At last Tennice pulled up somewhere deep in the forest. He gave me a hand down from the lathered roan and kicked open the door of a squat hut made of poorly joined logs. “We lost them, I think,” he said, urging me through the doorway. “No one knows about this place.”
Baglos tethered the horses on the lee side of the hut. While Tennice and I carried our packs inside, the Dulcé and the Prince tended the beasts, rubbing them down with a blanket Tennice had used for a saddle. Before long, Baglos joined us in the hut.
Shivering, the Dulcé and I pulled out blankets and what little we had that was dry, sharing with Tennice. After a brief glance inside, D’Natheil remained standing in the doorway, staring out into the rain, one hand peeling strips of soft wood from the rotted facing. When Baglos offered him a plain silver flask pulled from the leather bag he always carried over his shoulder, he shoved the Dulcé away and stepped outside, striding across the soggy clearing to a low brick wall, part of the abandoned charcoal oven. He perched sideways on the wall, drew up his knees, and rested his head on them, letting the cold rain pour over his head and back.
For myself, I appreciated Baglos’s offering. The potent, sweet wine left a trail of fire down my throat.
Tennice broke the tired silence. “And now can someone explain all this to me?”
“I can try,” I said. “If you’ve no wish to be… involved… I couldn’t blame you.”
“I’ve just left my friend and employer wallowing in his own blood, and I’ve been pursued through the forest by those who make me feel like someone else is living in my skin. And in the midst of it all appears a woman I believed ten years dead, who happens to be in the company of two most unusual strangers. Not likely I can just leave it.”
“The ones who murdered Ferrante are called Zhid,” I said, as I tried to get my thin, damp blanket to make a double layer around my cold feet. “They, as well as my two friends here, come from… someplace else. I’m not sure where. Clearly you’ve guessed some of this as you watched D’Natheil—that surly one who prefers the rain to our company. I seem to have gotten myself mixed up with sorcerers again.”
“I knew it…”
I told him how D’Natheil had come to me, and the evidence that led me to believe that it was not by chance. “… and so, even though for the past ten years I believed myself as dead as the rest of you, I have now been selected, coerced, or summoned to play nursemaid to a mute, half-wild princeling who can scarcely remember his own name. And this other one—the good Baglos—says he’s been appointed as D’Natheil’s ‘Guide,” but he knows nothing of where he is to guide him, and cannot tell me where their home lies, and in fact knows very little unless his master bids him. And somehow D’Natheil must remember how he is supposed to go about saving the world.“
“This makes no sense.”
“Absolutely correct. I’ll confess that it’s more than a little unnerving to listen to these two and attempt to find some logical conclusion to it.”
Even Tennice’s puzzled expression could not persuade me to voice the absurd speculation that had been running around the back of my head for the past few days. Where had D’Natheil and Baglos come from? From a land called Gondai that appeared on no map I had ever seen in my father’s vast collection of maps, nine tenths of it laid waste embroiled in a war that had lasted a thousand years. From an Avonar that was not Karon’s Avonar, but far older, a city of sorcerers. Across an enchanted bridge that connected Gondai to a land with no sorcery, a land that the people of D’Natheil’s Avonar considered exile. We in the Four Realms were indeed turned inward, giving scant attention to the vast reaches of the world beyond our borders. But how could such places exist and our people not know of them? Enchantment… sorcery… another place…
Tennice took a long pull at one of our wineskins. “Who are these Zhid? And what does Ferrante have to do with any of this?”
“From what I understand, the Zhid are the ancient enemies of D’Natheil’s people… Karon’s people. And Ferrante—” I puzzled over it again, the intricacy of the puzzle distracting me from my unnerving ideas. “Baglos claims he is unable to explain more than I’ve already told you, and that D’Natheil is the one who must explain their mission. And he says that D’Natheil’s condition—his inability to speak and his loss of memory—is certainly new. And so I decided that the only hope to discover what’s locked inside D’Natheil’s head is to find someone to read what’s there in the way Karon could.”
“But Ferrante was no sorcerer.”
“Another of the J’Ettanne could do it.”
With every justification, Tennice stared at me as if I’d gone berserk. “They’re all dead, Seri.”
“Are they? When Karon first went to the University, his father told him that in time of trouble he should go to Ferrante, that Ferrante was the only person outside their community who could be trusted implicitly, that he was sworn by the most sacred of oaths never to reveal a J’Ettanne to anyone. Ever. In that last autumn before he was arrested, Karon began to wonder if perhaps the professor was unable to tell him the truth, that Ferrante took his oath so seriously that he wouldn’t even reveal one J’Ettanne to another. He never had the opportunity to confront Ferrante with his theory.”
Tennice’s eyes had grown wide as I said this, and when I paused, he spoke in quiet excitement. “The list of those who are left…”
“What?”
“I can’t believe it. You’re right. Karon was right. It’s so obvious now.” His eyes glittered behind his spectacles. “Ferrante had records of all the students he ever taught over the years. Hundreds of them. Under each name he would list the topics they had covered, thesis titles, research projects, and the like. He was forever asking me to find out who had done the work on the Battle of Horn’s Cavern or written a discourse on the Honneck Invasion. On one of my delving expeditions, I came across three instances of Karon’s name. Two entries were quite typical, one from his student years when he first came to Yurevan, the other from his second sojourn, when he was studying archaeology and Martin met him there. But the third entry had nothing beside it but a mark. Several other names were on that list, most with the same mark beside. I asked Ferrante about those entries, and he said only that it was ”the list of those who are left.“ Stupid me, I never understood. I’ll wager frogs to elephants, they were J’Ettanne. There’s your answer…”
“But we can’t risk going back for it.” The disappointment was crushing. To be so close…
Tennice bumped my chin with his bony knuckle. “Have you forgotten so much? Though I never had Karon’s intelligence, Martin’s wisdom, or Julia’s wit, I possessed one skill that was out of the ordinary. These cursed eyes don’t see so well as they did, but the head to which they’re attached is the same.”
“Your memory!”
“Four names were still unmarked: Lazari, Bruno, Kellea, Celine.”
“And was there any clue as to where these people might be found?”
“Not in the book. Bruno, I never ran across again, nor Celine. But until a year ago, someone named Lazari wrote often from Kallamat. And Kellea”—he looked as though he might burst. “Well, there’s an herb shop near the University—I’m not sure exactly where. But once a year, Ferrante had a little box of a rare herb sent to Verdillon to ease his old cook’s gout. He said he could get it nowhere else, but that Kellea had a gift for finding things.”
“She’s here in Yurevan!” I jumped to my feet, unable to contain my excitement though cold reason told me we could not set out right away. Even if the shop was easily found, and the woman still there, we dared not leave the forest. Night was falling. The Zhid would be seeking. Even D’Natheil had come indoors at last, settling in a corner, where he was cleaning his knife and his sword with his sodden shirt. “I wonder if this house ever held people who cared for each other in a way that would hold back the Zhid?” I said.