Chapter Seventeen
The Garowai swam farther into the lake, and the mist dissipated into white wraiths as the rest of his body followed: black-leather wings folded against his back and a long spiked tail gliding after him. He submerged, and the lake and its strange reflections rolled in to cover his wake.
Chris’s breath, trapped in the back of his throat, seeped free. Up to now, the Garowai had sounded like some wise old man or something. But this creature looked like it preferred eating to admonishing.
Allara kicked free of her stirrups and dropped to the shore next to him. “Be polite.”
At the edge of the bank, the Garowai surfaced, and water sluiced off the roached mane that continued halfway down his back. He spread his wings and tilted them to let them drain, then shook himself like a dog. His mane fluffed some, but still lay dark and clumped around his face. As he climbed from the shallows to the dry pebbles, his lips peeled back and a double row of needle teeth flashed.
Allara saluted with her thumb and forefinger touching her closed eyes. “Garowai. The Gifted has come. And so has—”
“So I see.” The voice grumbled like the first hint of thunder.
Chris took a full step back. It talked? But then again, why not? Before yesterday, he’d never seen Cherazii and Rievers either. He made himself step up again.
The Garowai peered into Chris’s face. The wrinkle of fur above his eyes suggested amusement. “So you’re the Gifted the God of all sends to us?” His words tapered in a strange accent.
Chris fought the need to do something with his hands, to shove them into his pockets, cross them over his chest, something to cover their emptiness.
He cleared his throat. “That seems to be the consensus.”
“But, from this tone of yours, I gather you don’t grant your approval?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say anyone consulted me.”
“No one consulted you about giving you life either, I think? Or whether or not you wanted to be strong and healthy?” The Garowai laughed deep in his chest. “You take for granted the gifts you like and resent those you do not.”
Chris glanced at Allara, but she didn’t look back. She’d told him to be polite. She hadn’t told him he had to agree with everything. “Seems to me if I didn’t want it, it wasn’t a good gift.”
“Well, now, whether or not it’s a gift depends entirely on the perspective of the giver, not the receiver.” The Garowai’s mouth gapped, almost as if he were grinning. He looked at Allara. “How long since he crossed?”
“Yesterday morning. I found him amongst a group of Cherazii taken prisoner by a Koraudian raiding party. And—” her voice tremored, “—Mactalde crossed yestere’en.”
The Garowai scraped a foreclaw through the charcoal pebbles into the damp sand beneath. “Did he indeed?”
“You knew.” Color drained from her face. Her nostrils flared. “All these years, you knew he was coming. But you told Harrison Garnett, and not me. Why?”
“I’m not given to know all things. I did not know Mactalde would return.”
“I’m not talking about Mactalde. I’m talking about him, a second Gifted! He shouldn’t be here!”
“And yet he is.”
“Yes. And because he is, so is Mactalde.”
The Garowai looked at Chris and raised one eyebrow.
Standing before this creature, even the few defenses Chris had tried to offer Allara were stripped away. His gut twisted. He opened his mouth, found his tongue too dry to speak, and tried again. “Someone told me the dreams would stop if I brought him back.”
“Who told you this?”
“Orias Tarn.”
The Garowai cocked his head at Allara. “A Keeper has betrayed the lake? That does put a different light on things.”
She stepped forward. “I don’t care about what you didn’t know. I only care that you trusted Harrison Garnett and not me! Why? I need to understand that. Just that.”
The Garowai stared back at her. Only the twitch of his tail spikes showed movement. “I did not tell you because you did not need to know. Twenty years of preparation wouldn’t have changed a thing. You would just have grown twenty years older, fretting over the inevitable. I tell you only what I believe you need to know, only when you need to know it.”
The wind scattered loose tendrils of her hair. “Was what I knew enough to stop Harrison from trying to do the forbidden? Did what I know stop him—” she pointed at Chris, “—from doing it anyway?”
“Dearheart, I am not the one of us who needs to learn to trust.” He lowered his head and snuffled her hair, almost a caress. “Go on into the city. I wish to speak to the Gifted now.”
She hesitated. Then she turned and mounted. After she had adjusted her reins, she looked up. The anger still smoldered in her face, but it was tempered now by something else—a desolation almost. “Mactalde would never have returned had you told me.”
“Shush yourself.” The Garowai sniffed several times, then sneezed. He blinked before turning back to her. “You worry about the Gifted and let him worry about the rest of it. Now get along with you.”
She dragged her stallion around and urged him into a trot. At the base of the trail, she stopped to exchange a few words with Quinnon, then laid her heels to the horse’s sides. Quinnon remained, leaning forward over his saddle horn, watching Chris and the Garowai.
“Well, now.” The Garowai tilted his head down shore as an indication for Chris to follow. “Let us walk.”
Chris watched over his shoulder as Allara’s stallion lunged up the steep hill. She leaned forward, her hands in his mane. She didn’t look back.
“What might your name be?” the Garowai asked.
He turned. “Chris Redston.”
The Garowai limped with a heavy stride. He kept his wings folded over his back, and his tail trailed through the sand behind. “I’ve been watching you a long time, ever since you were a child.”
Now that was an unsettling thought—or was it supposed to be comforting?
Chris cleared his throat. “I talked to Harrison Garnett before I crossed, and he said you showed me to him when I was a kid.” If the idea of the Garowai watching him was unsettling, the notion of Harrison doing it was downright disturbing. “How does that work?”
“That would be the secret of Ori Réon.” The Garowai rocked to a stop and turned to the lake. “What do you see out there?”
Chris looked past the Garowai to the wide expanse of water and the images undulating on its surface. “It’s like the lake is reflecting something, or lots of somethings.”
“Do you have the Orimere?”
He reached into his pocket for the stone, and electricity shot up his arm. He gritted his teeth. Obviously, this thing was going to take some more getting used to.
The Garowai hobbled two steps back to give him an unobstructed view of the lake. “Look yonder.”
Chris nearly dropped the rock. With the Orimere in his hand, the flickering images on the water’s surface transformed into absolute clarity. The lake stretched in front of him for miles, and every inch, every ripple, every wave, projected the world he left behind when he slept.
Neon signs and blurred traffic lights sparkled along Michigan Avenue. Sails winked through the darkness beyond North Avenue Beach. Willis Tower melded with the reflection of the black castle high above, separated only by the glint of its backlit windows.
“See that?” The Garowai stretched his muzzle toward the center of the lake, where a man slept facedown on the rumpled bed in Mike’s spare room.
“Me . . .” He eased open his fingers and let the Orimere fall to the sand at his feet. In an instant, the lake returned to blurry shadows. “Can everyone see this?” He bent to pick up the stone.
“The Searcher and the Cherazii can see vague impressions of your world. But only a Gifted can see clearly.”
“Harrison saw me in there?”
“Aye. And, with considerably less clarity, so did Allara.”
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He looked at the crest of the cliff high above, where Allara’s silhouette rode the edge. “Why tell Harrison and not her?”
The Garowai sneezed again and turned back down the bank, toward the trail. “The progression life takes isn’t always one that makes sense. Sometimes things must happen which at first seem regrettable. I told Harrison he was not this generation’s only Gifted. That there would be another. He needed to know so he would act in the way that would cause his deceit to be discovered and eliminated.”
Chris pocketed the Orimere. “She said he was a traitor.”
“He was.” The Garowai’s forked tongue flicked between his front teeth. “Harrison was ambitious, ruthless, and without honor. Mactalde sought him out as his only means of escaping a dying body. He bribed Harrison with promises of Lael’s throne once the war was won.”
Chris walked two more steps. “Last time I talked to Harrison, he was pretty interested in staying as far away from Mactalde as possible. And I can’t say Mactalde seemed to bear him any love either.”
The Garowai’s shoulders rippled. “Things didn’t go precisely as they planned. Mactalde was captured and executed. So in the end, it didn’t matter his body was dying.”
Chris digested that. “If Harrison was still alive here, what stopped Mactalde from forcing him to take him across? Why wait for me?”
“By then, rumors were already flying about Mactalde’s promise to return from the dead. The Cherazii realized the only way Mactalde could return was if he were aided by a Gifted who lived on both sides of the worlds. This, as you know, is quite forbidden. So they hunted Harrison down and they killed him.”
The Garowai’s inner eyelids blinked. “And then they left Lael by the thousands in protest against King Tireus, who had refused to slander the name of a Gifted by telling Lael the truth.”
That didn’t necessarily strike Chris as the worst of decisions for a king to make, especially since most people didn’t seem too thrilled with the Gifted these days anyway.
“Was that such a bad thing?”
The Garowai shrugged again. “The truth is always worth the telling, in my mind.”
“And subterfuge is always a part of good politics.”
“Hmm. We shall see. Perhaps the good or the bad of Tireus’s decision will be dependent on the kind of Gifted you turn out to be. It was for you he preserved among the people the pure legacy of the Gifted.” His mouth gapped in another dog-like grin. “What is it you plan to accomplish during your tenure here, young man?”
Chris stopped and faced him. He spread his hands. They were empty, just as he was of knowledge and ideas. “I thought someone was supposed to tell me that. You, for instance.”
“Me, for instance.” The green eyes twinkled. “Well, for instance, I might tell you the Gifted are summoned to change the worlds. It doesn’t always turn out for the best, as you can see from Harrison. But the point is you have the power to change history, for better or worse. You’re destined to change it.”
“Change it how?”
“We never know for certain until it happens. Perhaps you’ll bring new technology, new medical discoveries into our world.” He leaned nearer. “Or, under the circumstances, perhaps you’ll save it.”
“Save it?” His skin turned cold.
“We’ll see, won’t we? At any rate, just know the God of all brings you here for a purpose. Never doubt that.” He smiled. “You should also know it’s the Searcher’s duty to guide the Gifted. Allara and Captain Quinnon will show you what you are to do.” He nodded up shore to where Quinnon still waited. “But whatever they may say, they’re not responsible for you. What you do and what you don’t do is because you and you alone have made the decisions.”
Chris watched the lake and its swirl of images. Saving the world was not what he had signed on for here. That was way above his pay grade. And if he had been chosen for this, then somebody had just made the mistake of the century.
“Why do you say I’m going to have to save the world?”
The Garowai flicked a glance at the sky. “Tell me, have you ever felt a wind that cold in the middle of summer?”
Chris stared up at the perfect sky and its perfect sun. The cold edge of the wind cut across his unshaven cheek. “It changed after I brought Mactalde across. I noticed it last night.”
“These two worlds of ours hang in balance. That’s the way of things. A man living two lives and dying two natural deaths in one world is all it takes to tear that balance asunder.”
Realization plowed into him so hard it nearly knocked him off his feet. “You mean Mactalde?” He faced the lake. Pitch had told him exactly this, if only he hadn’t been too stupid to listen. “I caused the imbalance when I brought him across?”
“You did.” The words were calm, without a trace of blame. “And now it’s time for you to move on and make it right.” The Garowai raised his forepaw in front of Chris, palm up. “Goodbye, Master Gifted. I’m glad to have met you. Perhaps I’ll see you again soon.”
Chris hesitated, then set his hand against the horny pad. “You’re leaving already? You’re like a genie—you only answer three questions?”
With a chuckle, the Garowai stepped back. “Answers are overrated. I find it much more effective to ask. And I’ve already told you what I can: the worlds spin on.”
His face scrunched, and his eyes hooded in concentration. Without warning, his skin started to rumple around his joints, as though it were suddenly too large for his body.
Chris stared. The Garowai’s body shrunk, the bones telescoping, joints swelling. “What’s wrong?”
The Garowai’s teeth bulged extra large in his mouth, then shrank to match the new size of his head. His mane and the roach down his back nearly engulfed him, and for an instant his tail was twice as long as his body. His height dropped to half his original size, then half again.
The contortions stopped, and the Garowai, now barely taller than Chris’s knee, shook himself and sneezed. He dog-grinned up at Chris. “You’ll forgive me. I’m old and my bones hurt. It’s easier for me to move about when I’m smaller.”
Chris snapped his mouth shut and just nodded.
The black membrane of the Garowai’s wings unfolded. Delicate blue veins zigzagged between the phalange bones. “You’ve less time to work in than many Gifted have, so use it wisely. Tell Allara what I said about the wind.” He nodded farewell, then raised his wings to the sky and caught the chill breeze.
Chris backed away from the swirl of air and watched the stroke of the Garowai’s wings carry him far away, until he was only a fleck against the horizon. Whatever he had expected of this conversation, a talking monster who preferred to ask rather than answer hadn’t been at the top of the list.
So apparently, he’d not only doomed the world to war, but to a new ice age—or worse? He took a careful breath. The first question right now was how was he supposed to fix an imbalance?
The obvious answer seemed to be he needed to remove the cause. That meant Allara was right. He was going to have to kill Mactalde. And that meant he was somehow going to have to get into touch with his lost Guardsman skills. If he didn’t turn out to be a prodigy of swordplay and battlefield tactics, they might all be in trouble.
He turned back and trudged to where Quinnon stood in front of his horse. At the edge of the lake, he stopped and knelt to raise a handful of water to his mouth.
“He say anything worth listening to?” Quinnon asked.
Chris shook the water from his fingers and stood. “He says there’s an imbalance between the worlds. Do you know what that means?”
Quinnon’s bushy brows knit. “Aye, I know what it means.” He stared after the Garowai. “I don’t ken him. He trains her ladyship, practically brings her up, then throws her to her enemies. She was nine years old when first I met her. A nine-year-old girl who was supposed to dedicate her life to the stinking likes of Harrison Garnett.” The look he gave Chris made it clear he didn’t hold the new Gifted in much
better regard.
He mounted, his stiff left arm held close to his body, and sat for a moment adjusting his reins. Then he kneed the horse forward to Chris’s side. “Might be best if we got something clear just between the two of us. I don’t do what I do for the money. I don’t do it for love of country or king, because Lael’s neither of mine. And I don’t do it because I’m hurrah-happy over any of this Gifted business.”
“You do it for her.”
“Aye. I do it for her. I’ve been with her ever since she was that nine-year-old little girl. I know what she is. I know what she does. And I know what she’s been through.” He leaned his forearm against the saddle horn and bent down. “I’d die for her without a second thought. But I’ll tell you this, I’d much rather kill for her.”
He’d been waiting all day for Quinnon to stake his territory, and it was just as well the man find out now that he had no intention of pushing him so long as Quinnon didn’t push first. He held his ground, feet spread, shoulders back, a position of strength without aggression. “Kill me, you mean?”
Quinnon pursed his lips. “You’ve caused enough trouble to last you the rest of your life. Cause any more, and you won’t be worth the effort as far as I’m concerned. Most people think the Gifted are chosen by the God of all, that they’re sacred. But plenty of men will still be more than willing to plant their steel in you.” He extended his hand to pull Chris onto the horse. “Not everyone in Lael calls upon God.”
Chris swung up behind the saddle. “Good to know where we stand.”
Quinnon urged his horse up the path. “Just do your job, and I’ll do mine.”
Of course, that might end up being easier said than done on both counts.