He let the sentence trail off, conscious that the others were all watching him, waiting for him to come to some sort of conclusion.
He hadn’t. “Let’s keep riding,” he said. “It’s not that far now. Something will present itself, before we arrive.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Myrana asked.
“It has to.”
Sitting close to a fire that night, Aric had still reached no conclusions. But he had arrived at the beginning of an idea. After mulling it over for a while, he decided to give voice to it. “Magic,” he said.
“What?” Ruhm asked.
“We can’t defeat Kadya and Tallik ourselves. But if we could use magic …”
“We need to reach the Veiled Alliance,” Sellis said. “Do you Nibenese have any contacts in that organization?”
“I don’t.”
“No,” Ruhm said. “Not me,” Amoni said.
“But … Rieve might. Her grandmother, anyway.”
“Rieve?” Ruhm echoed.
“She told me her grandmother practices preserving magic. She gave me a magical pebble I can use to locate her.”
“She did?” Myrana said. Her tone hadn’t changed much over the last several hours. Aric had tried talking to her a few times, and been rebuffed more or less politely.
“Yes.”
“I don’t like magic,” Sellis said.
“Neither do I.”
“There are times,” Myrana ventured, “when it can be helpful.”
“Do you really believe that?” Sellis asked.
“I know you don’t trust it, Sellis. And that’s why it’s hard for me to admit this, but … well, I’ve been using it to keep us safe ever since we left the House Ligurto caravan.”
He waved her off with his hands, as if she were an annoying insect. “That’s … that’s not possible.”
“But it’s true.”
“How? If you had done magic, I would have known.”
“Where do you think the burnflower came from, when that hermit was attacking us? How do you suppose I bested the cistern fiend? Or the rain paraelemental? I’ve used it several times.”
He still didn’t believe her; everything about his posture and voice dismissed her claims. “What kind of magic?”
“Magic when done right doesn’t have to defile the land.”
“I … I don’t know what to say, Myrana. It’s like you’ve been lying to me this whole time.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Myrana said. “Those of us who use magic are taught early on not to reveal it. I shouldn’t be telling you now, but if we decide to act on Aric’s plan, you need to know.”
“Still …
“He’s right,” Amoni said.
“Amoni?” Aric asked, aware that he gawped at her. “You too?”
“No,” she said. “But I have known those who use magic without defiling the land.” Her cheeks went red and she held her palms to the fire, then rubbed them together. “And I lied, just now. I do know of a contact for the Veiled Alliance in Nibenay, a vendor on the Palm Court.”
“Magic is not bad, in and of itself,” Myrana said. “Not as destructive as people claim. It’s all in how it’s used.”
“And to what ends,” Amoni added. “Magic can be used for good, in good ways. Healing ways.”
Aric knew some believed that. But one couldn’t stand anywhere on Athas’s surface, during the scorching heat of day or the cruel cold of night, and not see the fruits of magic. So went the stories, anyway.
“I’ll have to think about this more,” Aric said. “I don’t want to rush back, join forces with the Veiled Alliance, and have things go bad. This is too important for that.”
“Think, then,” Sellis said. “But do it quickly. We’re running out of time, Aric.”
“I know. Believe me.”
“Good, then.”
“Good,” Mazzax said. He and Ruhm had kept quiet through the whole discussion. Aric already knew how Ruhm felt about magic—he liked to pretend it didn’t exist. And Aric couldn’t read the dwarf, who had been sitting there the whole time but acted as if had just joined the conversation at its very end.
Later, when everyone else was sleeping, he sat up on guard duty and kept turning over the day’s revelations in his mind. He longed for a simple answer, but there were none to be had.
He had his own doubts about magic, and he wasn’t sure it would defeat Tallik anyway. But he wasn’t sure anything else would.
If only he could talk to Rieve again.
Thinking of her, he felt for the pebble in his purse, and took up a bladder of water and a shallow clay bowl. Beside the fire, he poured some water into the bowl, then dropped the pebble into it. He tried to clear other thoughts from his mind. “Show me Rieve,” he said softly. “Where is Rieve?”
The pebble sat at the bottom of the bowl. Had he used too much water? Too shallow a bowl? She hadn’t been specific about that. He had never tried to do magic, but for all he knew those sorts of things had to be very precise.
He stared at the pebble, bringing an image of Rieve to the forefront of his mind—not hard to do, since he had thought of almost nothing else all day. As he did, the pebble skittered across the bottom of the bowl. Aric peered through the water and saw that the pebble’s surface had grown cloudy.
He plucked it from the water and held it close to his eye. At first he could see nothing, but as he turned it in his fingers, he moved it so the fire’s light shone through from behind it. Then, as surely as if Rieve herself was inside it, he saw her. He almost dropped it, but managed to hang on.
Bringing it close to his eye again, with the fire behind it, he saw Rieve once more.
He didn’t like what he saw.
Her hair was bedraggled. There was a large red mark on her face. Worse, blood trickled from her nose and mouth. Still worse, when he shifted the pebble’s position, the angle changed and he could see a rope tied around her neck. Firelight danced on her face, but Aric couldn’t tell if it was real, or caused by the fire glowing through the stone.
Rieve was in danger.
And in an instant, Aric’s priorities had changed. He put the pebble back into the water, and again it moved at once to the far side of the bowl. To the northwest, the direction they had just come from.
That had to be its way of showing in which direction to look for Rieve.
They could do nothing until morning. Even if he woke the others, convinced them, traveling at night was too dangerous.
But when the sun rose, he would have some persuading to do.
Rieve had passed on Aric’s warning about the raiders to the rest of her family and their guards.
In the end, it hadn’t helped.
The first thing that happened was that Corlan caught up to them. They saw someone behind them, riding hard. Three of the guards dropped back, ready to deal with whatever threat pursued them. Fortunately, Rieve recognized him before anybody skewered him. His apology was so abject and heartfelt she had no choice but to forgive him. Once he was allowed to join the family, he apologized to Pietrus, and to the rest of them. Pietrus still wasn’t sure what the purpose of the whole voyage was; to him it was just an adventure, and the others were content to let him think that.
Once the reunion was accomplished, they continued on toward whatever Grandfather’s destination was. Perhaps the distraction of Corlan’s appearance caused the soldiers to let down their guard. Or perhaps they never had a chance.
They rode through an area thick with dark, jagged boulders, piled one on the other as if from some cataclysmic event. From the cover of those rocks, arrows flew, each one finding its target. Four of the six soldiers fell at once. The other two filled their hands with steel, but when a force of raiders rode out from a hidden canyon, the battle was brief and bloody. Corlan tried to fight, and the raiders mistook him for a member of the family and refused to engage him. They simply rode circles around him, isolating him from the rest of the family, then held steel to Mother’s throat and forced him to disarm.