The open volume of plays on the table before Lucas was as long on every side as Keri’s forearm, which was normal for bound plays—ordinary books were smaller. It was bound with plain, thin boards and common twine, also customary for plays, because players were always taking the volumes apart and tying them up again. The plays that were supposed to be in any particular volume would be written on the front, with names crossed out and added in, but Keri knew those scrawled lists were usually not accurate. The only thing one could count on was that puppet plays were almost never in the same books as plays for living players. She knew this because Tassel had decided when she was eight or nine that she and Keri and Cort should all be puppeteers when they grew up. Cort had cooperated only reluctantly, but Tassel had poured all her quick enthusiasm into plays and puppet shows for a year or so, until she’d gone on to other interests, to the relief of all their mothers.
Keri wondered whether Lucas had been pressed by his mother to become a puppeteer or a player. People had said a lot of things about Eline when she became Lord Dorric’s mistress, but no one had ever said that being the Lord’s mistress had made her snobbish about her background. Maybe she had wanted her son to know his way around other lands Outside, even though Eschalion was dangerous. But maybe not so dangerous for players, who were good at coming and going unseen. And people did say no land was wealthier than Eschalion. Maybe Eline had hoped her son might someday follow her to her homeland. Everyone knew she had gone back there in the end. Even Keri knew that, though she had all her life done her best not to care about gossip involving the Lord’s women.
The open book was probably one of puppet plays, because in his left hand, Lucas held the strings of a puppet. The puppet, Keri noted uneasily, was a stylized representation of a Wyvern sorcerer, and not only that, but one very like Eroniel Kaskarian: gray cloak and silver hair, its painted face carved with high cheekbones and angular eyes, somehow expressing a keen, villainous character.
Or maybe that was just her.
There was another puppet lying on the table, clad in black and with a red bear stitched across the front of its shirt. Keri supposed that somewhere in this room, there was probably a puppet meant to represent the Lady of Nimmira. There were undoubtedly puppets representing all kinds of people in here, including passed-over heirs. Rejected heirs were the villains in a lot of plays. Lucas didn’t seem to have gotten out any of those puppets, though. She wished she knew that meant something. She wished she knew for sure that she could trust him. She did know she liked Lucas better than Brann, or even Domeric, but…she wasn’t sure.
She said, “I don’t think it’ll be a popular play, if those are the only two characters in it.”
Her half brother smiled and held out one limp hand. “See the strings? I’m the good guy, of course.”
Keri studied him. “You’re writing a play with yourself as the hero?”
“Well, no one else seems likely to.”
Despite his flippant tone, Lucas did not look cheerful. Whatever plot he’d been working out in his head, Keri thought, he didn’t seem very happy with it. “You never know,” she said. “Sometimes things surprise you. Sometimes people do. At least, they astonish me all the time. Especially today.” She glanced around. None of the chairs looked comfortable, not even the one Lucas had chosen. They were all stiff and upright, and none of them had cushions. She pulled one around anyway and sat down.
Lucas’s eyes had narrowed. “Dear sister, have I been missing tremendous excitement this morning?”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Keri said fervently. “The first thing was, we found a gap leading straight from the previous Doorkeeper’s apartment to Eschalion. Cort found it. Magister Eroniel knew about it, or else we led him to it, I don’t know, but he grabbed Cort and took him through the gap.” She added, in a quieter voice, the worst part: “He was trying to take me, but Cort got in the way, so he took him instead.”
Lucas leaned back in his chair, frowning. “Well, well. Cort stepped up, did he? Good for him, but I don’t imagine that’s very good for us. In fact, very bad. You’ve got an idea about what to do, sister dear? An idea that involves me?”
“Maybe. I think so.” Keri wished she could tell whether her youngest half brother was surprised or shocked, or whether he might almost have expected something like this to happen.
“Wait, you found this gap right in Lyem’s apartment, you say?”
“Yes. Did you know about our father trading wheat and things to Tor Carron for garnets and things, and then trading the garnets to Eschalion for gold?”
Lucas shook his head, staring at her. “Wait, was he? And Lyem was part of this? It seems I’ve missed a great deal, and not only this morning!”
“So you didn’t know.” Keri found she believed him, about this at least. She was relieved. “Lyem’s no longer anywhere in Nimmira. He had to have been helping our father with all that, so I guess he’s probably—”
“—fled to Eschalion? That does seem likely.”
“Exactly.”
“Yes.” Lucas’s frown deepened. “Verens Corr must have known, I expect, and Bern Erram. It’s hard to believe that our father would have arranged something like this without their advice. Aronn Duval, if there was all this trade in wheat, he must have known. Tirres Corran, too. And possibly Gannon Morras. But you’re sure Cort wasn’t part of it, I suppose.”
“Not possibly. We don’t think Gannon was in it at all.”
“Because he’s Cort’s brother? Trust me on this, sister: it doesn’t follow.”
“No, because Aronn and Tirres are in the records Tassel found, but Gannon isn’t.”
“A substantially better reason,” Lucas acknowledged. “And now poor Cort has been snatched away by terrible sorcerers.” He absently made the puppet he held pace back and forth across the table, wooden hands behind its back, its head bowed in thought. He was good at it. The puppet really looked like it was lost in contemplation. Lucas said, in a quick, high, light voice nothing like his own, “What do I intend to do with the Doorkeeper of Nimmira? What did I mean to do with the Lady of Nimmira?” He made the puppet stop and turn and face Keri, its stiff little hands braced on its hips. “I will steal your magic and drink it down until your little Nimmira is empty, and then I will fill it up again with my magic, and then it will be mine forever. Ha, ha, ha, ha,” he added, in a deliberate parody of a puppeteer’s villainous laugh.
“Yes,” said Keri, staring at the puppet. It was thoroughly creepy, she decided. And impossible to ignore. She resisted an urge to tell Lucas to put it away. Or throw it away. Or burn it. She said instead, “I think that’s right. But he only got Cort, not me, and Cort will lock his magic away so even the Wyvern King can’t touch it. I think. For a while. Of us all, Cort ought to be the hardest for Wyvern sorcerers to get at. But who knows what they might do to him when he won’t cooperate? Besides, soon he’ll lose the magic that makes him Doorkeeper, and then—well, that could be very bad for us, because once that happens, the sorcerers might get it right. I think they really might. So I’m going to ask Osman the Younger to help, because he’s an enemy of the Wyvern anyway and he has those soldiers, you know….”
“Ah! Yes?”
“Well, yes. Because he’s already said he wants an alliance. But he wants to make it by handfasting with me. Then Nimmira would be part of Tor Carron, so his father would be all in favor of protecting it from Aranaon Mirtaelior. He wants us to be wed immediately.”
“Naturally he does,” Lucas said, his eyebrows rising. “Of course he does. He took your hints and ran with them, I gather. A forward sort, isn’t he?” He appeared, if anything, rather impressed.
“Domeric seems to think that’s a fine idea—”
“Ah, does he? I suppose he would. Full of plans for direct action and frontal assault, is our brother Domeric. I imagine he finds thoughts of those Bear soldiers highly seductive. I expect he thinks he would command them.” Lucas put down the sorcerer puppet and picked up the Bear puppet.
He made it march across the table and said in a deep, grim voice, “For this insult, the sword is the only answer! Let a red sun rise upon a field of iron and blood!”
It was a line from a play, of course—from distant history, from when the Lords of Nimmira had been war leaders, before Eschalion and Tor Carron had swallowed up all the little countries and Nimmira had in desperation found a different way to protect itself. Keri didn’t want to think there was any chance she might be watching Nimmira lose that other kind of protection right this minute, that she might be unable to do anything to get it back. She said quickly, “So it would be good if Osman the Younger would help, but I can’t agree to his terms and I’m not sure he’ll offer any others, so I still want to try to get him to help, but I thought it might be better to find another way to get our Doorkeeper back, one that doesn’t depend so much on the Bear. And then when Brann tried to kidnap me, he said—”
Lucas dropped the puppet, which collapsed in a tangle of carved wooden limbs and fine strings. It was the first thing Keri had ever seen him do that she was sure was completely unconsidered. She nodded, relieved beyond measure at her brother’s spontaneous shock. She said, “Yes.”
“Brann tried—” Words seemed to fail him.
“Yes,” Keri repeated. “He thinks the Wyvern King is going to win, so he thought he would give me to him and then Aranaon Mirtaelior would do whatever he wants to me, and the succession would go somewhere else. To Brann himself, of course. At least,” Keri added, “I think that’s what he thought. I’m not completely sure, because it’s—”
“Utterly insane?”
Keri found herself smiling. “Maybe a little ill considered.”
“And I missed all this? In one morning? Unbelievable.” Lucas looked her up and down. “Though you seem to have come through it all remarkably untouched, sister dear.”
Keri didn’t feel as unscathed as all that. But she nodded. She said, “So I thought of you.”
Lucas frowned at her. “Does that follow?”
Keri took a deep breath. Then she raised her eyebrows and gave him her mother’s look, the one that said, I already know what you’re not telling me. “Lucas, you don’t really expect me to believe that your mother cut all her ties with you when she left Nimmira? That when you disappear for a day or three, or a week or three, you’re visiting some girl? Why would you hide that so carefully?”
“Well, I imagine they might get jealous of one another if they knew I scattered my charms so widely. My delightful Mina, and pretty Rose, and sweet little Pellia—”
“Oh, stop.”
Her brother closed his mouth and looked at her steadily.
“She’s your mother,” Keri said to him. “I lost my mother, you know. She died.” She meant, Your mother didn’t die. She meant, I’m sure you still know how to find her, because she’s your mother.
Lucas cleared his throat. He picked up the puppet gently and untangled the strings. Then he laid it aside again and said, not quite looking Keri in the face, “All right. Yes, you’re correct. There’s a gap. The player’s crack, they call it. I mean, the players call it that. Or the mouse gap. It’s not exactly a hole in the boundary. It’s more like the boundary…folds in right there. In and out, very fast, a tiny little involution that lets you step across the miles. Players can recognize it. One learns to perceive such uneven places in the air, you see, when one learns to build illusions. Player’s magic is all about perception and illusion, of course,” he added, a trifle apologetically. “The most minor of all sorcerous arts, you may say, and you would be right, but in a sense also the truest, for player’s magic is the one kind of sorcery that does not depend on the theft of blood from a man or of magic from the land itself. And those are the arts that deflect attention from players in Eschalion. Otherwise, they would be forced to live only in Tor Carron and Nimmira, and, you know, the homeland of all players, and of all true sorcerers, is Eschalion.”
“I see,” said Keri, who wasn’t entirely sure she did. She focused on the important part. “So your mother used that…involution…to step across the miles between Glassforge and someplace in Eschalion. And you know just where it is, don’t you?”
“There’s no danger to Nimmira from small, narrow gaps like that,” Lucas assured her, his tone a shade too emphatic. “No danger at all. As I say, it’s not a true hole anyway, just a cut, like a tiny slice through folded cloth.” He held up his hands, pretending to fold cloth and stretch it out again, illustrating how someone might take a single step and yet cross not only the boundary, but hundreds of miles. “It’s not the sort of thing that true sorcerers are in any way likely to notice, either,” he went on earnestly. “My mother explained all this to me. Their very strength makes it hard for them to see such minute unevennesses in the air. And no player would show an involution of that kind to a sorcerer. They know how to keep secrets, in Eschalion.”
“I expect they do,” Keri said. “So do you, obviously.” She hoped it was all true, everything Eline had told her son, everything Lucas was telling her now, but she wanted very much to see this tiny little involuted fold in the boundary for herself. She said, “You know where your mother’s minute gap is, of course, and how to open it, and you know the people on the other side. Your mother’s there, of course. Of course she’ll help you, if you ask her. She’ll help us. With her special magic of perception and illusion, with her gift of coming and going unnoticed. She can help us slip unseen into whatever place Eroniel has Cort imprisoned and sneak him out again. She can, and she will, because you’re her son and you’ll ask her. After you show us the way through this little mouse gap.”
Lucas had begun tracing small circles on the table with the tip of one finger. Now he glanced up, his expression guarded. For once, there was no hint of mockery or humor in his eyes. Keri fixed him with her mother’s firmest look to encourage him to tell her the truth.
He said after a moment, “You’re right. That gap opens to a town called Yllien, in Eschalion, in the far north. That’s where my mother lives now, sometimes, when the players aren’t traveling. Her winter home is there. And, yes, I visit her.” Lifting his eyes at last, he gave Keri a sharp look. “In Eschalion, I’m a puppeteer, a player, Eline’s foreign-bred son. Hardly anyone there’s ever heard of Dorric or of Nimmira. Most people think my father was from Tor Carron. I mean, where else? Everyone knows there’s no other land between Eschalion and Tor Carron.”
“No wonder people here say you’re…erratic,” Keri said. She looked at her half brother, feeling for the first time that they might really manage to save Cort. If Lucas would help her. If he could indeed be trusted to get his mother to help. She was sure that with Eline’s assistance, they could find Cort and get him away. But Eline had no loyalty to Nimmira, plainly. Lucas…Lucas had a whole life with his mother, one nobody in Nimmira knew about. His role as Eline’s son might even be more important to him than his role as her half brother. But surely he cared about Nimmira, too.
Lucas could help. He could help in ways no one else possibly could. Keri decided she would make him help her.
“Fickle,” said Lucas. His mouth had twisted slightly, a sardonic expression. “That’s what people say. Undependable.”
“The kind to vanish for a day or a week,” Keri agreed. “The kind to make up wild stories about where he’s been, and about what business, and let everyone assume he was seeing a girl—or two, or three. Mina and Rose and sweet little Pellia, indeed!”
Lucas actually blushed.
Keri shook her head. “You know, I’ve heard people say you sometimes slip off to visit a player girl. I guess that’s actually true. It’s just that the company is in Eschalion, and the girl is your mother. She must have taught you all about the sorcerers of Eschalion and the Wyvern King….”
Lucas’s mouth crooked slightly, though still with scant humor. “Hardly. No one knows much about the Wyvern King. Except that it’s wise to stay out of his way. And out of the way of his sorcerers. Staying out of their way is
easy enough, for most people, at least in the prosperous towns of the north. The Wyvern sorcerers do as they please among the benighted villagers, but in a wealthy town, life can be very comfortable. Very secure. So long as you are well-to-do, and polite to your neighbors, and obey the law of the Wyvern King, of course.” He shrugged. “I’d never met a sorcerer before Eroniel. I thought, How interesting! But then when I met him, I realized…”
“That he might recognize your mother in you?”
Lucas shook his head. “I realized I had seen him. Not to know him, nor to know his name. Not for him to know me, I’m almost sure. But I’d seen him. I’d seen him visiting my mother.”
“Ah,” breathed Keri.
“She always had a knack for attracting powerful men,” Lucas said, a touch grimly. He gave her a hard look—wary, she could see, of any hint of criticism.
Keri said, “Your mother is a dancer, an acrobat, a player….Powerful patrons are important for a woman like that. I guess probably even more for players in Eschalion than here or in Tor Carron.”
She could see how her brother relaxed slightly at this. He said, “I don’t think that it was ever more than that. Some of the great sorcerers patronize the arts. They are contemptuous of player magic, but they do think of us—them—as artists. Eroniel Kaskarian has always been ambitious. Supporting a company of players is probably part of the image he cultivates. I think that’s what it was. No matter whom she knows, though, my mother is a player, not a sorcerer.”
The Keeper of the Mist Page 19
