He smiled back, stuffing his cane under one arm long enough to return the blessing. “Dear Brother Valen, one of my three blessed saviors”—he nodded graciously to Voushanti and Saverian. “It is a grace to see you returned safely to our company. Though, as always, you present yourself at inconvenient times.”
As I helped him settle gingerly into the chair beside Elene, he glanced curiously at my hands and then quickly to my face. I snatched my hands back under my cloak, hiding the marks that had paled to silver. I’d not told Elene or Voushanti of my own particular adventures in Aeginea as yet. Osriel’s predicament preempted every other concern.
“These secret pairings…” I began, returning to the lighthouse secret. Elene could not work magic, but Brother Victor was a pureblood sorcerer. The puzzle pieces shifted. “So, Mistress Elene, Osriel didn’t send you back here to assume Brother Victor’s burden, but to partner with him. To take Luviar’s place.”
She dipped her head, tears brightening her eyes. “We dare not leave my father and Osriel there together. Sila Diaglou will give them up only so long as she believes that only one warder is necessary. A pureblood warder. Dear, brave Brother Victor has agreed to the exchange.”
“Brother!” Saverian looked up in shock. “You can’t. You’re scarcely walking!”
“And what of Jullian?” I snapped. “You don’t think the priestess will notice you choosing to retrieve a sick man over a healthy, innocent boy?” That no one seemed concerned over the boy made me irrationally angry. I had yet to admit that Osriel’s life was worth the saving.
“If there is the slightest hope to rescue our prince, I must do it,” said Brother Victor. “I can transfer my wardship to another. And we must certainly do whatever we can to retrieve young Jullian as well. Perhaps I can speak to Gildas’s conscience…”
Perhaps they hadn’t told Victor about Gerard. “Gildas owns no conscience,” I said.
“The priestess will never yield a living captive.” Voushanti’s opinion interrupted the discussion with the subtle grace of a crossbow bolt. “Go through with this exchange and you but confirm she has a prize in hand. Then she will redouble her efforts to extract the truth from Thane Stearc. Whether or not he tells her what she wants to know, Thane Stearc is a dead man. His endurance is all that stands between Prince Osriel and Sila Diaglou’s questioning.” He glared at Saverian as if it were her fault Osriel was taken.
Voushanti’s reasoning—and its implication that Osriel was as good as dead, too—silenced us all. Elene closed her eyes and pressed folded hands to her mouth.
There had to be some other way to save three lives than to send this good man to certain death. I rolled the priestess’s message over in my mind. With every skill of memory I had developed through the years, I reviewed the exact phrasing, my thoughts focused as if heeding the whispers of stone. “She wants to have it done before the solstice,” I murmured.
Then truth struck home like a cudgel to the knees. “Of course!” I blurted out. “Max has settled her bargain with Prince Bayard!”
Saverian and Victor had not heard the details of Osriel’s meeting with his two half brothers at Gillarine. Thus I had to explain Osriel’s agreement with Bayard to join him in confronting the Harrowers, and how my brother Max, as Bayard’s negotiator, had been charged to drive a false bargain with the priestess over her demands for control of Evanore, the lighthouse, and me. “…and so Prince Osriel told them that either the joined might of Eodward’s sons defeats Sila Diaglou on the winter solstice or the world we know will end.”
“By the Mother, Riel!” Saverian’s harsh whisper split the despairing silence.
The problem, of course, was that without Osriel, his plan, whatever it might have been, collapsed like an empty sack. What hope had we of preventing Sila Diaglou from doing whatever she wished on the solstice? She could make Bayard her puppet king or crown herself. As long as she possessed the book of maps and the traitor Gildas to use it, she could eventually find every Danae sianou and work her poisoning, further corrupting the Canon. Harrowers would lay waste to Ardra. The warlords might hold Evanore against the combined legions of Harrowers and Moriangi, but what light would ever draw them from their caves as night and chaos drowned Navronne? No more savior princes waited hidden in Aeginea.
“Osriel commanded the warmoot to muster at Angor Nav on the solstice,” Elene said numbly. “He promised they would ride for Palinur the next day to enforce his claim to Navronne.”
No need to remind us that Angor Nav lay more than eighty quellae from Caedmon’s Bridge or to state the logical conclusion that Osriel had no intention of confronting Sila Diaglou with his Evanori legion. The prince had believed victory lay in the deserted gold mine of Dashon Ra, and if any knew what that dread solution entailed, it was Saverian. She looked as if she could snap bone with her teeth.
“Our first responsibility is to preserve the lighthouse,” said Brother Victor, always a man of practical reason. “Whatever plan Prince Osriel formulated and whatever he learned from the Danae that might aid him are imprisoned with him. So we must devise a new plan on our own.”
“Unless you’ve learned what we need, Valen,” said Elene, forcing her voice steady. “Perhaps he told you his intent before you were taken? Or perhaps you heard what he learned from the Danae?”
I heard her truer inquiry. Had I kept my promise to learn of Osriel’s dire enchantment and dissuade him from it?
I met her gaze and shook my head, then spoke to all. “We learned nothing from the prince or his meeting. But Saverian and I did learn that the Canon has been broken for a very long time. The Danae themselves are in decline and have found no answer for it. With each Harrower poisoning—what they did with Gerard and tried to do by killing Brother Horach—another part of the Canon is lost.”
Even as I spoke, many things seemed clearer in my own mind. On the day we retrieved Gerard’s body at Clyste’s Well, Kol, in his anger, had handed me the first clue. You lead me here, cleanse the Well so I do not sicken, return it to my memory so I cannot escape knowing what is lost—though I must lose it all over again. And Picus’s failing garden had given me the second.
“Once a sianou is poisoned, they can’t find their way there anymore,” I said. “And the rest of the land, despite their care, keeps failing. I saw what they do, what they fight, and I would wager on my hope of heaven that this failure is the root of our plagues and pestilence, our weather disturbances, too, for all I know. Prince Osriel went to the Danae hoping to gain use of their magic on the solstice, and we’ve no way of knowing what answer they gave him. But what Saverian learned is that no matter what they promised the prince, the archon’s enmity for humankind is so deep-rooted that trusting the Danae in any matter whatsoever increases our peril.”
As I laid out these truths, I saw no hope for Osriel or Stearc. Even if the thane had endured Sila Diaglou’s torments thus far, in the moment the priestess paraded her prisoners before Bayard, the game would be up and Osriel would die. It was only a matter of time.
“How long have we been gone?” I said. The confusions of Aeginea had destroyed my concept of time. Were we but a day or two from the solstice, I could see no course but to hide Elene and Victor and whatever monks we could salvage from Gillarine. Unbreached, the lighthouse might survive. But if those who could read the books and work the tools fell to Sila Diaglou’s holocaust, what matter if the priestess took her time to find her way inside? On the other hand, had we a sevenday, something more might be done, though I had no idea what.