Greenflower Magewar

The Greenflower Magewar was the first formally-named Magewar fought in the Five Duchies since the fall of the Magocracy and the deepest personal catastrophe of Minalan's career. Dranus, who knew the legal history of the Arcane Orders better than anyone, was the one who put the technical name on it.

The conspiracy

The plot was a convergence of three motives behind one operational programme:

• Baron Dunselen of Greenflower: aged former court wizard turned magelord, head of the Academic Order, ambitious to break the Arcane Orders' control of irionite distribution. Princess Rardine had matched him to Isily as a wedding-political gift.
• Baroness Isily: Family operative, the woman who had assassinated Duke Lenguin at Timberwatch on Queen Grendine's orders, the bearer of two daughters by Minalan (the first conceived on Family orders, the second out of her own obsession). She was operating the Greenflower scheme as a magelord-breeding programme: nine-plus children fathered by Talented men under coerced or compelled circumstances, raised in a secret nursery at Castle Salaisus, intended to develop strong witchstone-binding talent through selective breeding.
• Nothoua / "Lady Mask": the renegade warmage Minalan had defeated and stripped of her stolen witchstone in the Penumbra the previous year. Believed dead at her gurvani masters' hands; in fact alive, allied with Isily through Enshadowed intermediaries, motivated by personal hatred of Minalan. She wanted him dead; Isily wanted his wife dead; they pooled resources.
• Enshadowed contacts: human collaborators of the gurvani who supplied material and intelligence. Their long-term aim and Mask's converged: Sheruel's shadowmage networks gained from any blow to Sevendor.

The exposure and Mask's capture

The conspiracy unraveled in Enchanter through a chain of small leakages. Sire Ganulan (Sire Gimbal's bastard, still alive and bitter) reported overhearing "Lady Mask" used as a war-name in his service and named her real identity. Mask herself then made her move on Alya inside Spellgarden: she infiltrated the household, was confronted personally by Minalan and Alya, and was defeated in a knife-and-spear duel in the family quarters. Daisy, the household's Tal Alon nursemaid, raised a piercing keening cry that brought every Tal in the house running in defence of the children. Mask, wounded in the shoulder, was taken alive. The two thuggish cutthroats with her were killed.

Mask was unmasked and named: Nothoua. Minalan refused her execution, even after she confessed she had been working to kill Alya. He held her under truthtell and extracted everything she knew about Isily, including the location of the conspiracy's operating base — Castle Salaisus, an outlying domain southwest of Greenflower — and the nature of what was kept there (the laboratory and the nursery). Nothoua was then put in a cell at Brestal Tower to await disposition. (Years later, after rehabilitation under the Estasi Order, she would marry Azar — but that is the business of Marshal Arcane, not this war.)

Nothoua's own parting words to Minalan, in the cell: "If you do go to Castle Salaisus, Spellmonger, and face your jilted love, don't expect to ever return!"

The reconnaissance

Lorcus, in his packtrader-merchant disguise that he had run successfully through Greenflower for months, located Castle Salaisus quickly: an older limestone castle built a hundred and fifty years before by a Cormeeran knight, with a circular keep, a secondary tower, a great hall, an uncrennellated curtain wall, a moat, and minimal modern defences. Isily had been counting on secrecy, not fortification.

Lorcus set up a Waystone in the stable of a neighbouring manor three miles away. Gareth handled the logistics. The team moved men and equipment through the Waystone overnight. After considering multiple subtle approaches, they chose the direct one: they did not need to be subtle.

The night assault

The assault force comprised most of Sevendor's warmage corps and a Hesian-Horkan task force: Pentandra coordinating wards, Lorcus on the soporific perimeter sweep, Bendonal the Outlaw and Tyndal handling escaping sentries, Rondal in the great-hall sweep, Dara and her squadron extracting non-combatants. The hall fell quickly. The sentries went down to Lorcus's wide-area soporific. The Greenflower defenders fought harder than expected in the inner halls but were outclassed by the warmage corps.

Nine babies were rescued from the nursery and the older children from a separate hall in the bailey. Rondal was wounded (not seriously). Rondal afterwards warned Minalan of something important: Castle Salaisus itself had been transformed by some long working — Isily and Dunselen had bound the central keep to the Otherworld, in a small-scale and inverted echo of what would become the Snowstone Effect. The transformation enabled certain sorceries the Greenflower conspirators had been refining, including their magelord-breeding programmes.

The climax

Alya had accompanied her husband into the field, in her armour, very much against every safe convention. She had insisted on coming once it was clear the conspiracy had been targeting her personally and the children's lives. She also, by this point, was pregnant with their third child.

In the central keep Isily had constructed a sophisticated lacis, a thaumaturgical net binding multiple witchstones into a single compound source of power, including Dunselen's witchstone (which she had silently usurped, channeling his power through her own working without his knowledge). When Minalan reached her in the storm-lashed climax of the engagement, Isily had Alya at her side with a dagger to her throat, and Isily's lacis was deflecting everything Minalan threw at her through the Snowflake. Dunselen himself was somewhere else in the keep and remained connected only through the stone in the lacis.

Alya broke the standoff herself. "I love you Minalan!" she called, and brought the pommel of the broken dagger Isily had given her down on one of the witchstones in the lacis. The shattering of a bound witchstone in an active lacis produced a wave of arcane trauma that:

• Destroyed Dunselen's mind through his still-connected stone and crushed part of his skull from the feedback.
• Reduced Isily's enneagram to vegetative function — her mind utterly destroyed, her body kept alive only by some residual arcane connection to the Otherworld through her own stone. Sent later to a convent in Greenflower, kept by the nuns there.
• Knocked Minalan unconscious.
• Was deflected from Alya by Briga and Ishi's direct intervention. Ishi had heard Minalan's and Alya's prayer for help; the keep's Otherworld binding made her manifestation easier than it would have been anywhere else. She protected Alya's life. She could not protect Alya's mind, which scattered into a tangle of broken threads, nor the unborn baby, which did not survive.

Alya emerged from Salaisus alive but functionally a child, her recent memories scattered, her identity as Minalan's wife and the mother of his children only partly reconstructable, her unborn baby lost.

Aftermath

Minalan moved Alya to the Abbey of Trygg, where the sisters could care for her in a quiet hall. Minalyan, his eldest, crawled into her lap on his first visit and she stared past him; he was upset enough that Minalan had to move her out of Sevendor Castle to spare the children. The medical attentions of Lilastien, the Magolith's slow restorative protocols (once the Magolith existed), and the Snowflake's eventual paracletic care became the framework of Alya's recovery across the next several volumes.

Dunselen's body was buried; Isily was sent to the convent. Minalan and Isily's infant son inherited the Barony of Greenflower, with the lands held in trust by the Arcane Orders until he came of age. The protective nature of the magelord-breeding spells appears to have spared the infants in the nursery any direct harm from the lacis blast.

Lorcus presented Minalan with four recovered witchstones, one of them charred and black: "With the compliments of the Baron of Greenflower."

Nothoua's thread

Nothoua's captivity at Brestal Tower was the end of "Lady Mask" as an antagonist. She was eventually rehabilitated into the Estasi Order as a Sevendor-bound warmage and proved herself in the Olum Seheri scouting mission with Tyndal and Rondal, in the Darkfaller raid, and in the Battle of Olum Seheri itself. The romance with Azar that produced their Megelin wedding in Marshal Arcane is, by some accounts, the strangest love story in the saga.

The legal precedent

Greenflower-Salaisus established several principles that the Arcane Orders had not before had occasion to write down:

• An irionite-armed magelord acting in conspiracy against the kingdom would be neutralised by force.
• Witchstone-breeding programmes outside Orders' regulatory control were a capital offence.
• Magical alliance with the Enshadowed was treason.
• The Spellmonger himself would lead such an assault personally.
• The Arcane Orders could confiscate and redistribute a magelord's holdings under their own disciplinary authority, without referring the matter to a ducal court.

Princess Rardine, who had matched Dunselen and Isily for her own reasons, was politically embarrassed by the conspiracy and would spend years quietly rebuilding her credibility on the magi question.