He grabbed my arm. “Willet, we have to deliver the heir—the queen—to Cynestol.”
I sighed. “Yes, and I’m sorry that we’re not going to be able to do that just yet.”
Chapter 45
The town of Locallia, two miles from the farm, boasted only one inn, but it had a porch that wrapped around three sides and an affable keeper who might have been Braben’s brother if he’d possessed light hair and skin to go with his blue eyes. He escorted us to a private dining room with laughter and jests, bobbing his head and smiling as though our presence honored him.
Bolt waited for me to take a pull from my tankard before he started speaking. I think he wanted to keep me from interrupting him. “We have to get her back to Cynestol.”
I nodded. Pieces of a puzzle had started to come together in my head, but I was still too close to it, and I needed to talk my way through my thoughts without being interrupted. I pointed to the room above us. “For now she and the servant girls are safe with Rory,” I said. “No one knows where they are, and anyone who tries to force their way in will regret it.”
He sighed. “What are you planning?”
“I need to talk to Pellin and the rest of the Vigil, but short of that, I need to know if my intuition is leading me in the right direction.” I clapped Custos on the shoulder. “I’m hoping you can help, my friend.”
“What did you see, Willet?” Gael asked.
“Something that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “We knew Bishop Gehata used the attack by the dwimor as a cover to kill the queen, but when I delved his memories the description of the assassin seemed wrong. He was big. Why, when smaller dwimor are much more effective?”
“We knew he was big,” Bolt said.
“Yes. What we didn’t know was that there were two of them. The woman slipped away when the guards came.” I looked at my companions. “She left.”
“Two of them,” Bolt said.
“Two assassins seems an unnecessary risk,” Mirren said.
Gael’s eyes widened. “They weren’t trying to kill her. They were trying to take her.”
“I came to the same conclusion,” I said.
“Maybe,” Bolt said. “Why would Cesla try to take the queen instead of killing her?”
I took a deep breath. “I need your help again, old friend,” I said to Custos. “There’s too much to unravel here. Can you tell me what happened when men first came north from the southern continent?”
He nodded, and the light within our room played off the dome of his head. “That’s a short question with a long answer, Willet.”
I smiled, sharing in the joy that danced in his eyes at the prospect of answering it, and pointed to a bowl of almond-crusted figs perched on the table in front of him. “If you run out, I will pay the keeper whatever it takes to get more.”
He took one and savored it, working it from side to side before he answered. “Where do you want me to begin?” His eyes flicked back and forth in that way that told me he searched the library he kept in his mind.
There was no way of knowing what was important without hearing it all, or as much as he could tell me, and I said so.
“Very well,” he breathed. “When men from the southern continent took to ships over two thousand years ago, they found the north lush and wild and devoid of men. The first men to settle did little more than build villages on the coast and from there . . .”
Three hours later what remained of the food had gone cold, and the ale had warmed to room temperature. I nodded. Most of what Custos had told me, I’d already known, and though there were interesting details he’d recently gleaned from the Vigil library, there was nothing that truly surprised me.
Worse, nothing he’d told me explained the central question. “Tell me about the gift of kings,” I said. “I don’t understand how it appeared here in the north.”
Custos nodded. “Ah, it’s more a question of the south’s history than ours. From the beginning, the gift of kings was a part of man’s heritage. When the north was discovered, six with the gift of kings left and divided the north between them. The only change in that history came after a particularly divisive political struggle in Caisel. The country decided to split. The kingdoms of the northern continent agreed that the new country, Elania, would have all the rights and privileges of the other kingdoms, except that its monarch would never hold the gift of kings. It’s been that way ever since.”
“How many still hold the gift of kings on the southern continent?” Gael asked.
“Twelve,” Custos said. “But the southern continent is quite monolithic. The twelve choose one of their nobles to act as emperor of the continent. They’ve escaped the king wars and the order wars, but their internal struggles have been no less violent.”
“I think the Fayit created a prison,” I said. “Suppose you’re one of the last of a dying race of almost incalculable wisdom and knowledge and your job is to guard a prison. Knowing that events often transpire in unexpected ways, you give the civilization that comes after you the means to summon you, despite the oaths you swore to stay hidden.”
Custos nodded, his eyes bright. “Yes. They could require the assembly of a circle of four pure temperaments, nine pure talents, or six pure gifts.” He shook his head. “But the Fayit must not have counted on the dilution of our race, Willet. The ability to summon them is gone.” He pointed to Bolt. “His physical gift is as pure as we know, but in the dim reaches of time, we still have no idea how often it’s been split and shared. And we have even less knowledge of what a pure talent or temperament would look like.”
I rubbed the top of his head and smiled. “I think your ability, old friend, gives us a clue in that regard.” I shook my head. My heart pounded against my chest, constrained by the confines of my ribs. “I don’t think the circle is lost to us. I think Ealdor’s visits to me—to us—indicates there is still a means of summoning them, regardless of our decline.”
“What happened just before the start of the Gift of Kings War?” I asked. I didn’t say anything about my guess as to why there were eighteen who held the gift of kings. I might have been wrong. For now, and hopefully forever, it was beside the point.
Gael was the first to answer. She knew my mind better than any other and was the first to see where my intuition and logic had taken me. “They tried to split the gift,” she breathed.
Bolt nodded. “It wouldn’t split. When they tried to force it, it went free.” A moment later he shook himself. “No. It’s interesting, but there’s not enough steel there to make a dagger much less a blade. Herregina has to go back to Cynestol.”
Custos added his objection to Bolt’s. “The kings’ gifts aren’t pure, Willet. Even with the dilution over time the gifts the kings and queens hold don’t match those of their strongest subjects in power.”
Mirren leaned forward. “Not alone, no, but every king or queen carries a portion of all six gifts. Yes?”
I nodded. “Every new king or queen is tested for the six gifts. It’s axiomatic that a king or queen carries a portion of all six. No exceptions. Now work it backward. The gift of kings has been with us since our earliest history. If they can’t be split, then it is almost a certainty they’ve never been split. Don’t you see? Every king or queen of the original kingdoms of the northern continent has a fraction of each of the six perfect gifts. If you bring them all together, you have a perfect circle.”
“You’ll never get the queen of Frayel and the king of Owmead to commit on that basis,” Bolt said. “Ulrezia’s temper runs as cold as Rymark’s does hot, but they share a deep skepticism of any idea that’s not their own. They won’t come, I’m sorry.”
I held up a hand. “Don’t be. You want to believe I’m right. If I can’t convince you, how can I convince anyone else?” I knew what I had to do, and I hated myself for it. I looked at Gael. “I am so tired of killing people.”
Her eyes widened. “Willet . . .”
I reached across the table to where she sat on my
right and squeezed her arm, careful to avoid her bare skin. Work with the sword had strengthened her, bringing additional harmony to her willowy frame that I thought beautiful. I sighed, knowing I could put this off, but there was no point. There amidst the mutton and wine and figs, I closed my eyes and shifted in my seat until I faced northwest, aligning myself with the Everwood.
Toward Ealdor’s home.
“I’m sorry, Ealdor,” I said to the air. “Too much has been lost. We don’t know enough to summon you according to your rules.”
Though I suspected my friend had a flair for the dramatic, this time he didn’t make me wait, and he didn’t step from the shadows. He simply appeared.
I pointed to the stole around his neck, the tattered purple one he wore whenever we celebrated haeling together. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” I said. “Why does it look like that? Even the poorest priest keeps his stole in pristine condition.”
He gave me a smile, his blue eyes twinkling with mirth and more emotions than I could put a name to. “Do you really want me to expend myself on that question, Willet?”
Surprised laughter came from me almost before I realized it. “Even that?”
He sobered, as though his usual levity had become a burden. “I could tell you what you need to know, but you need to see what happened. The rest of the Vigil can delve any of you for the story.”
I delayed. “This is it, isn’t it. You won’t be able to come back anymore.”
A rueful smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Any question I answer will detract from what I’m about to show you, Willet.” He sighed. “It will be brief, too brief, but I’ll show you all as much as I can.”
My eyes stung. “I’m sorry, Ealdor.”
The inside of my head exploded into a chiaroscuro of light and sound, but first I heard Ealdor’s voice.
Chapter 46
“Among the Fayit there were those of us who could sense ripples in time, echoes of the future reaching into the past,” Ealdor whispered into my mind. “That inexplicable gift from Aer made me a general when the war broke out. When you came into the forest and when Cailin came after, I felt something in you, a pull from times yet to come that said you would be needed. Perhaps I was just lonely. Millennia ago I stood on the edge of eternity and swore I could bear my solitude, believing my desire for retribution would be enough to sustain me. I was wrong. Time is an implacable torturer.”
Tremors still rolled through the deep places of the earth like waves upon the ocean, reminders of cataclysm and war that had fractured the continent. Ealdor strode from the ruined halls with his lieutenants at his side—brothers in spirit, if not by blood—only two at the last.
“Is everything ready?” His voice came harsher than he intended, but grief and ruinous victory clogged his soul as the dust of annihilation filled his lungs. Across the far reaches of their world, nothing remained but ruins.
The fellow priest on his left, who owned the title of the Dara, second priest of Aer, dipped his head and reached out with his bare hand, tempting Ealdor to laughter. Dark in the way of the south, the Dara’s height lent elegance even to ordinary gestures. Ealdor sighed. What mattered their manners and deference now, when all was unmade? He thought of the centuries ahead and the long, long grieving yet to come and hungered for speech, as if he could somehow keep sorrow at bay for a moment longer.
“In words, please,” Ealdor said as the Dara’s thoughts began to convey themselves into his mind.
“As you wish, Altera.” Even to the end they used their titles of the priesthood rather than names. The Dara’s voice, oddly melodious in the midst of gray choking dust, almost had the power to banish visions of countless dead and destruction. How did one mourn the death of an entire world?
“The last prison is ready.” His fellow priest paused. “Your brother and his wife are waiting there for you.”
“Why?” Ealdor asked.
The Fayit on his right, similarly titled the Trian, the third priest of Aer, answered in a voice deep and resonant enough to match his bulk. “He’s your brother, Altera. He wanted to see you once more.” And as he always did, the Trian went on, striving for a deeper meaning that lay beyond the mundane. “Cuman knows that your positions could easily have been reversed, had Gretan survived the last attack.”
Ealdor stopped, his feet slipping a bit in the dust and ruins, to bow his respects to the name of his dead wife. Would she have desired Cuman’s choice? For a moment grief and doubt overwhelmed him, and he stumbled to find solid footing in the debris around his feet.
“Where have you placed the prison?” he asked. Thinking about his dead wife or the long duty that lay before him served no purpose. He and his lieutenants, bereaved priests like himself, would undertake the peace as they had the long, long war, by shouldering the burden one day at a time until all had been accomplished.
“Two hundred leagues northwest,” the Trian said. “As far away from the quakes as we could manage. There’s a slip in the earth where the soil runs nearly half a league deep.”
“I pray that it holds forever,” the Dara said.
Ealdor nodded, but until recently, distinctions of time had held no meaning. For the barest fraction of an instant he sensed the infinite branchings of possibility that overwhelmed him with countless outcomes of a distant future. One stood out from the rest, but it failed to resolve. He shivered. Aer had spoken to him.
“I pray that it does as well,” he said, but out loud his voice carried the hollow timbre of doubt.
The Dara and the Trian, ever perceptive, bowed to him as they sketched the profession of belief on their forehead—a single vertical line intersected by a horizontal. “What did you see, Altera?”
Ealdor, weary, waved at the air with one hand. The smell of dust and debris filled his nose. “I sensed a possibility, an impression only, too distant to resolve.”
“Good,” the Trian said.
“How so?” the Dara asked. “Aer has hinted at a future purpose that we cannot see.”
In a time removed from ruin the Trian might have smiled. “But we have a purpose. Still, it would have been a kindness to kill them, and more sure.”
“Yes, but not just,” Ealdor breathed, hot with anger that still surprised him.
They strode from the empty wreckage of the city of Tolamec, a beacon even during the war, and boarded the fyrlen platform that would take them to the last prison. Ealdor stopped to run the tips of his fingers along the smooth surface, a combination of steel and fiber as light as air and stronger than diamonds. So much had been lost. Soon he and his fellow priests would enter the long dark to ensure the rest of it would be lost as well.
The trip northwest to the prison took less time than he expected, the resonance engine of the platform humming with power. The Dara piloted, skimming the land as if fixing the images in his mind. Outside the burning ruin of the city, the signs of war and destruction lessened, but deep canyons gouged the earth, and sharp rock signaled where new mountain ranges would rise, testimony to the resonance they’d harnessed, power they’d turned on each other.
The fyrlen platform touched the earth, the landing gear flexing on the uneven ground to keep the seating level, and the hum of the engine died away as the rotors slowed. The platforms would have to be destroyed, of course, just as everything else.
They disembarked and walked the short distance to the massive cube where the last enemy awaited. The amount of pure resonant metal they’d committed to the prison still made his mind reel, the wealth of an entire world fashioned into three perfect cubes. The resonance field kept Atol Bealu imprisoned behind shimmering waves of power that diminished sound, but some instinct or premonition must have pulled his head up from unknown contemplations, and their eyes latched on to each other, victor and defeated.
Ealdor resisted the temptation to commence Bealu’s imprisonment. Even in this, he would not give Atol the pleasure of believing himself to be the first priority. Though it made his skin crawl to
turn his back on the horror Bealu had become, Ealdor willed himself forward to pull his brother and his wife into a clutching embrace.
As if their touch would always hold the power to know him, he voiced his doubt and fear at last. “Are you sure you must do this?”
Soft laughter, amused and rueful at the same time, came from Cuman and Endela. Cuman pulled back from the embrace and swept his arm in a wide arc that somehow encompassed the earth in all its wasted destruction. “Aer gave you and your fellow priests the command that we must surrender our immortality—and now you doubt?
“Look at us, Ealdor.” He pointed at Bealu. “Look at him. We became too much. Aer placed the earth in our charge, and we failed to stem the ambition of Atol and his like. The choice between departing or living mortal lives is Aer’s last, best mercy.”
“It seems a hard choice to me now,” Ealdor said. “Everyone else has departed. I don’t understand why you decided to stay. Your lives will be nothing but a breath, a wisp of morning mist to be burned away by the sun.”
Endela, Aer bless her, put a hand to his face, her eyes carrying nothing of grief, her gaze holding only compassion. That incomprehensible strength was exactly why Ealdor wanted her to live on.
“Ealdor, our children will have the chance to be both less and more than us. In their weakness they will come to depend on Aer as we were intended to and didn’t,” she said. “Their shortened lives will draw them close.”
Because he would never see them again after this day, he asked the question closest to his heart. “Does it hurt to know you will be less than you were?”
Cuman nodded. “Yes, but our children will have no reference for it.”
Endela added her assurance to his. “With each birth, I will grieve what had to be lost, but I’m hopeful that our sons and daughters will be free from the pride that destroyed our world.” Then she shrugged. “But even if they are not, the necessity remains.”
The Wounded Shadow Page 35