Free The Margrave by Catherine Fisher Page A

in archways and battlements. “And they must take this message with them, to everyone they meet. Spread it wide, my friends! The Crow has returned to Anara! The Crow is here, and he has gathered his army, and Alberic is with him! No more running and hiding in the dark! From this day, together, we will begin the destruction of the Watch!”
    He spread his arms wide. Awen-power crackled and spat at his fingertips; it made Alberic jump back in sudden alarm. Long blue tendrils of Maker energies soared into the air above the courtyard, coiling and intertwining in the form of an immense black bird, darkening the upturned faces, swelling until it hung like an ominous cloud over the whole Castle of Halen, wingtip to wingtip. Then it faded, slowly, without a sound. There was a vast silence. Until the crowd roared, a great outcry of delight and amazement and joy.
    Alberic’s face was white. He stalked back into the room, and above the uproar outside, he turned and rounded on Galen. “You’ve finished me!” he hissed. “Once the Watch hear of this, they’ll hunt us down like rats! They’ll never stop!”
    “They’ll think you and I planned it all together,” Galen said, folding his arms. “It seems you’ve finally been converted, Alberic. I always told you it would come to this. And one day you’ll thank me for it.”
    At the back of the crowd Raffi felt a sudden anxious pull at his sleeve. It was Milo. He looked scared. “Does your master have a bad temper?” he hissed.
    “Terrible.” Raffi was fascinated by Alberic’s screeching rage.
    “Then is this a good time to give him the letter?”
    “What letter?”
    “The girl’s.”
    For a second Raffi was utterly still. Then he turned. “ What girl?” he breathed.

9
    Swear no oaths.
Oaths are chains on the soul.
     
    Poems of Anjar Kar
    R AFFI GRABBED THE BOY and hustled him out into the corridor. “Show me!”
    Milo searched his pockets and found a grimy piece of paper. “She knocked me out,” he said sullenly. “After all I did for her!”
    Raffi stared down at the dirty sheet, then turned to find some light. The boy trailed after him, complaining bitterly. “I helped her out on the road. They treated her roughly, and I stood up for her. Got water for her. Even warned her about Uncle’s plan. How was I to know she was a spy?”
    “Shut up,” Raffi said fiercely. He tried a door and it opened. The room seemed full of light. A movement ahead made him jump, until he saw it was his own reflection, grimy and cobwebbed in a vast mirror that leaned in front of a stack of others.
    Behind him, the spotty boy peered in. “Don’t like this room,” he muttered.
    But Raffi was too interested in the paper. It was a list, a roster of some sort. On the back a few words had been scrawled in a hurried line that blotted and smudged and broke off abruptly. And it was in code. It looked like Carys’s writing.
    “Did she say it was for Galen? What did she say!”
    The boy wandered in. He rubbed the dust from a mirror with his finger. “Yes. For the keeper. Then she knocked me out.”
    “Was anyone else there?”
    “The castellan. And Captain Quist.”
    Raffi turned. “He brought you in.”
    Milo nodded. “She didn’t want them to know, because she whispered it and shoved the paper in my pocket.” He examined a bruise on his face in the dusty glass, jutting his jaw this way and that. “Then she knocked me out.”
    “I’ll knock you out,” Raffi snapped, “if you say that again.” He tried to think. Why had she gone with them? What was going on? And if the Sekoi was right, why had she gotten herself deliberately captured? He looked up. Thirty other Raffis looked up too.
    The chamber was a labyrinth of mirrors. They were stacked in great piles, higher than his head. Milo was climbing one heap like a ladder, up into the dim vaults. Glass slabs gleamed; they were slanted, forming archways and tunnels, and in the thousands of reproductions of the room, only light