The Elder Stones Saga Boxset: Books 1-3

by D. K. Holmberg

  “What might happen?”

  “It depends on where you Slide. If you were to Slide out to the middle of the ocean, you could end up drowning because you weren’t able to return. If you were to Slide into the middle of this rock wall, you might be trapped, suffocated by stone. If you Slid to the top of a tower and the—”

  “I get the idea,” Marcy said, shivering.

  Lucy shook her head. “I’m sorry, Marcy. I wasn’t trying to scare you. I was trying to help you understand the nature of your ability, and… I guess I wasn’t doing a good job of it.”

  “You are doing a good job of making sure I don’t want to use it.”

  “That wasn’t my point at all, but I do think it’s necessary you use it intentionally, and be careful when you do. You shouldn’t use your ability without knowing how to do so in a way that allows you control.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means practicing.”

  Lucy looked up the rock wall, and a realization came to her. If Marcy was developing this ability, then others might be as well, and she would need to work with these women. Though she had thought she wanted to find safety for them, perhaps safety was in mastering the gifts they had been given, the augmentations they now had, and being prepared for the possibility that they might face dangers. Safety came from understanding themselves.

  Hadn’t that been the case for her? After her augmentation, it wasn’t until she had mastered the nature of it that she had truly felt as if she were in control. The Sliding had been easy, but mastering her control over Reading, preventing herself from being overwhelmed by all of the thoughts, had been the biggest challenge.

  It would be the same for these women.

  Perhaps that was why some of them didn’t want to return to their homes. Isolating them here was safer for them in a way.

  And some of them might be Readers, their minds filled with other people’s thoughts to the point where it was difficult to ignore them.

  Lucy knew all too well how hard that was and how much she’d suffered when it had happened to her.

  “I think I need to work with you and the others. I think I need to help you find your abilities.”

  A relief swept across Marcy’s face. “You would do that?”

  Lucy swore to herself. Could she really have not thought about that first? That should have been the first order of business for her, the first thing she had considered doing. The fact that she had needed Marcy to prod her was shameful.

  “I will do that. I’m sorry I didn’t think about it sooner.”

  “You don’t need to be sorry.”

  Lucy smiled sadly, shaking her head. “Unfortunately, I think I do. Anyway, how about I get you back to the village and we can begin?”

  She reached for Marcy, and the other woman hesitantly reached for her. Lucy held out her arm, and she focused on the village.

  “The first step that I do when Sliding someplace is think about where I want to end up,” she started.

  Marcy nodded, and Lucy realized just how much this meant to her. She should have known that before.

  12

  Lucy

  Wind whistled around her, and Lucy stood on the rocky shoreline, staring out at the water. She wondered if there might be something she could determine from here, but the longer she was here, the more uncertain she was that she would find anything. There was movement behind her, and she felt it, almost as much as she heard it when she was Reading.

  She tried to Read these women, using her ability as much as she could, but there was nothing to them that she could uncover, despite every attempt on her part to find answers.

  More and more, she suspected the key was tied to the nature of the augmentation. There was something about the metal implant that made it so she didn’t Read them as well as she should.

  It hadn’t been the same way with the Architect, but then he didn’t have the same type of augmentation, did he?

  She needed to be getting back to the C’than. She’d been gone for the better part of the day, and in that time, she had been working with these women, trying to help them find answers for themselves, trying to help them understand their abilities. She hadn’t been able to help them as much as she’d hoped. Marcy was easy, but she had already demonstrated some capacity to Slide. She hadn’t been able to gain control over it yet, but Lucy suspected it was only a matter of time. She remembered her own lack of control the first time she had managed to Slide, and it had only been a matter of time before she had improved.

  The same thing had to be said for the others, but she wasn’t sure what abilities they had.

  She closed her eyes, trying to See, but her mastery of the visions was minimal at best. When she focused on them, they came to her, a flurry of imagery, but in none of them did she have any idea of what was out there or how she could grasp it.

  She had abandoned that ability, knowing there wasn’t much she would be able to use it for without any real control.

  The only problem was that she thought it was perhaps the most potent of her powers. If she could master it, she might be able to better understand what Olandar Fahr was up to and figure out some way of stopping him. He likely had the ability to See things others could not. With that ability, he was far more formidable than Lucy, and far more formidable than the others working with her.

  She sighed, pushing those visions away, ignoring them, and turning back to the women.

  “I know there’s something there,” Teresa said. She was a heavyset woman, probably five years younger than Lucy, and had pale green eyes. She came from the city in the south called Hej, a place Lucy had never visited. She tried to Read the woman but wasn’t able to uncover anything from her thoughts. If only she could, she might be able to know how to find the city from her.

  “You have to keep focusing.”

  As far as she could tell, Teresa had the ability to Read, though it was weak and uncontrolled. Given the paleness of her eyes, she’d likely had no abilities prior to any of this happening, but the fact that she had green eyes at all suggested she was touched by the Great Watcher, however faintly.

  Had she grown up in Elaeavn, it was possible she would’ve had far more abilities. It was when Teresa had admitted she had detected someone’s emotions that Lucy had realized the nature of her ability. It was difficult for her to try to teach someone how to Read. In Elaeavn, people knew they could Read from birth, and it took no time for most to know the nature of it and what to do with it, but then again, in Elaeavn, most people who could Read were prevented from doing so. Everyone had the ability to shut off their minds, to wall them away, and only the most powerful of Readers were able to penetrate those barriers.

  “How, though?”

  “You have to think about the strange nature of the thoughts you’re encountering,” Lucy said. She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking about what she had experienced when she had first awoken with the implant. The voices had been there, screaming in her mind. It would have to be something similar for Teresa; whether or not they were screaming, the voices would definitely be present. “Focus on what you hear. If it feels unusual, it probably is.”

  “How am I supposed to hear anything?”

  “I’ll admit it’s muted here. I could bring you someplace else—”

  “No,” Teresa said quickly, shaking her head.

  Like so many others, Teresa was nervous about leaving the village. Many of these women had been tormented, and the village was a place of safety, a place where they didn’t have to fear what might happen to them. She would protect them.

  “It’s going to be difficult here. It’s difficult for me here, so what you have to do is focus on what you can detect, and trust that it’s there. Hold on to it. If you find something unusual, use that, let yourself be drawn to it, knowing that strangeness is real.”

  Teresa nodded, and she looked at Eve, a slender woman who stood next to her. Lucy knew very little about Eve other than that she had a hard edge to her. One of the first w
omen Lucy had rescued from Nyaesh, she had been malnourished and near death, but time had been good to her, and she had begun to recuperate. Lucy suspected Eve would fully recover. The only thing Lucy didn’t know was how much of Eve’s hard edge was new and how much had been there before.

  It probably didn’t matter anyway. The edge was helpful, at least when it came to trying to be prepared for various challenges they might face.

  “I haven’t demonstrated anything,” Eve said.

  Lucy looked over at her. Eve was from Thyr, though she had a sense she had been somewhere else before that. Eve didn’t want to talk about it, and yet Lucy wondered if the other woman needed to talk.

  “It’s possible that you won’t,” she said.

  “You keep saying that, but half of these women have abilities now, Lucy,” Eve said.

  Lucy nodded. “Half of them do, which means half of them don’t. You might be in the other half. I know you want an ability…” Eve did, but she didn’t know why. Perhaps it was only so she wouldn’t feel helpless. If so, it was an emotion Lucy understood. It was better to have some ability, even if it was one she didn’t fully understand, than to be completely powerless. Most of these women had suffered enough and had no interest in going through something like that again. They feared the C’than would return, bringing their torment with them, which meant these women were constantly on edge.

  Lucy had hoped getting them away from that experience and letting them know she would do everything in her not inconsiderable power to protect them would give them a chance to relax, but not all of them had done so.

  Then again, she understood. They had been through so much, and had suffered so much, that it might be difficult—almost impossible—to fully relax.

  “I refuse to believe I don’t have anything.” Eve crossed her arms over her chest, meeting Lucy’s eyes.

  Lucy nodded. “Then we will keep looking.” It was possible that continuing to look would be a waste of her time, but if Eve needed something, even if it was to make herself feel better, who was Lucy to refuse? Besides, it didn’t hurt her to continue to work with the other woman to help her dig for other abilities. It was possible she had something Lucy had no way of detecting. As most of these women were either from Elaeavn or directly descended from those who were, Lucy suspected that her ability, whatever it might be, came from one of the Elaeavn abilities, which gave her an opportunity to better understand what she might need to do to help them. Yet the more time she spent with them, the more she wondered whether or not there was anything she could do to help them at all.

  In the case of Eve, the woman was stubborn, but it was a stubbornness she thought she could help, and she decided it would be beneficial to do so, if only so that Eve might gain a better understanding of her own abilities.

  “We’ve tried Sight, Reading, and we even tried Listening. So far, we haven’t found anything that matches with your skill set, but that’s not to say that we won’t.”

  Eve nodded as if there were no other choice but that.

  “It’s possible you have one of the more unusual abilities.”

  “Unusual how?”

  She glanced over to Marcy. While Lucy remained in the village, Marcy stayed with her, almost as if the other woman thought she could learn something from Lucy simply by watching her. She didn’t remember what it had taken for her to learn how to Slide, and she could see the desire burning on Marcy’s face to have some control over that ability, regardless of whether there was anything Lucy might be able to teach her by observation.

  “Take Marcy. She’s able to Slide. That’s not one of the typical abilities the people of Elaeavn have.”

  “It’s not?” Marcy asked.

  Lucy shook her head. “Sliding is different. We view things like Reading and Sight and Listening as the gifts the Great Watcher gave our people, but there are other abilities. I’ve got the ability to Slide, and that’s not considered one of the Great Watcher–given abilities.”

  “Why not?”

  “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. It comes from somewhere else, though I don’t really know.” All she knew was there was a belief that Sliding was something else. Then again, there was a connection to lorcith, which was also viewed to be something separate.

  What if Eve had the ability to use lorcith? It would be something different—and useful. She had been around enough people who had the ability to control lorcith, so she could see how beneficial something like that would be.

  Did she have anything on her that might help?

  Lucy raised her hand. “Wait a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you—”

  Lucy Slid, emerging near Ilphaesn Mountain. It was easy enough for her to do now, and she held herself there, hesitating, looking for something in the mountain. She Slid inside the mine and found a collection of metal that had been freshly mined, grabbing two lumps of it. She hoped the mining guild wouldn’t mind, but then, they wouldn’t even know she’d been here.

  Lucy Slid, returning to the village. She held the pieces of metal out to Eve.

  “What do you feel?”

  “Annoyed that you left.”

  “But I returned.”

  “You still left,” she said.

  Lucy chuckled. “Fine. You can be annoyed, but what do you feel?” She continued to hold out the pieces of metal for Eve. She wondered whether the other woman would notice anything at all.

  Eve stared at them, and then she took one of the hunks of metal, holding it in her hand. “Am I supposed to be impressed by this?”

  “I don’t know if you should be impressed, but I wondered if you might detect something from it.”

  “What should I detect?”

  “I don’t know. If you have some connection to the metal, you might be able to know how to find it, or perhaps you would have a way of controlling it.”

  “Controlling the metal?”

  Lucy nodded. “There are some who can control it. They use it in their fighting, and to do other things as well.”

  Eve held on to it, twisting the hunk of lorcith from side to side, staring at it. “I… I don’t feel anything.”

  “Well, you can keep trying,” she said.

  The other woman frowned, and she stuffed the piece of lorcith in her pocket. Lucy was about to argue, but if Eve was going to find some way of connecting to it, then having it on her would be beneficial. The longer she had to work with lorcith, the more likely it was that she would find some way of connecting to it, and Lucy hoped she did.

  “I’ll be back in the morning,” she said.

  “You’re leaving again,” she said.

  “Like I said, I have—”

  “Responsibilities. We’ve heard you.”

  Lucy glanced at the women around her. Most of them had seemed as if they understood why she was leaving, even though she hadn’t given them the explanation. She hadn’t told him that she was going to C’than, but she had said she had other responsibilities to take care of, and the fact that she was able to return as easily as she was shouldn’t have been a problem for them. But there were some, like Eve, who made it a problem. Lucy worried there were more than she realized. She didn’t want the woman angry at her, but the longer she spent away, the more likely it was they would end up displeased.

  “I could stay, if you think it will help.”

  “Don’t stay on our behalf,” she said, then turned away.

  She walked back toward the village, and Lucy was of half a mind to race after, to say something, but she didn’t know what she could do to get through to Eve.

  “Don’t mind her,” Marcy said, looking back at Eve. “She’s upset she doesn’t have any abilities.”

  “We don’t know that she doesn’t,” Lucy said. “All we know is she hasn’t discovered what they are.”

  “Right. So don’t mind her.”

  Lucy breathed out in a frustrated sigh. She wanted to help all these women, which meant she would have to help them find a way t
o move past the torment they had experienced. If that was a matter of them understanding their abilities, she wanted to be a part of that, as well.

  How was she going to do that if she was gone all the time?

  And yet, the more she was gone, the more she felt as if she were abandoning the C’than.

  How was she supposed to do both?

  The easy answer would be to find some way to merge the two, but Lucy didn’t think she could bring these women to the tower. If she did, there would be a different sort of rebellion, and given what they had gone through already, she didn’t want to expose them to the C’than again.

  “I really will be back tomorrow.”

  “Most of us know,” Marcy said.

  “Most?”

  “Well, we understand you’ve been returning. I think some people worry there will come a time when you won’t return, and that if that happens, we will be stuck here.”

  “But you won’t be captured. And you will have each other.”

  “We don’t know each other,” Marcy said.

  Lucy thought she could do something about that. Perhaps not yet, but if nothing else, it was an aspect of the village she thought could be corrected. If these women had a better sense of each other, who they were and what they had gone through, maybe that would bring them together in a way she had failed to do so far.

  “That’s something I need to help you with again tomorrow.”

  13

  Haern

  Haern pushed off, using his connection to lorcith to soar overhead, traveling through the forest and weaving between trees. He pushed and pulled on his connection to lorcith, forcing his mind to focus, wanting nothing more than to be able to draw the metal in a way that allowed him to make steady progress as he moved. Every so often, he thought he caught a glimmer of movement within the trees, but then it disappeared.