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All was suddenly quiet. Tressalara’s blood chilled. She scrabbled at the edges of the wood, trying with all her might to open the panel. It wobbled slightly but did not give. Eons passed while she tried to work it free, and there was nothing but silence from the other side. Then the hidden catch gave, and the panel slowly rolled back.
The chapel was dim. The great candelabra lay on their sides, flames extinguished, among the holy icons broken on the floor. Only the ruby glow of the altar lamp illumined the chamber. “Father?”
Silence. She moved cautiously around the altar. Something skittered beneath her foot. She stooped and picked up a stone. No, a small green jewel winking at her in the half light, its center carved in the shape of an eye. She had seen it somewhere before.
Tucking it in the leather bag she wore inside her smock, she looked around. In the faint red glow, she spied the painted panel of Saint Ethelred propped against the altar. Blood dripped from the saint’s painted breast. It ran in a thin diagonal line toward a dark piece of cloth on the ground.
Tressalara’s breath caught. Not cloth, but a pool of blood, widening as she watched. She pushed the panel aside. “Ah, no! Father!”
How small he looked, how diminished in his bloodied robe. Cradling him in her arms, she felt for a pulse. His eyes, so like her own, flickered open.
“Foul…treachery,” he whispered faintly. “I had been warned but I thought…I could not believe the reports…thank God and Saint Ethelred…I had the foresight to hide…the Andun Crystal.”
She refused to see that he was dying before her eyes. “Save your strength. I’ll hide you in the passageway…seek out help from our loyal soldiers…. You can send a messenger to Morania, asking for the duke’s assistance…”
His voice came out in a harsh, choking whisper.
“Child, I waited too long to find you a husband. You must take the Andun Stone, daughter, and flee to Morania. The duke has…several sons. Even without a kingdom you are…beautiful. One of them will surely…take you to wife.”
“I will not flee! Nor will you. We will stay and fight for our people!”
Varro gave a liquid cough, and the blood seeped through the fingers that Tressalara held to his chest to cover his wound. She put her cheek against her father’s and was shocked to feel how icy it was. Her tears mingled with his.
“So…cold…” he whispered, as if talking to himself.
Tressalara could fool herself no longer. She rose slowly and found a cushion to put beneath his head, a piece of fallen tapestry to cover him and hold the last bit of warmth in his bones. Her grief and the enormous responsibility of what it meant to be truly royal fell upon her shoulders like a cloak of lead. She could scarcely bear the weight of it. Her knees buckled, and she grasped at the panel for support, lowering herself to his side once more.
“You will be all right,” she lied. “Your loyal troops will overcome the enemy. I will stay here and guard you until they come.”
He clutched at her hand. His face was gray, and his eyes seemed focused on some distant sight. “You are brave, Tressalara. Too headstrong…but no one can fault you for your courage.”
His head sank upon his breast, and the ominous red stains on his tunic grew and coalesced. His breathing was ragged and irregular. “I must leave you now,” he said.
Tressalara cradled him in her arms. “No! Ah, saints!” She could see the life ebbing from him second by second. “Father, I swear to God Most High that your sacrifice will not be in vain. I will do anything that is necessary to rally the people and destroy Lector. I will avenge you!”
He looked at her and gave a little sigh: “Ah, Tressalara, If only you had been born a son…”
Silence filled the chapel. Tressalara was suddenly alone in the chapel with the dregs of her life around her and the taste of bitterness on her tongue.
2
In the Cavernsof Mist, an apprentice sorceress and an apprentice wizard watched the tragic scene in their crystal globe. “Poor Tressalara,” Niniane said sorrowfully, touching the princess’s image in the glass. She turned her head away to hide a tear, and her white draperies swirled like moonbeams. “And poor King Varro.”
Her companion hunched his skinny shoulders, and his spangled cloak shivered with dark light. “It’s all your fault,” Illusius accused. “If you hadn’t mixed that eye of newt with the bladderwort syrup…”
“I?”Niniane exclaimed with icy hauteur. “Iam not the one who broke the flask of Yann and loosed the spell that bound up Myrriden.”
“Yes, but if there hadn’t been newt and bladderwort lying about everywhere, it wouldn’t have exploded the way it did and—“
The two glanced uneasily at the rear of the cavern, where the great wizard Myrriden was encased in a sheet of glittering Spell-Ice as clear as glass. Although Myrriden was supposed to be in a deep sleep from the spell gone awry, his gray eyes were wide open. They seemed to stare at his erstwhile students in either fury or resignation, depending upon the light. At the moment a bubble of ice glimmered like a tear on the old man’s cheek.
Niniane turned hastily away, tugging at one of her silvery curls.
“Oh, hush! We won’t get anywhere if we don’t stop arguing about it. If only we could discover the spell that would release us from these caverns, I would find a way to save the princess.” She sighed. “But we can’t. So you must continue to assist me in going through these endless mounds of spellbooks until we find a way to unfreeze Myrriden. Then he can use his mighty powers to enable Tressalara to save her people.”
“We’ve been at it for ten human years now.” The apprentice’s dark brows drew together in a scowl as he scanned the stacks and stacks of cobwebbed tomes stretching up into the darkness of the cavern’s mile-high roof. At their current rate of reading, it should only take, oh, about another human century. Or two. “I need time to study for the apprentice examination. Why should I even have to get involved? She’s notmyhuman.”
“Hah! You’re so lazy and selfish you’ll never make senior wizard! No wonder you don’t have a human of your own to guard.”