“Who are you? Where am I? What do you want with me?”
“Three very good questions.” The voice remained even and calm. “You will have the opportunity to earn the answers to them.”
“Answer one now. I made a fire. That’s what you wanted me to do, wasn’t it?”
“No.” Another spell sped through the room and Kerrigan recognized it instantly. It was the first spell taught to every apprentice. It was the spell they learned before they learned how to make fire.
His fire went out.
“No, no! Not fair. I did what you wanted.”
“Listen, Kerrigan Reese. Very little in life is fair. You were born with vast potential for working magick. The world needs you, but you have been held apart from it. And because of your distance, you could easily do more damage than help. This must be determined.”
Something hit Kerrigan in the back. It was soft and slid down against his buttocks. He couldn’t see it, but it felt like a blanket.
“You now have some idea how desperate a man can be to create a fire when he is cold. Imagine those were not stones, but were raindrops or snowflakes. Imagine that the cold in your limbs made your hands numb. Imagine that huddled in the darkness was your family. Your wife, hungry and cold, your children terrified. The baby probably already dead. When you saw that spark, hope would soar. When it died, hope would die, and you would know your family was going to die along with it,
“You, Kerrigan Reese, might be that spark. If you don’t understand how important you are, you will be far too dangerous to be allowed to live.” The voice did not rise on that point, making it less a threat than a simple fact. “Think on what I have said. Cast no magick or you will be punished.”
“But I’m bleeding.”
“And how would one who has no magick deal with that, Adept?” The voice grew distant. “Remember first you are a man and then, perhaps, you will be able to save mankind.”
21
Will snarled and cursed as he kicked his way through brown slush. He didn’t care if it splashed up on him—his anger insulated him from the cold. As for the state it left his clothes in, he didn’t care about that, either. The clothes, titles, all that stuff was stupid and he hated it.
He spun around and looked back at the palace. The tops of the towers already hid beneath fluffy white blankets of falling snow. It looked very peaceful, which was ridiculous given who was in there at the moment. And the guards, all of them, should have been rushing to the palace to kill the sullanciri. That much seemed blatantly obvious to Will, but everyone else seemed to think a flag of truce meant something.
It means you’re missing a chance to kill Nefrai-kesh, that’s what it means.
Growing up in the Dimandowns wasn’t easy, but at least he’d learned some hard lessons. The slums of Yslin were a place where truces lasted for as long as it took someone to get more people on his side. If Nefrai-kesh had shown up there the way he showed up in Meredo, he’d have been ripped apart. And, given what he was, even if they hadn’t killed him, they certainly wouldn’t have believed anything he had to say.
Will turned his back on the palace and continued trudging through the snow. The way nobility acted never ceased to surprise him. On one hand you had folks like King Augustus, who were good and noble most of the time, but who admitted they didn’t act well toward a friend. On the other hand you had Scrainwood, for whom Will actually would take a bucket of warm piss in exchange. And in between you had folks who could be greedy and grubby, or who would tell you whatever they thought you wanted to hear, or just had folks who had no idea what life was like in the world of the streets. They all seemed stupid.
He frowned because he didn’t want to classify Princess Alexia as a noble in that regard. She really was different, but even she hadn’t done anything about Nefrai-kesh. He did allow as how she didn’t have a magick sword with her to kill him—Resolute had one, but he wasn’t there. And Crow’s sword, Tsamoc, now resided in the princess’ room, where it was no help. Still and all, he was pretty sure she had to have seen the stupidity of leaving Nefrai-kesh alive.
A shiver ran down his spine. He really had been ready to shove his little dagger into the thing that had been his grandfather, but that hadn’t scared the sullanciri. He’d just opened his arms and said that Will could come to him. Nefrai-kesh had said that Will would be his heir.
“I don’t want to be your heir.” Will snarled loudly and stamped his feet. “It’s because of you I’m in this mess!”
The absurdity of his complaint struck Will and made him laugh for a moment. He looked up, seeing if anyone else thought things were as silly as he did; but what he saw surprised him because most folks were completely ignoring him. They just paid him no mind, and that astonished him because even walking to the palace to attend the trial he had constantly been subjected to profuse wishes of good will by folks he didn’t even know.
But now, now everyone treats me as if I don’t exist! He wondered at that for a moment, then his jaw dropped open. Of course, the mask! The mask he’d left lying in the court had been the thing people recognized. Oriosans could read masks as easily as Will could calculate the worth of a purse by how it bulged. He might be Will Norrington, but Lord Norrington wore a specific mask and without it he was nothing.
He mulled over the irony that meant not wearing a disguise made him invisible, but realized it was just a reversal of the sort of misdirection he and his companions had used when cutting purses in Yslin. Working a crowd, he’d find a target. At a signal two of his confederates would start a fight, jostling people, including the target. As they bumped into him, Will would clip his purse and slip away quietly. All the attention had been drawn to the fighting kids and since no one was watching him, he got away cleanly.
Here the lack of a mask meant that you were beneath notice or, if not that, certainly below the interest of those who could wear masks. Will knew enough of history to know that Muroso, Alosa, and Oriosa had, at one time, been provinces that rebelled against an empire. The rebels had worn masks to disguise themselves as they fought against the empire, and when they won independence, those who had fought for it became the new nobility. To them and their descendants went the right to wear a mask, and the decorations on their masks marked their importance.
Because of the masks, the Oriosans constantly seemed to be looking for symbols and significance in things. Will was certain that tugging off his mask and throwing it on the floor would be seen as having all sorts of portents and meaning, while he’d just done it because he wanted to throw something and wasn’t going to throw the dagger, which he liked.
He shook his head, imagining them thinking it was a rejection of his citizenship. Since the masks of the dead were often kept by the family, tossing it toward Nefrai-kesh could be taken as a sign that he was saying that the sullanciri should just consider him dead. Or it could be taken as a gesture of his rejecting the niceties of the court and vowing to wage his own war against Chytrine.
There were many more things, and he assumed that gossip mills would be grinding away long hours making them up. He didn’t like the idea that some folks would think he was walking away from the war with Chytrine. That would probably be the darkest of the omens read in what he had done. There had to be a way to put that to rights, but exactly how to do it, he wasn’t certain.
More symbols, and the Oriosans will believe in me again. They all do things with reasons, and as long as I have a good one, they’ll believe me. Will sighed. He knew he’d have to figure things out. He’d have liked to talk to Kerrigan about it, since the mage’s perspective on things was even weirder than that of the average Oriosan. Kerrigan, however, had gone missing, and Lombo was out hunting him. The Vilwanese consulate had reported back to Princess Alexia that they didn’t know where he was, and their courier sounded nervous enough that Will believed the Vilwanese didn’t have him.