Senrid hated remembering the end of that episode six months later, with Detlev on the cliff on that first bloody day of Senrid’s reign. That sense of helplessness still haunted him, the despair that forced him to surrender and yell for Erdrael, though he’d had no hope of succor. The memory was as vivid as the day it happened, so he let it come, and sensed Lilith’s awareness.
He opened his eyes. “That was Erdrael.”
“The magical illusion called ‘Erdrael,’” Lilith said, “was fashioned to resemble my daughter, Erdrael, who was killed early in the Fall.”
“Your daughter,” he repeated, his stomach churning.
“Yes. Age was no defense against Norsunder then, any more than now.”
Senrid ignored the implied warning. “So someone was using me to get to you, all this time later?” He knew he was right about being used as a piece in a game, if nothing else.
“I will have to think about what it means,” Lilith said. She indicated the kids at the bow. “They’ll be finished soon, and wish to set sail. If you’re determined to go forward, you should probably go talk to them.”
Senrid turned away reluctantly, and approached the teens at the front of the boat. “Where are you going, and can I get a ride?” he asked.
The Universal Language Spell worked oddly, with curious lags, or mental image overlays on some words, making it hard to concentrate. It felt a bit like he was trying to hear a conversation in a noisy room.
But the boat’s owner, a weather-browned girl his own age and height, said they were willing to take passengers as long as the passengers were willing to work. Senrid said he had some experience with boats, and he was invited to find a hammock in the crew quarters under their feet.
When he turned toward the hatch leading below the weather deck, he was not surprised to discover that Lilith was gone.
Chapter Three
At an enclave, on an island east of Isul Demarzal
TO Erai-Yanya and the Geth mages, Lilith related the conversation with Senrid, leaving out only the exchange about Erdrael. That, she had not known about, and she would have to contemplate it—when she had the leisure for it.
“And so Senrid is on his way now,” she finished. “I suspect if I were to confront the rest of the children from Sartorias-deles, I will hear similar arguments.”
“I can yank Hibern out, at least,” Erai-Yanya stated.
“Do what you think is best, but I hope you will not do that to Senrid Montredaun-An,” Lilith said. “I believe anyone who does will make an enemy of him. That means nothing to you, of course,” she said, indicating the five Geth mages. “But it would be a very bad thing for your sister world.”
The mages sat in a circle on a shaded terrace in a fragrant garden, regarding her in silence, their expressions ranging from distrust and disgust to worry.
“Senrid,” Lilith said, “is going to try to rescue his friend, no matter what anyone says. So you senior mages have three choices. You can use force to take him back to safety. Relative safety. You can leave him alone, which will probably end with his being captured by Norsunder. Or you can lay parallel plans, that is, let him—and those who will follow him, as I suspect most of those youngsters will choose—to provide exactly the distraction we need,” Lilith said.
“This goes against instinct,” murmured one of the mages. “We do not know these Darksider youths.”
The others regarded him with varying expressions.
“They should be taken away for their safety,” another, older mage stated. “And returned to Darkside of the Sun.”
“If you summarily send them back to Sartorias-deles, you will deeply wound their trust, which is already tentative. Perhaps irreparably,” Lilith said. “They are not only testing themselves, they are, in a sense, testing us, the elders, who have not kept them safe in spite of all our efforts.”
Erai-Yanya had been nodding slowly. She remembered the trouble that she, Murial, and Gwasan used to get into in their mage student days. “So we have to work around them as well as with them, and keep them as safe as we can, without their knowing?”
“That I believe is the wisest course of action.” Lilith indicated the map of Isul Demarzal’s island that rested on the table between them. “We are in a situation where the unexpected, which can only be used once, might act in our favor. Here is my suggestion. The young people must be permitted to enter the city, but with a safeguard. Don’t tell them it’s a safeguard, of course. Convince them that they need illusory disguises, and ask the sharron to weave in certain magical precautions.”
Expressions lightened around the circle as they began to plan.
* * *
Various locations on and around the main island
Kyale wrote:
CJ? What happened? We landed on a beach with a village around it. Their houses are really ugly, and the girls are all wearing nightgowns, but they are very nice. Their food is delicious. If they’d told us that it was made from nuts and ground-up ocean plants, I would have refused to eat it, but I didn’t know until after we ate.
We can kind of understand the people, but when we said that we came to rescue them from Siamis, they said Who?
Leander told me Hibern says to go to the east of some big city called Issill Something.
Where are you?
CJ to Kyale:
We’re heading toward some mountains. It looks like forest ahead.
We also landed on a beach, but not near any people. It took a while to find some. Clair got a note from Hibern. We’re supposed to meet in the forest east of that city. Boneribs has some kind of plan. I don’t see why we can’t make our own plans, but everybody seems to want to meet up.
CJ hesitated, then crossed out the last few words, put a period after ‘plan,’ and sent the note. She’d been sitting on a rock while the others took a break from the hot walk in the sultry air by playing around in a stream. But then Clair beckoned, and everyone joined her.
“Weather here might be different, but at home that flat sheet of puff clouds looks like rain. Shall we try to get there?” She pointed down the slope to where a small village lay on either side of a tumbling waterfall.
Nobody argued. They slipped and slid down a narrow goat path, until they reached the first houses, which looked like others they’d seen: low buildings made out of smooth chocolaty-looking wood that reminded CJ of manzanita. The language the people spoke sounded to her kind of like French—or at least the kind of French they spoke in cartoons, as she had never heard a real French person before she left Earth—and kind of like Hebrew.
As Falinneh and Irenne ran ahead to talk to the locals about staying, CJ walked slowly, brooding about the news Clair had passed on: according to Hibern, Liere was Siamis’s prisoner.
When the rain came, they were cozily gathered on a broad porch. The etiquette was, if you didn’t have any money, or whatever they used for money, then you had to work to get a meal. That meant not only helping to prepare the food, but entertainment afterward.
Ordinarily CJ loved an excuse to show off some of their favorite songs and plays. Two girls snickered, blonde and red heads together as they shucked beans and pulled silk off corn for the kitchen people. They alternately rehearsed one of Irenne’s many plays, and laughed with anticipation over how thrilled their audience would be.
Dhana had gone off dancing in the rain.
CJ fidgeted, knowing that she was going to get stuck with dishwashing. Not that that mattered. If she got everyone to help, it would go faster, because she really wanted to reach that forest before anyone else.
She moved restlessly, hating how everybody had given her the stink-eye, especially that snobby Atan, before they all magicked away. Like Sartora going off to defeat Siamis was a bad thing. Like it was her fault.
CJ wished she had her magic boot, made in the days when Jilo was the worst villain the
y’d ever faced. Her boot was great for knocking villains off balance with a magic-propelled whoosh of wind. How things had changed! And not in a good way, except that ol’ Jilo was no longer on the villains’ list.
But his place had been taken by far worse villains, ones you couldn’t boot into a mud puddle and expect to slink off to the Shadowland while you laughed loudly. Sartora, with all her mind powers, was the best one to boot Siamis out, right?
CJ resisted the impulse to kick the railing. She was afraid that weird wood might crack, and everybody would give her the stink-eye again. Even if those snobs . . .
She grimaced fiercely, knowing it was no use calling Atan a snob. The Queen of Sartor seemed to like Clair okay, so it couldn’t be that she looked down on the Mearsieans in their little country with no court or army. It was that Rel business. Atan really seemed to like the hulking galoot, and CJ knew she couldn’t accuse Rel of buttering Atan up because she had a title, because Rel didn’t butter anybody up. He didn’t even seem to know how to crack a smile.
And I don’t hate him. I don’t, she thought firmly. She wanted to get to the forest first, before anyone else, so she could be seen giving him a big fat welcome, and also she wanted to be in on any plans to rescue Sartora, just in case they did think she was to blame.
Only why did people have to be so weird?
* * *
Isul Demarzal
Liere’s determination to survive received aid from two unexpected directions.
The first occurred a day later, after Julian threaded through a gaggle of Norsundrians to tug on Siamis’s arm. When she got his attention (causing every one of the scouts and flunkeys waiting to deliver reports to wish to be the one he would order to knock the vile brat out of the room) she said, “There’s a girl in the cellar.”
“Yes.” Siamis chuckled.
“Can I talk to her?” Julian thought she was being sly, because she already had talked to her. Three times.
“She’s all yours.”
“Mine?” Julian exclaimed. “Mine? Really?”
“Promise,” he said, mock-solemn.
“But she doesn’t have anything to eat!”
“Why not?” Siamis asked.
“I can’t open the door, and the bread wouldn’t fit under it.”
Siamis laughed. “We’ll see about that.”
He summoned the mage, who duly furnished his account of Julian and Liere’s conversations (the last two solely on the subject of food), and asked with genial sarcasm, “Don’t you think the quality of words might improve if someone troubled to open that cellar door and put in something to eat?”
The mage, who loathed this duty, said, “You gave no orders.”
“I am giving some now, and so plainly that I believe even you can take my meaning: see to it that Liere Fer Eider has a jug of clean water, and some food.”
Liere had been walking back and forth in her cell, after exploring its dimensions. Remembering what Senrid had said about keeping your strength up for escape, she’d even tried running around the perimeter, but she was so hungry and thirsty it had made her feel dizzy. So she sat down again.
A short time later Liere’s door opened, and an armed guard set down a jug of cold water, and a plate of stale bread, the end of a cheese, and the crumbled remains of a vegetable pie. Then the door closed, leaving Liere in darkness.
She slurped down the water, relief pouring through her veins. Then she tore into the vegetable pie.
Strengthened by her meal, Liere listened for Julian’s voice on the mental plane. She was with Siamis! “I saw them give her food, but they wouldn’t let me go in to talk to her. Why does she have to stay in the cellar? Why can’t she come out and talk to me?”
Siamis said, “Detlev wants her for his pet experiment. I might just have to comply, if I lose my gamble. Until then, talk to her through the door all you like, Julian. Ask her about the dyr. It’s a magic thing.”
“I hate magic things,” Julian retorted, thinking of Atan and lessons.
“Ask her anyway.” Siamis laughed. “Run along.”
Liere withdrew her mental tendril and sat back to think. So Siamis wanted them talking about the dyr. No surprise there.
Even if she knew where it was kept she wouldn’t talk about it, but there was something she could do: figure out why Julian hated Atan, and find out if it had something to do with her terrible memories of being shut in a dark closet by that whispering woman with the jeweled fingernails.
* * *
Senrid got himself acquainted with his new travel mates, did what he was told, and, when he could finally get a corner alone, he dug the notecase out of his pocket, pulled out the last note he’d received, and turned it over. He used the pen from the ship’s log near the tiller and wrote a quick note. Wondering if the magic would work on this world, he put the note in the notecase and tapped out Hibern’s sigil.
The paper vanished.
He went below to climb into his hammock, and dropped immediately into sleep.
* * *
—
Over the next few days, Senrid heard a great deal about Geth and its many islands from his shipmates. The captain whom he’d taken to be an agemate turned out to have done the Child Spell decades ago. You could tell if you got close enough to see the lines in her face that she wasn’t fourteen or fifteen. But she sort of acted like it . . . and sort of not. He found the idea somewhat repellent, but then he did not want to spend the rest of his life looking as if he were fifteen.
Senrid could feel the impulses to break the spell holding his physical growth back, but stronger was the conviction that he ought to keep hiding in plain sight to the likes of Detlev, to whom the passing of years had to be meaningless.
Ten days after his conversation with Lilith he was obligingly set down at a point that afforded the shortest path to the forestland directly south of the city. He wasn’t there half a morning before he found Jilo sitting dismally at a crossroads, puzzled by which way to turn.
Astounded that Jilo couldn’t gauge the geography that seemed so obvious, Senrid pointed him northwards, saying, “The forest seems to lie that way.” And, as Jilo had expected the moment they saw one another, “What does the book say?”
“It doesn’t say anything, because Wan-Edhe never came here to ward any Destinations.”
“Well, chances are pretty good we wouldn’t have any idea where any of them would be if it did, since we haven’t a map. Right. May as well hide it away again.”
Jilo promptly stashed the book inside his tunic, where it pressed comfortingly flat against his stomach. They walked together, as Senrid told Jilo about parts of his interview with Lilith the Guardian. It never occurred to Jilo not to try breaking Norsunder’s wards over this Isul place. His life had defined itself since the disappearance of the Shadowland in trying to break Wan-Edhe’s formidable wards. So they spent time talking about what Jilo had learned about lethal wards.
After a day, Jilo and Senrid were found by two of the sharron Lilith had spoken of: dark-haired people, one young and one old, in green and brown clothing. They were very shy, scarcely speaking or meeting anyone’s eyes. Not that Senrid or Jilo had much energy for talking, for it took all their concentration to follow their swift, sure-footed guides up razor-edged cliffs and down narrow trails shadowed by gnarled trees of types they did not recognize, or kind of recognized.
When it seemed they couldn’t walk another step, they emerged abruptly in a central clearing where they discovered half of the alliance already there, some doing various chores under Rel’s direction as they set about cooking fresh-caught trout on sticks. Others made biscuits with the meal that the sharron had given them before departing into the woods.
“Senrid,” Hibern said with relief. “Here you are! Everyone is full of questions.”
“So the mages haven’t broken the mirror-ward over that city
yet?” Senrid asked, his appetite waking up with a cavernous gape as the aroma of herb-rubbed fish wafted his way.
“No. Everybody has ideas about rescuing Liere. We wanted to hear what you were told.”
Dappled light played over Arthur as he wandered from below the low, spreading branches of a cousin to the chestnut, a book that he’d either found or brought with him tucked under his arm, and a quill pen sticking out from his ear. “All we’ve seen are the sharron who brought us. They gave us a bag of some kind of meal, and said somebody would come to lead us to the city.”
“They don’t talk much,” Hibern added.
“We noticed,” Senrid said, looking around appreciatively. It wouldn’t be accident that they’d been ushered to this deserted area, probably unknown to Norsunder’s scouts.
Jilo faded to the perimeter as Senrid said, “Here’s what I learned.”
* * *
—
The alliance gathered over the space of a few days, and fell into a companionable rhythm, with Rel as leader. They had a goal and an interesting new environment, and for some, the onslaught of emotions over Derek’s death gained distance.
Not all gained the relative comfort of distance.
Rel was good at camp life. He liked spending the day scouting fallen timber for firewood, and teaching people how to fish and to toast wild tubers that they found growing.
Camp food got even better when Leander arrived. Having spent a lot of his early childhood as a forest-dwelling outlaw with a price on his head, Leander knew how to find and cook tasty greens and wild onions and herbs. He even discovered varieties of sweet berries that they could eat for dessert.
Rel welcomed the work, but in spite of keeping himself busy all day, as soon as he fell asleep his dreams filled with flames and people screaming. It didn’t help that those first few days, he could still smell the lingering traces of smoke if he coughed.
A Sword Named Truth Page 73
