by Terry Brooks
She gave him back his hand. “Pretty resourceful.”
“When you are alone as much as I am, you need to be.” He looked away again quickly, as if realizing there were unspoken implications to what he had just said. “Mostly, anyway. Last night, it took both of us. Fooled the witch, though, didn’t we?”
She nodded wordlessly. She badly wanted to ask him if he had shifted into his human form while she slept so that he could hold her. She wanted to know if he had said I love you, if he had spoken those three words or she had dreamed them. But asking such questions seemed impossible, an invasion of privacy she could not afford to indulge in. Especially when she could not reply in kind.
They sat in silence, looking out over the placid surface of the swamp, into the trees and through the mists and beyond to what seemed like forever. It was not an awkward silence, but a companionable one—the kind that makes you feel at peace because you are with the right person and talking isn’t necessary. So odd, she thought. She had not felt this until now. She did not think she could have before. What had changed?
She glanced at him. “Do we really have any chance of getting Chrysallin back? Or even of coming out of this alive?”
He didn’t look back. “That is a very odd question, coming from you. Isn’t that the reason we’re here? Wasn’t this your idea?”
“Well, yes, but I made that decision in the heat of the moment and in ignorance of what we would find. Now I don’t feel so confident.” She kept looking at him, searching his face for some sort of tell. “I’m not saying we should turn back. I wouldn’t leave Chrysallin even if there were no chance at all. I’m just trying to…to gain some small measure of reassurance that you’re not following me just because…”
She trailed off. Because what? Because all at once she was feeling differently about him? Because all at once she was uncertain of herself where he was concerned?
Now he looked at her. “We came to get your friend back and that’s what we’re going to do. We are strong enough together to overcome the witch, and to survive whatever she throws at us. We know what we are up against, and we know what’s needed. That was true when we started out, and it’s true now. Nothing has changed.”
But it had. Something had changed. She couldn’t define it yet, but it gave her pause and it made her want to understand its implications. A shift had taken place inside her. Perhaps nothing had changed for him, but it most certainly had for her.
“Do you have a plan?” she asked him.
He grinned. “Don’t you?”
She laughed in spite of herself. “Not really. I just know I have to go in there and get Chrys back.”
His smile broadened. “That sounds like a good plan to me. How can you improve on something like that?”
Impulsively, she leaned into him and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for being here with me, Imric Cort.”
He had the grace to blush as he replied, “I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”
—
On a bright, clear morning, Arcannen Rai rose from his bed and, after washing and then donning the robes of the Fourth Druid Order, began walking the halls of the Druid’s Keep. He was awake early, preferring to conduct his ongoing investigation of the Keep’s layout while others slept, still wary of being surrounded by so many men and women who would like to see him dead. It was easier to move about when he didn’t have to worry about someone realizing that he was not who he appeared to be. Both the success of his plan and his survival had relied on subterfuge and misdirection from the beginning, and nothing had changed in the interim.
He went high into the Keep’s main tower, heading for the cold room, intent on having whoever was monitoring the scrye waters report any disturbances that might indicate the presence of a powerful magic. He had been careful to keep his magic hidden since being admitted to the Keep—a necessary protection against revealing who he was. He couldn’t be certain that it would register in the same way Druid magic did. Before, when using his magic in the city of Arishaig and again while struggling to reach safety in the Battlemound, he had been able to rely on the confusion and stress besetting his companions to distract them from spotting any differences. But within the Keep, he was vulnerable. It would be all too easy here to recognize a foreign magic. He had to step lightly. Everything happening now was new and unfamiliar to him, a journey of discovery and revelation. He had never been inside Paranor’s walls before, and its secrets were only just beginning to reveal themselves to him.
Even if it appeared otherwise to the Druids of Paranor.
He paused at a window that overlooked the courtyards situated just inside the east walls. He did this not to enjoy the scenery or attempt further measurements of the structure’s parameters. It was not even to try to determine once again the location of the vault that hid the artifacts of magic the Druid order had collected and locked away. None of those mattered just now. Instead, he paused for no better reason than to consider his appearance. To judge how well he was maintaining his disguise. To take momentary pride in what he had accomplished. The sunlight was reflected off the glass as it streamed through windows situated along the hall in just such a way that it created a mirror effect.
And revealed not Arcannen Rai, who he really was, but Isaturin, Ard Rhys of the Fourth Druid Order, whose identity he had stolen.
His reflection made him appear a bit haggard, but that was mostly due to the unevenness of the mirror. Besides, the members of his unsuspecting flock would simply attribute it to what he had been through while escaping from Arishaig and fighting to get home again. They would think it was the weight of the losses he had suffered in Druid lives. No one would suspect the truth. No one would guess he was not who he seemed or that the effort of maintaining his disguise was beginning to wear on him.
It was only for another day or two, and then he would have what he wanted and be gone.
His plans had been solid enough at the beginning, even though everything had begun to disintegrate right away. It had been easy enough to assume his disguise and infiltrate the sleeping quarters of the Druids in Arishaig. Easy enough to find Isaturin alone and dispatch him before he could even begin to understand why he was facing a mirror image of himself. Easy enough to burn his body to ashes afterward and hide the remains where they might never be found.
Arcannen smiled in spite of himself. Oh, the look on Isaturin’s face! It had been priceless. For just a second, he had been completely confused by what he was seeing. For someone with Arcannen’s lethal talents, a second was more than enough.
The others in the Druid delegation had suspected nothing—not in Arishaig, and not afterward during their flight north. His efforts at disrupting the Druid–Federation conference had gone well enough. He had brought the Sleath in earlier, during the night; it was a creature that could climb walls and did so. He had positioned it to come when he summoned it, and it had behaved as expected. A few dozen Federation guards were nothing to a wraith like that, for it was a demon of the first order, a monster of terrible power. It had taken him months to create it, to conjure it out of dark magic and subverted natural elements—months of physical pain and emotional agony of a sort he had not thought he could withstand. But the chance both to set the Federation against the Druids and to finally get inside the Druid’s Keep was too enticing to abandon. He’d kept a low profile ever since the destruction of the Red Slash, but nothing was ever accomplished by hiding, and he’d decided it was time to reemerge.
His only miscalculation was in not anticipating the Sleath’s disobedience. He had not expected it might refuse his orders. It had happened in the Assembly, right at the end, just as he was preparing to put the finishing touches on the matter. He was trying to steer the creature toward the old man because he was the most malleable member of the party. It had always been his intent to keep his creation close until he was safely inside Paranor—a hedging of bets in case things went wrong—but instead of the old man, the Sleath had chosen the seer in which to hide, the
partner of the most dangerous member of their party—and one Arcannen worried would discover the truth more easily because of the nature of their relationship. Especially when his escape plan had failed so utterly that they had been reduced to walking home and fighting for their lives every step of the way.
Eventually, he had been forced to sacrifice the Sleath, as well.
Even the best-laid plans go wrong, and the more complicated the plan the more likely the failure. He was fortunate things had turned out as well as they had. After all, he was still alive, while everyone else who had gone to Arishaig was dead, and he was inside the Druid’s Keep with his true identity still a secret. Considerable accomplishments, by any measure.
He turned away from his reflection and continued on. Sunrise was just breaking, and as yet only a handful of Druids were awake. The cold room was staffed twenty-four hours a day; he had picked up that bit of information from his aide, young Keratrix, who had been anxious to report to him. He knew of the scrye waters already, of course. He knew of the existence of many of the Druid secrets—knowledge gained over the years from one source or another, in one way or another. What he didn’t know were the particulars, and that was turning out to be a bigger problem than he had expected.
But it was a problem he was working on and would soon solve.
He reached the cold room and entered. The Druid standing watch glanced over and nodded companionably. “Ard Rhys.”
“Any disturbances?” Arcannen asked him.
The other shook his head. “All quiet. Small readings, nothing significant.”
Arcannen nodded and left.
While he was all but certain that Paxon Leah was dead and his sister a captive of the Murk Witch, he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. If a strong magical reading had occurred in either of the places where he believed the siblings to be, there might be cause for worry. Since it hadn’t, he could go about his business.
The part of his plan that had been the trickiest was finding a way to get both Paxon and Chrysallin out of his way so they could not interfere. Paxon had been assigned to the delegation dispatched to Arishaig—which Arcannen had suspected he would be—so that had put the Highlander within easy range for elimination. Once they had fled the Assembly and tried flying back to Paranor—where Arcannen hoped to be welcomed—he had intended to isolate Paxon Leah and dispose of him the same way he had disposed of old Consloe and Isaturin, taking advantage of the first opportunity that presented itself. But when their airship went down and they were forced to walk through dangerous country while being tracked by the Federation, he had decided to wait. Anyone who could help him at that point was a bonus. He could have bolted and gone off on his own, but that would have defeated his entire plan to get into Paranor. With Paxon and the others beside him, no one would even think to question whether he was really who he appeared.
But the dragon had solved one problem and left him with another. Conveniently, Paxon and the female Druid had been swept off the ledge, but he still had to get into Paranor. A combination of pilfered horses and airships, however—along with minimal sleep—had finally gotten him as far as the Keep’s gates yesterday morning, and everyone was so glad to see him back—to find even one member of the ill-fated delegation still alive—that there had been no hesitation about bringing him inside.
Of course, he had been forced to rid himself of the troublesome Federation commander, but by then he had revised his thinking on what he intended to accomplish at Paranor. Initially, he had thought to gain control over the order for the express purpose of destroying it. To compel the Federation to attack the Druids in retaliation for what happened in Arishaig, to undermine any attempts at peace between the two in his guise as Ard Rhys and bring the order down. But the danger to himself in doing so was enormous, and both that and the obvious complexity of what was required now suggested he change those plans. Instead of attempting a subversion of the Order by acting as Isaturin over the next few weeks, he had decided simply to pillage the artifacts vault of anything and everything he could make use of and go back into hiding while he decided how best to make use of his new acquisitions. The problem at present was that not only did he not know where the vault was situated but he also did not know how to get into it. Asking Keratrix or one of the other Druids would seem strange, to say the least, so he needed to get the information by other means.
That might take a little time and patience. But he had both at his disposal for the moment, having gotten rid of both Leah siblings.
Chrysallin’s kidnapping had been arranged for that specific purpose. Whatever was to happen when he got to Paranor, he wanted her out of the way. The rumor was she had mastered the use of the wishsong, and if so she was dangerous—especially to him. If she had a chance to use it on him, she wouldn’t hesitate to squash him like a bug. So a confrontation was to be avoided at all costs. Enlisting the aid of the Murk Witch to snatch her and hold her prisoner had been a stroke of genius. It removed her from Paranor and placed her on the other side of the Four Lands. It meant that for Paxon to save her, he would have to travel a long way. Maybe he would be successful and maybe not, but he would not be around to interfere with Arcannen.
Of course, none of that mattered now. Paxon was dead and gone. The witch still held Chrysallin prisoner, using the root with which he had supplied her to deaden the girl’s voice, but now there was no reason to expect her back, either. Not once he sent word to the witch to do with her as she pleased.
A message he would send off by arrow shrike later today.
Only one loose end remained, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. A casual conversation with young Keratrix had revealed that Leofur was at Paranor, too. She had become close friends with Chrysallin and was now searching for her in the company of some stable hand. His daughter stood not a chance in a million of succeeding, of course, but it was annoying to know she was out there blundering around. It was exactly the sort of thing Leofur would do; she couldn’t seem to help herself from engaging in these pointless quests to aid other people. He had thought her still in Wayford, but apparently he was wrong. She had followed Paxon here, and now she was trying to prove her love for him by bringing back his sister.
It was just stupid, even for her.
He wandered down to Isaturin’s offices and found an anxious Keratrix waiting for him. The scribe looked less than happy, his brow furrowed as he paced back and forth in front of the door. There were Druid Guard present, too, hulking creatures with impassive faces and slow movements. They stood ready and waiting for something, but it was not at all clear what that was.
Arcannen tried not to sound impatient, even though he was irritated beyond measure. “What’s wrong?”
Keratrix shook his head. “Visitors. Federation warships. Almost a dozen in all if you count the transports. They’re waiting just outside the south gates. For you, specifically. They’ve sent a demand for an immediate audience.”
This was inconvenient. He had not expected the Federation to act so swiftly; usually, actions of such magnitude required days of debate and dithering by the Coalition Council. He would have to put his search for the artifact vault on hold.
Keratrix had already started walking down the hall. Arcannen, sensing his plans were in further trouble, reluctantly followed.
Leofur and Imric had been sitting together in silence for almost an hour, waiting for midday to arrive before setting out for the witch’s cottage, when the shape-shifter began to speak.
“I have something to tell you,” he said. “I wanted to do so earlier, but I didn’t think you were ready to hear it. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to talk about it. It’s difficult for me even now, but I think I have to.”
He hesitated, as if still not sure of himself. “You remember how I spoke of Sarnya, who was tethered to me before you?”
Leofur nodded. “I remember. She was a Druid.”
“Yes, she was assigned to me. She was instructed to work with me, to learn by practical experience how to
control my shape-shifting tendencies. She was young, but she was very smart and sure of herself. I believed she could help me, even though she was a tiny thing physically, and emotionally she lived with her heart laid bare.”
“But you were not lovers.”
He had told her this earlier, so she made it a statement of fact, sensing there was something more and he was about to tell her what it was.
“No, we were not lovers, but she wanted us to be. Even though she never said so, I sensed it. And I was drawn to her enough through the tether that I wanted it, too. But I was afraid for her, so I did not let it happen. I thought that, by doing so, I could keep us both safe. This was my chance to conquer my addiction, and I was determined not to let anything interfere with that. Her interest seemed only an infatuation, in any case, and by ignoring it I believed it would run its course and that the tether would not be affected. I was wrong.”
“So she persisted?” Leofur could hear the uncertainty in his voice, could read the pain in his eyes. “I think she must have been deeply in love with you.”
“She insisted she was not once I felt confident enough to ask. She said it was her interest in finding a solution to my problem that intensified our relationship. When she was tethered to me, what I felt was her need to help—to stay close so she could be the safety line I required in order not to lose control. Still, I knew. Her emotional makeup did not allow for half measures. But I thought it safe enough to continue and did not report my concerns. Again, I was selfish. I was afraid if I said anything, they would take her away and not give me a replacement.”
Leofur thought about it. “The Druids are unpredictable,” she said finally.
His gaze shifted again toward the swamp as he continued talking, his features tense. “In any case, I could feel our relationship strengthening the more time we spent tethered, but she never once suggested we should be anything more than partners. So, thinking back, I suppose I convinced myself that she had managed to back away from her earlier attachment.”
