Sartor (5 page)

“All right,” Atan said, and handed it over. She
was already glad that Lilah had come. As long as they stayed safe, she thought
as she watched the smaller girl hoist the knapsack onto her back. They started
off.

They wound down next to the stream, as Point Adan—the
westernmost height—rose above them, an outthrust of ancient rock, colored
with angled layers, evidence of the violent and desperate wrenching of the land
into protective barriers made by long-dead mages in a vain effort to safeguard
Sartor against invasion.

Atan had begun to review past lessons on ancient magic when something
moved. Something pale, beyond the hedgerow bordering the trail. She stilled, a
hand out to halt Lilah.

The girls poised to run, as the pale something obscured by
the tangle of leaves resolved into—another girl!

She stepped carefully around the tangle of dusty-green
shrubbery, and stopped.

Lilah stared at this wraith of a girl who looked Lilah’s
age, or younger, her wide blue-gray eyes regarding them with a mixture of
apprehension and curiosity that (Atan reflected) was probably a twin to their
own faces.

“I’m Merewen,” the girl said. “Ah,
eh. Merewen Dei.”

Atan was too surprised to speak. Another girl? Not just a
girl, but a relative of some kind, because Atan’s mother had been a Dei
before her marriage contract.

Lilah was more interested in the girl, who seemed blue with
cold. Except that she didn’t shiver. Lilah studied her more closely, from
her long braids of wheat-colored hair past the anomaly of a silvery-white woven
yeath-fur cloak worn over a plain, dusty summer tunic that came just below her
knees. Her feet and arms were bare, the hue of the sky at sunup, sort of a
peachy blue, and not at all mottled. Her gray tunic was sashed. Over her
shoulder, peeping out from the soft folds of the expensive cloak, she’d
slung a knapsack.

“Are you related to my mother, then?” Atan
asked.

Merewen’s forehead puckered slightly. “I hardly
know,” she admitted. “You see, I have lived in Savar’s house
my whole life, but he was not always there.” She gave the girls a wistful
smile. “All I really know is the woodland. But I learn quickly.”

Atan sent a look at Lilah that the latter had no difficulty
interpreting: more evidence of how time had warped the people in this kingdom,
then she asked, “And so what brought you here?”

“Savar sent me,” Merewen said. “He said
you would come, and I was to meet you here—” She pointed up at
Point Adan, staring up at it. “He described it just so. I would know you
for a Landis at once, and he showed me a portrait. You look very like.” Her
smile was tentative. “But he did not mention
two
girls.” Merewen’s
brow puckered again as she considered Lilah’s short hair and her gown. “You
are a girl?”

“Yup. I came along to help.” Lilah couldn’t
help snickering. “I’m Lilah Selenna. I was disguised as a boy all
summer.”

“Oh!” Merewen’s eyes rounded with surprise.

“Tsauderei told me that there was a mage named Savar
who might help.” Atan glanced down the road into the shadowy haze. The
thick clouds overhead had darkened; the sun was setting.

Merewen ducked her head in a nod. “I am to show you
the way back to Shendoral. Though the way is easy enough, following alongside
the River Luyos, and no one else is on it.” She waved to the west. “But
Savar was very serious about my coming to find you. And those in my dreams said
you must make your way first to Shendoral alongside the river, where the
enchantment is weakest, and from there to the capital, and there you must break
the enchantment binding the Loi beyond time. Savar could not do it. Though he
was going to try again, I believe.” She frowned at her dusty toes. “I
don’t know, but I think he did not want me there when he tried.”

Atan considered all these things, then said, “Shall we
get started on our road?”

Merewen and Lilah fell in step on either side.

Presently Atan said, “Merewen. Is it a family name?”

“Yes, my mother’s,” Merewen replied.

Atan drew in a deep breath, sounding almost as if she’d
taken an unexpected blow. “She was
that
Merewen Dei? So you too
have been beyond time?”

Lilah had no idea who Merewen Dei was, and didn’t
really care, if she was a grown-up. She did not like the atmosphere, though the
road was indeed empty, the dusty farmland around them silent. But she couldn’t
see very far. The haze was both unpleasant and uncanny. She felt—well,
she felt she was being
watched
.

Merewen didn’t seem to mind, but then she’d
apparently spent her whole life in this atmosphere. A hundred years of life, or
just a few? It made Lilah’s head hurt to try to figure it out.

Atan had been counting generations outside and inside the
enchantment. She said to Merewen, “You could have a claim to the throne,”
she observed.

Merewen skipped over some rubble. “That’s what
Savar said. I don’t know what it means. Not really. He said that people
would expect it of me if you didn’t come, or if you were gone.”

“Claim to the throne?” Lilah repeated, walking
backwards so she could see both girls. “I know the Dei family is
famous—I love the writings of Lasva Dei—but aren’t they
forbidden to sit on thrones, or something? I remember some saying about how
they have birthed kings and queens but never wore crowns. So for one thing, she
can’t break the spell. Or can she? And uh, speaking of the spell, I guess
the first part of the spell really and truly broke?” She glanced around
doubtfully.

“Soon as I crossed the border.” Atan grinned. “You
did! You expected flashes of lightning.”

Lilah flung her arms wide. “It makes sense. Big magic
ought to make a big noise, or light, or
something
, don’t you
think?”

“Against Norsunder, invisible and imperceptible is
best.” Atan looked about warily in the gathering darkness, where brambles
and hedgerows made sinister shapes, and trees, so majestic in sunlight, seemed
to loom. “Remember what Tsauderei said about winter’s melt. The
effect is going to be noticed, but the later the better.”

Merewen ran her hands up her arms. “I feel different. Though
I can hardly say how, or why.”

Atan turned back to her, brow creased. “You did make
it all the way east, and you didn’t get lost in the binding.”

Merewen nodded soberly. “Savar said I would make it if
I kept in my mind Point Adan, the mountain of the rising sun. It’s
because I am part Loi.”

Atan drew in another of those breaths. “Yes, your
mother is... Gehlei told me she was thought to have disappeared, when her
father tried to renege on the treaty, and take the throne in her name, deposing
my father. Tsauderei told me she was rumored to have run to Shendoral to take
refuge to escape the, the trouble.”

Merewen shrugged. “Disgrace. That’s what Savar
said. My mother’s family left the capital in disgrace, but my mother came
to Shendoral.”

“I don’t get it,” Lilah said, looking from
one to the other.

Merewen seemed undisturbed, but Atan said carefully, “Merewen’s
grandfather married into the Dei family, and took their name, as required by
ancient treaty of any Landis marrying into the Dei family. That meant he could
never come to the throne. The other way, Deis who married Landises also had to
renounce their names.”

“An ancient treaty?” Lilah asked. “Why?”

“Old problems. I thought the Dei family went on to
Everon, after they were banished.”

“They did,” Merewen said. “Except for my
mother. They didn’t know she was in Shendoral. Nobody did. She didn’t
like being in the middle of disgrace. Dis-grace. Mis-grace. Sounds like she
spilled her soup on her clothes, or tripped over her own toes!” She
laughed, a delightful sound, reminding Lilah and Atan of birdsong.

“Did she disappear? You said you lived with Savar.”
Atan asked.

“She’s with the Loi,” Merewen said. “She
chose that form when she mated with the Aroel. She can’t be human again.”

“Aroel?” Lilah asked. “Is that a leader or
a ruler?”

“No,” Atan said. “The Loi don’t have
human hierarchies, Savar said. It’s more like the one chosen to take
human form long enough to communicate with us.” She turned to Merewen. “So
you are the child of human and Loi.”

“Is that why you’re blue?” Lilah asked.

Merewen nodded, skipping again. “Savar said that I should
be able to shift—ah, alter form, but I don’t know how, or when. I
can’t find them, except in dreams,” she added, her voice sad.

“Then how did you get separated from them?”
Lilah asked.

“They came to the world to try to help, and nearly got
caught in the binding. That’s what Savar told me. I
did
get
caught. I was with my mother, see, and they thought I’d go back when they
shifted. But I didn’t. Then Savar found me, and so I lived in Shendoral.”
Merewen’s large blue eyes were wistful. “When the dreams are right,
they sing to me, my parents. They call me Linet. I like that.”

“You will find them when we break that spell,” Atan
promised.

Merewen’s sweet smile altered her whole face in the
fading light. Atan discovered the contours of Merewen and of Lilah, too, were
blurring. Darkness was closing in.

“Shall we make ourselves a little camp in that grass
over there, and rest for the night?” she suggested.

Lilah sighed with relief. “My feet would like that
very much. As for my stomach, it would welcome a bite.”

The girls turned off the road toward the bank of the river,
making their way over dusty long grasses midway between green and brown. The
blades felt strange to Atan as she swept them aside. They had been caught for
so long midway between summer and autumn. Time’s measure really had
become meaningless here.

The Luyos flowed fast, a comforting sound to Atan, for water
was too strong to be bound. They made their way down to drink the cold water,
and then back up onto the grassy bank.

Merewen pulled from her knapsack a long, wrapped bread-shape
and said, “The miller’s lady made this for me. I ate one coming,
and this one is for going back.” As she uncovered it, the girls sniffed
the welcome smell of ground nuts and spices.

It was a familiar scent, one Atan had smelled every day that
Gehlei baked what she’d called winter-bread. It was a Sartoran bread, and
here was another loaf, so homely, so unexpected. Sartoran, made by unknown
Sartoran hands.

Atan’s throat hurt and her eyes stung with a longing
she could not define.

From a tower window in the Norsunder base south of Sartor’s
border, Granon Zydes stared down into a torchlit courtyard and watched the
diminutive yellow-haired mage Dejain issue some orders to a number of his own
scouts, and then pull them together so she could transfer them in pairs.

His
scouts. How he loathed her! He wished she’d
died the year before, when Kessler Sonscarna’s crazy conquering plan had
been smashed. He preferred dead mages. They did what they were told, and didn’t
think beyond that.

Dejain wanted the base. He knew it as well as she did. He
didn’t care what she wanted it for—everyone was plotting—but
he needed to find out how she planned to take it from him so he could
circumvent her, and make her look like a fool while at it.

He wished he could annihilate her, but Detlev had ordered
them to cooperate. “I need her expertise for my own plans,” he’d
said.

You could revile Detlev all you wanted, but you didn’t
cross him, not unless you liked him smashing your mind inside your skull
without even moving from his chair.

“Kessler is being assigned to you as an errand boy,”
Detlev had said then.

Zydes closed his eyes, memory of his dismay like a fist to
the gut. Young as he was, many were afraid of Kessler Sonscarna. He was both
lethal and crazy—the most lethal and the craziest to survive a family
known for its vicious insanity. And a combination you only wanted in an ally,
not in a subordinate who looked at you with unwinking, undisguised hatred.

But Zydes had known better than to complain, not with Detlev
smiling that faint smile and gazing at him with those cold, nasty eyes the same
gray-green shade as a winter sea, especially when Detlev added in a mild but
deliberate drawl that somehow burned with the threat of mid-winter ice, “He
will benefit from lessons in obedience.”

Zydes turned away from the tower and wandered back to his
desk. What had he meant by
that
? No one understood Detlev. Many had
tried to take him out, and his reprisals were both imaginative and lasting. Zydes
knew better than to tangle with him directly. Better to build a powerbase here
in the physical world, whose rules he understood.

So what was Dejain—

He became aware of a soft green glow at the extreme edge of
his vision. He whirled around. The scope, a face-sized mirror-like object
supported between two metal rods, gleamed.

Zydes crossed the room to stare into the smooth black dish. He
had several alarm spells keyed onto his scope. The faint iridescent sheen over
it was definitely green, not red, or blue, or gold. Green. That meant—

He frowned, thinking over his keys, which were not written
down anywhere—or told to anyone. Green, an unimportant one, set long ago...

Landis.

He stared at that green glow.

That meant a
Landis
had crossed the border?

He’d almost not bothered setting this particular
alarm-spell. Only long habit at being thorough (which included warding against
ruling families who’d been deposed) had made him set it.

The Landises were the most famous ruling family of all, of
course, which was why he’d put himself to the needless exertion of
setting that spell. Apparently it wasn’t so needless after all.

So. A Landis was alive?

Irritation and fear tightened the back of his neck. Stupid
old stories, nothing but myth, meant to scare children and old people. The
Landises were only good at endurance, like rats. The truth was, when they’d
been attacked they’d shriveled up like paper on fire, and even if one of
them had somehow escaped (and there had been rumors) that one could not be at
the head of an army now, or this would not be the only alarm—