Magebane

Magebane

Year 776 of the Great Barrier
LIKE A CHICK IN ITS EGG, Jenna lay curled within a bubble of ice half-buried in muck at the bottom of Palace Lake. In her gloved left hand she clutched the frost-covered spellstone that kept the walls of her shelter frozen, teased air from the blue-green water . . . and slowed time. After a day and a night, she should have been so cramped from im¬mobility she would not be able to move when the time came, but to her, it had not been a day and a night; to her, it seemed only a few minutes had passed since she had waded into the lake in the early morning darkness. Her thoughts, though flowing normally to her, in fact moved with all the sluggishness of treacle in midwinter.
She had left that cold the day before, passing through the single Gate in the Lesser Barrier into the Palace grounds with a dozen other young women, newly hired to serve as maidservants.
And what happened to those we replaced? she thought bitterly as she waited in her bubble of ice. Some have grown too old, some have grown too ugly. And some have simply vanished, used, abused, discarded, no questions asked, no investigations launched, no retribution, no recompense . . . because those doing the using and abusing and discarding were MageLords.
The spellstone filled her left hand, but her right held something else: a tiny crossbow, cocked and loaded, the quarrel white with frost, steaming with cold. Around her neck, she wore a third item of magic: a simple silver circlet, broken in one place, hanging on a cord of leather.
In her time-slowed memory, it had been only a short while since Vinthor had hung that amulet around her neck. “This is the power source,” he had said. “Keep it hidden.” She had nodded, and pushed it down inside her blouse, so that it lay, cold at first but warming quickly, between her breasts, glad that at least it did not glitter with frost like the spellstone and quarrel.
“The spellstone knows what to do,” Vinthor told her. “The moment you are completely submerged, it will form your . . .” he hesitated, searching for the word.
“Blind?” Jenna suggested. “I am going hunting, after all.”
Vinthor smiled at that, but it was a smile tinged with sadness. “I wish someone else could do this,” he said softly. “But . . .”
“But only a young woman, hired to be a maid, can get inside the Lesser Barrier,” Jenna said. “I volunteered, re¬member, Vinthor? When you told us what the Patron needed.” She remembered the pride she had felt, the excite¬ment that at last she could strike a blow for the Commons . . .
. . . for her mother’s sister, the aunt she had adored as a small child, until suddenly she wasn’t there anymore—vanished, like so many others, in the service of the MageLords.

From MAGEBANE. Copyright © 2011 by Edward Willett. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with DAW Books.