by K. C. May
“I’ll be there to guide you every step of the way.”
With a deep breath, she nodded. “All right. I’ll do it.”
Chapter 43
The ride from Ambryce was long enough, but it seemed even longer with Hennah, mile after mile, hurling insults, reminding Gavin of his wife’s infidelity, speculating about his son’s true parentage, and suggesting he get even by bedding her. Daia wanted to gag her, and after the first day of his prisoner’s ceaseless verbal onslaught, Gavin relented. As they neared Acorn Lake, he grew first eager and then impatient. They would soon find out whether his idea for a cure would work.
“Shouldn’t we be turning off the road soon?” Daia asked.
“Yeh,” he said. “Guardians, how far away is Rarga’s village now?”
They faded into view, floating alongside Golam. “You should ride north now, Emtor, through the forest. It’ll be another three and three-quarters hours’ ride.”
When at last they reached the place the Guardians had described, Gavin asked once more for direction. “It is here, Emtor. In this very spot. If we may offer advice?”
“O’course,” he said.
“Ride fifty yards to the east before you travel to the midrealm. Should you appear suddenly in the middle of the village, the kho-bent Elyle might react violently, thinking it an invasion.”
He nodded and led the way to a spot where the horses ate while they waited. “This should be fine,” he said as everyone dismounted. “Daia, you stay with Hennah. Cirang’s coming with me.”
Cirang, helping Hennah from her horse, looked up in surprise. “Me?”
“What?” Daia said. “No. Absolutely not. She’s not your champion; I am. It’s my duty—”
“I know, but I need her carving skill, and I can’t take both o’you or our prisoner’ll run off.”
“Fine.” Daia stomped over to Hennah and grabbed her roughly by the arm, then proceeded to tie her to a tree. Once she had the prisoner secured, she removed the gag and held a waterskin for her to drink, not seeming to care that most of the water went down the front of Hennah’s shirt.
“Hold it still, wench,” Hennah said. “If I wanted a bath, I’d go to the lake.”
Gavin pulled the two runes from his knapsack and dropped the summoning rune into his coin purse, keeping the rune of time in his palm. He ran a thumb over the dark symbol etched into its otherwise smooth surface. “How far back do I go to find Rarga?” he asked the Guardians.
“She lived a very long life, and even counselled your last king. You can find her as few as two hundred eight years ago or as many as three hundred eighty-six years ago.”
“Ready?” he asked Cirang. She nodded, and he put his free hand on her shoulder. With Daia’s gift fueling his magic, he found the vortex immediately and even willed it to stop on green, the color of the midrealm. It was getting easier, a blessing during a time when it seemed everything else was going wrong. “Taendat,” he whispered, and together he and Cirang took a step.
“Whoa,” she said, reaching for something to hold onto. She stumbled, and he gripped her arm to steady her. He was growing used to the vertigo of changing realms. Though it still threw off his balance, he recovered more quickly than he had at first.
“It’ll take some getting used to. Let’s go.” He led the way through the woods back towards Acorn Lake. The sounds of Elyle whistles and clicks reached his ears. “Set it down here,” one said. “We’ll bring the rest of it once we’ve had a chance to drink our fill of water.”
The buildings were made of brick and stone, and the walkways were paved with what appeared to be mats of woven grass. He and Cirang drew the attention of two Elyle on the outer edges of a village. They froze, their eyes bright yellow with alarm.
“Good day,” he said, lifting one hand in a friendly wave. “I’m the Wayfarer, and this is my companion.”
“Wayfarer?” one said. “Arek is Wayfarer.”
“That one has slain Arek!” the other cried. “Flee! He means to slay us too.”
“No,” Gavin said quickly. “I’m from a time in the future. I came back using a Rune of the Past, see?” He held it out to them with the rune’s symbol facing outward. “I need to speak to Rarga, and I heard she lives in this village.”
“Ohhhh, you want to see Rarga,” the first Elyle said, bobbing his head. His eyes turned from yellow to blue.
“Rarga,” echoed the other, doing the same. They looked like a pair of birds in a mating dance. “My complement saw her walking towards the stream to the south. Perhaps you’ll find her there, Emtor.”
“My thanks.” He bowed to them and started off, leaving them marveling to each other about the rune of the past.
Cirang followed closely behind. “It’s amazing that you can understand those squeaks and clicks and whistles. They sound like birds but look like cats.”
Not far away, he heard the sound of trickling water and hoped Rarga was still nearby. Through the trees, he caught a glimpse of something yellow among the green. It was a head, he saw as they neared, an Elyle paler than he’d ever seen, like the blond hair he’d had as a boy. It looked up at their approach, its eyes changing from blue to green and then to yellow. The Elyle stood like it was ready to flee.
“Are you Rarga?” Gavin asked, stopping. He didn’t want to frighten her.
“Are you the one called Sevae? You have slain Arek?”
“No, no. I’m Gavin Kinshield. I’ve back-traveled to see you.” He held up the rune for her to see. “I’m the Wayfarer two hundred years in the future.”
The Elyle’s eyes flew wide. “Colors be!” She splashed through the stream, seemingly unconcerned with getting her boots wet, and trotted up to them, her eyes now a brilliant shade of blue.
On her approach, Cirang reached for her sword. “My king?”
With a touch on her wrist, he stopped her. “It’s awright. She’s curious, not dangerous.”
The Elyle reached tentatively and poked Gavin’s chest with one finger. “It works! The rune works. You’re the first one to use it. Well, the first I’ve learned about. I’m sure not the first from your perspective. Two hundred years, you said?” She rose up on her tiptoes and looked closely into his eyes, and then looked into Cirang’s. “How do you feel? Are you dizzy? Disoriented? Have you a feeling in your mouth like raw cotton?”
Gavin chuckled. “No more than usual when I travel to another realm. I take it you’re Rarga?”
“Yes, I am. What did you say your name was?”
He smiled. “Gavin Kinshield.”
“Yes, I should have seen it. Arek’s champion.”
“Uh, not that Kinshield,” he said. Though she had the right of it, it was a more complicated matter than he wanted to go into. “He’s a distant ancestor of mine, though.”
Rarga’s lips peeled back, revealing straight, flat teeth. “I’m not as ignorant as you think I am. You’re he, perhaps older, perhaps in a different shell, but you’re Arek’s champion. What can I help you with today, Gavin Kinshield?”
He felt his face redden, glad Cirang didn’t understand her. No one from his own time knew his secret, and he preferred to keep it that way. “I’m in a bit of a bind. I’ve got a summoning rune—”
“Whemorard or Thertlddan?”
“The first one.” He hadn’t known there were two kinds.
“All right, go on.”
“Well, it’s locked. It summons the same being every time, no matter who I want to summon.”
“Yes, that’s the nature of Whemorard. You must craft another rune to summon a different being.”
Damn it. None of the Elyle from his own time knew how to craft it. That knowledge was forbidden. “Can you teach me to do it?”
“Absolutely not.” She offered no explanation, only stared at him as if waiting for an argument.
“Awright, then can you teach me to re-etch the one I have?”
“What being are you planning to summon?”
He told her a condensed version
of events that resulted in people being changed from zhi-bent to kho, as well as his plan to put them back to the way they were by summoning their complements, treating them with essence-infused water from the Nal Disi, and swapping their essences.
“The Nal Disi?” Rarga asked. Her eyes turned a shade of yellow-green, matching the alarm in her face. “You didn’t remove the Nal Disi from the wellspring, did you?”
He remembered Arek’s admonition to avoid talking about events in his past that might affect the future. His only option was to lie. “No, it’s still up there, in the mountains.”
Her eyes turned red as blood. “You lie! By the colors, human. Don’t you understand the consequences of pulling the Nal Disi into your own realm? You must bring it back to the midrealm. Give it to me. In exchange, I’ll make you a new rune of summoning to save your wife.”
Chapter 44
Gavin never imagined he would be explaining the limitations of the Runes of Carthis to Rarga, the Elyle who’d taught King Arek. “I can’t leave the Nal Disi or anything else I possess behind,” Gavin said. “Objects can be exchanged across realms, but not across times. It’s how back-traveling works.”
“Then I cannot help you,” she said. “Even if I agreed to make you a new rune, you cannot bring a summoning rune to the future with you. If you knew that, why did you come?”
“There’s a way I can get objects from the past to my own time—I can bury it here, and then two hundred years from now, I’ll dig it back out.”
Her eyes calmed from red to orange. “That’s a lot of time during which someone else could find it.”
“Yeh, but it works. I’ll choose a good spot.”
“I’m sympathetic to your plight, Wayfarer,” she said, “but the summoning rune is the most dangerous of them all. I don’t know how the previous Wayfarer managed to obtain one. I certainly didn’t craft it for him.”
From what Gavin knew of history, she’d crafted the one King Arek was holding when he’d died—the one Gavin used to send Ritol back to its own realm. He had to be careful what he said, since from her perspective, she hadn’t carved it yet. “I know, but it’s important. There’s no other way. My wife—the queen of my country—is pregnant with my son, and her hatred is slowly killing him. I don’t know what’ll happen if he’s born to a kho-bent mother.”
Rarga’s eyes pulsed between teal and pear green while she uttered a nonsensical string of clicks. “I’ll re-etch the Whemorard rune you have, once. This will enable you to return your wife to her former state and save your child.”
“My thanks, but what about everyone else? There are dozens o’people who’re doomed to spend their lives in gaol if I don’t fix them.”
“Return here,” she said, “with an imprint of their essence in a gem and the name of their complement. I’ll craft a rune specifically to summon that person. You can bury it and retrieve it in your own time, as you described.”
“What about your concern that someone might find it?”
“It won’t matter if it’s already locked onto the essence of someone who doesn’t yet exist. If someone finds it, that’ll be an inconvenience not a danger. I won’t give you an unlocked summoning rune.”
His mind went through the scenario: bring a prisoner from Ambryce, imprint his essence, go to the yellow realm to find his complement and learn his name, go to the midrealm’s past to find Rarga, bury the summoning rune, go to the midrealm in his own time to retrieve it, and summon the complement. He gaped at her. “It’ll take months to go through all that, maybe years. I’m the king now. I got a country to run. Popping back and forth between your realm and mine isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“Then find another solution, Wayfarer,” Rarga said. “That is my offer.”
He had no choice but to hope Cirang could learn to re-etch the rune simply by watching Rarga do it once. “I need a moment to discuss it with my companion.” Rarga inclined her head, and he pulled Cirang a few yards away. “This is where I need your skills as a carver,” he said in a low voice. “She’s going to re-etch the summoning rune. Watch closely so you can learn to do it for me.”
Cirang nodded. “I’ll do my best, my liege.”
He stalked back to Rarga. “Awright. I’ll take whatever aid you can offer.”
“In exchange,” Rarga said, “you’ll return the Nal Disi to the midrealm in your own time. Take it to an Elyle village so they can decide what to do with it.”
“What makes you think they can be trusted with it? After all, aren’t your people the ones who put it into the wellspring in the first place? That’s why the water got tainted. That’s why my people have been changed. My companion calls the spring the Well o’the Damned for good reason. If the water affected my people, then it surely affected people in other realms too.”
“Explain to them what has happened. They’ll find another solution. Keeping it in your own realm isn’t an option.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“It’s dangerous,” she said. “It doesn’t belong there; it belongs here.”
“So you don’t know what’ll happen—if anything?”
Rarga glared at him with red-orange eyes for a moment. “No. I don’t know. Nothing like this has happened before to my knowledge, but we must be cautious.”
Gavin felt an itch in the back of his mind but dismissed it. The Guardians weren’t like Ritol. The Nal Disi was a bloody rock. Any other inanimate object could be moved from realm to realm without consequence. How else would he have gotten the summoning rune? How else would Ravenkind have gotten the one he had? The Nal Disi had been merely a rock like any other sitting deep within a natural spring—a spring that existed in every realm. Though he didn’t understand her concerns, he had to agree to get her cooperation.
“Awright,” he said. She hadn’t specified a time frame for returning the Nal Disi to the midrealm. He would do it once everyone affected by the water was restored to their natural khozhi balance. After that, he would no longer need it. “I agree to your terms. I’ll take it back to the midrealm.” The Guardians wouldn’t be happy to learn this.
“Come with me,” Rarga said. “Your companion can wait there.”
“She doesn’t leave my side,” Gavin said, following the Elyle to the stream.
Rarga didn’t object. When she reached the stream, she held out her hand. “Give me your rune.”
He dug it out of his coin pouch and handed it to her. She looked at it, and her ears shifted forward. “Where did you get this?”
“I found it. Why do you ask?”
“I didn’t carve this, yet it has my signature.”
Oh, hell. If she knew Arek would ask for a summoning rune, she’d want to know why, but telling her wasn’t an option. He couldn’t give her any information that would make her behave differently or tell Arek something about his future that he mustn’t know. “Maybe someone forged it.”
She looked deeply into his eyes while her own shifted through various shades of blue and violet. “You don’t lie well, Wayfarer. I made this rune, but not yet. Why? For whom?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s another limitation o’back-traveling. I can’t give you any information that would change the future. If I try it, I’ll wind up in my own realm and time with the worst headache you can imagine. Know that you did make it when it was asked o’you, and doing so saved the world.”
Rarga’s ears flattened, and she clicked and whistled in annoyance. “You should help me with this. Pour water on the stone while I carve the rune.”
Gavin signaled to Cirang that they were about to begin, and then went to the bank of the stream and squatted beside Rarga. Cirang followed but stood back to give them room.
Rarga held the stone in one hand and traced the shape of the rune with the index finger of the other while he scooped water and let it trickle over the stone’s smooth surface. It sizzled, and smoke rose from the blackened rune. She traced it three times, her finger always following the same path. He watched her haze a
s she carved it, unsure what, exactly, he was seeing. It was speckled with red and orange, like embers floating from a campfire, but the speckles flowed from what looked like a flaming ball in her gut to one edge of her haze. With his normal vision paired with the mystical, he realized that the embers were flowing through her finger. Soon, the embers slowed and dimmed until he no longer saw them, and her haze was a solid light-green.
“It is done.” She handed the rune back to him. “It will now summon the complement of the one whose essence was imprinted in your sword’s gem.”
He rose to his feet. “What? No. That’s not my wife.”
Rarga flicked her ears, and her eyes turned a deep pinkish violet. “That was your mistake, then. I told you I won’t give you an unlocked rune. My offer stands, however. Return with your wife or imprint her essence in your gem the way you did for... whoever that is... and I’ll make a rune or re-etch the one you have to summon her complement.”
Gavin sighed and nodded. “Awright. I understand. You have my thanks for this. I’ll be back for another in maybe a week.”
“A week in your own time. You can return to this very moment, can you not? That would be most convenient for me.”
He smiled. For someone who hadn’t yet learned all the details of the Rune of the Past, she caught on quickly. “I’ll do that.”
Without Daia’s ring to lead him to her conduit, it took a minute or so for him to find the vortex. He took Cirang by the wrist and pulled her through.
Chapter 45
Gavin and Cirang found Daia exactly where they’d left her, scowling and stomping around. Hennah sat on the ground, tied to a tree at the waist and neck with her hands shackled behind her and the gag once again between her teeth. Golam, munching contentedly, looked up at him. His reins were tied to the lowest branch of a sturdy tree.
“You’re back already. Did you get it?” Daia asked.
“Yeh. We got the rune to fix Hennah, but no others.”
“I watched the creature make it,” Cirang said, “but I’m not sure I can duplicate it.”