by Carol Berg
“Yes, my lord. This connection lay dormant for four years, manifest only in nightmares and the boy’s unsettled nature. But I believe it was rekindled when you took him across the Bridge that night. Everything started after - ”
“And have you even considered the rest of it? If all this is true - if he’s been in the mundane world and the Breach and now here in Gondai - then he has taken his friend Paulo across the Breach unscathed, not with struggle and difficulty and expense of power as I do, but easily. Do you know what that means? Do you see the implication? The danger? The impossibility? It means he can transport Zhid between worlds.”
“Indeed. It would seem so,” said Ven’Dar, quietly. “My hope is that when you go to him knowing all of this, you and the boy together will discover how to resolve the problem. Your son needs to understand he is not evil, my lord. As do you. If nothing else, perhaps you will be able to do what he asks of you.”
The knot around my heart drew tighter yet. Karon’s resolve was written in his face. The rite… the revelations… had led us nowhere new.
“Where is he, Paulo?” Karon’s words hung in the air like a headsman’s ax.
“What will you do?” I blurted out before Paulo could answer.
“Tell me my choices, Seri.”
“There’s got to be another way, now we know he’s not one of them. They’re just using him.”
“For now.”
I stood up, too. Though I fought to stay calm and reasoned, my voice rose. “So what prevents the Lords from crushing Avonar right now? What prevents them controlling him all the time? There’s something else at work here, and you can’t stop looking for answers just because Gerick has. He doesn’t understand what he is, so his solution may not be the only one. We just need time…”
“Time is exactly what we don’t have. If there is the smallest possibility that I can do what he asks, what Ven’Dar has tried to give me the chance to do, it must be now. The war won’t wait. If the Lords come to this same conclusion, they won’t wait. And D’Natheil won’t wait.” He turned his back on me. “Where is he, Paulo?”
“Half a day’s ride, my lord. A ruin out at the edge of the Wastes near the place you found me. The young master said it must have once been a portal between worlds, like the one in Valleor where we went into the Bounded, as it was easy to find once he knew to look. I’ll take you there.”
“Perhaps I could make a portal to take us there, my lord,” said Ven’Dar. “It would take me only an hour or two.”
“No. No portal so close to Avonar. Not when we can’t be sure - ”
Not when he wasn’t sure who would be waiting for us on the other side of it.
“I don’t mind riding,” I said.
“You’re not going.”
The ten paces between Karon and me stretched wider, across the cavern, across Paulo and Ven’Dar and the litter of packs and supplies and pulsing coals… across sixteen years of grief and anger and longing, of loneliness and pain.
“Gerick is our son, Karon. I will not abandon him.”
The waves of the Pool of Rebirth, wreathed in mist beyond the shadowed arch, lapped softly.
“I will do what I have to do, Seri. I cannot say what that will be. But neither my own desires nor my feelings for you can weigh in my decision.” He had not moved from the growing shadows, so I could not see his face, only the shape of his powerful body, taut and still.
“Then the Lady must go with you, my lord,” said Ven’Dar quietly. “If she reminds you of the past with all its joys and guilts, then you are indeed the man who should be making these dreadful decisions. And truly, our Way says she must make her own choice as to the physical dangers, the risks to her heart, and the way she will endure what is to come.”
Ven’Dar began wrapping a round of cheese in a piece of cloth, and soon it was as if time had taken up its path again. Uneasy, but moving forward.
“It has been three days since you slept, my lord,” said the Preceptor. “And before that you were in combat for five more. You can scarcely stand. Even the urgency of your mission cannot preclude your need for rest. Any chance of success in whatever you attempt will require all your strength.”
Karon’s shoulders sagged a little. “Damnable body… ” He came back to the smoldering fire, then, and sat heavily beside me, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
Taking his shoulders, I pulled him sideways until his head rested in my lap.
“Three hours, Ven’Dar,” he said, his command already slurred. “No more.”
“Aye, my lord. Three hours it is.”
I stroked his damp hair with my fingers as he dropped instantly into profound sleep. His sword belt lay just beside us, sword and dagger within easy reach of his hand. D’Arnath’s weapons. Some among the Dar’Nethi believed these sacred talismans ensured that the city of Avonar itself would never fall and had been willing to sacrifice the incapable D’Natheil to the Lords to retrieve them. Karon had laughed and said he was grateful that our first venture to the Bridge had returned both Prince and weapons safely to Avonar. The memory of his laughter was a knife in my breast.
Ven’Dar had closed his eyes and sat motionless for a moment. Now he blinked and gave me a sad smile. “I’ve cast a winding to wake me in three hours, so I am going to take the opportunity to sleep a bit myself.” He bundled a cloak under his head and pulled a blanket up to his chin, yawning. “You should do the same.” He closed his eyes and was instantly asleep.
My back rested on a protruding rock. My fingers traced the wide brow and sculpted jaw, grizzled with many days’ growth of light hair… D’Natheil’s face, stern even in rest. I closed my eyes and tried to remember Karon’s face, but for the first time since his death, his features would not resolve clearly, as if we lay together in the darkness and I could catch only the shape of his cheekbone or the line of his dark hair. I wished I could sleep.
Paulo had sat quiet since giving his testimony, looking soberly from one of us to the other. Now he, who could usually sleep anytime and anywhere, sat staring into the dying fire. After a while he muttered a quiet oath, jumped up, and wandered restlessly back through the arch to the Pool of Rebirth. Before very long, he was back.
He crouched beside the fire and poked it aimlessly. Then, so quietly I almost missed it, he said, “If we was to leave now, ride hard, you’d have three hours’ head start.”
Three hours. To do what? Hold my son? Convince him to run away? Find an answer?
“Not deceiving. You could leave the Prince a writing to tell him we’ve just gone ahead…”
* * *
And so, many hours later after our frantic ride from Avonar, I crouched behind the still-warm rocks and waited for the signal from Paulo that all was well. After an interminable, breathless time it came, two flares of light in quick succession - a pause - and the third.
I hurried down the barren slope toward the crumbling stone walls. A tall, lanky figure appeared against the lighted rectangle of the doorway. Paulo. And another, smaller person beside him. Not tall enough for Gerick. I hesitated, just outside the light that spilled from the doorway.
“Come, my lady. It’s all right. I didn’t mention we brought someone else with us when we come from the Bounded,” said Paulo, as soon as I was within earshot. “I thought it best to leave her out of my story until I knew what was what. She’s watched over the young master’s body when he wasn’t in it. Lady Seri, this is Princess Roxanne. I told her you know her da.”
Evard’s missing daughter! I’d not given the girl so much as a thought in the hours since my awakening. Fair like her mother and just as regal in her bearing. A pale, smooth complexion out of place amid the half collapsed walls and piles of windblown debris that shaped the little haven. Yet her sturdy brown shirt, tunic, and breeches looked strangely appropriate on her, and her father’s sharply intelligent eyes flashed in the firelight as she sat on the cracked paving stones and watched over my sleeping son.
Gerick was curled up in a
dusty cloak, his head pillowed on a small bundle. If I’d not laid my hand on him and felt the slow shallow breathing, I would have believed him dead already. He was as pale as starlight and dreadfully thin.
“Another day and the water will run out,” said Roxanne, as she dripped a clear liquid from a tiny cup into Gerick’s mouth. “He said he’d come back before the water was gone, but he’s not moved so much as a finger since he put himself back to sleep three days ago.”
“What do you mean, ‘come back’? How is it you’re here? It wasn’t Gerick who abducted - ”
“No. The confounded little Vroon and his friends took me to the Bounded by mistake. Gerick freed me from their wretched prison, but he never really told me anything that was going on - not then - only that the place we were was ‘not Leire.’ ”
The girl’s animated expression took fire in the firelight as the torrent of words poured out of her. “Then, after he almost goes crazy when he finds that ring spinning in the cave, and just before he leaves for this cheery place, he tells me he needs to sleep for a few days while Paulo goes off to find his mother, and that he needs a friend - a friend, he says - to come along and watch and make sure he doesn’t die - for heaven’s sake - to make sure he doesn’t die by giving him water from the Source! I’m not an idiot, and you couldn’t be in the. Bounded very long without becoming accustomed to the fact that the world isn’t quite as you believed. But I’d never had anyone trust me like that. And I said that if we were truly friends, then he needed to tell me what this was about. Of course, he didn’t tell me everything, not by a league or ten. After we got here, he lay down and went away. Gone. His body was here for me to keep alive, but he was riding around with Paulo like a fat duchess in a carriage to help him look for you, while hiding where his enemies couldn’t find him. Who could believe that?”
She slapped her palm on the stopper of the blue flask, cramming it tight, then stuffed flask and cup back into a worn gray rucksack.
“Three days ago, he came back,” she continued. “After ten dreary days with his mostly dead body, and I thought I was going to be here forever and not even know quite where. I wake up in the morning to find him walking around like he’d just dozed off for an hour. He ate half the food we had left and told me about what had happened with Paulo and you and the list enchantment. He said we’d just have to wait to see what came about next. But it wasn’t two hours until he turned fifty colors of white, and I thought we were dead, because it was just the way he’d look when the firestorms came. Those storms were the most terrifying things, as if the world were shattering to bits. The poor Singlars would get caught in them, and their towers disintegrate right before your eyes, and one time I came near falling into one of the rifts and a Singlar pulled me out. It was the worst fright I’ve ever had. With Gerick looking so pale and awful, I expected this place to split open and fall apart any moment, but he said it wouldn’t happen here, and maybe it wouldn’t happen back in the Bounded either, if he could just turn off his head for a while. He felt so responsible. He said the storms were his fault, though I’ll never believe that. He almost died trying to stop them. Do you think I’ll ever get used to this, Lady Seriana? Bodies lying around with no minds in them, bodies walking around with two - ”
She paused in her breathless chatter, staring at the doorway behind me. I whirled about, and I couldn’t tell whether the iron-visaged figure who stood there was Karon or D’Natheil.
“Karon!” I said, choosing that it be so.
Gently, but firmly he took my arm and raised me up, moving me to the corner of the little room. When he returned to Gerick and looked down at him, the world paused in its spinning path.
Only the princess refused to heed the dread of that moment. Glancing at me briefly, she took up her story once again, as if she’d never been interrupted. “… so, before I quite understood what he meant, he took himself off again. I don’t know exactly where.”
She wrinkled her straight nose and pursed her lips while shifting her unabashed stare to Karon. “And Gerick - my friend, Gerick - said to tell his father - I presume that’s you - that he’d be waiting for you to fulfill your agreement. He didn’t explain that part or anything about the enemies he was hiding from, and I find it quite annoying, as I’ve had all this time to think, and he didn’t explain the most important part. ‘Too complicated,’ he’d say, which have to be the most exasperating words that can be spoken, and despite the fact that I’m almost two years older, and I helped him sort out all manner of things while he was being the king of the Bounded. He just said that if anyone could take care of the firestorms so the Singlars wouldn’t suffer so from them, it was his father. The only thing he was afraid of was that Paulo wouldn’t find you.”
“It took a number of people to find me,” said Karon, softly. “I thank you for your care for him, young lady. Now you’d best move closer to Seri. It will be safer. Or you might want to step outside.”
“But you see, just as I’ve been telling the Lady, you don’t have to pretend there’s no sorcery involved here. I’m not afraid… ” Roxanne’s words limped into the void very quickly. She stood and backed away from Gerick and Karon, but only as far as my side. Her chin was still firm and high. Paulo, who had said nothing since Karon’s arrival, stood behind us in the doorway.
Karon’s hand was steady as he drew his silver dagger from its sheath. I wanted to stay his hand until I was sure of him, but terror robbed me of speech.
“Oh, demons, Gerick - ” Roxanne gasped and lunged forward as Karon raised his glittering knife.
I grabbed her and drew her close, holding her tight and allowing her cry to loosen my own tongue. With all the hope I could muster, I said softly, “There are no demons here, Roxanne. No need to be afraid. This is Gerick’s father, who cherished our son before he was even born, who led him out of the darkness once and will do so again. He’s come here only to help him.”
At the same moment, Karon raised his other hand, closed his eyes, and with a passion that was all of his life, spoke words that would forever summon visions of a rainy summer afternoon at Windham, a frost-rimed Vallorean bandit cave, and a towering wall of white fire, blazing joyfully in a mountain fortress. “Life, hold. Stay your hand. Halt your foot ere it lays another step along the Way. Grace your son once more with your voice that whispers in the deeps, with your spirit that sings in the wind, with the fire that blazes in your wondrous gifts of joy and sorrow. Fill my soul with light, and let the darkness make no stand in this place.”
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” I whispered to the terrified girl, as Karon’s knife left its bloody track across Gerick’s limp forearm and his own scarred left arm. And while the golden flames danced on the ancient walls, the blaze of Karon’s enchantment embraced us all.
CHAPTER 27
We had basked in the warmth of Karon’s magic no more than half an hour when Paulo slipped out of the ruin into the night. I thought nothing of it. There was too much else to consider, too much wondering at what was happening between the two who were bound together by a narrow strip of bloodstained linen. Such a monumental task as exploring the link that connected Gerick to the world he had created from the Breach… who knew if such a thing was even possible? And his connection to the Lords… I was all too aware that this blessed reprieve was only temporary. Judgment would come with Karon’s withdrawal. I didn’t want to hurry it, even if I could. Karon’s work with Gerick after our return from Zhev’Na had taken as long as four or five hours each time, and I couldn’t imagine this venture could take less.
So after Paulo’s abrupt departure, I watched and continued whispering an explanation of Dar’Nethi healing to Roxanne.
But suddenly - far too soon - Karon’s hand fumbled for his knife, and with a swift motion, he sliced through the strip of linen that bound his arm to Gerick’s. He fell back on his heels, sweat beaded on his brow and soaking the tendrils of light hair dangling about his face, though our dying fire had invited the nighttime chill into
our shelter. “Get out of here, Seri,” he said harshly. “Take the girl and hide. Empty your minds. Someone will come for you.”
Gerick was stirring, and I hesitated.
Karon waved his knife toward the door. “Go now! For everything - hurry!”
I jumped to my feet just as Paulo burst into the shelter. “Someone’s coming. Horses beyond the ridge to the north.”
Karon had hunched his shoulders and closed his eyes, grimacing and cradling his bleeding left arm in his right. His incision did not close if the enchantment was interrupted. “Hurry!” he gasped.
“We’ll go south,” I said, kicking dirt over the fire. Then I grabbed Roxanne’s arm and pulled her out into the night. Halting abruptly in the deepest shadows next to the broken walls, I gave my eyes time to adjust to the dark, sacrificing the quick start for speedier going.
“What’s happening?” demanded the princess, wresting her arm free. “What did he mean? What’s he going to do?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t seem like the time to ask him. Now be quiet and come with me.”
I took off across the cracked dry earth of the valley floor, the reluctant princess lagging behind me. For everything - hurry! The distance across the exposed valley stretched impossibly far, and before very long a stitch in my side protested my long idleness. But the echo of Karon’s command drove me on until we had scrambled up the rocky incline at the southern edge of the valley. I had to trust him.
“Here,” I said, collapsing behind the first boulder that commanded a view behind us. “I can’t go any more just now.”
“I couldn’t go any more half an hour ago,” said the panting girl. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. Maybe something went wrong in the healing, or… I just don’t know.”
“Is the earth going to open up, something like that, like the firestorms in the Bounded? I’ve become accustomed to other things, but not that.”