In the end, it was a poor disguise, not because of the clothes, but because Jenine didn’t walk like a man, and couldn’t learn in the few moments Dorian was willing to spare trying to teach her. But if she didn’t look like a man, she didn’t look like a princess either. They’d just have to hope everyone was distracted.
15
Feir had asked for two hours to get Lantano Garuwashi’s sword out of Ezra’s Wood. He had no idea how much of that time had passed. In fact, he couldn’t remember how he’d come here. He looked up at the towering sequoys stretching to the sky.
Well, at least, he knew where here was. He was definitely in Ezra’s Wood. He looked at his hands. Both of them were scraped and his knees hurt, as if he’d fallen. He touched his nose and could tell it had been broken and then set properly. There was still crusty, dried blood on his upper lip.
Dorian had told him stories about men who’d taken a blow to the head and forgot themselves, either forgetting everything before the blow, or more commonly completely losing the ability to remember anything at all after the blow. They could meet a person, the person would walk out of the room, and five minutes later ret ner urn and be greeted as a stranger once more. For several moments Feir felt a panic rising inside him at the very thought, but aside from his nose, his head didn’t feel as if he’d taken a blow. He could remember leaving Lantano Garuwashi, he could remember approaching the vast bubble of magics that surrounded Ezra’s Wood, and he could remember the turmoil within those magics as—miles to the east—the Lae’knaught had entered the Wood and been trapped within it. Feir had used that turmoil as a distraction for his own attempt. But from that point, he could remember nothing.
He was facing the bubble now, as if he was leaving. He took a few more steps, disoriented and came around the trunk of another giant sequoy. Before him, not fifty paces away, just outside the magic, were Lantano Garuwashi and, oddly, Antoninus Wervel.
Maybe I have gone mad. Antoninus Wervel was a red mage, one of the most powerful and most intelligent men to walk the halls of Sho’cendi in decades. He was a fat Modaini man, and he’d been a casual friend for years. To see him sitting awkwardly cross-legged beside Lantano Garuwashi, who sat as gracefully as he did everything, was surreal.
Then the men saw Feir and both rose. Antoninus called something out, but though he was only forty paces away now, Feir couldn’t hear him.
Feir walked straight to the wall of magic. Whatever clever magic he’d used to get into the Wood, it obviously hadn’t been clever enough. He was alive only by the forbearance of whatever it was that lived here. So Feir walked straight through the magic. It slid around him, and for a moment, he could swear something in the Wood felt amused.
Then he was out.
“What are you doing here?” he asked Antoninus Wervel.
Antoninus laughed. “You escape the Wood, something no mage has done in seven centuries, and you ask what I’m doing?”
“Do you have my sword?” Garuwashi demanded.
Feir was carrying a pack strapped to his back that he hadn’t been carrying when he entered the Wood. “Him first,” he said.
Antoninus lifted his kohled eyebrows, but said, “I came with a delegation from Sho’cendi to recover Curoch. After the Battle of Pavvil’s Grove, the delegation turned back. They were sure that if Curoch had been present in such a desperate battle with so many magi and meisters present, that someone would have tried to use it. No one did, so they decided to backtrack and follow other leads. The truth is, I don’t think Lord Lucius trusts everyone in our delegation. He and I don’t care for each other, but he knows where my loyalties lie, so he released me. So now it’s your turn, Feir. Did you recover Ceur’caelestos?”
The Modaini was too damn smart. Feir could tell that the man had put together Feir, who’d held one nearly mythical sword, with the appearance of another nearly mythical sword and found no coincidence.
Feir opened the pack. There was a note inside with directions and instructions, written awkwardly, as if the hand writing it had been writing in an unfamiliar language. Feir read it quickly and remembered bits and pieces of what had happened in the Wood. Setting the