“What is different now?” Thaddeus asked, feeling this might be the core of what troubled him, wishing that he himself had given all of this more thought. When he was younger, and his mind sharper, he would have probed everything. Waiting for the prince’s answer, he knew he had not done so as completely as he should.
Aliver looked up, straightened, and seemed to take in the room anew. He wiped under his eyes with his fingertips. “The way people have been coming off the mist…it’s because the Santoth are aiding them. I told them that I could not fight with an army drugged and groggy every night. In answer they whispered out a spell. I heard it inside my head and felt the way it slipped out across the sleeping land each night. It moved like a thousand serpents, each seeking a user.”
“That’s incredible,” Dariel murmured. “I heard how people were breaking free of the mist, but…”
“Yes, it is incredible,” Aliver said. Having agreed, though, he struggled a moment with how to express the further things he had to say. He illustrated his thoughts with his fingers a moment, but then gave up on the effort and let his hands rest on his knees. “I could sense that there was corruption in the spell. It’s what they always told me. I don’t know how to explain it. I could not actually understand the language. It barely even seemed a language at all. It’s a sort of music, as if voices plucked tunes from millions of different notes. The notes were like words. And they weren’t like words…”
He glanced around from face to face, searching them, hoping that they understood him better than his capacity to put it into words. He seemed disappointed by the incomprehension he saw looking back at him. Thaddeus felt he should say something, but he had already understood Aliver’s point. Instead of refuting it, he sat, feeling its import grow on him.
“I cannot explain it,” Aliver continued, “but the Santoth were right, of course. The spell was garbled at the edges. They didn’t intend to make the mist dream into a horror, but that’s what happened. They made the mist state a living nightmare that preyed on each person’s greatest fears and weaknesses. They made it such a torment that the users feared the drug more than the torture of withdrawal, more than losing forever the dreams that they always sought the mist for. Understand me? It may have worked, but that was not the song they wanted to sing. They would have gentled them off with a loving pressure. Instead, by the time the spell took hold, it had twisted into something malevolent. If that’s what happens when they’re reaching out to our allies to help them, what might they unleash when they strike out to slay our enemies, when the song they intend is one of death and destruction?”
What a question, Thaddeus thought. Exactly as he would have put it himself. He had no answer to it, and sat in silence with the others.
“You know,” Dariel eventually said, a tinge of humor in his voice, “if this all ends well for us, we’ll have a most amazing story to tell. A most amazing story. One to sit on the shelf beside The Tale of Bashar and Cashen, as father used to say. Remember how he said that? ‘The most amazing tale is yet to be written,’ he said. ‘But it will be, and it will deserve the space beside Bashar and Cashen.’”
Aliver said that he understood that tale differently now. He began to explain what the Santoth had taught him, but Thaddeus could not listen to him. He knew the instant the words were out of Dariel’s mouth that something crucial had been said. It sent a shiver up from his lower back that fanned out across his musculature. He’d heard Leodan use just those words, but in a different context.
Somebody approached the tent door. The guard posted there gruffly asked the person’s business. A woman’s voice piped up in answer. Thaddeus could not hear her words, but there was a confident tone to them. Thaddeus assumed he understood the situation. The princes were young men, handsome and powerful. There were certainly women who vied for their attention. It surprised him neither brother had paid much attention to-
The woman shouted something. Thaddeus did not catch it, but Aliver and Dariel both shot to their feet and rushed toward the tent flap. They were out past it before Thaddeus could make sense of it. He sat forward in his seat, listening to the excited sounds that followed, but it wasn’t until Dariel called for him that he actually rose. Pushing through the tent flap into the torch- and star-lit night, he saw the two princes sharing a multi-limbed embrace with a young woman. She was as sun-burnished as they, as lithe and strong. She wore the dual swords of the Punisari at her waist. The fact that she went thus armed drew so much of his attention that he failed to realize a far more important thing.
“Thaddeus,” Aliver said on noticing him, “look, it’s Mena.”
By the Giver-when had he become so dim-witted? So slow? When had his eyes lost their ability to see what mattered? Mena. It was Mena. She disentangled herself from her brothers and walked toward him. Her strides were so determined and the swords so prominent at her side that he half believed she was about to cut him down. Mena, who had always been so smart. Who’d always understood people intuitively, even as a child. Mena, whom he’d feared he’d lost, whom he’d spoken to sometimes in his dreams, who’d named his crimes in those nightmares by counting them off one by one on her small fingers…For that Mena he would stand still and accept whatever havoc she would wreak upon him.
But if this young woman remembered all the ways that Thaddeus had betrayed her, she gave no sign of it. She closed on him with open arms. She smashed against his chest, arms thrown around him, her head nestled beneath his chin. Thaddeus’s eyes moistened immediately. It took a great deal of effort to balance his head in such a way that the tears did not break over the rims of his eyes. She could have squeezed the air out of him and he’d not have moved until he lost consciousness and crumpled to the ground.
Drawing back from him, Mena slipped her hands up his neck and clamped them around his head. Her grip was surprisingly strong. She tilted his head forward, spilling the tears onto his cheeks. “You are exactly the same,” she said. Her voice had a foreign accent to it, a bit of the thickness of Vumu that she somehow transformed to music. “Not a new wrinkle on your face. Not a blemish or freckle I don’t remember.”
Thaddeus gave up all pretense at controlling his emotion. He let it flow, more completely even than he had on reuniting with Aliver or on embracing Dariel. Three of Leodan’s children were together now; all of them-all of them-were alive! It was simply too much joy, too much relief and sorrow to contain. He let it flow.
What he did later that night was not the rash action it might have seemed. Or so he told himself. At some level he had known for a while that he had done all he could to help Aliver onto the path of his destiny. That job was complete. Aliver would either fail or succeed, but he would not turn away from either result. He had everything he needed to win this war except for one thing. He needed the book that would help his sorcerers sing his cause to victory. Though others had been asked to hunt for the book, there was nobody more likely to actually find it than he himself.
In the early hours of the next morning, before the sun had risen, Thaddeus Clegg set out to find this book, marching north ahead of the army, toward Acacia and the palace in which he hoped the volume might still lie hidden.