The Keeper of the Mist (29 page)

He didn't say,
My mother.
Keri heard that anyway. She offered cautiously, “Your mother might not have been there. She might have realized in time. She and her friends might have gotten away.”

Lucas shook his head, a small motion. He was still not looking at her. “I don't imagine the Wyvern King would have been so careless. Once he learned of the gap, I expect he realized immediately that my mother's people must have known of Nimmira. That they hadn't…that they hid their knowledge from him. In the face of such defiance, I don't imagine he would have been…careless.”

“Maybe it was Eroniel, not his King. He was the one waiting for us, not Aranaon Mirtaelior. However frightening he seems to us, he can't be as powerful as his King, so maybe some of your people got away, maybe your mother—”

“Keri!” Lucas said sharply. “
Maybe
grows no roots, as they say. I don't want—” He cut that off as his voice cracked. Then he said in a low tone, “It was probably Aranaon Mirtaelior himself. Why else destroy the whole town, except it was his own law they broke, traveling into and out of Eschalion, which is not allowed. And they say the Wyvern King sees every sparrow in the eaves and every cricket on the hearth. Not even the players could have hidden from him. Not even my mother.”

Keri looked away, ashamed. She should have understood that too much hope would be crueler than certain grief.

“I wonder what Magister Eroniel has gone to do,” Tassel said after a moment, deliberately matter-of-fact, recalling them all to the immediate problem. She looked around, flinching back a little from the dark shadows of the doorways. “And…when he will come back.”

And what he will do then,
Keri filled in without difficulty. She crossed her arms and looked coldly at Brann. “This is
your
fault.”

Her oldest half brother looked away. But then Keri saw him take a breath, and he turned to face the rest of them after all and said, “I know.”

Keri hadn't expected that, and she saw Lucas raise an eyebrow, drawing an expression of pointed astonishment across his fear and grief. She was relieved, because she suspected they would need his sharp wits, and if he found it useful to sharpen them on Brann right now, that was fine with her.

“But he would have done something anyway,” her oldest half brother said rapidly. “He always meant to steal our magic—he would never have just gone tamely away—and when he only got Cort instead of you, he was angry. He would have found another way to come at you and at Nimmira. But he wouldn't have chosen that moment or that way if I hadn't handed him the chance. I know that. But—” He stopped.

“But?” said Lucas, his tone sharp and dry. “Can you possibly mean to offer some excuse for your inexcusable behavior?”

Brann looked at him angrily. “He always meant to use anything that came to his hand as a weapon against Aranaon Mirtaelior. Nimmira was never what he wanted. He always wanted Eschalion. That was why—” Brann stopped again.

Keri was slow, but Tassel said, as though suddenly catching pieces and setting them in place, “Oh, that was why you were willing to help him! Because he really didn't want Nimmira. Or he convinced you he didn't. He was willing to give it to you as long as he got something he could use to bring down the Wyvern King. Is that what he told you? And you believed him? Even though he took Cort and stole his magic? Where
is
Cort?” She glanced around, as if even now she half expected her cousin to suddenly stride into the room through one of those shadowed doorways. Keri only wished he would, but there was no sign of him.

“I don't know,” Brann responded in a clipped tone. “I don't know, but he didn't kill him. He might have, but I told him if he did, the Doorkeeper's magic would whip away to find someone else before he could capture it, and he wouldn't take that chance. That'll protect you, too, Bookkeeper, so you can stop looking at me like that!”

Keri wanted to slap him. Lucas stopped her by tilting his head and smiling, a tight expression with little amusement in it. He said, “So that's what you told him, in your brave, selfless attempt to save our Doorkeeper's life? And what did he tell
you,
Brann? That he would only
borrow
our magic for just a moment, and then, lo! He would be happy to hand Nimmira back to you for your very own. A bit used, possibly, but all yours! Oh, perhaps we'd lose a few northern farms, a mountain or two, but that's less-peopled country in the north, isn't it, and what's one or two mountains and a handful of families after all?”

Brann said nothing.

“And, of course, we'd lose our new Lady,” said Lucas quietly. “And Cort, and Tassel, I presume, and the Timekeeper as well, I suppose. But that would hardly disconcert
you,
would it? You'd be glad to have people in those roles who would admire you and do as they were told. So you'd have everything your way, wouldn't you, as long as when he was done with it, he'd let our magic just flow tamely back, only slightly diminished, for you to pick up?”

Pressed, Brann snapped, “If it had
worked,
we'd be secure again, and none the worse for the trouble with our boundaries! Instead, we're here, like this, and what better outcome do you hope for out of any of this
now
?”

Tassel shook her head in disgust. “I can tell you what outcome we have better sense than to hope for.”

And Osman stepped up beside her and added, “I can tell you what outcome you were a fool to hope for. I can tell you that you sold your honor for a handful of smooth lies and worthless promises.”

Tassel gave the Bear Lord a sideways look and raised her eyebrows.

Osman smiled down at her—not down very far, because he was only half a hand taller than she was, though he always somehow contrived to seem taller. He murmured, not in the least disconcerted, “But
my
promises were never worthless. Even my
lies
were not actually worthless. And you never believed a single one of them anyway.”

Tassel smiled sweetly back at him, patted his cheek, and stepped away from him to join Keri. But not, Keri noticed, with any particular show of displeasure. She gave Tassel a raised-eyebrow look of her own, but her friend only gazed blandly back at her. Keri glanced at Lucas to see what he thought, but his expression was studiedly neutral.

Brann, wrapped up in himself, seemed to have noticed nothing. He said, “But I—but he—if it had
worked
—and even now, he might disregard Nimmira. Even now, he might just let it go, let us go. He doesn't care about it anyway!”

“Oh, you don't believe that!” Keri exclaimed. She spoke more loudly and decisively than she had intended—indeed, she had not really intended to say anything at all.

But Brann stopped. After a moment, he scrubbed a hand across his mouth and said, in a muffled tone, “No. I…no. He won't be satisfied to take less than everything. Now that he knows about Nimmira, he won't stop. He'll never be content to let anything go, once he has it in his hands. I thought I—” He broke off again. He wasn't looking at any of them now. He had turned his shoulder to them and was staring blindly at the shadows lying over the blank gray walls.

“He'd have tried something anyway,” Keri told him, this time more gently. “You were right about that, at least.”

Brann shook his head, not looking around.

Keri had not expected to feel sorry for him, but she found that she did, a little. Even so, she took a breath and turned to the others, leaving Brann to himself. She wasn't sure what to say; she was angry and scared and had no idea what to do, but if she didn't do something, she knew Osman would try to tell everyone else what to do, and then there would be a fight, and everything would get harder. She closed her eyes for a moment, hoping for inspiration. What would her mother do?

Her mother would never have let them fall into this terrible situation in the first place.

But Keri had not stopped this from happening. And now they all had to deal with what
was,
not what
ought to be.

Since someone had to decide what they should do, and since everyone was looking at her expectantly, Keri said at last, “Well…I suppose the first thing is to get out of this place, if we can. Brann, do you know where any of those doors lead?”

But her brother shook his head, not even looking up. “Nowhere. To nothing. Just more empty rooms, I think. All these places look the same to me. If we do get out of this place, the rest of the citadel will only be more of the same….”

Tassel glanced around in broadly mimed disgust. “Oh, no, the entire citadel can't possibly be like this. How could the Wyvern King stand it? Look, there are three doorways over there, and isn't that a fourth in that corner? We can at least see where they all lead. Only”—and she slid a sideways glance at Osman—“I confess, I don't really want to go exploring by myself.”

Keri rolled her eyes. She would have laughed if the whole situation hadn't been so horrible and depressing. She could not imagine a time or place—or a couple—less suited to flirtation.

And then she thought,
Well, but if flirting with him helps her stay bright and brave.
And Osman really was charming, in an overconfident, predatory way. And, all right, yes, handsome, if you admired clever, sharp-featured arrogance. It was true that he seemed less foreign now, here, after all this.

And he was doing his best to help. She almost thought she might like him, as long as he was here trying to help, instead of in her Nimmira trying to take it over. And as long as he was more interested in charming Tassel than in charming Keri herself. That was one way for Tassel to help Keri avoid any more of those handfasting demands. Not a way Keri would ever have thought of. She wondered if Tassel was actually serious about encouraging Lord Osman. Probably Osman wondered that, too. If they got out of this, she supposed they would find out.

All she said was, “Fine. Tassel, you look over there with Lord Osman. Lucas and I will look in the corner.” But she didn't expect to find any doorway leading back to Nimmira. She wished, briefly and despairingly, that the Timekeeper would step through one of those doorways and say, in his severe tone,
Lady, you have an appointment in twenty-three minutes. Let me show you the way….But if the Timekeeper were here, he would have lost his magic as well, so that wouldn't do.

In fact, now that she'd considered it, Keri thought it seemed likely that the only thing protecting Nimmira, the one thing making it difficult for Eroniel Kaskarian to grasp and master the magic she had so foolishly brought right to him, might be the Timekeeper's continuing presence in Nimmira.

And that Magister Eroniel must continue to move with caution, lest he draw the attention of his great-granduncle.

The Wyvern King. The terrible sorcerer who had conquered half the world until baffled at last by the jagged mountains of Tor Carron, and who had not conquered Nimmira only because he had never quite noticed it was there…He must certainly know it was there now. Had he sent Eroniel Kaskarian to look at the little land that had suddenly become visible, or had he perhaps not even yet realized Nimmira was even there? She suspected now that Magister Eroniel had come on his own behalf to see if he might make this newly apparent land into a weapon against his great-granduncle. She wondered how she hadn't noticed that the sorcerer had never formally delivered any message from his King. He must have had designs of his own from the start.

Lucas disappeared into shadow, carrying his staff warily in both hands, and Keri was suddenly recalled to the moment. She watched anxiously, but he came back out of the dim reaches of the farther room after only a moment, shaking his head. “A room of perfect boringness,” he assured her. “Other than the lack of windows, it is exactly like this perfectly boring room we have right here.”

“I do wonder what all these empty rooms are
for,
” Keri muttered.

“One hesitates to guess. Storing wine, storing cheese, storing inconvenient prisoners, storing shadows and cobwebs and silence…”

“Probably that last,” Keri agreed. She tilted her head back, examining the narrow window high above. “I wonder what's out there?”

“For this, you really want Domeric,” Lucas told her. But he laid aside his staff, set his back against the wall, and offered her his cupped hands. “You're a light little thing, at least,” he said cheerfully as she put her foot in his hand and gripped his arm for balance. Then he went on, still cheerfully, as he lifted her up, “Oof! Not quite as light as a man might guess, however. What do you see?”

It took a moment for Keri to catch her breath enough to answer. She had known the sea existed; she had guessed it might be washing against the cliffs quite near their prison. But nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the infinite gray water, breaking into white foam where it came against the cliff. It went out and out forever, gray sea and gray sky almost the same color. If there was a horizon where sea and sky met, it was invisible to Keri. Great long-winged white birds tilted through the sky, a little like falcons, but different.

“Keri? See anything?” inquired Lucas, a trace of strain in his voice, though he continued to hold her steadily.

“Nothing,” Keri said, because that was true in a way. There was nothing out there they could use, even though she would never forget the sight. She allowed herself just one moment longer. Then she let her breath out, shook her head, and had Lucas lower her back down.

“Well?” Tassel asked, coming back, along with Osman, to the center of the room to join Keri and Lucas. Brann came back, too, and stood a little distance away, as though hoping he wouldn't be noticed. Everyone ignored him.

“We didn't find anything helpful,” Keri admitted.

Lord Osman grimaced agreement. “No, neither did we. It's all more of this gray stone and emptiness. If there are any doors that lead elsewhere—” He opened a hand, meaning they had found nothing of the kind.

“Well, there must be a way out somewhere,” Keri said.

Lucas shrugged. “Not necessarily, if you can come and go by magic.”

A prison without doors. That was not a comfortable idea. Keri thought of Cort, who could open any door. Even he might be baffled if there were no doors anywhere.

Besides, Cort could open any door in Nimmira, not here. And only if he held the magic he was supposed to. Which he might not by this time, even if they found him.

She wished he were here anyway. Though that was selfish, when she should have wished he were in Nimmira, and safe.

“This is pointless,” Brann muttered.

Everyone looked at him. “I'm sure you're right,” Tassel told him. “Let's just stay here and see what happens when Magister Eroniel comes back.”

Brann turned his face away.

“What's most frustrating is,” Tassel added wryly, speaking now to the rest of them, “if I were in Nimmira, I could probably reach out my hand and pick up some old book with a floor plan of the Wyvern King's citadel as its frontispiece. With tiny writing in a difficult hand saying
You Are Here
and
This Way Out.
” She glanced around. “It all looks the same to me, too, I must admit.”

Keri blinked. She asked, “Tassel…you still have your magic, right? If you had paper, do you think you could
draw
a floor plan and label it yourself?”

Tassel stared at her. Then she moved her hand, opening and closing her fingers. She plucked the bone pen out of her hair and looked around vaguely, as though she expected to find a blank-paged book and a bottle of ink for her pen. Then she shrugged and scribbled quickly on the palm of her own hand and down her forearm, and even though her pen should have been dry, it was the Bookkeeper's pen and she was the Bookkeeper and the ink came as she wrote, very black and distinct on her pale skin.

Then she stopped, staring down at her hand and arm.

“Well,
your
magic hasn't yet faded, at any rate,” Keri observed. She was the first to step to her friend's side and peer at what Tassel had written. Lucas put his hands on Keri's shoulders and looked over the top of her head, and Osman put an arm around Tassel, ostensibly to steady her, though she did not appear to need steadying. Tassel glanced sharply up at him, but she didn't seem to mind.

Once she had figured out what Tassel had drawn, Keri found herself impressed by the Bookkeeper's magic. She had not really expected her friend to be able to do anything of the kind, but Tassel had sketched lines that plainly showed a rather awkward, stretched-out version of the prison, as it would be seen from her angle of view. As soon as Keri had grasped that much, she could see that Tassel had marked a door in the far wall, in a place where no door stood. And beyond that door, she had written, in very small, precise letters,
The Doorkeeper of Nimmira.

The moment she saw those words, Keri realized she had never truly believed they would find Cort, not ever. Not really. She had thought they'd lost him. She'd thought
she
had lost him. She realized now that Cort mattered to her, not just because he was the Doorkeeper, but because he was Cort. She'd actually known that for some time, inside, where she knew all the truths that were most sure. Now she had found him, but not found him. He was here, but not here, and not safe. None of them were safe, and there seemed to be nothing she could do about it. Rage and terror and hope all tangled inside her, and for a moment she couldn't breathe. For a long moment, she couldn't think at all. She turned and took a step across the gray room toward the blankness of the far wall, feeling her blood pound in her body. So close. Cort was
right there.
And she had no idea how to get to him.

She turned sharply back to Tassel, trying to think past the fear and hope that shook her. “All right, suppose there
is
a door, only it's hidden by magic. How can we make it appear?”

Osman, his arm still around Tassel's shoulders, frowned. He lifted a hand to touch the earring swinging from his bloody ear. “Illusion must after all be hiding that door from our sight, but I fear it is beyond my small strength to pierce that illusion, even with the aid of my little bauble.”

“If Cort's really right there…” Keri looked around, then up at her brother. “Lucas? What about
your
magic? Your player's magic has to do with illusion, doesn't it? Player's magic is different from other kinds of magic! Maybe if you took Osman's earring,
you
could see.” She felt shaky with hope as soon as she thought of this.

Lucas gave the garnet earring a wary glance. “Keri, my talent in that direction is
very
small.”

Keri wanted to shout at him. She made herself count to four twice before she said, calmly, “Not that small, it isn't. That creepy puppet was as tall as my arm.” She held her hands apart illustratively.

“Well, yes. But making a puppet get up and move isn't the same as weaving or breaking illusion. If she were here, my mother—” He stopped. Then he visibly braced himself and turned to Osman. “Naturally, I am willing to try my blood against this illusion, if you'll permit me.”

Infused with blood and magic, Osman's garnet earring seemed to glow even in the twilight-dim room. Even Brann stepped close, glowering suspiciously. Osman lifted a hand and touched it, then quickly took it from his ear and held it out.

Lucas hesitated.

Keri, seeing her brother's nervousness, checked him with a touch on his wrist and said to Osman, “This
is
safe for Lucas, isn't it? Is there something about blood sorcery I don't know?”

Lucas and Osman both paused, with astonishingly similar bland expressions. Lucas said, just a little too airily, “It's perfectly safe, I'm sure.”

Osman glanced at him and then added smoothly, “It is a trifle unpredictable, like everything my grandmother makes. But I think there is scant chance of harm.”