Then again, he’d seen the confident way she’d appeared. Not just confidence in her presence, but in the way she carried herself. He couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride. She was amazing, and it was good that she saw that about herself.
“Why are you smiling to yourself?” Elise asked.
“Was I smiling to myself?”
She chuckled. “Very much.”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about my friend and how different she is than who she had been before.”
“That makes you smile?”
Haern could only shrug. “When we were younger”—he realized how strange that sounded, considering that he didn’t view himself as all that old at this point—“we used to dream about getting out of the city.”
“Why?”
“I’ve told you about my homeland.”
She nodded. “You told me some.”
Haern smiled. “Someday if you’re interested, I’ll take you there.”
“I’d like that.”
“One of the things about my homeland is how isolated we are. Growing up, I didn’t think much about it, but I mentioned to you we never had merchants, not the same way you did. We didn’t have outsiders come to the city. It was just us. My father was about the only one who would leave the city for any extended period of time, and most didn’t care for the fact that he did that.”
“Why?”
“Many in the city have a complicated perception of my father. Partly it stems from how he went against the traditions of others within the city, but partly it’s because he continues to be… well, I guess he continues to be himself.”
She chuckled, glancing at him. “And what do you mean by that?”
“What I mean is that my father continues to oppose the Forgers. At least, he did. That made him some enemies.”
“Why?”
“There are quite a few people who feel he’s gone beyond his responsibilities.” Haern shrugged. “I can’t even say I disagree. Like I said, my father has a complicated relationship with those around him.” Haern’s gaze drifted off for a moment, and he shook his head.
“Anyway, Lucy and I had always dreamed about leaving the city. We spent lots of time talking about what it would be like, what the rest of the world might look like, and when we did, things were never quite like we imagined them to be. And yet, I can’t help but think that Lucy has found a sort of happiness.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve found my sort of happiness,” he said, smiling at her. How could there be anything but happiness when it came to his connection to Elise? She was nothing like anyone he had ever known. In so many ways, that was a good thing.
“You don’t always look as if you’ve found your happiness,” Elise said.
Haern glanced over to her. “I don’t?”
She shrugged. “I don’t say that to upset you. It’s more that you still seem to be searching, if that makes any sense.”
“When your father is like mine, I don’t know if it’s possible to ever stop searching.”
“At what point do you step out of his shadow?”
Haern smiled. It was a question he asked himself frequently, but he still didn’t have an answer. When would he step out of his father’s shadow? For years, he’d had a desire for more power, to be able to do the same things as his father, but he’d also known that he never would be the same as him. In all that time, Haern had come to terms with it, recognizing that while he wasn’t powerless, he certainly wasn’t as powerful as his father, either.
Was that the case anymore?
He couldn’t Slide like his father, but with the things he could now do, the way he could now use the lorcith, it was possible he shared his father’s skill.
Even if he didn’t, Haern wasn’t sure it mattered.
“I think I need to stop worrying about it.”
“If it’s not something that you can change, there is no sense in worrying.”
Haern grunted, taking her hand. “You know, you make a lot of sense.”
“Most of the time, it’s my mother’s sense.”
“Do you miss her?”
“Every day,” Elise whispered. “My experience was much like the others’. I returned to my home to find it gone. Destroyed. I didn’t have anything, so when I wandered off, thinking I had managed to find safety, I…”
She looked away, and Haern wished there was a way for him to take away her pain, and yet, he suspected she needed that pain, the same way he needed to strive to be something more than what he was.
“This is a good thing,” Elise said, looking around her. “When we went with you, I wasn’t sure.” She glanced at Haern, smiling sheepishly. “We didn’t know you, and we didn’t know what kind of person you would be or what you would do to us, but now that we know you… this is a good thing.”
Haern looked back at the wagons trailing after them. Much like theirs—the lead wagon—several people sat on top of the wagons, most of them women they’d rescued from the so-called merchants. Each shared an expression of determination. Strength. And it was one that gave him a sense of hope.
“I only wish we could make better time,” he said.
“From the sound of it, we don’t have that much farther to go.”
He hoped that was the case. Supposedly, they only had a few more days before they reached the outskirts of Asador. As a city-state, the Asador holdings extended quite a ways from the city itself. When he had traveled there before, he had Slid, and he didn’t have any experience with any of the surrounding areas. He still found it surprising there were no villages along the way, nothing that would indicate anyone else lived here, and that troubled him. Why wouldn’t there be others out here?
“I still worry that we might come across more of these spheres.”
Haern took the lorcith sphere from his pocket along with a handful of the nails. As far as he could tell, they seemed to be pure lorcith, and there shouldn’t be anything dangerous about them.
If only he had his father’s connection to lorcith. If he did, then he would know with certainty whether or not they were pure. If not, then he had to be careful. And as far as he could tell, the nails were laced with poison, though what sort of poison had been used on them?
Galen hadn’t known. He’d treated him with the general restorative, not anything targeted to a specific agent. And then Della had Healed him, purging the remaining effects of the poison so that anything that would harm him would be burned out of his body.
“What are you thinking about?” Elise asked.
Haern glanced over. “Just this sphere.”
“It looks like you’re trying to reassemble it.”
Looking down, he saw that he had been shoving some of the nails back into the sphere. It was something like a puzzle. Not all of the nails fit. He hadn’t realized it before, but the nails all seemed to be a different diameter, and when he tried pushing them back into the sphere, he found he wasn’t able to do it very easily. There was a pattern, and until he knew that pattern, he wasn’t sure he would be able to finish this.
“I don’t know if I can completely reassemble it.”
“Why? I’ve seen you working at it.”
Haern held out the sphere, pointing to the four nails he’d managed to replace. “This is the same sphere I somehow triggered.” Not only had he triggered it, but he’d suppressed it from triggering against him. In that regard, he should be better connected to it than he was to any of the others. “And these nails were gathered from it.” Haern had done his best to collect as many of the nails as possible. There were nearly one hundred, and all of them were slightly different. Not only did whoever made this sphere have some talent, but they also must have had a certain level of patience. “I’m trying to figure out in what pattern these nails go back into it.”
“Are you sure you should?”
He focused on the sphere. The steady sense of pure lorcith pulsed against him. That had to matter, didn’t it?
If he wer
e more skilled, better connected like his father, he had to think he would be able to determine where the lorcith came from. He remembered his father telling him how he could distinguish the lorcith mine from the song of the metal. At the time, that had seemed strange to him, but the longer he worked with lorcith, and the greater his connection was, the less odd that seemed. Now it was almost understandable.
“I’m trying to understand it. Until I do, I’m not sure we’ll know who’s responsible for this.”
“Are you sure we will ever be able to determine who is responsible?”
“Someone created this,” he said, looking at the sphere. “And there is incredible skill in its making. Whoever did this knows lorcith as well as I do, and I wonder if they know it as well as my father.” He looked up at her. “If you met him, you’d understand. My father is better connected to the metal than anyone I’ve ever known.”
She was silent for a few moments. “You seem to be quite well connected to it, too.”
What if there was another way for him to try to reassemble the sphere?
It was something he should’ve contemplated before. He could probe for the various openings within the lorcith, use that to help him determine where each nail needed to go. It might be cumbersome and slow, but could it be any more so than trying it by hand? He lost track as he went, so he suspected he had used the same nail on the same hole more than once. It was a wonder he’d matched up four of them.
“I should’ve tried that before,” he whispered.
“Tried what?”
He focused on one of the nails. As he did, he held it up, hovering in front of him. Using his connection to the metal in that way allowed him to recognize the size, and then he shifted his attention over to the sphere, wrapping his awareness around that. Combining the two, he could feel for the slight dimpling within the sphere, the openings that were meant for the nails, and in doing so, he…
There.
Haern moved the nail and slipped it into the corresponding hole.
It would be time-consuming going like this, but certainly less time-consuming than what he had done before.
Even if he did this, it still didn’t provide him with answers. It didn’t help him know how the sphere had been made, and almost as much as anything, he thought he needed that knowledge. If he could uncover the how, then maybe he could uncover the who.
Perhaps recreating the sphere, using the nails and slipping them back inside, would help him. Then again, it might not.
Elise said nothing as he worked. Haern went nail by nail, focusing first on the nail, then on the sphere, matching one to the other using his connection to lorcith. While it was slow, he made much better progress than he had. He continued slipping one nail into another hole and lost track of time as he worked, focused as he was on the process.
When the horses slowed and the wagons came to a stop, Haern looked up and realized much of the day had passed. The sun was beginning to set, and they had reached a stream.
“I thought this would be a good place for us,” Elise said. “I didn’t want to bother you while you were working.”
Haern smiled and nodded. There were only a few nails remaining, and yet, there were still several dozen holes. With the nature of the explosion, the way the nails had been blasted in all directions, some of them might have ended up buried in the earth. But then, Haern had used his connection to lorcith to try to gather them all together.
“I’m going to see if I can’t finish this.”
“We’ll get the wagons situated,” Elise said.
He finished the few nails he had remaining, and when he was done, he held the sphere. Joined together like this, there was a strange sense from it. The weight had changed. It was an unusual shift, almost as if it were doubled, not what he would have expected from just slipping the nails back into it.
Climbing down from the wagon, he joined the others at the campfire. They still didn’t have enough food, but one of the wagons had been stocked with more items than they had before, so they weren’t starving as they had been. Eventually they would need to resupply, unless they reached Asador quickly. A village might not even be enough with the number of people who traveled with them now.
“What have you been doing?”
Haern turned to see Jayna watching him.
He held out the sphere. “I’m trying to reassemble this.”
She reached for it, and he reluctantly handed it over, concerned that something might happen to her. It had been his project, and he’d spent considerable time trying to piece it together, but she could help.
“You’re missing some,” Jayna said.
“I thought I’d gathered all of the nails, but…”
“Even the ones that stuck into the sides of the wagons?”
Haern frowned. “What was that?”
Jayna glanced back at the half circle of wagons. They used them for a bit of shelter, but they didn’t circle themselves entirely. Doing so would block off access to escape if it were necessary.
“When we were captured”—Haern had heard about what had happened to them, the way they had been poisoned, something slipped in the water that had incapacitated them quickly—“we were trapped in the wagon when you came back. I heard the knocking, and then the sound of the nails slamming into the side of the wagon.”
Haern had thought Rayen had suppressed most of them, but what if she hadn’t?
He focused on lorcith. Within the camp, there were other items of lorcith, enough that he could detect it from many places near the campfire itself. Then there was the lorcith within the wagons. The one that had carried the spheres that had exploded remain untouched. Haern wanted to investigate it, but there were far too many nails collected in there to sort through them.
There was some metal near him that wasn’t within one of the wagons.
That was what he needed to focus on.
Haern pulled.
It came away, but it did so slowly. The longer he pulled, the more he realized this was exactly what he wanted. There had to be a dozen or more similar items, all of them staggered and spread out around the wagons.
With one more hard pull, the nails came free.
As soon as they did, Haern shifted the direction of them, sending them up into the air, ensuring no one was targeted. He squeezed, bringing all of the nails into a tight cluster, and then slowly let them descend until he could pull them from the air.
“You did all of that from here?” Jayna asked.
Haern nodded. “As much as I could. There might still be some remaining.”
“Impressive.” She handed the sphere back to him and then turned away, heading back to the fire, taking a seat next to Stacy and Beatrice.
With another cluster of nails, Haern had more to work with, and he began to focus on them, testing one after another until they were all placed within the sphere. Even with these, there were still a couple missing.
Haern couldn’t help but feel as if there was something he was close to understanding. Stuffing the sphere back into his pocket, he went and rejoined the others.
Elise glanced over at him. “You look as if you need something.”
“Just a sense of understanding.”
“You weren’t able to figure it out?”
He shook his head. “There are some nails missing.”
“That’s not the only sphere you have to work with.”
Haern glanced over to the wagon containing the lorcith that had exploded. It wasn’t the only sphere, but the problem was that drawing from the spheres within that wagon would be even harder. There had to be seven spheres, and all of them had exploded, which meant figuring out the puzzle there would be even more difficult than what he had tried with this one.
Yet he felt as if he needed to attempt it.
“Great,” Elise said, watching him.
Haern looked up. “What?”
“I have a sense I’m not going to see you for a while.”
39
Haern
Somehow, he would still have to figure out which of these nails went to which sphere. It had taken him the better part of the morning to remove the nails from the walls, and he still didn’t know if he’d missed any. It was possible some had broken free, shot through the wood, and were long gone.
He had to hope the nails could be sorted, but the complexity was far more than what he thought he was capable of doing.
It took incredible concentration. That was never one of his greatest strengths, but while working, he continued to go nail by nail, holding it and then moving on to the sphere. It took considerably longer to match each nail to the sphere, but he had been successful. Each of the spheres inside the wagon had several dozen nails already placed within it. The longer he went, the more certain he was he would be able to replace all of them.
More likely than not, this was a great waste of his time. If it was, then he would have simply expended unnecessary energy, but he couldn’t shake the thought—and the hope—that by doing this, he could figure out something about the construction.
Besides, it gave him a way to pass time. It would’ve been better to do so sitting next to Elise and talking, but she was busy working with some of the rescued women. With their numbers having swollen to well over fifty, her work was important. More than ever, Elise’s organizational skills had been crucial. Because of her, they had organized the amount of food that remained. They had set aside casks they filled with water at each stop, and they had started to help those who were injured and sick.
The Coming Chaos Page 38