Staring at the vista while he caught his breath, Ean suddenly saw another picture superimposed over the lush canopy of trees, a scene of barren basalt mountains and scalded red sands. The two images were part of the same circle of time, the same view separated by hundreds of years. Yet he perceived too clearly in that moment that what had once been could become so again.
He wasn’t sure why he saw these things, but he felt the moment was significant, and it took a long time before that vision of desolation and the feelings of defeat that accompanied it finally left him.
Isabel called his attention with a light brush of fingers across his arm, and then she led him away down the path. It narrowed as it hugged the mountainside, much of it tracing the edge of a sheer drop to the valley canopy, but finally it opened again onto another clearing, this one wider, grassy, and framing an even larger waterfall charging hundreds of feet down from the very lip of the mountain. Bathed in the waterfall’s mighty mist, a stone cottage gleamed.
“Ah,” Ean said as a welcome understanding dawned. He’d been wondering how they planned to overnight with no bedding to shelter them from the chill of the earth.
Isabel cast him a smile over her shoulder, and then she led him to the cottage. Inside, he found a table and chairs, a large butcher’s block over which hung an assortment of pots, and a wide featherbed across from the gaping stone fireplace, where a modest cauldron hung.
They prepared dinner together, working in quiet tandem, their actions as effortlessly coordinated as if they’d lived lifetimes thusly. And perhaps they had. Ean certainly felt at ease with her in a way he’d never experienced with anyone before.
The result was a tasty stew concocted from the vegetables and ham Treva and the children had provided. Isabel made a tea of lemongrass and mint, and afterwards they sat across the table from each other, which arrangement suited Ean, the better to admire her.
“I asked Djurik Nagraed about the paths to T’khendar,” he said as they sipped their tea. He watched her expression carefully to gauge her reaction.
“Mmm,” she murmured into her cup.
“He implied the nodes to T’khendar are not as twisted as people of Alorin might believe.”
“How deep does the alabaster go?” she echoed with a smile.
Ean looked at her intently. “Is it so?”
Isabel set her mug on the table between them and aimed her blindfolded gaze at it in thoughtful silence, one finger exploring the smooth rim. “Conventional wisdom,” she said after a moment, then added drily, “—said wisdom most often being the testimony of the First and Fourth Vestals—declares the nodes to T’khendar were hopelessly twisted when Malachai opened the weld into the Citadel on Tiern’aval.”
“So have I heard,” Ean agreed. This was the only thing ever said about the nodes, yet it occurred to him only then that it couldn’t be entirely true, for not only had he traveled to T’khendar across a node with Franco, but Carian vran Lea had also supposedly been to Niyadbakir and returned to speak of it—though admittedly with the help of the zanthyr. “And the truth?”
Isabel sat back in her chair, facing him in such a way that made him feel she was considering him, assessing his ability to accept what she was about to say. “The making of T’khendar was monumental,” she told him at last. “Nothing like it had ever been done. With the Council of Nine’s assistance, Malachai and my brother grew the world from within the womb of Alorin’s own aether. This process stretched the nodes and welds that formed the woof and warp of Alorin’s fabric. Some of these nodes splintered and had to be closed off. Others were purposefully twisted.”
“Intentionally?” Ean asked. “Why?”
“To protect Alorin from deyjiin,” she answered. “The consumptive power roamed freely here at first. It was a power we didn’t fully comprehend in those early days. It took my brother too long to understand it, and many died because of this failing—we both failed the others in this, the greatest of tragedies.”
“Deyjiin,” Ean murmured. He was too intimately familiar with that power to take any reference to it lightly. “How did deyjiin get here? Was it always here?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Deyjiin exists in the chaos beyond the realms of Light. T’khendar sits on this boundary, on one side opening to Alorin, and the other to the unraveling fringes of the cosmos.
“When my brother stretched Alorin’s fabric to create T’khendar, the fabric became so thin in places that deyjiin seeped in, like water through cheesecloth. After Tiern’aval was ripped from Alorin, and the last weld into our realm was safely closed, my brother and Dagmar labored tirelessly to shore up those aetheric places in T’khendar’s fabric where deyjiin was entering. Once this was done, elae flourished.”
Ean suspected there was much more to this story, more than Isabel could explain to him in a single night—or in a month of such nights. “So the nodes were twisted to protect Alorin from deyjiin,” he summarized. “Which means…” Already hints of the truth were pushing at him—whether by intuition or some barely perceived ghost of a memory, he couldn’t say. “If they twisted the nodes, they could just as easily untwist them, once the threat of deyjiin was gone.”
“Aptly deduced, my lord.”
He felt her praise unjustified, for the answer was too simple. The stories of Malachai making a pact with supposed ‘dark gods’ seemed utterly laughable now.
Yet this truth awakened strange stirrings within him, vague and distant memories that brought naught but discomfort and apprehension, as yet formless save for the glimmers of feelings that were their heralds.
“All my life I’ve been told untruths compounded by fabrications,” Ean murmured, trying his best to fit the various pieces into their proper place, dislodging the lies that had so inadequately been filling them. “It’s difficult to reconcile where real truth begins and ends. Everything just feels…upended, the full deck of Trumps scattered.”
She gave him a compassionate smile. “You cannot simply jump into the middle of a game in play and expect to understand it. So much has come before—too much to tell it all. But what we can explain, what we can show you, we will, always with the hope that each new idea may reawaken others.” She placed a hand over his. “We need your help in this game, Ean. But more than this, you are important, to my brother…and to me.”
He stared at her in silence upon this pronouncement, feeling suddenly scraped by her words. “Isabel,” he murmured, dropping his eyes to the table, suddenly unable to look at her, “Julian told me a tale of the man you were said to have loved. One of the First Lord’s generals.”
She gazed quietly at him beneath her blindfold.
“Arion Tavestra,” he posed haltingly. “Is it…him to whom you made your promise? Do you wear the blindfold for him?” Am I fighting him for your love?
“I think you know,” she replied softly.
But Ean couldn’t claim this knowledge from beyond the veil of death, no matter how much he desired to know it. There were truths behind that door as yet too painful to recall. He cursed his own cowardice, but he feared so desperately what he would find…truths far beyond a knowledge of the man Isabel professed to love. Instinct told him that waking those memories would somehow signal the end of the bond he was building with a woman he absolutely could not bear to live without.
Ean clenched his teeth and stared hard at the table. His thoughts went crashing into turbulent seas of self-denigration, and his expression grew darkly pained.
Sensitive to his turbulent state of mind, Isabel rose from her chair and walked to Ean’s side. He looked up at her feeling tumultuous, wishing he knew the secret to claiming her heart as thoroughly as she had claimed his. He could sense a distance as yet between them, one he felt should not exist. Yet he didn’t know how to correct it, how to bring Isabel back to him, and it was agonizing, that separation.
Isabel took his hand and drew him up, and they stood facing each other with Ean painfully aware of her closeness. His skin ached for want of her
touch, and equally his soul for a bond he sensed should exist but didn’t. With silence alone binding them, Isabel wrapped her arms around Ean’s waist and moved into his embrace, resting her head against his chest.
Ean enfolded her in his arms with a shuddering exhale. He remembered too nearly the dream where he’d last said goodbye to her, and he knew then that it had been a true memory. Upon acknowledging this truth, he suddenly had to choke back powerful emotions.
It might’ve been five minutes or the better part of the night that they stood this way, barely moving, only taking comfort in the close contact of each other, but finally Isabel slipped from his arms. Taking his hand in silence, she led him to the bed and motioned him to lie down. Then she settled in beside him, entwining his fingers with hers.
Long after he knew she was asleep, Ean stared at the reflection of the firelight upon the whitewashed ceiling and remembered…
“Can we remember?”
“Certainly.” Björn had told him.
“How?”
“One merely must take ownership over every action he has ever caused.”
But no matter how hard he wanted to do it, no matter how desperately he sought to rejoin Isabel—and it was a rejoining, he knew this somehow…knew that his distance, his unwillingness to remember was all that was keeping them apart—no matter this understanding, Ean couldn’t open that door.
Thirty-Two
“It has often seemed to me we might all reach untold heights if each expected greatness of the other.”
- The Fifth Vestal Björn van Gelderan
…olivia danae…
Trell heard the words like a chant as he pushed through the crowds on the Rue Royale. Who was Olivia Danae, and what did she have to do with Alyneri? Was she a noblewoman? And if so, did she reside in Rethynnea? Was she behind the kidnapping? In league with Brantley and the Duke of Morwyk?
Or was Olivia Danae a place? A villa?
Or a ship?
Even as he thought it, he realized this had to be the answer. A ship. They’ve taken her aboard a ship.
Trell stopped in the middle of the road, thinking fast. The crowd surged around him, bumping and jostling him amid laughter and shouting and general merriment, but he held his ground. Pieces of a plan were forming. He’d been known for quick thinking on his feet—praised for it by the Emir among many others. The skill had never felt so vital as in that moment.
There was no time to make it all the way back to where their coach awaited them. Too well, Trell remembered the ship he’d seen sailing with the evening’s tide just the night before. It was already past midnight and the tide would be going out. He needed a fast horse and an even faster ship.
He went for the first horse he saw that wasn’t hitched to coach or wagon. The animal’s owner stood talking to a woman wearing a winged mask. “I need your horse,” Trell said in a tone of command. He shoved two pieces of Agasi silver into the startled man’s hand and grabbed the animal’s reins without waiting for approval. “You’ll find him at The Nugget if you want him back!” he called as he jumped into the saddle and heeled the animal into a gallop.
The horse was fast for all he was an older gelding. Trell steered him off the Rue Royale and onto a smaller avenue that ran parallel but wasn’t as crowded. He had a vague idea of his destination, and he guided the horse in a wild gallop down the cobbled streets, its shodden hooves clattering loudly upon the stones.
The columns of the Thoroughfare soon came into view above and between the near buildings, their bands of cobalt, garnet and silver glowing with torchlight. He cantered the horse down a flight of wide steps running beneath the columns, yelling people out of his way, but he had to slow when he reached the Thoroughfare, for the harbor boasted its own Carnivále of a different flavor. Trell battled a rowdier crowd as he pushed the horse fast down the wide boulevard looking for a particular tavern.
He knew the place he sought could be found along Faring West. Fynn had said as much, and Carian likewise had told him that pirates never strayed far from their ships; but the Thoroughfare ran for miles. As he passed tavern upon tavern—none of them the one he sought—his borrowed horse started tiring and he was beginning to fall prey to the first shadows of despair.
And then Fortune’s eye fell upon him, as if guided by the benevolent moon, and he reached the tavern named the Nugget.
Trell was off the horse before the animal even came to a full stop, and he threw open the door as if blowing through a cavalry press. The wood slammed against the wall, and everyone inside turned with a sudden descending hush.
The Nugget was a pirate establishment, and its patrons formed a motley assortment of swarthy, long-haired men with more piercings than an entire village of Shi’ma.
“I’m looking for Haddrick,” Trell announced, breathing hard as he stood framed in the portal.
“And you’d be…?” asked one of the pirates sitting with his back to the far wall.
“Trell val Lorian.”
They laughed at him, of course.
That is, until they realized he was serious. Perhaps it was the trickle of blood dripping down his temple, or maybe it was just that he was clearly not a man to be taken lightly, even by pirates.
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” asked the same man.
Trell assumed he was Haddrick. “So they tell me.” He kicked the door closed behind him and walked purposefully toward the man. “I need to hire your ship. Tonight—now.”
Haddrick scratched at the violet scarf he wore over his long and tangled black hair and then rubbed at the five-day beard that shadowed his jaw. “And what would be in it for me?”
“A ship called the Olivia Danae and anything she carries—save for the girl that belongs to me—and the answer to what happened to your cousin, Carian. And this.” He dumped half the contents of one of the Mage’s bags of Agasi silver onto the table. Instinct alone had driven him to grab the entire bag when he left that afternoon. Thalma was still watching out for him, it seemed.
Haddrick’s colorless eyes widened, and he reached for the silver, only to draw back again as the end of Trell’s kingdom blade suddenly appeared before his nose.
The other pirates jumped to their feet, and Trell found himself at the end of sabers and cutlasses aplenty, but his eyes remained leveled on Haddrick, along with his weapon. “First the accord,” he said. “Rescue and delivery back to Rethynnea within a reasonable span of days. You’ll get half the money now, and the other half when my girl and I are safely aboard the Ransom.”
Haddrick broke into a grin, displaying a slightly crooked gold cap over one front tooth. “I like you, Trell val Lorian. You’ve got balls for all you’re a pretty chase. Carian told me about you…though he called you something else, if I recall.”
“Trell of the Tides.”
“That would be the name.” Haddrick lustfully eyed the fortune in Agasi silver that Trell had just dumped onto the table. “And Carian?”
“On the way to your ship,” Trell pressed.
“How do I know you can provide the information you claim?”
Trell told him boldly, “Because I wrung it out of my cousin Fynnlar despite his being bound with the fourth.” It wasn’t exactly true, and Haddrick would likely sense the half-truth, but Trell knew better than to show any weakness before a pirate at the bargaining table, even when he was a truthreader.
Haddrick barked a laugh. “You wrung it out of him, did you! I would’ve liked to have seen that!” He waved for his brethren to put away their swords and pushed to his feet. “Very well, Trell val Lorian,” he said amid the sheathing of steel. He extended his hand while eyeing him circumspectly. “We have an accord.”
Trell sheathed his blade and clasped wrists with the man.
Haddrick lifted his colorless gaze to the rest of his crew and boasted, “Now I’ve had the best of two val Lorian princes!” He scooped up his money with a lusty grin and began looking over each piece.
“Haddrick,” Trell said. “I’m i
n a hurry.”
Haddrick pushed the table aside and wrapped his arm around Trell’s shoulders, turning him toward the door. “Never you fear, Trell of the Tides,” he encouraged. Then he looked Trell in the eye and asked, “You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? It has such a nice ring to it.”
“Call me anything you like so long as we catch the Danae.”
“The Olivia D’ne,” Haddrick shouted to his mates then, all of whom were following them out of the tavern. “Who knows her?”
“She hails from Kroth but flies a noble flag,” one of the pirates said.
“And she sails tonight with the tide, eh?” Haddrick asked Trell. They were turning onto Faring West by that time, heading toward the water and the docks. “Never you fear,” he said again. “The Ransom is the fastest ship this side of the island. We’ll catch the D’ne before dawn or you’ll keep that silver of yours, my handsome.”
Trell eyed him steadily, waiting for the rest of it.
“Do you care to wager on my claim?” Haddrick finally asked when Trell didn’t automatically rise to the challenge.
“No need. There’s a reason I sought the best.”
Haddrick gave him a sour look. “Carian trained you too well in our ways. He always did talk too much. Where then is my dear cousin? He missed our meeting, as you may’ve heard.”
“He’s in T’khendar.”
Haddrick nearly missed a step and turned to stare at Trell. Then he barked a hearty laugh. But when Trell kept regarding him steadily, Haddrick cleared his throat. “Balls of Belloth, you’re serious. I can hear it in your thoughts.”
“Travel to T’khendar is no joking matter,” Trell said, as if he knew deeply of such things.
Haddrick looked uncharacteristically dismayed. “Well…what’s he doing in T’khendar?”
This was the tricky part. Trell didn’t want to compromise Fynn by speaking of the Temple of the Vestals, but he knew the pirate truthreader would know him for a liar if he attempted anything less than the truth. “Carian spoke to me of rescuing his Great Master, the Second Vestal Dagmar Ranneskjöld.” This was the truth, for Carian had told him of such intentions.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 43
