Hidden Warrior - Lynn Flewelling

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he’d first come here, the keep had been a tomb haunted by both the living and the dead. He and Iya had cajoled the duke into restoring it to a proper home for his child, and for a time it had been. It had become Arkoniel’s home, too, the first he’d known since leaving his father’s house.

      The place was falling back to rot and ruin now. The new tapestries and painted plaster already looked faded. The plate in the hall was tarnished with disuse, and spiders had reclaimed their kingdom in the rafters of the great hall. Without regular fires in most of the rooms, the whole place was once more damp and cold and dim. It was as if the boys had taken the very life from the place with them.

      He turned back to the desk with a sigh to complete the day’s notes. When the journal was safely locked away, he cleared up the wreckage of his latest failed efforts.

      He was nearly finished when something brushed softly past the door, no louder than a mouse’s whisker. Arkoniel caught his breath. The glass rod he’d been cleaning slipped from his fingers and shattered at his feet.

      Just a rat. It’s too early. Golden light still lingered in the eastern sky. She never comes down this early.

      Gooseflesh prickled his arms as he lit a candle and walked slowly to the door. His hand trembled and a rivulet of hot wax ran down over his fingers.

      Nothing there. Nothing there, he repeated, like a child in the dark.

      As long as Tobin and the others had been downstairs, he’d managed to hold his fear at bay, even when Bisir’s unexpected stay had trapped him up here for days on end. With others in the house, he didn’t mind so much the half-heard whispers in the corridor.

      Now that the second floor lay empty, however, his rooms were suddenly much too far from Cook’s warm kitchen and much too close to the tower door. That door had been locked since Ariani’s death, but that didn’t stop her restless spirit from wandering out.

      Arkoniel had climbed the tower stairs only twice since his first encounter with her angry ghost. Driven by curiosity and guilt, he’d gone up the day after Tobin left for Ero that first time, but felt nothing. Relieved but unsatisfied, he’d worked up the courage to return at midnight—the same hour Tobin had taken him there—and this time he’d heard Ariani weeping as clearly as if she were just behind him. Torn between fear and anguish, he fled and slept in the kitchen with the tower key clutched in his hand like a talisman. The next morning he threw it in the river and moved his bedchamber to the toy room downstairs. He would have shifted his workroom, too, but the furnishings were too heavy and it would have taken him the rest of the winter to carry down all the books and instruments he’d amassed. Instead, he resigned himself to keeping daylight hours.

      But today he’d lingered in the workroom too long. Taking a deep breath, Arkoniel gripped the latch and opened the door.

      Ariani stood at the end of the corridor, tears streaming down her bloody face, her lips moving. Frozen in the doorway, Arkoniel strained to hear, but she made no sound. She’d attacked him the first time they met after her death, but still he waited, wanting desperately to hear her words, to give some answer. But then she took a step toward him, face shifting to an angry mask, and his courage failed.

      The candle cast antic shadows around him as he bolted, then it went out. Squinting in the sudden darkness, he went down the stairs two at a time and missed his footing before his eyes could adjust. He trod air for an instant, then fell heavily, tumbling down the last few steps into the welcome lamplight of the second floor corridor. Resisting the impulse to look back, he limped quickly toward the stairs to the hall.

      One of these days he was going to make a ghost of himself.

      Lord Orun had left no heir. That being the case, his property went to the Crown, absorbed into the very Treasury he’d so ably administered. It had been, in Niryn’s estimation, the only good work the man had ever done. Orun’s exacting honesty when it came to his official duties had always amazed the wizard.

      The house and its furnishings were soon disposed of, and the new Treasury Chancellor installed. That left only Orun’s household servants to be dealt with, and few on the Palatine would have taken the gift of them.

      The more notorious spies were quietly put out of the way by those they’d helped compromise. Orun had had a passion for blackmail. Not for money—he had wealth enough of that sort—but for the sadistic love of control over others. Given that, together with his other unpleasant pastimes, none but a select few mourned his passing.

      And so his spies were poisoned or garroted in alleys, the prettier catamites whisked quietly away into certain other households, and the rest sent from the city with good references and gold enough to keep them away.

      Niryn followed these proceedings closely and had made a point of attending Orun’s burning. It was there that a young man standing among the few mourners caught his eye.

      His face was familiar and after a moment Niryn recognized him as a minor noble named Moriel, whom Orun had tried to force on the prince as a squire. Orun had left the fellow a small bequest in his will, no doubt for services rendered. He looked to be fourteen or fifteen, with a pale, bitter face and sharp, intelligent eyes. Curious, Niryn brushed the boy’s mind as they stood by the pyre and was pleasantly unsurprised at what he found there.

      The following day he sent the promising young fellow an invitation to dine with him, if his grief allowed. The messenger soon returned with the expected reply, written in the same purple ink his late protector had favored: Young Moriel would be delighted to dine with the king’s wizard.

      Iya was not sorry to see Orun out of the way, and had shared Tobin’s obvious relief when Chancellor Hylus appointed himself temporary guardian. She hoped Erius would leave the good old fellow in charge. Hylus was a decent man, a relic of the old times before Erius and his mad mother had tarnished the crown. As long as Erius still valued his counsel, perhaps Niryn’s sort would not triumph.

      She clung to that hope as she fastened the hated Harrier brooch to her cloak each day in Ero.

      She had to pass the Harriers’ headquarters when she left the Palatine. White-robed wizards and their grey-uniformed guard were always about in the yards around the old stone inn. It reminded her of a hornet’s nest and she treated it as such, passing on the far side of the street. She’d been inside only once, when they numbered her in their black ledger. She’d seen enough during that visit to know that a second visit would probably prove fatal.

      So she kept her distance and was circumspect in seeking out others like herself, ordinary wizards forced to wear the shameful numbered badge. There were far fewer in Ero these days and most of them were too frightened or suspicious to speak to her. Of all the taverns once patronized by their kind, only the Golden Chain was still open and it was full of Harriers. Wizards she’d known for a lifetime greeted her with suspicion and few offered her hospitality. It was a frightening change in the city that had once most honored the free wizards.

      She was wandering disconsolately through the half-deserted market in Dolphin Court one evening when she was suddenly engulfed by a searing blast of pain. Struck blind, she couldn’t hear or cry out.

      They have me! she thought in mute agony. What will become of Tobin?

      Then, as in a vision, she saw a face framed in white fire, but it wasn’t Tobin’s. Stretched with agony surpassing her own, the man seemed to stare straight into her eyes as the flesh shrank and sizzled on his skull. She knew that face. It was a wizard from the south named Skorus. She’d given him one of her tokens years ago and not thought of him since.

      The tortured face disappeared and she found herself sprawled facedown on the dirty cobbles, gasping for air.

      He must

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