The Iron Princess by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

He rode his borrowed horse fifteen miles south of the Denzerai canal, then turned it loose, knowing that the Gray Sisters would have long ago woven spells of safe return into its heart and hide. A farm wagon took him as far as the fishing-town of Etha, where he spent the night. The place had barely changed, save that every boat in the little harbor was marked now with Crystal Order spells and the glimmering silvery wink of adamine. The old gray stones of every house whispered of ward-spells and safe-spells written in the same silver runes, overlying the earlier marks of the Brown Mages who had chiefly come through the town. He even saw a few of his own.

When he slept—again in a stable, for he had no money, though he’d stayed at the inn across the courtyard a hundred times when the grandmother of its current proprietor had been a toddler collecting kindling—he dreamed again of Second Ox’s house, halfway down the cliff below the City of Butterflies. Dreamed of that big, rosy man in the embroidered shirt of a common merchant among the tribes, his faded hair—the characteristic red of the Ashupik paling slowly to white—braided up in a topknot, pacing as he listened. Light fell through the windows at his back, glimmering with the water far down in the canyon below.

Tasted, in his dreaming, the tea brought in by Second Ox’s wife and beautiful daughters. Heard the laughter of Second Ox’s young son.

Dear gods, what happened to THEM … afterward?

White Jade. Hummingbird. Ten Sparrows.

And for a moment the faces of his own daughters returned to him. And what happened to THEM?

When the women were gone Second Ox turned to him, and his green eyes were grave and filled with pain.

Because of what we were planning to do?

Because he feared for his wife and his children? Dreaded the consequences of failure and even more the consequences of success?

Ithrazel couldn’t remember.

He saw the images in his heart as if they were painted on silk, every tiny detail exact. But he could not remember a single fragment of what he had thought or felt.

In his dream he took the rolled-up parchment from his satchel, and spread it out on the table between them.

It was blank.

Ithrazel opened his eyes and saw the rafters of the hayloft above him, the furtive glimmer of the eyes of rats in the dark.

He slept no more that night.

The Faithful Harlot was a rambling tavern on the Street of the Broken Loaf. It backed onto the alleyway that served the refineries and seemed to float in a constant dirty murk of throat-catching smoke. Clothed in a slop-market dress and a mended petticoat, and with her bright hair loosened from its usual knot and dyed brown with walnut juice, Clea explained to its proprietress—in accents and vocabulary she’d picked up from Liver-Eater and Gerti the Rat-Lady—that her mistress had escaped from an unkind family and would pay well for nobody in the inn to mention her presence there with her handsome new husband.

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