He’d thought he’d do almost anything to change her dejection to renewed hope, but not this. Never this. A vision assailed him of her channeling her energea through a fresh fragment obtained by him from the gong, her clear features and straight body sagging into the deformities of the truldemagar, as she poured out her health – her very self – in the healing of others.
Her grasp on his wrist tightened. “Will you do it, Gael? Harvest another piece of the gong’s lodestone? For me? For the afflicted? For the unafflicted?”
This, too, was a new Keir. He’d never seen her plead before.
“The changed node channeled your energea, but you don't know that even a good copy – an unblurred one – would multiply it. And that is what you require, is it not?” he asked. “Also . . . Carbraes has consigned the gong to the new march,” he told her. “I doubt Dreben will allow me within sight of it.”
“Oh,” she breathed, all the air flowing from her lungs.
He’d only thought he’d seen her discouraged before. This was utter despondency.
* * *
Standing beside Keir, confronting the window bars between her and freedom, he wished he’d managed to preserve – or create – better options. Perhaps better options simply could not exist within a troll stronghold. That was certainly the conclusion he’d drawn, over and over again, during his years in Belzetarn. The tower swallowed down hope like a dragon gulping knights errant.
Keir started to hand the iron droplet back to him, but then brought it closer to her, slowing her breath, and opening her inner vision again.
Gael followed her lead. “That’s strange,” he murmured.
“What’s strange?” she asked.
He took the droplet delicately between his fingers. “Do you see that the scrolling lattice is asymmetric?”
“I’ve not studied broken nodes,”she answered. “Couldn’t the asymmetry be characteristic of them?”
“Perhaps it is,” he said. “But watch while I turn the iron. I think . . .”
He shook his head and began to twirl the droplet slowly, scrutinizing the tiny array as it revolved. The energetic arcs did not maintain a static configuration as they spun. Rather, each curling scroll altered its position in relation to the others, so that the longest protrusion remained on the side of the node pointing to . . . what did it point toward? Gael worked out the orientation in his mind.
It pointed toward Belzetarn’s tower.
“What does it mean?” Keir asked.
Gael’s brows knit, then smoothed. “I have a hunch, but I’ll need to test it,” he said.
Keir gripped her lower lip with her teeth. “What does it involve?” she asked.
“No magery.” Gael smiled a little sadly.
“What then?”
“I must take it outside to different places within the bailey and check its configuration.” He nodded definitively. “And then I’ll come back and tell you what I see.”
Her mouth straightened in exasperation. “Can’t you just tell me?” she demanded.
Gael repressed a smile. “I could, of course. But I’d rather talk of a certainty than a mere possibility, and my test will not take long.”
She glanced at him sidelong, but gestured him toward the door.
Gael went on swift feet.
He got strange looks at every step of his test.
The guards outside Keir’s cell thought it odd that he would leave for only moments and then return. The opteon in the front room clearly thought the same. The sentries on the curtain walls watched and pointed as he walked to random locations in the bailey, stopped at each for apparently no reason, and then walked on to the next. And the messenger boy, who dodged around him at close quarters, saw him staring raptly at the small nugget of metal while turning it slowly in his fingers, and must have wondered if he were a madman.
But he was able to share the certainty he sought with Keir.
“No matter where I stand, it points always at the tower,” he told her.
“But it can’t be the tower that attracts it,” she stated. “That would make no sense.”
“It’s the gong,” said Gael. “The metal from which it came.”
“The lodestone from which it came,” corrected Keir, her expression wondering.
Gael nodded. “Yes. It has to be.”
“But how does that permit us to salvage . . . anything?” Keir asked.
“I’m not sure,” he confessed, “but there’s something – some idea, some possibility nudging at the edge of my thoughts – that promises an answer. This droplet” – he tapped its polished surface with one fingernail – “points the way, if only we can link the right pieces of our situation together.”
Tension tightened Keir’s face. “Gael . . . we don’t have much time to pull these pieces of yours together. I don’t have much time. Carbraes might push my sentencing until after the funerary rites and Dreben’s investment, but he also might not. He could sentence me this very afternoon!”
She was right, of course.
But Gael had the sense that just as the final snowflake falling on a steep snowbound slope might start an avalanche, so an idea inspired by the last two days of events might shift his perspective so radically that his way forward would not merely appear, but seem so obvious that he would wonder that he’d ever missed it.
He closed his fingers around the iron droplet, concealing it, and searched for words with which to reassure Keir.
“When I near the bottom of a tally sheet, with but a sliver of parchment remaining, I don’t require stacks of additional sheets to finish my tally. I need only one, and truly only the top of that one,” he said slowly. “I just need . . . a moment now, not a day, or an afternoon, or even a full turn of the glass. There’s something I know, or that I’ve seen, that I’m forgetting.”
Keir shook her head. “Gael, it’s not something you’re forgetting or that you’re overlooking. It’s something you’ve been resisting all along. You must leave Belzetarn. As must I.”
Gael shifted his stance, leaning one hand on the sill of the barred window. “How will that answer? Wandering the wilds until a band of renegade trolls cut us down? Or Carbraes’ own legions, sent to do just that? And should we escape either of those fates, a winter storm or a pack of wolves straying down from the northern wastes will take us.”
Gael had ruled out solitary roaming as a reasonable choice long ago.
Keir perched herself on the sill, facing Gael.
“But don’t you see?” she said. “The lodestone in the heart of the gong sat at the bottom of that ruined well in Olluvarde, lost and unused for uncounted ages. And yet, all the time, it was there for the finding. If only someone had been looking, we might have had healing for the truldemagar before I was even born. Our ancestors were not stupid! They must have created more than one solution in all the eons that have passed. We should be out there looking!” Her hand closed into a fist. “Finding that solution – or those solutions – is the one truly worthy thing we can do to end this long war between those who bear Gaelan’s mark and those who do not. Even if we seek and never find anything, we’ll have done the right thing, instead of merely tallying which evil is the lesser of the two wrong choices available to us.”
She was right again. His doubts and his caution seemed suddenly petty when viewed against the tapestry she portrayed. Doubt might be accurate, but a man could lose himself in always compounding for what was practical and prudent. He had lost himself. And Keir was offering a way by which he might seek redemption.
Yet he did doubt.
The quest she sketched was a young person’s dream, conjured by inexperience that had not yet seen how luck alone was rarely sufficient to solve even simple problems, let alone complex and longstanding ones such as troll-disease.
Keir’s gaze grew almost tender. “Will you help me? Can you help me? Can you get me out of here? And will you come with me when you do?”
Gael’s lips twitched. That ‘when’ of hers was te
lling. Even imprisoned, awaiting sentence of death, and surrounded by the whole of a troll citadel, she had confidence that Gael could assure her safety.
“I’ve been considering three different plans to remove you from your cell and from Belzetarn,” he said. “None are ideal. You do realize that it’s not the locks on your cell that pose the real difficulty? Those are trivial. A mere smattering of magery, and they click open. It’s the presence of fifteen-hundred warriors – plus guards – who comprise the real obstacle.”
“But will you come with me?” she persisted.
“Yes,” he said. That was a given, but too much else remained unsettled. Getting Keir free was only the start; he needed the steps that came after.
She leaned forward, resolution firming her expression. “Tell me your three plans. We should –”
He overrode her. “Keir, running away from Belzetarn isn’t a plan. Randomly searching for some unknown artifact of the ancients isn’t a plan. We need, I need, detailed and specific –”
The overlooked, disregarded, missing piece slotted into his awareness so abruptly he swayed, glad of the stone sill beneath his palm.
“The panels at Olluvarde depicted more than one lodestone!” he exclaimed. “Two, I think. Maybe three!”
* * *
His body, which had been feeling so heavy through all this interview, felt suddenly light. To leave Belzetarn and the personal defeat that each day there represented, to embrace a new goal, a worthy one – Tiamar’s throne! – he wanted it, wanted it so much he felt dizzy. And he thought he saw his way to it.
Keir’s forehead wrinkled. “What?” she said, puzzled.
“The lodestone within the gong possessed no special attribute that permitted you to move troll nodes, did it?” he asked in return. “It provided merely a multiplying of your own energetic power?”
“Ye-es,” she answered, her thoughts still lagging his.
“It was your own skill that healed me, was it not?” he probed further.
Abruptly she understood, her torso straightening, her eyes blazing. “Gael! We have to find that second lodestone! It exists. The gong itself proves those panels recounted history, not mere myth.”
“Hold a bit.” He’d predicted this moment – when his answer would coalesce from thin air – but it all seemed to be moving too fast now. “The other lodestones could be anywhere. How in the north could we ever find one?” he objected. “They could be destroyed, and we would never find one.”
Keir’s fingers squeezed his wrist. “I doubt it has been destroyed. You and Arnoll and Nathiar, between you, could discover no way to destroy the iron boss of the gong. And if it has not been destroyed, then this” – she released him to touch his fingers, still curled around the iron teardrop – “will lead us to it.”
“It will lead us to the lodestone contained within the gong. We don’t know that it is also drawn to its twin, the other one affixed to that airship.”
Keir tilted her head to one side. “We don’t, of course,” she conceded. “Not for certain. But I think it likely that it will. And even if it doesn’t, the other lodestone is out there. Lost, perhaps. But what is lost may be found. The gong was found, even though no one was looking. We will be looking!” She grinned.
“Now will you come with me?” she demanded.
Gael started to laugh. He’d already answered that question in the affirmative, but it had seemed impossible even as he’d said ‘yes.’ Now the impossible had become . . . not easy, but . . . inevitable.
“There’s nothing I want more,” he answered.
Could her eyes blaze any brighter? “Then let’s go. Now! Using whichever is best of your three plans!”
He glanced around him at the dark cell in which they stood, with its meager necessities. The cold smell of stone chilled his spirit, while the shadows dimmed it. He’d almost forgotten where he stood in the intensity of the moment.
“I must tell Lord Carbraes that I intend to depart.”
Keir’s shoulders lowered. “Is that necessary? Or wise?”
“I cannot just scunner out in the night” – it was afternoon, but nighttime went with the metaphor – “as though I were a thief or a blackguard. Carbraes has dealt with me in all honor. I will not recompense him with cowardice and deceit.”
Keir sighed. “He may hold you.”
“He will not,” said Gael.
“Then I will come with you,” she said.
“No!” The denial burst from him. He moderated his voice. “No, you must not. Theron may well have convinced Carbraes of your role in the disguised tin. And Theron was correct. You cannot plead innocence. Your presence before the regenen would be fatal to our aims.”
“And yours will not?” she asked, skeptical.
“It will . . . precipitate matters,” he admitted, “but in a different way. And I –” he felt an unpleasant expression settle on his face “– I will hold Carbraes to my will in this.”
Her brows quirked. “So sure?” she said.
“No,” he admitted. “Carbraes has always listened to reason in the past, but . . . this is different. He would be reasonable in condemning you, and me with you for upholding you. This . . . will require that he be merciful . . . and concerned with his legacy. I do not know that Carbraes possesses such concern. Or such mercy.”
Keir’s face tensed with a strange blend of sympathy and irritation.
“Keir, I must speak with him,” Gael said.
She stayed silent a long interval and then nodded. “When?” she asked.
“Now,” he replied. “I will see him now. And then return to you. Or send Barris or –” he hesitated “– even Nathiar to you. Go with them, if I do so. Will you?”
Her eyes darkened. “Will it mean you have failed?”
“No, it will mean that my plans are shifting,” he answered. “I think we need to move quickly. So quickly that I should not stay longer with you, plotting and planning. Will you trust me?”
She stifled a chuckle. “Gael, I do trust you.”
“Well, then –” He smiled in return.
“Go swiftly,” she said.
He held her gaze a moment and then turned toward the door.
* * *
Chapter 23
The guards outside Keir’s cell glanced uneasily at Gael as he emerged. The skinny one moved to secure the door, but halted when Gael touched his elbow.
“Leave it unlocked, please,” Gael requested. He didn’t like the idea of Keir trapped in there. She was a healer, not a mage who could move dead metal.
Skinny’s eyes pinched in worry. “Sir?” he said.
“You will stand guard, as you were ordered, ensuring that the prisoner stays within and that no one save myself, or Opteon Barris, or the Lord Magus, enters. But you will leave the locks disengaged. Is that clear?” Gael pinned both trolls with his gaze.
“Yes, Secretarius,” the pair chorused.
He surveyed them a moment more, remembering how he had identified Keir’s cell at once, merely by their positioning.
“Guard the entrance to the corridor, rather than her door specifically.”
They glanced at one another and then shuffled into the stair hall, one on each corner where the corridor opened into the larger space. Skinny cleared his throat.
“Like this, my lord Secretarius?” he asked.
“Just like that,” answered Gael.
“We’ll fain we don’t know which cell she’s in, sir. If you like,” offered Skinny.
“Yes. I would.” Gael nodded curtly and strode away.
He gave similar instructions to the prison opteon in the front room – allow only Barris or Nathiar to enter Keir’s cell – and then hurried toward the artisans’ yard. The sun had slipped slightly from its zenith, causing the gatehouse shadow to creep outward by a hair, but Gael hadn’t spent as much time in Keir’s cell as he’d feared.
His life now possessed an entirely new direction. Could a life change so extraordinarily so quickly? His had
.
As he crossed the grassy lower level, he searched the yard for one of Carbraes’ messengers. That would be the fastest way to locate the regenen. A hum of activity and bustle floated from the windows of the workshops lining the edges of the yard – the artisans laboring busily within – but the only trolls in sight were a cluster of apprentices outside the woodcarvers’ lodge.
Gael took the steps from the lower level to the upper two at a time.
Someone burst from the door of the kitchen annex, racing down its ramp, just as Gael reached the top of the flight of stairs. When the runner veered, leaping the short drop at the middle of the ramp, instead of passing all the way to the bottom, Gael recognized him.
Short brown hair, lean stature, kitchen apron, bright brown eyes. Barris.
The cook nearly bowled Gael over, so rushed was his approach. He gripped Gael’s forearm.
“Sias! I’ve sent nearly every scullion I could spare from the regenen’s kitchen in search of you! Gael, Dreben’s taken Keir! The Mother only knows what’s happened to the boy since, but it can’t be good. Tell me what you need, and I’ll do what I can.” Barris looked thoroughly harried.
“It’s all right. I promise it’s all right.”
“No! It isn’t! It’s the worst!” Barris cast a harassed glance around the yard, as though some recourse lay upon its sunlight grasses, and then returned to Gael’s face. Some of the tension left the cook’s stance. “You’ve seen him,” he said. “You’ve achieved his release.”
“I’ve seen him just now,” agreed Gael. “He’s all right,” he repeated.
Barris exhaled loudly, then shook his head. “I might have known you were ahead of me on this. What did the brigenen accuse the boy of?”
Gael winced. Not only was he ahead of Barris, he was a long way ahead of him. Would it harm the cook to be seen talking with the secretarius, given what Gael intended to do? He thought not. And . . . he liked this vantage point. No one could approach close enough to overhear them without being seen.
Gael pressed his friend’s hand where it lay on Gael’s forearm. “Barris, Lord Dreas is dead, and Dreben is march in his place.”
Barris swallowed, all the animation draining from his eyes.
The Tally Master Page 45