Crown of Renewal

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Of course,” she said.

  Paks did not bring up the subject again, to Kieri’s relief, and he buried himself in his duties as king and his study of elven magery as the days passed. He was uneasily aware that he was still expected to wake the sleeping magelords in Kolobia, and he still had no idea how he was going to accomplish that.

  About half-Summer, as leaves lost their first freshness, she asked how his studies in the various mageries were coming along. “Dorrin is helping me with the magelord part,” he said. “And the western elves their king sent have taught me much about elven magery. But the real problem I see is that Kolobia is so far away. I can’t imagine it—either the distance or what it’s like. Magery at a distance requires the ability to focus, to see, at least in the mind, what is there. I can now direct my magery to something I cannot touch—I could set a flame to that kindling in the fireplace, for instance, from another room. But I can imagine the kindling. I cannot imagine Kolobia.”

  “I see it in my mind,” Paks said. “Is there no way to send the image from one of us to the other?”

  “Not that I know,” Kieri said. “Can you draw it?”

  Paks could not. Her attempts to draw either a map of the route to Kolobia or an image of the underground chamber looked like a child’s first attempt to make marks with a stick in the dirt, Kieri thought. He did not tell her that; her expression told him she knew it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can see it … I just don’t know how to show it.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I still need to find a way to access the Old Human magery they said was latent in me.”

  “Couldn’t you use the transfer pattern you said was here and come out there?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m oathbound to this land, and since I made the elvenhome here, leaving might damage it. The elves tell me it might disappear and leave here—the land I gave my oath to—without its protection. Whatever I do in Kolobia must be done at a distance, from here. I suppose that’s why I need all three mageries to do it.”

  Paks brightened. “I’m all Old Human as far as I know; our family’s lived up on the edge of the moor forever. And I have paladin’s magery. Maybe that will work. If I focus on what I remember seeing and we try to merge your magery and my memory …” Her voice trailed away.

  Kieri thought about that. “Suppose we tried that just to give me an image to work from later. After all, I don’t have the Old Human magery working at all yet, nor can I work at greater distances than from one room to the next. So it would be less magery, less disturbance … and might not affect the babies at all.”

  “Will you ask the elves about it?”

  “No,” Kieri said. “They will expect me to do it all at once, and I can’t.”

  “So … when?”

  “Why not now?”

  Kieri and Paks bent their combined wills and prayers to the task. It was like walking in thick fog as vague shapes formed and faded around his mental image.

  “I should know the way,” Paks said. “I have been there; I have seen the mountains, the great clefts in the rock. I saw the shape of Luap—I think it was Luap—on the rock arch. If I can just see it again—or the chamber inside, where the sleepers were—if Gird will guide me—”

  All at once Kieri felt his will touch another’s … like a hand brushing his in the fog, then tightening to a grip, a sense of someone in peril begging for help. Did the sleepers dream? Did they yearn to awake?

  “Paks …” he said, and glanced at her. She nodded, and now he felt, along the strand of his thought, something he could define only as an essence of her being as he had known it. He himself had never been Girdish; he had not fully grasped what Gird might be like, but now beside her he could sense a burly broad-shouldered figure, oak-sturdy, stubborn.

  Abruptly, as if a curtain shifted aside, he saw a handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed man of apparent early middle age staring at him. Wide awake, not kneeling in enchanted sleep as Paks had described. The man was handsome, and yet … spoiled by something. Petulance marked his mouth, and yearning shaped his gaze. He wore a belted gown of what looked like embroidered white silk and a blue overrobe with silver embroidery marking out an entwined G and L. Beside and behind him were others, also awake: an older woman, dark hair heavily streaked with gray, in a rose-colored surcoat over mail, her expression grim and angry; two middle-aged warriors, man and woman, the man more slightly built and somewhat pale, as if from a wound. In the background, others, men and women and children, milled around, clearly frightened. What was this? Had the sleepers wakened already? But there were far more than Paks had told him of.

  “That’s Luap,” Paks murmured. “In the blue and silver. He’s … he’s alive. This isn’t what I saw. This is … it can’t be before, can it?”

  “Before?”

  “Gird’s time … when Luap was still alive …” Her voice faded in awe. “What did we do? How did we do it?”

  “I have no idea. But we must do whatever we do quickly. If this is the past and they are awake before the sleep, then we must …” His voice trailed away. He had no more idea how to put them to sleep than to waken them, but he knew he could not transport them as they were now. “The world would break,” he said finally. “And it must not.”

  Kieri concentrated on the man staring at him—Luap, if Paks was right—and wondered how Gird could have been blind enough to trust someone so obviously flawed. Kieri felt, through Paks, the sorrow of that person—Gird, perhaps—at what had become of him. Kieri himself felt only anger, remembering what he had learned from the western elves. How dare the man abuse his people so? Leave them unprotected in the face of harm? Indulge himself at their expense? And he thought himself a prince? He would have blasted the man to nothingness if he’d known how, but Paks and Gird would not let him.

  I knew his flaws. I had flaws myself.

  That had to be Gird’s voice, as blunt and uncompromising as his appearance. So something—some worth—was there, some chance for—a use, a purpose?—was still in Luap, and without him this would fail. The man still had power, Kieri could tell, though he had no will to use it rightly.

  And he looked at Kieri as if Kieri could save him, pleading in his eyes, in what was left of himself. Remorse, shallow as it was, in the thin shell of a self that allowed nothing deeper.

  Kieri leashed his anger for the moment and concentrated on what he could discern of the situation. Where were the magelords he was supposed to waken … after they slept? But Luap’s silent pleading, the touches of power he kept using, broke his concentration again and again. It was like wounded soldiers who kept grabbing at a surgeon’s arm while the surgeon tried to work … he would have to find a way to hold Luap down, contain his panic, as men had to hold soldiers still for the surgeon to work on them.

  It seemed to take longer than it should, speaking to the man, asking the questions he must ask, getting answers that only emphasized what was wrong. Kieri had to restrain himself, control his own anger, and in so doing he returned to his earlier thought, that with the magelords he could undo some of the damage he’d done by trusting Alured the Black in Siniava’s War. That seemed to make an impression on Luap; Kieri pushed aside for the moment his knowledge that his place was here—even more now that he was lord of an elvenhome. But still … perhaps the magelords could do it instead of him.

  The face before him wavered, Luap’s unstable will as obvious as a flame in a gust of wind. Then Paks spoke, and Luap’s expression changed again, this time to awe. Kieri waited, watching that conversation and glancing beyond her to notice again the two, man and woman, who stood near Luap. One, the woman, gave him the same feeling Paks gave him. She met his gaze as frankly, then turned hers to Paks. The man looked at Luap and then directly at Kieri and gave a little nod.

  “Don’t worry,” Paks said. Kieri focused on her words again. “Gird will help you.”

  Luap flinched. “Not me,” he said. The words seemed dragged out of him. “I erred. Stupidly.” He said more, but soun
ds seemed to blur; Kieri poured more of his own power into the connection. “I could read, you see. I was smarter,” came through clearly. Luap blinked and looked down.

  “Smart enough to cut yourself with your own sword?” Kieri felt compassion for the broken man for the first time. “I did that, too.” From the corner of his eye he saw that Paks was looking at him. “We kings’ sons have much to learn from peasants, Luap.”

  Luap’s laugh was harsh, followed by a rush of tears. “So Gird said. And Rahi.”

  Kieri quirked an eyebrow. Who was Rahi, and why was he or she important in this crisis?

  “Gird’s daughter.”

  “You knew his daughter?” Paks said, shooting a worried look at Kieri. “I thought all his children died young.” She looked back at Luap. “You’re afraid. What is it?”

  “Iynisin,” Luap said, and then, as if capable of a final burst of resolution, even honesty, he told the tale in a hurried monotone, from moving the mageborn to the canyon to actions that made Kieri’s blood freeze. Stealing life from a mageborn healer? How could anyone—? “We will die,” Luap said at last. “All of us—”

  And they had all died. That much was clear from what the expeditions from Fintha had found. No sign of mageborn life in that wild land, only things left behind in the stronghold under the mountain. Far too like the elfane taig his grandmother had created and in which she had been trapped for a time.

  “Can you help us escape?”

  “No.” Not this way, not this man, not even the two who seemed to glow with a power similar to Paks’s. He could not, because he had not, because they were out there now, enchanted. But how could he tell Luap that? He had to try, and he began, thinking it out as he went.

  Paks interrupted, eyes bright with an idea. He let her talk, let her push past Luap’s objections, instead concentrating on what they might do—how they might do it. Then his ear snagged on something Luap said, and he interrupted. “You? Oathbreaker? You seized command against your oath to Gird?”

  Another rush of excuses followed, layer after layer of them, onionlike, explaining what Luap had thought and why breaking his oath was right. Kieri’s brief sympathy waned. At last, Luap fell silent and the silence lengthened. “I was wrong,” Luap said. “I thought I would be better than my ancestors.”

  Kieri thought of Dorrin, working so hard to be better than hers when she had been better from the beginning.

  Luap gulped and went on. “I was worse. And I don’t know what to do. Aris and Seri—” He glanced at the two Kieri had noted. “—told me to pray, and when I prayed, I saw you.”

  So the gods—or a god—were in this with him? Had they sent Gird to help? For the first time Kieri felt certain this impossible situation, magery worked across time, had a real purpose, that he was meant to be part of it. In fact, he knew what he had to do: just what he had done so often as commander, as duke, and now as king. Take command from someone who was incapable and straighten things out.

  Luap had power, though without character or strength of will. So little was left of the Luap Gird had known and loved, so much alien in the dark hollow of his core.

  “Yield to me,” Kieri said, heart to that feeble heart. “Let me do what can be done.” Little as it was, and deep as his own grief at it.

  “Please,” Luap said.

  Kieri reached into that dark center of Luap’s self, that hollow some evil had eaten out and nestled in. He plucked out the thing—he had no word for it but the elven banast, “cursed”—and squeezed it, feeling something like hands around his own will, helping him, until it was nothing, a spot of slime that vanished.

  Luap looked different—but weaker, not stronger as Kieri had hoped. He would, Kieri realized, waste precious time wallowing in guilt if allowed, but Kieri had no intention of letting him indulge himself in anything, not if any could be saved. He pressed deeper into Luap’s self, taking over his mouth to give the orders that—to a man of his experience—were so obvious. His meaning came out in Luap’s words—words his ears could not quite understand. The woman beside Luap nodded, her intelligent face showing determination now more than anger, and she turned to others. The man behind Luap, the healer-mage, frowned, then nodded and turned away; the woman protested, by her expression, but finally followed the man. All three moved into the crowd; it quieted; he could see clumps appearing that fit his orders—children and parents, adults bearing arms—until all had chosen a group.

  “Take them now,” he said to the group with the children, speaking in Luap’s voice. “At once, with what you can carry. You know where.” He hoped they did. He hoped the legend Paks had heard of survivors riding in from the west to Fin Panir was true. That group, the larger, moved out of the great chamber. At the far end, he saw a dais where Paks had reported a transfer pattern—but it had been blocked. Why had the Elders not let the innocents leave?

  He put that aside for the moment, focusing once more on Luap, that shell of a prince. Luap stared at him, still expressing nothing but fear and pleading.

  Let me. Gird again.

  Kieri dared not glance aside, but in his mind he argued: Wait. One more command.

  The pressure eased. Once more he seized Luap and through him gave more orders. Slowly the group of armed men and women arranged themselves on one side of the chamber, row on row, still talking, a few looking back at Luap. They knelt, and he pressed with all he knew of his magery, feeling Paks and Gird doing the same. Sleep. Rest. Wake later at need. Slowly now, the heads all turned to face the dais. Silence grew. No more fidgeting, no more movement at all: they knelt motionless, silent, in their formation.

  Luap alone remained upright, the look on his face something Kieri did not want to see or remember, though he knew he would not forget it. Grief, fear, pleading … If he had been a child, Kieri would have gathered him up, hugged him—but this was a man, or what should have been a man. “It wasn’t all my fault,” Luap said, heart to heart. Kieri’s sympathy vanished in a wave of contempt.

  Now. Let me.

  Gladly. Gladly he would let anyone else deal with that thing he could not call a man. He still gave power to the link but let Gird and Paks—or Gird through Paks—do what they would with Luap. The man’s shape enlarged and faded until it was a huge misty figure that then rose through the air—and as it passed into the rock, all at once Kieri saw the outside of the place and that shape wavering on a fin of rock sticking out from a big red block of it. So alien was the place compared with anything he’d seen that he could hardly take it in.

  Took me that way, too.

  Gird. When had he been there in life?

  Tell him to stand guard. You are a king; it will mean something to him.

  The wraith or phantom bothered him less than the human man had; Kieri gave his orders crisply, precisely, and the wraith bowed, then stood upright again. For a moment more his awareness held the place—he was seeing what had been, tiny planted fields in the canyon, now trampled and blighted by iynisin as they neared the block of rock on which the wraith stood. And far down the canyon—had it really been that long?—the cluster of refugees, hurrying along a thread of trail.

  Then it was all gone; he was falling, falling, and hit the floor of his study, its familiarity like a blow, like waking from a nightmare.

  He lay a moment, gathering his wits, and looked over to see Paks also lying still, eyes closed. Then, as he watched, her eyes opened. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I could ask the same question,” he said. The fall had been but a jolt; the whole experience still roiled his mind.

  “Kieri!” Arian’s voice. “What happened? I felt—”

  He pushed himself up to sitting; his head swam. He felt as exhausted as if he’d gone three nights without sleep. Arian, still in her dressing gown, stared at him, then looked at Paks.

  “Did you try—?” she began, her tone accusing.

  “We did … something,” Kieri said. “At least, now we know who put them to sleep. At least we think we did that.”<
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  “We did,” Paks said. “Gird was there,” she said to Arian.

  “I thought you were going to wait until I could help,” Arian said in a tone so like a mother to an errant child that Kieri could not help grinning.

  “You were sleeping soundly,” he said. “The babes were quiet for once. All we hoped to do was have Paks show me what the place looked like now so I could focus on it later. I thought, if it worked, it would be such a small magery it would not bother you or the babes. But some power—”

  “Gird,” Paks said.

  “—sent us earlier, in Luap’s own time, when the iynisin attacked and the Elders closed the transfer pattern there, trapping the magelords. There was nothing to do but figure out how to put them—some of them—into enchanted sleep.”

  “So I wake thinking you’re under attack and falling? That’s better?” She shook her head at them. “You look half dead, the pair of you. I’ll get food and drink; don’t bother to get up.”

  Kieri wasn’t sure he could get up; even sitting, he felt unsteady. He lay down again.

  “I suppose we did ask a lot of the gods,” Paks said. “That was a long way—time and space both.”

  “I still think it’s impossible,” Kieri said. “All I wanted to do was see the place. But then, I was told having the elvenhome magery was impossible.” And meeting the Old Human dead and alive returning from it that Midwinter night had seemed impossible. He shivered, suddenly cold with all the impossibilities.

  “In here,” he heard Arian say. King’s Squires brought blankets and trays of food and drink.

  Very shortly, he and Paks lay wrapped in blankets and propped up on pillows; a fire crackled on the hearth. Arian sat in his usual chair, now set between them. A mug of sib spiked with honey and a pastry cleared his mind, though he still felt tired and sore.