Stave

I didn’t like this fellow Mother had brought back. She hadn’t said a great deal, which wasn’t unusual when dealing with a demonlord, but she had said that she was pretty sure he was either my father–whom she had believed dead for a hundred and fifty years–or an absolutely perfect doppelganger, which, just to be clear, is never, ever good. Doppelgangers are known to exist pretty much only as parasites or predators of the things they duplicate, or upon their friends/relatives/etc. Anything that could prey on a man like that…I think you get the picture. An absolutely perfect doppelganger was also bad news because the creatures’ power could be roughly measured by how closely they could copy their hosts/prey. One that his own wife couldn’t even tell the difference, physically or by his voice, well…

Since his injuries had activated my mother’s geas-call, I was betting on a doppelganger. Human princes, after all, however powerful or eccentric they may be, do not count as demonlords in the magickal-chaotic infrastructure of the Nethergates, and Mother had never said or done anything to make me think her husband had ever been anything other than human.

I’ll be completely honest: the only reason I didn’t kill him as soon as she told me that was because he was a geas-patient, and it would have killed her too. I have, in the past, engaged to kill some of her patients–but only once they were well out from under her care and the obligations she suffered under were clearly fulfilled, and never where she could find out about it, since I wasn’t sure if knowing about my actions would make her accountable for them under the peculiar rules that the Chaos Nethergates operate under.

As I sat and observed him, however, I wondered; however good a doppelganger’s abilities and powers may be, they do very little to the inner realities of the creature, which is usually dominated by hunger and deception. The aura of this man, at least while sleeping, had very little of either. Actually, while my experience with actual human people was limited, I would say that he had a stronger sense of integrity than anyone or anything else I had ever encountered, and there was virtually zero limning of ambition or hunger in his aura at all. There did seem to be a fairly strong flavor of fear, which seemed odd, but it was rather muted in the way that I had come to associate with my mother when she was afraid for me rather than for herself, and his aura had none of the cracks and inconsistencies within it that I had come to associate with the various demons and their many different versions of insanity. Whatever he was afraid of, it didn’t seem to be personal, and it hadn’t endangered his mind in any meaningful way.

Well, he was still a patient, anyway; I would have to wait and see, though the fact that he seemed to feel no fear of physical harm in the aftermath of a terrible and violent accident seemed odd, to say the least, and more likely to support the doppelganger theory than that he might actually be my father. Though that did make me wonder slightly if there were a demon that could actually compromise my aural sight the way that doppelgangers could fool so many other faculties.

No, there is not, came a gentle, firm feeling from the back of my heart.

Hmm. This really could be interesting, then.

The next few days, I actually wondered a few times if my mother’s time on this plane of existence might be limited after all. His injuries, most from being smashed under a gryphon and a few from poisoned blades, were quite extensive, and we almost took too long to realize that he was combating poison from the apparently inconsequential knife wounds as well as all the damage from being landed on by a three-thousand-pound pseudo-avian. It became abruptly worse once, too, when his entire aura went black, meaning (I think) that he must have abandoned his body for a time for some reason (despair? but I hadn’t seen any in his aura), and it took every ounce of power we could muster to call him back from wherever his spirit and consciousness had hared off to.

Mother, however, had not been doctoring peculiar creatures for a hundred and fifty years without learning a few things that could be applied to even something as weak as an apparently human man (though, watching the rate his injuries healed at, I found reason to doubt once again), and we were able to pull him through enough that she finally thought it safe to wake him about a week after we’d brought him in–partly to see if we could get him to eat anything, but mostly because we both were getting antsy enough to need answers. I’d gotten her to re-tell me as much as she could remember of their brief courtship and marriage, the peculiar repeated dream she’d had, and the circumstances she had found him in, but neither of us, even wracking our brains and working together, could be entirely certain whether or not he really was the mysterious Eiandor; if he wasn’t, neither one of us had any idea what he really might be, and if he was, then he must somehow have survived having a dragon emerge from his body (clearly a little more than human), and then been recognized as a demonlord by the infrastructure of the Nethergates itself. Neither option made any sense. And if he was Eiandor, that might actually be harder for Mother, for while he had almost certainly believed her dead, and wouldn’t have been likely to search for her in the Nethergates even if he didn’t, the fact remained that she had been essentially alone down here, without his help or aid of any kind, for a hundred and fifty years, and the scars of that kind of abandonment are real.

My money was still on some version of a doppelganger, but his aura did introduce some doubt. I couldn’t read thoughts or intentions, but you could learn an awful lot about people by watching their emotions, and his, while tangled and dark, looked an awful lot more like mine or Mother’s than they did like any of the many demon tribes or demonlords I had had occasion to observe.

My first impression wasn’t helped any when his first reaction to waking up in a strange place was to lash out with both his hands and his magic–though I was impressed by the sheer magnitude of the force he was able to exert on my shields. We had chosen, after some deliberation, to wake him up while his physical abilities should still be a fraction of their normal capacities, and I had throttled his magic output in a self-destructive feedback loop that should have reduced it to a tenth its normal power, but the reflexive strikes still nearly broke my containment, and he did break one or two of the physical restraints we put on every demonlord we treated here.

I’ll give him credit, though. After an initial outburst that was almost certainly more reflexive than intentional, he stopped, calmed, and looked around him, seeming confused at first by the fact that he couldn’t see us past the invisibility enchantments, and he didn’t continue the counterproductive efforts to break out of either my magical containment or the room he was in.

“Where am I?” he asked after a moment.

His voice seemed solid, I decided. Not having much to go on as comparisons, I’m not sure I could tell you much about it, but his tones were both gruff and contained no malice, and served as a good match to his aura.

“The Nethergates,” I responded blandly, letting my voice come from just above him just to see how he’d react.

“Well, I figured that,” he snarled, though he smiled slightly. He didn’t react to the voice above him at all, which said nothing except that he was cool under pressure. “I’m pretty sure I remember crashing the Fenrar destruction vortex, and maybe…” he frowned, as if concentrating, and I saw his aura darken. “Did a gryphon come through with me?” he asked.

I wondered why it mattered, but Grandmother answered before I could ask. “He did, but he died in the crossover. You sound awfully concerned about a steed.”

The man in the bed shrugged as his aura flared with an astounding level of sorrow, as well as both anger and a doubt that never showed on his face. “Vastar’s been my friend for more than a hundred years. It matters.”

He still rang of no deception at all. A man who would call a gryphon–one that carried him on his back, no less–a friend, and of that long standing, and care enough to be angry that someone would wonder why he wanted to know the gryphon’s fate…perhaps this was a man worth knowing after all. Gryphons, after all, were proud, prickly, particular creatures, more intelligent than many men and with their own language and culture; they were supposed to be impossible to subjugate or tame without killing them. The simplicity principle would seem to indicate that he really did simply care about the creature, enough that he had managed to convince the gryphon to take the subservient role in the relationship (though I couldn’t imagine how). It was almost as interesting that he hadn’t allowed the reaction to be outward, too…

Enough with the speculation. “Who are you, exactly?” I asked.

“Who’s asking?” he shot right back. Perfect form for a warlord in unfamiliar territory–or a demonlord secure in his own arrogance. Names, after all, have power, particularly to the powerful.

My mother decided to take a more active hand at this point. She poked him–with a long stick, not her fingers, she’s not stupid–and snapped, “Ungrateful wretch! The ones who have kept you alive this past week, that’s who.”

This time, however, she had forgotten to disguise either her voice or her direction–a sure sign of how emotional she was getting, to be that sloppy–and the stranger’s eyes sharpened as he looked at where she was, mostly ignoring the stick, which had to have been fairly painful.

“How in the eighteen Nether-realms did you get that voice?” he asked, his aura flaring with genuine fury. “I don’t know who you think you are, but if you pulled it from my head or its owner, there will be consequences to pay.”

Huh. He had recognized Mother’s voice–and had a very strong emotional reaction to it. I still wasn’t completely sure he was who or what my mother thought he was, but that did seem to be pretty strong evidence that he was, in fact, Eiandor–and that their relationship had evinced emotions every bit as strong as Mother had described them to me over the years, and not just on her side.

Mother, however, had taken the assault a little differently, and she dropped both her invisibility and her composure as she moved to hit him with her staff. “Consequences? You ungrateful, shortsighted, thick-necked–oh, I’m not dealing with you right now,” she growled as she stomped out of the room after having belabored him hard enough with her rod that she’d snapped it off.

The mysterious “Eiandor,” for his part, was so shocked by her appearance that he merely stared in astonishment while she landed blows that would have been bone-breaking on many men and left noticeable welts even on his formidable body, and then tried to follow her before, apparently, remembering his bonds and looking up at where my voice had last come from. His eyes were slightly over-dilated from shock, but his voice was calm, and he sounded, oddly enough, far more dangerous than when he had just been threatening whatever he thought was impersonating his beloved.

“Someone,” he said, in a velvety-soft voice that I devoutly hoped would not get aimed at me often, “needs to explain–right now.”

“If you really are Eiandor,” I retorted, still wanting to make sure before I negotiated, “some of it shouldn’t need explaining.” It sounded slightly petulant, even to my ears, but I guess Mother wasn’t the only one who’d resented his sudden appearance for the gap in our acquaintance it had created.

He didn’t–quite–glare at me, but it obviously took some effort. “About all I know is that apparently Salthary Demonsblood was quite a bit better at portals and dimension manipulation than he had told anyone–and that for reasons I can only guess, my wife has not sought to return to the surface or contact me in a hundred and fifty years. I would very much like to know what I am doing here now.”

All at once, I felt slightly ashamed of myself. He was right. We had treated him like an enemy and an interloper, and it was perfectly true that Mother or I could probably have attempted some means of contacting him as easily as he could have devised a means to reach us–perhaps not as easily, if he spoke so easily of destruction vortexes and portal dimensions, but it was not as if I could claim we had tried.

Still, there were a few questions I still needed answers to before I could just let him walk away–or, more likely, follow my mother, as he clearly wanted to do. “Your injuries triggered a geas that normally only applies to demonlords. Higher-level demonlords, at that. You’re going to have to forgive a few suspicions,” I told him–but I did it with my real voice, from an only slightly deflected direction.

He wrestled with that for a moment, but he seemed to recognize that I needed some kind of answer to it. After a moment, he said, clearly measuring his words, “I suppose that’s fair. Who are you, to her?” It wasn’t said with any real hint of emotion, but his aura flared with a tangle of jealousy and fear, so I knew the question mattered, and I could only applaud the desire not to spread dirty laundry to the hired help, if that had been what I was.

“I’m the only family she’s got,” I said, after a moment of internal debate, “and not in the kind of relationship you fear. What is going on here?”

He was mildly surprised that I read that into it, though, again, it didn’t show on his face, but apparently the answer satisfied whatever he was looking for, because he answered, “I am a demonlord. I am also human. I did not find out about the demonlord aspect of my nature until the same conflict where I thought Kalerin shredded in one of those half-baked portals of Salthary’s, and I hope you’ll forgive me for not sharing more details than that at present. I would tear down half a world to save her one tear, and I would like to know more of what has happened since we parted. Including why she’s not dead down here.”

I found it slightly chilling when he said “tear down half a world,” mostly because neither his emotions or his voice told me there was any exaggeration or hyperbole in it. He would quite willingly destroy nations for my mother–which meant he didn’t necessarily consider that an unacceptable option in other areas, either.

What was far more telling, he didn’t have the slightest doubt that he could–which was far more disturbing than the usual barrage of empty threats most demonlords spouted at us.

The fact was, however, if I had that kind of power–and I still wasn’t sure if what the Lords of Law had given me was on that scale or not–I would use it for her, too, and that meant that I could, perhaps, trust this man–at least far enough not to continue a restraint I was increasingly sure he could break if he actually wanted to. He had been trying to be respectful so far, and Mother had never seemed the slightest bit afraid of him (she would not have gone after him with anything so paltry as a stick if she thought him an actual threat), but I got the impression he was doing so under immense emotional pressure, and we might need those restraints if another geas-call came for my mother’s services.

I released the shields, unlocked the manacles remotely, and untied the knot I had put his own powers in. “I think she should answer that,” I told him, and watched to see what would happen next. It surprised me not at all when he took a beeline in the same direction she had gone.

It did surprise me a little how fast he went, though.

Kalerin

He finally caught up to me out on the balcony, or what passed for a balcony in a mountain fortress with few openings to the light of day. It was still surrounded by wards and an invisible layer of hardened steel sixteen inches thick, but it showed me the sun without requiring constant vigilance, and I needed a little bit of sanity-anchoring right now.

He was, at least, polite about it; my old Eiandor would simply have charged in and started making demands, but this new version had more tact. Or at least knew when I didn’t want to talk to him.

Not that he had a lot of tact. He just moved up next to me and studied the plains-like landscape outside instead of yelling. If I hadn’t been so upset with him for being alive after a hundred and fifty years, I probably would have appreciated that more, but as it was, it was profoundly annoying. I was, after all, out here specifically to avoid thinking about him, and that was hard when he was only a few inches away and entirely inside my personal space.

I growled something at him–I’m honestly not even sure if I was coherent enough to use words this time–and moved down the railing.

He, of course, followed me. Naturally. I could practically hear him saying “You didn’t think it would be that easy to get rid of me, Kalerin, did you?” with that trademark wicked twinkle in his eye.

Well, two could play that game. I moved again.

He followed me again.

So I moved again.

And he followed me again.

I still wonder sometimes how long that (admittedly rather childish) stalemate would have lasted, but life, or fate, or whatever, had apparently decided to take the matter out of our hands. That was probably fair, considering how badly it was going.

We’d been dealing with an infestation of Aori for several years now. They’re pretty much the Nethergates’ equivalent of rats, except that they’re lizards, are part of a dozens-strong hive mind, spit acid, and are a little bigger than most rats (about the size of a normal person’s forearm). They’re pests, not really dangerous, but they have a habit of eating ingredients from my potion stocks, raiding the larder, and leaving acid burns in weird places. We’d killed probably twenty or thirty of the little creatures since they’d made their intrusion, but hives varied so much in number, and learned so rapidly from any of their fellows’ mistakes, that it was really a fools’ errand to try to get them all.

As we passed under one of the arches, however, one of them decided to launch itself headlong in a suicidal attack on my errant husband, who wasn’t carrying any talismans or wearing his armor, and was supposed to be at still a fraction of his nominal strength. Like I said, they aren’t normally dangerous, but attacking an injured man like that, there is a possibility to overwhelm him, and I had a–very brief–moment of startled panic and worry. They’re not big, but their teeth are over an inch long, and this thing’s mouth was wide, wide open, enough to make it look far more dangerous even aside from the acid being propelled ahead of it. It actually wasn’t unheard-of behavior from the creatures as a way of assessing whether or not a new inhabitant was prey or should be avoided; we had caught several of them in the first days of their arrival when they were foolish enough to go after either Stave or I in various circumstances, and had been fiendishly difficult to track or find since.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

This time, however, it became rapidly obvious that underestimating my husband was not something anything was very likely to do twice.

He showed it by twisting aside from the attack, seizing the creature in mid-air with his bare hand (one hand, mind you), taking a single searching glance at the creature to assess it, and then speaking “*Burn*” in that same intonation of the rune-voice, speaking the soul of a word and imbuing it with power, that I had seen in my recurring dream so many times in commanding his troops.

Only this wasn’t just a standard fire rune command; the creature vanished in a puff of incandescence, but it was nearly instantaneous, there was no smoke, and there were a series of threads of similar fire that flashed away in various directions in a way I strongly suspected was meant to annihilate the entire hive.

“What kind of messed-up fire rune was that?” I asked, taking refuge in attack as I always had.

As usual, however, he just shrugged. “Made it up on the spot,” he told me, and I knew from experience that if I wanted more details–which I didn’t really, anyway–the explanation from there would turn into a mind-numbing catalog of inferential dynamics and the way intentions shaped fire runes and their ability to shape the world around them and the technical details of anything else he had added to the mix.

Eiandor had never minded telling me how he did something–but I had learned very quickly that I often minded listening.

He, too, however, knew the dance and the pattern, and he clearly didn’t intend to give me the time to come up with some other comeback–or to change the subject.

“Why are you still down here, Kalerin?” he asked before I could take a breath. “Getting out of the Nethergates is tricky, but surely you knew enough from Salthary for it not to take a hundred and fifty years. Not to mention, how did you live down here that long? And why did you heal me?”

Oh, he would go there. That last question was the one I didn’t want to answer–and the one that I could not, by the terms of my geas, refuse to answer to a demonlord who called me. Usually they phrased it less nicely, but the question was one I was required to answer.

And the answer to any of those questions was really the answer to all of them.

At least the geas let me pick how I answered the question, as long as I didn’t take too long about it. “I came before the Council of the Demon High when I first landed in the Nethergates,” I said, firmly shunning the memory of landing before the highest demon court there was (with all of the worst and most powerful demons, by definition, being present), barefoot, pregnant, grieving…and alone. “Instead of killing me, they bound me to the service of any demonlord strong enough to exert a Beckoning call while injured, and told me that if any of my patients died, so would I.

“I imagine they’re still surprised none of the summonses have actually killed me yet–though yours nearly did. How in any realm, chaos or otherwise, does an Alsir prince get recognized as a demonlord to the Nethergates Beckoning calls?”

He winced slightly at my tone, but he didn’t pretend not to understand the question like I thought he might. He said instead, “Can I speak without them hearing here?”

I shrugged. “As far as anyplace in the Nethergates can be immune to that.” I was practically daring him to use that as an excuse not to tell me, especially after I had just been forced to bare my own painful reality to him, but apparently he knew better than to take the bait.

He swallowed slightly, then said, “Apparently there is a hereditary aspect of demonlord power, and my mother or father–or both–seem to have had histories down here I still don’t understand. I am the Shrentark demon king, at least theoretically ruler supreme of the inter-dimensional network of the entire Nethergates. I found out when the alternate avatar of that power took over my body and faculties when I saw you sucked into that portal and thought I’d lost you.”

We both paused, lost in the memory of that long-ago, painful moment when I had seen a dragon literally rip its way up and outward from his body in a rain of blood and fire–as I was in the process of being sucked into a portal that both of us thought was going to kill me outright and the mighty demon Garmondir was in the midst of slipping his leash from the master summoner Salthary.

Well. That was a more outlandish scenario than even I had anticipated, but it certainly accounted for surviving his apparent death all those years ago. Actually, I knew more about the Shrentark than he probably did himself; the creature was the subject of a great many snide jokes and pseudo-oaths from the various greater demons I had tended over the years, and a lot of those comments made a great deal more sense now.

What I said, though, was “Ah. Then is that what I should be calling you now, your high-and-mightiness? I always did want to know your real name.”

Eiandor had been chosen for him by Salthary when he first showed up, since he refused to give anyone a name; the only other name I knew for him was Mitlon, which meant literally “hammerhand” or “berserker” and had been given as a nickname of sorts after he went a little crazy in the arena–in my honor, incidentally.

“My real name? Veydann,” he said, solving the mystery of most of my life in one word. “Veydann Odinari Aerina Eiandor Modon Alsir, to be more exact; also Trideilon, Kobror, Jarrkalk, Somdall, Arbon, Lokon, and Bindann. Sometimes referred to as Mitlon, Gardbon, Kiraithron, or Shalshren, or as Valkoniran or Odinar when people are trying to suck up. Going to have to add Vaniar somewhere in there now as well,” he said, with a touch of sadness.

Even expecting something of the sort, I almost caught my breath. Noldurian naming customs were one of my hobbies in the world above, as was their language, so I could even tell what most of them meant. This man was the son of the ruler of the Noldurian empire and his long-dead first wife, still claimed the name Salthary had given him as a token of his marriage to me, and was a member of the highest and most exclusive order of his nation’s knighthood, not merely Alsir, but Modon Alsir, an honor they gave only to those considered pivotal in various conflicts. Most of the ones in the middle were mage rankings (high ones; in fact the highest in several disciplines), with a few nicknames and aristocratic titles thrown in. Vaniar meant orphan, which meant his father had, finally, died recently–making him, unless I had misunderstood, the newly-minted ruler of the greatest martial empire the world had ever seen.

Absurdly enough, my mind latched onto the piece of that massive array of titles that probably mattered the least. “You mean we’re still married with all those dangler honorifics on your name?” I asked, slightly startled. I may not have known exactly who he was, but he had admitted to being a prince, so I figured that meant he’d disown me if he’d actually made it back to his homeland and taken up his mantle. I didn’t even know who my parents were, let alone if they had any honorifics or titles and whatnot, and I knew how dynastic politics and saving face with nobility worked.

He blinked, and for the first time, he looked startled, and possibly a bit uncertain. “Shouldn’t we be?” he asked. “We both said the vows, whatever the circumstances might have been.”

“You mean like you refusing to tell me your name or any of the rest of your history?” I reminded him tartly. “Or giving me up for dead while I was down here–in what’s apparently your realm, no less–for a hundred and fifty years?”

This time, I actually managed to make him a little mad, because he stood up straighter and started watching just me instead of scanning the surroundings for more Aori or any other threats. “Give you up? I spent fifteen years as a raving-mad dragon because I thought you were dead, and another thirty tracing every scrap of portal or documentation about Salthary’s work I could find hoping to find out where you landed! I’ll burn the whole chaos-blasted–”

He had stepped right into my face as he started that tirade, but then he stopped, and he started to smile.

Really smile, in a way I could only remember seeing a handful of times in the stormy days of our courtship. “What?” I asked suspiciously. Eiandor–or Veydann, as he was apparently calling himself now–smiling like that had only ever happened when he thought he won something. Something important, at that, and I couldn’t think of anything I really wanted him to think he’d won right now…though finding out he’d spent forty-five years hunting for and mourning me certainly hadn’t hurt my feelings, however odd it was that he hadn’t been able to find us.

“You’re still wearing it,” he said, the glint of genuine happiness in his eye, as well as a great deal of mischief.

“Wearing wha–” Then I realized what he was looking at, and stopped asking. “Oh. That.”

It was a rather complex flower bangle earring he had given me on our wedding day. He had told me at the time that it was a token of both his affection and his intentions toward me, and that I was only obligated to wear it when I really felt like I was his wife in truth and not just the war-prize he had won. It was made from a rare substance called humilanite, which deteriorated when kept for extended periods of time away from human skin, so he told me that all I had to do to destroy it was to throw it away somewhere and watch it disintegrate, and he’d never touch me again.

The gesture impressed me enough to carry it, but it had taken weeks before I actually put it in my ear; I didn’t trust anyone at that point in my life, least of all some random stranger who had just won me in a tournament, and it took a while before I believed him.

There was only a fraction of the original piece left; I had worn it a few times too often during unexpected difficulties with my patients, since in the early years the geas-call had been so strong that I literally could not do anything until I had satisfied its demands and I wasn’t about to leave it lying around. I still carried scars from a couple of those encounters.

But I still had it, and the pattern was distinctive; he’d made it himself, by hand.

“We still have issues,” I warned him, though it felt more similar than I liked to the too-loud protestations of the homeless teenager I had been when we met.

He just shrugged and kept on smiling. “As long as they’re not leaving type of issues,” he said, sounding every inch the prince in the most grating, arrogant way, “I can handle the rest.”

Oddly enough, I believed him.

Oh, he was going to be insufferable for a while.

Veydann

The next few hours were heavenly, but I knew they couldn’t last. Finding out I had a son was quite a shock, in some ways even a larger one than realizing that Kalerin was still alive; Stave, however, simply treated it as casually as it is probably possible to do in such a circumstance, and pointed out that we were probably better off still acting like strangers, since we had just met, he had only barely learned my real name, and he was old enough not to need a traditional father figure by this point. I got the impression he also didn’t really trust me; that part stung, but I could hardly fault him for not handing over his mother’s safety and care to me wholesale after the two of them had been alone for so long.

More to the point, once the initial euphoria of realizing that not only was she still alive, she didn’t hate me, had worn off, there was still the future to consider.

Finally, it was Kalerin who asked the question. “Just how badly do you need to get back right away?” she asked, after the delirious joy of catching up on the last few decades had finally run its course.

I sighed. “I’m not sure.”

She poked me–not so hard, this time, but still right in the sore spot on my ribs. “What does that mean?”

“My father was assassinated by the Fenrar in the battle you saw the last edges of where I destroyed Fenrar Keep. I am assuming that ended the problem with the Fenrar, but it would have left the entire battle plan up to the interpretation of the individual generals, who are hard enough to corral when I’m there. If Trinda and Beavan are to be believed from what they said when I contacted them in the spirit-dream–”

“Wait, you did what?” she asked, sitting up straight.

“While I was unconscious, I used a spirit-dream to break into a dreaming connection between Trinda Toneilon–spoiled princess type–and Beavan Castellan, my youngest half-brother. They said–”

“You almost died from pulling that! That’s why all your vitals and aura went black! You wretched, incompetent, reckless, hobnailed–”

“Mother,” said Stave mildly. “Since he already did the stupid thing, can we find out what he learned from it?”

She huffed, and she had to take a few deep breaths, but she waved a hand for me to go on.

“I didn’t have long there, but they said, militarily, we fragmented. Beavan thought it might be bad enough to lead to another civil war like the one I told you about before, and even best-case scenario, it’s going to be pretty bad.”

“How bad is ‘pretty bad’?” asked Stave.

“We were already facing an alliance of every major enemy we’ve defeated over the last three hundred years, led by an obsessive madman who knows every secret we have, and with Garmondir coming from the south to pick up the pieces. They were saying that our armies just split themselves up to go in essentially random directions at a fraction of our real strength.”

“Do you have any kind of authority with Garmondir? Since you’re you-know-what? Maybe convince it to switch sides?” asked Kalerin, showing interest for the first time.

I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way, at least not in my experience. Every demon I have ever met attacks me on sight, often more aggressively than they will go after humans or even each other. I might be able to distract the creature, but I could only control it by becoming the dragon–and then I wouldn’t care.”

We all pondered that for a moment, but considering the havoc a grief-maddened dragon with no human morals or memories had wreaked the last time it had gotten loose, we all knew I had no intention of doing that again.

“Could they have been exaggerating?” Stave asked at last.

I shrugged. “Possibly. Trinda has a known drama streak, often at very inappropriate times, and Beavan didn’t even really believe I was there at the time.” If we had something other than me and my armor to connect to the world above, I might be able to scry and find out, but…

Kalerin, however, was thinking about something else. “If they all attack you like that, I wonder if that rabid horse-demon was after you instead of me after all? Still odd behavior, since you weren’t even visible at that point, though.”

Horse-demon? I didn’t think there were any horse-demons except unicorns, and Kalerin wouldn’t have referred to them that way. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

She blinked. “Oh, sorry. There was some kind of horse-creature that appeared when I found you. Covered ground from the horizon to me almost faster than my defenses could come up, and seemed really upset when I wound up taking you away. I thought we’d lost him when we went through a couple of airborne portals to get back here, but he showed up again a couple of days later. Much less upset this time, oddly enough, but still tries to attack either Stave or I every time we go outside.”

A horse, with that kind of speed, that had come what sounded like looking for me in here? And successfully found me twice, no less? If I didn’t know better, that sounded like…well, did I know better? If his bond was to the Odinar rather than specifically my father…

“Can I go see him?” I asked.

*Stand down,* I told Stalnir, hoping he was still coherent enough to do it.

My father’s eccentric stallion was in bad shape. I didn’t know where he’d been during the battle, but it was pretty obvious he’d been involved in at least part of it: large sections of his coat were ragged and bloody, his hooves were wet with mud and blood up to his knees, and there was a long, ragged, half-healed wound along one side of his body as well as several minor lacerations in other areas. His eyes were wide and rolling in the classic sign of what you might euphemistically call an “over-stimulated” horse, and he had instantaneously tried to attack both Kalerin and Stave when we emerged, just as she had said. He had not, however, tried to attack me, but kept skirting around me, back and forth, as if trying anxiously to get to me through some invisible barrier.

It was definitely him, too; even as unkempt and wild as he was acting, I had known Stalnir since both of us were children, and the fact that he had lived as long as I had–though, admittedly, with a few more signs of age–was yet one more sign of just how unusual of a creature he was.

*Stalnir,* I called again. *It’s me. You know it’s me. Calm yourself so we can let you in.*

Finally, just as I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we were going to have to sedate him or even put him down, Stalnir stood still and let his head hang, blowing hard enough I wondered if he was going to be alright. I walked, slowly, up to him, watching carefully for any sign of instability or trouble, but he just stood there, quivering, while I ran my fingers through his mane and up and down each of his legs, checking for any injuries beyond the ones we could see.

“Is it him?” asked Stave after a moment, while I examined my father’s faithful steed.

“It’s him,” I replied. “Just give me a minute with him. I can’t imagine how he got here, but it looks like it was pretty rough.”

*Came through the Great Gate, down by Garmondir, while it was away checking on a few things,* came the blowing, feeble, welcome reply from the slowly stabilizing horse.

*You, horse, are crazy,* I said cheerfully. *I sure wouldn’t want to do that.*

*It wasn’t looking for anybody yet. And it cares a lot more about keeping things in than about keeping things out of the portal,* Stalnir replied, which was probably true enough. Garmondir wasn’t very likely to expect to be seeing any meaningful threats from the human world at all after the way it trounced us last time, and it wouldn’t be expecting anyone to be able to threaten it immediately anyway, since it still didn’t believe in Stalnir’s abilities and anything else would take months to travel that far. That was how I’d escaped from it when we cast the Great Seal of Slumbering Water on its lair all those years ago.

Besides, Garmondir was far away, even by Nethergates standards.

*Nasty gash you’ve got there,* I commented, testing it for heat. *Do you know if the blade was poisoned or not?*

He shook his head. *That came from your father’s spurs when they dragged him off. I tried, Veydann, but…*

*I know,* I said, and I did. If somehow I had been able to go faster…if we had anticipated an attack better…if I had ordered Vastar to do a faster assembly to arms instead of a standard one… *I loved him too.*

“Veydann,” said Stave, and his tone snapped my head up instantly. “We need to get inside.”

There was something new approaching from the horizon, and if it wasn’t as fast as Stalnir, it was still getting closer uncomfortably fast. I actually recognized this one; it was a creature I had had dealings with several times during my hunt for where Salthary’s portal could have taken Kalerin, and it was unlikely to remember me with fondness. Worse, the being, which was made almost entirely of light and energy, reported directly to the Greater Court of the Demon High, who were as close to the real rulers of the Nethergates as you could realistically find–and were obviously both highly formidable and unlikely to view my presence here with fondness. If they found out I was here, the Healerie’s fortress-like qualities would be put to a far stiffer test than they had been designed for, and I had an entirely different war to fight before I was ready to deal with them.

I was, however, wearing my full battle armor, donned as a precaution before we had ventured out of the safety of the mountain, and that included my mother’s energy-matrix gloves–gloves I knew, from previous experience, could prevent even the Leehtorx from communicating with or escaping to the Court.

I also knew–whether or not Stave or Kalerin did–that the creature had already seen me, and that therefore it was already too late to hide. The Leehtorx’s peculiar abilities meant that if you could see it, it could see you–and could often perceive far beyond your field of view as well. It was the Court’s primary surveillance method, and it was very good.

So instead of listening, I got a running start towards the creature, who was rapidly growing brighter and hotter and would shortly surpass the intensity of a small piece of the sun, and launched myself up with all the power in my body, leaving a small crater behind as I soared upwards into the plasma that was the creature’s heart.

I inhaled as I drew my hands apart, activating the trap-absorber matrix that was the gloves’ chief feature. It opened what amounted to a miniature wormhole in the heart of the Leehtorx’s most powerful energies and separated it from any of the physical realities of which it was normally a part, sucking in its essence as only a specially tuned quantum black hole (a series of holes, really) can and depositing it in a specially designed pocket dimension to which the gloves were the only key.

By the time I landed back on the earth, I had closed my fists again, the entire substance, power, and personality of the plasma monster contained in the rippling fabric of Aerina Morningstar’s–my mother’s–dragon-scale gauntlets.

It took a few minutes for the gloves to process the creature, but by the time they did, Stalnir and the others were fully inside, and as its indignant unhappiness faded to a dull rumble of discontent in my psyche, I followed them back into the mountain.