by JA Andrews
Ewan’s eyes were wide and his face was very still. “You stopped her from… aging?”
“Not stopped, but slowed down. It will take years for her to age a month.” Alaric dropped his eyes to the ruby. “But the poison needs much less than a month.”
Ewan’s eyes were locked on the ruby again. “How long ago…?”
“A little over a year.”
His eyes lifted to Alaric’s face. “You’ve carried that this whole time?”
Alaric nodded. “I needed to know how to stop the poison, so I traveled south. I tracked down the blood doctors in Napon, any that were competent.”
Ewan’s eyes went flat.
Alaric forced himself to meet his friend’s gaze. “I studied with them for a time, learning about the poisons they used and the antidotes. Their methods are as brutal as we had heard. They perform all their experiments on prisoners, and if they run out of those, they round up the poor off the street.
“The elderly, women, children. There are death caves beneath the city where the fires that burn the bodies never go out. Even there, I found no antidote to the rock snake. So I left.”
Ewan’s face mirrored the repulsion Alaric felt. “I destroyed some things on my way out.” He squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the memory of the cave, the stench of decay and blood, the constant background hum of moaning cut through with shrieks. “What I should have done was burn it down.
“After that, I went to Coastal Baylon and spent time at their library and at the university.” The shelves of books there had been endless. “They have so much knowledge there. Books on every topic imaginable bursting off the shelves. And they research new things constantly. Building after building with labs and experiments and research. It’s no wonder they have no regard for us. We’re barbarians in comparison.” He shook his head.
“The experiments they do with poisons, though, are gruesome.” He pictured the long line of cells, the stench, the screams of the dying. “They use prisoners for study also.”
Alaric shook off the memory. “They even have a small number of books on Keepers. In one, I found a reference to Kordan the Harvester. He was credited with having an antidote to the bite of a rock snake.
“So a few weeks ago, I came back to Queensland to see what the Keepers knew of Kordan. And you know the rest.”
“Can you reverse this?” Ewan gestured to the gem that Alaric was still rubbing between his fingers.
“I think so.” Alaric stared at the ruby. “I know how they take this energy and put it into another creature. I will put it back into Evangeline instead.
“None of it matters, though, unless Kordan really recorded an antidote and I can get to it. If I can’t, my choice lies in leaving her asleep to die a lingering death, or wake her to a quick one. Painful, but quick. And I’m running out of time. The light in the ruby is beginning to fade.”
Alaric tucked the ruby back into its pouch.
“I’ve been thinking of what Gustav wants the Wellstone for. Once he has learned the knowledge it holds, I think he will use it as a well of energy. If he fills it with vitalle, it will hold a great deal of power. Whatever his plan is to raise Mallon, it is going to take a lot of energy. And when Gustav fills the Wellstone with energy, if he really takes advantage of every bit of power it will hold, I am certain when he pours it out into Mallon, the memories in the Wellstone will be destroyed.”
Alaric raised his gaze to his friend again, looking for hope that he knew he wouldn’t find. “Gustav is so far ahead of us that I can’t believe we are going to catch him. There is nothing to stop him from finding Mallon’s body and waking him.”
Alaric gripped the ruby through the pouch. He wasn’t going to get the Wellstone. After everything, the antidote was going to slip through his fingers. All the pain he had caused Evangeline, all the pain he had endured, all the people he had let down, it was for nothing.
Alaric dropped his head into his hands. “I should have let her die.”
Chapter 30
The truth filled the room.
It was useless to believe anything else. It was time to stop looking away from it. He faced it squarely.
“I should have let her die,” he repeated. The words, even though just a whisper, opened something inside of him. Some dark corner that he had kept closed cracked open. He saw himself, withered and pale, coiled around the hope of an antidote. Wrapped so tightly that the beauty of that hope was gone. What should have been bright was crushed and deformed into something else, something unrecognizable.
“Maybe,” Ewan said quietly, “but letting those we love die is no easy thing. Nor should it be.”
Alaric did not move, but the coiled creature inside him unwound the slightest bit more at the apothecary’s words. There was permission to stop. An invitation to stop turning away. To face what was done and release it. His actions could not be undone anymore than the poisoning. But he could let go of the mess he had made of it.
He met Ewan’s sympathetic gaze. For the first time, the words came out not as a desperate cry, but as a statement. “I should have let her die.”
Ewan’s eyes were wet, but he did not argue. “What will you do?”
Alaric took a deep breath and stared into the fire, watching the flame devouring the wood, leaving nothing but a small pile of ash.
“I will try to stop Gustav. But if I can’t, then there is nothing left to be done,” Alaric said, “beyond begging her forgiveness and letting her go.”
Ewan motioned around the room. “Alaric, you know that everything I have is yours. If there is anything that I have that would help you in any way…”
Alaric gave a slight smile. “I’ve collected a fairly impressive store of medicinal plants for myself. You should come see it.”
“Maybe you could bring it back here.” At Alaric’s silence, Ewan continued. “Whatever you decide to do, when it is done, please consider coming back and continuing in your role of Keeper.”
“Continuing?” Alaric gave a bitter laugh. “I haven’t played a Keeper role in… a lifetime.”
“You’re orchestrating a group of mismatched, powerful people to, what was it? Take care of some ‘significant trouble brewing to the west?’ That sounds very much like something a Keeper might do.”
After a long moment, Alaric sighed. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“You’re rather good at it, you know.”
Alaric stared into the fire. Yes, he was acting like a Keeper, but that is all it was. Just acting. What he wanted to do was go to Evangeline. “When I think of what will happen if we fail to stop Gustav, my first thought is that it won’t be safe for Evangeline to be cured in such a world. Saving the world is lower on the list than saving her.”
Ewan shrugged. “Heaped together, the world doesn’t look like anything worth saving. It only looks valuable when we think of it in terms of those we love.”
“Still. It’s not a very Keeperish sentiment.”
“It would be if more Keepers left their tower and loved someone in the world.”
The apothecary rose and went to the fire. He puttered around for several minutes before producing two cups of tea.
Alaric sat with an empty mind. He let the familiar sounds and smells seep into him, filling an emptiness he hadn’t realized was there.
“Reece died last year,” Ewan said, still facing the fire.
Alaric’s gaze snapped up to his friend.
“No! Ewan, I’m so sorry. I’ve been talking and talking, and I never even asked…”
“It was an infection in her lungs that wouldn’t heal.” Ewan looked out the window at the pouring rain. “I knew I couldn’t fix it, but I still tried everything I could. I even tried things I knew wouldn’t work. The darkest day was the one when I admitted there was nothing I could do.”
Silence stretched out between them. Reece and Ewan had been married for years before Alaric had met them. Their marriage, with its easy camaraderie, was the first one Alaric had ever envied.
“She lived four more days. Four days.” Ewan sighed deeply. “I wish I had some great wisdom for you.”
Alaric could think of nothing to say. How had he not recognized the grief that rolled off his friend? Maybe because it was different from his own. There was no taint of hope in Ewan’s. It was worn in, draping familiarly over him, bowing his shoulders. Is this what Alaric would look like in a year? Would this frantic, clawing grief that threatened him turn into something so quiet?
“May I pay my respects to her?” Alaric asked.
Ewan led Alaric outside and around the house, hugging the walls to stay out of the rain. Behind the apothecary, an enormous oak tree grew, dozens of huge branches twisting out in different directions. “I’m glad they buried her on the royal grounds,” Alaric said.
Ewan nodded. “The queen herself ordered it and set the stone workers to make the headstone.”
Alaric raised one eyebrow.
“Don’t worry,” Ewan said. “I talked her down from an eight-foot-tall angel to a stone marker.”
Alaric laughed. “She’s probably saving those angel plans for you.”
Ewan winced. “I should design something for myself. Plans she’ll feel obligated to follow after my death.”
Beneath the oak, nestled between two enormous roots was a grey stone marker. It read, “Reece ~ Beloved wife and friend.”
Sitting on top was a delicate, pale pink flower.
“Lambsbreath always was her favorite,” Ewan said. “That’s one of the last blooms of the season.”
“When I first arrived at the palace,” Alaric said, “it had been years since I had lived in a city. I told Reece I missed sprawling pine forests, that the city smelled stale. A week later, she appeared with a tray of dirt and moss formed into a little hill. She had planted a handful of pine tree shoots. She said it was my own forest, and anytime I needed to smell it, it would be on my desk. “
Ewan smiled. “She was proud of that little forest. You should have seen how excited she was when she thought of it.”
“It worked. My desk smelled like pine trees every day.”
Alaric leaned forward over the flower. He cast out to feel the vitalle from the grass around him, from the enormous oak and from the surrounding gardens. He laid his finger on the lambsbreath and found what was left of its own life. The edges of its petals were beginning to curl and wilt, the stem was dry. A trickle of energy swirled deep inside the flower, a combination of the white vitalle that made up its essence, giving it shape and scent, and the little veins of purple vitalle winding through it, letting the cut flower cling to life.
His finger began to tingle as he drew out the purple, separating strand after strand and gathering it just above the flower. A violet haze appeared and brightened.
The fog of purple flickered, and Alaric pulled small amounts of the vitalle from the grass beneath his knees, infusing the mist, giving it strength. The glow brightened again, tingeing the delicate pink petals with purple.
He set his other hand on the gravestone and felt the deep, slow essence of the stone. No energy swirled through it, no light, no color. But the stone was infused with its own dense sense of being.
It was this Alaric gathered, like collecting dewdrops. He felt down into the stone and stripped tiny beads of its essence out, pressing them into the glowing purple light above the flower.
His hand on the gravestone burned, but Alaric pressed it to the surface of the rock. He was almost done.
The bits of the stone he had added to the prick of purple light began to weigh it down. Alaric guided it back into the flower, spreading it along the surface of each petal and down the stem. The light diffused easily, flowing out into a lavender gauze covering the lambsbreath.
The flower pulled energy from him now, drawing what it needed. Alaric opened the channel wider from the grass through to his finger. He felt a blister begin to form on his fingertip where it touched the flower and moved more of his fingers to touch it, spreading out the pain.
The energy slowed, then stopped. He took his finger off the flower and pulled his other hand away from the gravestone. His palm where the skin was still new from the blisters in Bone Valley was a dark, angry red, and his finger had a long line of shiny new blisters stretching from the tip to the first knuckle.
Ewan was standing perfectly still next to him. Alaric gave him a small smile and nodded. Ewan hesitated, then reached out his hand to touch the lambsbreath which looked unchanged. When he turned back to Alaric, there were tears on his cheeks. “It’s stone,” he whispered.
“She deserves to have flowers year round.” Alaric looked at the stone flower, its thin petals still a delicate pink against the tombstone. “Maybe not everything I learned from the Shade Seekers was useless, it’s just a different way of thinking of the connection between things. Of course, there aren’t many wholesome applications for turning living things to stone.”
“You’ve found one.”
The flower sat atop the grave, part of the stone. It would be there long past the time when he or Ewan would visit.
“Using the tools of a Shade Seeker doesn’t make you one, Alaric. And the one choice of walking out of the Stronghold doesn’t negate the thousands of times you chose to be a Keeper. It is only one choice of many. We aren’t defined only by our darkest choices. There is much more to us than those.
“Our pasts are complicated, what we’ve done, what has happened to us, but the beauty of life is that each day, we choose again which parts of that past we will allow to shape our actions. Most of the worst decisions in history have been motivated by love of some kind or another. The decisions you are haunted by certainly were. The path we take away from those choices is dependent on whether we let the choices compel us, or refocus on the love that motivated us in the first place.
“If you don’t want to be a Keeper today, then don’t be one. But if the only thing holding you back is choices you made in the past, well, those choices are done. Let the past inform your choices today, but don’t let it rule them.”
Chapter 31
Alaric stood before the mirror in a formal Keeper’s robe. He had found the robe hanging in the closet of his room. It was just a black robe, hooded and reaching down to the floor. Even formal robes had no decorations, only a slightly thicker material.
Still, the robe gave Alaric pause.
The Keeper’s robe he had worn when he left the palace had fallen apart almost a year ago. He had replaced it with the first black robe he could find, but it was the black of a storm cloud or a shadow. This robe was the warm black of the night, weighted with the night’s stillness.
And there were pockets. Eight pockets just on one side. Eight pockets and nothing to put in them.
His mind slid back over the past year: the library at Sidion, the caves of the southern blood doctors, the dark searches for dark things, Evangeline’s withered face always driving him on, a relentless, hollow fire.
The map hanging on the wall above the mantle was shaded in grey over the areas Mallon had controlled eight years ago. It was a looming cloud seeping in from the edges of the country toward Queenstown. If Mallon were raised, that would all begin again, the death, the fear. Something deep inside Alaric rebelled against that cloud. There could be no more ruined villages, no more plagues, no more riving of the people. It didn’t matter how far Gustav was ahead of them. Alaric would reach him and stop him.
Alaric turned back to the mirror. A Keeper blazed back at him, cloaked in black, eyes burning. He stepped back in surprise, and the fire died. A knock at his door pulled his attention away.
“The scrolls you requested from the archives, sir,” a servant at the door said, bowing.
Alaric took the two scrolls and glanced at them. At least there was something good he could do. It was satisfying to tuck them into one of his pockets. Over the servant’s shoulder, he saw Ayda and Milly seated in some chairs outside his room.
“Did you ever meet Will?” Alaric asked, walking over to Ayd
a. “Saren said he had visited the elves last time she saw him.”
Ayda cocked her head to the side. “Another Keeper?” She nodded. “Two springs ago.”
“And in all of the vast Greenwood, he managed to find the one remaining elf?”
“I found him.”
“Why?”
“Because he asked the trees to find me. He was very polite to the trees.” She smiled. “He stayed with me for several weeks. The first night, he told me a tale of one of your ancient heroes. I’d never heard a human tell a story so well. We traded stories each night, besting each other. He said that the bards should sing songs of our battle.”
“Did he tell you where he was going when he left?”
“To the queen, then the Keepers.”
Why hadn’t Will gone back to the Keepers after coming to the palace? And why hadn’t he sent them a message explaining where he had gone?
Douglon and Brandson appeared, complaining about the rain. Alaric led them all through the palace to the council chamber. A long rectangular table filled the center of the room with enough chairs to accommodate a dozen people, but the chamber was empty.
At the head of the table stood Saren’s throne-like chair. To the left of it, in the position reserved for the court Keeper, sat a chair shorter than Saren’s but decidedly larger than the rest. Alaric raised an eyebrow. He’d never had a special chair before. This wasn’t set up just for a council. Saren didn’t want anyone to miss the fact that there was a Keeper back at court.
A door at the far end of the room was open, and raised voices came through it. He led the group through the door and into a smaller chamber reserved for the queen and her small council. Saren sat in a large chair, her husband’s old chair. It was too big for her, but Alaric had never been able to convince her to get a different one. It made her look like a child pretending to rule. She hadn’t taken it well when he’d told her that, though. Now Queen Saren was sitting in her too-large chair and looking troubled as Menwoth stomped back and forth in front of her, shouting.
