by Kate Elliott
The queen extended an arm, using the sword’s length to point toward the cottage. “Loremage, if you please, set it on fire. I tried to burn it down the day I found him here. But I couldn’t because the witch’s hex protects itself even in death, as we have seen today. Your magic leaches through spells, even ones set on you.”
“Indeed, indeed. Fortunate for us all that a spell-leaching hex was set on me as a child. The hex was meant to strip me of my magic and make me vulnerable and weak. Instead it made me into the loremage I am today. No magic can stick in my bones and thus I can wander the Wilds knowing most hexes and spells will not affect me, or not for long. I might have remained a crested eagle for the rest of my life if not for that! Strange how events do not always work out as we expect.”
A spray of flares and pops like fireworks sparkled inside the cottage. With a whoosh the structure went up in crackling, ferocious flames. A sickly thread of smoke swirled out of the well. It formed into the figure of a comely woman with long, pale hair and open, welcoming arms. Linden hissed between her teeth, expression tightening with old anger. But the smoke could not hold its shape. It unraveled into writhing strands and began to frantically circle the cottage as if desperately trying to put out the fire.
Linden’s jaw quivered as she turned away from the cottage burning in sullen fury. She held the blade over Algenus’s blond head, but she addressed her children.
“The day I found your father in this glade he was carrying a bucket to the well. He did not recognize my face nor did he know my name. So I kissed him. I truly loved him, enough to delay my quest for the high throne to find him when he went missing for so long. Him, or his remains. I just wanted to know.”
She pressed her lips together as memories chased through her head.
“My kiss woke him to himself. He realized he had spent a year in the witch’s thrall. That bucket he carried was awash with the blood of his own infant children. The witch is who birthed you, Rowan and Will. A witch who wanted a baby only because she desired innocent blood to brew an elixir that would give her a longer life. You were both dead when I found you, drained of the blood she intended to store in the well and drink as from a spring of immortality.”
“How…How could we have been dead?” Will whispered. Sweat broke on his face. His vision blurred as he stared at his hands. They were living hands, with callouses from training and a scar on his slightly crooked right pinky finger from the time it had gotten slammed in a closing door.
Rowan said nothing, fists pressed against her mouth as she stared at her living mother and her dead father.
“No one can gain five knighthoods without dying at least once. The Questing Beast knows this. Only the Questing Beast can forge a sword that can revive its wielder. One life is granted to those chosen for the royal quest. I gave the life in my sword to heal you two.”
“But if you gave the life to us, then is that why you never became High Queen?”
Linden brushed fingers against Rowan’s cheek. “My dear daughter, I made the only choice I could.”
“What happened to the witch?” said Will grimly.
His mother’s breath came slow, harsh, and uneven.
“She had hung his sword over the hearth, I suppose as an act of scorn and contempt. When he came to himself, he killed her with it and threw her and the sword down the well. I confess, he went out of his mind with shame and rage that day. He took my sword and rode into the Wilds. In his madness he did not care whether he died with no hope of revival. He desired only to regain his honor, for he felt sullied by what had happened to him. But I could not act so rashly, not with sickly twin infants who needed a mother. So I took you home.”
She swallowed.
“When Elowen brought me the news yesterday that you two had found him, and that he had been turned into a stag—as she had been into an eagle—I knew old instinct and the unresolved shame he has always felt would bring him here. The secret Ayara guessed at I know to be true. Before he fell prey to the witch, he had not died on his quest. Which means there is one life in this sword. I give it to him now.”
She pressed the flat of the blade to the crown of his head.
The flames roaring about the cottage abruptly flickered out, leaving a charred foundation. A gust of wind whirled through the threads of eerie smoke and tore them apart. As from a distance, a crow cawed mournfully, and then the sound ceased.
The sword began to glisten as hotly as if it was being newly forged in the magical furnace that had birthed it years ago. At the edge of the trees stalked a shadow with three long necks and three faces, one angry, one solemn, and one laughing.
“The Questing Beast!” Elowen cried. “I never thought I’d see it for myself!”
The sun’s light splintered the shadows, and after all no beast walked there at all; it was only a memory.
The sword’s glow swelled, expanding to touch every surface in the glade with gold.
The body on the ground took in a breath, and his eyes opened.
“Linden? Rowan? Will?” He pressed a hand to his forehead and, with a cough, sat up, then looked down at his blood-stained surcoat. The arrow lay on the ground, magically extracted from his body. “What happened? Where are we?”
Rowan lowered her hands. She was trembling. At first Will thought she was going to burst into tears and then he realized her terror and grief had transmuted into a storm of fury. “Why did you lie to us? Didn’t you trust us to know the truth? Wouldn’t that be the kind of thing you would want your children to know? By the way, Rowan and Will, the woman who gave birth to you was a witch, and her hex is bound into your very bones. Oh, and your father killed her after he’d been living with her for over a year. Thought you might like to know.”
Algenus Kenrith was renowned as a canny fighter, said to have a sixth sense for danger and a peculiarly keen ability to react at speed to changing surroundings. A glance acquainted him with Linden’s composed but wary expression, the burned cottage, Elowen’s stare of avid interest, the disenchanted sword, and his children.
“It isn’t always better to know every piece of an unpleasant truth if the events happened before you could be aware of them,” he said in the heartfelt, guileless voice he used habitually. Will had never quite been able to decide if the voice was an act or a genuine expression of his father’s character.
“You don’t think that’s something we needed to know!” Rowan shouted, gesticulating wildly. “That we deserved to know?”
“What good would it have done to tell you about a sordid episode you could do nothing to change? It makes no difference to our feelings for you and your brother, but were the truth to get out, it might make a great deal of difference to how other people treat you. And we didn’t want to take that chance.”
As he extended his hands, one to Rowan and one to Will, he and Linden exchanged a look, an unspoken trust shared between them across the years.
“We wanted to protect you,” their father finished with a rueful smile.
Will’s arm twitched. In a moment he would reach out and take his father’s hand. All would be forgiven. They had gotten the High King back, had they not? Their quest had succeeded. That was all that mattered.
Rowan pulled her hands in tight against her body. “Protect us!” she scoffed. “You were just protecting yourself.”
The High King winced as if a barb of truth had pierced his skin.
“Rowan,” said Linden sternly, “I think it best if—”
“No! It’s not even that you didn’t trust us. It’s worse than that, isn’t it? You were too ashamed to tell us! You were afraid people would find out about your sordid episode and judge you as not being the perfect, truthful, loyal, just High King everyone thinks you are. But Mother’s the one who saved our lives, at great cost to herself. You rode off because you cared more about your precious honor than you did about us!” She turned on Linden. “And you! You went along with it to spare his reputation! I don’t think either of you have any respect for us at
all.”
Rowan’s eyes blazed. She was going to do something rash and irrevocable. Just thinking about it made Will go dizzy and hot and cold in quick succession.
“Ro, calm down,” he said, grasping her arm. “This isn’t—”
A coruscating cascade of lightning spun up her arms and wove deep into her flesh until she was too bright to look at. Deep in his body a wave of bone-cold swelled outward, reaching for the lightning to join with it. Light and ice burst over them, onto them, through them.
The grip of a storm so powerful it could not be resisted ripped Will and Rowan away from the quiet dawn and the smell of embers. It was as if a door opened below them, or above them, and they fell upward, or outward, yanked into an utterly unfamiliar place that he comprehended instantly and horribly was not part of the Realm or the Wilds. Somewhere unfathomably far away from everything he knew and loved.
The last thing he heard before the world vanished was Garruk’s low whistle and the hunter’s rumbling voice, “Didn’t expect that.”
17
Garruk Wildspeaker’s mother had died when he was young. She’d been a retired soldier. Whatever she’d survived she hadn’t shared with her young son. The scars had been with her always, his father often told him, and she had worn them with weary fortitude. Garruk didn’t recall her well. He liked to think she would have had something of the stern discipline and firm compassion of Queen Linden.
The queen set down the sword as if it were no more valuable than a stick. She turned all the way around, shading her eyes. Her voice was composed but her hands were trembling.
“Where did they go? I know they were teaching themselves to coordinate their magic to fight with, but I didn’t know they could use it to…vanish.”
The High King got to his feet and picked up the sword. “Such a blessed weapon should not be cast carelessly upon the ground.”
“It’s just a sword, Kenrith,” she snapped. “Nothing, when compared to our children. It’s no wonder they’re angry. We should have told them long before this.”
“But we didn’t,” he said in the tone of a reasonable man who wants you to see how reasonable he is being. “Impressive bit of magic. We should be proud of them!”
“I’m always proud of them, but right now I’m really worried.”
He shook his head with a rueful smile. “If they’ve taught themselves to do that, then I’m sure they’ll be back the moment Rowan cools down. Her temper—”
“—is as volatile as yours.”
“I suppose I deserve that.”
Linden sighed and did not answer.
“It was an unusual magic the likes of which I’ve never seen before,” said the loremage. She sniffed the air, her nose twitching. “Never smelled anything like it either. Strange. Do you smell an ember?”
Linden’s eyes flared and she set hands on hips. “You burned down that cursed cottage at last, so yes, I smell the embers, and I’m glad to see everything that cursed witch built in ruins. I’m not sorry.”
But after the flood of words, her brow wrinkled as she glared at the glade, still empty of the two young people.
“Not the embers from the burned cottage.” The loremage began to walk in a widening spiral, pausing to sniff every few steps.
Garruk knew the loremage would find nothing. He listened to the forest, to the dawning day, to the rustling of creatures waking up, to the way a wild magic was woven through the heart of this plane and how the two sides who battled over it were opposing but also intertwined, impossible to untangle one from the other. The crows he’d called were dispersing into the wind. Oko’s trail—the flavor and color of his planeswalking—still lingered. The fey had no idea how easily Garruk could follow him and snuff out his ugly little life.
And yet, as much as Garruk wanted to wring Oko’s neck, or maybe just cut off his head with one satisfying blow, his mind was no longer ridden by the curse. The rot did not drive him. So he didn’t follow Oko. He waited, caught by the parents’ concern because it reminded him so painfully of his own beloved father.
The High King picked up the arrow, studied its deadly obsidian point, and pensively touched the still damp blood that blotted his tabard. Yet when Algenus Kenrith let out a sharp exhale, Garruk did not see a man contemplating his unexpected reprieve from death. He saw an anxious father who feared that, after all, he had not ever truly protected his children.
The High King looked straight at Garruk with the astute instinct of a quick-witted warrior. “Where do you think they’ve gone? You were with them, weren’t you?”
“I was. We followed the hunt.” He thought of Will and the cauldron, of Queen Ayara’s knowing smile and her air of mysterious attraction. She had guessed, but she hadn’t known for sure, and he wasn’t about to give up his own secrets.
“We’ve not been introduced. I’m Algenus Kenrith.”
“You are the High King,” said Garruk.
“I am, but right now I’m mostly concerned about being Will and Rowan’s father. Not to mention Erec and that troublemaker Hazel,” he added with a smile of such sweet fatherly affection that Garruk felt a sting in his own eyes, remembering what his own father had sacrificed to save his son. He hadn’t cried since he was a boy, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to cry now, but the tears felt earned and pure. “Do you have any idea of where the twins might have gone?”
“I think they’ve done what most young people do and set off on a quest of their own making,” said Linden with an impatient shake of her head. “I can’t help but worry but then I remember I left home the day I turned eighteen. You did, too, Kenrith. Or so you always told me. I hope you weren’t lying about that to impress me!”
He laughed suggestively, and she blushed a little.
“No. I couldn’t wait to get out of that boring town. Those two aren’t any different from us, are they, my love?”
“They set off into the middle of a magical storm at Wintertide because they were so desperate to find you. So I wouldn’t call our youthful situations quite the same. I’m afraid we have to allow them to live their lives now according to their wishes and not ours. They are free to quest, however much I might wish they would stay home where I can keep an eye on them. To be honest with you, Kenrith—”
“When were you ever not?” he said wryly.
“I don’t blame them for being angry. We should have been honest with them.”
She leaned over the well and looked down. Curious, Garruk stepped up beside her. The skeleton, complete with its skull, still lay at the bottom of the dry shaft, although no smoky tendrils lingered.
“Elowen,” said Linden, turning back, “how does one bury a witch to make sure she stays dead?”
“She’s dead all right. The smoke was her soul. It’s gone. As for the bones, lye will do. It will make quite an interesting experiment, don’t you think?” The loremage gave up her tracking and peered into the well, muttering under her breath about how many parts of this substance and how many of that, and how quickly bones might dissolve.
Garruk stepped away from the well. The forest beckoned, the beautiful wilderness where people did not chatter on about what could not be changed.
The queen took the hand of the High King. “We should go home, Kenrith. Let Castle Ardenvale know you are restored to the Realm. Let the twins do what they need to do. They’ll come home when they’re ready.”
The High King sighed again. “But how, and when? And what if…The Wilds is a dangerous place…I should have…They’re so young, Linden.”
“Stronger and smarter than I thought they would be,” remarked the loremage, her voice echoing weirdly from where she leaned over the well. “Though that lich knight did get Titus. And I don’t know what became of Cado and Cerise. The portal by the obelisks will have closed last night and won’t open again for a year. But on the other hand, we are a very long way from the heart realm now. Of course there must be some kind of magic that allows the hunt to cover so much ground in a single night. We’re closer to
Castle Ardenvale, not so far to fly, and in fact, you could easily have a griffin knight fly over this glade every day in case the twins return here. But for all we know, their spell has taken them home already. That could make the most sense. Wouldn’t that be a great trick for questing knights!”
“You haven’t changed at all, Elowen,” said Kenrith.
“I should hope not! And what happened to you, big man? Garruk? Is that your name? Will said you were an unwilling servant of the imposter. I’m minded to think Will was right about you. But something bigger than that’s changed about you. That curse afflicting you looked terribly strong, and it’s gone now. Just plain gone.” She cocked her head to one side rather as a crested eagle might, sighting a movement that could be prey.
Garruk thought of Will Kenrith being dragged down into the river’s depths by Garruk’s weight, refusing to let go.
Those two young ones had just been catapulted across the Multiverse. They’d have no idea what had happened or where they were or what it all meant.
“I’m free of the curse,” he said, figuring the loremage would believe he referred to Oko’s spell. She didn’t know about the Chain Veil or Innistrad or the Multiverse, and she never would. “I’m free to go where I wish. So I make a pledge to you, Algenus Kenrith and Linden Kenrith. I’ll track them, make sure they’re safe.”
“Why would you do that?” asked the High King with a glint of suspicion, sizing him up, gauging his chances for defeating a mysterious hunter and having the honesty to admit he would come up short.
Linden examined Garruk with her clear eyes and her honest heart, waiting for his answer.