Joisan must have been mindsharing, for her next words echoed my thoughts. “We have food left to last us but one more day…” She took another piece of journeybread, broke it, frugally stowing the remaining portion back in the pack. I must have shown my surprise as she chewed so eagerly on the tough, sustaining food, for she added, “I cannot remember when I have been so hungry. It must be the mountain air. And, of course, we did not pause at midday.”
“You are right, now that I think of it. Today,” I confessed, and felt some guilt at my blindness, “until we came into sight of this place, all passed in a haze for me. Though I pushed you hard, my lady, I did not know what lay at the end of our trail until I gazed upon Kar Garudwyn. Then it was as if this had always been there in my mind, waiting, its image behind my eyelids when I closed them…”
We talked but little more, soon rolling into our blankets, drowsy with long riding and perhaps some strain of self-discovery. The globes on the wall shone steadily. I lay watching their reflection on the sheets of water in the fountain, wishing I knew some way to lessen their glow lest they disturb my lady. My mind wandered… I heard Joisan’s soft breathing from the pallet next to mine, Guret’s some distance away.
My eyes widened. The lights were dimming! As though my thought had reached into stone and metal, they banked to a soft red glow. Dimly, overhead, I could now make out the stars before moonrise. Somehow this small example of sorcery, more than any other that had already evidenced itself, made me aware of how attuned this place was to my mind… my spirit.
My old fear of Power returned to tense my body. I forced myself to relax, allowing that peace to wrap around me as a cloak against a winter wind. Power, as Joisan had shown me that night so long ago, could be used for comfort and protection, as well as by the Shadow for evil. Perhaps I would grow used to that part of me in time. Time… how long had Kar Garudwyn waited? Perhaps here, time was measured differently… My thoughts jumbled, then stilled, as I sank down into sleep.
I awoke clear-headed for the first time in three days, stretching luxuriantly in the wash of sunlight from the east. Guret, I saw, was already up, his fingers busy rubbing clean the headstall of Vengi’s hackamore. Joisan lay still in deep sleep, her face in shadow. Sitting up, I made to block those early rays that she might slumber a few minutes longer. Those dark marks beneath her eyes last night had troubled me. Now, at long last, perhaps we could rest, spend time simply being. Today we would explore the citadel further, find rooms, begin to claim this strange place, adapt it to our use.
I gazed off across the morning-revealed heights, seeing the topmost portion of the other mountain nearly at eye level—though at a considerable distance—from the arched windows on the eastern side of the courtyard. Purple mist veiled that shorn-off peak, seeming to coil snake-fashion among those faraway, tumbled boulders. I tried in vain to follow the lines of those ancient stones, hoping to ascertain whether they were naturally placed or else marked a way of the Old Ones. I could not be sure… there was an odd distortion when I studied any one part of the mountaintop plateau, almost like the glamourie Joisan and Guret had described yesterday when they attempted to ride past the winged globes guarding the valley entrance.
Sunlight strengthened, brightened. Rising, I sought the windows opposite the entrance that I might see more clearly.
Kar Garudwyn, the full light of the sun made clear, actually rested upon the lesser of the twin mountain peaks. Between the two lay only a torturous trail that swooped down from the rear of this citadel, then climbed jaggedly up again, so rocky a way to look as though best traveled only by those tiny, narrow-hoofed deer that forage on the lichens and mosses growing at higher altitudes.
There was a movement beside me. Joisan, her hair loosed and tumbled from its neat braids, her eyes wide as they looked out upon that twin, somewhat higher, peak, clutched my arm. “ ‘Tis the same… the very same…” she murmured. “But Car Re Dogan is no more…”
“Car Re Dogan?” For some reason that name, though I was certain I had never heard it before, held a certain haunting familiarity. “Where—or what—is that, Joisan?”
She started, her fingers tightened on me. I guessed that she was unaware she had spoken aloud. Her eyes met mine, dropped abruptly. “I… have dreamed, too, Kerovan. Even as you saw the object of your dreams when we looked up at this place yesterday evening, so with the morning’s light, I see mine.”
“What kind of dreams?” I demanded anxiously, thinking of those strangely shifting shadows shrouding the other mountain’s summit. They disturbed me. One needed no lessoning in theurgy to realize that these mountains must be as cloaked in sorcery as the rest of this haunted land—how else could they have proved such an effective barrier ’twixt east and west, High Hallack and Arvon?
“Dreams of long ago, my lord… a dream whose end has not yet been revealed to me. There was an Adept, once, who lived in a Keep atop that mountain over there… Margrave of the Heights, he was, the watcher and guardian between the ancient land and the land from which his people had, mostly, withdrawn—High Hallack. Only there were none of the Dalesblood abiding there then, for it was long and long ago…” Her voice had taken on the cadence of a songsmith’s as she spoke, staring out across those twisted ways.
“Did he know Landisl?” I asked, fascinated and more than a little disturbed by and for her.
“I don’t know…” She hesitated, then shivered. “His place is gone, and Kar Garudwyn still stands. Oh, my lord… more and more I feel as though there is truly a designed purpose in our coming here. A purpose beyond finding a home, a cause we yet sense but dimly. Perhaps a reason that will be years… decades… in the revealing. I feel like a playing piece pushed hither and yon at the will of something greater—and I do not like it!”
I nodded. “In the past… I have felt the same. Do you recall Neevor’s words to us, that day we bested Galkur? He said that he—Landisl—had a part in my making, and that someday I might follow a road to Power that perhaps he had walked before me… Do you remember that?”
“Yes.” Her voice was soft. “But I also am mindful of your answer to him… that you chose to follow no road which led to the holding of Power—that you wished to be only Kerovan, lord of nothing, man of no great talent…”
I smiled at her ruefully. “You and Guret both have a knack for summoning my own words back to haunt me. There is a time for holding to such, and a time for letting go. A time for choices of the mind, and a time for choices of the heart. And sometimes only the fullness of time can tell us if we have chosen well or ill.” I drew her close as I bent to kiss her forehead solemnly. “Joisan… you are truly a Wise One, my brave lady.”
She laughed shakily, her eyes downcast. “You give me too much credit, my lord. I can be as foolish—or as cowardly—as the next one. Just as you pointed out, sometimes we all cast away things that may be good just because we fear. Truth is a two-edged sword. Before we left Anakue, Zwyie made a foretelling for me. I awoke this morning, having dreamed of her words. “You shall journey and you shall find a home of ancient wisdom, a place of ancient evil. What are now two shall be three… then six, to face that not of earth…
“Indeed,” I mumbled, my mind worrying at those cryptic words as a hunting hound might worry a lure-skin. We have journeyed and found a place of ancient wisdom right enough. As for evil… could it be that well I battled?”
Joisan shrugged. “Perhaps. Foretellings are chancy matters in the best of cases.”
“What means ‘two shall be three… then six’? Three is a number of power, but not so six. Do you understand it, Joisan?”