"War?" said a voice from the trees. "Exactly what we're tryin' to avoid, lady."The man who came out onto the road was tall and scar-faced, with a black cloak and, stitched on its breast in black thread, a crude serpent with two long fangs. He held a thing in both hands that Lucianna had never seen before: a staff of dark metal as long as his arm, ending in a wide-mouthed cone, and all down the cone ran rows of small runes that glowed, dully, the color of an old bruise.He leveled it at her."Orders are to take you alive," he said. "If possible."The cone went off.It made no light. It made a sound—a single deep thud that Lucianna felt in her teeth and her breastbone—and a wave of something went out from it across the road, and everything she was holding let go at once. The vines around the whip-man's ankles went limp and fell away like cut string. The hum of the earth under her feet, that she had heard every moment of her life since she was a child, stopped. Beside her, Tyriel stagger

They lay in a charcoal-burners' hollow in the woods under Avelline's wall until the sun went down, with the men who had taken Aetherlyn beating through the trees above them twice and not finding them. Then, at dusk, they went in with the carts.It was not difficult. The last of the market traffic went up the river road in a long slow line at sundown—farm wagons, a drover with a dozen pigs, a cart of barrels—and two more travelers in grey cloaks with their hoods up could walk in the shadow of the barrels as far as the gate. Lucianna had pulled her hood low. Tyriel had pulled his lower. He was limping badly now, and there was blood on his side as well as his leg, and under his cloak he carried the lute in the crook of his arm like a child.The gate was a great arch with a white falcon painted on the stone above it. Under the falcon, four men of the city watch stood in half-armor with white falcons on their surcoats, and watched the carts go by.They watched the elves go by too. Lucianna

It was three weeks from Avelline to Carosso by the roads Eric and Selena took, which were not the roads anybody else took, and they came to the capital at midnight.Lucianna had expected many things of the city in the song. She had not expected it to be awake. The gates were open. The streets beyond them were lamplit and busy even at that hour—carts, late drinkers, a baker's boy with a tray on his head—and over the gate and the towers and all along the walls there were banners: blue, with a silver dragon on them. Only above the castle on its hill, very high, a different banner hung red and heavy in the still night air."The Regent's colors," said Selena, riding beside her, "and the old King's. The red's the Crown's. The blue's his. He flies them under it."Eric and Selena took them straight up the hill, through the castle gate, past guards who knew Eric by name and looked at the two elves and said nothing, into a long hall of pale stone with tall dark windows down one side and a vaulte

Dawn came up grey over the marsh, and with it, at the corner tower, the court mage lifted her staff.Cassaran saw her do it. Everybody on the west wall saw it; there was nothing else to look at in the half-light but the Carossan fires going pale on the meadow. She stepped up onto the firing-step at the very end of the row of hired mages, raised the staff over her head in both hands, and brought the lightning down out of an empty sky and sent it back up again—one bolt, white, blinding, straight up, as high as the eye could follow. The thunder of it came rolling back off the clouds and along the wall and out over the water-meadows.She did it every morning. The whole city knew she did it; the watch on the west gate set their breakfasts by it. Cassaran had seen it himself a hundred times from his window, a white thread going up over the marsh at first light, and thought that woman is mad, and thought no more about it.Out on the meadow, the host of Carosso began to move.It moved all at o

They found the Duke of Westbridge in the middle of the morning, in the wine cellar of his own house, behind a rack of old Yanling plum wine that swung out on a hinge.The Duke's men had held the doors of Westbridge Manor for an hour after the white flag went up on the keep, because nobody had told them to stop. When the doors went in at last, the pikes found the great hall behind them empty of anyone who could fight: only the household, crowded into the far end under the stained-glass windows—stewards, cooks, maids in their caps, two grooms, a boy who turned the spits—on their knees on the marble, too frightened to make a sound. Then a sergeant heard something behind the wine racks, and pulled, and the rack swung.They brought Malric up into the great hall and put him on his knees in the middle of the floor.He was barely recognizable. His fine velvet doublet was torn and black with smoke, one eye was swollen shut, and somewhere in the scramble to take him his careful powdered wig had