The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  And Björn wanted to play this game. It was as much a part of him as life itself.

  But Ean...he had died three times for the game already. He was all too willing to see it done and over with.

  None of which was to say that Björn wouldn’t have solved the problem if he could’ve, but clearly the rules had been established long ago. Björn couldn’t change them just because his sister was in danger—and even if he could...who knew what that would do to the Balance?

  Ean glanced up to find Isabel studying his reflection in the mirror. She knew his thoughts well enough. He wasn’t sequestering them from her awareness like misborn children.

  One corner of her mouth curled sardonically. “What purpose will it serve to speak my thoughts when you’ll only scold me for having them?”

  “At least we would be sharing them.” He frowned at her reflection. “What are you afraid of?”

  Isabel shook her head. “I have been wrong in sharing things before.” In this, she did not hide her true thoughts.

  “Isabel—”

  “I doomed you the moment I told you what I foresaw.”

  Ean turned her and took her shoulders firmly. Too slim—they’d become too slim to bear the weight of these burdens alone. “If you hadn’t told me of my impending death and how long we’d be apart, I wouldn’t have known how or where to find Tanis in the future.” Ean held her gaze with gratitude powerful in his. “Isabel, it’s made every hardship worthwhile to know Tanis, to be his friend, to see him grow. Every hardship.”

  She saw the meaning he placed beneath this truth, but it didn’t ease her as much as he’d hoped.

  Ean stroked her shoulders with his thumbs. “Tell me what wakes you before the dawn. Let us face these fears together. Let me help you.”

  Isabel lifted an appealing look as if to the wind, which was ever howling against the roof of their tent, an enemy demanding entry. Even the stoutest of dispositions would be hard-pressed to sleep with such a storm screaming all the long night.

  Then she opened her mind to him.

  Seeing the dreams she’d been suffering, her resultant fears...understanding colored in all of the missing pieces of the painting. “But they are just dreams, Renaii.” Ean enfolded her in his arms. “True memory or otherwise, they have only what power we give to them.” He pulled back just enough to grace her with a smile. “A wise prophet told me that once.”

  She gave a derisive groan. “My worst mistakes and failures revisited nightly.”

  “But the dreams themselves aren’t what’s troubling you, I don’t think.” Ean looked her over, reading between the lines of her thoughts. “Not truly.”

  Her eyes flicked to his and away again. “I don’t recall your being so perceptive before.”

  “I was too preoccupied with losing you before.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, I’ll allow no force in this universe to part us.”

  Instead of the smile he’d hoped for, her brow constricted.

  This was not the woman he remembered. Whatever fear she battled, it was truly unbalancing her.

  Ean bent to capture her gaze. “Why does the lady hide her thoughts? Does she so fear my wrath?” This finally elicited the hint of a smile, and a glimmer of the truth she was trying to suppress.

  “Isabel...” he looked more seriously at her, “are you somehow ashamed?”

  She closed her eyes. After a long moment wherein the thoughts she was containing railed against the thin hold she still had upon them, she exhaled a captive breath. “Our thoughts establish our reality, Ean, and these days my thoughts are as dark as my dreams.” Her voice came faintly, strained by uncertainty. “It’s dangerous to delve into these thoughts too deeply, for one can easily become mired there, thinking death is already assured. But...” she lifted her eyes and met his gaze at last, “I’m terrified that if I don’t come to terms with the possibility...” she bit her lip and looked away again.

  “Say it,” he whispered gently.

  Her crystalline eyes returned to his, glassy with unshed tears. “I’m afraid I will become as Malachai was, in the end.”

  This he understood with crystal clarity. He’d regained enough of his own memory to know well of what horrors she spoke.

  Ean gently kissed a tear from one cheek and then the next. “But you are not Malachai,” he softly reminded her, “and we are not standing at the same crossroads as three centuries ago.”

  “If anything, the stakes are higher,” she protested.

  “And our positions are more fortified.” He drew back to meet her gaze, to better ensure she saw the truth as he saw it. “Two Malorin’athgul align to our cause—one is bound to it, thanks to you. Balance speaks to our son, and,” his eyes lit with the sudden recollection, “Isabel, the understanding I’ve gained through sharing minds with Darshan, with Rafael—by Cephrael’s Great Book! I can work deyjiin! I can tear the fabric of the realm and travel anywhere. Do you not see what this means for the game?” He gripped her arms and bent to make her look at him again. “I understand the enemy we face in ways I never did when I answered to the name of Arion.”

  She stared at him for a long moment while her troubled thoughts tumbled, rearranging beneath these truths. Oddly, the new arrangement didn’t produce the restoration of spirit he’d hoped for.

  Instead, Isabel dropped her eyes to her hands. Disappointment suffused her. “I regret that you’ve returned to find me so changed,” she confessed, yet her thoughts spoke in different terms.

  He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “You are not diminished. Renaii, look at me.” Only when she reluctantly met his gaze did he continue. “Here we both stand—worn, weary, with Cephrael waiting impatiently on our doorstep and our hopes as tattered as a cloak that’s seen far too many winters—yet our goal is finally within reach.”

  Her brow furrowed slightly, though not with disagreement.

  Ean stepped back from her in challenge. “You think I don’t recognize how our positions have reversed? Before, I stood where you stand now, certain I was facing my end and struggling to deny it, determined to keep walking my path no matter the cost, and still more afraid of the years I’d spend apart from you than of death itself.”

  Isabel’s eyes widened, and he saw that he’d hit upon a truth she’d thought he hadn’t understood.

  “So we arrive back at a place we’ve stood before, Isabel, but we are much stronger for the road behind us than ever we were when it still lay ahead, when you were called High Mage and I was Arion Tavestra.”

  Ean moved to stroke a thumb across her cheek. “We have never been more truly for one another than we are here and now, and in that union—Isabel, together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish.” He looked her over pointedly. “Do you deny this?”

  A faint smile had finally overcome her expression. “No, my lord.”

  “Well and good.” Ean cupped her face with both hands and opened wide the gates of his mind, that she could not doubt the fervor of his intent. “Because I’m going to find a way to save you, even if I have to rewrite the stars to do it.”

  Much later, having secured a promise from Isabel that she would stay in bed and rest, Ean shielded himself with the fifth and headed out into the storm. Dawn was transposing the sand-saturated air from a variegated band of darkness into a burnt sienna firmament. Soon the entire day would harbor a tangerine cast.

  Since his return to T’khendar, Ean had spoken with Björn at length about T’khendar’s pattern, the broader playing field of the game, Isabel’s condition and what they could do about it...many things.

  There were just as many other topics they hadn’t had time yet to broach. The Vestal spent every hour he could helping the drachwyr find their way back into the realm’s time-stream. They were hours that might’ve been spent—would’ve been spent, had the need not been so dire—on strategy and planning. Minimally, he would’ve been finding new ways to strengthen T’khendar’s pattern and better fortify this, their final outpost ag
ainst Chaos.

  But they had no chance of overcoming Rinokh without the drachwyr. The only solution was getting them back. The fast way required Mithaiya to find the pattern that had been used against her brethren. Then the First Lord—or Ean, for that matter—could unwork it.

  The excruciatingly slow way required Björn to seek each individual drachwyr across the unfolding centuries and draw him or her back in—essentially casting a line of awareness into time’s vast seas, hoping to snare the right fish, and then reeling in that line back through the ages.

  It wasn’t even worth pondering the mind-boggling mental mechanics involved. Ean was just grateful Björn was able to manage it, lest all of their centuries-long plans be extinguished in the breath of a single hapless working.

  Ean found the Vestal where he always was when not required to be elsewhere: in his shirt-sleeves, perched on a narrow ledge of the Khanjar butte, with his boots braced at a downward angle, elbows resting on knees, seemingly gazing across the open expanse of desert. Yet Ean knew that Björn was actually searching the endless ocean of time for five bright stars.

  That morning the Vestal was facing south.

  The early dawn was bright when Ean arrived, the sky depthless until it fell into its southern arc, where Rinokh’s storm was churning the horizon. Ean studied the swath of darkness as he climbed across the obsidian wall to join Björn on the dangerous side.

  “Something’s different about it.” He settled onto the ledge beside his brother-in-law and erstwhile best friend and braced his boots as the Vestal’s were, two slips of leather all that secured him against a fifteen-hundred-foot fall.

  Björn glanced appreciatively to him. “You’ve a good eye.”

  Ean tried to make out what was different about the storm, but despite the Vestal’s comment, there were no visual clues. It was more a feeling, a sense of something having changed. He settled elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry to be so late.”

  “On the contrary, I’m grateful you’ve been keeping my sister occupied and out of harm’s way. My note had no time attached to it, in any case.”

  Ean let his gaze traverse the storm while his Adept senses explored the elements comprising it. He just couldn’t put his finger on what had changed—but something was very definitely and obviously different.

  “I prefer the view from this side, actually.”

  Ean looked to the Vestal, then to the storm boiling on the horizon, and back to the Vestal.

  “Admittedly, there’s not much to see on the north side,” Björn noted with the ghost of a smile, “but this view has its own merit.”

  Ean thought he must’ve heard him wrong. “You mean you like watching the storm?” Just feeling its effects on the currents kept Ean faintly unsettled, and Björn was far more sensitive than he was.

  “Perhaps like isn’t the most accurate descriptor for what I feel towards it,” Björn admitted wryly. His expression became thoughtful. “I imagine you see it as I do, through the fifth: the webwork of fractures, the fraying threads of the realm’s fabric...but when I look upon this storm of destruction, I see also the miracle of creation.”

  He aimed another meaningful glance at Ean. “You and I built a realm to become a fortress, and it’s withstanding attack from a being who unmakes stars.” His gaze bestowed voluminous admiration upon the realm of their creation. “Do you not see, Ean? Our unassuming world is standing up to Rinokh and declaring it will not go down without a fight. I see a poignant moral in this.”

  “The mouse overcoming the minotaur?”

  “Some would see that familiar fable in it, surely. But more...” he seemed to search for the right words, his brow furrowing slightly, “I think more that we all have within us the potential to be as gods, the potential to see farther and longer and with greater reason than towards only one lifetime of choices.”

  For some reason, this comment brought a topic Ean had long been wanting to discuss to the forefront of his thoughts. He clasped hands between his knees. “Tell me about Baelfeir.”

  “Baelfeir...” Björn shook his head, and a thousand thoughts that Ean couldn’t read danced in his gaze. “They once called him the Lord of All Mishaps.”

  “That’s a moniker for Cephrael now.”

  “Yes. Interesting, isn’t it? But Baelfeir observably hasn’t been around to blame, and if the accusation fits...” he gave a resigned smile, “yet the game is probably more Baelfeir’s than anyone’s.”

  Ean drew back. “This game?” He narrowed his gaze on the Vestal. “Your game?”

  “Our game,” Björn corrected, still smiling. “With Baelfeir back in the realm, the field will have new equilibrium.”

  “Let’s assume I understand what you’re talking about.”

  Björn chuckled. “Just look at the teams, Ean. They’re equally weighted for the first time since the Balance went awry.”

  “And Baelfeir doesn’t unbalance it?”

  “No, that’s too simplistic a view. But it’s important to remember that Baelfeir weaves no thread through the tapestry.”

  Ean puzzled over the information. “Darshan and Pelas, by their intent, balance Shail and Rinokh in theirs. You’re saying Baelfeir is inconsequential to this?”

  “By no means.”

  Ean narrowed his brow as he thought things through. “Baelfeir weaves no thread through the tapestry...but obviously he can affect the tapestry.” He focused suddenly back on Björn, for the answer seemed obvious. “He affects the tapestry via others. Mortals, then?”

  “Correct.”

  “But the more he influences mortals, the more he changes the shape of the tapestry...and that affects the Balance.”

  “Correct.”

  Ean exhaled a slow breath while his thoughts tumbled. “The pattern of consequence I saw...I’m certain Baelfeir plays a large role in it.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  Ean tried to read meaning between the thoughts Björn was sharing and the ones he wasn’t for fear of too deeply influencing Ean’s choices.

  Suddenly, understanding crystallized so sharply in his mind that he hardly dared consider the implications for cutting himself upon them.

  His gaze flew back to Björn’s. “I have to unbalance the game.”

  The Vestal’s eyes danced.

  “In our favor.” He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before—everything fit so clearly within the pattern of consequence. “The field is leveled by the Malorin’athgul being split in their intentions, but as a Player, I can tip it to one side or another. And Baelfeir will be trying to unbalance the game in the direction of his own aims.”

  The Vestal’s smile grew admiring. “Correct again, Ean.”

  “But if Baelfeir is such a threat, shouldn’t I try to...I don’t know, remove him from the equation?”

  Björn gave him a dubious grin. “How would you propose to do that? At last reckoning, the Demon Lord was not so easily dispatched.”

  Into this, Ean read another truth: the Council of Realms had attempted to permanently dispatch the Demon Lord and his ilk millennia ago, but here he was back again, inopportunely, when the realm was at its lowest ebb.

  Ean recalled Isabel telling him that they weren’t playing the game of a single lifetime but a game for the ages, through the ages, to affect the infinite ages yet to come—because this was Cephrael’s game that they were about, and He had immortals for opponents.

  Ours is not a battle of force but one of reason. Isabel’s words.

  They finally made sense to Ean. He realized suddenly that in trying to win the game with force, they could win battle after battle and every time push the enemy to retreat, only to fight that same enemy a hundred years later, and again a hundred after that. Or a thousand. Or three, as in Baelfeir’s case.

  Force could never be applied to win against an immortal. All you did was ultimately run around in circles. It was the Ninth Law at work—Do not counter force with force, channel it.

  Ean focused back on Björn. “So how do I
take on Baelfeir?”

  Björn cast him a voluminous look. “You tell me.”

  Ean rolled his eyes. “Very carefully?”

  Björn gave an enigmatic half-smile. “Or not at all.” He looked back to the churning horizon. “Let me tell you an interesting story about the Lord of all Warlocks...”

  And as Ean listened with ever-growing wonder, Björn proceeded to do that very thing.

  Twenty-eight

  “There will always be some opposing force, some unequal

  weight to one side or the other. The equation is always

  working to balance itself.

  Even the universe has to have a game.”

  –The Fifth Vestal Björn van Gelderan

  Baelfeir conceived of the Empress of Agasan’s Twelfth-day proceedings as a farce of the blind leading the blind.

  After twenty-five hundred years, bureaucracy still maintained a crocodilian watch over the nest of civilization. In all that time, man had reached no greater pinnacle of governance than what amounted to, at best, a benevolent monarchy. Society evidently failed to evolve, utterly failed to achieve any sort of greater ideology, fell far short of a greater social awareness, or of an ethical standard of self-government—a far cry from anything greater.

  Surely this stultified empire was proof of the mortal tapestry’s endlessly spinning wheels, the serpent eating its own tail. Man, if given free will, always devolved. Only through the interference of higher-minded beings could humanity evolve to greater states of consciousness.

  Would that Cephrael had been there to witness the evidence so plainly before Baelfeir’s eyes. Even at his most purposefully obtuse, he would surely have had to concede the point.

  Baelfeir was still learning his way around the world he’d returned to, the society he’d had a hand in creating—though the histories he’d perused in the Sormitáge Archives failed to mention this. Still, much of Alorin remained new and different to him. He was in no rush to win the game and end it all.

  That he would win was nearly a foregone conclusion.

  Nearly.

  That nearly tugged at one corner of his mouth, bringing the slightest suggestion of a smile. The possibility, however remote, that his opponent might still prevail, that he might have—as Phaedor had implied—actually predicted Baelfeir’s next move...he found this potential endlessly exciting. In fact, he was enjoying the game so much, he would almost be disappointed when he claimed his victory.