“Are you related to my mother, then?” Atan asked.
Merewen’s forehead puckered slightly. “I hardly know,” she admitted. “You see, I have lived in Savar’s house my whole life, but he was not always there.” She gave the girls a wistful smile. “All I really know is the woodland. But I learn quickly.”
Atan sent a look at Lilah that the latter had no difficulty interpreting: more evidence of how time had warped the people in this kingdom, then she asked, “And so what brought you here?”
“Savar sent me,” Merewen said. “He said you would come, and I was to meet you here—” She pointed up at Point Adan, staring up at it. “He described it just so. I would know you for a Landis at once, and he showed me a portrait. You look very like.” Her smile was tentative. “But he did not mention two girls.” Merewen’s brow puckered again as she considered Lilah’s short hair and her gown. “You are a girl?”
“Yup. I came along to help.” Lilah couldn’t help snickering. “I’m Lilah Selenna. I was disguised as a boy all summer.”
“Oh!” Merewen’s eyes rounded with surprise.
“Tsauderei told me that there was a mage named Savar who might help.” Atan glanced down the road into the shadowy haze. The thick clouds overhead had darkened; the sun was setting.
Merewen ducked her head in a nod. “I am to show you the way back to Shendoral. Though the way is easy enough, following alongside the River Luyos, and no one else is on it.” She waved to the west. “But Savar was very serious about my coming to find you. And those in my dreams said you must make your way first to Shendoral alongside the river, where the enchantment is weakest, and from there to the capital, and there you must break the enchantment binding the Loi beyond time. Savar could not do it. Though he was going to try again, I believe.” She frowned at her dusty toes. “I don’t know, but I think he did not want me there when he tried.”
Atan considered all these things, then said, “Shall we get started on our road?”
Merewen and Lilah fell in step on either side.
Presently Atan said, “Merewen. Is it a family name?”
“Yes, my mother’s,” Merewen replied.
Atan drew in a deep breath, sounding almost as if she’d taken an unexpected blow. “She was that Merewen Dei? So you too have been beyond time?”
Lilah had no idea who Merewen Dei was, and didn’t really care, if she was a grown-up. She did not like the atmosphere, though the road was indeed empty, the dusty farmland around them silent. But she couldn’t see very far. The haze was both unpleasant and uncanny. She felt—well, she felt she was being watched.
Merewen didn’t seem to mind, but then she’d apparently spent her whole life in this atmosphere. A hundred years of life, or just a few? It made Lilah’s head hurt to try to figure it out.
Atan had been counting generations outside and inside the enchantment. She said to Merewen, “You could have a claim to the throne,” she observed.
Merewen skipped over some rubble. “That’s what Savar said. I don’t know what it means. Not really. He said that people would expect it of me if you didn’t come, or if you were gone.”
“Claim to the throne?” Lilah repeated, walking backwards so she could see both girls. “I know the Dei family is famous—I love the writings of Lasva Dei—but aren’t they forbidden to sit on thrones, or something? I remember some saying about how they have birthed kings and queens but never wore crowns. So for one thing, she can’t break the spell. Or can she? And uh, speaking of the spell, I guess the first part of the spell really and truly broke?” She glanced around doubtfully.
“Soon as I crossed the border.” Atan grinned. “You did! You expected flashes of lightning.”
Lilah flung her arms wide. “It makes sense. Big magic ought to make a big noise, or light, or something, don’t you think?”
“Against Norsunder, invisible and imperceptible is best.” Atan looked about warily in the gathering darkness, where brambles and hedgerows made sinister shapes, and trees, so majestic in sunlight, seemed to loom. “Remember what Tsauderei said about winter’s melt. The effect is going to be noticed, but the later the better.”
Merewen ran her hands up her arms. “I feel different. Though I can hardly say how, or why.”
Atan turned back to her, brow creased. “You did make it all the way east, and you didn’t get lost in the binding.”
Merewen nodded soberly. “Savar said I would make it if I kept in my mind Point Adan, the mountain of the rising sun. It’s because I am part Loi.”
Atan drew in another of those breaths. “Yes, your mother is... Gehlei told me she was thought to have disappeared, when her father tried to renege on the treaty, and take the throne in her name, deposing my father. Tsauderei told me she was rumored to have run to Shendoral to take refuge to escape the, the trouble.”
Merewen shrugged. “Disgrace. That’s what Savar said. My mother’s family left the capital in disgrace, but my mother came to Shendoral.”
“I don’t get it,” Lilah said, looking from one to the other.
Merewen seemed undisturbed, but Atan said carefully, “Merewen’s grandfather married into the Dei family, and took their name, as required by ancient treaty of any Landis marrying into the Dei family. That meant he could never come to the throne. The other way, Deis who married Landises also had to renounce their names.”
“An ancient treaty?” Lilah asked. “Why?”
“Old problems. I thought the Dei family went on to Everon, after they were banished.”
“They did,” Merewen said. “Except for my mother. They didn’t know she was in Shendoral. Nobody did. She didn’t like being in the middle of disgrace. Dis-grace. Mis-grace. Sounds like she spilled her soup on her clothes, or tripped over her own toes!” She laughed, a delightful sound, reminding Lilah and Atan of birdsong.
“Did she disappear? You said you lived with Savar.” Atan asked.
“She’s with the Loi,” Merewen said. “She chose that form when she mated with the Aroel. She can’t be human again.”
“Aroel?” Lilah asked. “Is that a leader or a ruler?”
“No,” Atan said. “The Loi don’t have human hierarchies, Savar said. It’s more like the one chosen to take human form long enough to communicate with us.” She turned to Merewen. “So you are the child of human and Loi.”
“Is that why you’re blue?” Lilah asked.
Merewen nodded, skipping again. “Savar said that I should be able to shift—ah, alter form, but I don’t know how, or when. I can’t find them, except in dreams,” she added, her voice sad.
“Then how did you get separated from them?” Lilah asked.
“They came to the world to try to help, and nearly got caught in the binding. That’s what Savar told me. I did get caught. I was with my mother, see, and they thought I’d go back when they shifted. But I didn’t. Then Savar found me, and so I lived in Shendoral.” Merewen’s large blue eyes were wistful. “When the dreams are right, they sing to me, my parents. They call me Linet. I like that.”
“You will find them when we break that spell,” Atan promised.
Merewen’s sweet smile altered her whole face in the fading light. Atan discovered the contours of Merewen and of Lilah, too, were blurring. Darkness was closing in.
“Shall we make ourselves a little camp in that grass over there, and rest for the night?” she suggested.
Lilah sighed with relief. “My feet would like that very much. As for my stomach, it would welcome a bite.”
The girls turned off the road toward the bank of the river, making their way over dusty long grasses midway between green and brown. The blades felt strange to Atan as she swept them aside. They had been caught for so long midway between summer and autumn. Time’s measure really had become meaningless here.
The Luyos flowed fast, a comforting sound to Atan, for water was too strong to be bound. They made their way down to drink the cold water, and then back up onto the grassy bank.
Merewen
pulled from her knapsack a long, wrapped bread-shape and said, “The miller’s lady made this for me. I ate one coming, and this one is for going back.” As she uncovered it, the girls sniffed the welcome smell of ground nuts and spices.
It was a familiar scent, one Atan had smelled every day that Gehlei baked what she’d called winter-bread. It was a Sartoran bread, and here was another loaf, so homely, so unexpected. Sartoran, made by unknown Sartoran hands.
Atan’s throat hurt and her eyes stung with a longing she could not define.
FOUR
From a tower window in the Norsunder base south of Sartor’s border, Granon Zydes stared down into a torchlit courtyard and watched the diminutive yellow-haired mage Dejain issue some orders to a number of his own scouts, and then pull them together so she could transfer them in pairs.
His scouts. How he loathed her! He wished she’d died the year before, when Kessler Sonscarna’s crazy conquering plan had been smashed. He preferred dead mages. They did what they were told, and didn’t think beyond that.
Dejain wanted the base. He knew it as well as she did. He didn’t care what she wanted it for—everyone was plotting—but he needed to find out how she planned to take it from him so he could circumvent her, and make her look like a fool while at it.
He wished he could annihilate her, but Detlev had ordered them to cooperate. “I need her expertise for my own plans,” he’d said.
You could revile Detlev all you wanted, but you didn’t cross him, not unless you liked him smashing your mind inside your skull without even moving from his chair.
“Kessler is being assigned to you as an errand boy,” Detlev had said then.
Zydes closed his eyes, memory of his dismay like a fist to the gut. Young as he was, many were afraid of Kessler Sonscarna. He was both lethal and crazy—the most lethal and the craziest to survive a family known for its vicious insanity. And a combination you only wanted in an ally, not in a subordinate who looked at you with unwinking, undisguised hatred.
But Zydes had known better than to complain, not with Detlev smiling that faint smile and gazing at him with those cold, nasty eyes the same gray-green shade as a winter sea, especially when Detlev added in a mild but deliberate drawl that somehow burned with the threat of mid-winter ice, “He will benefit from lessons in obedience.”
Zydes turned away from the tower and wandered back to his desk. What had he meant by that? No one understood Detlev. Many had tried to take him out, and his reprisals were both imaginative and lasting. Zydes knew better than to tangle with him directly. Better to build a powerbase here in the physical world, whose rules he understood.
So what was Dejain—
He became aware of a soft green glow at the extreme edge of his vision. He whirled around. The scope, a face-sized mirror-like object supported between two metal rods, gleamed.
Zydes crossed the room to stare into the smooth black dish. He had several alarm spells keyed onto his scope. The faint iridescent sheen over it was definitely green, not red, or blue, or gold. Green. That meant—
He frowned, thinking over his keys, which were not written down anywhere—or told to anyone. Green, an unimportant one, set long ago...
Landis.
He stared at that green glow.
That meant a Landis had crossed the border?
He’d almost not bothered setting this particular alarm-spell. Only long habit at being thorough (which included warding against ruling families who’d been deposed) had made him set it.
The Landises were the most famous ruling family of all, of course, which was why he’d put himself to the needless exertion of setting that spell. Apparently it wasn’t so needless after all.
So. A Landis was alive?
Irritation and fear tightened the back of his neck. Stupid old stories, nothing but myth, meant to scare children and old people. The Landises were only good at endurance, like rats. The truth was, when they’d been attacked they’d shriveled up like paper on fire, and even if one of them had somehow escaped (and there had been rumors) that one could not be at the head of an army now, or this would not be the only alarm—
He wiped his hands down the sides of his tunic. If it was in truth a Landis just over the border, he was the only one who knew. Unless Dejain—
He bolted to the window, but of course they were long gone. No, Dejain and the Landis signal could not be connected. She’d had some scheme going for days, and this alarm spell had been wakened recently, sometime between dawn and now, for he’d been out of the office all morning and most of the afternoon.
He cleared his mind and murmured the spell that activated his magical scope, his most powerful invention. He waited for the residual magic vertigo to pass, and then looked down into the black curve of the scope’s bowl, and whispered the spell that would locate any living Landis.
Dark had fallen, corroborating that the Landis was indeed in Sartor. It was difficult to make out much. He saw three childish shapes rummaging around. Girls, from the clothing. Making a campsite. A distinctive landmark silhouetted against the lighter sky beyond them. He was sure he’d once seen it on the—ah. He flicked open his map and ran his fingers around the bowl of mountains that bordered Sartor, touching at each of the old access ways. Point Adan.
Facts: the Landis was only a girl, and she’d just that day crossed the eastern border. And had no magic protections—at least, nothing important, nothing that had warded her from location spells, or his spell would not have worked. She was accompanied by a pair of girls. Had to be maidservants. Only which was the Landis? The scope was most useful for spying on the fortress’s denizens. The farther away it had to reach, the flatter and more distorted the images. One of them was doing something, and magical light flared briefly. Of course that would be the Landis, probably taught spells by whoever had secreted her.
Though it was true that this girl’s presence would break the key to Detlev’s century-old enchantment, those spells would take time to dissolve, and Detlev was elsewhere in the world, or out of it. Once he had the girl, Zydes could weave his own spells, with keys only he knew, and so even if Detlev returned, Sartor would belong to Granon Zydes.
He gazed hungrily into the scope, a plan flowering in his mind. A capital plan. The spells over Sartor could be renewed, but altered by him. The people would be his. The land would be his. The Landis child, suitably enchanted into an obedient puppet, could be an enormous asset in a world that still heeded the power of the names Sartor and Landis, and he would accomplish it all himself, before any of the other soul-devouring death’s-heads in Norsunder even noticed.
The lure of power was sweeter than anything in the world.
He snapped his fingers and the spell ended, the scope going black. A quick murmur: the alarm spell vanished as well, leaving no trace of evidence.
He was the only one who knew. He began to reorganize the next day so that he could go in pursuit—except then his absence would be noted. And he couldn’t transfer out, not without triggering wards—
How many spies did the place have? Everyone was a spy for somebody, even if only for themselves.
Time was limited. Therefore he must act with dispatch, but not careless haste.
The first requirement was to get hold of the Landis girl.
He stepped to the door, then hesitated. His best runners had just been transferred out by that scheming Dejain. But there was always Kessler.
He frowned. Advantages: he was quick, unnervingly fast, which was astonishing because he was a Chwahir, who were known for being the worst-trained fighters in the world. He was smart, and so far he did what he was told with speed and efficiency.
Disadvantages: every one of his advantages, for Zydes knew someone that smart and that fast was not going to remain a runner. He was also crazy, so crazy there was no reading him, no using the usual enticements to keep control of him. He seemed impervious to mind-warping spells as well, and worse, he was just beginning to learn magic—though Zydes tried to keep him busy enough
with scutwork to permit little time for that.
Zydes opened the door and sent one of the guards to fetch Kessler. Zydes had his plans in place by the time the door opened again. Kessler appeared, barely medium height, and so slim that apparently some less observant warriors thought he was feeble. They didn’t survive the mistake. Zydes didn’t care about anyone’s personal prowess, real or boasted. The jolt he felt every time he saw Kessler was entirely due to those protuberant eyes with the droopy under-lid. Landis eyes, only pale blue, in a black-haired, pale Chwahir face. Long ago the Landises had married with the Sonscarnas of Chwahirsland, and here was evidence, generations later, in Prince Kessler Sonscarna, now putatively a runner. Not for long, if he can help it, Zydes reminded himself.
Kessler only saw a silhouette.
He approached the broad desk set squarely before the window, glowglobes behind it, so that its owner was limned in light, rendering him a shadow. It was a trick to intimidate, but Kessler interpreted it as hiding. That meant Zydes was launching some sort of plan.
It also meant that Kessler was about to be ordered to perform the scut work: whatever Zydes either didn’t want to do, or did not want to be seen doing, himself.
“There are three children who just crossed into Sartor’s eastern border. Bring me the one who has a light-making magical aid. I’m minded to try an experiment.”
Kessler said nothing. He waited, not reacting, because he knew that Zydes hated not seeing visual clues, and so was likely to break a silence by saying more than he had planned to.
“At once,” came the sharp voice.
“The other two children?” Kessler asked.
Zydes waved a hand. “Kill ’em.”
There was a need for no witnesses, and in a hurry? Yet Zydes would not speed his plans along by giving Kessler access to magic transfer? And he wanted one child—one with magic—without naming names?