“All right,” Michael replied. “All right. We’ve started. Redouble the Palace Guard first thing. There will be more attacks by assassins.” He’d never confessed that he had brought the Harish into the kingdom himself, then had let Abaca get control. Nor did he admit that he knew quite a bit about what Credence was doing. His goals were not those of either party to the fighting.

Abaca spent Harish assassins liberally. He kept the Crown’s forces at a standstill. Desertions plagued both sides. Norath, repeatedly attacked and twice more wounded by the Harish, not armed with his pride of monsters, and unable to cope with Abaca’s woodland guerrilla warfare, found an excuse to return to Hammad al Nakir. Megelin hadn’t fared well in his absence anyway.

Winter’s arrival saw the sides at a standoff. Inger controlled the cities and castles. Abaca controlled much of the countryside. Their soldiers showed little inclination to mix it up. They could see no reason to fight men with whom they had stood shoulder to shoulder during the Great Eastern Wars.

Michael became a man in the middle, playing a game with purpose and parameters known only to himself. Both sides believed he was their man. For a time. In reality he began fighting his own war, as a third force. It was touchy and dangerous, and he had to be alert every instant. Whatever he might pretend, he knew he had no real friends inside Kavelin. That cannibal bitch had eaten them all.

For the first time Michael knew fear. It was just a feather’s caress, and mainly fear of failure, but it was fear nevertheless. “Damn you, Bragi,” he muttered frequently, like an incantation. “Why did you have to go crazy at the end? Why did you have to run off on us?”

Sometime in the heart of winter, when neither Inger nor Credence was watching, Michael disappeared. He reappeared only rarely, at random, in unpredictable places. As Derel Prataxis had observed on his deathbed, Michael Trebilcock had his own shadow empire and shadow government. He simply slipped off into that shadow world, where his own people served with unquestioning loyalty, both to him and to the dream. They were almost everywhere, and were as spectral as he.

He became an invisible boulder in the stream of war, unseen but felt, and feared by everyone. No one could fathom his motives, but he had to be accounted for in every plan. He remained there, like that rock. Backs had to be watched. Unwritten rules, apparently benefiting Kavelin as a whole, had to be observed. He who ignored Michael did so at his peril.

Michael’s war was intended to buy time. He knew something the other principles did not. Only Kristen, Sherilee, and Ragnarson’s children shared the secret.

Buying time. Awaiting a chance to wake the cruel storm that would be put paid to relentless ambition and bickering for all time… that was what Michael called the inevitable. The cruel storm.