Something she wore on her wrist caught the firelight, a glitter of silver and a glint of deep amber-gold.
“I’ve not seen that bracelet before!”
Startled by his raised voice and abrupt question, the others swiveled their heads to look at him, and then, following his glance, at her.
“It was King Yri’s gift,” she answered quietly, sliding the silver band further up her arm until it disappeared inside the dark sleeve of her gown.
“Isn’t that…” Skerry began.
“What?” said Ruan, rounding on him. It seemed for a moment as if revelation hovered on the air. “What were you about to say?”
“Something Prince Tyr said about the jewelry the dwarves make.” Skerry shook his head. “I thought I recalled, but it escapes me after all.”
Disappointed, Ruan looked to Kivik. “As it seems that I was not there at the time, do you remember what he said?”
But Kivik remembered nothing. “It was so many weeks ago, and so much has happened since.”
Turning back to Sindérian, the Prince narrowed his eyes. “What reason had King Yri to give you such a gift?”
For a moment there was an answering spark, a swift rush of color into her cheeks. “You must ask him the next time you see him,” she said with something of her old defiant manner. “He said nothing about it to me. But it was there in my saddlebag when we left Reichünterwelt, and as it is beautiful, I choose to wear it.”
And hide it under your sleeve, so that the rest of us might not see it, thought Ruan. Yet for all that his suspicions were so thoroughly aroused, he could find no obvious threat in King Yri’s gift of a silver bracelet.
The first watch of the night being appointed to Aell, the others arranged their bedrolls around the fire and settled down to sleep. Ruan had insisted on the early morning vigil, with some idea in his mind that Sindérian might attempt to strike out on her own at dawn. Lying on his back, concentrating on the dark behind his eyelids, he willed himself to sleep. He thought that he succeeded, for it seemed a long time later that he rolled over on his side, opened his eyes, and saw that Sindérian had risen from her bed.
She sat alone at the edge of the camp, cradling something in the palm of her hand: a little black, fluttering thing, like a moth or the shadow of a moth. Watching that mothlike fluttering made him feel drowsy and curiously languid. So drowsy, indeed, that he could scarcely keep his eyes open. So drowsy that a dark wave of sleep swept over him, and…
He came awake again when someone shook his shoulder and spoke in his ear. It was not like him to wake confused and disoriented, yet this time it was an effort to drive the mists from his mind, to focus his eyes on Kivik’s face. “Is it my watch already?”
“No, it’s mine,” said Kivik. “I hardly know how to tell you, I am so ashamed. I nodded off. One moment I was sitting on the ground staring up at the stars, the next I found myself lying flat on the ground.”
Ruan levered himself up into a sitting position. A swift glance around the camp told him that Aell and Skerry were already up. He knew with a cold sensation at the pit of his stomach that something was seriously amiss.
Reading his face, Skerry nodded. “The lady is gone—not just wandered off, but truly gone. She has taken her horse with her.”
Ruan sprang to his feet. “Where is Faolein?” No one had thought to look, and it was Ruan himself who finally spotted the white owl asleep on a branch. “Take comfort,” he said to Kivik, as he strode across the camp to rouse Sindérian’s father. “You did not ‘nod off.’ She put a spell on us all.”
Ruan scooped up his sword belt and buckled it on. His mind was reeling with conjectures, with memories; things he had never connected before were falling into place—too late. He spat out a string of oaths. “Fool that I was, why did it never occur to me that she would do something like this? She has gone to do battle with the Furiádhin, leaving the rest of us behind.”
“But we are nowhere close to them,” said a bewildered Kivik. “She will not even know where to find them.”
“Will she not?” There was a flash of white and a beating of wings overhead as Faolein took off from the branch and disappeared into the night. “Do you know what passes between her and her father when they speak mind to mind?”
“But why?” said Skerry. By this time Ruan was saddling his horse, and the others hastened to do the same. “What possible reason could she have for going alone?”
Leaving his bedroll and all else behind, Ruan vaulted into the saddle, took up the reins. “Because she knows that we—that I—would prevent her from doing the thing she intends to do.”
He rode south, following the tracks left by Sindérian’s mare, which he could just make out by moonlight.
Before long, he could hear the hoofbeats of Aell’s horse directly behind him. But it was only when the moon went behind a cloud, and he was forced to dismount and search the ground for hoofprints, that the Skyrran princes finally caught up with him, bringing with them all the things he had left behind. Swinging back up into the saddle, Ruan was confident now that Sindérian was heading for Ceir Eldig.
“Tell us what you think she means to do,” said Kivik as they all rode south together. “And why she would even imagine we would try to hinder her.”
“She knows that I would do everything in my power to stop her,” Ruan said grimly. “As she also knows that I, having been tutored by a wizard, could not watch her do what she means to do without understanding it.
“Before ever I left Thäerie to begin this journey,” he continued, “Elidûc said to me, ‘When you meet Sindérian Faellanëos, observe her well, for then you will be privileged to see the most gifted young wizard of her generation. She was born with such talents that if she had even the most distant left-handed connection with the royal house of Phaôrax, the wizards on Leal would have reared her from childhood to challenge Ouriána in fulfillment of the prophecy. As it was, they allowed her to pursue her own inclinations and devote herself to the healing arts. They let her go off at an early age to break her heart on the battlefields of Rheithûn, leaving all her other talents lying fallow.
“But I,” said the Prince, “have seen her grow in knowledge and in power all during our long journey.
Yes, and I have seen what she does late at night when she thinks no one is watching—the ropes she weaves out of fire, the lessons in magic her father has been teaching her. She is far, far more than she was when we first met.”
“Strong enough that she feels she could survive a test of her own magic against three Furiádhin?” asked Skerry. It was clear from his tone that he did not believe it.
“No, not so strong as that. But then, she doesn’t intend to survive. When a powerful wizard or magician dies before his or her time—and particularly if he or she should be struck down by magical arts—a great power is released. It is as though a shock passes through the entire world of matter. All that he or she might have accomplished in the course of a lifetime, all the potential for good or evil, explodes into the world as a burst of energy. The effects can be felt by wizards across the world, and the effect on anyone in near proximity can be devastating—if spells are not already in place to contain that power. That is why wizards and mages so rarely confront each other in open battle. The outcome can be as unpredictable as it is terrible.”
“But if there is no way of predicting what will happen,” said Kivik, “why—”
“Because it sometimes happens that a dying wizard can seize the moment and imprint his or her own intentions on that burst of power,” said Ruan. The moon came out again, and he dug in his heels, urging his horse to a faster pace. “There is a rune they use to accomplish this—a rune so sacred that wizards never speak its true name—but they refer to it sometimes as the Rune of Unmaking. To make use of this spell is a desperate act, for it requires that the magician accept death willingly and make no last effort to survive, for which reason it is also known as the Rune of the Great Sacrifice. Elidûc told me that any least doubt, any fear of death that intrudes on the magician’s final thought, and the rune loses its power—worse, the spell could be reversed, doing harm where it means good, good where it means harm.”