Trere’if filled the whole Vale where the Basilisk Prince had created his citadel and capital. The Tree Natural’s restoration to his own place had been Cassandra’s very first action as High Prince. If anyone, including Trere’if, had asked him where he was coming from, he’d have said the Jade Ring, though that wasn’t exactly true. He was Guardian of the Talismans. The Sword, the Spear, the Cauldron and the Stone, symbols of the Lands, and the dra’aj that formed it. There were very few people who knew that the Guardian Prince was the only person who could Move to Ma’at, the Stone of Virtue, that it was impossible for anyone else, even if they had visited there, to hold the place firmly enough in their minds to Move. Cassandra, as High Prince, could fly there, in her Dragonform, but not even she could simply Move there.
Max walked through the camp quickly, nodding at some, raising his hand to others. The Wild Riders were gone, he noticed, every Rider in the clearing was wearing someone’s colors—most of them Cassandra’s own, of course.
He didn’t stop until he heard voices through the drape of tent that was the door of her private sitting room, and didn’t go in until he recognized the second voice as Moon’s.
“What’s this you’re saying about Stormwolf?”
Cassandra looked at him and smiled. “Do you know I can’t feel your dra’aj when you’re on Ma’at? Did you find the Horn?”
Max threw himself onto the padded stool nearest her and took her hand. “I regret to say I did not.”
“Destroyed, do you think?”
“If the Basilisk was wearing it—and I’m sure he was, just as Moon thought—” he gave the younger Rider a nod. “Then it must have been destroyed when he was.” He kissed her hand and got to his feet, heading for the table and the carafe of cool water that sat on it.
Cassandra stood, stretching her arms above her head, and came to join him. “So there’s no chance of controlling the Hunt that way.”
“Maybe it’s for the best.” Max handed her a glass of sparkling water. “I’ve got little stomach for simply summoning them and putting them to the sword.”
Cassandra smiled at him over the rim of her glass, and her gray eyes glinted. “You were always more sentimental than I.”
“Goblins are more sentimental than you.”
She smiled again, putting her free hand flat on his chest. Max took her hand in his and kissed her palm. “What were you two arguing about when I came in? What’s happened?”
Cassandra arched her golden eyebrows. “We were not arguing.”
Max started to grin, but stopped when he saw that Moon was genuinely distressed. “What were you discussing, then?”
“Moon tells me that Wolf came to see her.”
Cassandra had turned until he had her in profile. It was like looking at an old Roman coin. Moon looked down at her feet in a way he hadn’t seen since the Basilisk had still been alive. “Nothing unusual in that, surely? He would have come as soon as he’d heard about Lightborn.”
“Except that he did not know until he arrived, and Wings of Cloud told him,” Cass said quietly, glancing at her sister.
“Then that wasn’t the reason he came.”
Cassandra turned toward him, the corner of her mouth lifting for a moment. “Apparently there is some quality in human dra’aj that allows the Hunt to remain in one shape for a long—or at least a longer period of time.” She looked up at him. “They can look like their original selves, like Riders.”
Max suddenly wished he was sitting down. More, that he was still the Exile, and that he and Cassandra were sitting in a sidewalk café in some Mediterranean seaside town, with none of this to worry them.
“Can they do anything else like Riders?” he asked. My god, if they could Move. “My sentimentality aside, is there really any doubt about what we should do?”
Cassandra stepped away from him, picking up a pawn from the Guidebeast game. “Moon told me none of this until he had returned to the Shadowlands, where he plans to continue in his task.” She looked up from the small silver dragon with ruby eyes she was turning around in her fingers. “He also plans to track the Hunt.”
“He what?” Max couldn’t stop himself from turning on Moon, but he managed not to say anything else. Particularly not: “Are you insane?” She’d had a catastrophic loss, and he wouldn’t want to do that to her.
“It’s not what I wanted, certainly not what I would have allowed to happen, had I been consulted.” This last was definitely aimed at Moon, who only pressed her lips tighter together. Since the death of the Basilisk, Moon had been very meek, very docile—if anything, Max would have said she was too conscious of her own guilt. He knew he should be happy that she was finally able to disagree with her sister. But did it have to be over this?
“However,” Cassandra was still speaking. “He is the only one I have with tracking abilities that come close to what the Hunt can do. He would be the only one who could find them, when they do not wish to be found. He also wishes to offer them the chance to be cured.”
“You’d do this?”
“They are of the People, they are ours. From the moment I first understood that they were Riders who have somehow become addicted to dra’aj, they became part of our responsibility.”
Max pulled up a chair and stood by it pointedly until Moon sat down. He turned to his wife, but she was already seating herself. He positioned his own seat where he could see them both easily. “Who else knows about this?” Cassandra’s eyes moved to Moon’s face.
“No one from me,” the younger Rider said. “When I think of what I said before—” She waved one hand in the air. “All the People who have never been to the Shadowlands…they will say we should close the Portals, and let the Hunt have the humans.”
Max whistled silently through his teeth. “So we’re keeping this all to ourselves for the moment?”
“Are we not stretched as it is, between the strange Binding of the Basilisk Warriors, and the restoration of the Lands?” Cassandra looked down at the pawn she still held in her hand and frowned.
“There is something else, a smaller thing, I hope.” Moon’s voice was certainly small enough.
“Honey, pretty well anything would be smaller than this.” Max was rewarded with a smile from each woman. Small, but smiles.
“There was something else Wolf wanted to tell me, but he could not bring himself to speak of it.”
Max watched Moon’s bent head for a moment, then turned to find Cassandra looking at him. He narrowed his eyes, and reminded himself that Cassandra was not sentimental. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Then there is something we can all agree on.”
Chapter Twelve
WE HAD SOME TROUBLE with the Portal at Union Station, and I’m not sure exactly what Alejandro had to do, but we were back in our own living room practically before I realized there was anything wrong. At first I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that it was only the late afternoon of the same day we’d left. Somehow I expected to find that more time had passed while we were in the Lands, but Alejandro explained that it didn’t always work that way.
“Time does run differently,” he said, as he fussed around the kitchen throwing together a salad Nicoise. Now that my motion sickness had disappeared, I was starving. “But the how and the why of it depends on many things. With whom you pass through a Portal, for example, and your own level of dra’aj—to say nothing of where, precisely, you stay while in the Lands. There are places, for example, where time does not pass, where it is always midnight, or always a spring morning. So you are as likely to return to an hour very close to the one you left as to find it much later.”
“That’s not what the stories say,” I pointed out. I’d expected to have a headache, or at least to feel run down, as I had every other time I’d been sick. But there was nothing, no aftermath at all. As if we’d never left this world. Even the High Prince was starting to feel like a dream. I kind of wished I was alone, so I could figure out how I felt about that. “Usua
lly the human feels like he’s been gone a few hours, and when he comes home, years have passed and everyone he knows is long dead.”
Alejandro looked up from arranging tuna on the bed of greens. “But I have told you, querida, the stories humans tell about the People are not so very accurate.” He put down the fork and set the empty tin into the sink. “And many of those stories, you will remember, involve Solitaries. Trolls, Dwarves, Goblins, and the like. Solitaries and Naturals themselves live a different order of time from the rest of us.”
He popped the hardboiled eggs through the slicer and arranged them around the tuna. I placed two glasses of water, two wineglasses, and the cutlery on a tray and followed Alejandro outside onto the deck. Whatever explanation accounted for it, the sun still felt as if it was in the wrong part of the sky. I shivered.
“¿Te traigo un jersey?” Alejandro switched to Spanish, just in case any of our neighbors were at home. Even if you weren’t listening deliberately, you could hardly help but overhear what was being said in the next yard.
“¿Como lo explicaré?” I said. “Hace casi treinta grados.” I could just see trying to explain to either Barb or Shari why I was wearing a sweater when it was almost thirty degrees. That was one of the easy things about coming to Canada from Spain, temperatures, weights, and distances were metric—even if Canadians had a habit of measuring distances by traveling time rather than actual kilometers. How did they measure distances in the Lands? I wondered. It looked like I would never need to find out.
We were just getting settled at the table, and Alejandro had that look on his face that meant he had something serious to discuss when the phone rang and he went in to answer it. I glanced through the window. I’d noticed that the younger you were, the more likely it was that you would check the caller ID before answering and then letting the call go to voice mail once you’d checked. It was something I had taught myself to do, to fit in.
Alejandro, true to his own apparent age, had answered the phone and was speaking. I saw him glance at me, notice me watching him, and hold up his hand to keep me in my seat. The previous owners’ Vogue magazines were still coming to the house, and the latest one had been left out on the table, the cover and pages curled from the day’s humidity. I snagged it by one corner and pulled it closer. Maybe checking out the photos of what Alejandro called “las flacas,” the skinnies, would distract me. My whole life I’d been dressed by someone else, and Alejandro was doing his best to teach me about clothing and fashion, and how to use clothes to give the impression I wanted to give—age, economic status, that kind of thing. He’d laugh at the models in the magazines and on the runways, but not as though he found them very funny.
“They are like sticks,” he’d say, warning me not to fall victim to the idiocy. “Chosen for the purpose of focusing all attention on the clothing, of showing it to the best advantage. Believe me,” he’d say, shaking his finger at me. “Women are not meant to be clothes hangers! It is entirely the contrary. It is the purpose of clothing to make women look beautiful. When a woman enters a room, one should say, ‘How wonderful she looks,’ not ‘What a nice dress.’” Then he would make that Spanish face, and shrug that Spanish shrug.
Not even knowing what he would say about the models I was looking at could make me smile just then. I found myself wishing that I was still feeling sick. Then I could pretend it was the flu, and not the Lands themselves that had affected me so drastically.
Come on, I told myself, squeezing my eyes tight. Stop whining. A little over two years ago my world had consisted of a handful of rooms—sometimes without windows. The inside of a closed car. Books and movies that had been chosen for me. And the snippets I’d been able to gather from the psyches of the very few people I was allowed to meet and touch.
What had I seen since? A couple of cities? A house in the countryside? Maybe a few hundred square kilometers of this world? Certainly no more. I hadn’t even begun to explore all there was here. Was I really going to waste time feeling sorry for myself because there was another world I wasn’t going to visit again? Surely I couldn’t be that shallow?
Well, maybe a little. It was hard to be grown up when you’d never had a childhood. When someone tells you that you can’t miss what you’ve never had, you know you’re talking to someone with no imagination.
Alejandro’s shadow passed over me. “Fue tu amigo,” he said. “Nik.”
I pushed the magazine away and picked up my fork. I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself, no matter how much I wanted to. There were people with real problems out there.
Walks Under the Moon and her three principal Singers had put in a good morning’s work reviewing the lore of the Horn when the arrival of the Warden Nighthawk was announced.
“Nighthawk?” Moon tried to keep a welcoming look on her face. What could the old Warden want with her? She’d Moved herself and the Singers who helped her with her researches to Lightstead, the home she had shared with her sister and their parents before the time of the Exile. An icy hand clutched at Moon’s heart, and her hand went automatically to where her child lay growing. Nighthawk had been sent to the Shadowlands. Did he bring news of Wolf?
“Bid him enter, please.”
Jade Enchanter, the young Rider who brought her the news, eyes shining with excitement, hovered while she asked her Singers to excuse her, barely waiting for the older Riders to clear the door before he burst out.
“He has brought a Troll with him from the Shadowlands.” He was practically dancing. “I have never seen a Troll, Lady Moon, may I stay?”
“We shall see.” So used was she to her sister’s court, Moon had to remind herself that many of the younger Riders had never encountered Solitaries. That Jade Enchanter wished to was a good sign that her sister’s policy of complete inclusion for all People was finding some fertile ground, if only that of curiosity.
But when Nighthawk reached her study, supporting the Troll with obvious difficulty, Jade Enchanter at first shrank back to her side in fear, before venturing out again, concern in the angle of his shoulders.
The creature who stood panting painfully just inside the doorway looked as though he had stopped halfway in a change from Troll to a human disguise. He was tall enough to need to stoop, though her ceilings were high, thicker through the shoulders than even some of the Tree Naturals she had met. His left arm was huge, dragging on the ground, his right more human-sized. He was gray all over, even the inside of his mouth.
She searched the Rider for injury, but Hawk’s human clothes showed no marks.
“Older Brother, you are injured.” Moon stepped forward, her hands outstretched. The Troll backed away before she could touch him, but not before she felt the heat rising from his skin. Moon glanced at Hawk. “Why have you not taken him directly to the High Prince?”
“I will if you have no Healer here,” the Sunward Rider said. “But if we can, I think we should keep this to ourselves for the moment. Wait,” he held up his hand as Moon started to protest. “Hear his story first.”
“Jade Enchanter.” Moon turned to the boy still behind her. “Go and fetch Mist in the Trees.” The boy scampered out of the room, looking back over his shoulder as he went. As soon as he had cleared the door, Moon turned to Hawk. “Tell me, quickly, what has occurred?”
“I took Twilight Falls Softly to Madrid, and found the fountain of Cibeles deserted, and the Water Sprite gone. I sent the Singer back to the High Prince to report, and went myself immediately to check on Mountain Crag.” He indicated the Troll with a tilt of his head.
“And you, Older Brother, what attacked you?”
“A dog that was not a dog, the beggar. I drove it off with my sledges, my hammers.” The Troll grinned, and Moon had to force herself not to look away at the sight of his teeth. This was one of her sister’s People. One of her own people, if it came to that: sick, injured, and come to her for help. This was not the time to remember old tales, and let the word “Solitary” cold-foot it up her spine.
&n
bsp; “A Hound?” Moon came closer and helped Hawk support the Troll until it could sit on Moon’s worktable. The darkwood—from an ordinary tree, not a Tree Natural—groaned, but it was thick and the table well made. “Did it bite you?”
“Barely a nip, scarce a scratch, it is.” The Troll swallowed, and Moon could hear the roughness in his throat as he did so.
“You burn with fever.” Moon reached out toward his face, in vague recollection of something her mother, and then her sister, had done. Where was that fool Healer? “Do not fear, the Healer will be with us soon. You are still conscious, and with her help, you will not die.”
“Won’t be coddled.” The Solitary shifted, and the table creaked again. “Think I’m a child?”
“Come, only a Troll could have lasted as long as you have with a Hound bite sucking the very dra’aj from you. Any other of the People would have succumbed.”
Moon caught the direction of Hawk’s thoughts: pride could be a tool to keep the Solitary alive. “Truly, only a Troll, and not many of them. Songs will be sung of this.” She reached out again and this time Mountain Crag let her take a grip around his wrist. Luckily, she was on the side of the human-sized arm, or she would have needed both hands.
“That’s right, Songs.” He stamped the floor with one foot and it seemed that the whole building shook.
A bustle in the doorway heralded the arrival of Mist in the Trees, Jade Enchanter on her heels. Like many of Moon’s staff, this Rider had originally come from the service of Honor of Souls, Lightborn’s mother. There were a few of her own people left from the time when her father had been alive, but not many.
“Off you go then, my lady and lord. I work the better with privacy. Young Jaden’s Dragonborn, and can help me.” Jade Enchanter grinned as the older Rider actually made shooing motions with her hands, and even Hawk made no protest as Moon led him away to her private sitting room.
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