by Dawn Cook
“Uh, Strell?”
“Don’t ask, Alissa.” He didn’t even look up.
“Strell?” She swallowed hard. “Did—did it ever move on its own?”
His eyes flicked up, then down. “Not very much.”
“They’re grubs!” Alissa shouted, feeling herself go red.
Strell sighed, not meeting her eyes. “What does it matter, if it fills your stomach. Food is food. And they never had feet, Alissa.”
She looked at her half-empty bowl. She looked at Strell. Slowly she set the bowl down. Strell chuckled and kept right on eating.
Pulling her blanket up about her ears, Alissa tried to ignore his enthusiasm. She’d heard stories but never believed them. The plains were a harsh place: insufferably hot in the summer, stupefyingly cold in the winter. The people in the foothills spent all their efforts growing or raising all—well, most, apparently—of the food the plains ate, leaving the foothills little time to make necessities. The plains obligingly produced everything from chamber pots to blankets. They traded, cheating each other to the point of no one having enough of anything. Her mother, Alissa mused, treated food with almost a reverence. Alissa had thought it was because she couldn’t cook. Now Alissa wondered if it was because she had grown up not having enough.
Deep in thought, Alissa dipped out two cups of tea. Strell finished his bowl, then, without even asking, hers. They sat in a ponderous silence, keeping their thoughts safely to themselves. Strell reached for his cup. Setting it down beside him untasted, he brushed at his coat sleeve. Alissa looked up, half expecting his next words.
“Um—Alissa?” he said. “I—uh—want to apologize for what I said about your ancestry the other night.” He dropped his eyes, and Alissa could tell this was something he didn’t do often. “I spoke out of ignorance, and it shames me to think I can’t admit it when I’m wrong. It’s just that—when you’re told something long enough, it can’t help but become a truth for you.”
Alissa’s face hardened, and she took a deep breath to inflict a few choice words.
“I’m not done yet,” he interrupted, and with a tremendous effort, she held her tongue.
He poked at the fire, his eyes lowered. “My father kept the usual low opinion of hills people, and he took great pains that his children inherited this.”
Acutely aware of the practice, Alissa nodded stiffly. The foothills were just as bad, instilling their children with a hatred that stopped just shy of violence.
Catching her eye, Strell held it with a frightening intensity. “Everything you said about the plains is true. We are self-righteous about our skills and ignorant about yours. I’m truly sorry for what I said. I didn’t know. I’ve never known anyone . . . well . . . Can we just begin again?”
Alissa’s eyes dropped and her anger vanished in a puff of shame. “Actually, Strell,” she said, embarrassed by his honesty into some of her own, “your belief that the foothills are lacking in any skills other than farming is fairly accurate.” She looked up, reading his genuine surprise. “The only reason I can sew is because my mother insisted I learn. And how to smooth out a bowl, and pretty much everything else. My papa taught me how to read, bring in a crop, and husband a herd, or rather, he taught my mother, who taught me. There’s no question I’m a foothills farmer, but I’m also the daughter of a plainswoman.” She swallowed hard, forcing herself to be painfully blunt. “It’s obvious I’m a—a half-breed. I’ll never be accepted in the plains or foothills.” A spark of defiant anger stirred. “The villagers hate me more than they hate my mother. She, at least, doesn’t have to pretend to be anything she isn’t.”
Strell sat before her, stiff and unreadable, and she wondered if he was going to take back his apology. “Is that why you’re going to this Hold place?” he finally said.
Alissa looked away, rubbing a faint ache at the back of her neck. “Maybe. Personally, I think my mother sent me because they need someone who can properly weed a garden.”
“Beg your pardon?”
Giving him a wan smile, Alissa ran her fingers up her neck and over the back of her skull, following the odd sensation of tingling prickles. “What else would a farmer do? You’d have to be daft to believe the stories about that place.”
Strell chuckled then, and she felt her knot of fear loosen, glad he hadn’t started with the expected recriminations. “Yes. The stories,” he said. “Tell me one?”
The soft prickling in Alissa’s head became a buzz. As she looked up in alarm, her balance left her. She reached out to find the ground, blinking as she struggled to focus.
“Alissa?” came Strell’s voice, sounding hollow and distant. “Are you all right? You don’t look well.”
“Uh—no,” she murmured, noticing that the trees seemed to have their leaves again, and that they were green, and that the stars were gone, and she could see daisies in the grass where there should be none. Her vision started to blur. “Listen,” she said, struggling to stand. “Can—can you smell apples?” and with that, the clearing and Strell disappeared from her sight.
Meson tossed his apple core into the pine scrub and frowned. His eyes went deep into the empty sky, dropping to the majestic peak looming over the fortress, and then to the Hold itself. Not a clue could he find to explain what he had found.
The outer doors were standing open—as usual. Someone had placed a ward upon them in a long-forgotten incident, and the heavy timbers couldn’t be shifted. Beyond them were the exquisitely carved, but no less formidable, inner doors. They had been locked, but it was simple to bypass a ward keyed for general entry. All appeared as it should on the outside; it was the inside that told the story.
The Hold was all but deserted, and that couldn’t be.
Yesterday, a mere half-day’s journey away, he had sent an unspoken hail to tell those at the Hold of his arrival. No one had answered him. This morning, on this very spot, he had run a mental search of the Hold, catching a wisp of familiar thought. It was Bailic. Meson found him in Talo-Toecan’s rooms. Apart from Bailic, there were no other Keepers, students, or Masters. Everyone was gone. Something had gone very, very wrong.
Having learned caution when it came to his “old friend,” Meson had spent the earlier part of his day prowling furtively about the Hold and its environs. His exploration of the silent halls and fallow fields had a double purpose. It confirmed his mental search that only Bailic remained, as well as confused his trail as to where he hid the book. Meson was not so innocent that he would bring the book to the very man he feared was behind this utter abandonment.
The wind gusted and dropped, and gusted again. It spun the leaves by the door into a clattering whirlwind, and then, as if tired of the game, it dropped them and ran away. Meson shouldered his pack and strode forward through the late daisies. As he slipped between the tall doors, he felt the tingle of the Hold’s truth ward take him.
The Masters of the Hold abhorred lies, though they would willingly stretch the truth or view it from unbelievable angles. Knowing mankind was easily swayed, they had long ago blanketed the Hold from its highest balcony to its rumored, but never seen, dungeon with a truth ward. An entire generation of Masters had reinforced it until it was said the very walls of the Hold would fall in defense upon any who would dare attempt to break it. But that had never stopped Bailic from trying.
Meson stood in the spacious entry hall, his eyes narrowing. It had been stripped. Not a scrap of fabric or stick of furniture relieved the ancient gray walls. The sight had shocked him the first time, now it made him angry. Even the pendulum, a silent witness to the spinning of the earth and the weave of time, was gone. The stairs of yellow stone wound upward in graceful swoops, becoming thin and rough at the base of the tower where the Masters’ quarters were. It was said the Masters had no need for aesthetic beauty that men did, but Meson knew better. They found their beauty in other places.
To his left, the tunnels leading to the annexes gaped. They were the Hold’s belowground attics, holding everything from bo
otstraps to strawberries, forever fresh under wards. His eyes rose to the fourth-floor walkway, where, as boys, he and Bailic had dropped feathers from his pillow to see who could control the lightly drifting bit of fluff. Bailic, Meson remembered, always took the friendly contest too seriously, sulking for days if he deemed himself the loser.
Leaning back against the closed door, Meson exchanged his boots for the soft-soled shoes worn behind the Hold’s walls. He turned to the stairway and padded on his muffled feet to the small closet he and Bailic had once found hidden under it. Here, among the cobwebs, he placed his pack. There was nothing in it that would help him now. Unencumbered, he began to ascend.
The ninth landing marked the base of the tower, and it was here that Meson stopped at the first of two doors. It was plain and unadorned, opening silently to his touch. Meson slipped inside and shut it behind him. The tall-ceilinged room was lit entirely from the enormous balcony jutting out to overlook the Hold’s entrance. He recalled his teacher’s rooms as being airy and bright. Now they were dingy, carrying the acrid smell of burnt metal. On a small table sat a teapot and two cups. Evidently his efforts to remain undetected during his search hadn’t been as successful as he hoped.
“Meson,” a mocking voice broke the hush. “I’m surprised. Rumor had it you became a farmer to cultivate turnips instead of wings.” A shadow at the end of the room shifted. “As we both know, wings are notoriously difficult to tend. Tell me, are turnips any easier?”
Meson’s unease blossomed into a thick apprehension at the scorn that cold, smooth voice carried. “Bailic.” He gave him an incommunicative nod. “How is it that everyone is gone and you’re in Talo-Toecan’s rooms?”
“Suffice it to say he didn’t require them anymore. But they do have a lovely view, don’t you agree?” Bailic waved a thin hand to the balcony and turned to regard him.
Dressed in a Keeper’s traditional tunic, short vest, and floor-length trousers, he cut a startling figure. He was refined-looking, not yet old, but thin with the sharp look of too many late springs spent in want. Though plains-born, only his height and spare frame would attest to it; his skin was a pale mockery of his true ancestry. As a boy, his severely short-cropped hair had been a transparent white. It had since darkened to a pale yellow. His eyes, too, lacked almost all pigment, and were so pallid, they were almost pink.
It had been this nonconformity that prompted Meson to take the awkward, half-starved, terribly nearsighted plainsman under his wing soon after Bailic arrived at the Hold. Meson had treated him like the brother he never had, and after reaching an understanding thanks to a black eye and bloody nose, they had become nearly inseparable, banding together to fend off the pranks of rival students. But a great friendship can often turn into an even greater animosity. And so it happened between them over the oldest of reasons: the affections of a young woman.
Bailic stood with his back to the window. Meson knew the glare was enough to trouble him. His weak eyes saw best when the light fell over his shoulders. “I see the years have been kind to you, old friend,” Bailic said. “Perhaps I should have abandoned my duties as well.”
Meson stepped closer, staring at the long, puckered scar running from Bailic’s left eye and down his neck. “I said, where has everyone gone?” he demanded.
Bailic laughed, choking it back with a rough cough. Slowly he eased himself into a once plush, high-backed chair. His eyes never shifted from Meson. “Somehow,” Bailic said sadly, “the Masters got it into their fancy to journey to find the lost colony.”
“Lost colony?” Meson said as he recalled the tale they had concocted together as students. “That was a story. Everyone knew it was only a bit of nonsense to whittle away a long winter.”
“True.” A grin danced about Bailic’s thin lips. “But when I ‘found’ your map of the island, they took it as a truth making itself known through you—the quick and clever Meson.”
Meson stiffened, disguising his alarm by taking a step forward. He remembered now. Bailic had encouraged him to illustrate the tale, and he’d willingly obliged. The map had gone missing halfway through the winter. They’d still been friends then.
Seeing his confusion, Bailic sniffed. “My dear, innocent farmer, it takes but a small thing to spark a fatal interest among the bored centennials. At my subtle hints, they flitted away and drowned trying to find your island. How unfortunate,” he mocked. “Your tale led nearly all of them to their deaths. You,” he scorned, “emptied the Hold.”
“No,” Meson whispered, knowing it was probably true. But that didn’t explain where the Keepers were. “Why?” he said, half to himself. “Why did you do this?”
“Because they wouldn’t give it to me!” Bailic shouted. A trace of madness swirled to the forefront of Bailic’s eyes, vanishing as he shuddered. Rising with an exaggerated care, Bailic stepped behind his chair to hide the almost imperceptible trembling of his fingers. “It must have been an oversight,” he murmured. “One can only imagine?”
Bailic smiled brokenly. “My dear Meson,” he crooned. “Did you come all this way empty-handed, or is there something you may have felt a need to return?”
Meson made his face a mask. There was only one thing Bailic could be speaking of. Thank the Hounds he had already hidden it. “Return what?” he asked softly.
“Come now,” Bailic cajoled. “You’re the only Keeper left. You must have it.”
He blanched. All the Keepers dead? Not just gone? Bailic couldn’t have killed everyone! “H-have what?” he stammered, feeling the first whispers of the Hold’s truth ward rise up about him like hard snow swirling in a late-winter field, cold and unforgiving.
“Don’t be foolish,” Bailic said sharply. “Talo-Toecan gave the cursed thing to someone. I need it.” He crept from behind his chair as if drawn by the thought of the book. “Have you seen the chaos of the foothills and plains lately? It’s appalling. They have far too much freedom. They could accomplish so much if they would just swallow their pride and condescend to work together. You haven’t noticed how their divided talents lend themselves perfectly to each other? No?” he mocked. “Talo-Toecan didn’t either, and when I approached him about it, he forbade me from instigating any such plan. Forbade me!” Bailic caught himself with a steadying hand upon his chair. He took a slow breath.
“That was when I knew I had to do it on my own. All they need is someone to unify them under one rule—to properly guide them, you understand. I’m going to lead them to the future I foresee, even if it takes a war to do it.” Shaking his head in mock remorse, Bailic chuckled. “Knowing them, it will. A good fight will teach them the value of solidarity if nothing else. But regardless, I can’t control the situation unless I have the First Truth, and you aren’t leaving until you tell me where it is.”
Meson took a confident step forward. “You can’t hold me here. You know that. What the Wolves is wrong with you?”
Waving a careless hand, Bailic gracefully sat before the tea. “Didn’t notice when you came in, did you?” he almost sighed. “I worked long to hide the resonance so you wouldn’t feel it. Talo-Toecan’s doorsill has a ward on it. Unless I wish it, you can’t pass the threshold.” He leaned back deep into the cushions, smiling. “And I don’t. You, my farmer, have caught yourself more securely than a mouse in one of your grain traps. Ripping the truth from you will be easy.
“True.” Bailic leaned forward, lowering his voice. “I can’t make a ward that subtle and strong. But it’s a simple thing, is it not, to bend someone else’s handiwork to one’s own use?” Bailic looked up, his eyes almost glassy from his greed. “Once you know how?”
Meson took a shaky breath, knowing with an ugly certainty what was going to follow. The Hold’s truth ward would force him to speak, and now he couldn’t leave to avoid it as he had done before. The phrase “disturbing tendency to paranoia” flitted through him, a muffled comment overheard from behind closed doors when they both had been younger. Talo-Toecan had always dismissed the concerns of the
other Masters, rationalizing them away, but now . . .
With a contrived carelessness, Bailic reached for the pot, and the soft, domestic sounds of tea being served filled the room. “After you left, I began my work. A word here, an idea planted there. Soon the Keepers began to leave. Those who refused to be swayed, disappeared. It was really quite disturbing,” he said lightly as he set the pot down with a surprising gentleness. “No one could find them. Our benevolent teachers were next.” He hummed a regretful tune, sipping at his cup. “All in a watery grave trying to find an island that only existed in your thoughts. The wandering Keepers returned one by one, and one by one they died. It took some time, learning which wards can be easily countered and which ones can’t. I’m quite good at those now.” He sighed in an easy memory. “You haven’t a chance.”
A small chortle escaped Bailic, and he choked it back. Setting his cup down, he gestured grandly for Meson to join him, frowning when he didn’t move.
Meson tensed, his eyebrows tight. “I’ll take out the ward on the door,” he threatened.
Bailic laughed. “Try,” he crooned. “I can’t remove a ward that strong. It was all I could do to bend it to my will. And even if you could, I would simply follow you home. What a splendid idea,” he said, simpering. “Family reunions are so-o-o-o endearing.”
Meson nearly groaned in despair. The book would be safe, but his family. . . . What did a book mean? Nothing. Escaping Bailic wasn’t a victory but a postponement of defeat.
“Your precious Talo-Toecan,” Bailic said, “finally got over his sulk and came back.”
“He’s alive!” Meson cried.
“Yes, alive but quite useless.” Bailic rose and strode to the mantel. His fingers drummed together, a nervous habit Meson remembered from their youth. “He’s . . . He won’t get out,” Bailic said stiffly. “I bested him. He can’t. It’s impossible.”