“Ah.” Kural smiled blandly and Taigan had the sneaking suspicion he’d known about the lie. “Which means you two are here because…”
They volunteered nothing in reply.
“I am prepared to help all of you,” he said. “For this young man, I already have some ideas. As you may have guessed, I am a wizard of no small amount of power. I cannot, however, help you two if I do not know what you are trying to do—and I would rather not find out later that I had, instead, caused you harm.”
She sighed. “Okay. I’m not from this world. In my world, I’m asleep—dreaming. I need the key to get myself home. And my brother.”
“Ah,” Kural said thoughtfully.
“That’s all?” she asked after a moment. “Seriously? You have no follow-up questions and you simply believe me?”
The man gave her a small smile. “Let us say you are not the first person I have found in this predicament. There was a young man named Justin and a woman named Dotty.”
“I think we met her,” she said in surprise.
“Oh? Interesting. And then, of course, there was Ben.”
“Ben!” Taigan’s jaw dropped. There was only one way this man could know the name Ben. “You have met some of us before.”
“That is what I said.”
“Yes, but…” She sighed. “Okay, so…can you help us get to the key? It has to be guarded, doesn’t it? It hasn’t been that difficult to get here and someone would have tried to use it before if it were easy to get to.”
“You’re correct.” Kural nodded. “There’s a reason that I, for instance, have never sought it out. It will become clear as you get close but suffice it to say you will need to face your deepest fear in order to obtain the key.”
“Spiders?” she asked.
“I was going to say sauerkraut,” Jamie joked.
“Ewwwww.” But her laughter trailed off when she saw Esak’s face. “Esak?”
“You wanted the key,” he said. He looked furious now. “I told you the truth about why I was going for it, I told you Ella would die if I couldn’t find her medicine, and you listened to that and you never once told me that you wanted it too. What did you plan to do? Sneak away in the middle of the night and leave me alone on the mountain with no key and no hope?”
“I…” Taigan shook her head. “Esak, I always thought there must be a different way for you—”
“Don’t.” He cut her words off with a swipe of his hand. “All you’ll tell me is more lies and I don’t want to hear them.”
Chapter Twenty
Jamie was the one who went after Esak. He waved a hand at Taigan to tell her to stay there and loped off into the trees.
She sighed as she watched him go.
“How did you know Ben?” Kural asked.
“How did you know Ben?”
“I met him in the fae lands. He found it difficult to move at all due to his injury. My apprentice and I helped him—well, he did most of the work himself—and wound up fighting off an assassination attempt on the fae king. We parted ways in the city of Heffog.” He raised his eyebrows. “Now you.”
“He made sure we didn’t get mugged in a tavern and we helped him deal with a…witch…problem.” She shrugged. “There were monsters she had made by fusing rings into people’s skin.”
Kural raised his eyebrows. “That’s a nasty piece of work.”
“It was,” she said emphatically. She sat with a thump. “Okay, if you know about our world, you know that Esak won’t be able to come to it.”
“I don’t know. You came here, after all.” He shrugged. “I know enough to realize I know very little about the world. I do agree with you, however, that he should not attempt to go between worlds.”
“You do? Could you explain that to him?”
He smiled slightly and came to sit nearby, his back propped against a tree. He was clearly quite powerful and from the cut and cloth of his robes, he was also very rich, but he did not seem in the least stuck up.
“Do you think it would work?” he asked her. “Finding treatment for the mass in his friend’s belly?”
Taigan shook her head. “I wish I could say yes as we do try to treat cancer. But we have surgery and machines that wouldn’t work here unless he brought a surgeon back. Also, the treatments don’t always work and I don’t know what stage the cancer is in.”
“Cancer.” He mused over the word. “Very well. So your world does not have what he seeks. Why did you not tell him this?”
“I should have, shouldn’t I?”
“Most likely.” He looked at where Jamie and Esak were talking. The two of them gestured with obvious annoyance but they weren’t yelling as far as she could tell.
“I wanted to help him realize that he should stay,” she said. “He didn’t tell us the cancer part at first and only said he was leaving because he had no place here. I think that was really it—he wanted to leave. He was masking it with a desire to make sure she survived and since he did want that, it was easy to pretend.”
“Hmmm.” Kural considered her statement. “Yes, he does carry some shadows, doesn’t he?”
“Can you truly not heal cancer with magic?” Taigan asked.
“Few people have such skills,” he replied. “Healing is incredibly intensive. Imagine the last time you got very sick or hurt badly, and remember how tired you were while you were healing.”
She nodded.
“Healing expends all that energy at once and a single person doesn’t have that much energy to spare,” he explained. “So the healer must provide some of their life force. That’s the first difficult thing.”
“Then how did you heal your palms?” she asked curiously.
“Ah. That was an illusion. It’s much easier.”
Her sigh was disgruntled. She kept getting taken in by people’s lies and it made her feel foolish.
“The second problem,” Kural explained, “is that the healer must become the body that is being healed. Not literally, of course, but the awareness must sink into the wound or illness and heal it. Now, with something like a cut or a body that was exhausted from a sickness that was gone, it could be simple enough. But sickness and cancer are different. They’re alive.”
“You have to kill them,” she said in dawning comprehension. “You’re trying to heal the body but also kill something, and because it’s in the body, you experience the death as you create it.”
“Essentially. That’s a very good way to put it.” He smiled. “So it is a disturbing enterprise as well as being one that requires a great deal of power and control.”
“Couldn’t you use the life force of the sickness or the cancer to fuel the recovery?” Taigan asked with a frown.
Kural’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “I had not considered that. Interesting. Very interesting.” He looked over as Esak strode into the clearing. “Have you two reached an accord?”
“Yes,” the young man said bluntly. “They’re both jerks.”
It was difficult to argue that point, but Taigan tried anyway. “We didn’t know about the cancer at first,” she reminded him. “You told us you wanted to go because you had no place here and I knew that was wrong. There was no need to set ourselves at odds over something you might not even want.”
“How can I possibly trust that?” he asked her simply. “You want me to be wrong because then it makes sense for you two to get the key.”
“I’m not wrong,” Taigan countered. “You’re good with animals, you’re good with numbers, you can learn to fight, and you can learn to read too! It’s all possible. I don’t think you have a good idea of how the world sees you and what you mean to people.”
Esak folded his arms.
“And…what there is in my world won’t help you with Ella,” she said finally. “There isn’t simply medicine for it and we’re far from perfect at it. You would need to bring a whole team of surgeons back, and some blood, and medicine, and a radiation machine thing, and…all kinds of stuff. And even then, it
wouldn’t be close to a guarantee.”
“I have to try!” His hands went into fists. “What about that do you not understand? I have to try. It’s not a certainty that your world can fix it but I know mine can’t.”
“Not necessarily,” Kural interjected. He held Esak’s gaze. “I think it’s possible that the two of us could come up with a solution.”
“If there was a solution, the rich would have found it.”
“Not necessarily.” The wizard smoothed out a wrinkle on his robes. “Grifters are common. Remember, they profit by keeping the person sick, not by curing them. Besides, very few have the power to do what you’re asking.”
“And you do,” Esak said. Disbelief was evident in his tone.
“I do.”
“And you want me to believe you’d do that for a peasant girl who doesn’t have a gold piece to her name.”
“I promised to help you, remember? Besides, I rarely have the opportunity to work on something so interesting or challenging.”
“Her life is not a challenge!” The young man’s face was flushed.
“No,” Kural conceded, “but solving the problem is, and it’s the people who revel in such challenges who usually manage to solve them. I’m offering to do everything in my power to save your friend’s life, my boy. I wouldn’t expend too much energy criticizing my motives for doing so.”
Esak glowered for a long moment, then turned away.
“Unless, of course…” Kural’s voice was soft. “Unless the point was for you to die in her place.”
The mayor’s son went very still.
“You never felt you belonged,” the wizard said. It was a relentless march to a conclusion, but there was no malice there. He wasn’t hunting the boy, simply uncovering the truth layer by layer. “She was part of why you kept living. When you heard about the journey to another world, the risk of it didn’t frighten you—that was the draw.”
Esak swallowed convulsively.
“You’re fighting us and fighting these offers of help because then you’d have to find a way to keep living,” Kural said. Pity lingered in his gaze. “And it’s far, far easier to die for something than to live for it.”
“You don’t understand,” the young man whispered.
“Of course not. No one can understand another’s heart. But I’m several centuries old now and I’ve seen a great many things in my time. I’ve watched many people go to their deaths when they did not have to. Some of them wanted to live forever in stories. Others wanted to escape madness or despair. All of them feared the messy business of being alive, of failing, of struggling, and of uncertainty.”
Esak looked at Kural now. He was breathing hard and seemed on the edge of a panic attack, Taigan thought.
“Esak.” She went to take his hand. “What about Midnight?”
“Midnight…” He looked at the dog. “He’s a dog. He’ll find another person who—”
“No.” She shook her head. “Dogs have more sense than humans. He came to you because he knew you’d be kind. If you die, you know he won’t find anyone like you and he’ll grieve you.”
“I can’t stay alive simply for him!”
“You can’t stay alive for anyone,” Taigan snapped. “Not for anyone but yourself, Esak. You have to choose whether to live or die. All I’m telling you is that other people see past the lies you’ve told yourself. Other people know the truth about you—the truth you don’t know.” How do you think Ella would feel if she knew you sacrificed your life for her, especially when you didn’t have to? She didn’t say the words, though. They sounded too manipulative.
They were true, of course, but still manipulative.
Esak closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at Kural. “Do you promise we can save her?”
“No,” the wizard said simply. “There are no guarantees. But neither are there any with your original plan. And between what Taigan has told us about her world and what we know of moving between them, I’d say my plan is a great deal more likely to work.”
The young man groaned and sank his head into his hands.
“Fine,” he said, his voice muffled. “None of you will give me a moment’s peace until I do, will you? So fine. I’ll try it.” He raised his head to glare at Kural. “But if you fail, I’ll gut you like a fish.”
“I’d like to see you try,” the man said with an unsettling smile. “Many very, very powerful people have tried to kill me before. None of them have succeeded.” He noticed the wary looks on their faces. “None of them tried to do it for a good reason.”
“What would you consider a good reason?” Jamie asked faintly.
“Betrayal…hurting someone badly, killing them. That kind of thing. Those who came after me always did so because I stood between them and power.”
“Huh.” Taigan sighed. “Um. Well, if you two are going down, do you know a way that isn’t through the wind?”
“I do,” Kural said. “Although studying the wind is part of why I am here. On the other hand, it’s probably better to begin healing the young lady sooner rather than later.”
“No,” Esak said. He shook his head. “Taigan and Jamie didn’t simply murder me or anything. They were going to help me get to the key. I should do the same for them.”
“Gods save us from honorable people,” the wizard muttered. “Very well. You three go on and I will remain here to complete my studies.”
The three companions fixed him with firm stares.
“I should simply have let you go past,” Kural said. “In the future, I won’t take it upon myself to test people’s characters. Very well, I’ll come along. The four of us and the dog. What a strange party we shall make.”
“You could teleport us to the peak,” Taigan suggested.
“No. First, there is a great deal of magic around this mountain that I do not want to wake. Second, that necklace you’re wearing is full of magic and I’m not quite sure how it works. I can only say it’s protecting you. How or from what, I don’t know.”
She looked at it. “It’s from Dotty.”
“I should have known. She always did have a flair for solving problems in strange ways.” He shrugged and shouldered his pack. “Well. Shall we?”
Chapter Twenty-One
The problem with the mountain, Jamie thought, was that it seemed to go on forever. You could climb and climb and climb, make your way past one crevasse and over another, weave between trees, and look up and see that you seemed no closer to the peak than before.
Govorn had been right about it.
“Your heart and limbic system are indicating intense emotion,” Prima commented. “Is that accurate?”
“Yes,” he said shortly.
“Bad emotions?”
“Yes.”
“What are you upset about? Everything seems to be working out well. Due to your efforts, Esak won’t do something suicidal and you and Taigan will get to go home.” She sounded almost wistful.
“Will you miss us?” Jamie asked. He smiled at the sky and tripped over a tree root. “Ow, fuck.”
“Who will I make fun of once you’re gone?”
“I should have known it would be something like that.” He sighed and examined the route in front of them. They were tracking diagonally along the mountain in what looked like a path of sorts but was, of course, broken up by numerous cracks in the ground. “Where do you all think we should go next? Keep heading this way or climb up and try that?”
Everyone came to look. The path, such as it was, stretched ahead of them but an equally well-trod lane—which was to say, not well-trod at all—stretched off in the other direction. They would, however, have to scramble up a six-foot-high rockface to reach it.
“Well, we don’t know where that one goes,” Taigan pointed out and looked at the one that appeared to double back. “On the other hand, we don’t know where the first one goes either. I have to say it’s not helping my mood that we might climb all day, only to reach a dead end and have to backtrack.
”
“Really? Because it’s helping my mood immensely.”
The twins bit their tongues on some very impolite commentary.
“I say we choose the path that gets us farther up the mountain more quickly,” Esak said. “Since we have no idea which is better, why not go for that?”
“The man has a point,” Kural said. “Who should go first?”
“You,” the young man said and pointed. “Go on. Get ready for us to boost you up.”
“I am not exactly an intrepid explorer,” the wizard said with dignity. However, he walked over and let the others boost him up before he scrambled onto the path. That part, it had to be said, was not so dignified, and it was a good thing he wore pants under his robes.
Midnight went next. He didn’t seem at all worried about the process and gamboled around Kural’s feet once he was up.
Esak followed, then Taigan and Jamie last. All of them, already with their thighs burning, were now sweaty and panting, so they set off without much discussion. They needed to concentrate, after all—this path was narrower than the other and with a steeper plunge down the side.
Jamie brushed his fingers through the pine needles as they walked along. Trees covered each sheer drop, leading to the deceivingly gentle look of the mountain from far away, and while those drops were deeply annoying, it was also fun to walk amongst the tops of trees.
The sun had reached its peak and was beating down on them relentlessly, and it occurred to him that they would need to find a ledge wide enough to sleep on. The thought of rolling off in the middle of the night triggered a cold shudder.
“Now, what was that emotion? All your vital signs spiked and while one would think higher would always be better, I’m told that’s not the case.”
“I was imagining falling off the mountain.”
“Were you…doing that for any particular reason?”
“Sometimes, people picture things they’re scared of. Things they wish wouldn’t happen. Because they’re very invested in it not happening, it means they think about it and they picture it happening.”
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