On a warm autumnal day, Jordel stopped by Aloê’s new house to have breakfast and say, “You don’t have to do this.”
The one irritated her as much as the other, but it was the last day she would endure either one for a while: she was already packed for her journey north. Her ostler had already saddled Raudhfax, in fact.
“That’s a complicated teleological question,” she said.
“I didn’t ask a question.”
“You implied one. Can a mantia be broken?”
“I always try to avoid mantias, myself. Hate causal loops.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Jordel finished the rolls and tea that Aloê had made for her breakfast and said, “There! Ready to start?”
“I suppose so. Are you coming along?”
“Of course! Unless you’d rather I didn’t. Baran’s coming, too, although he discreetly waited outside.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was hungry.”
Aloê looked at her friend narrowly. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be seen with me, J?”
He made a disgusted face. “That kind of stupid, sloppy thinking is precisely why I came! You are my friend. You are my peer in the Graith of Guardians. You stood by me in some rough times. I stand by you.”
“Even though you disagree with me?”
“I don’t know that I do disagree with you. I simply say you need not do this.”
“Ever had a horse that was dying, J?”
“Yes. And, if you want to know, I always pay a professional horse-knacker to put them out of their misery for me. It’s a trivial comfort, but it helps me sleep better.”
“This’ll help me sleep better.”
“I’m not arguing with you, am I?”
“You are, in fact, arguing with me.”
“Well. You started it!”
She kissed his forehead, in preference to kicking him, and walked ahead of him out the door, where Raudhfax was awaiting her, along with Baran and the brothers’ two horses. Jordel’s was an ungainly, sway-backed, yellow nag that began to dance with joy as soon as he saw Jordel approaching; Baran’s was a stalwart brown stallion with an ill-tempered eye, a bit like Baran himself.
“Thanks!” she said to her ostler. “Take care of the house for me, won’t you? I won’t be more than a halfmonth or so.”
“Take your time,” said the ostler, and turned away as they rode off.
They did not, in fact, waste much time on their trip north. It wasn’t a pleasure excursion.
They found Bleys already in residence at the Gray Tower. He greeted them in the atrium with an unpleasantly warm smile.
“I wondered if you would really go through with it, my dear,” he said.
“Call me that again and I’ll cut your throat. I’ll do it personally, too—not through an assassin.”
His smile disappeared, reappeared. He turned away.
“Does everyone in the Graith know about that damned mantia?” she muttered to Jordel and Baran.
Jordel hah-hummed for a bit, and Baran finally said, “Yes. You should not have consulted Noreê. It’s the type of story that would amuse her.”
Noreê was also the greatest seer Aloê knew, apart from the unspeakable Bleys. Perhaps she should have consulted Illion, but he was undergoing the rigors of ascent to the rank of summoner—the one good thing to come out of the Graith recently, she thought.
On the afternoon of the day the mantia had foretold, she stood at the base of the Gray Tower, along with Jordel, Baran, Bleys, and a handful of thains.
Then she could almost smell the lyrea leaves she had burned to summon the mantia; she could feel herself floating free from her body, in time, not space. She could see herself doing what she was about to do.
“There he is,” said Jordel quietly.
Too far away to tell who it was, she nonetheless knew who it was. On his shoulders was a weather-worn cloak of red; in one hand, a black cloak of exile.
She took up her songbow. She spun a gravebolt in her right hand until its impulse well was full. She fitted it to the bow and waited.
Morlock wasn’t following the shifting paths of the Maze. He was breaking across them. She guessed he must be furious, afraid.
He held the black cloak aloft and she knew he was furious, defiant. He had a right to be furious. He and his companions had saved the world that she and the Graith would have let die. He didn’t deserve this. But the Graith had decreed it: he was an exile, too dangerous to be allowed back into the Wardlands. Some feared that he was ambitious to be king. For some, it was bad enough that he could make the attempt. Some hated him, like Bleys, for their own reasons. Some feared him, especially after the battle with Naevros, when some of them had died, dropped dead from the dais under the Dome of the Graith.
Some of those things might change in time. But an exile who returned to the land was killed. That was the First Decree. He could not be allowed to return.
She took aim with the gravebolt.
In her vision of the future, she had seen herself doing these things and she had wondered why—why would she do this, how could she bring herself to do this? But the more she thought about it, the more reasons she thought of.
Not hate or fear. She had been afraid that terrible day of the battle beyond the edge of the world; she had felt pain, as Morlock’s damned sword shattered the soul armor they had made to protect Naevros. But she’d been glad the Graith and the Sunkillers were defeated, glad that the world would go on living.
But if he came back now, he would be killed. There was one way that she knew to keep him from coming back. She knew it would work because she had seen it in the future. Causal loop: knowledge of the future creates the future. . . .
She took aim with the songbow. She could see him quite clearly now. She remembered what they had meant to each other, even though she couldn’t quite summon those feelings now. She didn’t feel anything, really. She wasn’t telling herself this was for his benefit. But if he came back, and they killed him, and she could have prevented it, how could she live with herself? She was doing this for herself. There was work to do in the Graith, in the Wardlands, and it needed her. She had to be alive and reasonably sane to do it.
He was not very near now—still a thousand paces from the base of the Tower at least. But close enough. She was confident her bolt would fly true. She had already seen it all. She let the bolt fly; the bow sang gently in her hand.
“A hit,” Jordel said calmly, as if he were the judge of an archery contest.
Yes: a hit. Morlock had fallen over. She had been wounded herself; she knew what his mind was doing now. He would look to see what had hurt him. He would look at the gravebolt that had passed through him—through his leg, she thought. He would see the runic rose on the bolt and recognize it.
He was motionless for a long time, so long she feared he was dead. (And how would she live with that?)
Then he rose to his feet. He was too far away for her to see his face, but he was looking toward them here, that was obvious.
If she knew him from a mile away, then he ought to know her. She stood away from the group so that he could see her better.
He stood still for a long time as the fire from his Ambrosial blood spread through the plain around him.
At last he moved. He took the red cloak from his shoulders and tossed it away into the burning grass. He took the black cloak in both hands and bound it across his shoulders. He turned and limped away into the west, trailing blood and fire behind him as he went. She stayed watching until he was out of sight. She stayed there, not watching, until the sun set in the east and the bloodfires lit the blue autumnal land below like bonfires.
Jordel touched her shoulder. She turned toward him.
“You did the right thing,” he said. “Come. Let’s go eat.”
“That’s not what you said before.”
“I always say that.”
“I mean . . . about it being the right thing.”
“I didn’t say it was wrong. I said you didn’t need to do it. Now that you’ve done it, you don’t need to feel bad about it. You probably saved his life.”