We told the story to Arachne. She didn’t make a big demonstration upon hearing what we’d decided to do with Karyos and the Hollow—that’s not her style—but I could tell she was pleased. She thanked us, and thanked me again later in private.
We’d meant to have a party to celebrate our success, but it didn’t last very long. Within an hour Luna and Variam were asleep, sprawled on sofas, and only Anne and I were left awake, talking to Arachne. She promised to help with the work on the Hollow, and curled up in an armchair surrounded by silks, I felt warm and safe.
Eventually the conversation turned to the dreamstones, and Anne and I laid our prizes out on one of the tables. Arachne crouched over them on her eight legs and studied them. “What do you think?” I said when I couldn’t take the suspense any longer.
“About which you should give to Richard?” Arachne asked.
“Yeah.”
“Preferably neither.”
“That’s not really helpful.”
“The mages of your Council would be extremely uncomfortable about placing either of these into the hands of a Dark mage,” Arachne said. “I think I would agree with them.”
“Are they alive?” I asked curiously. I hadn’t sensed anything from either crystal since returning to the Hollow, but I still couldn’t make sense of that boy I’d met. Had it been the crystal, or . . . ?
Arachne gave the spider equivalent of a shrug. “If you write down someone’s life, do they live forever?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that one. “These are powerful items,” Arachne said. “Whatever Richard intends to use them for, I doubt it will be anything good.”
“Yeah, well, if we keep them, then I’m pretty sure what’s going to happen to us will be a lot less good,” I said. “So given that we’re going with the least bad option, which one do you recommend?”
Arachne tapped one of the crystals with one tapering foreleg. “This.”
I looked at it. The one Arachne had tapped was the one Anne had brought, slightly slimmer and darker than the other. If mine was amethyst, hers was a deep violet. “Why that one?”
“The darker of the two crystals is more suited for compulsion,” Arachne said. “To use it to its full potential, the wielder must want to impose their will upon another. Not out of necessity, but out of desire. It would be a poor match for you, I think.” She tapped the other crystal. “This could have a similar use, but its focus is slightly different. More of a tool for linking.”
I nodded slowly, then looked at Anne. “What do you think?”
Anne looked down at the crystal she’d carried out of the shadow realm. “Get rid of it,” she said at last.
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Much later, after Luna and Variam had yawned themselves awake and we were preparing to leave, I spoke quietly to Anne while the other two were putting on their coats. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Anne said after a moment. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
Anne shook her head.
I met her eyes. “What did you see when you picked up that thing?”
Anne hesitated and I knew she was thinking about dodging the question, but I held her gaze and the moment passed. “If I were in danger,” she said slowly, “real danger, would you come to help?”
I frowned. “Of course.”
“What if you couldn’t do anything?” Anne said bluntly. “You’re not as powerful as any of us. Would you still try?”
That stung. But still . . . “Probably.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. I could have said that I had few enough friends and that I didn’t want to lose the ones I had. I could have just said that that was the sort of thing I do. There was another reason, a truer one perhaps, but I shied away from admitting that, even to myself. But something in Anne’s eyes made me uncomfortable, and I fell back on a less naked answer. “We all have things we don’t want to give up.”
Anne stood looking back at me for a long moment, then a burst of laughter came from Luna and Variam behind us, and the moment was gone. She turned away.
I looked at Anne, frowning. Somehow I had the uneasy feeling that I’d said the wrong thing. But then Luna and Variam came to rejoin us, and we fell in together for the walk out.
chapter 11
JULY AND AUGUST
The handover took place without incident. Morden contacted me a couple of days after our return, giving me instructions to deliver the dreamstone to Onyx. I prepared for the worst, but to my mild surprise, when the day came, Onyx showed up at the meeting point, gave me one poisonous look, took the package, and left without a word. Either Morden had drilled into his Chosen’s head what the consequences of picking a fight would be, or Onyx was just biding his time.
With that done things went back to normal, or as normal as they got these days. I tried asking Morden what Richard wanted the dreamstone for, but I hadn’t really been expecting an answer and I didn’t get one. I wasn’t comfortable with Richard having the thing, and Arachne and I spent a couple of evenings talking over what his intentions might be, but all we could come up with was speculation.
The deep shadow realm fell out of alignment with the Hollow about two weeks after we left it. Variam tested it thoroughly and confirmed the next day that it was gone—gating from the Hollow to the deep shadow realm didn’t work anymore, and that strange place would stay inaccessible in some distant reality for years, if not forever. I couldn’t help but feel relieved. That vision had shaken me badly, and it was a long time before I could look Anne in the eyes without feeling a twinge of fear. But Anne acted just the same as she always had, and as the weeks passed my uneasiness faded away.
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Clearing out the Hollow turned out to be even harder than Variam had predicted. Karyos had spent decades turning the shadow realm into her personal fortress, and the place was littered with traps and guardian plants. Most had been failures—based on what we found, Karyos’s creations had tended towards the imaginative rather than the practical—but they definitely made life interesting, and we learnt to be extremely grateful for Anne’s healing.
“You know,” Luna said after one particularly memorable encounter, picking the last of the venomous thorns out of her leg, “I’m really starting to go off plants.” But she persisted, and by the end of the third week we were no longer nervous about walking the grounds.
Troublesome as the plants were, they weren’t our biggest worry. An expedition led by a pair of independent mages tried to penetrate the Hollow, hoping to access the same deep shadow realm, and they weren’t terribly happy when we told them we’d looted it already. For a change we were able to resolve things diplomatically, but only two days later a Dark mage called Blackout arrived. He’d heard about Karyos, had decided that with the dryad gone the Hollow would be a great place to set up shop, and unlike the last pair, he wasn’t willing to take no for an answer. Convincing him otherwise took some work.
But one thing did go our way. Talisid was initially less than enthusiastic about helping out with our new project, but once I made it politely but firmly clear to him that no help for us meant no more intelligence reports for him, he changed his mind. Within an astonishingly short space of time a group of gate magic specialists arrived, and by the time they were done, gating into the Hollow was all but impossible without the access keys, a set of six focuses carved from the wood of one of the Hollow’s trees, allowing their wielder to step through the wards. As an added bonus, they doubled as regular gate stones, meaning that Anne, Luna, and I could use them to gate to the Hollow whenever we wanted. We took one each, hid the last two, and met up for a celebration in our new shadow realm, where we ate and drank and told stories under the spreading branches.