A wave of nausea swept over Steven and he clung to the staff for support until his knees grew strong beneath him again. ‘Okay. Fine. So, Malagon is in Orindale. Why does he care? He is a powerful monarch, and a sorcerer. Who is coming to meet him who merits such a display of military might?’
Gita grinned broadly at him. ‘Gilmour, my dear. You four, Sallax Farro, and Gilmour Stow.’
Steven felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He closed his eyes as a river of cold sweat ran across his forehead, then tensed, about to retch. Beside him, Brynne sank to her knees.
It was Garec who summoned up the courage to speak first. He leaned heavily on his longbow and announced quietly, ‘Gilmour is dead, Gita.’ He waited for some response from her, but she stared back at him in silent disbelief.
As if to fill the silent void, he went on, ‘We were crossing the Blackstones when an assassin got him. In our camp. He’s dead. We gave him a funeral pyre.’ Garec said nothing about Sallax’s role in the plot to kill the Larion Senator.
Slowly, Gita asked, ‘What happened to the assassin?’
‘He escaped.’ Garec fingered the smooth rosewood of his bow. ‘Whoever it was knew enough about us to cut my bowstring. He was gone from camp before we knew what happened.’
‘And where were you and your magic stick?’ she asked Steven coldly.
‘I was badly injured at the time,’ was the best he could offer. He cringed as he said it; he knew how it sounded.
Silence reclaimed the space between them. Neither Timmon nor Brand made a move to comfort Gita as her world began unravelling. Soon she began to speak again, but her comments were not directed at anyone.
‘My whole life- this moment represents my whole life. We attacked them. We made time for you to get here – we sent riders to Riverend last Twinmoon, but it had fallen. We assumed you were coming, watched for you in the east along the highway, but then this- The Prince Marek sailed right into the harbour. We figured if Malagon’s not at Riverend, he would be here. We can attack, keep them busy, because somehow Gilmour would know. He always knew.’
She wiped a sleeve across her eyes, then stood up straight and turned to Brand and Timmon. Gita was back and giving orders. ‘Get your soldiers ready to travel. We’ll cross in the morning and make for Orindale as soon as possible.’
‘Are we going in together? Or should we plan to break up and make our way into the city incognito?’ A frontal assault would doubtless mean certain death for everyone, but Brand appeared happy for either response from Gita.
Before answering, the Falkan leader turned to Steven. ‘Are you heading for Orindale?’
‘We were, but now that you’ve told us about the defences, I’m not sure. Our ultimate goal is to get to Praga and find a former Larion Senator named Kantu.’
‘Larion Senator?’ Gita gaped at him in disbelief. ‘Young man, there have been no Larion Senators for a thousand Twinmoons.’
‘It’s a long story. We really need to talk before you make any decisions.’
‘Fine. We can send a rider to intercept Sallax. Where had you planned to meet him?’
Steven frowned. ‘No, we really do need to talk, before we do anything.’ He motioned her towards the nearby campfire.
Later, while the others slept, Mark lay beside Brynne, listening for her breathing and marvelling at her ability to sleep in the wake of such momentous news. It still echoed in his mind; he didn’t anticipate being able to sleep before his turn to stand watch. He stared into the darkness and imagined the stone canopy far above, blanketing them from the outside world. For once he was happy to be shrouded by such a formidable coverlet; he wondered for a moment whether it was possible to stay beneath the surface for ever.
Seron, and much worse. The Seron were terrifying enough. They’d been lucky, that night in the Blackstones, but if Steven hadn’t found the staff, they all would have died, perhaps even Gilmour. And then there was Lahp. Together, Steven and Lahp had broken Malagon’s hold on him, and Lahp had protected Steven, up until the moment the warrior died – and even in that moment, he had not hesitated. It had taken four wraiths to defeat the Seron. Mark swallowed hard as he imagined the ghosts tearing Lahp apart from the inside out.
If Lahp was that emotionally and physically resilient, the Seron waiting for them outside Orindale, and in Malakasia, would be impossible to defeat. On the other hand, if Lahp had withstood that brutal attack for so long because he was less than human, the Seron would be equally impossible to defeat. Mark sighed. This was pointless; they were in a lose/lose situation. It would take real magic to defeat the army, powerful magic.
The Falkan Resistance had been routed, and unless they adopted guerrilla tactics and stuck to them, they’d be nothing but a token force, full of determination and eloquent, rousing speeches, but devoid of any real substance. ‘Like Rona’s?’ he wondered aloud, and then fell silent, unnerved at the sound of his voice in the vastness of the cavern. Sallax had talked of a resistance force in Estrad and southern Rona, but save for a cache of weapons lost in the cistern at Riverend Palace, they’d seen no evidence of it.
He turned his musings back to the task at hand, content to leave military engagements to those better qualified to organise them. Their path did not lie with the Falkan Resistance, anyway. If they were to find Kantu, they would need to employ stealth, cunning, timely retreats, and a healthy ration of luck.
Steven desperately needed the Larion Senator’s help if he were to master the quixotic magic of the staff and bring its full potential to bear against Nerak. Mark hoped his friend was up to the task; he was worried that Steven’s dogged determination to preserve life, no matter how badly they were being threatened, would cost them all dearly in the end. It had been dreadful, watching him kneel over the body of the dead soldier while an enemy force surrounded them on the beach. Mark had wanted to scream, ‘Steven, pay attention, you idiot! He’s dead. Leave him and see to us, before we are too.’
Mark sighed. He was pretty sure Steven had only just begun to tap the staff’s inherent strength: if he’d wanted to, he could have incinerated the entire band of assailants in one sweeping gesture. Once he knew how to employ the magic properly, he might use the staff to level a mountain range, to summon fire from the sky, or to bring Welstar Palace down about Nerak’s neck and bury the murdering bastard in a pile of rubble.
He’d watched Steven battle the wraith army; it had been like watching a ballet, graceful and perfectly coordinated. That was the magic Steven needed at his fingertips, not rock clouds and glowing balls of light.
Mark grimaced: this was pointless; he was speculating on things he knew nothing about. Steven would do his best to save them all, to save Eldarn, and to find them a way back to Colorado. He rolled onto his side and hoped once again to fall asleep.
It was a long while before he did.
THE CROSSING
In the avens before dawn, Mark dreamed of the beach in Estrad and the night he slipped and fell through the open portal stretched out across the living room floor at 147 Tenth Street. He looked to the twin moons hanging in the night sky, and the ten thousand visible stars, thick in the air like a cloud of luminous insects, illuminating a pale sandy ribbon stretching off and disappearing into the darkness in either direction. It was humid. Mark removed his sweater and boots and strode into the water, basking in the familiar caress of the waves that gently tugged about his ankles as if to drag him out to sea.
His father was there. It was Jones Beach in New York, and his father had just sat heavily on a folding aluminum lawn chair. The family’s large yellow umbrella cast a circle of dim shade on the sand, and Mark heard the snap of a beer can being opened. But his father didn’t face the water, nor go in swimming, nor did he stretch his bare toes towards the foam as the tide ambled in that afternoon. Rather, he faced the city, turning his chair and squinting into the distance as if to catch a glimpse of the sun flashing off the silvery jets taking off and lumbering into the sky above Jamaica Bay, huge flying fish captured for an instant in a photographer’s flash. By the end of the day, his father would have finished six beers, two ham sandwiches and an ice cream cone, the latter purchased on his one trip to the public restrooms out along the boardwalk. Mark held his hand as they walked and his father regaled him with tales of Karl Yazstremski’s late-inning heroics the previous night and how tiny the ball had looked as it bounced off Fenway’s Green Monster for a game-winning double.