His mind ticked back to times past. He had tried to destroy it—the stone of power his wife had found, the stone of source. She hadn’t known what it was, of course, and he hadn’t told her. He had simply sent a servant to relieve her of it. It had killed that servant, and in the few days Crespin had possessed it, he had found himself weakened. He had taken it to the place of treasures. There he had brought forth the gram of precious Pallium that had been panned from the River Rylen. Pallium was a metal of containment. Crespin had been hoping to use it to protect himself as Tomar had. But such things could wait. Containing the Sourcestone could not.
Magically, he had crafted the bits of metal into four thin prongs on which he placed the stone. The prongs clamped around the gem, holding it fast and dulling its strength.
Crespin smiled, feeling better in the memory. Being born the son of a court magician may have been a lowly position, but that magic—honed and perfected—had served him well during the years of his reign.
Crespin sighed and folded himself into the down-filled blankets, the clean sheets soft against his tired, wolken body. At least there were some perks to ruling.
He was drifting to sleep when he saw her, not Loerwoei whom he had wished to meet in his dreams, but the awful other. She sat perched on his windowsill like an enormous owl, staring with her ill-paired eyes. He rolled over, hoping to change the dream to something more pleasant, but then she spoke.
“Hello, father.”
He buried his head in his pillow.
“It was rather warm yesterday in the gardens—unseasonably so.”
He shook himself and sat to try to wake up, but when he did, she was still there, her legs dangling to the floor. He growled and held out his hand for his staff. It flew to him like a bolt of lightning and he stood, tapping it to the ground in a way that made the room shudder. “How?” he said fiercely. “How are you here?”
The girl leaned forward on the windowsill like she was going to whisper a secret to a close friend. “What you should be asking,” she said, jumping to the floor and holding her own staff casually in her hand, “is how I got into your dreams. It’s much more complicated magic, you know.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, moving very close to her. “I do.”
She held her head high, but he could tell from her posture that she was not quite as safe here as she had been in her wood. He tapped his staff to the ground and a golden cup came into his hand. “Perhaps I should offer you a cup of tea,” he said, sneering.
She clamped her teeth together, pulling her neck as far away from the cup as possible. “That’s terribly kind of you, but at this time of night, I fear it would keep me awake for far too long.”
“I doubt that,” he said, laughing as he dropped the cup at her feet. The liquid turned red and thick and ran like blood through the stones around her. He smiled. “This is my land. This is my realm. This is my room. What do you want?”
The fluid had reached her feet. It climbed her shoes like a deadly glue. She murmured a few words, her own staff glowing, and the poison retreated through the cracks in the stones.
“What,” he repeated, moving his face only inches from hers. “Do. You. Want?”
“What I want,” she said stepping back, “is my mother back, my grandparents, the world I should have been born into. But since you cannot manage that, oh mighty king, I would like you to refrain from smoking up my wood. You know you left quite a mess.”
The bones of the king’s knuckles turned white around his staff and he glared at her. “You pulled me to your wood in the first place,” he said. “So it’s hard to believe you really wish to be left alone.”
“Well, then,” she said, every inch of confidence returning to her voice. “I must be here in order to taunt you, haunt you, watch you crumble like a stone through which water flows and then freezes, weakening it and then, in time, breaking it apart.” She stamped the stone floor, and the bricks beneath her cracked.
Crespin laughed at the gesture and spun his staff towards her so the floor became ice, slippery. She stumbled, catching herself on the windowsill and dropping her staff.
He kicked her staff up with his foot, caught it and snapped it in half. She ground her teeth, stumbling again, and he threw her staff through the window. When he heard it hit the ground he leapt at her, howling. He grabbed her neck with his golden fingernails—sharp and long as talons, but still less deadly than his teeth, which he bared inches from her face in an ugly smile. She would snap even more easily than her staff and this part of his day, at least, would have been productive.
Letting his power increase, he grew wider and taller until he stood several feet over his prey. “You were not content to hide in your enchanted wood, conceited child. If you really wanted to taunt me, as you say”—he tightened his grip on her neck—“then you should have remained in my dreams.” Bowing over her, he pressed the nail of his thumb against her throat, drawing it down in a straight line from her jaw to the base of her neck, his eyes glowing as red as his staff. A line of blood ran from her neck, the drops falling to her dress in a steady stream, but still the green and brown eyes stared at him as though nothing had changed. Her face became white, but her breaths continued as steady as they ever had been.
With one hand she held the windowsill; with the other, she carefully reached under the king’s enormous arm and quietly touched his staff. It shuddered from the pressure of her hand and the stone at its tip went black. Crespin threw her to the floor with a curse and she stood, holding three fingers to her neck, stopping the flow of blood. He snarled at her, gripping his staff harder.
“If it’s any consolation, father,” she said, rising to her feet and summoning her staff just as he had first summoned his. “I can’t kill you either.” With her free hand, she gripped the two pieces of her staff, holding them together like a doctor setting a bone. “My mother revealed to me many things in our time together in the woods. There is a magic that keeps you from destroying me.” When she took her finger from her neck, the wound had healed except for a small line of red.
“Your mother was a human,” the king snarled. “And she is dead. She protects you from nothing.” He grabbed his staff and sent so much power into it that the gem at its tip relit and caught fire.
“My mother was a healer,” the girl witch said. “But I did not say that it was she who protected me. You seem to forget, Lord King, that my mother is only half of who I am. You,” she continued. “You are the one who protects me now.”
“I?” the king said, laughing and raising his staff.
“You,” she said again. “Those come forth by mother’s womb. Protected now from father’s doom.”
He lowered his hand as though he’d been struck in the stomach. “That was,” he said. “That was—”
“That was not for me,” she concluded. “I know. Covenant spells are tricky little beasts. I never mess with them myself—promises provide too much margin for error.”
She pointed the tip of her staff at the tip of the king’s. Both weapons trembled as they met and then both went still. “We are an even balance,” she said, giving the king time to realize he could not move against her any more than she could against him. Then she drew her weapon back and turned from the king.
He roared, reaching for her, but found himself stumbling on his own icy floor. She jumped onto the windowsill and steadied herself for a moment. “An even balance,” she repeated. The king rose and she looked at him eye to eye, opening her palm to show that her staff was now whole. “Though I expect that soon I will add a weight to my end that will tip things in my favor.”
With that she stepped purposefully backwards out of the window just as he raised his staff over his head to crush her. He waited to hear the sound of her body hitting the earth, but she was gone, carried from the window as though she’d been a dream after all.
Chapter 34
Wittendon woke, his head full of nightmares. Why couldn’t he just dream of flying like Sarak always
did? Yes, flying would be nice. Instead there was the thick wall of blackness, a hole like a tunnel leading to more blackness. It was always there in his dreams, but in Zinnegael’s wood, it pressed on him. Somehow, he knew that outside of the blackness of his dreams there was light, but he couldn’t see it or touch it. He only smothered in the dark.
He had spent two days sitting in Zinnegael’s cellar while she attended to the forest fire and what she called “business.” Now, Wittendon crawled out of the cottage, expecting to see a great change, but everything was as it had been before. Except, perhaps, that the tea had gotten cold. The white sentry cats sat regally cleaning their paws. The plate of pastries sat on the table next to the jar of cream. The trees swayed in the wind and when Wittendon sniffed he could smell the lavender and rosemary in the garden. But he could smell something else too. Slowly, he walked from the hut, through the forest, and into the bright afternoon. The woods across from him were gone—completely gone. In their place lay a flat, empty field, gray from ash and dust. In the distance, he could hear the hondsong howled in mourning.
“Cookies are not the only thing I offer,” Zinnegael said, coming up beside him.
“What is it, exactly, that you offer?” Wittendon asked.
“A chance,” she said simply. “A chance to change the world you know is wrong. Have you met the boy?” she asked after a pause.
“He will not speak to me.”
“You stole his father.”
Wittendon sighed. “I did what—”
“What you were commanded to do,” she finished for him. “Now perhaps it is time to do what you know you should do.”
Wittendon did not answer her. He did not even look at her. He began walking across the ashen field and did not look back. The slave Jager would be executed when the blades were completed. Wittendon did not know about finding magical spears, fighting his own father, or what to do with the powers of a Greylord. But he knew that Jager was an innocent man. He had always known it. It was a place Wittendon felt he could begin. A place of pitch black versus stark white. The Greysmith’s child had lain helpless for most of the previous day while the cats rubbed a healing balm on his face and neck and drizzled warm tea into his mouth. When he had come to, Wittendon had seen him—really seen him—for the first time. At the mines he had watched the child only from a distance. Here he could see the deep blue eyes, solid as stone and clear as water. Here he could sense the boy’s hostility. The child would not look at him. Hours they had sat together waiting for the smoke to clear, and hours had turned over in bone-cold silence.
Watching him, Wittendon began to see, not only what his race had taken from the boy, but that his race had grown accustomed to taking things, easily and without any thought to the consequences.
Wittendon walked through the ash and around the dogs’ land. He wanted to run from the hondsong, but forced himself to listen—to hear the grief and loss in every word. When he was clear of the dead land, he shifted into his wolken form and sprinted. In less than three weeks, Jager would be eating a last supper. It was time, at last, for Wittendon, eldest prince of the dictator Crespin, to act.
Fourteen Years Ago
Loerwoei knelt in the garden, pruning back the limbs that shot out into long stalks without forming a bud. They took energy, but would never flower. She related a little too much. Her gardener had been creating tonics and teas that had done much to keep the unseen wound from spreading, but Loerwoei knew she was still getting sicker; and a permanent solution had yet to be found.
One of so many permanent solutions yet to be found, she thought to herself. Loerwoei could not yet bestow the stone on Wittendon—he was still too young. And she could not keep it much longer in her care. Soon, the king would feel it and then he would know—each of the tiny lies she had piled onto one another—like crystals forming around an impurity in a jar of honey.
When her grandmother had given the stone to her all those years ago, it had been with a warning. “Hide it, child, until you know the one on whom it must be bestowed.” That part had been easy. As soon as she’d looked into her first babe’s delicate face she’d known that the gem must someday be his for he made her heart strum with even more energy than the stone had. But in hiding it, she’d already failed once—Crespin had felt it, found it, and taken it deep in his treasure cave. Through her unlucky accident in that cave, she had it again, but she knew she would not be able to hide it forever.
The shadow her gardener cast was long by the time she made her way to the rose bushes.
“I have missed you,” Loerwoei said, touching the stone in her cloak.
“It is a feeling that will not soon leave you,” the gardener said, kneeling beside the queen and shoving a hand into the loose dirt.
Loerwoei looked up. She had started to notice the way the cloak rounded on the gardener’s belly when a strong breeze blew. “You are leaving,” Loerwoei said.
“But not without saying good-bye,” the gardener said. “Please remember that. When I am gone.”
There was something in the final phrase. “Where is he?” Loerwoei asked.
“For now, his majesty sleeps soundly. I prepared a special tea for our lord.” The gardener stood, dusting off her knees, the gentle round of her abdomen protruding slightly as she brushed her dress free of dirt.
“Take the stone with you.”
“I cannot, my lady. It burns my hand with the hate I carry for your king. To hold it, for me, would be death.”
When they looked at each other, they knew that, at this point, almost anything for her would be death. Loerwoei held out her hand, a small sachet of seeds in her palm. The gardener took it, pressing her own fingers against those of her queen.
Wittendon had come when he heard his mother weeping. Loerwoei had pulled him to her lap, the stone in her cloak humming with happiness when she did. It was then that the trumpets sounded and the Königsvaren spilled forth, one long unified howl before they stampeded into the night, hunting the renegade gardener. Loerwoei buried her face into the soft hair on her son’s head.
“Wittendon,” the queen said, as calmly as she could when the sobs pressed hard against her throat, screaming to break free. “Come with me to the hill above the Grey mines. I’ve a hope to add some moonflower to my tea tonight.”
Wittendon made it to the woods outside the head city when darkness settled heavy across his shoulders. The moonflowers had begun to open and their musky breath hung in the air like an invitation. Wittendon followed an overgrown path thick with the seven-petaled flowers until he came to a clearing with the softest moss he had ever felt. There he wrapped his cloak around himself and fell—exhausted—into sleep. Yet just as the blackness of his dreams began to enfold him, a bright streak sliced through, like lightning in a fog.
Wittendon jolted awake. The cave—he had seen it—the cave of his dreams. And just like in his dreams, his legs ached to take him there. Only this time the dream had ended and still his legs throbbed, pressing him to move.
In the dark, the clearing looked strangely familiar. He realized that it was perfectly still—no bugs buzzed, no bats screeched. From the corner of his mind he caught a piece of the dream that had rattled him awake, the bolt of an animal, black as death with slashes of sterling white across its coat. And then the dream began to form into memory. He had followed the animal with his brother when they were very young. Dusk had been descending. The animal had moved through the trees. Someone else had been there with them, tending them—the gardener who was Zinnegael’s mother. But she had been a stone’s throw away and distracted, busy gathering moonflowers for his mother’s favorite tea. He and Kaxon had run after the animal. The gardener had followed them calling, but they had ignored her. They were Veranderen princes and she was a human servant. Before she caught up to them, they had found an overhang at the far end of the soundless meadow, and hidden there.
Wittendon stood now in the clearing, fully awake and rubbing his head. The foliage had grown and changed since his ch
ildhood, but looking around, he knew the hidden tunnel was to the northwest—a tunnel with something inside it that he could not remember. Whatever it was had frightened him like nothing had before or since. As the half-memory took hold, his body began to tremble and his stomach felt weak. Kaxon had stayed near the opening of the tunnel and cried. Kaxon, who had once snapped the bone of his forearm completely in half without shedding one tear, had bawled the entire time, his face buried up against a stone wall.
It was jarring, the recollections with the gaps in between. Wittendon could not help but feel that there was a reason he had wanted—needed—to forget this place. But now that he was here, he felt almost as urgently that he needed—wanted—to remember it. He walked to the edge of the clearing and, just as he’d known he would, he could hear the steady drum of water. In front of him was a large rock that he and Kaxon had climbed over. The sound of water grew louder, grinding against rock as Wittendon walked toward the noise.
And then, though it had been impossible to see from the clearing, he came upon the dark overhang of rock with vines that hung down, perfectly concealing the opening Wittendon knew was there. Water dripped from the overhang and Wittendon held his cloak over his head and stepped, as he had all those forgotten years ago, toward the blackness.
It seemed crazy to walk towards something that had scared him so much as a child. Yet the cavern pulled at him with answers to lost questions. Wittendon felt his way along the wall of the cave until he came to the opening of a narrow tunnel. It was smaller than he remembered it, tall enough for his kind, but just barely.
Wittendon stared into the dark tunnel. For several minutes all was blackness in the cave. But then, in the distance, he saw a stab of light no bigger than the head of a pin. His head flooded with stories his mother had told him—stories he hadn’t thought of for many years—dashing legends of ancient human princes, cats cast out and hunted, shifter-pirates annihilated by the king. His mother had often told him of a stone. It was shiny as the sea and smooth as glass, a globe of a gem that would fit snugly in a grown man’s hand. The story nagged at him as a tiny green light flickered in the dark belly of the tunnel.
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