She bit her lip again, hard enough to hurt. She could still retreat back to Cloisonné House. Take Karah with her—they’d both be so much safer if they slipped away again and nobody ever knew they’d been here. Karah might think she loved Prince Tepres, but how often could she even have met him, yet? Once, twice? Karah couldn’t really know him. He was a prince—not just some court noble’s left-hand son by a keiso wife, but a prince—not just a prince, but the prince, the heir—Nemienne bit her lip till it bled and told herself that her sister would even probably be better off if Prince Tepres was gone. She would meet somebody else, somebody less exalted, somebody safer to love.
But even while Nemienne was telling herself they should simply creep away again and flee back to Cloisonné House, she and Karah were quietly following the cats instead.
The voices became louder as they pressed ahead, but no more comprehensible. The weird echoes of these caverns kept layering words on top of words, until the constant rippling sound blurred to a meaninglessness like the sound of the sea.
The light that illuminated the caverns before them was different here. It was magelight, Nemienne knew. It seemed out of place here beneath Kerre Maraddras—harsh, almost offensive somehow. The stone was meant to shine under a gentler luminosity. Nemienne shuddered. She wanted so much to like Ankennes’s brilliant light, but she couldn’t. She wanted so much to trust her master, to believe that he knew what he was doing, that he was right. But she couldn’t do that, either.
The two girls picked their way toward the hard magelight through a sweeping cluster of fragile needles and spires. At last they emerged to find the voices much louder and more intelligible.
“… needn’t be so delicate,” Mage Ankennes was saying. His deep voice broke through the silence of the caverns like a stone dropped into water, and echoes came back and back again, some with a clear and rounded sound and others hissing and sibilant. “Do you think I’m unaware why Miennes died, or how? You weren’t so reluctant there, I believe.”
“And yet,” replied the lighter voice, “I find I have no wish to lay out a path to sorcerous death a second time to suit the whims of you ruthless Lonne conspirators. You might well consider again what happened to Lord Miennes.” It might have been Nemienne’s imagination that this voice, while sharp, produced echoes that wavered.
“That won’t happen to me,” Mage Ankennes said with assurance.
Nemienne was sure he was right. She might not know exactly what had happened to Lord Miennes, but she was absolutely certain that her master was far more clever. She wondered if the foreign sorcerer realized this, or if he’d been misled by Ankennes’s brawn into thinking the mage dull. She edged around the final curtain of stone, drawing her sister after her, and then at last the girls were able to see into the dragon’s chamber.
The black pool was unchanged. Everything else was different. Mage Ankennes had not carried simple lanterns into the dark, not this time; instead, he had set balls of harsh magelight here and there around the chamber. The white light glared mercilessly off the dragon’s sinuous form, making it look somehow more like stone than ever, flatter and less real.
Mage Ankennes stood nearest to the pool, his back to it and to the dragon. He held a staff in one hand. The staff was heavy and black, nothing Nemienne recognized. The mage looked tensely exultant. It was easy to see him as a man close to achieving his life’s great ambition.
A circle of light blazed on the stone before the mage, and within the circle stood Leilis and the Kalchesene sorcerer. Nemienne knew the man must be the foreign sorcerer because he was with Leilis, but he didn’t at all resemble the image Nemienne had had in her mind’s eye. She had imagined an old man, at least Ankennes’s age, with a scholar’s fine-drawn intensity. This man was young, not much older than Leilis. He possessed an unusual, long, sharp-featured face that instantly proclaimed him foreign, but he didn’t immediately look like a sorcerer. Leilis looked far more stern and proud than he. The Kalchesene only looked frustrated.
Within a separate circle, this one smaller and not so brilliant, stood another young man. Even without Karah’s intake of breath beside her, Nemienne would have known this man for the prince, for royalty was in the haughty set of his shoulders and back. He had pale hair caught back with a clip of jet, dark eyes that at the moment snapped with outrage, and a thin, arrogant mouth. He was standing very straight, his arms crossed over his chest and his jaw set.
“He looks so alone!” whispered Karah.
This, although she supposed it was true, would not have been Nemienne’s first thought. She hissed, “Shush!”