The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (57 page)

Uncomfortable with where this was heading, Ean returned them to safer waters. “Where do the children go from here?”

“Once they finish their schooling, they’re free to return to their own lands—or stay in T’khendar and join the First Lord’s crusade.” He rested hands inside the flap of his overalls and exhaled a thoughtful sigh. “I’m proud to say most choose to stay.”

A hubbub of excited shouting preceded Isabel’s arrival at the farmstead. Still surrounded by a froth of children, all of them clearly beneath the age of seven, she was soon bombarded with two dozen more coming at her with exclamations of surprise and welcome. Ean watched, entranced, as Isabel allowed the youngest children to take her hands, guiding her toward the manor, while the oldest boy claimed her satchel and two of the adolescent boys—all long legs and lean-muscled arms, so like Tanis these days—carried her staff between them.

“You know,” Djurik mused, gazing at Isabel just as entranced as Ean, “there’s a lot of folks as say they stayed in T’khendar ‘cause of the First Lord, to serve him, to do their part. I reckon that’s true enough. But I warrant there’s just as many of us are here to serve the Lady. Not that there’s competition between the two, mind,” he added, glancing at Ean, “but this world is their world. We all know that.”

Ean considered Djurik. He seemed a simple man with his tattered work clothes and sweat-stained neckerchief, but he wondered… 
None of us are truly the shells we wear.
Isabel’s admonishment. He was beginning to see the truth of it.

By the time Ean and Isabel left the farmstead, midday had come and gone again. They headed off on foot, their satchels packed with food enough for several more days on the road, their stomachs full from a hearty meal of smoked ham and hard cheese, black bread smeared with salty butter, of a tart with apples and dried plums, and all of it washed down with spicy cider. The children gave them an enthusiastic send-off, waving and cheering as if they embarked upon a grand adventure fraught with danger and daring. They were deep on a path through the woods before the sound of youthful voices finally faded.

“My lady,” Ean asked once the silence of the wood had fully enveloped them, “why did you bring me to Sionym House?”

Isabel walked with smooth strides, her staff finding its way unerringly along the path before her, never mind that she walked blindfolded. “It was on the way, my lord.”

“Is that the only reason?”

She glanced at him with a brow aching gracefully above her blindfold, and she considered him this way for a time. Then she looked back to the path ahead. “There is much to know about my brother’s game, Ean. Much to recall—too much to explain. You must see something of this world, of what we’ve created here, of the people who chose a life in T’khendar. You must make your own connections, form your own conclusions. My brother will not have your oath unless it is in full knowledge of what you swear.”

My oath.
The words made Ean immensely uneasy. He looked away from her and exhaled a troubled breath, pushing a hand through his hair. Of course he’d known it would be expected, he just…well… 

But that was her point, wasn’t it? She knew he wasn’t ready to give his oath, that he didn’t understand nearly enough about what they were doing. He wandered the formless midlands between sides, unable to fully choose either, for both were obscured beneath a haze of falsehoods and unknowns.

Only Isabel was clear.

“I haven’t asked you,” Ean said, hastening to change the subject, “because it hasn’t mattered,”
because I would follow you anywhere,
“but…where are we going?”

She cast him a brief look over pursed lips. “To see him.”

“Who?”

“
Rinokhálpeşumar
.”

Ean stopped abruptly. “Rinokh,” he repeated, staring after her. He felt a dry-throated panic welling at the idea of confronting the creature again. “But I thought…”  He adjusted the straps of his pack and tried to calm himself. “I thought he was… undone.”

Isabel halted several paces ahead. “Malorin’athgul cannot be unmade. Only the shells they’ve chosen to wear in this realm might be stripped away. Come, Ean,” she reached back for his hand. “You must understand what it is we fight.”

Ean thought he had a fair idea of that already, but he took her hand and allowed her to lead him on, for he could refuse her nothing. Yet as they started walking again, Ean kept seeing his dreadful confrontation with Rinokh superimposed over the path before him, and the persistent memory started making him ill. He thought he almost felt again the man’s chilling power crushing him into the earth, and either this or the increasingly steep climb soon had him sweating beneath his tunic.

Rather than dwell disturbingly upon the moment of his near-death, he tried again to push the vision from mind and asked Isabel instead, “Why do we not travel the nodes?” 

“There are no nodes leading to this place. It would be too dangerous.”

The path continued steepening until they were using hands as well as feet to climb from boulder to boulder. Isabel tied up her skirts around her knees and used her staff for support, climbing sure-footed in suede boots. Ean shouldered her pack as well as his own, and in this fashion did they make steady progress up the mountainside.

It was late afternoon when the path leveled out and they emerged into a clearing where a waterfall had carved a grotto out of the stone. Above them, the bare rock face angled up and out of sight, while to their right, a lush valley spread, velvet-soft for all it was hundreds of feet beneath them. Seeming close enough to touch, the deeply ribbed walls of the adjacent ridge soared to impossible heights, the true temples of the earth. Their emerald sides were softened by a lush canopy of trees that somehow clung to the near-vertical walls. More waterfalls fell from on high, long lines of silver-white gleaming against a granite face. It was a magnificent and unearthly vista.

Standing amidst such majesty, Ean felt an inexplicable sense of expansion, as if some part of him was being stretched, his awareness extending to the peaks of the mountains and beyond, the rest of him filling the valley, becoming the water of its bountiful cup.

Staring at the vista while he caught his breath, Ean suddenly saw another picture superimposed over the lush canopy of trees, a scene of barren basalt mountains and scalded red sands. The two images were part of the same circle of time, the same view separated by hundreds of years. Yet he perceived too clearly in that moment that what had once been could become so again.

He wasn’t sure why he saw these things, but he felt the moment was significant, and it took a long time before that vision of desolation and the feelings of defeat that accompanied it finally left him.

Isabel called his attention with a light brush of fingers across his arm, and then she led him away down the path. It narrowed as it hugged the mountainside, much of it tracing the edge of a sheer drop to the valley canopy, but finally it opened again onto another clearing, this one wider, grassy, and framing an even larger waterfall charging hundreds of feet down from the very lip of the mountain. Bathed in the waterfall’s mighty mist, a stone cottage gleamed.

“Ah,” Ean said as a welcome understanding dawned. He’d been wondering how they planned to overnight with no bedding to shelter them from the chill of the earth.

Isabel cast him a smile over her shoulder, and then she led him to the cottage. Inside, he found a table and chairs, a large butcher’s block over which hung an assortment of pots, and a wide featherbed across from the gaping stone fireplace, where a modest cauldron hung.

They prepared dinner together, working in quiet tandem, their actions as effortlessly coordinated as if they’d lived lifetimes thusly. And perhaps they had. Ean certainly felt at ease with her in a way he’d never experienced with anyone before.

The result was a tasty stew concocted from the vegetables and ham Treva and the children had provided. Isabel made a tea of lemongrass and mint, and afterwards they sat across the table from each other, which arrangement suited Ean, the better to admire her. 

“I asked Djurik Nagraed about the paths to T’khendar,” he said as they sipped their tea. He watched her expression carefully to gauge her reaction.

“Mmm,” she murmured into her cup.

“He implied the nodes to T’khendar are not as twisted as people of Alorin might believe.”

“How deep does the alabaster go?” she echoed with a smile.

Ean looked at her intently. “Is it so?” 

Isabel set her mug on the table between them and aimed her blindfolded gaze at it in thoughtful silence, one finger exploring the smooth rim. “Conventional wisdom,” she said after a moment, then added drily, “—said wisdom most often being the testimony of the First and Fourth Vestals—declares the nodes to T’khendar were hopelessly twisted when Malachai opened the weld into the Citadel on Tiern’aval.”

“So have I heard,” Ean agreed. This was the only thing ever said about the nodes, yet it occurred to him only then that it couldn’t be entirely true, for not only had he traveled to T’khendar across a node with Franco, but Carian vran Lea had also supposedly been to Niyadbakir and returned to speak of it—though admittedly with the help of the zanthyr. “And the truth?”

Isabel sat back in her chair, facing him in such a way that made him feel she was considering him, assessing his ability to accept what she was about to say. “The making of T’khendar was monumental,” she told him at last. “Nothing like it had ever been done. With the Council of Nine’s assistance, Malachai and my brother grew the world from within the womb of Alorin’s own aether. This process stretched the nodes and welds that formed the woof and warp of Alorin’s fabric. Some of these nodes splintered and had to be closed off. Others were purposefully twisted.”

“Intentionally?” Ean asked. “Why?”

“To protect Alorin from
deyjiin
,” she answered. “The consumptive power roamed freely here at first. It was a power we didn’t fully comprehend in those early days. It took my brother too long to understand it, and many died because of this failing—we both failed the others in this, the greatest of tragedies.”

“
Deyjiin
,” Ean murmured. He was too intimately familiar with that power to take any reference to it lightly. “How did
deyjiin
get here? Was it always here?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Deyjiin exists in the chaos beyond the realms of Light. T’khendar sits on this boundary, on one side opening to Alorin, and the other to the unraveling fringes of the cosmos.

“When my brother stretched Alorin’s fabric to create T’khendar, the fabric became so thin in places that
deyjiin
seeped in, like water through cheesecloth. After Tiern’aval was ripped from Alorin, and the last weld into our realm was safely closed, my brother and Dagmar labored tirelessly to shore up those aetheric places in T’khendar’s fabric where
deyjiin
was entering. Once this was done,
elae
flourished.”

Ean suspected there was much more to this story, more than Isabel could explain to him in a single night—or in a month of such nights. “So the nodes were twisted to protect Alorin from
deyjiin,
” he summarized. “Which means…” Already hints of the truth were pushing at him—whether by intuition or some barely perceived ghost of a memory, he couldn’t say. “If they twisted the nodes, they could just as easily untwist them, once the threat of
deyjiin
was gone.”

“Aptly deduced, my lord.”

He felt her praise unjustified, for the answer was too simple. The stories of Malachai making a pact with supposed ‘dark gods’ seemed utterly laughable now.

Yet this truth awakened strange stirrings within him, vague and distant memories that brought naught but discomfort and apprehension, as yet formless save for the glimmers of feelings that were their heralds. 

“All my life I’ve been told untruths compounded by fabrications,” Ean murmured, trying his best to fit the various pieces into their proper place, dislodging the lies that had so inadequately been filling them. “It’s difficult to reconcile where real truth begins and ends. Everything just feels…upended, the full deck of Trumps scattered.”

She gave him a compassionate smile. “You cannot simply jump into the middle of a game in play and expect to understand it. So much has come before—too much to tell it all. But what we can explain, what we can show you, we will, always with the hope that each new idea may reawaken others.” She placed a hand over his. “We need your help in this game, Ean. But more than this,
you
are important, to my brother…and to me.”

He stared at her in silence upon this pronouncement, feeling suddenly scraped by her words. “Isabel,” he murmured, dropping his eyes to the table, suddenly unable to look at her, “Julian told me a tale of the man you were said to have loved. One of the First Lord’s generals.”

She gazed quietly at him beneath her blindfold.

“Arion Tavestra,” he posed haltingly. “Is it…him to whom you made your promise? Do you wear the blindfold for him?”
Am I fighting him for your love?

“I think you know,” she replied softly.

But Ean couldn’t claim this knowledge from beyond the veil of death, no matter how much he desired to know it. There were truths behind that door as yet too painful to recall. He cursed his own cowardice, but he feared so desperately what he would find…truths far beyond a knowledge of the man Isabel professed to love. Instinct told him that waking those memories would somehow signal the end of the bond he was building with a woman he absolutely could not bear to live without.