I woke, not in the yellow mud of the mountains, but in the dark chill of my room, under a pile of blankets. Somehow, the afternoon had fallen into night without my knowing it. If the slow growl of thunder and the steady pattering of rain hadn’t been there to greet me as I opened my eyes, the entire day might have been a dream.
How had I gotten down from the pass? I had slipped and knocked my head against the rocks before, but never so badly as to lose all recollection of it. And the stranger, what about him?
“Sydelle, are you awake?” Mother whispered. I turned my head and allowed the dizziness to wash over me. The usual rasp in her voice was gone.
“What’s happened?” I asked, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. She held a candle up to her face, its flickering light catching the strands of her pale hair. I saw that my loom had been disassembled and moved from the main room of the house into my cramped room.
“That man I met in the mountains—is he here?”
There was sadness in her eyes where I had expected to find anger. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or frightened by it.
“I’m sorry about the roots,” I said quickly. “When the rain clears, I’ll find more.”
She brought the candle closer to my face, and for the first time, the warmth it provided was a relief. My hair and dress were still damp, and the rain had cooled the air enough for me to shiver beneath the blankets.
“I’ll go tell your father you’re awake,” she said. “He’s with our guest.”
My mother left without another word, leaving me alone, my questions still unanswered. I sat up slowly, wishing she had left the candle with me. All I could make out in the darkness was my loom and the shape of my father’s leather bag next to it on the floor. It looked full. What had the man asked—if my father had left for the capital yet?
“…would you…Sydelle…it’s…”
The words came in soft fragments. I strained my ears past the slow drumming of rain to the conversation on the other side of the wall. Layers of mud and plaster muffled the voices, but the stranger’s rich voice was clear, almost as if he was in my room.
“…from the capital?” asked my father.
“No, but I have spent a great amount of time there,” the stranger replied after a long pause.
“Just how old are you, Mr….?”
“North,” the man said, neatly sidestepping my father’s question. “Wayland North, if you’d prefer.”
“What are you doing around our parts?” Mr. Porter, Henry’s father, asked. I hadn’t realized he was there. “It’s unusual to find a wizard so far west, given that we’re so close to Saldorra and they don’t take kindly to your…kind.”
A wizard, I thought numbly. The word rolled around inside of me. That man had been a wizard, one of Astraea’s disciples…and I had been so disrespectful. Had he brought the rain?
“After the king was murdered, some of the details didn’t align for me,” said the wizard. “I needed proof, so I traveled west.”
I pressed my ear up against the wall.
“We were told the poison came from Auster. Are you saying that it came from Saldorra?” my father asked. His voice was too calm—I almost couldn’t hear it above the pounding in my ears. Poison? Henry and I had guessed an illness, an accident perhaps…but murder…?
Wayland North let out a sharp laugh. “I have it on good authority that the wizards haven’t the slightest idea where the poison came from. They only know it was put in his nightly glass of wine.”
“So we’ve declared war against Auster for nothing?” Mr. Porter asked, and I didn’t need to be by the wall to hear him. “On a whim—a guess? Did the Wizard Guard send you out here to search for information?”
“The Guard is still pursuing Auster as the primary culprit,” the wizard said. “You have to understand that if we go to war with them, it won’t be because they killed our king. With the king dead, Auster’s king is claiming his right to the throne.”
“By what right?” Mr. Porter said. “It’s absurd.”
“No,” my father said. “It’s not. The king of Auster is our king’s second cousin, the last of his living relatives, and you know as well as I do that our laws say that a woman cannot inherit the throne, regardless of circumstances.”
“You said a law had been introduced to change that,” Mr. Porter said, “on the chance that the queen didn’t deliver a male heir.”
“There was to be a vote on it next month,” Father said. “We can vote it in, but there’s a real possibility that Auster won’t recognize the law as valid.”
“They’ve been waiting for an excuse to invade our country under legitimate circumstances,” North said. “Saldorra’s soldiers will join their forces. I would say they’re maybe half a day from overtaking your village.”
“Sydelle!” a voice hissed. I started, tearing myself away from the wall. It had come from outside, slipping through the small hole in my wall that was meant to be a window, without glass or fabric.
“Delle!” It was Henry. If he had been any louder, the entire village would have heard him. I looked out to see him hunkered down in the mud, drenched straight through his clothes.
“What?” I asked, annoyed.
“Are you all right? I waited for you in the market,” he said. “And out of nowhere you appeared with the wizard—I thought you were dead, you were so pale. Did you faint?”
“Not now!” I whispered. “I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Just go!”
I didn’t wait to see if he would listen. Two steps later and my ear was back against the wall, catching the wizard’s voice.
“…and they won’t stop,” North said. “I used the rain to slow them as much as I could—I didn’t realize it would be such a help to you.”
“You have no idea what you’ve done for us in bringing the rain. I can’t even begin to fathom how you succeeded where other wizards have failed,” my father said. He sounded tired. “Anything we can give in return, anything, we’ll give you.”
“If you’re still willing to give up what we discussed before, then there’s nothing more I could ask for.” North cleared his throat. “But we shouldn’t stay much longer. Auster and the officials in Provincia have agreed on a two-month deadline to try to resolve this without magic and sword, but I’m afraid it may take me just as long to get there, and I don’t trust the mail service to deliver the report safely.”