Of Truth and Beasts

Chapter 2

Seven nights later, Wynn knelt on the floor of her small room, feeding Shade bits of dried fish. All was quiet except for the dog’s clacking teeth and smacking jowls. She glanced at the door again, wondering why Chane still hadn’t arrived, and then looked around at her simple room: the bed, desk, small table, and one narrow window with a view of the keep’s inner courtyard.

Once she’d felt safe here, in what was now her prison. The council had maintained a deafening silence, and she had begun to wonder if they’d ever decide her fate. She and Chane had pressed ahead, anyway, itemizing supplies for him to acquire and making preparations for a journey. He stopped by her room each night before heading into the city to either tell her what he’d acquired or to see if anything new had been put on the list—or to return a journal and pick up another.

Wynn clenched all over every time he did the latter.

It wasn’t that she minded him reading her journals. They were a scholar’s records, after all. But a fair portion of their content dealt with the undead, with hunting and eliminating them. Chane often grew sullen or even bitter whenever she mentioned her old companions, Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. She could only imagine his state while reading so much about them.

Wynn’s relationship to those three was ... complex.

Magiere was a fierce, dark-haired rogue and the only dhampir Wynn had ever even heard of. Leesil was half-elven, raised in his youth to be an assassin enslaved to a warlord, a life he had escaped. Chap was a majay-hì like no other, a true Fay who’d chosen to be born into a pup of the Fay-and-wolf descendants of the elven lands.

In Wynn’s time in the Farlands of the eastern continent, she’d journeyed with these three in search of an artifact once wielded by the Ancient Enemy of many names. Their journey’s last leg ended in the far south of the region, in the high, desolate range of the Pock Peaks. There they’d finally uncovered the artifact—the orb—as well as those old texts that had given Wynn nothing but misery since returning home. She and her companions carried away what they could, and upon their return to the new little guild branch in Bela, Wynn had been given the task of bearing those texts safely back to Calm Seatt.

Magiere, Leesil, and Chap had sailed with her, bringing the orb. Their journey encompassed the better part of a year. They stayed together until the city of Calm Seatt loomed into sight and then parted ways. Wynn’s companions—mostly Chap—had decided the orb was too dangerous to bring to the sages. So they’d left to find a place of hiding for it against those who might seek it out.

Wynn still missed them. Magiere, Leesil, and Chap had become more than friends to her. They were like blood ... like family. She was lonely for them, and Chane knew it.

He’d wanted so badly to read her journals, and she understood his reasons, but each time he returned one and took another, he grew more silent, tense, and matter-of-fact. Even worse, he feigned ignorance if she asked why. His darkening mood might have nothing to do with the journals, but she doubted it.

And to make matters worse, he kept returning to the topic of Sau’ilahk.

Sau’ilahk was gone—Wynn knew this. She’d seen the end, and Chane hadn’t. She’d described every detail to him that she could, though she couldn’t explain the influence of Chuillyon or the Stonewalkers upon the wraith any more than he could.

But he hadn’t seen it happen.

Chane was many things to Wynn. He’d appeared at some of the worst times in her life, when it seemed no one else could protect her. He’d thrown himself in front of her and done whatever he deemed necessary to make certain nothing got past him. But he was a vampire, one of the higher forms of the undead, known in some cultures as the Noble Dead. By any account, as a predator of the living, he went too far at times in defending her.

Much as Wynn trusted him as an ally, how could she dare feel anything more than that? Still, she wished she understood him better. Was he worried about their journey or about their limited chance of blind success? Or was it what else they’d pieced together in their time in Dhredze Seatt? Between more passages she’d translated from the ancient texts and a scroll in Chane’s possession, they’d uncovered a deeper burden.

Magiere, Leesil, and Chap had not carried off the only orb.

The Enemy had created five for some unknown purpose, one for each of the Elements of Existence. The one Wynn’s friends possessed was likely that of Water, and they were somewhere to the north of this continent, trying to secure it in secret.

At the great war’s end, the Enemy had given thirteen vampires known as the Children the task of scattering the five orbs into hiding. A thousand years later, it seemed the orbs still existed ... somewhere ... the last tokens of a war so few believed had ever happened at all. The Enemy now had minions—old and new—on the move, seeking the orbs again.

Wynn suspected one orb might still be in Bäalâle Seatt. If so, she had to find it before any other servants like the wraith reached it first.

Shade finished the last of the fish and whined for more.

“You’ll not become a glutton like your father,” Wynn said, stroking the dog’s head. “Time for your language lessons.”

Shade scooted backward on her rump, flattening her ears with a low snarl.

“Shade ... no more arguing.”

Wynn’s head suddenly filled with a chaos of her own memories. In each image, she was touching Shade and communicating by sharing mental pictures. But the rushing cascade made her head pound.

“No ... no memory-speak,” she said. “You will learn words, even if I have to pin your ears back to hear them.”

Like her father, Chap, and other majay-hì, Shade communicated through memories with her own kind via touch rather than any form of speech. Wynn called this memory-speak. Shade’s father was unique, for he could speak words into Wynn’s head. Both father and daughter could also raise another being’s own memories so long as they had line of sight. But, unlike Chap, Shade couldn’t speak words in Wynn’s head.

In place of this, Shade could send her own memories to Wynn when they touched. She could also share memories she’d picked up from others. To Wynn’s knowledge, no other majay-hì and human could do this.

“Shade, come here,” she said.

Shade curled her jowls, and the pink tip of her tongue flicked out and up over her nose—just like Chap used to do.

Wynn exhaled.

“I barely tolerated that from your father. Don’t think I’ll give you half as much. Come here!”

Recently, Shade had made a slip. Wynn had uncovered that her young majay-hì guardian indeed understood spoken words—to a point. Shade couldn’t speak, but she could listen, and she’d been doing so without anyone knowing it. She was going to listen now, and learn.

Shade abruptly launched straight from a squat.

Wynn lurched back in surprise, but the dog only hopped to the bed, turning a full circle before settling. Shade curled up, facing away, toward the stone wall.

Wynn scrambled to her feet. “Don’t be obstinate.”

Shade resented being forced to communicate like “jabbering” humans, but Wynn was determined to expand the dog’s vocabulary. The grueling process of memory-speak might be all right for fluent majay-hì accustomed to nothing else, but it wasn’t efficient enough for Wynn.

Wrestling an animal bigger than a wolf would’ve made a sensible person hesitate, and yet ... it didn’t stop Wynn from grabbing Shade’s tail.

Shade whipped her head around with a snarl.

Wynn didn’t let go. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Then Shade’s ears stood straight up. She looked across the room, rumbling low as her ears flattened again, and she scrambled up to all fours.

Wynn released Shade’s tail and turned around, looking to the door.

“Chane?” she called. “Is that you? Come in.”

The door didn’t open, and Shade’s rumble turned to an open growl of warning.

Before Wynn looked to the dog, the wall to the door’s left appeared to shift. She backed up until her calves bumped the bed.

Gray wall stones bulged inward, as if something pushed through them.

Wynn rushed for the corner beyond the door and grabbed the staff. She ripped the leather sheath off its top, exposing the long sun crystal, and thrust it out toward the rippling wall stones.

Something like a cloak’s hood overshadowing a face surfaced out of the wall. Thudding footfalls landed upon floor stones, and a cloaked and stout hulk stood within the room, easily twice as wide as Wynn, but no taller. An overbroad hand swiped back the hood, and a stocky dwarf glowered at her, eye-to-eye.

Wynn’s initial fright turned to anger. “What are you doing here?”

Ore-Locks cast one glance toward Shade, who was still growling. Beardless, something uncommon for male dwarves, his red hair flowed to the shoulders of an iron-colored wool cloak. He looked young, perhaps thirty by human standards, so likely sixty or more for a dwarf. Wynn knew better still.

Ore-Locks was older than that due to his life among the Hassäg’kreigi—the “Stonewalkers” of Dhredze Seatt.

“Why do you still delay departure?” he asked, ignoring her question.

She clenched her teeth. He’d left his own sect, determined to join her in search of Bäalâle Seatt, but she didn’t trust him. He was an even darker complication beyond dealing with the council.

From what she’d gleaned of Bäalâle Seatt, its fall—its destruction—had been the work of a traitor. That one’s name had been forgotten long ago, and only a cryptic title in ancient Dwarvish remained: Thallûhearag, the “Lord of Slaughter.” Only Ore-Locks seemed to know his true name.

Byûnduní—Deep-Root—had been a stonewalker of Bäalâle Seatt, just as Ore-Locks was in Dhredze Seatt. But the connection went deeper than that, for Ore-Locks claimed it was this spirit of his ancestor that had called him to sacred service as a stonewalker, a guardian and caretaker of the dwarves’ honored dead.

Ore-Locks worshipped this genocidal traitor, claiming that Deep-Root—that Thallûhearag—was not a Fallen One, those who stood for the opposite of all that the dwarves’ Eternals represented.

Chane claimed, by his truth sense, that Ore-Locks truly believed Deep-Root was no traitor. But there was no proof in mere believing. Knowingly or not, it all made Ore-Locks a potential tool of the Enemy through the spirit of a mass murderer. Perhaps he already was.

Wynn wanted no part of him.

Then she noticed his attire.

He no longer wore a stonewalker’s black-scaled armor. He still bore their twin battle daggers on his belt, along with the new, broad dwarven sword in its sheath. But the long iron staff in his large hand was the first bad sign. He was dressed plainly in brown breeches and a natural canvas shirt, and through the split of his cloak, Wynn saw the burnt orange, wool tabard.

Stunned, she stared at his vestment. “What are you wearing?”

“I am in disguise,” he answered quietly.

That was something else about Ore-Locks; he didn’t behave like a typical dwarf. Most of his people were slow to anger and quick to laugh. They wore their emotions on their broad faces, their feelings expressed proudly with booming voices.

Ore-Locks’s voice was too often low and quiet, his dark eyes devoid of his people’s heartfelt emotions. She could never be certain what lay behind his words. And while she wasn’t religious, his choice of disguise, that tabard and staff, were blasphemous.

Ore-Locks had “disguised” himself as a holy shirvêsh of Bedzâ’kenge—“Feather-Tongue”—the dwarves’ saintly Eternal of history, tradition, and wisdom. That was as far removed from the deceits of Thallûhearag as possible.

“Take that off,” she told him.

“The shirvêsh of Feather-Tongue are well received in most northern lands. I do not wish to be noticed along the journey.”

“I said ... take it off.”

Anyone who worshipped a servant of the Enemy had no business masquerading as a shirvêsh, a religious servant, of Feather-Tongue.

“When do we leave?” he asked.

“I never agreed to let you come.”

“That was settled in fair barter with your companion.”

Wynn glanced away.

Chane had broken his sword trying to get them past a massive iron door because of her obsession with finding the Stonewalkers. When they’d returned to the guild, Ore-Locks had appeared. He’d brought Chane a new sword made of the finest dwarven steel, which Chane never could have afforded.

Chane distrusted Ore-Locks only half as much as Wynn did, and he needed a new sword. At the offer of one of such craftsmanship, he hadn’t said a word to refuse it.

“When do we leave?” Ore-Locks repeated.

“I don’t know. I’m waiting for funding and ... other matters to settle.”

She wasn’t about to tell him anything more than necessary.

Ore-Locks turned away. “I am at the Harvest Inn, west of the Grayland’s Empire district. Send a message when you are ready.” He paused with his back to her. “You would do well not to leave without me.”

Shade’s rumble turned to a snarl. Though Ore-Locks’s quiet tone hadn’t changed, those last words had sounded like a threat. Or perhaps Shade had snatched a memory that rose in the dwarf’s conscious thoughts. Either way, Wynn kept silent as Ore-Locks strode toward—through—the wall.

She sank on the bed’s edge, feeling stretched thin on all sides, and snarled her fingers into Shade’s scruff. Shade shoved her head against Wynn’s neck, but soft fur and a warm, wet tongue weren’t comfort enough as Wynn glanced at the door.

Where was Chane?

Upon rising at dusk, Chane dressed quickly, pausing briefly at the mirror over the short dresser. He tried to smooth his raggedly cropped, red-brown hair. Several objects, the results of his nightly errands, rested upon the dresser. As of yet, he had not told Wynn about these extra acquisitions.

The sword that Ore-Locks had brought him now had a plain leather sheath. A fresh cloak of deep green wool, with a full hood, was folded atop the dresser’s end. Upon it lay a matching scarf, a pair of new, fitted leather gloves, and two small leather triangles with attached lacing for their final purpose.

He still had two more items to attain, and tonight, he was already late in seeking one.

Rushing through the small study and into the outer passage, Chane locked the door to his guest quarters and hurried to the end stairs. When he reached the building’s ground level, he did not head for the courtyard. Instead, he ducked into one ground-floor chamber laden with workbenches, books, and glass contraptions and other tools. Rounding to the back, he headed down another flight of stairs.

Emerging in the building’s first level of underchambers, he stepped into a narrow stone corridor lit by two sage-crafted cold lamps set in wall-mounted metal vessels. Alchemically mixed fluids provided mild heat to keep them lit. By their steady light, he counted three wide iron doors on both sides of the passage. These were the lower laboratories of the guild.

In two previous visits over eight nights, he had never seen what lay behind any but one. He had tried opening others to peek in and satisfy his curiosity. Not one budged, though there were no locks or bars on their outsides. He headed for the last on the right, but tonight it was shut tight, like the others.

Chane let out a sigh, an old habit left over from living days. He knocked, listening for an answer, but none came. He tried the heavy iron handle, anyway, expecting the door would not open. To his surprise, it slipped inward as he twisted the handle. He hesitated and glanced along the other heavy doors.

This was wrong. Still, perhaps she was within and had not heard him. He pushed the door wide.

“Géorn-metade,” he called in Numanese.

No one answered his formal greeting.

A short, three-step access hallway emptied into the left side of a small back chamber. He had come here twice before, just past dusk, both times in haste before going to Wynn’s room. He never told her where he had been.

Chane entered, quietly closing the door. All he could see from the hallway were shelves pegged in the chamber’s left wall. They were filled with books, bound sheaves, and some slender, upright cylinders of wood, brass, and unglazed ceramic. As he stepped out of the passage, the room filled his view.

Stout, narrow tables and squat casements were stuffed with more texts, as well as odd little contraptions of metal, crystal and glass, and wood and leather. A rickety old armchair of tattered blue fabric barely fit into the back right corner beyond the orderly mess upon the age-darkened desk of many little drawers. Atop the desk’s corner sat the dimming cold lamp, brighter than he had first thought.

Someone had been here recently to rub its crystal to brilliance.

Chane scanned stacks of parchment and three bowls of powdered substances. An array of brass articulated arms anchored to the desk’s other corner each held framed magnifying lenses. They were mounted so that one or more could be twisted into or out of alignment with the others.

Chane stood in the private study of Frideswida Hawes, premin of the Order of Metaology. And he was tempted to dig through everything in sight.

He understood a little of thaumaturgy, the physical ideology of magic, as opposed to the spiritual perspective of his own conjury. Still, something here might shed a spark of light on his own research. He leaned over the desk, touching nothing as he examined the stacks of parchment and paper. Most appeared mundane, concerning daily guild operations and Hawes’s own order. Considering the top one’s immature topic, one stack seemed to be papers written by initiates.

Chane returned to the left wall’s pegged shelves.

Spines and labels on texts and containers were all marked in the Begaine syllabary. Even after nights of stumbling through Wynn’s journals, he still struggled to understand the sages’ mutable writing system. He reached for a ceramic cylinder with a wooden cap to verify that it was a scroll case.

“So ... disrespect is not your only flaw.”

Chane spun at the voice behind him and came face-to-face with a mature, slight woman in a midnight blue robe.

“Do we now add thievery to the list?” she asked.

Chane studied the narrow face of Premin Hawes. With her cowl down, cropped, ash gray hair bristled across her head, though any lines of age were faint in her even, small features. Severe-looking, she was not unattractive.

“My apologies,” he began. “I was ... only ...”

Chane glanced down the short passage to the chamber door.

Hawes could not have passed by without bumping into him, so how had she entered unnoticed? He flashed back to their first meeting.

When Wynn had been called before the Premin Council and he had been ejected, Hawes had stood inside the chamber doors. As the doors shut tight, the seam between them began to vanish. In a mere instant, the doors became one solid barrier. The image of Hawes with one hand raised, as she glared at him through the closing doors, had remained fixed in his mind. Her revealed abilities that evening were why he had ultimately sought her out in private.

“Well?” she said.

Chane remained calm, facing this deceptively academic-looking woman.

“Is it finished?” he asked.

She scrutinized him a moment longer and then turned toward her desk. Opening its top left drawer, she lifted out a narrow pouch of brown felt stacked atop two torn half sheets of paper and one of Chane’s own books. Much as he hungered to know what she made of the latter three items he had shown her, the first was the most important.

Premin Hawes loosened the pouch’s drawstring and slid its contents into her hand.

“This pair is smaller,” she said, “as you requested.”

She held out a pair of glasses much like those Wynn wore when igniting the sun crystal.

“They are the same?” he asked.

“Yes, simple enough to duplicate ... though these have structural improvements.”

Smaller compared to Wynn’s, their round, smooth lenses were framed in pewter. Unlike the straighter, thick arms of the original pair, these had tin wire arms with curved ends to better hook around a person’s ears.

Hawes had likely engaged her apprentices to make them—considering what little Chane discerned of her. Wynn had mentioned that Domin il’Sänke had scant respect for this branch’s metaologers compared to his own. Ghassan il’Sänke had not known with whom he was dealing.

The premin, like a mage of worth, did not put her skills on display unless necessary. Only petty dabblers made a show. From what Chane had seen at the council chamber, she was far beyond some academic practitioner.

“They were created from your specifications,” Hawes continued, “though they will not fit you.”

Chane said nothing. These glasses were meant for Wynn, to replace the ones she had. As to the first pair ...

He stepped around Hawes to her desk. Fingering aside the two half sheets of paper, he picked up the book he had left with her.

Chane had scavenged and saved as many books, journals, and sheaves as he could from a remote keep of Stravinan healer monks, ones that Welstiel had turned into feral vampires. This text, thinnest among them all, had held Chane’s attention from the start, though he could not truly say why. An accordion-style volume of grayed leather cover plates, it had one thick parchment folded back and forth four times between the plates. Its title read The Seven Leaves of ...

That final word in old Stravinan was too obscured by age and wear.

“Did you make anything of this, based on my attempted translation into Numanese?” he asked.

Hawes barely glanced at the book. She slowly pivoted the other way and retrieved the first half sheet of his notes—his translation. There were now more notes written in her own hand.

“Of ingredients mentioned, some are rare. They are mostly herbs and substances considered beneficial to healing ... but not all.”

Her explanation made sense, considering where he had acquired this text. To some relief, he realized what the last word of the book’s title must be.

The Seven Leaves of... Life.

But not all seven substances in the translated list implied leaves. Two he could not make out at all, proving difficult to copy them rote into Belaskian letters of similar sound. He glanced at Hawes’s notes, looking for those two.

“What is ... a muhkgean branch?” he asked.

“A mushroom grown by the dwarves,” she answered. “Its cap spreads in branched protrusions that splay and flatten at the ends.”

“Like leaves?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Yes, that might come to mind in looking at one. But I know of no medicinal purpose for them.”

This left another puzzle for Chane. To his knowledge, there were no dwarves in his part of the world. So how would those healer monks have known of this mushroom, let alone what it was called by dwarves?

“What of this ... an-os ... a-nas-ji ...”

Chane still struggled with the last of the seven terms. It was not Belaskian, old or contemporary Stravinan, or any language he knew. When Hawes said nothing, he looked up.

She was scrutinizing him again, as if deciphering him like some ancient tome.

“What is this text to you?” she demanded.

“A curiosity. I would think any bit of recovered knowledge would interest a sage as much, if not more. Are these ingredients for something? Is it a type of healing salve, like I have seen Wynn sometimes carry?”

“Not a salve ... a draught, a liquid concoction, at a guess.”

She paused long, never even blinking, and Chane grew unnerved. Before he spoke, she cut him off.

“I’m uncertain of the full process, since it isn’t described in detail. By your translations, the text contains only cryptic references, perhaps key points or reminders of some more explicit procedure. It does not appear to be thaumaturgical—or, rather, alchemical—in nature, so perhaps a mundane process.”

Chane sagged a bit. Even for these grains of knowledge gained, he had hoped for something more conclusive. His own body was almost indestructible, but Wynn’s was not. He would use anything that might keep her whole and sound. Yet if Hawes could not decipher the process hinted at, what chance would he have to do so? He was no thaumaturge, let alone highly skilled as a conjurer. He worked mostly by ritual, sometimes spell, and rarely ever artificing, even in its most common subpractice of alchemy.

“What is this seventh item?” he asked again.

Open suspicion surfaced in Hawes’s expression.

“Anasgiah ... is perhaps Old or even Ancient Elvish,” she said, correcting his failed pronunciation. “I found no translation for it, though I’ve heard something similar. Anamgiah, the ‘life shield,’ is a wildflower in the lands of the Lhoin’na.”

Chane wanted more, but clearly Hawes’s patience thinned with each answer. Instead of pressing her on this, he picked up the second sheet of his scribbled marks before her patience ran out. This one he had shown her with hesitation; it concerned a starkly different topic.

“And this list,” he said. “Do you know any of these ingredients?”

Hawes whispered in warning, “What kind of ... man ... carries works of healing, only to stack them with something of deadly harm?”

Malice flickered so openly across her stern features that Chane tensed.

“It is a poison, as a whole?” he asked. “Or is only one component so?”

He already knew some ingredients for Welstiel’s violet concoction were benign. Others baffled him, particularly the flower he knew as Dyvjàka Svonchek—“boar’s bell” in Belaskian. Hawes might be as puzzled as she was suspicious.

“Do you know the flower?” he urged. “Perhaps by a name other than those I translated?”

In one quick step, Hawes closed on him.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “And make no mistake: I have no fear of you!”

Her claim was obvious, though Chane could only guess how skilled she might be beyond what he had seen. After their encounter at the council chamber, it made him wonder again why she had assisted him at all.

“You do not agree with the way the guild has treated Wynn,” he said, hoping to throw her off balance.

“Agreement is irrelevant,” she returned instantly. “The guild’s purpose comes first. Answer my question.”

To Chane, there were few who mattered among the common herds of human cattle. Fewer still who would be a loss at their death. Wynn was foremost among these.

Hawes was obviously well beyond the unworthy masses, and beyond many here within the guild’s walls. Had he stumbled upon a hidden, if adversarial, ally that Wynn had not recognized?

“I am the one who keeps Wynn safe,” he answered.

Hawes lifted only her eyes, not her head, glaring up at him, as if his superior height were nothing but an annoyance.

“It has been called Léchelâppa,” she said.

Chane frowned. It sounded Numanese, but he could not translate it in his head.

“Corpse-Skirt,” she added in different terms. “It was used by some in the past as a common way to draw out and kill vermin ... foolishly, considering livestock were attracted to it. I know of no one who carries it or sells it ... or would be allowed to do so.”

So it was known in this part of the world.

Chane was grateful for the information, but one thing disturbed him. Hawes openly discussed an illegal substance, but she never asked what this second deadly concoction was for. This left him wary.

He slowly reached out and took the list of components from The Seven Leaves of Life out of her hand. Clutching the book and his note sheets, he held up the glasses, peering once through their clear lenses.

“My thanks,” he said. “I am late in meeting Wynn.”

If his sudden desire to leave startled the premin, she did not show it. She cocked her head to the side, still eyeing him, and simply nodded.

Without another word, Chane strode out and down the passage. Late as he was, his own quarters were close, so he took both flights of stairs two at a time. Fumbling briefly with the key to unlock his guest quarters, he went directly to the desk, hiding the glasses and his other burdens in a lower drawer. As Chane turned to leave, his gaze fell upon Wynn’s stacked journals, and he winced.

The mere sight of them hurt for what he had found—or rather not found—in their pages.

At first, he had allowed Wynn to work with him, helping him interpret so many symbols he could not follow. The further he traveled within her stories of the Farlands, the more he wanted to study and absorb her writings by himself. He later took to struggling alone in his own room with copious notes made in her company.

Doing so without her assistance was daunting, but he began to grasp the syllabary’s premise of compressing and simplifying multiple letters into symbols of fewer and fewer continuous strokes. These were combined with special marks to account for pronunciations and special sounds in any language. It was all elegant, concise, adaptable, and so much could be condensed within a single page.

Fascinated as he was by each of the experiences he wrested from the symbols, something odd began to trouble him. Soon he stopped paying attention to actual events, paged backward, and focused on her accounts of the Noble Dead, most specifically the vampires.

She wrote of Toret—Chane’s own maker—once called Rat-Boy, and of Sapphire, Toret’s doxy. There were many passages concerning Welstiel Massing, Magiere’s half-brother, and Li’kän, that ancient undead now trapped beneath the castle in the Pock Peaks’ frozen heights. Wynn wrote of the feral monks Welstiel had created to fight his battles as they had raced for that castle. She even recounted meeting a vampire boy named Tomas in a decaying fortress outside of Apudâlsat in Magiere’s homeland.

Chane paged faster, but some of Wynn’s encounters with the undead that he knew of were missing.

At times, he had been an intricate part of her life—of her stories. But she had omitted how he had protected her from an undead sorcerer named Vordana, simply noting that Vordana escaped to be later destroyed by Leesil. She omitted how he had saved her from two mindless undead sailors in those same swamps and marshes. The account of Magiere severing his head was missing entirely.

As for the orb’s discovery, guarded by the deceptively frail Li’kän, Chane found only a mention of “another undead” in Welstiel’s company. And, that in the end, one of Welstiel’s “servants” had betrayed him. That one was never described, let alone named.

It had been Chane himself. There were so many holes in the tales, and he felt as if he were falling through all of them at once into nothing.

Chane Andraso was not mentioned once in the journals of Wynn Hygeorht.

Standing in the guest quarters’ silence, he could not bear to pick them up again. As if touching them would make the truth all the more real. Wynn had written these journals as if he never existed. All record of him had been blotted away from later becoming a reminder to anyone, especially to her. Chane did not need to ask why.

He was a thing not suitable for her world.

That realization—that intentional omission of him—cut him worse than Magiere’s falchion severing his head. Yet he could not leave Wynn.

His place was at her side for as long as she would allow him. He swallowed the pain and locked it away, but he still could not touch those journals again.

Chane left the guest quarters, heading out across the courtyard to the old barracks that served as a dormitory, trying not to let himself think. As he reached the dormitory’s second floor and Wynn’s door, a part of him did not want to see her. But he always went to her just past dusk. He stood there for a while before he could finally knock.

“I am here,” he rasped.

Chane heard Wynn’s quick footsteps within the room trotting closer to let him in.