CHAPTER
39

Aunn sat in the back corner of the Ruby Chalice, the hood of his purple cloak pulled down to shroud his face in shadow. It would have been so much easier to just put on an innocuous human face, round and flushed with drink, and blend right in with the rest of the evening crowd. The temptation was strong, but he fought it, clinging to his new sense of identity. Instead, he wore his true face but hid it in shadow and distance, staying on the fringes of the crowds.

Five days had passed since Gaven left Fairhaven—Aunn figured he was probably almost half way to Varna. Aunn had spent the time working with Mauren and Ossa to unravel the strands of Nara’s plot, but he took every chance he could to stop in the Ruby Chalice in hopes of seeing Cart and Ashara. It was the only place he could think of they might return to, if they were looking for him. He had tried a more active search for them, but after they created a significant buzz by walking arm in arm through the city, on the day Gaven had left, they seemed to have disappeared from public view. As far as he knew, Mauren was still ignorant of Ashara’s involvement in the Dragon Forge, but he wasn’t sure how long that could possibly last.

Aunn had led the Sentinel Marshal to the basement of the old cathedral, where they found Kelas’s office ransacked, stripped bare of any clue to what he was involved in. Aunn suspected that either Janna Tolden had taken everything with her, or Nara had sent Vec to do the job. Since then, Mauren had arrested Kharos Olan and Bromas ir’Lain, two of Kelas’s co-conspirators. Their involvement in the scheme had been almost exclusively financial, though, and they didn’t have much additional information to offer. Janna Tolden and the half-orc from Droaam remained at large, to Aunn’s and Mauren’s increasing frustration.

Vec proved to be a tricky quarry. An individual changeling was almost impossible to track down, of course. The fact that he was an agent of the Royal Eyes made the situation much more complicated. In theory, the Royal Eyes should have cooperated with a Sentinel Marshal trying to prevent the assassination of the queen. In practice, Mauren had met nothing but resistance. She and Ossa were at the Tower of Eyes now, still trying to arrange an interview with Thuel, but Aunn didn’t expect a breakthrough after five days of stalling and posturing.

He sighed and swirled the wine in his glass, watching the light from the candle on his table filter through the golden liquid. It reminded him of the Eye of Siberys, which sent his thoughts back over all the events and plots of the past year. For just a moment, the whole room seemed bathed in the golden light, and he felt an inexpressible sense that there was a purpose at work in it all—not just Nara’s sinister plot, whatever it was, but some contrary intention. He felt as though he were seeing his own path laid out in the swirls of golden light, his own part in the Prophecy. He smiled as peace washed over him.

A woman draped in blue appeared in the doorway, and Aunn watched as she scanned the crowded room. When her face turned toward him, his heart leapt—it was Ashara. He adjusted his hood just enough that she could see his gray face, and she hesitated. He waved and let his face suggest Kelas’s features for an instant. Ashara smiled and made her way to his table.

“Aunn, thank the Fire and Forge,” she said, collapsing into a chair across from him. “We’ve been looking for you for days.”

“Where’s Cart?”

“He’s waiting in the square. If I don’t come out in a moment, he’ll come in. We’ve found it’s best not to be seen together.”

Aunn nodded. Separately, neither of them was distinctive—most people had a hard time telling one warforged from another. It was their obvious affection for each other that drew attention.

“What happened to you?” Ashara asked. “We agreed to meet back here for dinner, and you never came.”

“My trip to the Tower of Eyes didn’t go as I’d planned.”

“And so you’re not trying to be Kelas any more.”

“Right. Oh, there’s Cart.”

The warforged stood in the doorway, scanning the room. He spotted the blue of Ashara’s cloak and strode over to join them.

“Aunn?” he asked, staring at the unfamiliar blank face.

Aunn stood, smiling, and extended a hand to Cart. The warforged pulled him into a clumsy embrace that threatened to squeeze the breath from his lungs.

“We were concerned,” Cart said. “Have you seen Gaven?”

It still came as a surprise to Aunn that anyone would be concerned for him. “Yes,” he said, blinking. “He’s on his way to Varna.”

“Varna? Why?”

Aunn shrugged. “The Prophecy draws him on, as always. Listen, there’s a Sentinel Marshal in town—”

“Yes, we’ve spoken with her,” Ashara said. “And the Kundarak with her,” Cart added. “You have? When?”

“A few days ago,” Ashara said, looking to Cart for confirmation. “The morning after we saw you last,” Cart said.

Aunn thought back over the last several days. He had first met Mauren and Ossa the same morning, and he’d been with them for most of that day. They must have met Cart and Ashara just before that. Aunn thought it strange that the Sentinel Marshal had never mentioned Ashara.

“You told them nothing about the Dragon Forge?” Aunn asked.

“I told them enough to get them off our backs,” Ashara said. “I told them it was a catastrophic failure that led to my disgrace and excoriation.”

A sick feeling clutched Aunn’s gut. “You admitted that you were responsible for it.”

“I suppose so. What of it?”

Suddenly Aunn understood much of what had been confusing him for days. He had wondered why the Sentinel Marshal seemed to be moving so slowly, unwilling to make any direct move on Jorlanna or House Cannith. He suspected now that she wanted to avoid causing too much alarm until she had Ashara in custody.

“Mauren knows what the Dragon Forge did,” Aunn said.

“Mauren? The Sentinel Marshal is a friend of yours?”

“I’ve been working with her to stop Jorlanna. It would have been better if you had cooperated with her as well.”

Ashara’s eyes were wide with fear, and Cart rested his hand on top of hers.

“It’s not too late,” Aunn said. “I’ll tell her you’re willing to help—tell her all the ways you’ve already helped. I couldn’t have undone the magic of the Dragon Forge without you.”

Ashara shuddered and looked down at the table, seeming more vulnerable than Aunn had ever seen her before.

Cart squeezed her hand. “He’s right,” he said. “It’s better this way.”

“I should have listened to you,” Ashara said, smiling at Cart. “But I was too afraid.”

“Fear is a gateway for the Dark to enter the world,” Cart said.

Aunn cocked his head at that—it didn’t sound like anything he’d heard Cart say before. He glanced at the runic mark on Cart’s forehead, reassuring himself that this was the right warforged. Imprinted at the creation forge, those marks were unique to each individual warforged. Satisfied, Aunn smiled to himself. Cart was proving himself more complex—more “many-layered”—with each passing week.

“So what about you?” Cart said. “You’ve been working with the Sentinel Marshal? What have you learned?”

“It’s starting to come together—at least, I think it is.” Aunn sipped his wine and gathered his thoughts. “Kelas sent me to the Demon Wastes to stir up the barbarians, to get them to strike eastward. I know that Nara was behind that mission, and I’m pretty sure the goal—or one goal—was to get Aundairian troops as far away from the capital as possible. Most of our army is either in the Reaches already or guarding our borders with Thrane and Breland. But rather than leave the capital entirely unguarded, the queen hired mercenaries, quite a lot of them. Now, normally, if you want to hire mercenaries you go to House Deneith or House Tharashk. But the queen’s not in a position to deal with the dragonmarked houses right now, especially not Deneith.”

“So she’s hired mercenaries from Droaam,” Cart said. “Led by the half-orc who was at Kelas’s council.”

“Exactly. A whole company of minotaurs, disciplined and ferocious, marched into the city today. As far as I know, Janna Tolden is still involved in the plot as well, and even though she’s been discharged in disgrace, she still commands devout loyalty from some number of soldiers. So our working assumption is that the entire military forces of the city, with the possible exception of the palace guard, are more or less directly under Nara’s control.”

“So you think they’re going to seize the palace?” Cart asked.

“I expect they’ll try. And in the confusion of the skirmish the assassin will strike at the queen. The key question is when—and here’s where I wish Gaven were still around. I figure there has to be a significant moment, something related to the Prophecy, that will signal the attack.”

“Then, when the queen is dead,” Ashara said, “the mercenary army installs Jorlanna on the throne?”

“I suppose. Jorlanna’s involvement is still not clear to me.”

“Jorlanna doesn’t dare take part in the battle openly,” Ashara said, “in case it doesn’t go according to plan.”

“But she can help covertly,” Cart said. “We found out that the mercenaries are armed with weapons made and enchanted in Cannith forges.”

“Which means Jorlanna spent a small fortune already,” Ashara added. “And those weapons might be enough to tip the scales of the battle.”

“I can see that,” Aunn said. “But they’re also physical proof of her involvement, aren’t they?”

“Probably not,” Ashara said. “Ordinarily, the magewrights would stamp the House seal in the tang of the blade, but Jorlanna probably ordered them not to for these weapons.”

“But what about the enchantments they carry? Where else would a band of mercenaries from Droaam get magical weapons?”

“I’m not sure that constitutes physical proof,” Cart said.

“And my House has devised some temporary enchantments,” Ashara said. “I’d bet that within a day or two of the battle they’ll be ordinary, if well-crafted, blades.”

Aunn stared into his glass, empty except for a few drops of the golden wine. “So how do we prove Jorlanna’s connection to this whole scheme?”

A voice from behind Ashara startled him—he hadn’t seen the man approach. “Exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out,” Harkin said.

*  *  *  *  *

Rienne’s ragtag army marched toward the ruins of Varna as fast as her would-be soldiers could manage. It wasn’t a march, really—the farmers and foresters walked in casual clumps of two to five, sharing stories or singing songs as they went. The handful of real soldiers began the trip marching, lined up in formation, but their rigid lines soon dissolved as the soldiers drifted off in ones and twos to join the clusters. Rienne smiled, watching it. She understood the need for discipline in an army, but it heartened her to see hope take root among those she had come to think of as her people.

The march brought them through miles of farmland and past the occasional tiny village where they could stock up on food—freely donated, more often than not, by the farmers who pegged their sole hope for the Reaches’ survival on this straggling army. Rienne had been concerned that some of her followers would drift away in each village, but in fact their numbers swelled—a few survivors of the battle who had made their way separately to these communities rejoined the army when it passed through, and a handful of hardy men and women who had never joined the militia took up weapons that had lain unused since the Last War and joined Rienne’s march to Varna.

Cressa was her nearly constant companion on the march, a fountain of energy and a source of unending chatter whether or not Rienne had anything to add to the conversation. Slowly, Rienne let her guard down—she stopped worrying quite so much about conveying the impression that she had everything under control, and began confiding in the girl as she would to an old friend. By the end of the first week, she had told Cressa about Jordhan—starting with his death at the Mosswood, then slowly working backward through their long history together. That forced her to tell the girl all about Gaven, which occupied the beginning of the second week.

Cressa seemed shocked, at first, to learn that Rienne’s betrothed had gone to Dreadhold, and even more surprised when she learned that Rienne helped Gaven after he escaped from that supposedly inescapable prison. As Rienne told more of her long tale, though, Cressa looked on Rienne with even more adoration in her eyes, as though she were a true hero because of the devotion she showed to her true love. Rienne almost laughed, but the girl was so earnest—and in fact, Rienne’s heart ached with the truth of it. She had sacrificed everything to help Gaven, to be reunited with him … only to have him stolen from her side in the depths of Argonnessen. Now, as her story came to what seemed like the end, she was going to face the Blasphemer alone, still wondering where Gaven was.

Night fell early as winter spread its icy claws down from the Frostfell, and the lights of the night sky did little to illuminate the ground. Even so, Rienne ordered torches lit so the army could keep moving—they had to reach Varna before the forces of the Blasphemer caught up with them. When they finally did make camp each night, Rienne walked among her people, talking with them and hearing their tales, watching as the more experienced soldiers offered some basic training to the freshest recruits, as conversations struck up on the march continued and expanded and blossomed into friendships. Before allowing herself the luxury of sleep, she consulted with Kyaphar and Fieran, and sometimes with the officers as well.

Kyaphar spent most of every day on the wing, flying in wide circles around the army to watch for threats from the Blasphemer or the spreading Depravation. He reported that the Blasphemer’s horde was close on their heels, fully regrouped after the chaos of the breaking seal and now no more than a day’s journey behind them—and Rienne was deeply grateful for that day of distance. Then in the middle of the second week, he reported that Varna was in sight—as was a battalion of Aundairian soldiers, heading along the edge of the lake from the west toward the ruins of the city.

“Thank the Sovereigns,” Rienne said. “We won’t have to defend it alone.”

Kyaphar shook his head. “It sickens me,” he said. “They sacked Varna on the pretext of holding the barbarians back, protecting their borders. Then they struck farther and farther into the Reaches, utterly ignoring the barbarians. Only when the Blasphemer threatens to actually cross the Wyr into Aundair do they return to do the job they supposedly came here to do in the first place.”

“I only hope they’re not too late,” Fieran added.

“How far did they get?” Rienne asked. “They marched west from Varna—did they take Cree? Or sack it?”

“I don’t think they made it as far as Cree,” Kyaphar said. “It’s only been two weeks since they left Varna—that’s barely enough time to get to Cree, turn around, and come back. Of course, they could have sacked the town quickly, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Especially if half the city’s defenders were facing the Blasphemer at the Mosswood.”

Rienne sighed. “How long until we reach Varna?”

“Two or three days.”

“Let’s make it two.” She stood and touched each of the men on the shoulder. “Rest well, friends. I want an early start in the morning.”