The Keeper of the Mist

by Rachel Neumeier

  “Sol Daris lies that way,” said Osman. “And beyond Sol Daris, the mountain road and, ten days farther on, Tor Rampion and my father’s castle.” He was gazing up that way with some wistfulness.

  Tassel reached out and touched his hand. “Do you wish to go? It might be wise. I could send your people after you. Then whatever happens here, you won’t be caught up in it….”

  Osman blinked and seemed to come to himself. He caught Tassel’s hand in his and smiled into her eyes. “Wise? No, no. It would be cautious, but that is hardly the same thing. How would I ever discover what happens here? No, I should be ashamed to bring my father—or my grandmother—so scant a mouthful of news.”

  It had crossed Keri’s mind in Eschalion that Tassel might be deliberately teasing Lord Osman to make sure he stayed on their side, to persuade him that Keri’s reluctance to accept his offer wasn’t a personal rejection, or maybe simply because she liked him and liked teasing him and wanted to make both him and herself feel better. But now, watching her friend’s hesitant, wistful gesture, Keri believed that Tassel was quite in earnest. Lord Osman was certainly not much like any of the boys or young men who had pursued Tassel since she’d grown up. And he was unquestionably brave, and clever. And he really did know what he wanted. Keri thought she could see why Tassel might like him.

  But she couldn’t see how this tentative beginning of a relationship could end in anything but loss and regret and pain for both of them.

  But she said nothing. There did not seem to be anything a friend could say, at such a moment.

  Then Osman turned to her and added, “Keri—Lady—you mustn’t close your little land away from mine so tightly this time. You must see that such careful solitude is neither necessary nor right.” He glanced at Tassel, who raised her chin and looked away from them all, refusing to catch Keri’s eye. Osman said persuasively, “Leave a gate, at least, Lady! A way to come and go, too narrow for armies but enough for friends. Surely that would be possible?”

  “Maybe,” Keri said, refusing to make that promise. Regret tugged at her heart, the beginnings of grief. The moment pressed her with a cold presentiment of loss, and she shivered. Cort, not seeming to hear any of this, took an impatient step away, toward the diminished boundary.

  “There’s Gannon,” Tassel said suddenly, nodding toward Cort’s brother and a handful of other people hurrying in their direction.

  “You can tell them everything.” Keri wasn’t really paying attention. “Lucas, you can tell them at the House, can’t you? Tassel, listen—”

  “Yes?” Tassel asked, puzzled, following Keri’s gaze along the line of the boundary. Of where the boundary ought to lie. She said, “But the Bookkeeper has nothing to do with the boundary magic, Keri. What can I do to help?”

  “I don’t know,” Keri said, still absently. “Something. Let me think.” The watch was heavy in her hand, heavier now than it had seemed right after the Timekeeper had given it to her. It felt like solid gold, with nothing of clockwork or crystal. Its chain seemed heavy, too. It had left a red mark all across her wrist where it lay.

  She suspected it would get heavier before she was able to give it away.

  She said, to Cort and to everyone, “I think…I think we’d better begin. And then we’ll see just how far this one moment can be stretched.”

  “Far enough,” Cort said shortly. “It will have to be enough. You’re set to do this, Keri? Of course you are. You’re always ready to do whatever must be done.”

  Keri gave a stiff little nod. It wasn’t herself she was worried about—but she was glad Cort trusted her to do her part. She didn’t ask if he was ready. She knew he was.

  “You’re not actually going to—” began Tassel, and stopped, wincing, as Cort made a quick, short cut across two of his fingers. She began again, “Look, Cort, you can’t—” but stopped again because, of course, as they all knew, Summer Timonan had done it.

  Cort didn’t even look at his cousin. He simply started off, one step and then another, along the line he knew ought to be there. One drop of blood for every stride; Keri could feel it, just as she had when they had tried to repair the boundary before, except somehow different. One step and another, one drop of blood and another, and the mist rising behind him where he had stepped—all that part was the same. The difference was in something else. Somehow Cort’s magic felt more decisive this time. More…determined. It almost felt to Keri as though Cort had slashed the knife across not his hand but the land—as though he were still cutting through the earth, tearing the narrow blade right through the soil and tangled roots and little pebbles behind him, cleaving it all in two parts, so that even without Keri doing anything herself, Nimmira fell inward and every other part of the world fell away to the Outside.

  But Keri knew she had to finish what Cort had started for the boundary to be solid.

  She caught Tassel’s hand and said hurriedly, “Listen, there has to be a way to save Cort, you know. There has to be a way, and we’ll find it.”

  Tassel shook her head, her eyes wide and her mouth tight. She burst out, “You’re always so confident, you always know what to do, but it’s almost four hundred miles, Keri! He can’t do it; no one can do it; he’s not Summer Timonan, and anyway, she died! Oh, three hundred and seventy-eight,” she added in a different tone. Evidently, that was just one of those things the Bookkeeper knew. Then she remembered what she had been saying and repeated even more emphatically, “He can’t do it! Keri, you have to think of something else, some other way; we can’t let him try to do this—”

  “Wait for us,” Keri said hurriedly. “Wait for us, no matter how long this takes. I think we’ll need you, in the end.” She looked around, as though she might be able to see all the hundreds of miles of their journey stretching out before them. She knew they were horribly unprepared for anything of the kind, but what choice did they have? She said quickly, because although she didn’t know why, she thought it was true, “I don’t know what you can do, Tassel, but I think finishing this will take all of us.”

  Tassel stared at her. “Keri—we don’t even have a Timekeeper anymore!”

  “I know, I know, but wait for us anyway!” Without pausing for an answer, she spun around and ran to catch up with Cort.

  Cort was already most of the way across the pasture, walking faster now as he got used to what he was doing. His magic wanted to drift, or maybe disperse. He was laying it down in one line, but it was trying to spread out again. Keri knew where it should go and fixed it in place. One step after another, hurrying, making Cort’s magic more real and definite, telling the boundary where to lie, telling it what was on the inside and what on the Outside. It wasn’t hard, but she didn’t have much of a chance to look at Cort and see how he was faring; her attention was constantly tugged this way and that by an awareness of tangled roots and crawling beetles that crossed the boundary, of bees and butterflies and little russet-capped sparrows that had to be coaxed away from the rising mist lest they cross the boundary at just the wrong moment and get trapped in uncertainty.

  She caught the knack after a bit and found time to glance at Cort. He was looking straight ahead, not seeming to see the land over which he strode, flicking a drop of blood from his cupped palm to the earth with every step he took. His expression was abstracted, his attention absorbed, Keri understood, by some special kind of awareness that was probably not quite the same as hers. She wanted to ask him how many steps he thought this would take, how many drops of blood he thought a person might lose and still be able to walk three hundred and seventy-eight miles.

  But she was distracted then as a slate-winged falcon, stooping fast on unseen prey, crossed the line of the boundary just ahead of them, from inside to Outside. The bird went from flashing flight to utter stillness as it crossed the border; it hung in the air like a sculpture, its narrow wings angled back in its dive. She felt its flight as a sharp loss as it passed out of Nimmira into the Outside skies of Tor Carron; she had a sharp awareness of just w
hen and where the falcon had hatched: three years ago on a ledge on a cliff not too far away. But she had lost it. It was in Tor Carron, and now, as the boundary rose up, it would not be able to come back. The boundary was spreading out—a width of land a good stone’s throw across blurring and becoming indistinct and uncomfortable, so that bird and beast no less than person would turn away without ever knowing they had turned.

  Three hundred and seventy-eight miles!

  But she didn’t think now that Cort, or she, was going to have to walk all the way one step at a time. She thought it was more as though Cort would open one door after another and step through them all, folding the distance between each step and the next, as the player’s gap had folded the distance between Glassforge and the Wyvern King’s citadel. Cort was going to…He was going to stitch the boundary across the countryside, she thought, like putting beads of icing around the edge of a cake. So that when he was finished, he would have set a whole border of beads in place, even though he had not traced out a continuous line.

  It was a ridiculous analogy, but she couldn’t think of a better one.

  Keri glanced up at Cort’s face again. She wanted to take his hand, but of course she couldn’t. He looked strained and pale and tired, and they had barely started. She longed to ask if there was something she could do for him, but she didn’t dare speak lest she distract him. And all the time, part of her attention was on his magic and part on her magic and part on the strangely indistinct magic of Nimmira that was separate from them both. She could feel how the land fell away behind them: in a rapid-fire series of tiny jerks. Like beads around the edge of a cake.

  Cort was hardly pausing now to make sure drops of blood fell as he walked. She didn’t have to see the blood fall to know a drop was falling with every one of his steps. She could feel the drops of blood touch the earth and turn to magic. Every stride was the same length, too, and every drop of blood carried an exactly equal measure of magic. That was simply Cort, who liked to have everything just so and thought it was important to do things right. And to do them right the first time.

  She whispered out loud, to herself, not expecting Cort to hear her, much less respond, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter how far it is. We have plenty of time. All the time in the world.” Or…all the time that could be stretched out from the gift of a single moment. The heavy gold watch in her hand was silent, its clockwork still and waiting, but how long could this moment last before the magic set into Nimmira compelled her to pass that watch to a new Timekeeper?

  It would have to be long enough. She looked up at Cort.

  He had heard her. He gave her a sober little nod. Not exactly agreement, Keri understood. It was more reassurance that he wanted her to be right, that he would do his best to make sure she was right. He didn’t say, All the time, maybe, but what about all the strength and endurance in the world, do we have that, too? He didn’t have to say it, because Keri heard it without Cort saying a word.

  She wondered if her five-times-great-grandfather Lupe Ailenn had first drawn out the boundary of Nimmira this way, too: in a single stretched moment, only afterward handing off the keeping of time to the right person, a person who could make time move forward again as it was supposed to. She wondered even more whether Lupe Ailenn had had any notion of what he was doing, or if it had all seemed to happen in one mad cascade as he scrambled to avoid disaster. Maybe that was the way it always was: complete confusion at the time, until afterward someone wrote everything into a play and put in a smooth plot anybody could understand.

  Of course, Lupe Ailenn had lost Summer Timonan. So he hadn’t avoided every disaster.

  Cort was now striding along at a decisive pace, his face turned straight forward. Keri, not as tall, had to half run to keep up. But that was fine, because it had become impossible to miss the sharp flickering as he stitched the boundary closed. They should have been just about leaving the far pastures of Gannon’s farm and pretty near the edge of Glassforge, but every step took them farther than it should have; the town was already miles behind them.

  Step, and a flicker in the air, and they walked through a pine woodland. A well-kept farm nestled between the trees. A dog barked a warning at their sudden intrusion so near its goats. The goats, whose oblong yellow eyes could, as everyone knew, see magic, did not seem disturbed.

  Then step, flicker, and they were under the shadow of a great spreading oak, with the pines only visible in the distance, and no one but a startled squirrel to scold them on their way. Then teetering on the pebbly bank of a creek, in the lacy shade of overhanging shrub willows. Then, without so much as dabbling a toe in the water, high on a hill in a springtime wood, with everywhere around them bluebells and wood anemones.

  It wasn’t a mile with every step—nothing like it. But it was far more than a single step. Maybe a hundred steps instead of just one, Keri guessed. She could not quite tell; her own sense of where they were did not measure distance in steps or inches, but only gave her an awareness of the minnows in the creek and the fox pups in their den, of the earth underfoot and the weight of time held back.

  She wished it had occurred to her, sometime in her life, to count how many steps made up a mile. She had no idea. Thousands, surely. She wished she had a better notion of how much distance Cort was stepping over and how much he was passing through, and of how long a moment the Timekeeper had given them, and whether the Wyvern King might be able to step out of that moment and into this one. She could feel the boundary spinning out behind them, and she knew where it should lie before them, and she could tell they had a long way to go. The watch seemed now to weigh more than a bag of flour; Keri had twisted the chain around her wrist to help support it, which hurt, but she couldn’t just hold it in her hand anymore. She wished she’d thought to find a bit of cloth to tuck under the chain, to protect her skin. She knew she was going to have a nasty welt if she had to carry this weight any distance.

  She was sure the watch would only get heavier. She was starting to be afraid of how heavy it might get.

  Cort strode up a sloping pasture where rust-colored cattle grazed and then up a wooded hill, Keri hurrying behind him. Then another and then a third, always uphill, each time with trees bigger and older and closer together. Keri knew they were approaching Woodridge. They would pass rather close to the town, because, like Glassforge, Woodridge lay quite near the boundary. Once, before Lupe Ailenn and Summer Timonan had separated Nimmira from the Outside, Woodridge had traded wood and beef with the stonier, poorer lands to the west. Then the palisade had been important for defense, though the town’s ties of friendship and kinship with the Outside had also been closer than those of Glassforge, and far closer than those of Ironforge.

  Now, of course, Woodridge’s trade was only with Glassforge to the south and east and Ironforge to the north and east, and its palisade was merely decorative.

  Oak and hickory gave way to pine. The air was sharp with the fragrance of pine needles and damp earth, and, yes, there was Woodridge before them. Keri could have drawn the course of the quick little river that ran right through the middle of the town; she recognized the sweet tones of the great brass bells set one above the next in the famous bell tower; she recognized the houses and shops, the steeply pitched roofs of pine shingles. The people of Woodridge painted the blades of their water mills red, and also the bridges over the river. Keri loved the town immediately. She thought it looked peaceful and pleasant.

  Then Cort took another step, and Keri followed, and Woodridge was suddenly far below. Only the red blades of the water mills flashed in the sun, like the wings of summer tanagers. Cort’s blood was darker, the drops glowing in the light like garnet cabochons as he flicked them off his fingertip, one by one. His face was drawn now, and pale, and Keri thought of blood loss and wondered again how many drops of blood would fill a cupped palm, and how many would have to run out of a man’s veins before he died. There was a long way to go. The Timekeeper’s watch weighed as much as a lump of iron ten times its size, a
nd she looped its chain through her belt to make it easier to carry. Then she had to tighten her belt, so heavy had the watch become.

  Cort took another step, and Keri followed. The world around them flickered, and Woodridge was gone. Had it been a shorter step, though? Keri tried to see if Cort looked different, and was terribly afraid he seemed more weary, more strained. They were still walking uphill, and the land here was steep; no wonder he seemed to have to put so much effort now into just moving forward, but she was so afraid it was more than that.

  But it was working. The magic trailed out behind them, a ribbon of mist that broadened into a river or a wall or a bulwark, except it was none of these things. No analogy really fit, but Keri felt a doe, startled by a snapping twig, begin to leap away to the west and then turn instead to bound south. She couldn’t smile, but she nodded to herself, stiffly. If the boundary would turn back a deer, she knew it would turn back a man.

  Step, flicker, and to Keri’s relief the land began to run downhill again; the pines were thin here, replaced by birches and red-seeded maples and lonely summer pastures as yet tenanted only by deer. Step, flicker; step, flicker; step, flicker, and the birches were giving way to stands of oaks and hickories, and to lower, gentler pastures dotted with the honey-colored goats and rust-red cattle of this part of Nimmira.

  Cort stopped, gasping, bent over, breathing hard.

  Keri seized his arm, steadying his hands so he wouldn’t cast blood uselessly across the pasture grasses. He had closed his eyes, but now he opened them. Something had shocked him back into the world, for his eyes were once again sane and aware of her. He did not pull away from Keri’s grip, but glanced down at her fingers, smeared now with his blood, and ran his thumb gently across the back of her hand. He said huskily, “I’m so thirsty. How far—?”

  “Just past Woodridge,” Keri told him anxiously. “There’s still a long way to go. What happened? Are you—” But she knew he wasn’t all right. She didn’t dare ask. Besides, he would only say he was fine. What else could he say? She wanted to embrace him, make him sit down, tell him it was all right, that they had done enough, he had done enough, Nimmira was safe. But she couldn’t. And anyway, he would know it wasn’t true.