The Keeper of the Mist (36 page)

But maybe now there was hope.

Cort stepped forward, and she followed. Now at the back of her mind, along with her own magic and her awareness of Nimmira and the boundary, she was thinking about Tassel, and about what the Bookkeeper might do. Maybe. Maybe.

Step, and flicker, and they were on the stone above Ironforge's highest mines; Keri felt the seams of coal and iron running through the earth below her feet and made a quite automatic mental note to suggest to the miners of Ironforge that they shift their workings east and south; she was almost sure there was a good vein there. It felt rich and heavy below her, though deep. It occurred to her that she might be able to open the earth for the miners; though she had never thought of it, that seemed like something she might do.

Or she might do
if
the boundary could be secured so the Wyvern King couldn't take all this country as his own and make the miners into his slaves.

No, no leisure now to think about losing Nimmira. She shouldn't think about anything except moving forward. About coming around and back to Gannon's farm with Cort, both of them completing a solid working that would protect Nimmira, both of them living a long, long time and protecting Nimmira for all that time. Perhaps not as long as the Timekeeper had, but long enough.

Step, and flicker, and they were suddenly in among a small group of men and boys, miners who had come up to guard the thinned border into Eschalion. Keri blinked in surprise to find all these people in her way, the first in this whole long walk. Some of the men held heavy blacksmith's hammers and some held pickaxes and all of them wore worried expressions, but the worry turned to astonishment when Keri and Cort appeared. Startled shouts rose all around them. They knew her. “Lady!” one of the men exclaimed, and another, “Kerianna Ailenn!” which surprised her again; she would not have thought they would know her name. But she had no time to be surprised, because they pointed urgently northward.

Turning quickly to see what had worried them, Keri stepped back in alarm before realizing that there was no danger, not now. A long stone's throw away stood a village or camp of some kind: shelters more fit for goats than people, set amid ragged gouges that were not immediately recognizable as the entrances to mines. Much nearer, and this was why Keri had flinched, stood several dozen men, frozen in midstride when the Timekeeper had made a gift of his last moment to Nimmira and to Keri.

The men were thin and their clothing was poor, but they had plainly meant to attack someone. They had clubs, mostly, and shovels, and a few pickaxes, smaller and with sharper points than the pickaxes belonging to the miners of Nimmira. Their lips were drawn back, their faces twisted in ferocious grimaces, every one of them caught in an attitude of fury and hatred.

Keri's own people began calling out questions and warnings and confused explanations: “The mist, it failed.” “Those bandits…Timmis, he said they caught him alone—”

At last, one man shouted the others down and turned to Keri to finish the story in a tumbling rush, but a little more coherently. “So anyway, those men, they were going to rob and murder Timmis, I guess, and who knows what after that, but they just stopped, just like that, Lady, which saved Timmis, and they haven't moved since, so Timmis, he came and got us, and we're watching them!” He gave the frozen attackers a fierce glower and her a firm nod. “If they come back to life, we'll show them the hammers of Ironforge, you can count on that!”

Keri didn't know what to say. It hadn't exactly occurred to her before that if she and Cort failed to lay down the proper boundary, then this sort of scene would surely occur in a hundred places around Nimmira. There would be no safety for anyone, even if the Wyvern King did not come immediately with his sorcerers. Every village with men less determined than these might be overrun. She began to stutter over some kind of praise of the miners' courage but then turned sharply as one of the younger men said, in patent alarm, “Lady, that watch has stopped!”

And the young man dropped his pickax, stepped forward, and reached out for the watch dragging at Keri, with its unnatural weight and its crystal face and its frozen hands.

Horrified, Keri stumbled back against Cort, but not quite quickly enough.

Cort caught her absently. He didn't seem to have really noticed the miners or the young man or Keri herself. But he caught her anyway, though his arm trembled just perceptibly. He caught her and muttered something she didn't hear, shook a drop of blood impatiently from his hand, and began to step forward, pulling her with him.

But not…quite…quickly enough. Because the young man snatched after the Timekeeper's watch as though it were the only thing in the world, as though he hadn't even noticed Keri flinch away or Cort steady her, as though in this one long, stretched instant, nothing in the world was real to him but that watch.

Which was true, of course. Keri, shocked as she was, wasn't actually surprised. It wasn't the young man's fault. She knew that, too. The Timekeeper's magic had been trying all along to go somewhere, to settle on someone. Now, here, it had seized its chance, snatched up this young miner in its grip, and how was he to know?

He couldn't, and he didn't, and he caught the Timekeeper's watch up in his hand as though it weighed nothing. With a sound like many tiny bells ringing, all the watch's hands began to tick forward once more, and the moment that had lingered so long moved on at last. Keri felt the jolt of Nimmira's time catching suddenly up to Outside time all through her bones. No one else seemed to feel it, but she would have fallen to her knees except that she clung to Cort and he braced her solidly and did not let her fall.

The young man gazed dazedly down at the watch, holding it cupped in both his hands. Outside the line of the boundary, the ragged men with their makeshift weapons rushed forward, found themselves unexpectedly facing a good double handful of miners armed with hammers and pickaxes, and stumbled to a halt.

Cort blinked, shuddered, looked about as though aware of his surroundings for the first time in hours, and flicked his hand sharply, casting drops of blood all along the boundary line between the miners of Nimmira and the unkempt brigands of Eschalion.

Keri caught the mist that rose up and framed it swiftly into a proper boundary, defining inside and Outside and setting one away from the other. But up ahead of them, along the arc of the border where they had not yet repaired the boundary, she was aware that the mist was shredding away in the breeze.

Cort was aware of it, too. Turning, he took Keri's shoulders in a hard grip. “That's temporary, but it'll hold long enough against brigands like those, I swear it. Where are we? Up by Ironforge, is it? A third of the distance to go, and the Timekeeper's moment broken? How long before the Wyvern King realizes what's happened?”

Keri wanted to hug him, she was so glad to see him returned to himself. Terror filled her, but also a wild optimism; for the first time in timeless ages, she was certain they would make it back to Glassforge and complete the boundary, and Cort would slam closed every door and crack and tiny little gap between Nimmira and Eschalion. She even thought he might survive the effort, even if she had failed to get her message to Tassel. She wrapped her fingers around his wrists, nodding. “There's only a quarter of the whole left, not much more, we'll do it, we'll make it work, but we have to be quick, Cort—”

“I know.” He jerked his head at the new Timekeeper. “And that fool of a boy doesn't know anything and can't help! If he'd had the sense to
ask
first, we'd still
have
time!” He glared at the young miner.

If Cort was a year older than the other man, he wasn't three. Keri almost wanted to laugh. The miner drew back, offended, holding the watch protectively against his chest as though afraid Cort might try to snatch it away. Cort glowered at him. In another moment, he would start shouting, and that wouldn't be helpful to anyone. Keri patted his hand urgently, took it in hers, and pulled him around. “Quick, Cort.” Then she beckoned firmly to the young miner. “Come on, right now!” Somewhere in the back of her mind, the incomplete circle of the boundary trembled.

Cort plainly felt it, too. He clenched his teeth, turned his shoulder to the new Timekeeper in an angry snub, found his knife, flicked the blade across his palm with practiced speed and only a slight grimace, and strode forward.

Keri beckoned again, then rolled her eyes at the new Timekeeper's hesitation, grabbed his wrist, and pulled him along after Cort. “What's your name?” she asked him, but found she knew. “Oh, Merric. Merric Daroson. All right, Merric, you realize you're the Timekeeper now? You must take up this charge and count off the passing years. In fact, you
have
taken it up. Do you understand what happened when you took the watch?”

“No,” the young man admitted. “No, I think…no. But time was wrong, something was wrong with time, and now it's right again. But—” He looked at her warily. “Did I do something bad?”

Keri hesitated. “Not
bad,
” she said at last. “But it would have been better if you'd waited. The Wyvern King—the old Timekeeper—it's all too complicated to explain. Come on, walk faster!” She knew Cort was moving only on nerve and will: shock and anger were merely a fleeting substitute for rest. But for the moment, his strides were long and sure, and each tiny doorway he opened before them and shut behind them carried them just a little farther than the last. Flicker, flicker, flicker, and the landscape changed around them: down the long slopes of the mountains and back into the warmer lands, where the forests were green and sturdy and spring was further along, and then down again.

To Keri's left, the land of Eschalion rolled away unpeopled, while to her right lay the gentle farms and fields of Nimmira. Nowhere else had the contrast between the two lands seemed so stark. In Eschalion, it was all wild country, forests rising sharply to more mountains, with here and there amid the trees a mean-looking village of cramped hovels and scraggly gardens. In Nimmira, the land rolled gently downward, open and welcoming. In the pastures, lambs bounced and chased one another around their mothers, and in the fields, the green wheat was already knee-high. Here, the scattered farmhouses were all painted white with cheerful yellow trim, and the barns were all painted russet red.

Keri wanted badly to loop the boundary outward and take some of those mountains into Nimmira, take those villages away from the Wyvern King and bring those people into Nimmira. But she knew it was impossible. Since the border of Nimmira could never be drawn so unevenly, pressing the boundary out here would mean having to redraw the whole thing bigger, which was beyond impossible. But she could hardly bear to look at the grim little villages of Eschalion.

As far as she could tell, Cort walked past all this unseeing. He moved fast and with determination, and he never once glanced to either side. He only put one foot in front of the other and flicked a drop of blood from the crimson pool cupped in his palm and made a gap that looked like a contained bit of heat haze and stepped through it, and Keri fixed the boundary he had raised up and stepped through the haze after him. She still held the new Timekeeper's wrist, hauling him along with her, afraid he might otherwise hesitate and be left behind. He seemed to her like he might hesitate. He pulled against her grip from time to time, and darted wary glances at Cort, and muttered about blood magic under his breath. Keri was glad to be rid of the weight of time pressing on her, glad of the new balance she felt in the magic of Nimmira, but she could have wished her new Timekeeper a bit faster to catch up.

The magic rising through her and trailing behind her gave her a strange feeling of being stretched out thin, and her vivid sense of the earth beneath her feet and the fields around her and the birds above made her dizzy, but she was all right.
Basically,
she was all right. She wasn't sure about Cort. He was still staring only straight ahead, and sometimes he staggered a bit when the ground was uneven. Stretching her legs and dragging Merric with her, she caught up to Cort, taking his arm and trying to steady him. But he only shook free impatiently. He seemed as blind to her as he was to everything else.

Miles and miles to go, still, before they came back to Gannon's farm and completed the boundary circle. Tassel would probably have known exactly. Keri could only guess: a hundred miles, more or less. Less now, less with every stride, but still a long, weary distance. And she was starting to worry Cort would try too hard to shorten it and break the continuity of the boundary. He wanted to complete the circle fast, as fast as possible, and they needed that speed, no one had to explain that to Keri. But she could tell that pouring his strength into speed was stretching his magic to its utmost. His white, taut effort frightened her. She hurried to catch him up, to tell him to slow down, to
force
him to slow down, what difference would one or two minutes make if he depleted too much of his strength to gain those minutes for them?

Merric hurried with her, no longer attempting to break her hold. Once or twice he resisted her, trying to stop, as though he simply would have liked to take a moment to catch his breath and figure out what was going on.

Of all things, they dared not stop. Keri pulled the new Timekeeper along, barely glancing at him. Away to their left, the land grew more rugged once more, steep cliffs climbing to meet the sky. That was Tor Carron over there, she thought; they had passed beyond the southern border of Eschalion at last. It didn't make her feel safer.

She wondered how long it would take for time between Nimmira and the Outside world to come into balance. For the Wyvern King to realize what had happened—or at least to realize that
something
had happened, that his prisoners had escaped and taken their magic with them. For him to realize that unless he moved swiftly, Nimmira might once again disappear from his perception and memory. Minutes, she guessed, not hours.