The Measure of the Magic (33 page)

Her grandmother made a placating gesture.
I know you are disappointed not to find me still among the living. But I am as you see me, my life complete. I was alive when I made the avatar I hoped would bring you to me. I was alive when I made my escape from my home. But there were minions of Isoeld waiting for me, sent to kill me and take from me the Elfstones. She couldn’t know for certain I had them, but she certainly suspected. Her creatures would find them on me or find them when they searched the cottage
.

She sighed, a deep exhalation.
My faithful friends, my oldsters from so many years, friends and lovers and servants, fought to save me and died doing so. I escaped because of their sacrifice but was grievously injured
.
Knowing I would die and pass from this world without ever having told you what I must or done what I had promised, I came here, down beneath the Ashenell, down to where the most powerful of the Elven spirit Queens dwells with her people. Here, I could maintain a presence long enough for you to find me
.

She made a curiously compelling gesture with one white hand.
And you have found me, child. My trust in you was not misplaced. But your struggle has been every bit as difficult as mine, and for that I am sorry
.

Phryne took a step toward her, wanting to embrace her, to feel the old woman’s arms around her one final time. But Mistral held up her hands in warning.
You cannot touch me, Phryne. You must not. We can only talk now, nothing more
.

“Grandmother, I just want—”

No, Phryne! Don’t say it!
She made a quick, warding gesture.
Things aren’t as they seem. We have to hurry. Now talk to me. Tell me what happened to you after your escape
.

The urgency in her voice was unmistakable. It caused Phryne to glance around hurriedly, searching for its source. But she found nothing different than it had been. The tombs were unchanged, the waters of the lake still, the torches casting shadows as before, the cavern vast and silent.

“There’s nothing to tell,” she answered her grandmother. “I escaped with the help of the Orullian twins and a young boy. The boy brought me to your cottage, which had been searched and abandoned. Your avatar appeared and directed me to the Belloruusian Arch. I fled there when Isoeld’s soldiers came to the cottage. At the arch, I passed through into the tunnels that led to this place.”

She took a quick breath. “But what am I to do now? I will not let Isoeld blame me for killing my father. Can you help me, Grandmother? Can you do something to help me expose her?”

Mistral Belloruus shook her head.
I am of the dead now, and I can do nothing to aid the living. I lack substance, and I am confined to this place until I am allowed passage to the world of the dead and my final rest. I can do only one thing for you. I can give you the blue Elfstones. I have them with me, and they are meant for you. Take them and use them to help our people. You will find a way. You must
.

She fumbled in her clothing and produced the familiar leather pouch. It was more substantial than the shade who held it and instantly recognizable.

Come closer
, she said.

Phryne started toward her, but had taken only a few steps when a sudden wind rose out of nowhere, gusting through the chamber with such force that the torches were nearly extinguished and Phryne was forced to drop to one knee and shield her face. The whispering rose to a new crescendo, filling the immense cavern with a wailing at once so terrible and so sad that it defied belief.

“Grandmother!” Phryne called.

But Mistral Belloruus had shrunk back against the stone marker where she had first appeared, her face twisted with emotions Phryne could not read. She still held the pouch and the Elfstones clutched in her hands, clearly visible through the ephemeral trappings of her diminished body. But no longer was she making any effort at handing them to Phryne.

A voice spoke, harsh and cutting, managing somehow to rise above the wailing of the voices and the wind.

-You are of the living, girl, and do not belong here-

Phryne’s throat clenched and her blood turned to ice.

“R
EMEMBER WHAT I TOLD YOU,
” Panterra was telling Xac Wen as they neared the Elfitch and the city of Arborlon. “If we’re stopped, just say that we’re visiting old friends and hope to do some hunting in the eastern wilderness while we’re here. You don’t have to say anything more.”

The boy scowled at him. “I know what to say, Pan. You don’t have to worry; I won’t make a mistake.”

He sounded so fierce about it that Panterra had to smile in spite of himself, but he managed to mask it with a sudden fit of coughing.

Prue, following a pace behind them, stepped forward and placed her hand on Xac’s shoulder. “He knows that. He just needs to reassure himself because he’s afraid for Phryne. Don’t be angry with him.”

Xac Wen glanced over at her and scuffed the toe of his boot as he walked. “I’m not angry at anyone. I just don’t want to be treated like a child. I’m big enough to do what’s needed. I rescued Phryne, after all. I got her out of that storeroom where they were keeping her.”

“Which was a very difficult and dangerous thing to do,” Pan said. “I don’t know if any of us could have done it. So I’ll tell you what. I’ll stop telling you what to do and just assume you already know.”

The boy nodded. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing with the Gray Man’s staff? You could tell me about that, and I wouldn’t get a bit angry.”

Panterra rolled his eyes.

While they crossed the meadow to the base of the bluff on which Arborlon sat and climbed the broad ramp of the Elfitch, Pan repeated the story of the death of Sider Ament and the passing of the staff to himself one more time. Xac Wen listened intently, alternately nodding and grunting until Pan was done.

“Can you do stuff with that staff?” he asked. “Magic stuff? Some say the bearer can. Is that true?”

“It’s true,” Pan told him.

“Can you show me?”

“Leave him alone, Xac,” Prue interrupted. “He doesn’t need to show you anything.”

Elven Hunters doing guard duty looked them over as they ascended the various levels of their climb, but let them pass. One or two greeted Xac by name, and he responded with a word or a wave but never anything more. At the top, they left the Elfitch and went into the Carolan Gardens, working their way along the pathways that crisscrossed the flower beds, trellis vines, and hedgerows to reach the city proper.

As they passed out of the gardens and crossed a bordering lawn toward the city roadways, Xac Wen said to Prue, “What happened to your eyes? And don’t tell me that it has anything to do with being in disguise.”

“I lost some of my vision,” she said. “Just a part of it. That’s why my eyes look like this.”

“What part did you lose?”

“The part that sees colors. I can’t see anything but shades of gray anymore.”

“How did that happen?”

“Magic. I traded off being able to see colors for having the use of instincts that are valuable in protecting myself and those with me.”

“What sort of instincts?”

“Ones that let me sense danger when it is near so that I can be ready for it and maybe avoid it.”

The boy studied her for a long moment in silence and then shook his head. “That explanation is worse than the one you gave before. I’ll ask you again later.”

At one point, they encountered an Elf whom Xac Wen knew, a young woman close to Pan’s age. Xac stopped her and asked for word of Phryne. He was told there was no news of the Princess, that since her escape she had not been seen.

“Just wanted to be sure she hadn’t returned from wherever she disappeared to,” he advised his companions as they left the young woman and walked on.

“She might have returned and not been seen,” Prue suggested.

The boy stopped and looked at her. “That’s so. But then where would she go? She would have to go into hiding right away.”

“She could have found a way to get out of the city and decided to try to reach the Orullians.”

He shook his head. “She would stay put for now. She knows I will be searching for her.” He stopped suddenly. “There is one place she might go.”

He led them hurriedly ahead, moving into a residential section where there were rows of cottages situated on the ground and in the trees overhead. Eventually they reached the tree house that the Orullians had been working on when Pan and Prue had first come to see them weeks ago to discuss the collapse of the protective wall that warded the valley.

“Wait here,” he told them.

He scrambled up the stairs onto the platform on which the cottage was situated and disappeared through the door. Pan and Prue waited patiently for his return.

“He certainly doesn’t lack for energy,” Pan observed quietly.

“He doesn’t lack for determination, either,” Prue added.

They continued to wait, shifting their gazes every so often to the roads and pathways around them, keeping watch. Neither felt entirely comfortable with the situation, even though there was no reason to think they were in any immediate danger.

Xac Wen reappeared abruptly and scampered down the stairs, his young face grim. “Nothing. She’s not been there. We should go to the arch. If she came back through, she will have left me a sign.”

It took them less than half an hour to reach the gates of the Ashenell burial grounds. There was little activity in evidence here, the iron gates leading inside open, but the grounds themselves deserted. Xac Wen led his companions ahead without slowing, taking a direct route toward the Belloruusian Arch.

Even before the boy told them they had reached their destination, Pan knew it for what it was. Built of massive stone blocks stacked one atop another, the Belloruusian Arch was fully twenty feet high and almost as wide. The letter
B
was carved into its keystone, signifying the surname of the family and marking the entrance to all the tombs and sepulchers that stretched away within the shadow of its broad span.

“This is where she disappeared,” Xac Wen announced, pointing at the arch. “Right there, underneath. She just walked up to it and then vanished.”

Panterra studied the arch and the space below for a long time, trying to see if he could discern something that would explain what had happened to Phryne. But he couldn’t see anything unusual or revealing about it. Stones and earth—that was all.

“There must be a portal of some sort,” Prue said quietly. “There must be magic at work.”

Pan nodded. “Definitely magic.”

He was resting the black staff butt-downward against the earth, running his fingers slowly up and down its length, feeling the runes respond with a soft tingle. The staff’s magic was awake, perhaps responding to something he couldn’t see. It was sending him a signal—perhaps a warning—of something waiting.

Yet Prue had said nothing of her instincts responding to any danger. They had been quick enough to warn her when Bonnasaint
had lain in wait for them in the meres. So perhaps the staff’s response was to the presence of another magic and not necessarily to anything dangerous.

“Do your instincts tell you we are threatened?” he asked her quietly.

She shook her head no.

“Wait here for me,” he told her.

He walked forward alone, taking his time, the magic of the black staff fully awake now, coursing up and down its length and into his body. He was prepared to use it if he was attacked, but he couldn’t find anything that suggested this might happen. The Belloruusian Arch and the ground about it were empty of movement or sound or life of any sort. He studied the space beneath the arch where Phryne had disappeared, but he couldn’t see anything of where she might have gone.

When he was very close, he called up the magic and gave the space directly ahead of him a spray of its bright light. For just an instant, something flickered in response—a sliver of darkness, a splitting of the air that was little more than a vertical shimmer. It was there and then gone again in an instant. Pan blinked in response to its quick, momentary appearance, not certain what it was he had seen.

Slowly, he moved toward it.