The Keeper of the Mist

by Rachel Neumeier

  “Perhaps provide some little magic, even something very small,” urged Tassel.

  “And possibly one or two soldiers would not go amiss if we must conduct a daring raid,” Domeric added prudently.

  “Well, well…” Lord Osman seemed slightly taken aback by all this. Then his soldier leaned forward and murmured in his ear, and Lord Osman paused, his expression growing thoughtful. The soldier murmured something else. Lord Osman nodded, looked up, glanced quickly at Tassel, drew himself up, looked firmly at Keri, and said just a bit too quickly, “I gather your peaceful land has scant need of soldiers, and less need of…active magic, shall we say? So I understand why you wish the assistance of Tor Carron in this exigency. Yet I must observe that Tor Carron has difficulty enough protecting itself, and has little wish to defy the Wyvern King over the fate of a small land such as yours—a land that our people do not even know exists. Allow me to suggest once more that a handfasting agreement would be the wisest course. Such an agreement would compel Tor Carron to assist you in regaining your Doorkeeper—this cornerstone of your magic!—despite the considerable risk and against our normal policy. Not even my father could argue otherwise, as our alliance would be clear and strong for all to see. I am sure my father would support a still greater risk than you ask, once Lady Kerianna and I were handfasted.”

  “Would he, indeed?” said Tassel, her tone even. “Yet do you yourself desire this precise form of alliance, Lord Osman?”

  “Of course I must desire any alliance so beneficial to my people,” the young Bear Lord declared, not quite looking at her. “Also, of course, Lady Kerianna, I am sure you see that your people would work more smoothly with my soldiers once you and I were wed.”

  He meant by this last that her people would take his orders, Keri realized. His, and those of his people. Naturally, he would expect to be in charge of everything. Naturally, he would. In charge of the whole of Nimmira. He thought he could get that by marrying her. It was her fault, too, since she had been the one to put the idea in his head. She couldn’t stop herself from giving Tassel an accusing glance: This was your idea, and now look.

  Tassel opened her eyes wide and shrugged.

  Keri glared at her, briefly. Then she turned back to Lord Osman and tried to smile.

  She had never meant to put herself in a place where she had to promise Osman Tor the Younger things she knew she could not actually give him. Marriage to him might not be truly impossible, but the permanent alliance between their two countries it would signify, that was impossible. The whole point was to close all the foreigners out of Nimmira again.

  Worse, expanding the magic of blindness and misdirection to cover all of Tor Carron as Lord Osman wanted…that was completely impossible. Tor Carron was simply too big. No one could walk all the way around Tor Carron, letting a drop of blood fall for every step.

  But she did not dare explain how impossible that would be.

  She said instead, “We can—I can—we can all think about your suggestion, Lord Osman, but the delay it would occasion, surely you must see that, though we may agree generally with everything you say, we can’t wait. We have to find Cort now, we have to get him back right away, or anything we agree to will—will crumble and fail before the Wyvern King!” There, that sounded flowery and formal enough, didn’t it? And it was true, every word of it.

  “Indeed, Lady Kerianna,” Lord Osman rejoined immediately, nodding in warm reassurance, “everything you say is true, but there need be no delay. I have sufficient men of rank in my company; there need be no lack of witnesses on my side. And of course you have all of your Nimmira on which you may draw. It is true we would need to forgo the feasting, and I would have to ask you to excuse the lack of the handfasting gifts that are your due and trust that I would not shame your worth when I sent for them! But as you say, we must be swift: we need not delay for anything once we are agreed on this course. The customs of a gentler time can wait.”

  He sounded perfectly reasonable, that was the trouble. Keri thought again that he was a great deal more like a fox than a bear. Charming, smooth, and predatory: that was Osman Tor the Younger. She couldn’t even argue, because what he said made sense, given what he knew—which was, of course, just what she and her people had told him.

  She looked at Tassel, but her friend was studying Lord Osman with narrow-eyed intensity. Keri shot Domeric a look instead: You’re supposed to be helping! So help!

  Her intimidating brother did not step forward, but he shifted his weight. That was enough to draw all their attention. But what he said, in his deep, authoritative voice, was, “Kerianna, Lord Osman makes sense. A quick wedding and we’d gain his men and his experience, and what does it matter how we frame this alliance with Tor Carron? If this will content the people of the Bear, I say we do it and get on.”

  “What?” said Keri. She was astonished. Did her brother think he was helping? Lord Osman was certainly looking pleased; he looked exactly like a fox that had gotten away with a hen right out of the yard, and she couldn’t blame him. But she could blame Domeric. She did. She said sharply, “Domeric, this is something we need to think about more carefully!” There, that shouldn’t sound as insulting to Lord Osman as if she’d screamed, No, no! and run away. He might be impatient or he might only want to press Keri for a quick answer, but he couldn’t say that she didn’t have reason to consider.

  Or at least to consult her other advisors. She suddenly realized that was in Lord Osman’s mind—and Domeric’s. She could tell by the patience in the glance they exchanged; she could tell by the way Lord Osman began to say something to her and her brother gave the tiniest shake of his head: Not now, don’t startle her, let her settle to the idea in her own time. He might as well have said it right out loud. Despite what had happened with Brann, maybe because of what had happened with Brann, Domeric thought she was—what? Young, silly, female? Anyway, incapable of making decisions or getting things done. He thought she would run to someone for advice. The Timekeeper? Someone else?

  Did Domeric really think he had rescued her from their oldest half brother? She had rescued herself, hadn’t he noticed?

  But she guessed now that he really hadn’t. She could see he thought she needed an older, more experienced man to protect her and guide her and make decisions for Nimmira. Or else maybe he and Lord Osman thought they could work with each other more easily than with her. Or, more likely, all of that. That might not be exactly what had driven Lord Osman’s demand, but she was almost certain it was exactly what Domeric had in mind.

  It frightened Keri, and it made her angry.

  Tassel knew all this because she knew Keri, and Keri could tell that Linnet guessed at least some of it. She could tell by the way Linnet moved softly to lay her hand on Domeric’s arm to stop him arguing further. She was helping him, not Keri, when she did that. Keri was angry at her, too. She was even angry at Tassel, which wasn’t fair at all.

  She snapped, “Lord Osman’s offer is gracious, but even though we may not have all the days that lie before the turning of the year, I think we may have one day!” That was from a play. She said it because it was flowery and formal and because it came to her mind when she couldn’t think of anything on her own account. Only afterward did she remember that they probably didn’t have as much as one day left, and after that she remembered that the play was Osprey and Milander, and that it told a story where at the end, the hero, Milander, came upon the body of his beloved Osprey and knew he’d been just moments too late to save her.

  That was not exactly the play Keri had meant to recall just now. She saw Linnet nod, and Domeric give a little smile of satisfaction, and came within a scant thread of shouting at them both.

  Instead, she whirled around and went out, not quite running, but nearly. She did not even know where she was going until she found herself in Cort’s apartment, staring at the wardrobe where only hours before anybody had been able to step right through from Nimmira to Eschalion and where now, when she impulsively flung o
pen the wardrobe’s door, there was still nothing but fine-grained wood.

  It occurred to Keri for the first time that if Magister Eroniel had closed this little gap, he might be able to open it again. That was an uncomfortable thought.

  Then it occurred to her that the Wyvern sorcerer might not have been the one to close this gap. Cort might have done that himself, to stop any movement between Eschalion and Nimmira. To stop her from following, no doubt. As though she would be so foolish. High-handed man, stopping anybody from coming after him! That would be just like him. And then Eroniel had tried to use him to break open Nimmira—and since then, nothing. Keri didn’t know what frightened her more: that Eroniel had tried to shatter every lock in Nimmira or that he had not tried again.

  Now Lucas had gone to open the player’s way. A crack between lands, a little gap, a hole for mice to slip between Nimmira and Eschalion. She was confident he could do that, since he had been doing it all his life. And he had always gotten back again. Back again was very important. Back again with Cort, and if Lord Osman wouldn’t help and Domeric wouldn’t help, at least she thought she could depend on Lucas.

  Strange to think of Lucas as the dependable one. He would laugh at that idea, she thought. Tassel would laugh, too. She tried to imagine storming the Wyvern King’s citadel with no one to help but her friend Tassel and her youngest and wildest half brother.

  Except, of course, she daren’t leave Nimmira. Nor could Tassel. Neither the Lady nor her Bookkeeper. Keri tried to imagine Lucas storming that citadel all by himself, and shook her head. They needed Lord Osman. And Domeric. But she needed Lucas. She trusted him in a way she did not trust the other two. She knew he couldn’t really be as unreliable as he was so widely thought to be, or he’d hardly have successfully hidden his double life from everyone for so many years.

  This would work. It had to work. So it would work. And then everything would be fine.

  She went to find Lucas. She would ask him to persuade the young Bear Lord and Domeric to do as she asked. Maybe he could do it, even if she didn’t know how—he was a lot better with words than she was. But first she would look at the player’s involution in Nimmira’s border for herself.

  Not that she would even think of stepping through it. Because she couldn’t. She daren’t. She knew that. Not even to find Cort.

  She found the involution at once, since she knew where Lucas was. It wasn’t all that far from the Lady’s House, and closer still to her mother’s small house and bakery, where she’d grown up. It was so strange to have an involuted sliver of the Outside right there, folded into Nimmira so smoothly she could hardly tell it was there even when she stood right next to it. Even standing directly in front of it, she saw it only with her eyes, not with her inner sight.

  The crack in the air, Lucas had called it. Like a slice through folded cloth. It truly was like a cut from a knife: narrow and jagged, hardly wide enough for a single person to slip through by turning sideways and squeezing. The weakening of the boundary mist made it even more difficult to see. Because a little mist was still here, but so thinned that the player’s gap had a wavery, transparent appearance around the edges, as though it were made of…it was hard to describe…something even less substantial than mist or smoke. Maybe heat haze. Maybe just a slant of light that was subtly different from the light in Nimmira. But it was there, and visible, if you were a player and knew exactly where to look. Or if you were the Lady of Nimmira and a player, or a player’s son, had pointed it out to you.

  Once she knew how to look at it, Keri almost thought she could glimpse mountains through the player’s crack. Yes. Not the rugged, rolling mountains of Tor Carron, but the high, sharp-edged peaks of the far north of Eschalion, where the land stopped and the sea rushed endlessly against the frozen cliffs. Where the sun shone without heat in a white sky and turned the ice streaking the mountains to glittering fire.

  It was nothing like Nimmira, the place she glimpsed through that jagged, narrow crack in the air. Keri leaned to one side and then the other, trying to see better. There was no gentle beach before the sea, only those white cliffs. But below the mountains lay a forest of dark-needled firs and silver-barked birch trees that were leafless, because though it was spring in Nimmira, northern Eschalion was still locked in winter. Though it was almost lost amid the firs, she thought she could make out a village of rough huts with pointed thatched roofs and, above it, carved into the mountain, the fine, sweeping lines of a narrow citadel built right into the stone. Keri shivered with dread even at this distant glimpse of those edged towers.

  She told herself she was only shivering with cold from the high winter wind that made its way through the gap.

  The player’s crack was not behind the theater or tucked away in any of the puppet stands in town, as she might have expected. Instead, it cut through the air and stone of a well house, within the private garden of a small house. Eline’s own house, Lucas explained now, bought with her own money, though she had not lived here after her time with Lord Dorric. Eline had bought it because of the gap, of course. And she had signed it over to her son when she left Nimmira.

  If Keri had known about this house, she wouldn’t have needed Lucas to show her where the hazy gap wavered in the air. She wondered how Brann had known about it. Maybe he had spied on Lucas, or maybe Magister Eroniel had found the gap and shown it to him? If that was the case, her own people would have to be doubly careful when they went through. But she still saw no choice but for her people to step through that gap: there was no other way to cross all those miles and find Cort fast enough.

  But she wished she’d known Brann was heading for it. She could have stopped him coming here. She was almost sure she could have. Then things would be…She didn’t know. But different than they were.

  Although Cort would still be missing.

  She wondered how many other narrow little cracks there might be between Nimmira and the lands Outside. If there had been two just in Glassforge, there must be more—invisible to her, as these had been invisible. Not quite part of Nimmira, not quite part of any land, but a way for anyone who pleased to step across the miles from one land to a far distant place in a single heartbeat. Or maybe not anyone. Maybe just players, those few who had the special kind of magic that let them remember Nimmira when they were in the lands Outside. She hoped only players had that magic. She would have to ask Tassel to find out. Sometime. When there was time.

  She thought Lyem Aronn must have been mad to fold the boundary in and tuck a gap into the involution at the back of his wardrobe. But who had sliced this little gap through the air? The players themselves? That was more than she’d ever supposed they could do. Lucas would probably know. She couldn’t guess whether he would tell her. Perhaps not. He was still very much Eline’s son, that was clear. She wondered whether he would object to closing this gap after they got Cort back. It would be sad if he had to choose between Nimmira and his mother.

  Although it would be worse if, like the previous Doorkeeper’s wardrobe had, this gap interfered with redrawing the borders of Nimmira.

  She stared at the cold, high mountains of Eschalion and the citadel of the Wyvern King and made a silent promise to herself. No one would ever again be able to snatch one of her people away into a different land, or sneak away himself with secret jewels in his pocket. Whatever Lucas or the players thought, she would close every gap in Nimmira, though no bigger than a mouse hole. She and Cort. As soon as he was back.

  “What do you think?” Lucas asked, his tone uneasy. “You see it’s a long way to the Wyvern King’s citadel even from Yllien, and a good thing, too. Who wants to leave tracks he might glimpse, right? The town is all behind us, though. I mean, behind this view. Those huts are where the poorer folk of Yllien live.”

  Keri nodded. “So this gap is out in the air there, too?”

  “Smiths work iron, you know, and iron is proof against some kinds of sorcery. My mother said they thought it safest to leave the crack out of doors, where its
magic can tangle with the magic of the smithing and be lost to view.”

  Keri nodded again, thinking hard. She had not promised Lucas that she would tell no one else of the player’s crack, but she knew he hoped she wouldn’t reveal it to just anyone. Even so, she knew she was going to have to tell Tassel everything as soon as possible. And the Timekeeper. She was not eager to explain all this to the Timekeeper, but she knew she had to. She needed time; they all needed time: time to find Cort, time to steal him away right under the Wyvern King’s cold gaze. They needed more time than they had. So she needed the Timekeeper. She wondered what he would say when he learned that she meant to send Lucas to Eschalion with, if possible, Lord Osman and the Bear soldiers. He would probably say nothing at all. But she suspected he would disapprove—of Lucas, and even more of Osman the Younger. But what choice did they have? What choice did any of them have now?

  But she couldn’t quite imagine Lord Osman taking direction from Lucas. Domeric, maybe. If she could trust that Domeric would support her, rather than working at odds with her.

  Other girls had brothers they could depend on, surely. She sighed.

  Lucas glanced down at her. “We’ll get him back,” he said gently, with none of his usual mockery.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” answered Keri, who hated promises that couldn’t be trusted or kept. Though she liked Lucas for saying it. She shrugged uneasily and turned away from the jagged gap in the well house. “You do know the people there? In Yllien? You can get them to help us?”

  “If my mother’s in Yllien herself right now, I’m sure I can. If not—” He hesitated. “I know those people. But they aren’t…I don’t belong to them, you know. They’d do a reasonable favor for Eline’s son. But this may turn out to be a very big favor. I can’t promise what they’ll do, except that I doubt any of them will join us if we need to break into Aranaon Mirtaelior’s citadel. Lend us costumes and props, yes. Get caught in our company…” He spread his hands in an eloquent gesture.