“Maybe you’re right,” said Danny. “But that’s the system you prefer. By that system, yes, I’m the Gatefather and you’re the Lockfriend.”
Again the silence as she stared at him.
She dashed the glassful of water in his face.
Then she walked to the gate that led to Washington DC and went through it.
Danny wiped the water from his eyes. “Think I’m rehydrated yet?” he asked Veevee.
“She’ll change her mind, Danny.”
“I don’t think so,” said Danny. “To her I’m just a kid. A kid from the North Family. The Illyrians think they’re better than everybody-especially Norths. I don’t think she’s going to change her mind and come crawling back to try to put things back the way they were.”
“Well, so what? She can’t make gates, and you can.”
Danny wanted to cry. “I kind of like to keep my friends.”
“Like you said, sweetie. She never was your friend.”
“Yes she was,” said Danny. “She was a great friend. But she changed her mind.”
“All right. But love is not love if it alters when it alteration finds.”
“That is one of the most convoluted lines of poetry ever written,” said Danny.
“But Sense and Sensibility made me cry and cry,” said Veevee.
“Dead squirrels in the road make you cry.”
“You’re taking this all very calmly,” said Veevee.
“Because it doesn’t matter what Hermia says, Veevee. The Belmage is real. Loki is right-that’s the real war. All this bull about the Families going through Great Gates, that’s just stupid. I need to learn how to eat gates the way Loki did. I need to get to Westil and pull the gates up after me, just as he did.”
“Please don’t tell me that this will involve another trip to Egypt,” said Veevee. “At least bring somebody along to pour water over your head from time to time.”
“You know what?” said Danny. “I’m going to eat a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and go out for a run. I’ve got to make sure my legs still work.”
“So you’re going to stick with the high school thing a while longer.”
“It’s either high school or figure out how to save the world, and whom to save it from.”
“I like it when you say ‘whom,’” said Veevee. “You actually know the rules.”
“I don’t know any rules,” said Danny. “I don’t know anything.”
Inside him, Loki’s gates were murmuring to him. It’s all true, they were saying in their wordless way. Don’t doubt it. True true true. The Dragon is real. The Dragon wants to go through a Great Gate to Westil. Keep him out of the Great Gate.
“All I can do is muddle through as best I can,” said Danny.
“It’s what we all do,” said Veevee.
18
What no one knew about Wad, what he barely knew about himself, was how lost he was. You don’t live a thousand years inside a tree without losing something, and what Wad had lost was his own story.
Once he had been driven by a terrible purpose, something so important it was worth locking himself away from human life and devoting everything to the single task of taking away from any gatemage in Westil and Mittlegard the power to make a Great Gate. In doing this, he diminished all the mages, and consigned generations of human beings to suffering and death for lack of the power of healing that the gatemages had held.
But, waking from the tree, called from it by something he did not recognize or understand, Wad had wandered with no purpose at all. A girl had fed him and given him clothing, so he did not freeze to death or starve. A bakerwoman had taken him in and so he had dwelt in a castle and learned to care about the things that castle dwellers care about-kings and dynasties.
He had followed his body’s inclinations and fallen in love with a woman of beauty and ruthless power. Only gradually had he discovered that he had some moral principles, things he would not do. He would not murder King Prayard’s mistress and their children. He would not rip the baby from Bexoi’s womb in vengeance for her murder of the child they had made together.
It implied that once upon a time, Wad had been a man who thought deeply about right and wrong, and came to conclusions different from those that were common among the mages. That man had learned much about the workings of power, had acquired never-before-seen skills in gatemagery.
Above all, he had strength of will. When he set his mind to a purpose, he accomplished it.
Yet was there any sense in which Wad was still that man?
If he was, what purpose did he have now? Anonoei had her plans, and Wad helped her, as once he had accepted the purpose King Prayard assigned to him, and then had become the willing tool of Bexoi in her plotting.
When Wad came upon Danny North, he had acted according to what was left of the driving purpose of the man that Wad had once been. But when Danny North fought back and ate most of Wad’s own gates, Wad had backed away, beaten, and now even this feckless boy in a faraway place had more purpose in his life than Wad.
No, it was Wad who was feckless. Danny North had accomplished everything he set out to do. His mistakes had been mistakes of ignorance. Even Wad had not known what would happen to a Great Gate made of the captive outselves of other Gatefathers, for the very good reason that few mages had ever had captive gates to work with.
It was Wad who had no sense of responsibility.
No. He could not lie to himself, even in self-loathing. He had far too great a sense of responsibility. When he adopted someone, he took absolute responsibility for them-even when they were his captives, like Anonoei and her sons during their many months in prison; even when they were using him without conscience, like Bexoi and, for all he knew, Anonoei.
Wad especially took responsibility for his failures. Even when he had no idea what the right thing to do might have been, he blamed himself for not having done it.
As he watched Anonoei manipulate everyone whose life touched Bexoi’s, Wad understood quite clearly that Anonoei’s purpose was dark and destructive, and she showed him over and over again why manmagery had always been feared and banned, why manmages were destroyed whenever they were caught at their work. When her plotting came to terrible fruition, just as with Bexoi’s, Wad would bear the terrible guilt of having helped her accomplish it. And yet he had no will of his own to give him the strength to say, Enough, we will do no more.
Or was it that his will was every bit as dark and evil as Bexoi’s, as Anonoei’s, as anyone’s, but by letting them make the decisions, he left himself an excuse? Yes, I share responsibility, but it was not my plot to do this terrible thing.
These were the thoughts that he brooded over, whenever he was not actively doing something else, and sometimes even when he was. Watching Ced raise a tiny dust devil and whip it into such power that it became a blade that could cut through stone, Wad could not stop his mind from wandering back to his own troubles, his own mistakes.
Where is the teacher who can help me know when to use my power, and whom to trust, and whose plans are worth fulfilling?
I don’t even know if my own former plans are the ones I should support, or if I made a terrible mistake fifteen centuries ago.
At that moment, on another world, Danny North took the gates that Wad had given to him-and why not, since he already had them? — and used them to bring back a memory.
Wad had no idea what Danny North was seeing, hearing, experiencing. But to Wad it was all so clear and powerful that he could not escape from it. He lost all contact with the present moment. He could not see Ced or the ancient treemage who was teaching him. He could not feel the sun on his back or the grass in the meadow where he lay.