by JA Andrews
Her hand reached out and she set a finger on the blade. Thin tendrils of blue light poured out into her finger. She yanked back her hand. “It pushed energy into me!”
Lukas nodded eagerly. “It has some powers. And Killien doesn’t even know. We should take…”
The memory drifted away, but thread after thread snaked away from it, connecting it to dozens of other memories she couldn’t quite see. One silvery thread glimmered over to an image of a desolate, rolling landscape. The image closed in on a low pile of rocks set like a cairn on top of a small rise. A hand reached out to brush dirt off the largest stone, and the gloomy light caught on a silver crescent ring.
Chesavia.
Sini grabbed for the image, but it slipped through her fingers like honey.
There were runes on the rock. Sini reached after it, but the memory caught on a current swirling through the Wellstone and spun away into the chaos.
The memories of Lukas were connected to others’ memories of him, as well. Sini followed the threads to one that felt new.
The room around her was stone. An enormous table filled the center, and rich tapestries hung on the wall. Alaric sat across the table with a half dozen men in grey military uniforms. Queen Saren sat at the head of the table in a tall-backed chair.
“If this man is a threat,” a military man said, “then send the army. Give me three units of the rangers and we’ll sniff him out.”
“We don’t really know where he is,” Alaric said mildly. “Sini has been mapping his movements, but they seem erratic.”
“Should we be worried?” the queen asked. “Is Lukas a threat?”
“Probably,” Will’s voice said, and Sini realized the memory was his.
Alaric glanced at Will. “He is capable of violence.”
“Capable? He slaughtered Roven with frost goblins!” a man with a captain’s emblem said. “He tried to kill the man he was working for! You yourself have said he hates Queenstown and the Keepers.”
“He does,” Will admitted.
“Then let us take care of him before he has a chance to hurt us.”
Sini lost her hold on the memory and it drifted away. She watched it disappear into the flurry of other images with a cold knot in her gut. The Wellstone pushed her out until she sat again on the top of the Stronghold, with no sounds but the quiet valley and no light beyond the sparkle of the stone.
She looked at Will, who now sat against the column. “I’m coming with you to the capital.”
Chapter Eight
It took ages to fall asleep. She’d organized what she needed to bring to the palace quickly enough. The map and all the accompanying notes were rolled up in leather. The few clothes she had packed up quickly, along with the two books she’d decided to bring: Chesavia’s quotes and Alaric’s new book on Mallon. The Shield had stopped by with a little bag of coins for her. No one had ever trusted her with money before, and it felt heavy in her palm.
On top of the busyness, her head still spun from the Wellstone. Snippets of memories flitted by. Hers, mostly, but sometimes she caught a hint of one of the others she’d seen. She hadn’t thought about her mother in a long time. And Vahe…
Her chest felt raw after the emotions of the day.
The early memories of Lukas were different from the final ones. Seeing them in such quick succession, she couldn’t ignore the fact that by the time Will had met him, Lukas had become bitter and angry. The earlier, happier memories were hard to hold on to.
The next morning, she woke with a gritty feeling not just in her eyes, but in her whole head. Her hand lingered on the black Keeper’s robe in her closet, but it felt even more ill-suited today than usual. Maybe because going to court was intrinsically Keeperish and she felt utterly unqualified to do it. The palace had Keeper’s robes, anyway. If she needed to put one on there, she could. She dressed quickly in her normal shirt and leggings, busying her mind with questions of whether she’d packed enough and what the trip would be like, doing her best to ignore the knot of nerves in her stomach.
She made it all the way to the loaf of bread in the kitchen before the thought she’d been avoiding all morning pushed its way to the surface.
Who was going to bring the twins breakfast tomorrow? She pulled plates off the shelf and set them gently on the tray. Gerone, most likely. He’d do a good job of giving them enough jam. Not a stingy serving the way Mikal would.
She cut off two thick slices of bread for the twins, and a thin one for herself, unsure if she’d be able to eat it.
Would Gerone do it every morning until she got back?
A sob rushed up her throat and her hand flew to her mouth to hold it back.
Trips to court were never quick. She’d be gone months. She pressed her eyes shut. The task of bringing the twins breakfast would end long before she returned.
Gripping the tray tightly, she headed toward their room. The ramp felt longer than it ever had, and their familiar answer to her knock almost undid her again. It must have been obvious on her face when she entered, because both twins’ expressions were full of empathy.
“You’ve made the right choice,” Nikolas said as he moved aside their book.
She couldn’t bring herself to nod. “You’ll write me?”
“Of course. And we expect updates from you regularly, or we’ll be driven mad by curiosity.”
They ate a while in silence. There should be something to talk about, now of all times, but none of their thoughts translated into words. She desperately wished that her healing was useful, that instead of just removing fluid she could actually heal the underlying sickness. Everything felt out of sorts and unfinished.
“How many pages left?” Sini asked finally.
“Fourteen.” Steffan let a small smile peek out from his beard. “Yesterday was a remarkably productive day.”
“Yesterday we finished almost twice as much as usual,” Nikolas agreed. “Some might suggest we were looking for something to occupy our minds from more mournful thoughts.”
Sini let her eyes drop to the book. “I can’t wait to read it.” She picked up their hands, one at a time, and traced a rune over them, drawing out the stiffness. When she finished, she gave each old man a hug. Nikolas brushed the tear off her cheek with his wrinkled finger.
“We’ll miss you.”
She wanted to say a million things, but she couldn’t quite get any of them out. “I’ll miss you too.”
She said quick goodbyes to the other Keepers on her way to the stables. When she stepped outside, the fresh air chased back her tears. There was no direct sunlight down at the floor of the valley yet, but even the weak sunfire was soothing. Will was by the stables with Rett. Her stomach tightened and she shifted her pack on her shoulder. When Rett caught sight of her, his brow wrinkled in worry.
He came out to meet her but stopped a few steps away, looking down at his hands. “Can I come with you to court, Sini?”
From behind Rett, Will shook his head regretfully
“I don’t think you’d like it there.” Sini took one of Rett’s huge hands. “They wouldn’t let you care for the horses.”
“Will you like it there?”
She hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
“Then why are you going?”
“They think they’ve found Lukas.” His gaze snapped eagerly to her face, and she pressed her lips together. If Lukas really was doing all these terrible things, how would she ever explain it to Rett?
“I’ll make sure the room next to yours is clean,” he said, a spark of hope in his face. “It’s gotten dusty.” He leaned down and engulfed her in a hug.
“Good idea.” She tried to draw some of his hope into herself, but she mounted her horse without feeling any better.
The tunnel out of the Stronghold lay at the base of the immense cliff on the western wall of the valley. In the center it was tall enough she could have stood on her saddle and not reached the arched stone ceiling. It was neatly made of squared-off stones stacked
smoothly against each other. If there was some kind of mortar between them, she couldn’t see it.
The sunlight from the valley lit the smooth floor around them for a good distance. It ran straight under the high cliff and their horses’ hoofs echoed in a tumbling chaos.
It was dim when they reached the wall at the far end, but Sini felt the subtle wave as Will cast out. The echo of a smug little rune humming with vitalle came back to her. Every single trip, Mikal made her try to open the door. Last spring she’d been a little afraid he wasn’t going to let them back into the Stronghold until she could do it. But this rune wasn’t doing anything. There was no path to it at all. Traveling with Will was going to be so much better than with Mikal.
Will reached toward it. A thin line of blue light flowed out of his hand, connecting with the rune.
“Aperi.” With such a small effort, the wall thinned and shifted. Green light seeped through, then the wall disappeared entirely, revealing a thick pine forest.
Talen, who had perched patiently on Will’s saddle horn through the tunnel, took off into the open sky. They stopped their horses in the small grassy space between the trees and a cliff that rose immeasurably high above them. It seemed taller even than the back side of it in the Stronghold valley. The arched opening sat in a section of stone wall built directly on the cliff face.
Will raise his hand toward the opening. “Care to do the honors?”
She shot him a glare until she noticed a thin blue line snaking out from his hand to the wall. A path. She grinned, set her fingers on his hand, and funneled her own vitalle into the path.
“Cluda,” she said with an air of triumph. The stones shifted again and smoothly formed up, leaving no indication in the wall that the opening had ever existed. She considered the stones. “Do you think I’ll ever be able to do that without help?”
Will turned his horse toward the forest and grinned at her over his shoulder. “Limitations are a good thing. Without them, the hero has nothing to struggle against, and the story is too dull to be worth telling.”
They found the thin trace of a path leading into the forest, and Sini cast out at the nearest trees. Subtle hums emanated from the trunks along the trail. A thin black rune was barely visible against the nearest trunk, but it did nothing as they passed. Even in the calm, bright morning, she shivered at the memory of the ghostly faces those runes could create. “I suppose it’s nice that the ghosts don’t talk to us when we’re leaving.”
The first time she’d come to the Stronghold with Will and Alaric, even after being warned about the faces, the forest had been terrifying. They’d tried to get through during the day, but it was dusk when they’d finally reached this stretch of the forest and the milky faces that had leaned out of the trees toward her had spoken words that cut paralyzingly deep. You do not belong here. You are worth nothing. You are not what they hope you are.
In the intervening years, the taunts of the ghosts had shifted to focus more on her shortcomings and failures as a Keeper, but they always managed to throw in the original barbs for good measure.
He turned in his saddle again. “Did you know,” he said with a touch of indignation, “that Alaric never saw the ghosts until the last few years?”
“What? How?”
Will shook his head. “I’d always suspected he was too saintly for them to have anything to torment him with. I guess I was right.” He sobered. “Until he did all those things to save Evangeline.”
Sini had read Alaric’s chilling account of those days. “But that was long ago. What do they taunt him with now?”
“I don’t like to ask.”
In the morning light, with no ghosts, the forest was peaceful and gentle. The only sounds were the muffled clop of the horses’ hoofs on the dirt path, and the scattering of forest animals. She didn’t breathe freely, though, until they reached the wider road that ran toward Queenstown. She rode alongside Will while the sunlight poured down on them. The familiar sunfire seeped into Sini’s skin and warmed her horse’s dark neck.
It had been half a year since Sini had left the valley. She traveled with Mikal twice a year to the small market town of Brenlen a half day’s ride south, but their last trip had been in the spring. It would be several weeks before Mikal would venture out again. The Keepers had standing orders from several of the merchants there for ink and paper, seeds, fabric, herbs that couldn’t be grown at the Stronghold, and several different medicines sent from the court apothecary. Though the town was small and the market nothing more than a wide street swollen with local farmers and traveling merchants, even those crowds felt overwhelming after the isolation of the Stronghold.
After so long in the deep, narrow valley, passing through the cliffs felt like entering a different world. The sky stretched so low to the horizon. It always took several hours to feel comfortable with the idea that there were no walls around her. Will, of course, seemed as perfectly at ease as he always was.
Remembering something from the Wellstone, she asked, “What do you know about Killien’s sword?”
Will thought for a moment. “The one Lukas stole? Almost nothing, which is a shame. If Killien really got it from Flibbet the Peddler, there must be at least one good story behind it. Probably more.”
“You don’t think it was really Flibbet, do you? No one’s seen him in generations.”
Will shrugged. “It seems impossible, but Killien certainly believes it. Why do you ask about the sword?”
Sini explained how the Wellstone had made dozens of connections to her memory of the sword
“Wait,” he interrupted her. “You saw connections between memories in the Wellstone?”
“I think so. There were webs of silvery lines. As soon as it finished drawing in my memories, it started connecting them to others. My memories of Vahe to yours. The times I saw the dragon to Alaric’s encounters with it.” She paused. “And I saw Ayda. She was so…” There was no way to describe the creature that had faced that dragon,
He nodded and considered her for a long moment before letting out a laugh. “I’m glad you’re good with magic, Sini.”
She fixed him with an annoyed stare.
He just smiled at her. “It means I don’t have to be. You’ve really taken a lot of pressure off me.”
Her hands clenched on the reins. “You realize I can do almost nothing by myself.”
“You can access power the rest of us can’t even find. And you’re connected to it in a way we don’t understand. You’ll find a trick for using it yourself, or you’ll decide you don’t need to. Clever people always find ways around their obstacles.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Have you ever had any obstacles to overcome?”
“I can’t read runes like you and Alaric can, I can’t control vitalle well, and I get bored studying records that aren’t well-written. I’m basically bad at all the scholarly things Keepers are supposed to do.”
“But you have magic words that spill out of your mouth when you speak!”
He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think anyone’s ever told me that my words were magical. At least not anyone who knew what magic actually is, so thank you.”
She snorted. “It wasn’t a compliment. It was a fact. When you tell stories—and sometimes just when you have something important to say—you breathe out this cloud of magic and it spreads out among everyone who’s listening.”
Will turned in his saddle to looked at her. “A cloud?”
“A blueish green one. It’s hard to see in daylight, but at night…” The first night she’d seen him speak in the square in Porreen, she’d been mesmerized by it. “It’s like sparkling mist.”
Will sat back, his face stunned. “I know it happens, but I can’t see it. I can…feel it there.”
He considered. “I’m glad you’re coming to Queenstown, Sin. Everyone there is so boring.”
“I’ll tell Alaric you said that.”
“He already knows. Although Evangeline has helped. He’s less seri
ous all the time.”
“Sora makes you more serious.”
He let his gaze run ahead of them. “Maybe she did.”
“She’ll come back,” Sini said. “She wanted to. Anyone could see that.”
“Wanting something four years ago doesn’t mean she wants it now.”
Sini shook her head. “She’ll be back. Her people needed her to free them from that awful holy woman. I assume, since she’s still there, that her people still treat her like she’s a holy woman herself.”
“She’s tried to convince them otherwise, but she does have some magical skill, the way she can feel if living things are nearby, and that’s enough for her clan. In the process of getting rid of the old holy woman, she got dragged into training the new one, who’s still young. I don’t think she understood how hard it is to extricate yourself from a position like that.” He glanced at Sini. “Which is why I’ve done everything I can, not to become an official part of court. Alaric’s going to be stuck there forever.”
Sini shuddered. “Tell me your secret so I don’t accidentally become part of court. I just want to get back to the Stronghold.” She glanced at Will out of the corner of her eye. “How long has it been since you heard from Sora?”
“Since early spring.” Will stared ahead unseeing. “I keep toying with the idea of getting Douglon to lead me back over there. The dwarves know how to find her.”
“Any news from Douglon and Rass about new elves?”
Will shook his head. “Same as always. Rass is sure the Elder Grove is awake and that new elves will come, but…”
Sini sighed. “She’s been saying that for four years.”
Early that evening they reached a small inn. The innkeeper, obviously familiar with Will, beamed and bowed and doted on them, even offering Talen some strips of meat. When he discovered that Sini, despite her lack of black robe, was a Keeper as well, he offered her the best room, which turned out to be marginally larger than a closet with a lumpy bed. Will, his own Keeper’s robe hanging on him quite naturally, told stories in the common room and the entire town tried to cram themselves in. The ale flowed, and Will’s words spread through the room, glittering among the listeners.
