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“Um. Talamh and all the worlds are grateful for your vigilance.”
“We’re honored to stand.”
“And how’s that brother of yours, Lisbet?” Mahon asked, and got a quick grin.
“Traveling from pub to pub with his voice and his harp and happy as two pigs rutting.”
Keegan took time to speak to all three, then again turned to Breen. “Do you see the shadow of it?”
Now a test—in front of the guards. But the nerves that rose dropped away again as she looked.
Shefeltthe portal, felt its seal, strongly charmed and locked. And as she looked, as she opened, she saw the faint blur of shadow.
“There.” She pointed up to a bare branch. “Clawed open for the raven and the message carried. Clawed closed again. No bigger than my fist, and shut tight again. It costs to open it, blood and power, and the payment wanted in return never came. But blood, they’ll always have it to spend, so stand watch for Talamh and all the worlds.”
“And so we will.” Lisbet murmured it. “I climbed the tree to where the raven flew through, and barely saw the shadow when I stood on the branch a handspan away that you see from here.”
Next they flew north, where winter clung tight. Keegan repeated the process, this time to the guards on a snow-topped hill.
She saw the shadow in the hill.
At every portal, she realized. Scratching and clawing at every one.
“I don’t understand strategies or tactics when it comes to war and battles.” She turned to Keegan as she remounted Lonrach, and Bollocks leaped up with her. “But I do know it takes a lot of effort to put those cracks in the portals. To open and close them so a raven can get through. Wouldn’t one, even two be enough? It may take longer for the bird to get where it’s going and back, but it would get there.”
“I understand strategies and tactics very well.” He glanced back as they lifted into the air. “First, can it be done, this small shadow of a breach? Pitting magicks against magicks, and likely slow and careful on the other sides. And where each portal opens, wouldn’t he have those who follow him to aid in this?”
“Okay, yes, I can see that, but—”
“We go through to trade and travel, though not so free and easy these past months. If I’m Odran, I use the time—the time upon time he has—to think of this, to plan this, to work the magicks. Aye, one would do for spying, if spying was the end of it.”
Riding the wind, he looked ahead to the east. “So I ask myself the very question you ask me now.”
“And what’s the answer?”
“If you find you can make this crack, the size, you said, of your own fist, in time, with purpose, with blood magicks, you’d work on a way to make a bigger one, and bigger yet. To make them big enough for armies to pass through, as they did in the South, as they did at the Tree of Snakes.”
“To—to break through them all, all the portals, all at once?”
“It’s what I’d do, had I time upon time and no quibble about the blood spilled for it.”
“But what will you do about it?”
“What needs doing. The Capital,” he said, gesturing ahead. “We’ll talk of it later.”
The castle stood, stone sturdy and strong on its hill, its banner of the red dragon on a white field flying. Behind it, the sea thrashed, heaving itself against the rocks before drawing back to heave again.
The village bustled below the castle and its towers, beyond the river and the bridges that spanned it.
When she’d last left, some of the land had still lay churned from the battle. Now it spread green and lush or brown and rich from the plow.
Smoke curled up from the chimneys of cottages and farms, shops and pubs.
On the far side of the castle, the woods loomed where the battle had begun.
They landed on the green, where on that day she’d faced Yseult, had bested her, bloodied her. But in her rage had failed to end her.
Now she knew that because in that rage she’d wanted Yseult’s pain more than that end, Odran’s witch would spell and scheme to cause more death.
