He begged her to stay. He got down on his knees, this strong and driven man, this man who had endured and survived so much, and he pleaded with her. He wept uncontrollably. It was useless. Worse, it was pointless. She did not understand his behavior. She had no frame of reference for doing so. Spirits did not weep or beg. They acted instinctively and out of need. For her, the choice was clear. She was a creature of the forests and the spirit world. He was not. She could not stay with him.
When finally she turned to leave, her recognition of him already beginning to fade, his desperation turned to rage. Without thinking, his life ruined, his torment too much to bear, he leapt upon her and drove his hunting knife through her back and into her heart. She was dead before he bore her to the earth.
He sprang up instantly then and ripped his knife free to kill the boy as well, but the boy was gone.
The Borderman ran after him, his mind collapsed and turned inward so that nothing else existed. In one hand he carried the hunting knife, wet with the shape-shifter’s blood, waving it at the shadows about him, at the fate that had undone him. In the shadowy concealment of the trees, in the silence of the forest, he sought the boy. His madness was thorough and complete. Bloodlust ruled his life.
He ran until he collapsed in exhaustion, and then he slept.
But before he could wake to resume his search, the boy found him, pried the knife from his sleeping hand, and with a sure and practiced touch, cut his throat.
Truls Rohk’s low, guttural voice went silent. Crouched and hidden from view, he continued to slide through the tall grass ahead of Bek. Bek waited for him to continue his tale, but he did not. Sweat coated the boy’s sun-browned face, a damp sheen prompted as much by his horror as by his exertion. To have watched your father kill your mother and then to have killed your father was an experience too horrifying to contemplate. What must it have felt like to have witnessed and endured such madness at two years of age? Even if you were a spirit creature, a shape-shifter, and not entirely human, what must it have been like? Worse than he could imagine, Bek decided, because Truls Rohk was half human and cloaked in human sensibilities.
“Stay low,” the shape-shifter growled in warning.
He stopped and turned back to Bek. His face was hidden in the folds of his hood and his body concealed by his cloak, but Bek could feel the heat of him emanate from beneath his coverings.
“I buried them where they will never be found. I felt nothing at first, not until later, when I had time to think on it.” Truls Rohk’s voice seemed distant and reflective. “It was not so terrible until I realized I had lost the only two people who were like me—not because we were the same physically, but because we were bonded by blood. These were my parents. No one else would ever care for me as they could. Even my father might have loved me, given time and sanity. If he had not gone mad, perhaps. Now I was alone, not all of one species or the other, human or spirit. I was some of each, and that meant I belonged with neither.”
He laughed softly, bitterly. “I never tried living with humans. I knew what their response to me would be. They spied me in the mountains a couple of times and sought to hunt me as they would an animal. I tried living with shape-shifters, for there are bands of them concealed deep in the Wolfsktaag, and I could find their hiding places. But they smelled the part of me that was human, and they knew what I was. My mother had crossed a forbidden line, they said. She had committed an unpardonable act. She had died for her foolishness. It would be best if I died, too. I could never be one of them. I must live out my life alone.”
He looked at Bek. “Do you understand yet why we are alike?”
Bek shook his head. He had no idea at all. He was not sure he cared to speculate.
“You will,” the other whispered.
He turned away and began moving ahead again through the tall grass, closing swiftly now on the castle entry, another of night’s shadows. Bek followed, not knowing what else to do, still waiting to hear why they were alike, still wondering what was going to happen to him. He had come this far on faith and because of his need to be more than a spectator on this voyage. Had he made a mistake?
The castle rose before them, a maze of crumbling stone walls and black holes where doors and windows had fallen away. The moon had dropped toward the horizon, and the shadows cast by towers and battlements fell across the earth like long, black garments. No sound came from within the ruins. Nothing moved in the dark.
Truls Rohk stopped and faced him once more. “The Druid looked for the key’s guardian within the castle walls. He did not think to consider the guardian might be the castle itself—his first mistake. He looked for the key’s guardian to defend the key by attacking and destroying those who invaded. He did not think to consider the guardian might rely instead on deception—his second mistake. He sought his answers with reason and magic, with a certainty that one or the other must give him the answers he needed. He did not think to consider that his adversary relied on neither—his last mistake.”
Smoothly, he retreated through the grasses to hover close. Bek flinched at the other’s approach, uncomfortable with looking at the black hole of Truls Rohk’s hood and the eyes that haunted there. “The guardian of the third key is a spirit, and it dwells within these castle walls. It has no presence but for the castle itself and wards its treasures equally. The key is but one of its possessions; it has no special value to the spirit. Whoever put it there knew that. The castle wards everything equally, hiding all, revealing nothing, an immutable sentry. It deceives, boy. Like me. Like you.”
“How do we penetrate that deception?” Bek asked, glancing up sharply now, eager to know.
The strange eyes glimmered. “We try seeing with different eyes.”
They moved forward to the very edge of the grasses, no more than a few yards from the drawbridge and the castle entry. They had stayed low during their approach, hidden by the grasses, concealed by tall stalks, not because the guardian could see them if they stood, for it had no eyes, but because it could sense their presence once they were exposed.
“Time to use other means to conceal ourselves,” Truls Rohk advised, hunching down within his robes. “Easy enough for me. I am a shape-shifter and can become anything. Harder for you, boy. But you have the tools. Hum for me again. This time, use your voice as if you were hiding still within the grasses, as if they were all around you. Here, slip this over your head.”
He handed Bek a cloak, torn and frayed and dirtied. Bek slipped into it obediently. It smelled of the grasses the shape-shifter wished him to blend into. He took a moment to adjust the garment, then looked at the other questioningly.
Truls Rohk nodded. “Go on. Do as I told you. Hum for me. Use the sound to change the air about you. Stir it like water at the end of a stick. Push what you can away from you. Bury what you can’t deep inside. Make yourself a part of the cloak.”
Bek did, losing himself in the smells and feel of the cloak, in his vision of the plains, burrowing deep into loam and roots, into a place where only insects and animals ventured. He hummed softly, steadily for a time, then stopped and looked at the shape-shifter again.
“You see a little of it now, don’t you?” the other whispered. “A little of how you are? But only a little. Not yet all. Come.”
He took Bek out from their concealment into the open, his form changing visibly in front of the boy, turning liquid, losing shape against the night. Bek hummed softly, wrapping himself in the feel and smell of his cloak, masking himself, hiding who and what he was deep within. They entered the castle without difficulty, moving from the darkness of the outer courtyards and into the gloom of the inner halls. They penetrated deep within the ruins, advancing steadily, as if they were no more than a breeze carried off the grasslands. Walls appeared before them, looking solid and impenetrable, but Truls Rohk passed right through them with an astonished Bek following in his wake. Stairs appeared where none had been moments earlier, and they climbed or descended accordingly. Doors materialized and closed behind them. Sometimes the air itself changed from light to dark, from pitch to clear liquid, altering the nature of the path ahead. Gradually, Bek came to see that the entire castle was nothing of what it seemed, but was instead a vast labyrinth of mirages and illusions integrated into the stone and designed to deceive—to provide doorways and paths that led nowhere, to offer obstacles where none existed, to obscure and confuse.