“Then the Lady must go with you, my lord,” said Ven’Dar quietly. “If she reminds you of the past with all its joys and guilts, then you are indeed the man who should be making these dreadful decisions. And truly, our Way says she must make her own choice as to the physical dangers, the risks to her heart, and the way she will endure what is to come.”
Ven’Dar began wrapping a round of cheese in a piece of cloth, and soon it was as if time had taken up its path again. Uneasy, but moving forward.
“It has been three days since you slept, my lord,” said the Preceptor. “And before that you were in combat for five more. You can scarcely stand. Even the urgency of your mission cannot preclude your need for rest. Any chance of success in whatever you attempt will require all your strength.”
Karon’s shoulders sagged a little. “Damnable body… ” He came back to the smoldering fire, then, and sat heavily beside me, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
Taking his shoulders, I pulled him sideways until his head rested in my lap.
“Three hours, Ven’Dar,” he said, his command already slurred. “No more.”
“Aye, my lord. Three hours it is.”
I stroked his damp hair with my fingers as he dropped instantly into profound sleep. His sword belt lay just beside us, sword and dagger within easy reach of his hand. D’Arnath’s weapons. Some among the Dar’Nethi believed these sacred talismans ensured that the city of Avonar itself would never fall and had been willing to sacrifice the incapable D’Natheil to the Lords to retrieve them. Karon had laughed and said he was grateful that our first venture to the Bridge had returned both Prince and weapons safely to Avonar. The memory of his laughter was a knife in my breast.
Ven’Dar had closed his eyes and sat motionless for a moment. Now he blinked and gave me a sad smile. “I’ve cast a winding to wake me in three hours, so I am going to take the opportunity to sleep a bit myself.” He bundled a cloak under his head and pulled a blanket up to his chin, yawning. “You should do the same.” He closed his eyes and was instantly asleep.
My back rested on a protruding rock. My fingers traced the wide brow and sculpted jaw, grizzled with many days’ growth of light hair… D’Natheil’s face, stern even in rest. I closed my eyes and tried to remember Karon’s face, but for the first time since his death, his features would not resolve clearly, as if we lay together in the darkness and I could catch only the shape of his cheekbone or the line of his dark hair. I wished I could sleep.
Paulo had sat quiet since giving his testimony, looking soberly from one of us to the other. Now he, who could usually sleep anytime and anywhere, sat staring into the dying fire. After a while he muttered a quiet oath, jumped up, and wandered restlessly back through the arch to the Pool of Rebirth. Before very long, he was back.
He crouched beside the fire and poked it aimlessly. Then, so quietly I almost missed it, he said, “If we was to leave now, ride hard, you’d have three hours’ head start.”
Three hours. To do what? Hold my son? Convince him to run away? Find an answer?
“Not deceiving. You could leave the Prince a writing to tell him we’ve just gone ahead…”
And so, many hours later after our frantic ride from Avonar, I crouched behind the still-warm rocks and waited for the signal from Paulo that all was well. After an interminable, breathless time it came, two flares of light in quick succession - a pause - and the third.
I hurried down the barren slope toward the crumbling stone walls. A tall, lanky figure appeared against the lighted rectangle of the doorway. Paulo. And another, smaller person beside him. Not tall enough for Gerick. I hesitated, just outside the light that spilled from the doorway.
“Come, my lady. It’s all right. I didn’t mention we brought someone else with us when we come from the Bounded,” said Paulo, as soon as I was within earshot. “I thought it best to leave her out of my story until I knew what was what. She’s watched over the young master’s body when he wasn’t in it. Lady Seri, this is Princess Roxanne. I told her you know her da.”
Evard’s missing daughter! I’d not given the girl so much as a thought in the hours since my awakening. Fair like her mother and just as regal in her bearing. A pale, smooth complexion out of place amid the half collapsed walls and piles of windblown debris that shaped the little haven. Yet her sturdy brown shirt, tunic, and breeches looked strangely appropriate on her, and her father’s sharply intelligent eyes flashed in the firelight as she sat on the cracked paving stones and watched over my sleeping son.
Gerick was curled up in a dusty cloak, his head pillowed on a small bundle. If I’d not laid my hand on him and felt the slow shallow breathing, I would have believed him dead already. He was as pale as starlight and dreadfully thin.
“Another day and the water will run out,” said Roxanne, as she dripped a clear liquid from a tiny cup into Gerick’s mouth. “He said he’d come back before the water was gone, but he’s not moved so much as a finger since he put himself back to sleep three days ago.”
“What do you mean, ‘come back’? How is it you’re here? It wasn’t Gerick who abducted - ”
“No. The confounded little Vroon and his friends took me to the Bounded by mistake. Gerick freed me from their wretched prison, but he never really told me anything that was going on - not then - only that the place we were was ‘not Leire.’ ”
The girl’s animated expression took fire in the firelight as the torrent of words poured out of her. “Then, after he almost goes crazy when he finds that ring spinning in the cave, and just before he leaves for this cheery place, he tells me he needs to sleep for a few days while Paulo goes off to find his mother, and that he needs a friend - a friend, he says - to come along and watch and make sure he doesn’t die - for heaven’s sake - to make sure he doesn’t die by giving him water from the Source! I’m not an idiot, and you couldn’t be in the. Bounded very long without becoming accustomed to the fact that the world isn’t quite as you believed. But I’d never had anyone trust me like that. And I said that if we were truly friends, then he needed to tell me what this was about. Of course, he didn’t tell me everything, not by a league or ten. After we got here, he lay down and went away. Gone. His body was here for me to keep alive, but he was riding around with Paulo like a fat duchess in a carriage to help him look for you, while hiding where his enemies couldn’t find him. Who could believe that?”
She slapped her palm on the stopper of the blue flask, cramming it tight, then stuffed flask and cup back into a worn gray rucksack.
“Three days ago, he came back,” she continued. “After ten dreary days with his mostly dead body, and I thought I was going to be here forever and not even know quite where. I wake up in the morning to find him walking around like he’d just dozed off for an hour. He ate half the food we had left and told me about what had happened with Paulo and you and the list enchantment. He said we’d just have to wait to see what came about next. But it wasn’t two hours until he turned fifty colors of white, and I thought we were dead, because it was just the way he’d look when the firestorms came. Those storms were the most terrifying things, as if the world were shattering to bits. The poor Singlars would get caught in them, and their towers disintegrate right before your eyes, and one time I came near falling into one of the rifts and a Singlar pulled me out. It was the worst fright I’ve ever had. With Gerick looking so pale and awful, I expected this place to split open and fall apart any moment, but he said it wouldn’t happen here, and maybe it wouldn’t happen back in the Bounded either, if he could just turn off his head for a while. He felt so responsible. He said the storms were his fault, though I’ll never believe that. He almost died trying to stop them. Do you think I’ll ever get used to this, Lady Seriana? Bodies lying around with no minds in them, bodies walking around with two - ”