Page 80 of Valdemar

It was a very stark little room in the basement floor of the Palace, and windowless; there were silencing spells on all four walls and doubled on the doors and ventilation apertures to prevent any sort of mundane eavesdropping. There were so many anti-scrying measures that to Restil’s senses everything seemed a little muffled in here. Even the mage-lights were warded, because scrying via a light was a known thing, although it was not commonly used, and he had only seen it demonstrated once, by Sai.

They sat down around a table with a map of Haven on it.

“I’m calling Delia and Pebble back from the border, and we have changed our minds about sending you and Starbird north,” Kordas said as soon as the door was closed, and Sai and Jonaton had laid in still more anti-scrying spells. “Jonaton has discovered some things that have caused us to completely re-assess our defensive plans.”

Before Restil could say anything at all, Kordas turned to Starbird. “Starbird, this is a position I hate to put you in, and it is probably going to test your loyalty, but your uncle has been very evasive about this Adept we face, and if you know anything about her, we need you to tell us, regardless of whether or not you’ve been asked to keep it secret.”

She blinked slowly. Clearly this was not anything she had expected. “What do you mean by ‘evasive’? I don’t actually know what he’s told you.”

“Next to nothing,” the Lord Martial rumbled. “Only that she was a Hawkbrother of k’Vesla, that she ‘disappeared,’ and that they assumed until now that the wilderness had claimed her life. And despite the fact that he certainly should have more information than that—after all, there cannot be more than a few thousand people in your clan!—he has not been at all forthcoming.”

Starbird held up her hand to stop him from saying more. Finally, after a term of silence that seemed to go on forever, she sighed heavily and spoke.

“Radiant says I should tell you everything I know, and Radiant comes from the Star-Eyed Herself. So whatever my uncle thinks, it’s obviously my duty to do as you ask.” She grimaced, and cast her eyes down. “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you . . . and yet I am not surprised. The reason my uncle doesn’t want to talk about her is because she was his apprentice. He is very ashamed, and considers her defection a moral failure on his part.”

The silence that fell after that shoe dropped was so profound that Restil found himself feeling as if he needed to break it before he went mad. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. Starbird continued.

“As I was told by my parents, everything in Cloudfall’s apprenticeship appeared to be normal—though there wasn’t a great deal of it. She had only barely come into her powers, though it was clear that she was going to be an Adept. My uncle had just begun to teach her the basics. In fact, just that day he had taught her the spell to create fire, and left her in a safe place to practice it when he knew she could handle it on her own. And that is the last time he saw her. Everyone woke in the middle of the night to shrieks from the bondbirds and fire in the bondbird aviary, where they raise their young. It was a terrible, terrible fire. It nearly spread to the rest of the Vale, and many almost-fledged birds died horribly. Cloudfall’s own bondbird was found pegged to the ground with a knife in her heart at the aviary entrance, and Cloudfall herself was gone.”

Restil gasped. He knew how close the Hawkbrothers were to their birds; it was a bond not unlike the Herald-Companion bond. For the Hawkbrothers, it would have been as if their own children had been slaughtered.

“Everyone assumed some enemy had somehow penetrated into the Vale, kidnapped Cloudfall, and set the fire to cover their tracks. But immediate spells, including past-scrying, proved that was not true. It was Cloudfall who had done all this, murdering her own bird and setting the fire in such a way that only the adult birds were able to escape. Then she simply vanished. Quite literally. There was no trace of her, not to any sort of magic anyone tried.” She licked her lips. “Uncle blamed himself, completely, I am told. He never talked about it. But he looked for her tirelessly for years. A decade at least. And then he gave up.”

Kordas blurted, “A decade! How long ago did this happen? He must have been devastated!” He exhaled a tense gust. “I wish . . . we could have helped him somehow.”

“It was when you were all still in Old Valdemar. I wasn’t even born yet. It was bad on him in every way—he couldn’t teach again, his hygiene fell, and Healers came and went from his ekele daily for months. Other mages came to replace him, and it turned out to be wise of them. Adepts’ students achieve an intimacy with their teachers that you probably wouldn’t understand,” Starbird stated bluntly, then she softened the statement. “Different approaches to learning than you may be used to, is what I’m trying to say. Learning the subtleties of high-power spellwork is done by shared senses, and it is—sympathetic. She was someone whose soul he knew a little like Companions know a Herald, which implies of course that she knew him that well too, and had orchestrated an atrocious emotional torment specific to him from it.”

“I can’t imagine how personally he must have taken it all,” Restil commented. Starbird met eyes with him for a few seconds longer than she had to.

“It would make lesser souls shatter, but those who loved him stood with his hand in their palms. They did not wish him words from a distance, they sought out what actions would take strain off of him, and championed them like questing heroes. The whole while, understanding his heart was deeply bruised, they took care to not mention Cloudfall in any disparaging way around Silvermoon. Besides, it was still an ongoing mystery—as horrible as it was, we Tayledras deal in facts, and there were too few facts to begin judgment. Like everyone else, Silvermoon surmised that something about tapping into her powers sent her insane—she could have had a stroke, brain-bled, or otherwise damaged her reasoning, and that was why she did—what she did. The whole Vale reeled from it, and I’ve long thought covering an escape was why she did it. Insane doesn’t mean stupid.” Starbird frowned at herself for the acidity of her words. “The search for her was thorough, and eventually Silvermoon assumed that she had died somewhere out in the uncleansed lands.”

Jonaton’s look directly at Kordas was clearly meant to send a pointed message.

Kordas returned Jonaton’s look with a subtle double-shake of his head which obviously meant don’t you even start with me. “Is that—common?” Kordas asked, looking not only at Starbird, but at Sai and Jonaton. “For Adepts to fall prey to madness?”

“It’s not unheard of,” Sai said carefully. “At least, not in the limited amount of information I’ve read about them.”

Jonaton nodded. “I’ve heard the same. Why? Maybe when an Adept comes into their power, instead of having to coax it into being, learning to control just the trickles you first get, then bigger and better sources of energy, it blazes up within you all at once, like fire in oil-soaked wood, and some people can’t handle that. Particularly if they are already mentally unstable.” He raised his hands and shrugged. “That’s just speculation on my part.”

Starbird mirrored his shrug. “I don’t know either, but it’s as good an explanation as any. And if that is the case, it might explain why she killed her bondbird and all the young ones. It’s one thing to have your bird in your mind when you want to talk to it. It would be quite another to suddenly be privy to its every single thought, and then have all the half-formed thoughts of the fledglings rushing into your head, like being surrounded by shrieking children.”

Kordas nodded. “Well, obviously she didn’t die. And whether she is mad or not, she’s perfectly capable of controlling an entire city. But that is not what concerns me now. Sai, Jonaton—could an Adept take over a warded and protected Gate? That sudden fear last night was what woke me, made me wake the Lord Martial, and decide to bring Delia and Pebble back.”

Sai and Jonaton looked at each other, and many emotions flitted across their faces. Alarm, speculation, calculation, consternation. “Well,” said Sai at last, as Jonaton made a motion with his head suggesting that he deferred to the old man, “yes. An ordinary mage, even one as powerful as Jonaton, no. Or at least, not without alerting every mage in the country that someone was appropriating a Gate. Not even an entire circle of ordinary mages. But an Adept can handle the full power of the largest ley-lines, and with that, she can blast through what she could not ordinarily break. We’ve permitted ourselves to become complacent about her, and assumed too much.”

This time the silence felt stifling. Restil felt as if he was being crushed by a sensation of impending doom.

“We have . . . severely underestimated her,” the Lord Martial said, slowly.

“We were . . . stupid,” Jonaton said bitterly. “We should have thought of that. We just blithely went along thinking that nothing could come through our Gate because we locked it and only we and k’Vesla had the key to it. It never even occurred to us that she could force it open, like a thief breaking a lock rather than trying to pick it.”

“So,” the Lord Martial said, his voice now pitched so low that it sounded like a mastiff growling, “what we have is essentially a wide-open invasion port right outside the walls of the Palace. She doesn’t have to march her army across the intervening space and end up on the border. She doesn’t even have to make an unanchored Gate on the border and drop them there. She can drop them right at our feet.”

Only the King seemed, if not undismayed, less dismayed than everyone else. Then again, he’s probably been thinking about all this since he got woken up by his—call it a premonition, I guess. Knowing his father as well as he did, Restil figured that he had run through every single possibility he could think of, with special attention to worst cases.

“Right.” Kordas straightened. “We should assume she’s had some way of spying on us—for all we know, she’s got an agent inside the Palace walls. So outwardly, except for bringing Delia back, which we would have done about now anyway, nothing changes. She actually doesn’t know that we’ve trapped the northern border—”

He looked inquisitively at Starbird.