The Soul Weaver

CHAPTER 26

Seri

“Watch for my signal: two flashes, a pause, and then one more. All will be well, my lady. You’ll see.” With a touch of my hand, Paulo vanished into the night. A very dark night.

The ruins of Calle Rein - the Lion’s Grotto - lay like a smudge of soot on the black cloak of the desolate valley. Only a few stars glimmered in the enveloping midnight, the last outriders of the glittering heavens of Avonar, just as the ragged thorn bushes and the gray, brittle grasses that braved the scree were the last remnants of life and growth that marked the border of the Wastes. Not a breath of wind stirred the chill air, and only the screech of a hunting owl, echoing from the barren cliff walls behind me, marred the heavy silence.

There… A pinprick of light flared briefly from the ruin, as if one of the lonely stars had given up its fight against the encroaching darkness and fallen into the valley. Had someone noted the dark figure so carefully picking his way down the rocky slope toward the light? Who was waiting inside the broken stone walls so far below me?

Foolish, all our precautions. If the one who awaited us in Calle Rein was not who he claimed to be, then the place would surely be surrounded with enchantments - wards to let him know his grand trap was sprung. But if he was only what he claimed, and he was alone, we had nothing to fear.

The excitement and anticipation that sharpened my vision, pricked my ears, and made the hair rise on my neck at every whisper had no relation to the truth of the night’s events. Such reactions must be a remnant of a primeval innocence, when life was a constant wonder, and survival depended on the scents and sounds carried on the night wind.

Dread was my proper companion as I hid in the rocks above Calle Rein, and her brother grief hovered on the dark horizon, for unless some miraculous circumstance intervened, my child would die before morning, and the true heart of my husband die with him. It was a mutual sacrifice of such unfathomable proportion that only the salvation of three worlds could demand it. And I - a woman of some experience, but not the least shred of power - was the only voice that dared cry out that the price was far too high. I could not allow it. Not if the Lords of Zhev’Na themselves were to die alongside my son at the hand of his father - not even for that could I permit it.

I had stayed with Karon all through the Rite of Purification, hiding in the shadows while he struggled with his demons. No reassurance of Ven’Dar’s could alleviate my terror when he dropped below the surface of each pool and failed to emerge for hours at a time.

“Is it truly necessary to put him through this, Preceptor?” I said, after watching my love stagger blindly from the Pool of Darkness to the Pool of Oblivion. “If it won’t reverse the change… ”

“He is D’Natheil, my lady,” said the Preceptor. “And while the essence you cherish is still part of him, it has become subservient to D’Natheil’s passions. The rite can push one to the limits of endurance, but if anything can quiet the rage that consumes him, if anything can allow even a small part of what he was to emerge, it is this.”

And so I wasn’t sure what to expect when Karon crawled from the Pool of Rebirth, and I couldn’t even attempt to interpret the tears that tempered his smile. But whatever the truth of the rite, I felt a lifetime of love in his fierce embrace.

“You didn’t describe this part, Ven’Dar!” he said hoarsely to the man who stood just behind me. “I’d never have dallied so long if I’d known a miracle was awaiting me.”

“It’s a benefit I’ve added just for you, my lord. But if you recall, I most certainly told you that your lady awaited you at the end of it.”

“What winding have you cast to make this most magnificent of gifts possible?” His cold thumbs traced my cheeks, my neck, my lips, my brow.

“It was not my own doing, but that story will have to come with the rest. Right now, I’ll look after our fire and our supper.” The smiling Preceptor bowed and retreated into an adjoining chamber.

“A day of visions. If you’re yet another, don’t tell me,” said Karon, burying his face in my hair, scarcely able to speak for his shivering.

“A day of enchantment,” I said, kissing his shoulder and his neck. “More than a day, in fact. I’ve hurried the hours along, but now I don’t want it to end.”

He pulled away enough that I could see the cloud of sadness that crossed his brow. “Seri, I must tell you - ”

I put my hand to his lips. “Not yet. The Preceptor has a fire ready in the next room. Much as I would love to tarry with you in this beautiful place, you’re getting me dreadfully wet, and I’ll soon be as cold as you are. Everything else must wait.” The hard knot in my breast, loosened for a single moment, wrenched tight again.

Ven’Dar had not only a fire in the next room, but soup and tea and dry clothes… and Paulo. We had debated whether to have Paulo with us or not, and came to the conclusion that we gained nothing by waiting. Karon would be expecting him. And indeed when he caught sight of our young friend tending the fire, scarcely daring to peek out from under his shaggy hair, Karon gave Ven’Dar a curt nod.

For a while none of us spoke of anything save commonplace arrangements for food and fire and places to sit. The important things were too large and everything else trivial.

Karon relinquished my hand only long enough to pull on the breeches, shirt, leggings, and wool tunic Ven’Dar gave him, and to tie back his wet hair with a leather thong. But once we were seated beside each other on the floor of the cavern, he twined my fingers in his cold left hand as he used his right to drink three mugs of steaming soup and three more of tea. When we’d finished our refreshment, however, he kissed my hand and laid it carefully in my lap, leaned back against a block of granite, and looked from one of us to the other like a magistrate facing three pickpockets. “So, who is to begin?”

Ven’Dar answered. “Young Paulo has the most fascinating story to tell, my lord. But I will begin with the small part I have witnessed and my theories as to the nature of our dilemma. I believe it casts a critical light on Paulo’s tale. Your wife is both our evidence and our advocate.”

“So you can speak to me now?” said Karon, cocking an eyebrow at Paulo.

“It wasn’t my choice, my lord. You’ll see.”

“Tell me your tales, then, all of you. I’m listening.”

Ven’Dar began with the story of his imprisonment by Radele, and his belief that Men’Thor and Radele intended to goad D’Natheil’s anger to make Karon receptive to their beliefs about the conduct of the war. The Preceptor then told of Radele’s silencing enchantment and how Paulo had discovered the secret of the list of the Hundred Talents that enabled Ven’Dar to set us free.

“Men’Thor and Radele… and Ustele, no doubt. And I never suspected,” said Karon, his eyes stormy. “Naive fool that I am. Though Men’Thor annoys me to distraction, I’ve always believed him a man of honor. He offered to grieve with me and seemed sincere… ”

“He longs to be a Preceptor. His initiation robes have been prepared for many years,” said Ven’Dar.

“He can wear them in the Wastes after his banishment! And it was all so pointless. Silencing Seri… yes, it perhaps accelerated what was happening with me anyway. But your story changes nothing of true importance: Jayereth, Gar’Dena, the betrayal, the initial attempt on Seri’s life. Radele was searching the ruins of the main house when she was stabbed; I saw his light moving through the windows. We were hunting Gerick, while Gerick was standing over Seri with a bloody knife in his hand. Paulo saw Gerick, not Radele, back away from her and bolt.”

“Oh, but my tale does change matters, my lord,” said Ven’Dar. “You’ve heard only the first hint of the true mystery. Leave off thoughts of Men’Thor and Radele, and hear my story again. How was I able to use Paulo’s information when I could not so much as distinguish day from night? My thoughts were wholly out of my control. Something else… someone else… intervened… ”

As Karon leaned forward, intently focused on the Preceptor and his story, Ven’Dar described the mysterious infusion of strength that enabled him to free himself and then me. “… No one imposed the list on my thoughts; the knowledge was my own, couched in the terms I have used for thirty-five years to articulate it. But I was provided with the strength, focus, and reason to use what I knew. The second hint of the truth came when your wife emerged from her captivity, looked into the eyes of this youth, and saw something she did not expect to see. And the third came when I awoke in my tower the next morning and found a letter from your son…”

“I’ve never heard of a Soul Weaver.”

Karon was visibly shaken by Gerick’s letter. I felt his desire to believe in Ven’Dar’s theory, to grasp some hope out of the tangle of revulsion and grief. But his responsibilities left him no such freedom as I had, to believe as soon as he heard, to accept without rational explanation.

“We’ve no written record of a proven Soul Weaver. Few believe such a profound talent could even exist. But my studies of the talents have allowed me to spend a great deal of time considering the legend of soul weaving.” Ven’Dar’s face was alight with discovery and wonder. “Unlike the ordinary Dar’Nethi who mind-speaks, reading or hearing the thoughts of another person, or the Healer, who can link his own mind with the body and mind of the other, seeing the damage done to him and sharing the pain of his injury or disease, a Soul Weaver actually becomes one with the other. The Soul Weaver leaves his own body behind and subjects himself to the physical dimensions of the receiver, taking or yielding control of the body and mind as he wishes or as need demands. Courage, skill, knowledge, will… all these things the Soul Weaver can offer or withhold, and then, when ready, relinquish the mind and body of the other, separate himself, leaving the other soul intact. Such acts would require a clear sense of self and monumental self-discipline. To subject oneself to the physical boundaries and mental confusions of another being, giving such help as I received, while resisting the temptations of control and exploitation would require an immense generosity of spirit. Easy to see why nature would make it so rare a gift.”

Karon propped his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his clenched fists. “But the Lords do this thing possess. How can you know this is not just the manifestation of his true identity, dressed with an honest face for his own devious purpose?”

“Of course, I cannot. Yet, it’s this ability of the Lords to possess another that’s always made me believe that soul weaving was not just a myth. Everything the Lords do is a perversion of true talent. Think of their ‘healing’ that destroys one life while preserving another, and their mind-speaking that withers the soul, locking one being in subservience to another rather than enlarging the realm of understanding between the two. Even their Metalwrights devise such things as an oculus that allows them to draw on our worst parts - our hatreds, fears, our cruelties and despair - enhancing and growing their power. Is it not inevitable that the Lords’ version of soul weaving would leave only death in its wake? The boy himself feared that he had killed Paulo the first time it happened. But Paulo lives, his mind free and undamaged.”

“What the young master does isn’t wicked, my lord,” said Paulo, speaking up for the first time from his place in Ven’Dar’s shadow. “My… thoughts… my feelings about things… get all mixed up with his. It’s so big a thing going on inside me… I can’t tell you how big it feels… but it isn’t wicked. I would know.”

“And what of Gar’Dena?” Karon remained the prosecutor, determined to squeeze the guilty truth from us. “When my trap was sprung, I probed Gar’Dena’s mind to find out why he would betray us. But he was not Gar’Dena. I could not mistake Gerick. And when Gerick left him, Gar’Dena died. The boy so much as admits the deed in this letter. If this is his own gift, and not a perversion of the Lords, then why, in the name of all the stars, did he betray us?”

Karon crushed Gerick’s letter in his hand and threw it at the little fire. It bounced to the side on the uneven floor, stirring up ash and sparks. Ven’Dar retrieved the letter before the floating sparks could settle on it, smoothing the crumpled paper against his knee.

“Read this again, my lord.” The Preceptor’s eagerness and wonder had dimmed, but not his urgency or conviction. “Your son neither denies that he did these things, nor does he supply any easy explanation. He understands it no more than we do. Less, in fact, because he has so little knowledge of Dar’Nethi talents. More is involved here than soul weaving, though I am convinced your son’s talent is the mechanism by which these horrors are accomplished. Paulo, tell the Prince how young Gerick came to believe he was the betrayer, even though he has no remembrance of the deeds.”

“To explain it, I got to tell you where we were, and what happened there… ” Paulo told Karon of the strange land called the Bounded, and of the Singlars, the Guardian, the firestorms, and the Source, and of the day Gerick saved his life by taking over his body and then gave it back again.

“Is it not a marvel?” whispered Ven’Dar.

Karon did not answer, but motioned for Paulo to continue. And so he did, telling the story of Gerick’s devastation when he saw the oculus in the cave of the Source and heard the revelation of his own crimes, and how he then made this desperate plan to arrange his death on his own terms.

Karon shook his head and scraped his fingers through his hair. “I can’t see beyond the Lords, Ven’Dar. I hear speculation and possibility and the faith of a true friend. But I hear nothing to prove that his connection to this new world is a result of Dar’Nethi talent and not the Lords taking control of the Breach as they have craved for a millennium. If I do as Gerick asks, link with his mind, only to find I have linked with the Lords… ”

Ven’Dar nodded. “You have told me the story of your own coming to talent, my lord. Of how desperation to save your young brother’s life forced you to take up the knife and recite the Healer’s invocation. You’ve told me how only when you looked back through the years could you recognize the precursors of your talent: aversion to combat, fear of carrying a knife, a thirst to know how the human body worked…

“Now consider your son. He has told young Paulo here that he’s been seeing visions of the past: his mother as a young woman, his friend Paulo as a crippled child, and his true father’s face - your true face - that no portrait has ever shown him. And each of these visions occurred in the presence of the person most concerned. He has dreamed their dreams, felt their joy and shame, experienced the pain of a broken wrist that was his father’s, not his own. I believe he has been slipping in and out of souls, uncontrolled.

“And even earlier, what do we see? What could be the trigger that charted his course? Desperation, just as you experienced. Four years ago, on your journey out of Zhev’Na, desperate to escape the pain of separation from the Lords, your son’s soul fled his own body. Not understanding what was happening, unable to control his gift, he could not seek refuge in any of you three. That left him adrift in chaos… as if he were a part of the Breach itself. I believe that by his act, he imposed order upon the crippled bits of matter and sentience that existed there, forming a solid center… a source… from which a world has grown - immature, awkward, with all of the spotty wisdom and ignorance of a sixteen-year-old who has experienced too much and too little of living. He loaned a world his life.”

“And that’s why the firestorms come near killing him as they destroy the Bounded,” said Paulo.

“And why the Source knew what he’d done, even though he didn’t realize it himself,” I said. “Because the Source is a reflection of himself.”

“Yes,” said the Preceptor. “And when this strange joining occurred as you traversed the Breach, he was still connected to the Lords… ”

“… through the jewels and the mask they had given him in Zhev’Na… ” I said.

“… and so the Lords indeed obtained their foothold in the Breach.” Ven’Dar’s conclusion dropped a pall of silence over us, so that Gerick’s desperate plea echoed in that firelit cavern as if he stood before us. If it was possible for Gerick’s link to the Bounded to be severed, a Healer of Karon’s skill and power was the only one likely to accomplish it.

Karon stood up and walked away from the fire into the shadows. Only after a long time did he speak, his voice no more yielding than the stone walls of that cavern. “And so you agree that Lords are still part of him, that the oculus in the cave of the Source is the manifestation of his soul’s link to them. Somehow, they can control him, just as he says, and make him do things he would not, even to attempting the life of his mother.”

“Yes, my lord. This connection lay dormant for four years, manifest only in nightmares and the boy’s unsettled nature. But I believe it was rekindled when you took him across the Bridge that night. Everything started after - ”

“And have you even considered the rest of it? If all this is true - if he’s been in the mundane world and the Breach and now here in Gondai - then he has taken his friend Paulo across the Breach unscathed, not with struggle and difficulty and expense of power as I do, but easily. Do you know what that means? Do you see the implication? The danger? The impossibility? It means he can transport Zhid between worlds.”

“Indeed. It would seem so,” said Ven’Dar, quietly. “My hope is that when you go to him knowing all of this, you and the boy together will discover how to resolve the problem. Your son needs to understand he is not evil, my lord. As do you. If nothing else, perhaps you will be able to do what he asks of you.”

The knot around my heart drew tighter yet. Karon’s resolve was written in his face. The rite… the revelations… had led us nowhere new.

“Where is he, Paulo?” Karon’s words hung in the air like a headsman’s ax.

“What will you do?” I blurted out before Paulo could answer.

“Tell me my choices, Seri.”

“There’s got to be another way, now we know he’s not one of them. They’re just using him.”

“For now.”

I stood up, too. Though I fought to stay calm and reasoned, my voice rose. “So what prevents the Lords from crushing Avonar right now? What prevents them controlling him all the time? There’s something else at work here, and you can’t stop looking for answers just because Gerick has. He doesn’t understand what he is, so his solution may not be the only one. We just need time…”

“Time is exactly what we don’t have. If there is the smallest possibility that I can do what he asks, what Ven’Dar has tried to give me the chance to do, it must be now. The war won’t wait. If the Lords come to this same conclusion, they won’t wait. And D’Natheil won’t wait.” He turned his back on me. “Where is he, Paulo?”

“Half a day’s ride, my lord. A ruin out at the edge of the Wastes near the place you found me. The young master said it must have once been a portal between worlds, like the one in Valleor where we went into the Bounded, as it was easy to find once he knew to look. I’ll take you there.”

“Perhaps I could make a portal to take us there, my lord,” said Ven’Dar. “It would take me only an hour or two.”

“No. No portal so close to Avonar. Not when we can’t be sure - ”

Not when he wasn’t sure who would be waiting for us on the other side of it.

“I don’t mind riding,” I said.

“You’re not going.”

The ten paces between Karon and me stretched wider, across the cavern, across Paulo and Ven’Dar and the litter of packs and supplies and pulsing coals… across sixteen years of grief and anger and longing, of loneliness and pain.

“Gerick is our son, Karon. I will not abandon him.”

The waves of the Pool of Rebirth, wreathed in mist beyond the shadowed arch, lapped softly.

“I will do what I have to do, Seri. I cannot say what that will be. But neither my own desires nor my feelings for you can weigh in my decision.” He had not moved from the growing shadows, so I could not see his face, only the shape of his powerful body, taut and still.

“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 - ”

She paused in her breathless chatter, staring at the doorway behind me. I whirled about, and I couldn’t tell whether the iron-visaged figure who stood there was Karon or D’Natheil.

“Karon!” I said, choosing that it be so.

Gently, but firmly he took my arm and raised me up, moving me to the corner of the little room. When he returned to Gerick and looked down at him, the world paused in its spinning path.

Only the princess refused to heed the dread of that moment. Glancing at me briefly, she took up her story once again, as if she’d never been interrupted. “… so, before I quite understood what he meant, he took himself off again. I don’t know exactly where.”

She wrinkled her straight nose and pursed her lips while shifting her unabashed stare to Karon. “And Gerick - my friend, Gerick - said to tell his father - I presume that’s you - that he’d be waiting for you to fulfill your agreement. He didn’t explain that part or anything about the enemies he was hiding from, and I find it quite annoying, as I’ve had all this time to think, and he didn’t explain the most important part. ‘Too complicated,’ he’d say, which have to be the most exasperating words that can be spoken, and despite the fact that I’m almost two years older, and I helped him sort out all manner of things while he was being the king of the Bounded. He just said that if anyone could take care of the firestorms so the Singlars wouldn’t suffer so from them, it was his father. The only thing he was afraid of was that Paulo wouldn’t find you.”

“It took a number of people to find me,” said Karon, softly. “I thank you for your care for him, young lady. Now you’d best move closer to Seri. It will be safer. Or you might want to step outside.”

“But you see, just as I’ve been telling the Lady, you don’t have to pretend there’s no sorcery involved here. I’m not afraid… ” Roxanne’s words limped into the void very quickly. She stood and backed away from Gerick and Karon, but only as far as my side. Her chin was still firm and high. Paulo, who had said nothing since Karon’s arrival, stood behind us in the doorway.

Karon’s hand was steady as he drew his silver dagger from its sheath. I wanted to stay his hand until I was sure of him, but terror robbed me of speech.

“Oh, demons, Gerick - ” Roxanne gasped and lunged forward as Karon raised his glittering knife.

I grabbed her and drew her close, holding her tight and allowing her cry to loosen my own tongue. With all the hope I could muster, I said softly, “There are no demons here, Roxanne. No need to be afraid. This is Gerick’s father, who cherished our son before he was even born, who led him out of the darkness once and will do so again. He’s come here only to help him.”

At the same moment, Karon raised his other hand, closed his eyes, and with a passion that was all of his life, spoke words that would forever summon visions of a rainy summer afternoon at Windham, a frost-rimed Vallorean bandit cave, and a towering wall of white fire, blazing joyfully in a mountain fortress. “Life, hold. Stay your hand. Halt your foot ere it lays another step along the Way. Grace your son once more with your voice that whispers in the deeps, with your spirit that sings in the wind, with the fire that blazes in your wondrous gifts of joy and sorrow. Fill my soul with light, and let the darkness make no stand in this place.”

“It’s all right. It’s all right,” I whispered to the terrified girl, as Karon’s knife left its bloody track across Gerick’s limp forearm and his own scarred left arm. And while the golden flames danced on the ancient walls, the blaze of Karon’s enchantment embraced us all.