The Gates of Winter (3 page)

4.

They came home to Calavere on a cold, brilliant day late in the month of Geldath.

Grace Beckett smiled as the familiar silhouettes of the castle's nine towers hove into view, banners snapping atop their turrets, as blue as the winter sky. All her life, she had lived in places she had not chosen, houses in which she had not belonged—the orphanage, an endless rotation of foster homes, countless drab apartments where she had never bothered to hang a picture on the wall. But she belonged in Calavere; she knew it by the beating of her heart. If ever she had a home, on any world, it was here.

A small form wriggled in the saddle in front of Grace. She wrapped her arms around the girl and rested her chin atop Tira's curly red head.

“Do you see the castle on the hill over there?” Grace murmured. “That's where I live.”

Tira reached out her hands and laughed.

Grace stroked the girl's hair, smoothing tangles she knew would reappear in an eyeblink. In moments like this, it was possible to believe Tira was a normal child. Possible, if Grace didn't think about how she ran around in the frigid air wearing just her thin smock, yet was always warm to the touch. Possible, if Grace forgot how she had once risen into the sky like a star to become a goddess.

Tira had not spoken a word since Midwinter's Eve, since she appeared at the Black Tower without warning, handed the Stone of Fire to Travis, and called him
Runebreaker
. There was so much Grace wanted to ask her—where she had been, how she had come back, and why she had brought Krondisar to Travis—only there was no point. Tira wouldn't—perhaps couldn't—answer. And Grace did not for a moment let herself believe she wouldn't be leaving again soon.

“I love you,” Grace said, tightening her arms around the girl's tiny body.

Tira gazed up with a placid expression, one side of her face soft and pretty, the other a blank mask of scar tissue. On Midwinter's Day, when they had set out from the Tower of the Runebreakers, Grace had wondered about Tira's face. Krondisar had turned her into a goddess. So why hadn't the transformation made her whole? However, as the leagues passed by, Grace understood. Tira
was
whole. This was what the Stone of Fire had made her.

Grace kissed her forehead—the scarred half—and Tira looked again at the looming castle.

“That is a sight I feared we would never see again,” said a deep voice, comforting in its gloominess.

Grace looked up to see Durge guide his horse close to hers. She smiled again. “I don't believe you, Durge. I think you've known all along we would make it back here. Why else would you have set out on the journey in the first place?”

“To be by your side, my lady. Where I belong.”

Grace couldn't help feeling a note of pleasure. She loved the craggy-faced knight; he was truer than any person she had ever met. Travis had told her Durge had been a sheriff's deputy in Castle City, in the year 1883, to which they had traveled and returned from with the magic of the gate artifact. It wasn't difficult to see Durge as a frontier lawmen; no matter where he went, no matter what century he was in, he would always be a knight. Her knight. However, she doubted loyalty was his only reason for returning with her to Calavere.

We're coming, Aryn.
Grace cast the words across the threads of the Weirding, not knowing if her thoughts could be heard from so far away. Several times, as they journeyed east, the baroness had contacted Grace over the Weirding, the web of life and power that wove itself among all things in the world. Aryn had spoken of affairs in Calavere and the Dominions, and Grace had recounted their own harrowing encounters at the Black Tower. However, each time Grace tried to contact Aryn herself, she had failed. She did not have the ability to reach out with her thoughts over such long distances as Aryn seemed able to do.

Grace stole a glance at Durge's somber profile. His eyes were focused on the castle as he rode, his left hand pressed against his chest. She wasn't certain when she had first begun to suspect the truth. Maybe it was the way, each time she told the others Aryn had contacted her over the Weirding, Durge seemed to take particular interest. At the same time, Lirith would cast frequent glances at the knight, her dark eyes troubled.

One night, as they lay on the frozen ground near the feet of the Gloaming Fells, Grace had asked Lirith if there was something about Aryn and Durge she ought to know. Lirith had tried desperately to hide the truth, but Grace was a doctor; she knew precisely where to make an incision. At last, over the secret strands of the Weirding, Lirith had told her what she had learned by accident in the Barrens last summer, when she and Durge had traveled with Falken to find the Keep of Fire. In that desolate place, the witch had tried to lend a bit of her own life power to the weary knight, but in the process she had unwittingly stolen some of Durge's memories.

He loves her with all his heart, Grace,
Lirith's anguished voice had sounded in Grace's mind.
But he says she must never know, that she is too young and good to be bothered by one as old and derelict as he, and he made me vow never to tell anyone. Only now I have, and so I've betrayed him again.

No, Lirith, you haven't betrayed Durge—he's betraying himself. If he loves Aryn, he owes it to her to tell her the truth.
Just because he didn't want to trouble Aryn was not reason enough to hide his feelings from her. Grace always gave her patients the true diagnosis, even if it was something they didn't want to hear.

The wind blew Durge's hair from his brow and tugged at the mustaches that drooped beneath his hawkish nose. Durge wasn't handsome. All the same, there was a kindness to his craggy visage, a nobility that went beyond mere beauty. She didn't know if Aryn could return Durge's love, but the young woman deserved the chance.

Durge glanced at her. “Is something amiss, my lady? We must look our best to greet King Boreas and Lady Aryn, and I suppose there's a bit of this morning's porridge stuck in my mustaches.”

Grace laughed. “No, Durge. You're absolutely perfect.”

This statement appeared to confound the knight. He opened his mouth, shut it again, gave her an odd look, then spurred his mount ahead, toward Falken's horse.

“What did you do to him?” Travis said, veering his horse toward Grace's. “It looks like his brain just went
bonk
.”

“I told him the truth.”

“That'll do it,” Travis said with a nod. “I used to complain that no one ever told me what was really going on. Only then they did, and I realized how much happier I was not knowing.”

“And would you go back if you could? To not knowing?”

Travis smiled, only there was a look in his eyes—sorrow? resignation?—she couldn't quite name. His hair was coming in now, thick and red as his beard. After Krondisar destroyed and remade him last summer, he had taken to shaving his head, hating the way his hair had changed from sand to flame. However, since the Black Tower, he had been letting it grow. It was as if he didn't mind anymore seeing the outward reflection of what he really was. And maybe that meant he had answered her after all.

Travis gazed at the castle, bouncing in the saddle like a sack of turnips. After all these leagues, he was still a terrible rider. Grace sat on her own mount straight and tall, rising and falling with its gait as if she had done it all her life. Of course, the horses were only a recent luxury. For most of the journey they had traveled on foot. Grace, Falken, Beltan, and Vani had had no horses; they had taken the fairy ship as far as they could up the River Farwander, then had marched the rest of the way to the Black Tower. And the horses Travis, Durge, Sareth, and Lirith had ridden there had been left over a century in the past.

It was nearly a hundred leagues from the Black Tower of the Runebreakers to Calavere. The idea of walking the entire way had filled Grace with despair, but with little other choice they had set out on foot on Midwinter's Day, and much to their surprise, they made good time. Perhaps
too
good. After they made camp each night, Falken would judge the landmarks, and by his estimates they would have covered more leagues than seemed possible.

“Something's not right about this,” Falken said the third night of their trek, and Grace agreed. As they walked, she would keep her eyes fixed on a distant hill, measuring their progress toward it. Then they would pass through a copse of trees or descend into a ravine, and when she caught sight of the hill again it would suddenly loom close, as if it had leapfrogged over the intervening miles when she wasn't looking.

“That's just not possible,” Beltan said, scratching his head after one such instance, and Tira had laughed, as if he had told a marvelous joke.

Grace looked at Tira, but the girl only bent her head over the half-burnt pinecone she had plucked from the campfire, and around which she had wrapped a rag, as if it were a doll.

Soon they left the wild reaches of the western Fal Sinfath and moved along the borders of Brelegond. Several times they caught sight of a troop of knights in black armor riding heavy warhorses, their shields marked with a silver tower and red crown. Durge and Beltan would draw their swords, Vani would vanish into the shadows, and Lirith and Grace would use the Touch to weave illusions to divert the eye.

They needn't have bothered. Each time, the knights rode on without getting close. The runelord Kelephon—whom the Onyx Knights knew as their supreme general Gorandon—wanted both Grace's blood and the magical sword Fellring, which he had failed to wrest from her in the dead kingdom Toringarth. What would he have done if he had known his knights had come within a half a mile of her more than once? Only he wouldn't know.

“You're keeping them from seeing us, aren't you?” she whispered to Tira one night as they curled together on the ground. The girl's little body was so warm Grace hardly needed her cloak, which she had thrown over them as a blanket. The snow curled into steam as it landed on them. “Just like you're helping us walk faster than we should be able to.”

Tira snuggled against her and went to sleep.

The Onyx knights were not the only peril they encountered on the road. Sometimes, those first few nights after they left the Black Tower, whoever was standing watch—Beltan or Durge or Vani—would see a pale glow atop a distant hill or ridge. The Pale King had failed to gain Sinfathisar and Krondisar at the Tower of the Runebreakers, but his minions still searched for the Stones.

However, before they left the tower, Travis had taken a rusted iron pot he found—their old cooking pot from a hundred years before—and had held it in his hands while he spoke the rune
Dur
. The pot shone with blue radiance, and when the light dimmed, in its place was an iron box. The box was surprisingly delicate and perfectly formed; whether or not he cared to use his power, his ability was growing. Travis slipped the Stones into the box and shut it. On its lid were angular symbols.

“What are they?” Grace asked, touching the runes on the box.

“A warning,” he said, and tucked the box inside his tunic.

The Pale King's wraithlings could see the trail of magic the Imsari left on the air—but not if the Stones were encased in iron. The eerie glow never drew close to their camp, and after a few nights they did not see the lights again.

At last they crossed the headwaters of the Dimduorn and entered into Calavan. They saw no more Onyx Knights, and when they came to a town, they dared to stop and buy horses with some of the gold Grace had left. After that, the leagues had flown by more quickly yet.

“Our journey's almost over.” Grace only realized she had said the words aloud when Travis gave her a sharp look.

“Is it really over, Grace?” He reached inside his cloak, as if for the iron box he kept hidden there.

Grace touched the sword belted at her hip. Fellring. It felt heavy and good at her side, as if she had always worn it. “No, I suppose it isn't.”

“Well, at least we've made it this far.”

They rode in silence until they reached the track that spiraled up the hill toward the castle. Falken and Durge still rode ahead. Grace turned in the saddle to see how the others fared.

Lirith and Sareth rode not far behind, their horses close, their heads bent toward one another. As she had many times on the journey, Grace found herself wondering what exactly had happened to Travis and the others in Castle City. They had told the story of course—how they had found themselves in the Colorado town in the year 1883, and how a sorcerer had followed them through the gate—but Grace suspected there were some things they didn't speak of. For one thing, Lirith and Sareth's love was clear; they made no attempt to hide it anymore. Yet it was fragile, like a bauble made of spun glass.

We can never be as one,
Lirith had told Grace. But was the witch talking about the laws of Sareth's people—the Mournish—which forbid a man to marry outside the clan? Or was something else keeping her and Sareth apart?

Behind Lirith and Sareth, Beltan and Vani brought up the rear of the party. Here was another mystery. While there was still an uneasiness between the blond knight and the golden-eyed assassin, they had left their animosity behind on Sindar's ship. Something had happened to them there. Only what?

On the voyage to Toringarth, it had been all Grace could do to keep Beltan and Vani from throttling one another. Now the big knight seemed curiously, awkwardly protective of her. More than once Grace had seen him bring Vani a cup of
maddok
when he thought the others weren't looking, or lay a cloak over her as she slept. Nor did she seem to resist such gestures.

After a while, it occurred to Grace that Vani might be ill. While the rest of them were always ravenous after a long day of walking, devouring what scant foodstuffs they had scrounged, the
T'gol
seemed to have little appetite, and often her coppery skin was tinged with green. However, one night when she asked Vani if she could examine her, the assassin had stared, a look of horror on her face, and had told Grace to leave her alone.

As they journeyed, both Vani and Beltan cast frequent glances at Travis, their expressions fond and longing. All the same, both of them seemed unwilling to spend too much time near him. Each time Travis tried to draw close to Beltan, the blond knight would retreat, and Vani did the same. Travis would smile at them, but Grace knew by the slump of his shoulders that their behavior wounded and confused him.