The Keeper Chronicles: The Complete Trilogy

by JA Andrews

  Douglon, leaning on his axe, watched them for a moment before dropping the weapon to the ground and stomping over. “You’re doing it all wrong.” He waved them out of the way. “Back up, back up. If they’re low down, we tunnel in. Two of us shifting stones at a time. Roan, with me. The rest of you, find good, thick branches.”

  Sini left them and walked alongside the fallen tower. The rubble was as tall as she was, taller in spots, the white stones shining brightly in the sunlight. It felt like she was walking beside the fallen body of some ancient hero. She felt oddly numb next to the destruction. The sunfire that reflected off the stones warmed her just like the standing tower used to do. She touched the edge of a huge block of stone next to her, expecting…something. It was just cool stone.

  The top of the tower had flung out farther than the rest, the blocks of rock rolling out into a large grouping of oak trees. Sini cast out when she got near and a bright beacon of vitalle glowed from further within the trees, far past the ends of the tunnel. She found the Wellstone glittering in a nook between two gnarled roots. In the shadow of the tree the flash of white light from its facets cast bright spots on the trunk. Sini almost picked it up with the intention of bringing it back to the Shield, when she paused. As soon as she touched it, it would draw in the memories she’d made since the last time she’d touched it. Could that have been barely more than a fortnight ago?

  She’d planned to do it somewhere quiet in the library.

  Despite the chaos of the day, the valley had settled back into normal sounds of birds and the occasional rustle of trees. The sunfire fell exactly as it always did, in thin streaks where it could sneak through gaps in the branches, in wide diffuse clouds of green light where it had to go through the leaves. From where she stood the only sign of destruction she could see were two white stones that had tumbled into the trees.

  She sank down onto the root. This is what she’d been longing for since she left the valley. This peace. But like the library, it wasn’t quite right any more. The anger she’d been expecting since the tower fell started to form deep in her stomach. Lukas had torn apart the Stronghold. The best place she’d ever found, and he had destroyed it. It grew to a fury inside her. How dare he come and destroy her home out of ignorance and viciousness? Her hands clenched into fists. She should have stopped him when she had the chance. In that little sewing shop, she should have…

  The flickers of light on the hundreds of facets of the Wellstone caught her eye. Her anger chased away any reservations about using it. Let it take her memories, let everyone see how often she failed and how she’d let Lukas control her.

  As long as it helped her fight back. Chesavia had known about the black sword. There had to be information in the stone that could help. With a deep breath, she picked it up and settled it onto her lap.

  She stood in the chaos again. Images and sounds swirled around with wild abandon. She stepped out into it, willing it to slow. The Wellstone paid her no heed. She caught a glimpse of Alaric, looking much younger, and the Shield, with a little bit of hair actually growing out of his head. Even though the Wellstone surrounded her, she could still feel her hands set on each side of it. She willed a little vitalle into it and the chaos shifted like a flock of birds. A brush of curiosity swept past her and paused. Her own memories began to roll out of her. She let them flow as quickly as the stone would take them. Queenstown, talking on the roof with Roan, the Lees, traveling to the Greenwood.

  The stone slowed as she hovered over Goven, watching him heal. Then it rushed ahead again. When Sini stepped into the Lumen Greenwood, the stone slowed drastically, drawing out every sight and sound. It focused on the darkness of the trees, taking in every detail of the Greenwood. Every detail of the new elves.

  With the scenes moving so slowly, Sini noticed threads of light stretching out from each, winding into the surrounding storm of memories. They left the Greenwood and the flow sped again, moving past Duncave and Queenstown. She saw Lukas again, then the dragon. The stone took an inordinate amount of interest in the battle with the dragon. Every glimpse Sini got of the twins’ faces, she studied. It was obvious they had begun exhausted and weakened themselves with every shield they cast. Without having to focus on the dragon, she caught the moment when Anguine’s tail had smashed into Rett, and all the other injuries she’d missed while they were happening.

  The twins weakened, leaning against each other, casting shield after shield, far more than she’d noticed at the time.

  When the tower finally fell, she saw their faces and knew the Shield was right. They knelt together almost as white as the tower. One lay limply against the other, his face already slack. As it toppled, neither of them moved.

  The Wellstone backed away from her a little, the memories in it beginning to swirl again as though it had forgotten she was there. She grabbed at her own memories, which were winding away into the chaos.

  Everything shifted. Spread out around her was her life. Glimpses of the Lees, the Sweep, the Stronghold. New memories slid in between others, her latest journey connecting images of Douglon, the elves, Sora, or Killien to earlier memories of them put in the Wellstone by Will and Alaric.

  Sini remembered her hands on the Wellstone, and funneled a little vitalle in through them, directing the stone to show her Lukas.

  The first memory that drifted close was Lukas handing her the small topaz stone. “We’ll need a lot of energy, Sini. Just funnel it in slowly.”

  She shoved that one away, but not before she saw her own hands sewing the glowing stone into the lining of Vahe the Wayfarer’s money bag.

  Her most recent conversation with Lukas drew near and she grabbed for it, focusing on his swords. Several threads stretched away from the image. One led to her own memory from the Sweep as she and Lukas examined the blue sword.

  The second led to the image she’d found before: Chesavia on the moors, her hand, with the crescent ring, brushing dirt off the stone cairn where Naj was buried. Sini held onto the memory she’d already read about in Chesavia’s journal and let it play.

  The afternoon was bright. Chesavia held her palm up toward the sunlight and stretched her other hand toward the grave. A violet-tinted stream of light poured out from her fingers toward the cairn, bits of the energy splitting out from the main stream and shooting uselessly into the air. The amount of light was incredible before the topmost stones shifted to the side, then the ones beneath it. In a few breaths, they had revealed Naj’s body. His face was severe, his hair and beard unkempt. His skin was pale with death, but he could not have been dead long.

  Two swords lay crossed on his chest. He gripped the hilts with each hand. One blade let off tendrils of blue light; on top of it, the other was wrapped by fingers of darkness. Chesavia reached out to move the blades. Her hands touched them both at once and her fingers clenched. She yanked back from them, but her fingers wouldn’t release.

  The blue blade was sending arcs of blue into Chesavia, while the black one…

  Chesavia’s fingertips on it blurred slightly, the edges becoming unfocused.

  She turned her face up toward the sun and Sini could almost feel the sunfire streaming into her. With a cry, Chesavia threw herself back and her hands flew free of the swords.

  A strand of light led away from that memory and Sini followed it.

  She caught sight of Naj in more than one nearby image. He was slightly wild-looking, with two thick, unruly braids catching the auburn hair that hung down his back. She was surrounded by Chesavia’s memories of the war chief. He sat in a tent, or rode a horse on the moors, his face attentive and intelligent. There was a private dinner, his face split in a smile.

  Sini let all those images flow by, following the thread from the swords.

  Chesavia’s hand gripped the top of a low rock, hiding on the edge of a battle. The moors stretched out into the distance under a grey, formless sky. Men cried out and swords clashed. But one man strode through the center of the chaos, slicing through the fight holding t
wo swords.

  It was Naj, utterly changed.

  The sword in his right hand was black like a sliver of the night. Chesavia shifted to the other side of the rock and Naj plunged the black sword into a man on the edge of the fight. The man’s body convulsed and fell.

  Naj drew in a deep breath and the blue sword flashed brighter. Chesavia’s hand clenched on the rock. The warlord’s face was gaunt, sunken. His eyes flashed with a dark viciousness. He swung the blue blade and it cut through the man as though he were mist. The black sword hung at his side, seemingly worthless after its one kill.

  But still, no one could stop Naj, and the battle was short and swift. Chesavia sank down behind the rock and buried her face in her hands.

  Sini let go of the brutal image and moved on, following the trail of Chesavia’s memories.

  She let Chesavia’s life move past her quickly until she caught a glimpse of a wide lake against the backdrop of snowy mountains. From far across the water, a creature rose, formed out of black water. It was vaguely human-sized, but its arms and legs were too long, its torso too thin. Its eyes were nothing but holes, glowing a dark, deep blue.

  Chesavia stood on the shore. Sini realized she must be watching through the eyes of Bernn, the Keeper who’d traveled with Chesavia on her final trip.

  Of course Chesavia couldn’t have given this memory to the Wellstone herself.

  Above her the sky was clear and blue. Sunlight glittered on the lake and off the edges of the water demon. The creature clutched a large, wriggling fish in its hands and thin streams of yellowish light flowed out of the fish and into the demon.

  “They say it’s killed four already,” Bernn said, “and grown stronger each time. They hit it with a lit ball of pitch, but the monster devoured it and grew.”

  “It is drawing in the energy of the things around it,” Chesavia answered. “The fire was more food.”

  “Then how do we destroy it? If you pour sunlight into it, it will just go stronger.”

  “Everything has its limits.”

  “Do you?” His voice reflected his growing fear. “Does your sunlight?”

  She looked up into the sky. “There is no end to the sunlight. Everything is light.”

  “That thing doesn’t look like light.”

  The creature moved closer.

  “It is. It’s just hiding in a different form. Get the people back into the trees. It won’t reach the shore.”

  The creature slid closer over the surface and Chesavia stepped up until her feet were in the edge of the water. She held her hands out toward the demon and Sini saw…nothing. Bernn, unable to see the stream of vitalle almost certainly flowing out of Chesavia’s hands already, backed up until he stood in the trees with several others. Chesavia was a small figure at the edge of the lake. The energy must have reached the demon because it flung its arms out in surprise, then took a faltering step forward, reaching hungrily toward Chesavia. With each step, the creature grew.

  Sini knew how this story ended, and she watched with dread as Chesavia stood on the water’s edge, holding her arms out toward the monster. Bernn gasped when her fingertips began to glow with a golden sheen, then her hands. The demon drew closer, it loomed twice as tall as a man now, its chest swollen. A watery maw opened, nothing more than an empty hole surrounded by shifting water. The creature made a deafening wordless sound. The tree next to Bernn trembled at the noise.

  The water demon reached forward with dozens of fingerlike rivulets.

  Even from this distance Sini could see Chesavia’s breath coming in gasps. This is where the well-known story said Chesavia was fighting against the pain of the vitalle. But Sini saw the way Chesavia turned her face toward the sun. She wasn’t in any pain. Her struggle was against the desire to let the sunfire consume her.

  The monster was within a dozen paces of the shore. Chesavia’s arms stretched forward, the glow reaching past her elbows. Her arms were like molten gold, her fingers too bright to look at. Bernn stepped forward, reaching helplessly toward Chesavia. Deep inside the creature something glowed like sunlight through the water.

  “Stop,” Chesavia voice was ragged. Her hands clenched into fists and the golden glow dimmed.

  The creature froze, caught off guard by the absence of the light.

  “You,”—Chesavia’s voice was a wrenching mix of determination and sorrow—“can come no closer to those people.”

  Sini’s stomach dropped at the words.

  Chesavia flung her hands open again and lunged forward into the water, grasping the creature’s arms.

  The water demon twisted back and the light inside it grew brighter. With a roar from its shapeless mouth, it swelled to an enormous size. Chesavia’s head tilted back, her gaze drifting up toward the sky and she sighed with utter contentment.

  The glow spread up her arms, across her chest, filling her body. The water demon lit like a torch and exploded into glistening shards of light.

  Bernn shielded his eyes with his arm, and when he looked again, the lake was perfectly empty. Sini caught a glimpse of the water glittering with a million golden flecks of light before it faded.

  Sini dropped her hold on the memory and the images in the Wellstone surged past her. She pulled herself out of the chaos of images, growing aware again of the valley around her.

  A claw of cold worry gripped her chest.

  Sitting in the shadows of the oak, Sini’s arms warmed with the memory of sunfire flowing through them. But the thought of how far the glow had moved up her own arms chilled her.

  The thought of what might have happened felt like ice, and she tried to push it from her mind. She thought about the other memories from the Wellstone.

  She knew what the black sword did. Like the water demon, it pulled energy into itself. When Naj had wielded it, any enemy he touched with it was sucked dry of vitalle. That energy fed the blue sword, and seemed to flow into Naj himself, changing him, feeding a darkness in him.

  Chesavia’s journal entry about the swords came back to her. They were not made to be wielded by an ordinary person. In Naj’s hands they wreak destruction in this small part of the world. But I dread how terrible they would be were they wielded by someone who understood them, who could use the power in them.

  How much more would the sword do in the hands of someone like Lukas? Could he focus the blades? Draw life out of anyone nearby, even without touching them? Could he draw all that power into himself and make himself more powerful the more he killed?

  Sini rubbed the ring on her finger.

  Everything has a limit.

  Every magical item she’d ever seen did. She’d certainly broken enough of them on the Sweep.

  Everything has a limit.

  Except the sunfire.

  The facets of the Wellstone flashed at Sini with colors and bursts of white.

  Lukas needed to be stopped. The fact sat like a dull piece of rubble surrounded by the destruction of what she’d wanted for so long. Maybe it had been naive to believe Lukas could come here and be free of all the dark things that drove him. Maybe it had been love that had driven her to think the best of him. Either way, she finally saw who he was. Whether he wanted to be vicious and destructive or not didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was headed south to join his armies. He’s spread destruction all the way through Queensland unless someone stopped him.

  His dragon wasn’t strong enough for battle now. It might not even still be under Lukas’s control.

  But he still had the swords.

  And now Sini knew how to destroy them—and that she was the only one who could.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Sini found the Keepers sitting near the fallen tower, resting while Douglon and Roan took a shift trying to reach the twins’ bodies.

  “I know what the swords do,” she said, setting the Wellstone down next to the Shield. “And I know how to stop them.”

  She sat down between Rett and Gerone. Rett moved over until his arm was against hers, and he
smiled warmly at her. She leaned against him, letting his sturdiness prop her up, and explained everything from Chesavia’s memories.

  “Lukas will be able to do much more with the swords than Naj ever could, I’m sure of it. If we are going to stop Lukas, we’ll need to destroy at least the black blade.”

  “Do you think you can pour enough energy into the sword to destroy it?” Alaric said.

  “Assuming it’s daytime, yes.” She paused. “I saw Chesavia’s battle with the water demon. She didn’t die from moving too much vitalle. I’ve discovered something new about the sunfire.”

  All the Keepers looked at her with interest.

  Haltingly, searching for words to try to describe the longing, she explained the hint she had of the sun’s power while she was healing Goven. How in the Elder Grove she’d funneled so much that she’d known if she just kept going, she would become the light herself.

  The Shield nodded slowly. “I’ve always wondered about the way Chesavia’s arms glowed.”

  Sini rubbed her own hands, remembering how they’d glowed against Anguine’s scales. “There’s something that happens when I have enough light. It seems there’s no real difference between the light and me. That I’m just a cruder stage of it, frozen in solid form. I can feel how everything is connected. How everything comes from the light, and how we’re all destined to go back to it.”

  She stopped. The words sounded strange once they’d been said. She wasn’t explaining it right at all.

  “Everything is light,” Will said. “That’s what Chesavia said before she died.”

  Sini nodded. “She knew that she was using too much, that she wouldn’t be able to resist it. It didn’t kill her—I mean it did, but it didn’t destroy her body the way we’ve always thought. She became light.”

  The men were quiet for a long moment.

  “It still killed her,” Mikal pointed out, his face set in a worried expression focused more on Sini than the story.

  Rett made a worried sound.