Chapter 1
Something hit the side of the carriage so hard it tipped to one side, teetering for a moment on the verge of falling before crashing back onto all four wheels. Our forward momentum lurched, slowed, and halted completely as the carriage continued to shudder and rock.
I picked myself up from the far side of the vehicle, where I had been thrown by the violent movement. Thankfully I was riding alone, or I would have ended up with a pile of others on top of me.
If any of my family members had accompanied me—as they had wanted to do—they would no doubt have now told me to stay safely inside while they investigated the disturbance. But since they weren’t present to baby me, I thrust open the carriage door and clambered down without obstruction.
“Your Highness! Get back inside!” barked a familiar voice.
I sighed. I wasn’t entirely free of cautious protectors yet.
“What was that?” I asked Captain Layna.
When a scan of the immediate area didn’t reveal any obvious sign of attack, I frowned back at the side of the carriage. The section that had taken the hit was easily visible, the paneling splintered and caving inward. The damage stopped just short of an actual hole, faint traces of power lingering on the wood.
I spun back around. “Mages? An attack?”
I gave my surroundings a more thorough examination. Although there was no visible sign of it in the air, I could sense the power that now enclosed us in a large bubble. As royalty, I was so used to being shielded that I had hardly registered its presence earlier. No doubt the captain had released a shielding composition the moment after the attack hit. We hadn’t been expecting trouble on our own side of the border, or we might have already had one in place.
“Princess Verene, I really must insist you return to the carriage,” Layna said in a pained voice.
I continued to ignore her. Nothing lay ahead of us on the road in the direction of Bronton, no enemies appearing to spring an ambush or follow up their attack. I looked back the way we had come instead and recognized our location.
I frowned. “That’s the Wall. But I thought they cleared this section already. And we didn’t leave the road, so it should be safe anyway.”
Ever since we left the capital, we’d been surrounded by ripe fields, stretching out on either side of the West Road. But here, the ground lay barren for a wide strip, spearing out on both sides, perpendicular to the road.
I winced at the sight of the dark, dead land, so stark after the colorful growth we’d been passing through for so long. Here was a visual reminder of why I was being sent away from my home and everyone I knew and loved. Even after more than twenty years of peace, a barrier lay between my home kingdom of Ardann and our western neighbors and long-term enemies, Kallorway. But as the aging Head of the Armed Forces liked to remind my parents, the war had raged for longer than the peace had so far held. It took time to heal such scars.
Time, and apparently effort and sacrifice. And I was the chosen sacrifice.
I shook my head at the morbid thoughts. I should be grateful my aunt, Queen Lucienne, had finally found a way I could be useful, however unpleasant this particular prospect seemed.
I refocused my attention on the strip of land that had once been the Wall. It had taken a full twenty years of peace for the people to be ready to see it dismantled, so the work had only recently begun. I had come this way with my family a few times as a child, on our way to visit the fortified border town of Bronton and the Abneris River which was the official border with Kallorway.
I called up a picture of how the Wall had looked then: a wide stretch of jagged rocks butting right up to the road on either side, the stones too large and sharp to allow either vehicles or horses to cross. And while I had never ridden its whole length, I knew it had once stretched all the way along the river from the great northern forests to the tip of the southern forest. Only Bronton and a few border settlements, instrumental to the war effort, had stood between the Wall and the Abneris. The barrier had funneled all traffic to the border through this one road and had been the only reason Ardann had managed to keep the war contained to the border region for so long.
The clearing efforts had begun at the road and spread outward, and only a scattering of smaller rocks were left as far as I could see southward. But when I squinted north, I could see a patch of cleared dirt that grew steadily more rocky. Several distant figures milled around the point where the stones grew to full size. It looked like on this side, at least, the clearing crews were still within sight of the road.
The six people had stopped whatever work they had previously been engaged in and were milling together in what looked like confusion. One had an arm raised, pointed in our direction, and despite the distance, I thought I could see concern on their faces. After another moment, they all took off together, in a huddled mass, jogging in our direction.
I watched them come warily. Something wasn’t right with the scene, although I couldn’t put my finger on what. Beside me, Captain Layna stirred uneasily.
“Where’s their mage?” she asked, identifying the wrong note with the scene.
The Wall had never been merely a collection of sharp rocks. Such a barrier couldn’t have hoped to keep back the might of the Kallorwegian war mages. It had been created not with the labor of commonborns but with the effort of a hundred creator mages. When they moved the stones into place, they had bound them and strengthened them with power. And in the three decades of war that had followed, every newly graduated mage in the kingdom had spent a two-year term at the front lines, adding their own workings to the ones left by the creators of the Wall. Over the years, it had become a patchwork of power—a death-trap with no key or even record of the deadly dangers lurking within.
There was a reason—beyond our mistrust of the Kallorwegians—that no one had been eager to attempt dismantling it. And there had certainly been no talk of assembling a hundred mages to undertake the difficult task. Mage numbers were too few to be diverted for such a purpose during times of peace.
But the work had been going on for many months now, a slow and steady process undertaken by teams of commonborns working with a mage. The commonborns did the physical work of moving the stones only after the mage had painstakingly cleared each small portion of lingering workings. But the men racing toward us were clearly all commonborns, and I could see no sign of a mage robe anywhere.
My muscles clenched, and I rose onto my toes, poised for action, as the reality of the situation hit me. We hadn’t been attacked at all—at least not with any intent. The commonborn clearing team had triggered an old working, and we had been the unfortunate targets of its aggression.
My eyes picked out one of the commonborns who lagged well behind the others, both hands clutched around his chest. It looked like we weren’t the only victims. And if they had reached an untouched section of the Wall, then there could be more danger still to come.
I took several steps toward the approaching workers, who were still outside the protection of our shield, but Layna darted forward to stop me. Using her unique privilege as my personal guard, she grabbed at my arm, pulling me to a halt.
“No, Your Highness,” she said firmly.
No doubt she had intended to follow the words with a lecture about my safety, but her words stopped, both of our heads whipping toward the approaching workers, although there was nothing to see but their running forms.