The Keeper of the Mist

by Rachel Neumeier

  At last, one man shouted the others down and turned to Keri to finish the story in a tumbling rush, but a little more coherently. “So anyway, those men, they were going to rob and murder Timmis, I guess, and who knows what after that, but they just stopped, just like that, Lady, which saved Timmis, and they haven’t moved since, so Timmis, he came and got us, and we’re watching them!” He gave the frozen attackers a fierce glower and her a firm nod. “If they come back to life, we’ll show them the hammers of Ironforge, you can count on that!”

  Keri didn’t know what to say. It hadn’t exactly occurred to her before that if she and Cort failed to lay down the proper boundary, then this sort of scene would surely occur in a hundred places around Nimmira. There would be no safety for anyone, even if the Wyvern King did not come immediately with his sorcerers. Every village with men less determined than these might be overrun. She began to stutter over some kind of praise of the miners’ courage but then turned sharply as one of the younger men said, in patent alarm, “Lady, that watch has stopped!”

  And the young man dropped his pickax, stepped forward, and reached out for the watch dragging at Keri, with its unnatural weight and its crystal face and its frozen hands.

  Horrified, Keri stumbled back against Cort, but not quite quickly enough.

  Cort caught her absently. He didn’t seem to have really noticed the miners or the young man or Keri herself. But he caught her anyway, though his arm trembled just perceptibly. He caught her and muttered something she didn’t hear, shook a drop of blood impatiently from his hand, and began to step forward, pulling her with him.

  But not…quite…quickly enough. Because the young man snatched after the Timekeeper’s watch as though it were the only thing in the world, as though he hadn’t even noticed Keri flinch away or Cort steady her, as though in this one long, stretched instant, nothing in the world was real to him but that watch.

  Which was true, of course. Keri, shocked as she was, wasn’t actually surprised. It wasn’t the young man’s fault. She knew that, too. The Timekeeper’s magic had been trying all along to go somewhere, to settle on someone. Now, here, it had seized its chance, snatched up this young miner in its grip, and how was he to know?

  He couldn’t, and he didn’t, and he caught the Timekeeper’s watch up in his hand as though it weighed nothing. With a sound like many tiny bells ringing, all the watch’s hands began to tick forward once more, and the moment that had lingered so long moved on at last. Keri felt the jolt of Nimmira’s time catching suddenly up to Outside time all through her bones. No one else seemed to feel it, but she would have fallen to her knees except that she clung to Cort and he braced her solidly and did not let her fall.

  The young man gazed dazedly down at the watch, holding it cupped in both his hands. Outside the line of the boundary, the ragged men with their makeshift weapons rushed forward, found themselves unexpectedly facing a good double handful of miners armed with hammers and pickaxes, and stumbled to a halt.

  Cort blinked, shuddered, looked about as though aware of his surroundings for the first time in hours, and flicked his hand sharply, casting drops of blood all along the boundary line between the miners of Nimmira and the unkempt brigands of Eschalion.

  Keri caught the mist that rose up and framed it swiftly into a proper boundary, defining inside and Outside and setting one away from the other. But up ahead of them, along the arc of the border where they had not yet repaired the boundary, she was aware that the mist was shredding away in the breeze.

  Cort was aware of it, too. Turning, he took Keri’s shoulders in a hard grip. “That’s temporary, but it’ll hold long enough against brigands like those, I swear it. Where are we? Up by Ironforge, is it? A third of the distance to go, and the Timekeeper’s moment broken? How long before the Wyvern King realizes what’s happened?”

  Keri wanted to hug him, she was so glad to see him returned to himself. Terror filled her, but also a wild optimism; for the first time in timeless ages, she was certain they would make it back to Glassforge and complete the boundary, and Cort would slam closed every door and crack and tiny little gap between Nimmira and Eschalion. She even thought he might survive the effort, even if she had failed to get her message to Tassel. She wrapped her fingers around his wrists, nodding. “There’s only a quarter of the whole left, not much more, we’ll do it, we’ll make it work, but we have to be quick, Cort—”

  “I know.” He jerked his head at the new Timekeeper. “And that fool of a boy doesn’t know anything and can’t help! If he’d had the sense to ask first, we’d still have time!” He glared at the young miner.

  If Cort was a year older than the other man, he wasn’t three. Keri almost wanted to laugh. The miner drew back, offended, holding the watch protectively against his chest as though afraid Cort might try to snatch it away. Cort glowered at him. In another moment, he would start shouting, and that wouldn’t be helpful to anyone. Keri patted his hand urgently, took it in hers, and pulled him around. “Quick, Cort.” Then she beckoned firmly to the young miner. “Come on, right now!” Somewhere in the back of her mind, the incomplete circle of the boundary trembled.

  Cort plainly felt it, too. He clenched his teeth, turned his shoulder to the new Timekeeper in an angry snub, found his knife, flicked the blade across his palm with practiced speed and only a slight grimace, and strode forward.

  Keri beckoned again, then rolled her eyes at the new Timekeeper’s hesitation, grabbed his wrist, and pulled him along after Cort. “What’s your name?” she asked him, but found she knew. “Oh, Merric. Merric Daroson. All right, Merric, you realize you’re the Timekeeper now? You must take up this charge and count off the passing years. In fact, you have taken it up. Do you understand what happened when you took the watch?”

  “No,” the young man admitted. “No, I think…no. But time was wrong, something was wrong with time, and now it’s right again. But—” He looked at her warily. “Did I do something bad?”

  Keri hesitated. “Not bad,” she said at last. “But it would have been better if you’d waited. The Wyvern King—the old Timekeeper—it’s all too complicated to explain. Come on, walk faster!” She knew Cort was moving only on nerve and will: shock and anger were merely a fleeting substitute for rest. But for the moment, his strides were long and sure, and each tiny doorway he opened before them and shut behind them carried them just a little farther than the last. Flicker, flicker, flicker, and the landscape changed around them: down the long slopes of the mountains and back into the warmer lands, where the forests were green and sturdy and spring was further along, and then down again.

  To Keri’s left, the land of Eschalion rolled away unpeopled, while to her right lay the gentle farms and fields of Nimmira. Nowhere else had the contrast between the two lands seemed so stark. In Eschalion, it was all wild country, forests rising sharply to more mountains, with here and there amid the trees a mean-looking village of cramped hovels and scraggly gardens. In Nimmira, the land rolled gently downward, open and welcoming. In the pastures, lambs bounced and chased one another around their mothers, and in the fields, the green wheat was already knee-high. Here, the scattered farmhouses were all painted white with cheerful yellow trim, and the barns were all painted russet red.

  Keri wanted badly to loop the boundary outward and take some of those mountains into Nimmira, take those villages away from the Wyvern King and bring those people into Nimmira. But she knew it was impossible. Since the border of Nimmira could never be drawn so unevenly, pressing the boundary out here would mean having to redraw the whole thing bigger, which was beyond impossible. But she could hardly bear to look at the grim little villages of Eschalion.

  As far as she could tell, Cort walked past all this unseeing. He moved fast and with determination, and he never once glanced to either side. He only put one foot in front of the other and flicked a drop of blood from the crimson pool cupped in his palm and made a gap that looked like a contained bit of heat haze and stepped through it, and Keri fixed t
he boundary he had raised up and stepped through the haze after him. She still held the new Timekeeper’s wrist, hauling him along with her, afraid he might otherwise hesitate and be left behind. He seemed to her like he might hesitate. He pulled against her grip from time to time, and darted wary glances at Cort, and muttered about blood magic under his breath. Keri was glad to be rid of the weight of time pressing on her, glad of the new balance she felt in the magic of Nimmira, but she could have wished her new Timekeeper a bit faster to catch up.

  The magic rising through her and trailing behind her gave her a strange feeling of being stretched out thin, and her vivid sense of the earth beneath her feet and the fields around her and the birds above made her dizzy, but she was all right. Basically, she was all right. She wasn’t sure about Cort. He was still staring only straight ahead, and sometimes he staggered a bit when the ground was uneven. Stretching her legs and dragging Merric with her, she caught up to Cort, taking his arm and trying to steady him. But he only shook free impatiently. He seemed as blind to her as he was to everything else.

  Miles and miles to go, still, before they came back to Gannon’s farm and completed the boundary circle. Tassel would probably have known exactly. Keri could only guess: a hundred miles, more or less. Less now, less with every stride, but still a long, weary distance. And she was starting to worry Cort would try too hard to shorten it and break the continuity of the boundary. He wanted to complete the circle fast, as fast as possible, and they needed that speed, no one had to explain that to Keri. But she could tell that pouring his strength into speed was stretching his magic to its utmost. His white, taut effort frightened her. She hurried to catch him up, to tell him to slow down, to force him to slow down, what difference would one or two minutes make if he depleted too much of his strength to gain those minutes for them?

  Merric hurried with her, no longer attempting to break her hold. Once or twice he resisted her, trying to stop, as though he simply would have liked to take a moment to catch his breath and figure out what was going on.

  Of all things, they dared not stop. Keri pulled the new Timekeeper along, barely glancing at him. Away to their left, the land grew more rugged once more, steep cliffs climbing to meet the sky. That was Tor Carron over there, she thought; they had passed beyond the southern border of Eschalion at last. It didn’t make her feel safer.

  She wondered how long it would take for time between Nimmira and the Outside world to come into balance. For the Wyvern King to realize what had happened—or at least to realize that something had happened, that his prisoners had escaped and taken their magic with them. For him to realize that unless he moved swiftly, Nimmira might once again disappear from his perception and memory. Minutes, she guessed, not hours.

  The Wyvern King would be furious. She knew that. Though furious seemed a very…active word, considering the golden King they had met. He would be calmly acquisitive, then. Ferociously but calmly acquisitive. He would move to stop them hiding Nimmira; he would do anything he could to stop them and take Nimmira for his own, all its people and magic, and he would never let them go. Keri could not guess what he might do to stop them. But she was sure he would do something.

  Unless they finished the boundary first.

  Keri stretched her legs until she was nearly running. It seemed she had been nearly running for a long time, for miles and miles; her breath came hard, but she felt light and quick. She was glad she was no longer carrying the weight of stopped time—well, that was ridiculous, since that was the whole problem—but she knew just where her foot was going to come down at the end of every step, flicker, and they were hurrying through a peach orchard, hard green peaches on the trees; and then a grove of almonds and apricots; the sun sliding down toward the hills on their right as they sped into a new and beautiful evening. And suddenly that was Glassforge in the distance, she was almost sure of it, flicker, and she was sure: Glassforge, and, barely glimpsed beyond, a low but distinctive ripple of mist that began right in the middle of Cort’s brother’s pasture.

  Keri couldn’t see Tassel or anyone, not yet, not as more than tiny figures in the distance, but she knew they were there, waiting. Tassel and Lucas and a whole clutter of other people, but she didn’t have time to sort them out. Flicker flicker flicker, and she could almost make out Tassel’s face. The other girl was herding everyone else out of the way, good, and Cort hadn’t slowed down a bit, he flung himself along with great strides, Keri was still nearly running to keep up, without Merric to help her she couldn’t have managed, there was probably a lesson in that somehow, and then they were there, they were there at last. People were shouting and rushing toward them, but Keri had no attention to spare for any of them; she jumped forward to catch Cort as he fell.

  She wasn’t strong enough to keep him on his feet, but at least she broke his fall. He hardly seemed to know he had fallen. He knelt on the ground and brought his bloody hands down hard against the pasture grasses and the earth beneath, and the boundary snapped into place, whole and complete, and without letting him go, Keri told Nimmira what it was, that it was itself, separate from the Outside world. In both directions, as far as the eye could see, mist rose up in a shimmering wall. If you looked right at it or put your hand into it, it was just mist, no more solid or forbidding than the steam that rose from warm cobbled streets after a summer rain. But it went on and on and on, and towered up and up and up, and if anybody thought of walking into it, somehow they would just forget and turn aside. Because that was what it was. That was what it did.

  It was over. They’d done it. They were safe. Except for Cort.

  Tassel was there. A lot of people were there, actually. Keri was aware of Lucas and Brann; of Cort’s brother Gannon and some of his people; of Linnet and, slightly to her surprise, Nevia the wardrobe mistress; of Mistress Renn and Timmet and Kerreth and a dozen other townspeople; of Osman Tor the Younger and all his men….It seemed a huge crowd. Keri was simultaneously vividly aware of them and hardly knew they were there. She clung to Cort, but he sagged bonelessly.

  Tassel was there, though, and she didn’t hesitate. She knelt by Cort’s side, patting his face and speaking urgently. In her other hand, she held a crumpled brown oak leaf. Keri didn’t hear what Tassel said, but she took a breath, gazing urgently at Cort. He would be all right, she was sure he would be, almost sure. He wasn’t trying to get up, but suddenly he was trying to smile and had taken Tassel’s hand to make her stop patting him.

  Keri took a deep, hard breath, let it out, and straightened her back. Cort was all right. He was all right. Tassel had gotten her message and everything was all right. Keri began to turn, and suddenly the new Timekeeper seized her by the shoulders. He was shaking his head, his eyes wide. He looked stunned. He exclaimed, “Lady, in four minutes, disaster will fall on Nimmira.” Then, plainly shocked, he put a hand over his mouth.

  Keri stared at him. Then she looked around. The boundary was complete. It rose up and spread out, and she knew it encircled the whole of Nimmira, an unbroken line right around all their land. She knew it was complete. She looked back at Merric, not understanding. Except that somehow things weren’t over after all, and disaster was going to fall.

  In, apparently, four minutes.

  More like three now. Or two. Or possibly even less. She clenched her teeth and got to her feet, trying to look in every direction at once. Nothing she could do would hold back time for even an instant.

  Merric stared at her. His lips formed words without sound, but Keri knew what he was trying to say. He was trying to say Now.

  Keri squared her shoulders.

  Above them, directly over Glassforge, the deeper, richer light of a midsummer afternoon poured suddenly through the air. It was like the way light might spear through clouds, vivid and brilliant before a storm. It was like that. Only this light lanced down from an empty, cloudless sky, a great circle of summer light blazing through the gentle spring evening.

  Keri closed her eyes. She knew what it was. She knew exact
ly what it was. It was their own circle, the one they had drawn in Eschalion, in the Wyvern King’s hall. The circle they had left there behind them. The King had found it; he must have realized it was there before they had managed to reset their whole boundary and make Nimmira properly unnoticeable. He had taken that little circle and claimed it and spun it out wide and flung it into the sky, and now he was going to use it somehow—

  Through the circle flew an enormous wyvern that seemed to have been made of gold and light. It poured across the sky like sunlight, liquid and graceful. Its long, elegant head snaked from side to side; its tail flicked like a whip. High on its back, where its neck flowed into its great shoulders, rode the Wyvern King.

  Little birds, swifts and martins and swallows, scattered in panicked flight from the shadow of the wyvern’s wings, hiding amid the spring leaves of the trees and the eaves of the houses. Keri wished fervently that she and all her people could do the same. Hiding was what Nimmira had always done to protect itself from Aranaon Mirtaelior. But hiding now was clearly impossible.

  “Ah…,” groaned Merric. “I did this?”

  Keri shook her head. “No, no. We finished in time. This isn’t your fault.”

  “No,” Cort said hoarsely. “No, this is our fault. My fault.” He struggled to get to his feet, not quite successfully despite Tassel’s help. Sinking back, he said, his voice scraped raw from effort, “If I hadn’t made that circle in Eschalion, he couldn’t do this.”

  “If we hadn’t made it,” Keri said.

  “As though we had a choice?” said Lucas sharply, behind them. “As I recall, at the time, we were all glad you drew that circle, as without it, the King would have seized us outright. I know I for one didn’t spend many seconds thinking about the possibility of a huge wyvern flying through it after we recovered our border.”

  Cort didn’t seem to hear either of them. He was staring upward at the great wyvern, at the shining king riding it through their sky. “We left it in his dream of summer. We left him a way into Nimmira. How could we have failed to close it? We should have found a way to close it—”