The Keeper of the Mist

by Rachel Neumeier

  Keri had not really expected him to answer her. But his voice was exactly as she would have anticipated: it was beautiful, as smooth and rich and golden as this summer that had trapped them. It was not a human voice. The very beauty of that voice was a sort of mask, Keri thought, just as much as that ironic, tilted smile. It was hard to think about the actual meaning of his words. When she did, she found herself growing cold despite the heavy light and heat of this place. She protested, “But we don’t—we aren’t—we belong to ourselves and to our own land, not to—to Eschalion or to you. It’s Eroniel Kaskarian’s fault we’re here at all, where we don’t belong. You should let us go!”

  The Wyvern King lifted one graceful hand, stopping her effortlessly. “You are mine,” he murmured, and Keri could find no way to argue with that golden voice.

  He tilted his head, and at once, without any sense of movement or transition, they all stood in a thronging hallway. Larger than the King’s chamber in the midst of his summer, much larger than Eroniel Kaskarian’s stark, empty prison; a single great hall that could have encompassed, Keri thought, very nearly the entire House in Glassforge. Despite the thin veil of the mist that bounded their circle, she could see ranks of white pillars supporting a high, vaulted ceiling. Torches burning with a clean, smokeless white flame lit the hall, and through a myriad of narrow windows wandered a gentle breeze, nudging past the mist, carrying the salt smell of the sea and the fragrance of roses even into the circle that had become part of Nimmira.

  Everywhere, tall, slender men and women turned with studied grace to gaze at the little circle and the foreigners it contained, half veiled as they were by the thin ring of mist. And every one of them smiled. Keri was sure they were all sorcerers. Or maybe all under a spell. She was sure she could see enchantment clinging to them like ambition. She would have been terrified of them, except the Wyvern King’s mask of humanity was so much more horrifying than any of these lesser sorcerers.

  A shadow seemed to pass overhead, though the light illuminating the immense hall did not dim; Keri flinched and looked up, finding she still had room to be afraid after all, certain it was the shadow of a great wyvern returning to its master. But she saw nothing to cast the shadow, and no vast dragon shape was visible above the hall. She leaned against Cort. He leaned back against her, comfortingly. She felt young and stupid and childish, a scant excuse for a Lady. But Cort was sturdy. As rooted as the earth. The ordinary earth, not this place of magic and masks. She held out her other hand, and Tassel took it.

  Osman stood behind Tassel, his hands resting on her shoulders. His head was raised, his black eyes gleaming with fury. He hadn’t given up. Beyond Osman, Lucas leaned on his staff, smiling and confident. That was a mask, too, of course, but a different kind. Keri could draw courage from the role Lucas played. Even Brann had crossed his arms and pulled disdain over whatever he actually felt. He looked down his nose at the whole gathering, and Keri almost liked him for it.

  She murmured to Cort, “This is Nimmira, really, isn’t it, where we’re standing? No matter how thin the boundary you and I made, we’re in Nimmira, aren’t we, even if we are surrounded by Eschalion.

  “We are,” he breathed in reply. He was standing with his back straight and his shoulders square, studying the beautiful throng with very much the same expression, she thought, as a farmer facing a stray goat in his vegetable garden. Practical, annoyed, unimpressed, and above all prepared to cope. He said, “But truly surrounded, unfortunately. How we are to get this bit of Nimmira back where it belongs, I have no idea.”

  “I have one idea,” Keri whispered. “You’re here, and Tassel is here, and I’m here, and this really is Nimmira, a fragment of Nimmira anyway. You and I made this circle, and it’s real, just as real as the—the other part of Nimmira, isn’t that right?”

  “I think it is,” Cort muttered. “But what good that does us, I admit I don’t know.”

  “It slows him down,” whispered Tassel, nodding slightly toward the Wyvern King. “Or why else would he be waiting?”

  “For his pets to return, possibly,” suggested Osman.

  “Don’t suggest such things! Huge dragons wouldn’t improve this situation at all,” Tassel told him, adding in a reluctant mutter, “Even though that’s probably just what he’s waiting for.”

  “I suspect he’s allowing anticipation to build in his audience,” murmured Lucas. “Timing is everything in a play.”

  Keri believed at once that was exactly right. “Oh, yes! You feel that, too?”

  Lucas nodded just perceptibly. “He may be a king, but those are player’s tricks he’s using. That’s why he brought us here: he wanted his audience. I’m sure of it.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s true, but it doesn’t matter, you know,” Keri whispered, and dropped her voice even further. “We daren’t just wait to see what he does. We’re not experienced, we’re not—not complete. And we don’t know enough.” She looked from Cort to Tassel. “I think we need the Timekeeper. And I think…I think I could call him.”

  “And deliver him into his hands, along with the rest of us?” Cort demanded, jerking his chin toward the Wyvern King. “Keri, do you think that’s wise?”

  “I think we’re out of ideas and out of hope and, most of all, out of time,” Keri retorted. “If you have a better idea or a different idea or any idea at all, this would be a wonderful moment to share it with the rest of us!”

  “The Lady has a point,” murmured Osman, looking fascinated.

  “If it’s an idea, I’m for it,” Tassel said fervently.

  Cort gave them both a look. But then the Wyvern King began to walk—or glide, as though he were weightless and merely drifted on some unseen current of the air—forward. Around him, the gathered sorcerers turned toward the little circle of Nimmira, drifting after their king, closing in, beautiful and predatory. Keri had never imagined anything like them. She thought she would be happy never to see anything like them again, ever, if she could only get herself and her people back to Nimmira—the real Nimmira, the rest of it—and help Cort slam shut every doorway and crack and gap that existed between the two lands.

  Cort gave a jerky little nod, his eyes on the approaching King. “If you’re going to do it, Keri, you’d better do it right now.”

  “Yes. Except I don’t know his name. But Tassel does.”

  “I do?” whispered Tassel, surprised. Then her eyes widened slightly. “Oh,” she said.

  “Of course,” Keri told her. “All the births and deaths, and all the names of everyone between birth and death. Of course you know the Timekeeper’s name. Bookkeeper, you’ve already shown you don’t need to have a book in your hand to know what you know. What is the Timekeeper’s name?” She waited, holding her breath.

  Tassel blinked twice. Then she answered, “Lady, your Timekeeper’s name is Winter. Winter Nuolon. He was born…Keri, he was born two hundred and seventeen years ago!” She stared at Keri, wide-eyed. “I knew he was old, Keri, but…two hundred and seventeen years!”

  “Older than Nimmira,” muttered Cort. “I knew it. Didn’t I say so?”

  “There’s only ever been one Timekeeper?” Lucas looked shaken. “Did I…I might have…I used to play practical jokes on that man!”

  “And he said he didn’t make the succession go as he wants,” Keri murmured. “In a way, I’m sure that’s even true….Winter. That’s auspicious, don’t you think?” She thought it was, at least. She repeated, “Winter Nuolon. Winter Nuolon, where are you? Winter Nuolon, Timekeeper of Nimmira, come!”

  And he came. Of course he came. Keri wasn’t even surprised. He stepped out of the very air, out of a slant of light, out of a shadow cast by nothing at all; or that was how it looked to her. Maybe her Doorkeeper saw it a different way.

  The Timekeeper looked exactly as he had the first time she had seen him: utterly formal and correct in his long coat with its tailored lines and high collar and gold embroidery and many buttons; his white hair bound smoothly back in its
queue; his unreadable colorless eyes and thin unexpressive mouth. He glanced around the circle, turned his head to consider the gathering, lifted one white eyebrow when his gaze crossed that of the Wyvern King, and turned without a word back to Keri. He looked for all the world entirely unimpressed by anything. In his hand, he held his watch with its five hands, the quick, narrow black one that counted off seconds and the shorter, blunter sapphire hand for minutes; the long crystal hand that showed the passing hours and the arrow-shaped silver one that ticked over just once a day. And the other one, the one of pearl, that counted off the years. Or, Keri thought, perhaps not merely years, but the ages of the world. She saw that the watch’s hands were all nearly lined up, even the pearl hand poised just at the top of the watch’s face, and a sharp chill went through her, though she did not know why.

  “Lady, I will give you a gift of time,” said the Timekeeper to Keri. His voice was old, old, old; it was like the husky, dry voice of blowing dust. How had she not realized from the first moment that he was aged beyond any normal human span? Every word he spoke felt dusty, weightless, as though he had used up all the effort of speaking long ago and only ashes of words remained. The light whisper of his words went on, “A gift of stopped time—a single moment that is yours, to do with as you choose. When you give your time and the time of Nimmira over into the hands of a new Timekeeper, that moment will pass on and your time will again enmesh with the world’s time. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Keri, though she didn’t understand at all. Or she did understand, though she didn’t want to and tried not to, but she lifted her hand and allowed the Timekeeper to lay in it the heavy weight of passing time.

  He set the watch in her palm, her hand dipping under the weight of it. Then he turned unhurriedly and stepped through the circle bounding this fragment of Nimmira and passed into Eschalion.

  For one moment, he stood gazing without expression at the Wyvern King. The King had halted, and regarded him with an equal lack of expression: they were nothing alike and yet very much alike, and Keri could hardly stand to watch because she knew something terrible was going to happen.

  The Timekeeper said, in his dust-dry weightless voice, “You shall never have it.”

  The Wyvern King only smiled. But his smile was clearly a mask, and Keri almost thought she could see past it or through it or beneath it to the fathomless ambition and insatiability at the heart of the King.

  Then the Timekeeper lifted his long, pale hands, and Keri saw cracks passing through them, the tips of his fingers shredding away. His hands, his face, his coat, everything. He turned at the last moment, and his eyes locked with hers while he blurred. He inclined his head, his remote expression never changing, but his face rippled and crumbled into dust, and then the dust blew away on the breeze of Eschalion, and he was gone.

  At that moment, in the Timekeeper’s watch, the sapphire minute hand ticked over, and the narrow second hand swept up to join all the slower hands, and the hand of pearl clicked forward that last little bit, and the watch chimed. Keri had never heard even the hour strike before, far less all the hands strike together. It made a sound like a tiny bell, or really more like a handful of different bells all ringing in unison. The sound was not loud, but it trembled in the air for a great deal longer than reasonable, until it seemed not so much that the chime lingered but that time itself had stopped.

  Which, of course, it had. At least for Nimmira. Whatever the Wyvern King or his wyverns or his sorcerers meant to do, none of them could do it in this moment that lay outside of time. Keri stared at the watch cupped in her hands. A gift of stopped time…a single moment. Until Keri gave this watch and the post to a new Timekeeper. She thought she could feel the magic of Nimmira poised, uneasy, trembling, waiting to encompass someone else and make a new Timekeeper. She thought it might get harder to stop that from happening the longer this moment…lasted. Two kinds of time, and she and this little circle of Nimmira were in one kind and everything else in the other….She could not quite tell whether all of Nimmira was caught in this lasting moment, but she thought it might be.

  Looking up, she stared out of the circle they had made, at the Wyvern King. He was as still as a golden statue. Whatever had been true a moment ago, now that impossible stillness was not a pose or a mask or an illusion. All the strange, terrifying people of Eschalion were just that still.

  Keri met Cort’s eyes.

  “So we have time after all,” he said, agreeing with something she hadn’t said but knew was true. “It’s up to us to make use of it, Keri. What are we going to do?” He hesitated and then added, uncharacteristically tentative, “I know what I want to do. I know what I think we have to do. I don’t know, though, if—” But he cut that off.

  “I know,” said Keri. “We have to get back to Nimmira proper. And then we have to redraw the whole boundary, the way Lupe Ailenn did it with Summer Timonan.” The thought made her feel…cold. Afraid in a completely different way than the Wyvern King frightened her.

  “Don’t worry,” Cort said grimly. “I expect I’m a good deal stronger than she was.”

  Keri didn’t doubt his strength, exactly. But she didn’t think the magic he had in mind would take merely that kind of strength. Only she couldn’t say so. Because it didn’t matter. Both of them knew they had to try.

  She said, “Doorkeeper, now that we’re back in the world and not trapped in that dream of summer, now that we’re not precisely in Eschalion anymore, can you make a door that will let us step from this little circle to Nimmira proper?”

  Cort smiled and glanced behind her. He didn’t seem to do anything, but Keri followed his glance and nodded. There was Cort’s wardrobe, or the other Doorkeeper’s wardrobe, of course, except it was plainly Cort’s now. It seemed even more massive standing right here in this little circle, but she recognized its dark, polished wood and carved doors. Keri wasn’t even surprised to see it, because naturally Cort was not the sort of person who would permit just a crack in the air. That would be untidy. A wardrobe was much more orderly.

  Cort stepped past Keri and opened the door of the wardrobe without any kind of flourish. It was empty of coats. But through the back of it was clearly visible an early-spring pasture, bright with tender new grass and bordered with a neat rail fence. Not too far away, a placid mare lifted her head and put her ears forward, and two newborn foals flagged their tails and bounced stiff-legged in excited circles.

  “Your brother’s farm!” Keri exclaimed in belated recognition.

  “The boundary runs right there,” Cort said, mildly defensive. “As well there as anywhere.”

  Tassel laughed. It seemed the first time anyone had laughed or had reason to laugh for half an age. She said, “Can you imagine what Gannon will say if you leave a spooky wardrobe with a hole in the back standing out in his best spring pasture?”

  “I don’t have to leave it there—”

  “Oh, I think you should. Your brother can have so much fun heaving it out of the pasture and into—where? His wife’s room, I suppose! At least”—Tassel glanced significantly back toward the Wyvern King—“perhaps after you close the gap.”

  “Though maybe not just yet,” murmured Lucas. “Give me one moment, I think.” And, crossing the circle, he leaned down and gathered up, abandoned among the rugs, Brann’s gold coin.

  “Probably an excellent idea,” Keri said after a brief pause in which they all considered what the Wyvern King might have done with a gold coin from Nimmira. Especially a coin infused with the sorcery of Eschalion. “It’s a good thing someone thought of that. Thank you, Lucas.”

  “Don’t let it get out!” Lucas told her with a show of alarm. “People give you responsible jobs to do if they think you’re responsible.” Turning, he offered the coin to Brann with a polite, ironic bow.

  Brann snorted. “As if I’d touch it now.”

  “Just as you like,” Lucas agreed, smiling brilliantly, and made the coin disappear with player dexterity.

 
“If we might get on?” Cort snapped at everyone generally, and gestured firmly toward the wardrobe he had conjured up. But he didn’t snap at Keri. He gave her a little dip of his head and a much more formal gesture. “Lady, your door, if it please you.”

  Nothing could have pleased Keri more. Except having all this over and done with, and Nimmira safe, and Cort safe as well.

  Even after so much, Nimmira itself seemed unchanged. The rest of the world might be caught in the Timekeeper’s lingering moment, but Nimmira clearly was not. Or maybe the rest of the world was going on normally, and only Nimmira had slid somehow out of time; on second thought, that seemed more likely. Either way, Gannon’s farm was just as always, with the mares in this pasture and the sheep beyond, the farmhouse and barn on the other side of the sheep pasture, the young wheat green in the fields to the west and the martins and swallows darting about above everything. Nothing here was frozen out of time, Keri could see; not just she and her companions but all of Nimmira was caught up in the Timekeeper’s lingering moment. Then she knew she should have realized it must be that way, because of course her time was also the time of Nimmira. But the Timekeeper’s gift pressed at her, harder now that she stood here in Nimmira proper and not in the fragment enclosed by Eschalion. The moment trembled, wanting to tick forward and carry Nimmira into time. She had not realized before how hard the Timekeeper’s gift might press her—how fiercely his role wanted to pass to someone else.

  The boundary was thinner than before, the mist so attenuated that it seemed, to the eye, entirely gone. If Keri hadn’t simply known where the boundary lay, she wouldn’t have known. Well, that sounded ridiculous. But it was true. One couldn’t mark the smooth arc of the boundary by eye at all, not anymore. She traded a glance with Cort, because of course he was the other one who knew exactly where the line ought to be.

  The land on the other side shouldered up into the foothills and then mountains—wild country except for the road, clearly visible, that ran along the border of Nimmira for some little way before curving up into the hills and vanishing into to the east.