“I tried, so hard, not to fall for you. I took every precaution I could think of, and I’m glad I did. I feel somehow that, under the circumstances, it was the proper thing to do. But it didn’t matter in the end. I love you anyway, damn it. I love you.”
Lanokas pulled her to her feet. “I love you too,” he said. She kissed him, her hands around his neck; this time, he was the one to pull back.
“You don’t need another complication, and to tell the truth, I don’t either. Not before the stand. We said two weeks, didn’t we? When everything’s over, in two short weeks, we’ll discuss us then. Right now, we should start taking those baskets to the barn.”
Kora’s face turned as red as the ruby beneath her bandana. “We should. We really should, they’ll be wondering what’s kept us.”
445
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Stand
Laskenay transported the League west, to a district near Partsvale and the Shrine of the Giver, the most renowned place of worship in Herezoth, even more so than the Temple in the capital. Off the road they found a wooded stretch of land, sparsely populated with poplars at the fringe but denser as one moved inward. They split up in the hopes that someone would find a suitable clearing before night fell. Kora had been tromping through the weeds, scratching her legs on bushes and brambles for about an hour when she heard the owl sounds that signaled success. The call came from nearby, and sure enough, Kora was the first to join Bendelof. “What do you think?” the girl asked.
“It’ll do just fine. It’s definitely remote enough.”
While not huge, the clearing was large enough for six people to coexist. The ground was flat, with few rocks and little vegetation that would have to be cleared away. Lightning had felled a tree some weeks before, leaving a charred and jagged stump and a decent supply of firewood, once one of the men chopped the trunk.
Neslan showed up second, and then Hayden. Laskenay followed soon after, nodding her approval. She threw her two sacks to the ground with a tired sigh, but her eyes were bright. “I have a surprise,” she said. “Tents.”
“Tents?” said Kora. “Shelter?”
“Excellent,” said Hayden.
Laskenay sank to the ground and pulled a folded stretch of canvas from one of her sacks. Bennie was grinning from ear to ear. “I have the poles,” she said.
“How did you get tents?”
“We bought two of them,” said Laskenay. “From the smith, with the money the mayor gave us. It was Bennie’s idea to track them down. This time of year, we’ll have to weather at least one storm.”
“But what about food?” said Kora.
Bennie said, “Word spread fast about the trolls, and how it was us—well, you all—that raised the alarm. People weren’t surprised in the slightest we were leaving. No one even bothered to ask where to. They didn’t want to know.”
“Or they knew you wouldn’t say,” suggested Neslan.
“Or that,” Bennie consented. “Anyway, they were grateful. They say the Giver provides: we didn’t pay for the food, not for a single ear of corn. No one would let us. We don’t have a great variety, but the stores will last what we need them to.”
Neslan joined Laskenay on the ground, resting his legs. “It’s refreshing, isn’t it, that not everyone accepts Zalski’s lies about us. Sometimes I think there’s no one, though some fraction of the kingdom surely sees the bias….”
“It’s more than a fraction,” said Laskenay. “We just don’t see the proof of it, as we’re forced to seclude ourselves. Besides, those who see through the libel see the wisdom of not being vocal. They can’t demonstrate support for us.”
“Where’s Lanokas?” asked Hayden. “What direction did he go?”
“Southeast,” Lanokas responded, appearing through the brush. He took in their accommodations. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”
“We have tents!” gushed Bennie.
Lanokas started. “Do we really?”
Laskenay showed him the folded canvas, and Hayden said, “It’ll be like we’re camping, like I used to do with my family. Well, not quite like that, but it’s nice to get out of that barn, don’t you think?”
“It is nice,” said Bennie. “It’s so nice I don’t want to move. I just want to sit here and do nothing.”
She plopped down where she was standing, and Lanokas dropped next to her. “I second that,” he said. He patted Bennie on the shoulder. “We’ll put the tents up later.”
The next three days passed before Kora found time to mark them. The scenery had changed much, but the daily tasks just little; when Kora felt confident in her knowledge of the maps, she formulated her battle plan, complete with a plan B. In what event would she forget her assigned role of protecting her allies and turn to the offensive? Which spells would she attack with, if things went badly? She wanted to go after Zalski, not work defense, but Laskenay refused, and Lanokas supported the elder sorceress wholeheartedly. Laskenay told her, “My brother’s my responsibility. On top of that, my magic’s stronger than yours.”
“We should go after him together,” Kora insisted.
Lanokas told her, “We need you in the courtyard. The guard outnumbers us, sorely, and you wouldn’t dare deny what an asset you were at the inn.”
Neslan agreed. “As far as any of us can plan a thing, you can do the most good in the courtyard, in the thick of things.” Kora threw up her hands. “We all want to be the one to take Zalski down, believe me. It has to fall to Laskenay.”
The only consolation was that the assignment put her alongside Lanokas. Whatever might happen to him, she would be poised to know of it, perhaps to intervene. Kora dropped her protests and returned to work.
That night, when she went in the women’s tent after speaking with Lanokas for a while, Laskenay and Bendelof were already asleep. Sighing at the memory of her bed at home—in all this time she had never quite adjusted to living without a mattress—Kora climbed beneath her blanket and shut her eyes. A few minutes later, she felt the vaguely familiar sensation of being pulled from her body and the much more familiar, and more painful, shallow gasps for breath that were always part of her sudden transports to the Hall of Sorcery. “Not again,” she thought. “Not now.”
She was standing in the middle of the Hall. She turned around, and just as she expected, Petroc lounged some yards away, his back against a pillar. Momentarily forgetting his advantage over her when he summoned her this way, she marched up to him.
“What is this? Haven’t you done enough?”
Petroc crossed his arms and straightened his posture, towering over her. “I need to speak with you. You’ll consider this important.”
Kora told him, “You’re sending me back, this instant. I’ll transport here, I can do that now I came here once in person, but you won’t bully me.”
“I don’t want you attacking.”
“Why would I attack you?”
Petroc did not respond; he stared at her, obstinate, nostrils flaring. Kora, who figured she had nothing to lose, concentrated all her strength on the will to return to the clearing. She wished to leave the mountains, demanded it of herself with such intensity her head ached. When she did, all of a sudden, feel the pleasant warmth of blankets and hear Bendelof’s steady breathing, she could not be sure they were real. Slowly, a smile crept across her face. She had never imagined she could actually break that spell.
Feeling proud for the first time in ages, Kora transported back to the Hall. Petroc nodded to her with reluctant deference. “Your magic’s grown,” he said.
“Why would I want to attack you?” Kora repeated.
“Come with me.”
The sorcerer led her through a numbing chill outdoors to a second building covered with stained glass windows, a surprisingly small number of which had broken through the centuries. This place, like the Hall, was magically warm when Kora stepped inside, and she said a mental prayer of gratitude, forming voiceless words through chattering teeth. With an i
ncantation, Petroc lit the ten or so tapers scattered throughout the library’s only room—for it was the Hall’s famed library they had entered. Engraved metal shelving hung in midair in twisting rows, rising almost to the vaulted ceiling. There must have been ten, or fifteen thousand tomes.
“All right,” said Kora, “Why are we here? What’s going on?”
“I’ll be concise: after our last meeting I continued to keep track of you, mainly out of a morbid curiosity.”
“You wondered when they’d kill me, is that it?”
Petroc narrowed his eyes. “You’ll allow me to speak.”
“By all means….”
Kora motioned for him to continue.
“You were in Yangerton at first. For quite a while. Then one day, you returned to this area, to an inn I’ve frequented. This piqued, as you can imagine, my curiosity even further, so I brought myself down to the village. I watched you turn a book over to the innkeeper. She gave it back to you. To my astonishment, she then walked away, and though you turned invisible, you proceeded to bury the tome. Why in the world, I asked myself, would the Marked One be burying a book?
“And then I remembered that you had, in fact, mentioned a specific book, a book you claimed Zalski was dying to possess. The very spellbook penned by my ancestor.”
Goose pimples appeared on Kora’s skin. A sense of foreboding made her palms turn clammy and a wave a heat travel down her spine. “The Librette Oscure,” she said.
“I returned that night to dig up your tome. It was a spellbook, but not of dark magic, certainly not one of the darkest magic ever contemplated. I shook my head and muttered to myself: if it wasn’t the Librette, why were you trying to hide it? Well, when I mentioned the title….”
“I know what happened,” said Kora. She wanted to support her weight against one of the bookshelves, but dared not. They hovered; she could not tell if they were stable.
“I took the book here, to the library. I pored over it: quite an interesting read. A disturbing read at moments, but never dull. Here it remained, until two weeks ago.”
“It disappeared?” Kora’s grabbed the front of Petroc’s robes. “How? What happened to it, what?” Unperturbed, Petroc removed her fists from his clothing and straightened his outer garment. “What happened, Petroc?”
“I went down to the village for food. I lingered for a while.”
“How long?”
“Perhaps three hours. When I came back, I found the library in disarray. Not grand disarray, but some books had been strewn across the floor and the Librette….” Kora followed him down two rows to the end of a half-filled shelf. “The Librette, which I left right here, was missing.”
“You should have summoned me sooner,” said Kora.
“I saw no point in that before I combed the entire collection. It’s gone, without a doubt. Someone stole it.”
“Not someone,” said Kora. She struggled to keep her voice firm. “Zalski. He’d been to the Hall before. He remembered the library and transported back on the off chance…. And now he has everything, he has everything he needs.” She advanced on Petroc. “How could you do this? How could you let this happen? You interfering oaf!”
“Listen, Porteg, if you’d informed me that Zalski could transport here, I would never have kept the book at this location.”
“I didn’t see the relevance! There shouldn’t have been any relevance, you should never have taken….”
“Taken a piece of my family heritage?”
“I never once dreamed Zalski would return here! I didn’t know he’d even been here until he mentioned the Lifestone. Don’t blame this on me!” Kora fell back against one of the shelves. It did not budge an inch. “I knew something bad was lurking, I could feel it, feel it in my bones, but this…. He’ll kill us all that way, every one of us. There won’t be a person left standing who’s ever helped us. No one will challenge him, not ever again.”
Zalski would find his nephew, would find Zacry. He would discover Ilana’s contribution to the Letter and kill Hank, that portly soldier farther south, the one who covered Kora’s flight when she met Bidd and Hayden.
Petroc narrowed his eyes. “Kill you how?”
“To hell with you, it’s no concern of yours! He’ll find out about you, though. He’ll find out where I got that miraculous chain, and he won’t be happy. He’ll kill you too, and it serves you right, you selfish….”
Petroc grabbed her by the wrist. “I brought you here to help you, but if all you’re going to do is insult me….”
Kora laughed. “Help me? How exactly do you mean to help? Unless you have a spell to turn back time….”
“This is partly my fault,” said the sorcerer. Kora harrumphed. “Partly,” he repeated. “So I’m offering my services in recompense.”
“You want to work with the League? Petroc, that’s not my decision.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’re not one of my favorite people. You’d mock me if I said something different. But I can’t deny your magic would be a major asset, especially now. I have to talk it over, with the others.”
“I don’t adore you either, doll. Just in case you were confused.”
Kora sighed. Why Petroc? Now that Zalski had the book, why did this man have to be the one the Giver granted to restore some balance? “I’ll plead your case,” she said. “Not because you deserve it, let’s make that clear. Because we don’t stand a chance in hell without you, not anymore. If my companions agree, you can join us, if you don’t change your mind once you know what that entails.”
“I have my flaws, Porteg. Failure to settle debts is not among them.”
“We’ll see,” said Kora. “I’ll be back when it’s daylight.”
“Somehow I’ll survive the wait.”
Kora sat in silence while the others breakfasted on stale bread, ripe pears, and water. She had not fallen back asleep, and her head ached. Neslan even remarked on the circles beneath her eyes. Lanokas kept cracking jokes to gear everyone up for another day of mind-numbing preparation.
“Do you know what I miss?” he said. “Decent food. Hell, even a variety of bad food would be an improvement. We just eat the same crappy food day after day. These things here do have their advantages, though.” He picked up the loaf of bread. “This, for instance. It’s so hard that by tomorrow we can bash in Zalski’s head with it.”
“Here here!” said Neslan.
When Bennie took it upon herself to join the levity, and even Hayden cracked a smile, Kora could not stand the strain. She meant to wait until everyone had eaten, but she said above the laughter, “Zalski has the book.”
No one understood her over the noise. “What was that?” said Neslan.
“Zalski has the book.”
Laskenay dropped her glass; it rolled to the other side of the clearing. Lanokas swore, while Bendelof coughed so as not to choke on a throat full of half-chewed fruit. “My God,” she said, “that’s not funny, Kora.”
“I’m not joking.”
“You have to be,” Bennie insisted. “How could Zalski get his hands on…?”
Kora related her midnight conference with Petroc. She watched the enthusiasm, the hope, drain by degrees from every face, even that of Lanokas. She had never seen him look so gray: not when he shattered his leg in the Hall of Sorcery, not when his brother died…. Never.
Laskenay spoke in a deadened voice. “This changes everything.”
Bennie sounded like a lost child. “What do we do? Where do we go? We can’t go after him now, not when he’ll torture…. When he’ll find out…. Who was it you stayed with in Podrar, Kora?”
“On that first visit? Ter Jute’s wife, Nani.”
“She’ll have an infant now. And she, she’s not the only one with a family. Most have families. We can’t risk this.”
Lanokas said, “We have to risk it. We can’t evade Zalski forever. Striking first gives us the only advantage we can hope for. We’ll just have to warn as
many people as we can.”
“We can push the date back a week,” said Neslan. “We’ve supplies enough to manage that.”
Laskenay said, “We’ll always find reasons to postpone. If we start that trend…. Besides, there’s the militia to consider.”
“What about Petroc?” asked Kora.
“He’ll join us,” said Lanokas. “I’m no more thrilled about the prospect than you are, but let’s face it, we need him. We need six of him.” Lanokas swore again under his breath.
“I’ll go get him,” Kora volunteered.
* * *
“So that was Zalski’s motive in hunting Hansrelto’s book.” Petroc, reclining in the League’s makeshift camp, had just listened to Laskenay explain everything, including the assault plan. “You certainly let things deteriorate, didn’t you?”
Lanokas glared at him. “We had help.”
“There are no more of you? What about the blonde girl?”
“Malzin killed her ages ago,” said Kora. “At least, it feels like ages.”
“A shame.” Petroc drummed his fingers. “She had a fighter’s pluck.” He cast a disparaging look over Bennie, comparing her to Kansten. The girl flushed with shame. “Listen,” he said, “I’ll do what I can. Frankly, you’re all doomed, and at the point when all’s lost, I intend to save myself. Transport out.”
The Crimson League (The Herezoth Trilogy) Page 55