26.13

Dirk glanced through the bars of the door to Cai's cell, surprised to see the cell's furnishings. There were rugs, heavy blankets, several stacks of books, and candles. A small brazier smoked in the center of the small cell, warming the space. Cai lay on his make-shift bed, wrapped in a fur-trimmed blanket, reading.

Dirk noticed that his seneschal appeared to have aged several years already, despite the comforts friends in the castle had provided during his confinement. Cai hadn't shaved in weeks, and for the first time, his beard showed flecks of gray, though he was no older than Dirk.

Cai looked up from his book at the sound of a visitor. Seeing Dirk, his eyes widened. He stood up quickly and bowed. His voice quivered as he spoke. "My liege."

"Enjoying your new quarters?"

"No, Sire."

"It has a lovely view," Dirk mused, glancing over his shoulder at Portia's corpse, which still hung from the wall on a spike.

Cai was silent, declining to follow Dirk's gaze to the corpse. Cai said darkly, "Portia played a dangerous game. She had to know how it would end."

"And you?"

"I had no idea she was stealing money. I would have told you if I'd known. She talked endlessly about wanting to retire and start a family, but I didn't know she was planning to do something so idiotic. She deceived me as much as anyone. Zyrdicia left me alive - surely that proves I was just a pawn in Portia's game, Sire. I've devoted my entirely life to serving you. I would have killed Portia myself if I'd known of her treachery!"

"Did you continue to see Portia after she returned to Lyr and no longer lived here in the castle?"

"A few times."

"How did you get there?"

"She came to my quarters and took me there, or sent someone for me."

"I want to go to Lyr," Dirk said slowly. His recent attempt at pressing Bethel to take him there had ended badly. On the third night she visited him, he told her it was time for her to start taking magical orders from him again. She had seemed ready to obey. But when he told her he wanted her to take him to Lyr, she was furious. The witch was not stupid - she knew perfectly well the only reason for Dirk to want to go to Lyr was to see Zyrdicia. Bethel had not been back to see him since his request.

Dirk prodded, "If you can think of a way for me to get to Lyr, I will let you live, and release you from this cell."

"Portia's ring," Cai said quickly, pointing to the corpse's left hand. "That's how Zyrdicia's servants move around using magic."

Dirk gazed at the ring a moment before pulling it off the dead woman's frozen finger. It was small and unimposing. In fact, he had never noticed it on Portia's hand before this moment. It consisted of a single, hexagonal amethyst set in a band composed of interlocking "Z" runes carved into arcanium.

"The gem turns in the setting, and there's a series of words to trigger it opening a gate to a specific place. There's some emergency protocol that sends it back to the Old Temple. Portia told me she used that if she ever she got lost or had someone chasing her."

"And the protocol?

Cai hesitated before answering. "I'm not positive. But I'll gladly help you figure it out, my lord."

Dirk flashed the monocle at the lock on the cell door then, opening it. "Come, Cai. We have work to do. Work your life depends on."

26.13.1

Dirk scowled at Cai. They had not had any luck in guessing the magic word needed to operate Portia's ring. They had tried the name of Zyrdicia's dragon, and all her human friends. They had even tried obvious favorite things like "blood," "pain," "death," and "destruction." None of them worked.

"Could it be something in a magical language?" Dirk wondered.

"It's the same for all the rings. I can't see Charles and Anthony getting something like that right. It has to be simple enough that any of them would remember it while running from something dangerous. We'll get it - I'm sure of it."

Dirk sighed irritably. He knew was going to be something idiotic - something she found obvious and funny. "Go through every word in the dictionary, if need be."

He moved across the room to a stack of sealed correspondence on his desk. "When did these arrive?"

"This morning. From Geshna. Kendall received them, I think," Cai said. He had been trying to resume his normal duties. Kendall Kraxton was shadowing his every move though. Trust was a hard thing to rebuild in Castle Blackpool. And he and Kendall had always been rivals.

Dirk scanned the unfamiliar script of the first one and realized it was from a merchant guild in a city he had never heard of - Fidinia. The city offered clandestine trade rights to Karteia, in light of Karteia's trade embargo from Lyr. The letter's tone was obsequious in the extreme, promising to send a messenger to take any orders for provisions that might be supplied by Fidinia's Merchant Guild. And it was not until the final line that Dirk realized why: "Sources suggest that Karteia may have mineral wealth that would be fair compensation for whatever goods we might offer."

Dirk irritably tossed the letter toward Cai, who caught it in the air and read it quickly. The seneschal groaned. They needed a source for importing food desperately now that the trade gates with Lyr were closed. Most of the South's best farmland had been destroyed, so there were unlikely to be any crops grown there this year. But this was not good news. "If the secret gets out that we're the source of arcanium, we may have foreign invaders to deal with at some point soon."

"When the messenger arrives, tell him his masters are mistaken about what they heard about our mineral wealth. Say we have nothing. And we need nothing from them. But I'll pay a handsome sum of platinum for a magical courier to take me to Lyr."

"As you wish, my lord," Cai said, exiting the room.

The second letter made Dirk's heart race as he tore it open. He recognized the stallion stamped into the red wax seal. This was from the duke who ruled Kastania - Camerand's largest, richest province. He smiled to himself as he read it. It had taken a very long time to negotiate the province's surrender in secret. He had left Kastania largely unmolested by his army in the adjacent kingdom of Tronin.

The Kastanian duchal family - who were themselves Greystones - would be given safe passage to Baaldorf, or to flee Aperans if they preferred. They could take with them whatever they could carry. And they would sign off on a public acknowledgment that they had been unlawful possessors of the duchy, which rightfully belonged to the Blackpool family through Dirk's marriage to Zyrdicia.

The current rulers of Kastania acquired it when Ellington Kastania, the last true Duke of Kastania, died without any progeny and his lands passed to Philonius Greystone. Ellington had one daughter who went missing about a hundred and seventeen years ago. Dirk had figured out that the Ellington's daughter, Korinna Kastania, had fled to Lyr, pregnant by a demon and died there at the hands of Crusaders - led by Philonius. So the province rightfully belonged to Korinna's only child, and Philonius had been a usurper.

Fortunately for Dirk, there were volumes of documentation from Lyr about Korinna's arrival, Zyrdicia's birth, and the names of the leaders of the Crusaders. Portia had provided him with it months ago. It had been an easy thing to put the pieces together - but a hard thing to keep from Zyrdicia. She would have been enraged by his meddling in her past.

He had worked very hard at not thinking about this undertaking whenever she had been in his presence. No one else in the castle knew about it. She was an excellent mind reader, and he had wanted to avoid the inevitable confrontation that would follow her discovery of the theft of her birth records.

He had started the project with the notion of having the power transfer in Kastania completed by Spring. Her birthday was on the magical holiday that fell on the last day of April. He had planned to give it to her - along with the pieces of the puzzle she didn't know about the real reason the Crusaders came to Lyr and killed her mother.

Thinking of her now rekindled a familiar ache. They had been so close to reconciling on so many occasions, and always anger and mistrust ruined it. He had experienced a bout of private rage at himself for having reacted so badly when he awoke from the coma and found her ruling his kingdom, and his castle under attack.

He wondered whether she might be right about her observation in her last letter to him that they were toxic for one another. He shook his head silently, refusing to permit the possibility. The idea of living til the end of his days without her made it very difficult for him to draw breath.

The threat of the Council of Magic made his need to see her all the more acute. She had to be warned of their plot against her. Even if she didn't want to see him, at some point, he expected that she would come to Geshna to see her temple or to steal arcanium from the mines. And then there was the lure of the Hell Window and Azriok. Tristan Ildewynd had told Dirk everything about that place - under torture. As a servant of Azriok, Tristan had earned himself an especially painful death.

Sometimes Zyrdicia's absence felt especially cruel to Dirk. This was one of those moments. He was able to manage fine, most of the time. There was a rumor circulating that they were on the verge of reconciling. The rumor quelled the rebellious urge among his troops, but it did nothing to mollify Dirk's own psyche.

Occasionally when he was alone, the sadness was nearly overwhelming. It was as though joy had been burned out of his world. He found nothing funny anymore. And he especially couldn't bear to see others happy. Geoffrey's budding romance with his "captive" Princess Arial Baaldorf had nearly brought Dirk into a murderous fury. They avoided him now, which was better for all concerned.