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But then how had she managed to cause the torch to catch flame?
Wolfhere frowned. “I have never heard Eika were accomplished magi, or that they had any skill at the forbidden arts, or even knowledge of them. They are savages, after all. But I no longer doubt Prince Sanglant. There is a presence among them who controls great power. That must explain—” He ran a hand over the slab of obsidian. “Strange.”
“Explain what?”
But now an edge came to his voice. “Sit still,” he ordered. He traced a ring on the stone and then rested his hands, one palm up, the other palm down, a shoulder’s width apart. He stared at the black surface, intent, concentrating. She saw nothing, but she felt a breath like wings brushing her cheek.
“An eagle!” he breathed sharply, starting back. “An eagle in flight, plummeting to earth.” He jumped up. “Come, Liath. We must go back. I don’t know what this portends.” Hastily, he collected his weapons from the floor, and they hurried back to the stairs that led out of the crypt. When Liath stuck the torch back in a sconce, it snuffed out as soon as it left her hand, plunging them in darkness. Wolfhere grunted, sounding surprised, but he said nothing. They climbed the stairs by feel and hastened out of the cathedral.
It was dark and still overcast, but after the blackness of the crypt, the night did not seem heavy. The Eika drums sounded louder now; they usually reached their peak at midnight.
As they walked swiftly back toward the mayor’s palace Liath recalled Wolfhere’s broken sentence. “You said the presence of an enchanter might explain something.”
“Ah.” For the space of twelve steps, clipped and hard and rapid on the plank walkway, he considered. “When we rode into Gent, I cast a spell to attempt to delay the advance of that group of Eika who were coming after us. Nothing more than an illusion. My skills are not great, and I am only adept at certain arts of seeing. I warned you to ignore what you saw.”
The flight to Gent was still graven in her mind with the vivid colors of a freshly painted mural. What he spoke now made her suddenly understand that which she had almost forgotten, because it had made no sense at the time.
A flash, a glittering of light like a fire’s light seen from inside a dark room. Her horse had almost thrown her, and Manfred had flung a hand up to cover his eyes, as it to protect himself from a much fiercer vision.
A tingling on her back. The tiny winkings of fireflies.
But that was all she had seen. Either Wolfhere’s magics were indeed very small, or else …
“I knew there must be some kind of sorcery at work,” he continued. “Now I know it is more powerful than I feared. To dissipate my illusions is one thing. To cloud my seeing is entirely another.”
Or else she had seen only the faint edge of his magic—or not his magic at all, but the barest trace of the enchantment that had protected the Eika against it.
“You’ve thought of something,” Wolfhere said.
“No. Nothing.” Until she understood it herself, she would not confess this mystery to him. It would give him power over her, more power than he already had. “Only what Da said: ‘To master knowledge is to have power from it.’”
“True words,” commented Wolfhere.
The palisade marking the inner fortress, the mayor’s palace, rose before them in the gloom. She heard the distant buzz of many voices speaking at once.
Were they true words? When Da said, “trust no one,” had he meant her to include himself? She was deaf to magic, yet he had begun to teach her the arts of the magi. She was deaf to magic, yet she had some kind of power; she had seen it manifested twice, once when she had burned the Rose of Healing into the table in Hugh’s study and this night in the crypt, when she had caused the torch to light.
“Is that all you have thought of?” he asked.
She remained mutely silent.
“Have I made any attempt to harm you, Liath?” he asked gently, if a little accusingly. “To bring you to harm?”
“You brought me to Gent!” But she said it with a wry smile, hoping to distract him.
They came though the wooden gateway into the courtyard of the mayor’s palace. The stone-paved courtyard was awash in torchlight, smoke and flames setting a yellow haze over the people gathered like so many bees swarming. This was a new crowd, smaller than the one this morning, and agitated in a completely different way.
“Alas that I did,” he murmured. Then he grabbed her by an elbow and with a grim expression pulled her through the crowd, shoving Dragons and rich merchants and the mayor’s retainers ruthlessly aside so that he and Liath could get to the center.
There, they found the mayor, Manfred, and Prince Sanglant—and an Eagle, battered beyond belief, his cloak torn, his head wrapped in a bloody, dirty cloth, one arm hanging useless at his side, and his horse dying at his feet.
He looked up, saw Wolfhere emerge out of the crowd, and tried to get to his feet, but staggered. Manfred steadied him.
“Find a healer,” Prince Sanglant ordered, signing to his Dragons. “Bring a stretcher, and wine.” His closest attendants, the scarred-face woman and the man with the limp, hurried off.
Mayor Werner’s complexion had a ghastly white cast under torchlight. But it was not only the light but also his expression. He looked like a man who had seen his own grave.
“Lie down, my son.” Wolfhere knelt beside the Eagle and lowered him onto Manfred’s bundled cloak. “What is your news?”
