It had to be three in the morning at the latest, going off the fact I couldn’t see the faintest brushstrokes of the sun’s paint across the sky, even from high up. It had finally stopped raining; in Ryntol Wood the magical fires that’d been raging through the damp undergrowth were all extinguished, by the looks of things, but there were still plenty of wizards amongst the druids going about tending the trees, probably in case there was a resurgence. Arch-wizardry could be tricky that way, Em was always telling me…
I scowled as I flew. My heart was conflicted, where it came to Em. Better not think, for the moment. I’d find the body first – how it’d been left on the battleground to rot I had no idea; a sorcerer should’ve been able to sense it by its signature, and a druid by the flies that decided to make their homes within it…
When I came upon the spot, I had an empty shield, sitting there, a blue dome of force quivering nervously.
I dismissed it with a thought, then soared off towards the magisters I’d spotted at the treeline coordinating the contractors.
“Haspophel?” I cried, squinting, as I approached.
The tall, dark-skinned diviner in his blue, starry robe turned away from his colleagues to look up at me.
“Feychilde!” he said in surprise – then, after a moment, the shocked face became one of contempt, if not open derision. “What are you doing here, exactly?”
“Don’t you dare look at me like that,” I snarled, coming to a stop over him.
His eyes widened, and the drop-sniffing expression did indeed melt away immediately into a look of barely-tempered horror. His two fellow magisters, a man and a woman I’d never met, joined him in staring up at me.
“I want to know how you moved Winterprince’s body.”
“How we…“ Haspophel began, then looked to his companions’ faces before continuing: “We haven’t moved Winterprince –“
“He wouldn’t look the same – he was –“ I waved my hand in the direction in which I’d expected to find him. “There wasn’t much of him left.”
The diviner-magister shook his head. “I’m sorry, Feychilde. I can’t help you.” He shifted his weight as though to turn away, turn his back on me.
Why was he putting emphasis on my name? Was he trying to exert leverage over me, remind me he knew my real name, my identity?
I swooped down, descending forty, forty-five feet in less than a second; I augmented the near-silent rush of my wings until they produced a thunderous crack –
The three magisters cowered, crouching down to stare up at me, and one of them yelped; my feet were only just above their heads now.
“I put a shield on him,” I said in a flat, quiet voice, altogether unlike the din I’d just caused. “Do you understand? Fixed to him as its locus. You need to cast a spell, find out what happened here. If he’s gone, that means someone has taken –“
I stopped talking, working through the possibilities.
“Feychilde, Zakimel will hear of this, and I –“
“It’s okay, Hasslepuff. Apologies for the intrusion but I’ll need to take this over your head. Over your boss’s, too.”
I thrust upwards with my wings, then directed my course towards my supposed-friend’s mansion.
Timesnatcher. It’s time for you and I to have a little talk.
* * *
I elected to knock on the door, obey the niceties of respect that I no longer wholly felt he deserved. I could’ve gone rushing, enwraithed, right through the wall of his bedroom, challenged him there in the darkness – the mood I was in, I was tempted, so, so tempted. However, he would surely know I was on my way, and there was no chance he’d be taken unawares no matter how outlandish I made my sudden appearance. Worse, it would humiliate me – to expose the rawness of the betrayal that I felt eating me up inside. It would instantly be me on the back-foot, not him – I would be the intruder, the offender; he would be the injured party. No, I would knock on the door, and this way I would be the guest, he the host with a mouthful of lies.
Besides, the lights were on. It seemed I wasn’t the only champion keeping strange hours.
Of course, as I descended into the gardens and stepped towards his broad front doors, they swung inwards in advance of my approach.
Irimar stood there in the brightly-lit entryway wearing his civilian clothes, and in the predawn silence I managed to catch Tanra’s muttering from behind him – but I couldn’t tell what she said.
I was missing my fairy already.
“I-Irimar,” I stammered, much of my anger evaporating at the sight of his calm face, the ordinary (if expensive) garments he wore. “Winterprince –“
“I can’t countenance this.” Tanra stepped into view behind him – she was in her champion’s outfit, but the mask was pushed up on top of her head, the hood thrown back to reveal her mousy-brown hair. “You shouldn’t talk about these things.”
Irimar, for his part, was merely peering up into the sky above the house.
“You didn’t bring her,” he said after a moment in a marvelling tone of voice, then lowered his gaze to my face. “What in Celestium’s happened to you, Kas?”
I reached up, removed my mask.
I flicked my gaze across to Tanra, and she shook her eyes, left-right, an infinitesimally-tiny motion meant only for me.
She kept the secret?
“Zyger. Zyger’s the first thing, Irimar.” I moved my eyes back to him, clenching and unclenching my fist rapidly. “You say my fate’s entwined with Neverwish’s. You know my future, you know where it leads –“
“Where it led,” he corrected me. “You see, this is the very reason we seek to say as little as possible to you! Now you’ve spent – who was it? Starsight? You’ve spent hours brooding over nothing. My friend –“
“Don’t! Don’t ‘my friend’ me…” I drew a ragged breath – my throat still hurt a bit. “I’m a piece, a pawn, and when you call me your friend you’re only doing it because you know it’s better for you, a better move to make…”
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“You think we cannot feel,” he said, in an almost-strangled voice.
I met his eyes. “No! No… I –“
“Kas, let it go,” Tanra said in a soothing voice, stepping forwards. I could see the concern in her eyes. “This isn’t anything you can change. We can see parts of your future. And we do, we do care about you. It’s just, if we tell you anything it changes things, and not always in predictable ways… You can’t dwell on it.”
“Did you see me in Zyger too?” I asked in a whisper.
She shook her head, and I almost felt relieved until she said, in a small voice: “I heard you, though.”
“You heard me…”
“Enough!” Irimar barked – and moving my attention back to his face I could see the way my words had upset him: his brow was furrowed; he gripped the edge of the door and it appeared his fingers were pressing grooves into the wood. “We heard you! One paltry, petty future, no longer a hand that the deck of fate can deal! Can you imagine the futures we perceive for ourselves? Do not be too hasty to play the victim, when you know nothing of the truth, when the truth only makes you close your ears!”
His words lashed me and, chastised, I stood like the condemned man chained to the post, rigidly accepting my punishment.
“You wish to speak of your pet’s betrayal, do you not? The creature you know as ‘Zel’? Yes, I’ve done my research. Yes, I knew what she was. A liar. A deceiver. I saw her, or someone very much like her, in Hellbane, and maybe in Tailtrap too… Do you know why I didn’t tell you instantly to reject such a filthy creature? Because this would be your reaction. By the maw of Wyrda!” He shouted the curse-word and I flinched. “You’d never have trusted a word that passed my lips, ever again! You need to get a grip. You need to grow up. You’re not the only one going through something, Kastyr Mortenn.”
I didn’t quite know why, but I shrank down to the ground, crouching and then falling to my knees on the pebbled path just outside the doorway. Exhaustion. Defeat. My emotions were drained, like fingertips that wouldn’t react upon waking. The nightmare – it had taken something out of me.
“That’s enough,” Tanra advised him in a cold voice.
I looked up when I saw his hand appear in front of my face. I met his eyes.
“Irimar, I –“
“It’s okay, Kas. You’re tired. We all are. And we’re not done yet, tonight.”
I accepted his help, rose to my feet.
“Winterprince,” I murmured. “I don’t care what you want me to do – I’ll do it, but first, tell me what happened to Winterprince.”
He cast a look over his shoulder at Tanra. “Perhaps it’s best if you tell him, O Great One.”
She sighed. “Could you stop doing that? And must I? He’s not going to like it.”
Irimar headed back into the house and waved a hand as he turned around the corner. “A cup of wine’ll help him deal with it. I’ll be a moment.”
Tanra turned away towards the drawing room, but I stayed on the outside; she hadn’t taken two steps before she halted, then turned back.
“Don’t be a dreadful ass, Kas,” she sniped at me. “If he says a cup of wine will help, it will help. Come in. Sit down.”
“No. Tell me.”
I caught her sighing again, then an instant later she was standing right in front of me on the threshold of the light, holding out a cup of aromatic, dark-red liquid.
“Just take it.”
It was my turn to sigh. I snatched it from her, took a big swig just to prove to –
“Winterprince isn’t dead.”
* * *
“What do you mean, a fake?”
“Not an illusion – a real corpse, created to look as though it were his.” Timesnatcher’s face was now inscrutable behind the star-browed mask as we sped south-east, towards the estates that stretched out to the walls of Mund.
Beyond him on my right side, the trees of the district were a blur. On my left side, Killstop was just as inscrutable, and she wasn’t talking, focussing on her magic. They’d apparently drained their power-reserves right to their limits today, and according to Tanra they barely had enough juice left – even combined – to bring me into their time-stream as they ran.
“But Timesnatcher you – you let Shadowcloud just –“
“If Shadowcloud didn’t go out with a bang right then,” Killstop cut me off, “he’d have gone out with a fizzle. The wet, bloody, vampiric kind of fizzle.”
“He killed –“ I choked on my words, knowing that many more of us could’ve, would’ve died a few hours ago, if not for his sacrifice, his mass-slaughtering of the heretics.
“I know, Kas. I know. But far fewer than he might’ve if the fabric had followed a different pattern. Better this way. For him. For everyone. Now if you wouldn’t mind shutting up for a moment –“
Whiteness rose up before me, below me, behind me, as we hit, and bounded over, the wall.
Thankfully it was just a blip, a single moment of stomach-churning intensity as we tipped back, ascending, then tipped forwards again, descending – before reaching the ground outside Mund and returning to our horizontal orientation. If it had lasted any longer I’d have needed to stop, apply my wraith to my queasy belly.
As though there weren’t enough to be making me feel sick, enough to be churning over in my mind – Winterprince wasn’t dead. What had Everseer done, exactly? Had she recruited him, subjected him to a vision that stole his sense, his loyalty, just like she’d recruited Nighteye?
Not something I could ask.
Now we crossed the fields, and, ahead, I could see the faint blur of Salnifast-by-the-Sea, marble gleaming under the constant radiance of spell-light.
“But that doesn’t explain how –“ I started.
“You tied the shield to Winterprince.” Timesnatcher answered me this time. “You felt its fluctuations, no?”
I remembered – the way it’d wavered, as though unwilling to come into existence…
“Intention…” I sighed. “So, I tied it to Winterprince, and it didn’t react when someone removed the corpse because it wasn’t his in the first place.”
“The shield had even drifted a little from its original placement,” he said. “Even before we left Ryntol for the Maginox, I noticed its lack of anchor by its future impressions – but that wouldn’t have been the right time to tell you, would it?”
I thought about the conversation with Everseer I’d had, of which he knew nothing, could scry nothing – how differently it might’ve gone…
“I suppose,” I lied, then quickly changed the subject: “So why’re we going to Salnifast, exactly?”
We were getting closer, rapidly. Smears of dark-hued colour surrounded us, hedges and meadows and copses of trees, but ahead the sea was swelling up to fill the foreground, the harbour-town only growing bigger and brighter.
“There’s a lacuna in our prophecies,” Killstop said.
“Lacuna?” I’d read the word, but never heard it spoken aloud before. “A hole? Something you can’t see?”
“It wasn’t until I watched Tanra sleeping beneath the Ceryad-tree that I understood,” Timesnatcher interjected. “I saw her face, and I realised – we share the same dream. The diviner of whom we know nothing. The tidal wave to obliterate the dry land.”
“The patternless plane,” Tanra murmured. “The featureless fabric, without permutation, differentiation.”
I swallowed. “Everseer?” I suggested. “Duskdown?”
Timesnatcher shook his head. “Something greater.”
Mal Tagar’s creatures? my mind whispered.
“That’s why we were waiting for you,” Killstop supplied. “We might need back-up of the sorcerous kind. Sucks that we can’t fly, though. We did think you’d be with Em…”
It wasn’t even a half-question – it was a quarter-question – and yet there it was: the hidden interrogative in her statement.
“I suppose if neither of you could see I wouldn’t bring her, that had to be down to Zel,” I said.
It could’ve been Everseer too, but I couldn’t mention that with Irimar here.
“It was too much for you?” Killstop asked, sympathy in her voice. “The fairy that broke the camel’s back?”
I nodded, frowning in frustration. I had no idea what I’d say to Em, how I was going to act…
“I’ll see her… Em I mean… tomorrow.”
“If you want my advice, you’ll leave it two days,” Tanra said. “Spend time with the twins. Your twins, I mean.”
I licked my lips and nodded. “Maybe.”
Timesnatcher chuckled, then placed his hand out across my chest.
We slowed, then came to a stop; I swivelled my head about immediately.
The pier upon which we stood was a wooden road, leading back towards the bright port-town behind us, docked ships like rows of buildings on either side. But we were near the pier’s end, our feet oriented towards the moonlit ocean.
I returned my eyes to the sea, gazing forwards.
There was a light out there that was approaching the harbour: a vessel bobbing up and down on the water, its sails filled with a wizard-wind.
“What is it?” I asked, feeling suddenly nervous. “What’s coming?”
“Answers,” Killstop said, sounding just as nervous, but excited most of all.
I looked at her, framed in the darkness. The frigid wind had caught a bit of her hair, letting it free from the hood’s rim to stream in the salty breeze. She turned her eyes to mine, and I saw through the mask’s slits that they seemed to shine more brightly than the harbour, than the ships, reflecting the moonlight like mirrors.
She’d changed, so much, but the eyes were still the same as they’d been in the warehouse that morning that now felt so long ago.
And what had Timesnatcher called her? ‘Great One’?
“Yes, Kas,” she said, and patted me on the arm. “At last – answers.”