“Sorry!” Rap shouted over the gale. “Have to work on this a bit!” He heaved harder, and the opening was large enough for Inos to slip through, into frigid darkness.
The door thumped closed behind her. She hadn’t heard Rap follow. She had forgotten how intensely cold air could be, like ice water on her face.
“Akk!” she said. “Light?”
Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw moonlight beyond a window on her right and a fainter one straight ahead.
“Recognize it?” Rap’s voice inquired sardonically at her back.
“Inisso’s chamber!”
She turned, and the magic portal was a blackness filling the central arch. The side arches framing it were simple casements of clear glass. She stared out in wonder. Far below her, the snowcapped roofs and battlements of the castle, and of Krasnegar itself beyond them, fell white and steep to the distant harbor, a snowy plain glowing silver under the moon. Every chimney sported a plume of smoke, rising slowly in the crystal-still air. Her heart thumped in her throat and she felt tears that were only partly due to the cold.
Home! Home at last!
“The casement! What have you done with it?”
“I got rid of it. They’re nasty things. You’re better off without it. But we sorcerers have strange ideas of humor—on this side, the portal’s a real door, always. Don’t forget the magic word, or that first step will get you. Ah! There’s the trouble!”
Vague in the darkness, he moved off to where the western casement had blown open. “Faulty clasp!” he said, shutting it. “There!”
Inos could see her breath now, like a white cloud. She could feel the cold aching in her lungs. She had returned to Krasnegar as she had left it, by sorcery, and in the exact same spot.
“Rap? What did you mean when you said the magic casement didn’t prophesy?”
“Well, it did in a way. But its prophecies tended to be rather nastily self-fulfilling.”
“Doctor Sagorn said . . .”
“Sagorn doesn’t know half as much as he thinks he does,” Rap said firmly. “And he had magic casements wrong! A casement does not advise what’s best for the person opening it. It doesn’t care a poop for his welfare; not the way a preflecting pool advises a person. Casements are fixed things and care only for the welfare of the house. Inisso’s house in this case.”
“I’m not sure I follow that. How did the vision of the goblins killing you help anyone?”
“It made me see that he was important, and help him when he was in Hub. The goblins will have a king. Raven Totem is one of the most northerly lodges and Little Chicken won’t attack Krasnegar, for my sake. He’ll direct the tribes southward. Another king might not.”
“Oh!” Inos said doubtfully.
“Magic casements are evil!” Rap insisted. “It made me cheat Sagorn out of a word of power, and it made Kalkor kill Gathmor. Rasha made a magic casement—not a very good one, I admit—but it led her to you and that brought me, and then look what happened! It put the welfare of Arakkaran ahead of hers. No gratitude at all.”
Inos did not argue, but it seemed that the casement had effectively arranged events to bring her back here with a sorcerer in attendance so she could claim her, throne, and in that case . . .
“Watch your step here.” A flicker of light burst forth and strengthened. Rap was holding a lantern. The room was a shambles of bedding and discarded clothes. She saw empty bottles, too, and the remains of meals.
“I didn’t have time to tidy up,” he explained as she began picking her way through the mess. “The imps must have boarded men up here.”
The thick door had been repaired, most likely by Rap. It opened silently and he led the way down the curving stair. Her heart was thumping painfully, and there was a horrid dryness in her throat.
He paused partway down. “All clear,” he said after a moment. ”The whole tower’s deserted. And it’s all a mess!”
“Rapt I just thought of something! I came up this tower months ago and disappeared. Now I reappear and come down again . . . What do I say if they ask where I’ve been?”
“Ignore them!” Rap said sarcastically. “Tell them you’re starving and ask what’s for breakfast.”
“Rap!”
He continued to walk down the steps, with her following. “They’re not going to ask,” he said. “You’re a queen, and monarchs don’t get questioned. just glare at them, like the imperor does.”
Easy for him to say—he was a sorcerer. She would have to practice glaring.
They emerged into her father’s bedchamber. The mattress lay on the floor, amid some dirty straw pallets. A few fragments of furniture remained, but most of the rest must have gone for firewood. The two portraits above the mantel had been defaced. with charcoal and used for knife-throwing targets. Rags and bottles and dishes lay everywhere. A fierce anger began to warm her.
The next room was as bad. The withdrawing room was worse, although admittedly it had been bad when she saw it last, with charred rugs and broken china littering the floor. There was an ominous stain near the fireplace.
Down and down . . .
The Presence Chamber showed signs of recent occupancy—lingering warmth, embers still smoldering in the grate, rumpled bedding. Four or five men were living here, she deduced. Her home had been defiled, and her jotunnish blood boiled in her veins.
On the last stair Rap halted, and she heard faint sounds of music and shouting. The beat of her heart was almost as loud. The lantern faded and disappeared. Then Rap’s strong .hand gripped her wrist. “Invisibility spell,” he whispered.
They picked their way down, step by step. Faint light showed ahead, seeping around the curve of the stone, and then she began to stumble—not only was there no Rap ahead of her to explain that tight grip, but she could not see her own feet. He steadied her, and they came cautiously into the Throne Room, and into noise.
Here also lay bedding, and peat glowed hot in the grate. The throne itself had been removed, but when she raised her eyes to look through the arch into the Great Hall, she saw it out there, in the middle. A young man was sitting on it, with a girl on his lap.
Tables defined a central arena like a dance floor. Other men sprawled at those tables, with other girls, and they were laughing and jeering as they watched two more girls dancing clumsily in the center. Off to one side somewhere, a small orchestra battered away discordantly at a jig tune. Flames leaped in the big fireplaces.
Girls. Not women. They all looked younger than herself, and most of them had no clothes on. She tasted bile in her throat. More than the increasing warmth was making her sweat inside her wrappings. Azak! Pixies . . .
The men were all jotnar, roughly dressed, most of them. A few had begun to strip. They were big. She had forgotten how big jotnar could be. These fair-skinned youths were intimidatingly huge . . . just youths, most of them. A few were older, but she could see none without some trace of beard. The one on the throne must be Greastax. He wasn’t much more than a boy, and he certainly did look like a young Kalkor. He was going to die if she had to kill him herself.
But Nordland raiders never parted from their weapons, even when celebrating Winterfest. Here and there she recognized palace servants, scurrying to and fro with bottles and plates. She knew some of the girls, too. Friends, a few of them, and younger sisters of friends. Children!
Perhaps there were no older women available now for such sport?
“Gods!” she muttered under her breath. “Gods, Gods, Gods!”
“Forty-one!” Rap whispered with satisfaction. “All accounted for. Got any scruples left now?”
“None!” she said. “They die! All of them!”
“Good. Let’s go a little faster, all right?”
“Oh, yes!” She saw another dress being ripped off, and she could about guess what sort of entertainment was to follow. She almost commanded her court sorcerer to strike down these brutes as he had blasted Kalkor.
But that would be too simple. If she hoped to hold her realm by mundane means, then she must win it by mundane means . . . or seem to, at least.
Rap’s invisible hand tightened on her wrist. “Steady now!”
Shock! She was plunged back into darkness and arctic cold, and snow underfoot. The impact disoriented her and she cried out, shivering already.
“Sorry. I can’t zap us out of the castle. Here, through here.”
He put her hand on a vertical edge. Her dazzled eyes had begun to pick up the moonlight again, and an opening. She recognized the postern gate, and clambered through with a visible Rap close behind her, out into the yard before the castle, silvered by the high moon.