She patted his cheek. “You found me,” she said. “Twice. And you’ll do the same for Luda.”
Her faith in his abilities humbled him. He prayed she was right. They kissed before leaving the bed to dress as quietly as possible. Bron promised he’d return from Gatisek as soon as possible but couldn’t guarantee he’d be back before Zaras awoke and asked questions about his absence.
“Don’t worry,” Disaris assured him. “I can weave some tale to satisfy her. Afterall, she did draw you a map, and you did say you needed to buy a horse. Early arrival at the horse markets usually means a better choice of a good mount.” She squeezed his arm, worry clouding her brown eyes. “Please be careful. You may have fought the Daggermen. I lived with them. They don’t think like regular people. There’s no reasoning with them. They’re puppets to the Hierarch. If they’re willing to kill themselvesand their own families at his command, they’ll kill you without hesitation.”
The night was old by the time Bron sneaked out of the cottage, but dawn was still hours away. He glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of Disaris’s silhouette, backlit by candlelight, in the bedroom window. She raised a hand in silent farewell, and he did the same before slipping out of the garden and onto the road leading to Gatiset.
It wasn’t the straightest or shortest route to the town, but it was to the Daggermen’s stronghold. While a horse would have gotten him there faster, he would have made a lot more noise. A steady run was his best bet, and he’d participated in plenty of marches at double time. So it didn’t take long before he heard the rushing of water and glimpsed the unfortunate chancellor’s house. Once a grand affair befitting a Kefian or Daesin aristocrat, it bore the hard-worn look of a bandit’s den. Makeshift fencing enclosed a lawn overgrown with weeds, while columns made from the wood of a disassembled barn were crowned with narrow platforms.
Bron cursed his eyesight, which had never been the best and was worse in darkness. The eyeshine spell he’d relied on to get him and Disa across the plains without laming their horses wouldn’t work here. Guards would see his glowing eyes from a hundred paces, and he didn’t want to end up mistaken for a wolf and riddled with arrows. He’d have to rely on stealth to get a better look at the towers. The trees lining the riverbank provided him with some cover as did the numerous outbuildings—mill, coops, bakery, laundry house--that once supported the main house but were now abandoned. They allowed him to get closer, even to the fence itself. Shadows of men patrolled the grounds as well as the platforms atop the four sentinel towers.
They wore nondescript clothing and cowls that allowed them to cover their faces instantly. Daggermen usually did so whenthey carried out the assassination of an official or military leader, even wearing them when they murdered families and slaughtered entire villages. Driven by religious fervor and a belief in their own righteousness, the Daggermen had become a force to reckon with for both Daes and Kefinor. Their hives were spread throughout both kingdoms, but the only one Bron was interested in was the one that held Luda. If Disaris was right, she was a captive of this hive.
“I think I know why the Hayman Stone worked for us but not for others,” she’d told him as they lay in bed together, waiting for the night to age. “The passage on the stone alters each time someone translates, though I think the first line mostly remains the same: ‘Wish the place and wish the name.’ It’s the first instruction for how to open the gate.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand. What does wishing for something have to do with getting troops through the gate?”
Disaris shrugged. “When it comes to entire armies, I don’t know. There’s a spot on the Hayman stone where a newer symbol overlays an old one. I couldn’t read what it was, but maybe whoever carved the new one tried to hinder or limit the number of people crossing from one place to another through the gate. One person can cross, definitely two from what we experienced. Maybe even a dozen, but not whole battalions.”
Artifacts possessed of lim magic always made him twitchy. He’d dealt with a few during his time as a mage-in-training. They were enigmatic and uncanny, and in a careless human’s hands dangerous, unreliable, and sometimes deadly. Desperation had forced him to rely on one, and it had dropped him and Disaris in the middle of enemy territory, near a nest of Daggermen. “I saw your face while you read the symbols the first time, before you spoke them aloud. It was like seeing someone discover a priceless treasure.”
A hint of that same expression flickered across her features again. “It was the third to the last line of the passage, ‘dear one,’ that made me understand how it worked. The first verse of the passage tells you what to do. The one at the end instructs you what to tell or wish to the stone. Wish the place. Wish the name. Dear one.”
Bron’s eyes widened as the bottom dropped out of his stomach. “Dear One,” he murmured. “Luda.” Disaris had literally wished them to her sister, and lim magic had answered.
“Yes!” Her eyes shone bright in the weak candlelight. “Because the connection is stone to stone, gate to gate, it couldn’t send us straight to Luda…”
“Which is a good thing, considering.”
“But it could send us to the gate closest to where she was.”
“Thus, the Merisack Stone.”
He’d clasped her face in his hands and planted several kisses on her cheeks, forehead, and mouth in celebration.
Disaris had quickly brought them both back from the clouds with one succinct question. “What if we’re wrong?”
“We’re not,” he said firmly, refusing to even entertain the idea. “I believe we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be in order to rescue Luda.”
Creeping around the perimeter of the chancellor’s seized property, Bron still believed what he’d told Disaris, and just as he was looking for a way past the fence that wouldn’t alert the guards, that belief was confirmed in the most unequivocal way.
Luda jin Gheza, a taller, darker-haired version of her older sister, walked out of the great house, flanked by two Daggermen carrying torches. She paused at the top of the steps leading to the unkempt lawn and turned to look directly at Bron hiding in the shadows of a slat fence.
He froze, waiting to see what she would do. For all he knew, she simply looked in his direction without seeing him, or she sawthe shape of a would-be intruder lurking just outside the fence. Even if she did see him, he didn’t believe she recognized him, Bron—until her mouth curved into a smile and raised her hand to the sky, with its profusion of stars and a sickle moon barely there. “The moon,” she said in a reverent voice reminiscent of her sister’s. “The beautiful moon.”
For a moment, all the blood in Bron’s body rushed to his feet, leaving the empty spaces to be filled by battle fever. She knew him. There was no mistake, and every instinct screamed for him to vault over the fence, kill the two Daggermen and run with Luda all the way back to the widow’s house where Disaris waited. The more logical, cool-headed part of him warned he embraced death for himself and Luda if he followed the commands of his emotions. Instead, he stayed crouched where he was, wondering how she’d seen him there when no one else had—yet.
“I want to walk,” she told her guard. Both exchanged looks of contempt for their charge but didn’t argue, staying next to her as she descended the stairs and began a leisurely stroll around the edge of the property, near the fence but not so close that someone else might detect her observer.
She moved farther away from the perimeter wherever the cover or the shadows were more sparse for him to hide as he followed her path, and she stopped to wave at those standing guard on each of the sentinel platforms, calling out greetings and asking after their welfare.
“Mad as an old loon,” one of her guards said, not bothering to lower his voice so she wouldn’t hear the insult.
If Luda was offended, she didn’t show it. Instead, she laughed in a strange girlish way that made Bron wonder for a moment if the guard spoke the truth. He was dispelled of that notion when twice more she met his eyes and either gave a quick nod or the faint flick of her hand to signal an upcomingchallenge at remaining hidden or a spot where she intended to pause.
She walked the entire border of the overgrown front and back gardens, and in this way offered Bron a chance to reconnoiter the outside of the property while she distracted the guards. There was nothing to she could do to show him the inside of the house, but she paused at both the side and rear entrances to the house. At the rear entrance, she tapped a foot impatiently while her guard retrieved a key to unlock the door. “I don’t understand why you have to be the one with the key to this door!” she exclaimed in a loud, indignant voice. “What are you going to do with it? I’m the one who needs it when I have to relieve myself late at night! Instead I have to hunt you down to unlock the door!”
The guard she spoke to replied, but in a voice too low to hear.
