian really were far more expressive than she’d given them credit for. This girl, this thing with Sukata’s face and eyes of glass, was no more a person than a doll.
The only people upright were a handful of Kellian, Kendall, and a man with black hair and black eyes, dressed very finely in dark blue. He had more angles to his face, was better looking, but was, no matter what Rennyn had said, very much like Sebastian Claire. There was a weird shimmer in the air above him, a hint of violet light. Hanging from his wrist was the Black Queen’s focus.
They had lost. The shock of it made Kendall dizzy. This was the Black Queen’s demon son. He had the only thing which could stop her return. Rennyn had lost.
"Put her over there."
Kendall twisted in Sukata’s hold as Sukata’s mother moved forward from the Hall’s entrance and lowered a still figure to the floor at one edge of the central black square. Rennyn. She lay without moving, her hair making black swirls on the marble.
"Is she dead?"
"No more than you are, fledgling." The demon prince walked over to stand above Rennyn and nudged her with one foot. With a sharp sideways glance he said: "Put one of the restraints on her, then clean this place up."
Captain Illuma, eyes as empty as her daughter’s, drew something out of a black bag. A barbed and twisting thing, like a mix between a bramble and a worm. She dropped it on the back of Rennyn’s hand, where it writhed for a moment, then slid around her wrist. Rennyn twitched as the spiked bracelet pierced her skin, sighed, but then lay still again.
Asleep. She was just asleep as Kendall had been. Perhaps they all were. There was no sign of any injuries, no blood. Everyone had just fallen to the ground in a scatter of swords and slates.
"Wake up!" Kendall yelled immediately, careless of consequences. "Wake up! Wake up!"
The demon prince laughed. "Noisy fledgling. Would you like me to give you a reason to scream? It wouldn’t stir them."
"Don’t talk to me, monster!" Kendall cried, caught between panic and fury. "You’re a horror! You’re a wrong thing! Just – go away!"
The demon only looked entertained. "Spirit, if a little lacking in common sense," he said. He seemed an oddly smiling and cheerful sort for a monster, though there was a taste to his words she didn’t like. "Now, what was it I wanted – oh, yes, my distant nephew. Tell me, fledgling, where is he?"
"Why would I know that?"
"Don’t be obtuse. That was his bed you were lying on. You were with his sister. My little cousin’s best little friend, isn’t that so?"
How did he know? But the last question had not been addressed to Kendall. She felt the faintest movement behind her. Sukata had nodded. The demon prince smiled, cheerfully smug.
"I don’t know," Kendall spat, grateful for ignorance. "She sent him away, somewhere safe, somewhere only she knows. Somewhere monsters like you can’t get him."
"How lacking in confidence. Really, I overestimated her. What a disappointment she must be to you."
This was unanswerable, and Kendall made a searching study of Rennyn’s still body. It could be possible to wake her. Would she be able to do it?
More Kellian began arriving then, carrying people. Kendall’s eyes widened at the sight of Captain Faille with Princess Sera across an arm and Prince Justin over his shoulder. He put them both down to Kendall’s right, where Captain Illuma had been clearing away unconscious Sentene. Another Kellian set a woman down beside them, one who resembled Sera enough for Kendall to guess that this was Tyrland’s Queen.
As the demon prince walked over to inspect the new arrivals, Kendall twisted experimentally in Sukata’s hold, but the Kellian girl was far too strong and not the least inattentive. Kendall didn’t bother to try appealing to Sukata, to try and break her free of the control. There was no feel of the person she knew in this silent creature holding her, and definitely no sense that any words would reach her. Talking to a wall would achieve as much.
While the demon son of the Black Queen bent over Princess Sera, Kendall decided the only thing left to her was Thought magic. Pebble skipping. It was useless for attacking or escaping, but she figured that she could try and pull that horrid spiky thing from Rennyn’s wrist. Even if it didn’t come off, the movement might wake her.
Taking a deep breath, Kendall focused, determined to pull as strongly as possible. And Rennyn’s wrist moved. Not much, as if someone had plucked at the skin. That was it. Totally, utterly, completely useless.
The demon prince just laughed again, not the leastways bothered. "You don’t listen well," he said. "Watch."