“You have not…” The elf’s face went slack with disbelief. “Venick,think. You will ruin everything. All that we have worked to gain.”
“I won’t.”
“We need the Elder’s soldiers. And this city needs its leaders.” But Venick was done listening. He pulled himself up onto Eywen, urged the horse forward. Branton grabbed Eywen’s halter and Venick felt a rush of wild fury. He had to fight the urge to kick the elf in the face. “What are we supposed to tell the Elder?” Branton asked.
“Tell him whatever you want.”
“That is suicide.”
“I don’t care.”
“No,” Branton said, releasing Eywen’s halter. “I can see that you do not.”
THIRTY-SIX
Venick peered through the night at the palace. He saw its sharp spires. The thick parapets. He saw the way the mountains seemed like fingers interlocked, a handhold to hoist the castle up between them.
He reined himself in. During his windswept journey across the elflands he’d given himself over to his impulses. He’d cursed the bitter winds, the too-short days. He’d pushed Eywen as hard as he dared, resting little, sleeping even less. Venick had been driven by fear and fury and something less easily named, a feeling that seemed to sink its claws into his bones and howl. He was edgy, nervous, sleep deprived, and possibly insane.
When he reached Evov, however, Venick was nothing but careful.
He left Eywen at the edge of the city. He had nothing to tether her there, nothing even to tether herto. This high in the mountains, the rock was sheer on all sides. The path—a narrow back passage—bore no life. No trees or shrubs. “Stay,” Venick told Eywen, and prayed that she would. Then—without thinking too hard on what would happen if she didn’t—he turned his back on her.
Venick entered the sleeping city.
He moved carefully, keeping to Evov’s edges, slipping through the shadows that pooled between buildings. The streets were quiet, the windows dark. The road was crusted with a thin sheet of ice that creaked and crunched with every step, and though Venick grimaced at the sound, it seemed that for once the gods were on his side. The streets stayed empty. The windows stayed dark. No one saw him.
He crested a ridge and again the palace came into view.
Venick thought he would have remembered the queen’s palace in detail, but the sight hit him fresh: those clawing towers and razor edges, the pinprick lights floating high in the black sky. A deep ravine separated the fortress from the rest of the city, connected only by a single bridge that currently played host to a literalswarmof black-clad guards. For a brief moment Venick imagined facing those guards, drawing his weapon, cutting them down one by one. The vision filled him, a cup to the brim.
Spilling away. Venick might be a fool, but he knew this much—he’d never be able to fight them all. If he intended to enter the palace, he’d need to find another way in.
But where? The palace was a stronghold. It had been built for the very purpose of keeping outsiders out, and stood like a sentry, as it had for a thousand-thousand years: silent and cold and colorless.
Or…mostly colorless. It occurred to Venick—oddly, in a way that seemed both unimportant and yet also vitally significant—that there was a room inside the palace that hadn’t been built with dark stone, but brightly colored glass. The entrance hall. Venick had been a prisoner the first time he’d set foot in that hall, and though at the time he’d been focused on his impending death, he’d still been distracted by the huge, glittering mosaic that covered the entire back wall of the entrance hall. He remembered a few of its figures: a three-headed horse. A blue lizard.
That mosaic was strange. He’d thought so then, and he thought so again now. Elves didn’t make art, so what did they know about glass craft? What were they doing, adorning the queen’s hall with that beautiful, intricate mosaic?
Unless they hadn’t.
Venick blinked. He drew that thought back, pulled it in close. Wait.
Wait.
What if they hadn’t?
It was well known that humans had once roamed Evov. This was before the purge, before the border, when humans and elves had lived peacefully side by side. In those days, humans had conjurors among their own ranks, men and women who could bend the elements and shape the earth.Our conjurors even helped build their cities, Erol had told Venick in Irek. But if humans had helped build elven cities, who was to say they hadn’t built this palace, too? And if that was true…
All manmade palaces have a secret escape.Venick had said this to Dourin in Parith, though the memory seemed to speak in his father’s voice.If ever there’s an attack or a siege, it’s a way for dignitaries to quickly get out.
Or for someone else to get in.
Venick turned away from the bridge and angled north. He stepped off the path and began his decent into the ravine.
???
The moon rose. Its soft light glinted off the water below. Venick concentrated on his hands. On the wet, frozen earth crunching under his fingers. He forced himself to move carefully down the cliffside, to test each foothold before trusting it with his weight. If he slipped, he’d fall far. His body would shatter on the rocks below.
