Magebane by Lee Arthur Chane Page B

Great Hall. Over the course of the winter the swirling wind had pushed the snow into deep drifts, some as high as Brenna’s head, all around the walls, but had left the worn cobblestones in the center exposed, though covered with ice. Sometime since she had looked out through the window of her room the snow had stopped falling. Heavy gray clouds continued to scud overhead like boats on one of the Seven Fish, the long, narrow lakes strung like a fisherman’s catch on a line along the bottom of the Grand Valley that sheltered the estate, but patches of blue sky showed between the clouds. Not a blizzard, then , Brenna thought. Just a line of flurries.
    Which meant she didn’t have to confine herself to moping around the manor grounds. She could safely go down to the lakeshore, or up the hill. It didn’t really matter. Just being out of the house for a while always made her feel better, freer . . .
    The hill , she decided. She felt the need for an expansive view.
    A small, heavy door opened through the wall next to the big padlocked freight gate. The door was bolted but not locked. The manor’s walls were more for show than anything else, since no one but another MageLord would dare to steal from a MageLord, and walls offered no protection against that sort of attack. Not that Brenna could imagine anyone, Commoner, Mageborn or another of the Twelve, daring to attack Lord Falk.
    She unbolted the door and pushed it open, grunting a little as she forced it through the drifted snow on the other side. She slipped out and glanced up and down the blank expanse of the manor’s back wall. Except for the gate and door from which she had just emerged, there were no other openings in the wall on this side of the manor—which made it that much easier for her to escape unseen.
    Around the front, the manor boasted ornamental shrubs, shrouded in canvas this time of year; statuary that, being mostly of the heroically nude variety, currently looked both silly and uncomfortable; and, most impressively, a magical, multicolored fire fountain that played one of a selection of tinkly musical tunes whenever someone passed by. Utterly impractical and an enormous waste of magical energy, it had been installed by one of Falk’s more ostentatious predecessors as a way of proclaiming that here dwelt a MageLord. Brenna had long wondered why Falk had not had it pulled out.
    This side of the manor actually seemed to fit Falk’s personality better: a few distinctly nonornamental shrubs, a few winding graveled paths (all currently buried under snow, of course). Brenna grinned a little. All right, maybe that weird limestone sculpture of a giant frog doesn’t exactly say “Lord Falk,” she thought. But the rest of it: plain, direct, utilitarian. That was Falk to a tee.
    Beyond the manor’s outer fence of black iron, perhaps fifty yards away, a forest of aspen, birch, and pine began, but it spread only halfway up the tall, round-shouldered hill that backed the manor before petering out into shrubs and then into undisturbed snow, the smooth white surface marred only by the occasional rocky outcropping.
    Brenna trudged toward the fence, the snow, calf-deep everywhere and over her knees in spots, pulling at her legs. The newest layer, fluffy as eiderdown, covered the hard crust left behind by the recent thaw. Below that were layers of old snow, strata marking every storm of the long winter.
    The wind, though it whipped long, ghostly tendrils of snow around her feet, lacked the bitter bite of midwinter: cold, certainly, but not the knifelike unbearable cold of winter’s depths, the life-stealing cold that could freeze exposed flesh in less than a minute. When that kind of cold settled over the land, no one went out any more than could be helped, and then only for short periods of time.
    This, though . . . this she could bear all day, warmly dressed as she was. The relative warmth was the first whisper of spring,