The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [92]
“Sister?” Grace said, rising, but still the queen stared at the spilled wine. “Your Majesty?”
Ivalaine's head snapped up. “Go!” she said, her voice a hiss, her eyes wide and shot with red. “This one last thing I will do as queen—you have my permission to ride through my lands. But go quickly, before you and your shadow coven are seen. Their spells of illusion will not hide them for long, not from those who keep watch. And if you are discovered, I can and will do nothing to protect you.”
With that, Ivalaine turned her back and vanished through a slit in the canvas wall. Grace stared after her, trying to comprehend what had just happened. There is but one last role for me to play, Ivalaine had said. But what role did she mean? And where was it she intended to go?
“Your Majesty?” said a deep voice behind her.
She turned around and let out a breath. “Durge.”
The Embarran stood in the entrance of the pavilion. “We spied the queen riding back to the castle with her servants, and we assumed your audience was over. Do we have her permission to ride through Toloria?”
Grace managed a stiff nod. She staggered a bit and caught the back of the chair for support.
Durge hurried to her side, steadying her with a strong hand. “Are you well, my lady?”
A shard of pain lodged in her chest. He wasn't the one who should be asking her that, not with what worked its way toward his own heart. However, Grace forced herself to stand straight. Like Queen Ivalaine, she had just one role to play.
“Come on, Durge. Let's get out of here.”
24.
They continued to make impossibly good time as they marched eastward over the rolling hills of Toloria. By late afternoon of their second day after crossing the river, the spire of the Gray Tower soared into view. Much as Oragien and the other runespeakers might have liked to see how their brethren fared, the army did not stop. By the evening of the next day, they had reached the edge of the wilderness that lay between Toloria and Perridon.
“Tomorrow we turn north,” Tarus said as Grace and her commanders took supper by the fire.
Paladus looked up at the frosty stars. “I have never seen an army march so quickly as this. Surely the gods must favor us.”
Grace gave Tira a hug. “I'm pretty sure there's at least one who does, Commander.”
The next morning they left Toloria behind and marched into the wilderness. Last summer, when they had journeyed through this region on the way to Castle Spardis, Falken had called it Dun-Dordurun, which meant In-Between-Land in the language of the Maugrim. Only the Maugrim had vanished an eon ago, and no one lived here now.
The landscape was achingly lonely: a series of misty valleys and scrub-covered ridges that stretched as far as the eye could see. The only sound that broke the silence was the occasional call of a hawk, and the army passed no human habitations, though a few times Grace glimpsed a ragged circle of stones crowning a distant hill.
The sun was sinking low in the west when they reached the gigantic drawing of Mohg on the side of a hill.
“So it's still there,” Grace murmured as Shandis came to a halt on a ridge opposite the drawing. But then, it had been there for centuries. She shivered despite the warmth that radiated from Tira's body.
“What is it?” Master Graedin said. The voluble young runespeaker had been bouncing on his mule alongside Grace for the last few leagues, chatting eagerly in response to her questions concerning what the Runespeakers had learned in their effort to repair the runestone.
“It's Mohg,” Grace said, only the cold wind snatched her breath away so that the words were barely a whisper.
Graedin's cheerful expression