Whatever this new crisis was, one thing was for certain—they needed Elias Duana on the case.
Eithne felt the weight of eyes upon her. She turned from the window with a sigh. Bryn’s red-rimmed eyes were fastened on her with an atypical intensity and paired with an equally uncharacteristic grim expression. It rattled Eithne further yet to see her brazen and glib cousin so discomposed.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” Danica said, bringing Eithne’s attention back to the private council that included but herself, Bryn, Ogden, and Danica. “Whatever seemingly invisible magical explosion occurred, it stinks of the Hand.”
“Let’s not put the plow before the ox,” said Ogden, who knew that Danica voiced what was on all of their minds. “Any number of events could have caused a disturbance in the ether.”
“Really,” said Danica, whose fire was much restored by some watered wine and a quick doze in one of Eithne’s armchairs. “An invisible arcane event takes place in the middle of the day that rattles the teeth of every sensitive in six miles and not a single report from the Blackshields of anything remotely out of the ordinary. Elias has disappeared. Just today, Bryn is attacked by an equally elusive force in the most heavily guarded and warded patch of earth in all of Galacia. And you say any number of things could have caused this. By the One God’s beard, Ogden, who else could have done this if not the Hand?”
Ogden shrugged his eyebrows. “Your point is well taken, Danica. However, Elias tidily bound the Hand and their power little more than half a year ago, and I can’t see how they could have managed to break his geas so soon.” Ogden steepled his hands beneath his chin and his eyes became unfocused and the far-away look of an arcanist reaching outward with his senses stole over his features. “I can still feel Elias’s spell layered through the palace and the heartland. It lays atop the old magic, interweaving with it, snaking into the earth, reaching into the sky.”
“Thing is,” said Bryn in a soft, dry voice, “you’re thinking it’d be easier if it was the Hand. Then we’d know what we’re up against. No, this is worse, because you can’t think of a single arcanist on the continent that could manage this. Arcanists of this age aren’t that strong. None except Elias that is, but he’s gone. You’re thinking this is an entirely new threat. One that may have a strength that surpasses Mirengi’s. One that is not bound by the old laws. You’re thinking this may be far, far worse.”
“What?” asked Ogden, painfully aware of how hollow his voice sounded, how feeble his response.
“Bryn!” cried Eithne, who found herself taken aback by Bryn’s venomous words and wild look. “What in Agia has gotten into you?”
“Pardon me, cousin.” Bryn raked a hand, which trembled ever so slightly, through her hair. “I am not myself. I feel as if...”
Eithne went to Bryn and took her hand. “What is it?”
Bryn smiled tightly. “I feel as if I should retire for a bit. I’m a little shaken is all.” She offered them a thin smile. “Besides, I need an excuse to get into my closets and move some spring dresses to my dressing room.
“I’ll see all you at supper.” Without further remark, Bryn stood and swept from the room, while the stunned trio watched her go.
Eithne slumped in the vacant chair her cousin had lately occupied and exchanged glances with Ogden. “Is she right?”
Odgen cleared his throat. “She’s not exactly wrong.”
“Conjecture will do us little good,” said Danica. “What we need now is a plan. And it begins with finding out what happened to Elias. If we find out why and how he went missing, then we find out what caused this. I’m convinced now more than ever that these two events are connected.”
Eithne looked to her steward. “Ogden?”
“I tend to agree with Lady Duana,” Ogden said.
Danica snorted. “Lady?”
Ogden smiled, glad that his attempt at levity had succeeded, if only it part. “Technically, it’s Sir Lady Duana, now.”
“Indeed,” returned Danica, who shot Eithne an arch look. “I suppose if you are going to continue to knight women, you had best come up with an honorific other than sir.”
Ogden chuckled, then, sobering, said, “What can you tell us about the details surrounding Elias’s disappearance?”
Danica’s features grew tight once more. “We’d been in weekly contact.”
“Weekly?” asked Eithne, a little taken aback. She knew that the Duana siblings were close, but she figured the cost and hassle of making post from Knoll Creek would be a deterrent to such frequent correspondence.
Danica smiled thinly. “Elias insisted that I return to the Academy to finish my education as a doctor, and I insisted that we write weekly. With all that had happened, I didn’t like the thought of him staying at the homestead by himself, and what with the Hand still out there somewhere I wanted to know as soon as possible if something went sour. I had already lost him once, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. Only I did.”
Danica began to tremble, not with grief but with anger. Eithne supposed her rage to be all that shielded her from her grief. “And one week a letter didn’t come,” Eithne said, “and so you knew.”
Danica nodded. “But that wasn’t all. I awoke one night in the middling hours with a terrible feeling of dread. I was certain something awful had happened. I got out of bed and went to the kitchens to fix some tea. Everything just seemed...wrong.” Danica’s brow furrowed and a far-away look crept over her delicate features. “I can’t explain it, but everything felt not quite right, like the world had changed in some invisible but profound way. I know it sounds mad.”
“Not really,” said Ogden in a soft voice. “I’ve had the same thought worrying in my mind since you told us this afternoon that Elias had gone missing.”
Danica continued to gaze off into the distance, perhaps at something she alone could see, seemingly unaware of Ogden’s words. “I feel as if he is gone very far away, further than I can possibly imagine. But I know that he’s alive. He’s out there. Somewhere.”
“You were right once when we all thought him lost to us, including me,” said Eithne, “and I know that you’re right again.”
A silence fell over the chamber. Ogden shifted in his chair and said, “Was there any evidence of foul play?”
“Not as such,” Danica said. “The rickhouse and barn weren’t locked when I got back home. There was a pan, cold on the stove with a half eaten meal. Nothing was broken. No signs of a fight or a forced entry. Just the evidence of someone who left in a hurry.”
“Nothing else?” asked Odgen.
“His sword was missing with him,” Danica said around a grim smile. “He had put it away in father’s old trunk when he returned to Knoll Creek and there it remained, until now. Wherever Elias was going, he was expecting trouble.”
“He must have been in a hurry indeed,” said Eithne, “if he left not even a note or message with anyone.”
Ogden nodded. “What did Phinneas and Lar have to say? Did Elias give any indication to them that anything was amiss?”
Danica’s face reddened. “I didn’t actually speak with them. As soon as I realized Elias was missing I took Comet and set out for Peidra at once without a thought to tarry even a moment. When I stopped in Abbington to water Comet and pick up some supplies I sent post back to Knoll Creek to alert our friends.”
“I’m sure they won’t hold it against you,” Eithne said.
“I should like to hear to Phinneas’s thoughts on this predicament,” Ogden said. “Though he is not a fully dedicated arcanist, he is more skilled than I as a diviner, and he has a penetrating wit and a keen insight into arcane theory.”
“If I know those two,” Danica said, “they are likely already well on their way to Lucerne.”
“I do hope so,” said Eithne. “It would be good to see them again, despite the circumstances.” A charged silence fell over the chamber, in which no one could quite meet each other’s eyes. It seemed the Lucerne Palace Sentinels were b
anding together once again, but not under happy conditions. “Perhaps we should all retire until dinner, take some time to rest. We can revisit this later and formulate a plan.”
“Very well,” said Danica, but before she could rise the doors to Eithne’s sitting chamber crashed open.
As one, the three friends looked up to see a white-faced, wild-eyed, and breathless Bryn standing in the doorway.
“God’s blood,” said Eithne. “Bryn, what is it?”
Bryn lifted her arms and then it was the other Sentinels turn to blanch. “I found this in my closets, though I have no memory of how it came to be there.”
Bryn held up Elias’s sword in shaking arms. “He was here.”
Chapter 2
Shaper
Elias Duana awoke in a field of stone, but he wasn’t alone.
The girl peered at him with bright and cat-like eyes as green as wet grass. Her nose crinkled as she pursed her lips in thought, studying him with open curiosity.
Elias, deciding she presented little threat, closed his eyes for a beat, took a deep breath, and then surveyed his surroundings. Slabs of weather-worn granite poked out of the earth like the bones of a long-dead stone dragon. An ancient archway situated at the edge of a clearing stood before a lichen covered staircase that rested against the ghost of a seamless stone wall and dissolved into a leaden sky after a dozen steps.
The girl crouched, perched atop a tree limb belonging to a behemoth wytchwood. There could be no mistaking the craggy, ebony bark and red ochre leaves. Elias sighed. “Of course.”
“I’m glad this seems normal to you,” said the girl, her words oddly accented in a way that stirred Elias’s memory, but which eluded comparison to any nation with which he was familiar. “It’s not every day persons appear from nowhere at all. Even the Elders can’t do that.”
Elias sat up and gingerly rose into a crouch as his head swam. When the pinpricks of light cleared from his vision he said, “Believe me, this is unusual for me as well. My name is Elias.”
“I am called Nyla. I’m a great shaper. Or I will be one day, at the least.”
“What’s a shaper?”
Nyla snorted. “Where have you been living? A fox hole?”
Elias looked around. “Not here. Can you tell me where I am?”
“You’re in the stone garden. That’s what I call this place.”
Elias stood up on trembling legs. “Could you be more specific? What land am I in?”
Nyla blinked. “You are on the outskirts of Illedium. Right now, though, we’re in the Wilder lands.”
“Land of what people?”
Nyla blinked again. “The barbarians. The only people around. Well, at least for a few hundred miles.”
“Shiny.” He glanced around the ruins. “If these are barbarian lands then what are you doing out here?”
“I’m here to investigate. There’s something wrong with the ruins beyond the stone garden, and it’s getting worse. But the Elders won’t talk about it, so I came to see for myself.”
“What’s wrong with the ruins?”
A scowl stole over her features and she looked at a loss for words. “There’s a kind of...thinness here. There always seems to be this white haze over the ruins, but it’s grown worse lately. It’s kind of like a glow, but without light. It doesn’t make sense, I suppose. You really need to use your second sight to see it, but I know it’s there.
“It’s rumored that the Elders have held a secret council because there is a problem with the ether, that it’s eroding. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that there’s something strange going on out there, and it’s getting worse.”
Elias agreed with Nyla about one thing—something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
The gate spell had malfunctioned and deposited him on the shores of some distant land, or else another realm entirely. He had to find out which, and quickly. Elias sighed and took a step forward. His head swam. To her credit, Nyla maintained her position, though the muscles in her colt-like legs tensed.
He reached out a splay-fingered hand and laid it on the wytchwood. He dropped into the void and summoned his arcane sight so that he could scan the tree’s energy field and initiate communication. A series of shadowy images flashed through his mind—strange shapes that lacked form and half made symbols that held no meaning for him.
A searing pain lanced through his head that robbed him of his vision. He felt the earth punch him in the back, unaware that he had fallen until the jarring shock stole his breath. Nyla was at his side murmuring to him and probing him with hot hands. He focused on sucking in air until his equilibrium returned.
“Whoever you are, it would seem you’re a shaper too,” Nyla said. “Although, not a very good one. Still, I’ve founded friendships on less.”
“Glad to hear it,” Elias croaked. He made to sit up, but thought better of it and remained on his back. He looked up at the gnarled and twisted boughs of the wytchwood and a cold boulder of dread formed in his gut before radiating outward until his fingertips felt frostbitten. Elias’s teeth chattered.
“By the Eldest, you’re shaking like a leaf.” Nyla placed a hand on his chest and one on his forehead. “Elias, you’re freezing. What’ve you done?”
As the world began to dim, Elias found himself thinking the same thing.
†
“He’s awake.”
Elias reached for his sword out of instinct, sensing he was involved in a bitter struggle, a knowing that coagulated in his mind as if from a half recalled dream, or the spider’s web of a long forgotten memory, only to remember he wasn’t wearing it. He had left his blade behind, in another world.
“Be at peace, Wayfarer.”
Elias blinked sleep away from eyes that felt laden with ground glass. He lay atop a thin, firm mattress in a squat, stone room. A cast iron stove crackled on the far wall filling the room with an ember-red glow and warmth. A fair woman knelt at his side. She had eyes that felt familiar and seemed to glow a feline green in the dim light.
“Who are you?” Elias croaked.
The woman lifted a mug. “Here take some nettle and willow-bark tea. My name is Teah. Nyla is my daughter. She brought you here.”
Elias coughed. “How?
“I told you, I’m a great shaper,” said Nyla, who appeared in the doorway.
“Ah, yes,” said Elias, “I had forgotten.”
Teah smiled at her daughter. “She may have saved your life.”
Elias coughed a humorless laugh. “I’ll have to add the debt to the list.”
Elias studied Teah. She shared Nyla’s peculiar eye color, and wore her golden hair held up with an obsidian comb, which drew attention to her high cheekbones and teardrop shaped ears. “I suppose the real question, Teah, is not who you are, but what you are.”
Teah offered him a mirthful, eye-crinkling grin. “Yes, indeed, Wayfarer, for I suppose we are different, you and I. Still, that is best explained by another, so I bid you be patient. But I can see your mind is hungry to be at ease, so know this: You are a guest under my roof and are in no danger. In many ways it is lucky that you have happened here. The accommodations are a great deal better here than elsewhere on the continent.”
Elias swallowed. “And what continent would that be?”
Teah squeezed his hand. “Drink your tea. It will help. Now, get some rest. I have some business to attend to, which largely concerns you. Nyla will see to any of your needs.”
Elias lay back with his tea. Nyla padded over to him and sat on the side of his bed. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Like I slept outside on the bare ground on the night of the winter solstice.”
Nyla crinkled her nose. “You’re a funny kind of man, Elias.”
“Thank you for helping me. Saving me.”
Nyla blushed and tried to affect nonchalance by picking at a fingernail. “Think nothing of it. We’re kindred spirits after all, you and I. Mom says you’re a great shaper too, but you’ve gotten yo
urself into some kind of trouble.”
“She ain’t kidding.”
“I told Mom you might make a good husband for her after father crosses, but she said you were probably closer to my age.”
Elias sat up. “What? How old are you?”
Nyla straightened and her bottom lip stuck out ever so slightly. “Twenty winters, not that I’d have you.”
Elias eyed the girl. She looked to be half that age at best. He cleared his throat. “I just thought you were a great deal younger than twenty. Where I come from, folk age differently, you see. Any man would be lucky to have a...uh, a person such as yourself.”
Nyla’s posture relaxed. “Well, I’m sure you’re right. In any case, I won’t come of age for six years yet, and I’m sure you can’t wait that long.”
An awkward silence fell between them. Elias busied himself with sipping on his tea and then said, “You mentioned your father is going to be crossing. Is he ill?”
“No.” The word came softly, but Elias could hear the tears in that small word. “But he will be leaving this world all the same. Tonight, if you arrival doesn’t alter the plan.”
“Timing never was my strong suit.”
Nyla offered him a wistful smile. “I told you we were kindred spirits.” She shifted until she sat cross-legged by his side. “Elias, would you like me to sing you a song?”
At once Elias felt a keen pang of nostalgia coupled with the profound fear that he might not see the land of his birth or those that he loved ever again. “Yes, I believe I would.”
Nyla’s voice filled the small stone chamber with a haunting melody in a language unknown to him. The aching, bittersweet strains coalesced Elias’s longing into a millstone on his chest which dragged him into a stygian slumber.
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 2
