The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (14 page)

As Niko and Franco also stood—since their meeting was clearly adjourned—Franco noticed that the rain formed a sheet around Dore. The faintest tingling reached his awareness as well, one he’d come to know of late—through recent association with Björn van Gelderan—as wielding of the fifth strand of elae.

If Franco had been dismayed before, now he was veritably howling.

A man was mistaken who thought that wielders weren’t able to learn fifth strand patterns—some of the simpler patterns, such as those that shift the density of the air, were not too complex for a studied wielder to master. Rather, the problem with wielding the fifth—as any
sane man knew—is that every endeavor involving fifth-strand patterns requires an enormous understanding of Balance and its play on the realm. Few wielders had ever mastered the fifth and achieved the necessary understanding of Balance, though many had tried and died in the attempt. Every wielder knows that to dabble in the fifth is courting disaster. Yet here was Dore using the fifth to keep his boots dry. Franco gazed at him in horror.

“I know it can be a lot to take in, my old friend,” Niko said, once more misinterpreting Franco’s silence. He placed a hand on Franco’s arm again. “I look forward to putting these dark times behind us, to a day when we might renew the friendship we once boasted.”

Franco looked to him. One day I will do it, he promised himself as his eyes met Niko’s. One day I will make you regret all of the lives you’ve so callously ruined in pursuit of your own vanity. “I look forward to that day,” Franco replied, thinking of an entirely different scene from the one Niko proposed.

Niko smiled and squeezed his shoulder. “Good.” He dropped his arm and turned to frown at Dore, noting, “It is a relief to me that you are with us, Franco. With the dark times ahead—surely to mirror on some level those that lie behind—we must separate our friends from our enemies, the craven from the courageous souls who place the realm’s survival above their own.”

Franco thought that demarcation had long ago been made, and by the Fifth Vestal no less, who was far more qualified to sort through such allegiances. “I must go, Niko.”

Niko turned in surprise. “You will not stay for dinner? For the festivities? At week’s end I am throwing a grand fete—many of our old acquaintances will be attending, as well as some illustrious personages you would do well to meet, Franco.”

“I fear I cannot stay. I have an…engagement,” and he managed his best wanton grin.

Niko’s gaze turned knowing. “In all these years…you haven’t changed.”

Franco clapped a hand on his shoulder and replied with daggers in mind, “Neither have you.” Then he turned his back on the man and left as quickly as he dared.

“
Let not the eyes deceive the mind; the heart is a truer guide.”

- Jayachándranáptra, Rival of the Sun

Tanis dreamed
of his mother.

In his dream, he was naught but a babe wrapped in blankets against the brisk sea air. His mother was holding him in her arms, and he could smell the ocean and feel its breeze on his fac
e… 

“Now, Tanis love,”
his mother murmured lovingly as she held him close and rocked gently back and forth, “don’t you ever be afraid. Fear is but the mask of capricious apparitions meaning only to deceive. It haunts and teases and torments, but its threats are empty. If you follow fear, if you let its whispers turn you from your path, fear will lead you to your doom. There’s nothing in this world that can hurt you unless you first decide that it can. Even death is only another beginning. What then is there to fear?” 

“Wise words from the wisest woman alive, Tanis lad,” came the
solemn voice of his father. Tanis couldn’t see him, but he sensed his presence somewhere behind his mother. “What has Tanis to fear in life with you for his mother?” his father asked lovingly then, and Tanis saw the underside of his chin as his father leaned to kiss his mother.

To which his mother replied afterwards
, “We all must walk our paths…”

When Tanis woke, he was in a strange room.

He vaguely recalled the Fhorgs hauling him off in the middle of the night, but these memories were hazy and difficult to reach, blurred as they were by pain.

Pain.

Tanis sat straight up on the narrow bed, suddenly alert.

Why didn’t he feel any pain?

He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept—it could’ve been a day or longer—but he still ought to be experiencing
some
pain. He pushed at his eye and lip, which should’ve been swollen or at least bruised, and then yanked up his tunic to assess his ribs and belly. He found no bruises. No swelling, no tenderness. Nothing to show he’d been beaten.

The realization came as a shock. Had someone healed him? Surely no other explanation was sound, yet it seemed impossible that Pelas would allow it. In fact, though Tanis would’ve liked to believe otherwise, he was certain Pelas had nothing to do with healing him.

Then who?

And what would the others do when they found out?

Tanis didn’t have long to wait for this answer, because it was just a moment later that one of the Fhorgs barged into his small room. The Wildling took one look at him, and his face went wooden. He spun on his heel and stormed out, slamming and locking the door behind him. Two of them showed up three minutes later, and the second one stalked over and grabbed Tanis’s chin, looking him over with his woad-stained face. He snatched up the lad’s clothing even as Tanis had done himself only moments before. Then he stepped back looking suspicious.

“How did you do it?” the Fhorg demanded.

Tanis shrugged helplessly.

The Fhorg slapped him. “How did you do it?” he shouted.

“I don’t know!”

The man’s second cuff knocked Tanis sideways on the bed, and he tasted blood. Tanis glared up at him. “The truth doesn’t change just because you hit me!” 

“You’d be surprised,” remarked the Fhorg coldly. “We’ll see what Pelas says about this.”

They stalked out.

Alone on the bed in a strange room, Tanis promised himself he wouldn’t cry, but he felt shaken and frightened and altogether miserable. And he was so mad at himself! Why had he followed Pelas?
Why?
He’d known the horrible, malicious things the man involved himself in ever before he left the café—he’d
known
the man was terribly dangerous. Why then? It made no sense whatsoever!

Yet every time Tanis thought back to that moment, the same sense of duty resurfaced. It was as palpable a feeling as hunger or heartbreak, and it called to him purposefully while fear quickened his heart.

Tanis didn’t understand what it meant that he kept feeling as if he had a duty to carry out in regards to Pelas, but he imagined it must mean something—that much he knew from his training with Master O’reith.

“We’re all capable of knowing much more about the world and each other than we allow ourselves, Tanis youth,”
his master had often lectured.
“The Fifth Law of Patterning states that a wielder is limited by what he can envision. Likewise, the First Truth is based on the principle that a man may know what he envisions himself capable of knowing.”

Tanis only ever understood about ten percent of anything Master O’reith talked about.

“Instinct comes from many sources, Tanis youth: conscience, long-buried truths often denied, and even earlier memories from our past
Returnings
resurfacing to influence our decisions for good or ill.”
  The old man had continued while cleaning his spectacles with a corner of his robe and thus squinting across the table at Tanis
, “Most people ignore instinct, but that does not mean it doesn’t hail from a place of truth. Often instinct is all that stands between choosing a ship destined to falter in the storm and one that will safely reach port.”

Tanis had interpreted this to mean when instinct guided you, you’d be smart to do what it said. But that didn’t make it easy, and instinct certainly didn’t keep his stomach from growling.

Forlorn and hungry, Tanis laid down on the bed again and curled into a ball, still fighting off tears. His hand slipped up underneath his pillow, and—

Tanis bolted upright and shoved the pillow aside.

His dagger glinted dully against the cot.

Tanis stared at the weapon while his mind tried to make sense of what he saw. Of course, there was
no way
that Pelas would’ve returned his dagger. Which left only one explanation.

Phaedor must’ve enchanted the blade.

Tanis felt suddenly choked with gratitude. Inhaling a shuddering breath, he picked up Phaedor’s dagger and held it to his chest, gritting his teeth against hated tears. That he carried with him something of the zanthyr, something Pelas couldn’t take away from him—at least not for long—it was so incredibly important and special to him.
Thank you, my lord!
he thought desperately, sending his heartfelt appreciation toward the zanthyr, wherever he was.

Tanis easily imagined the zanthyr placing some kind of working upon the blade before giving it to him, a boomerang dagger that always came back to where it started. What really twisted his mind into knots, however, was wondering
why
Phaedor had put the spell upon the dagger. Had he known, even then, what Tanis would face? He wouldn’t put it past the zanthyr to know such things. Phaedor stood leagues above others in most every imaginable way.

After hugging the dagger for longer than he would’ve been comfortable admitting, Tanis slipped it into his boot. Then he got up from the bed and walked to the room’s only window. A rough shove pushed it open. Cold air flooded in, thick with brine and laden with the sound of the crashing sea. Charcoal waves thundered at the base of a cliff a hundred paces beneath his high room, and nothing but rugged, rocky coastline spread for miles.

Tanis sank to his knees and rested arms on the windowsill. Well, they weren’t in the Cairs anymore. 

Resting his chin on his hands, he watched the waves crashing below. He felt as if he’d been split in half, where one side of him wanted to do one thing while the other knew it had to do just the opposite. This duality manifested in several ways. For instance, part of him really wanted to be afraid, but another part knew he couldn’t afford to be—the part that remembered his dream and his mother’s important words.

Part of him wanted to mourn the loss of his friends and the safety that came in their company, while another part knew his friends would get along fine without him and there was something he was meant to do meanwhile.

Part of him felt guilty and morose and worried what his lady must be thinking, how afraid for him she must be and how all of his companions must feel he’d betrayed them by sneaking off, but the practical part insisted that the others would understand.

That’s good, because I certainly don’t.

Mostly Tanis felt uncertain and sad and really regretted his decision while at the same time knowing he would make the same decision again if it presented itself.

These were complicated and inexplicable feelings, much too complex for an innocent boy of fourteen to make sense of right away.

As it turned out, he had all day to think on them.

He’d been back and forth from the window a dozen times when the sun finally slunk to hover between the overcast and the darkening sea. He was kneeling glumly at the window again, timing the growling of his stomach against the crash of the waves at high tide, when the door to his room banged open. Tanis let out a startled yelp and spun to find a Fhorg standing in the portal.

“Pelas wants ye lad.”

Feeling suddenly apprehensive, Tanis got to his feet and shut the window. Then he followed the Fhorg from the room. Three flights down a grand, curving staircase landed them in a large hall bordered on one side by huge glass doors overlooking a stone patio and the sea. As Tanis passed an open door leading to an inner hall, he glimpsed red candles burning around two Fhorgs, who sat cross-legged with their backs against each other and their palms bleeding onto the floor. Tanis caught whispers of their thoughts and shuddered.

His Fhorg guide escorted Tanis out onto the patio, wherein the lad saw Pelas standing at the far end, facing out to sea, with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a jacquard ochre coat with belled sleeves, and his long hair blew wildly on the wind of the rising storm. He looked altogether unearthly and frightening, a creature of lightning and thunder, born of the storm.

Terribly nervous now but trying not to be, Tanis watched the Fhorg return inside and sort of stood there uncertainly, wondering what to do.

Eventually Pelas turned and pinned his coppery eyes on the boy. “Come here, little spy.”

Tanis swallowed and went to him, coming to an uneasy halt at his side.

“Who sent you to spy on me?” Pelas asked without looking at him. “Tell me all, this time. I mislike lies of omission, Truthreader, and believe me,” he added, pinning Tanis with a telling look, “I’ll know when you’re holding back.”