Oath Keeper

Warding the Wagon of Tears was a job that usually required three people: one to lead the way around trees, rivers, boulders and the like, one to sing the Wagon up into the air and move it forward, and a third to keep the path clear of anything that might trip up the second guy. Unfortunately, all they had was Abeni, and one damaged idiot.

So while the field of hard-packed snow they now trudged across was not as taxing as a twisted mountain track or a gnarled game trail in the forest, it still required all of Abeni’s focus to keep the Wagon up and moving. Tayna did what she could, staying out in front, protecting him from the most likely of all obstacles.

They marched that way all day, slowly crossing the great white tundra known as the Cold Shoulder, the frozen domain to which the Dragon Methilien had long ago exiled the Miseratu, who were now, hopefully, behind them. Shivering in her kirfa, and leaning forward, squinting into the wind and the bright white snowscape in front of her, Tayna had nothing to do but stumble and think.

She did a lot of both.

Her body still ached from her stupid cremation hallucination. The cold continued to ease the worst of it, numbing her face and hands and feet, but it would be days before she would be able to move freely again, without her battered extremities throwing her off stride. Until then, that stride would remain a combination of lurching, stumbling, staggering, and other varieties of spasticness.

As for the thinking part, most of that centered on what she would do next. Part of her knew that things were heating up in Methilien. Everything seemed to be about Angiron lately. First Prince this, and Contender that. And let’s not forget the whole dangly blue earlobes revelation either. Her own life had been sucked into a tight orbit around that creep. Tighter even than anyone who actually lived here. But marriage was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. She was still a kid, and a kid her age shouldn’t be worried about abusive, ego-maniac villain husbands trying to take over the world. She should be acting out, refusing to do the dishes, and rebelling against her parents.

But first she had to find them. And so far, it had been non-stop husband issues that had been getting in the way. Even that word was a problem. “Husband.” There was no way it applied to her life. Not even a little bit. But English can be so unimaginative sometimes. Where was the word for “delusional psycho-stalker with a magically signed marriage license” when you needed it?

Whatever word you called him though, he had been her biggest problem so far. But as she dragged her feet across the snow, with her shoulder lowered into the biting wind, it occurred to her that maybe things were changing. Angiron was a Contender for the Gnomileshi Crown now—maybe even King, for all she knew. So he was probably ten kinds of busy back there in Gnome Land, giving speeches and making up war slogans and stuff. Where was he going to find time to be chasing after a useless girl-wife like her? Especially one who worked so hard at being a pain in his everything? And from what he’d said on the Braggart’s Arch, he really was planning some kind of war, so that would only make him five times less patient than usual. All she had to do was keep her distance and stay off his radar, and she probably wouldn’t see him again for a year or more.

And where could she go that wouldn’t be all tempty for Captain Creepy? Well, if he did start a war, that would happen in the Forest, against the Wasketchin, right? Certainly not up on the mountain against the Djin. Not even Angiron was stupid enough to pick two fights at once. So that meant the safest place for her to go, to keep out of Angiron’s reach, was also the most likely place to find her parents: on the Anvil, with Abeni. It was almost too convenient to be true, but at this point, any good news was a welcome change of scenery.

Smiling, despite the twinge it wrung from her battered face, Tayna picked up her pace and stumbled on into the wind.

Late that evening, after the sky had dipped from gray, through soot, and had settled into the deep darkness of coal, Tayna heard a squeak of snow behind her and turned back to look. Abeni had given up his chant and allowed the Wagon to sink to the ground onto its runners. Sleepy time. Too tired to say anything, she nodded her agreement and trudged back across the snow to join him. There was no moon in the sky, nor any starlight to see by, and that totality of night made her feel oddly claustrophobic, even though she knew there was a vast, open plain stretching out in every direction around her. She found the edges of the Wagon as much with her fingers as with her eyes, and ducked down quickly beneath it to get out of the wind. Abeni was already there.

As she crawled under the Wagon’s bulk, Tayna remembered another time and another place, when they had first set out from the Wayitam’s village. On those evenings, before Elicand and Shondu had been lost in the pocket, and before Sarqi and Zimu had been left in the clutches of the water sprites, preparations for night had been almost fun to watch. Soothing. A sort of ballet of the familiar—each of the sons of Kijamon tending to his own duties, each brother working constantly, yet simply, as they went about the practiced ritual of their tasks. And in no time at all, that ballet had produced a tent, and a fire, and food.

But today there was no ballet. No food. No tent. There was nothing at all to organize. Today, preparing for sleep consisted of crawling under the Wagon and then trying to get comfortable. Sort of. That was all. Despite her half-hearted protests, Abeni insisted on wrapping his arms around her. Better that at least one of them be sheltered and warm, he said, but Tayna was too tired and sore to argue sincerely, so she slumped herself gratefully back into the warmth of his arms and closed her eyes.

“The land rises,” Abeni said, as they waited for sleep to overtake them.

“Does it? Hadn’t noticed.”

“The wind rises, also.”

“Noticed that part,” Tayna said, reaching up to rub warmth into her strange new earlobes. Apparently her magic ear extensions hadn’t come with the electric heating option. “What does it mean?”

“Who can say?” Abeni said, shrugging against her back. “Perhaps it is nothing.”

They lapsed into silence then, and before she knew what happened, Tayna and her earlobes were asleep.

Morning broke with all the subtleness of a train wreck. The sun just seemed to hurtle itself above the horizon, right into Tayna’s eyes. With nothing to eat and no camp to break, the pair of them were ready to get under way again in no time, pausing only long enough to stand and stretch a bit, and to pick up a few chips of ice to suck on. At least they wouldn’t die of dehydration before they starved.

There was a moment though, when she stretched out her arms in the brilliant sunlight, and then froze. My knapsack! She glanced about quickly, but search as she might, it was nowhere to be found, and Abeni confessed that he had not seen it either. Not here, nor anywhere since he had awakened in this place. The last time she could remember seeing it had been on the Braggart’s Arch, and that meant it had probably been swept away when she’d hit the river. A dull ache throbbed briefly in her stomach, but what could she do? It wasn’t that big a deal, really. The only thing in it had been her journal. Her letters to Shammi. But as important as that had once seemed, she realized now that Shammi was just another one of those icons of childhood that fell away as you got older, like Santa Claus and sleepovers. Given everything that had happened to her recently, losing a powerless fantasy figure who never responded to your pleas for help was probably the least of her problems. Plus, the whole thing just felt a little silly now. She’d miss her journal, for a while, and the ritual of pouring her heart out into it, but that would pass. So when Abeni sang the Wagon back up into the air and they set out across the snow again, Tayna walked a little taller, realizing that an important milestone of her childhood had just been passed.

Quickly, her thoughts returned to the present, and the problems that hadn’t gone missing. For one thing, she could see that Abeni had been right. As they continued to march, it became obvious that the land really was rising slowly ahead of them, although if that caused any problems for him or the Wagon, Tayna didn’t notice. And by the time the sun had risen midway into the sky, they had reached the brow of the long, slow incline, so it didn’t much matter, anyway. They’d been climbing steadily since sometime yesterday, and now from the top, she could see all the way to a new horizon, down a much steeper slope that dropped away in front of them.

Or… Wait a minute. What the freakity frack is that?

It had taken a moment, but Tayna now saw that there was no horizon. There was something in the way, spread out before them. Something huge—as perplexing as it was big. An enormous bubble of milky… sky-ness, stretching as far as they could see, to both left and right. But it wasn’t just below them—it rose up in front of them too, and beyond, reaching high up into the sky. High enough to have clouds drifting across its upper reaches. The slope of dirty, wind-blown snow they now stood on ran down sharply, but it stopped when it met the bubble. The great dome was so high that it had surely been visible for days, but they hadn’t noticed it because its whiteness was almost identical to that of the rest of the sky. It had only really become visible now that they could see the slight contrast along its base, where the shadows and ripples of the uneven snow halted abruptly. Even with that edge to start from, Tayna could only just barely follow its arc into the sky with her eyes. She looked back at Abeni, the question clear in her eyes.

“Abeni does not know this thing,” he said quietly. He had ceased his chant and allowed the Wagon to settle once more into the snow beside them. “But he thinks it would take many, many, many days to travel around it. More days than any journey Abeni has ever made.”

But there was little else to say, and so, with a hesitant shrug, Tayna stepped forward to begin the long descent that lay before them. Behind her, she could hear Abeni’s renewed chant as he sang the Wagon back up into the air to follow.

By mid-afternoon, they had been walking downhill for half a day, with Tayna slipping and stumbling on the icier patches, and getting her foot caught in the wind-blown ruts and cracks that were too hard to see in the blank, gray light of the blustery sky. Abeni, meanwhile, plodded along behind her, as sure-footed as ever. Somehow it didn’t seem fair.

Even after half a day of relentless down-sloping, it was hard to see any progress against the vast bubble of whateverness. Tayna had to keep turning to look back up the slope to reassure herself that they were actually moving, because the only thing in front of them that ever seemed to change was the apparent height of the bubble, which now loomed impossibly high above them. Like airplane high. Higher maybe. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was one other thing that was growing too. Her sense of unease. Even with confident, competent Abeni at her side, walking down into this giant crevice between the hill and the bubble made her feel… trapped. What if somebody was following them? They hadn’t seen any sign of skulking pursuit since they’d left the Miseratu things behind, but until now they’d been walking across huge, open expanses of whiteness. Now that they were descending into this giant ditch, her view was much more confined. And she didn’t like that feeling at all.

The bubble now took up more than half the sky and Tayna found she couldn’t look at it. Every time she tried, her vision refused to catch hold of it, and her head swirled with vertigo. That made her stumble even more frequently, and twice she actually fell. Abeni’s chanting continued unabated though, and unlike her, he showed no signs of difficulty with his footing on the shifting slope.

Tayna’s shins were now burning from the strain of all that walking—first uphill for days, and now downhill. Was there any such thing as a leg doctor? If so, she’d like one now, please. Or maybe two. Dr. Left and Dr. Right to O.R. please. To say that her calves and shins ached would be to misunderstand the meaning of the word “ache.” And it was different from the battered throbbing that had been her companion since the tailbox. She needed a new word. Crambarking. Her legs were now totally crambarking, and it was only because gravity gave her no option that she continued to flop one numb and burning leg in front of the other, step after step after crambarking step. She seriously doubted her feet would ever function normally again, but still, onward and downward they trudged.

The swirling winds on this face of the slope drove the cold and the snow through the gaps in her kirfa, and even though her Wasketchin boots were warmer than they had any right to be, they still weren’t much use on densely packed snow. Wasketchin, it seemed, had never heard of treads for the soles of their boots. Probably because there had never been a winter in the Forest before, but that seemed like a pretty lame excuse now.

Down and down they walked, steadily descending the slope, as the bubble wall grew higher and higher above them, with nothing to entertain or distract them other than the wind, which flung a continuing barrage of tiny ice darts into their faces. Still, despite the difficult conditions, there was no question of turning aside. The Wagon continued to point straight down the hill toward the place where the sky-bubble met the ground—a place that Tayna realized with a start had gotten noticeably closer.

“We’re almost there,” she said, as much to herself as to Abeni. “It’s like, suddenly one parking lot away from us. Maybe two.” Tayna knew about yards and feet and meters and inches, and she could use them to measure shoes or hallways, but those measurements meant nothing to her for judging distances outdoors. And how big does a mile look, anyway? Or a kilometer? She had no idea. The only thing she could actually visualize that was large enough to be useful was the parking lot at the grocery store where Sister Disgustia had sometimes sent her when the Goodies were planning one of their special parties. And right now, by her official estimation, the base of the sky bubble was exactly two point three parking lots away.

She paused to look back and check the ridge behind them again. Still clear. Still no tree-hags following them. No axe murderers or insurance salesmen either. It didn’t make her feel any easier about being in this ditch really, but one problem at a time. And for now, the giant bubble dome in front of them was the biggie.

They reached the base of the slope more or less together. Abeni looked around with a puzzled expression as Tayna turned to look at him, but he did not stop his chant. It took a moment for her to realize the problem. The slope did not level out—it continued at a steady downward angle right up until it met the enormous bubble wall rising up out of the snow. So if he stopped chanting, the Wagon would settle to the snow and then slide downhill to strike the wall. He couldn’t turn the Wagon either. Not alone. Not even with her help. It had taken both Zimu and Sarqi working together, sometimes even requiring Abeni’s help, when they had needed to turn its great bulk in the forest. So here, on a slope? In the wind? This Wagon wasn’t going to be turning aside any time soon. Not for nobody.

So it was Tayna who first went up and placed a hand tentatively against the bubble, while Abeni continued to sing. The surface was neither warm nor cold. Not rough, not smooth. Neither wet nor dry. It just was. Strange. Weird, even. Otherworldly. But it was strong, too. Tayna kicked it gently with a cold, snow-clumped boot. Nothing happened, so she kicked it again, harder this time. Still nothing, although she wasn’t even sure what she’d been hoping for. She tried slapping it with her hand, but that was a mistake. Nothing changed about the wall, but the cold had numbed her hands. She’d forgotten how sore they still were, and the wall was happy to remind her, so now the bones in the middle of her palm throbbed at the top of their lungs. Angry at her stupidity, Tayna slumped against the wall and slid down its slippery face onto the snow. She was completely out of ideas.

In the end, Abeni just stopped chanting. The Wagon settled onto the slope with the usual sound effects of heavy things crunching on dry snow, and then it slid forward until it bumped rather loudly against the bubble, with a deep and heavy thud. But that was all. Abeni inspected the point of impact, satisfying himself that there was no damage to the Wagon, then he took several steps backward, up the hill, craning his neck way back, as though trying to see if he could see the top of the wall. But there was no top. The wall just curved away from them, impossibly high, yet still indistinct, as the colors of the wall and the sky faded into each other like milk into cream. After scanning the sky for some time, the big Djin smiled at her and shrugged.

“It is very big,” he said.

“Thank you, Commander Obvious,” Tayna replied, still rubbing at the sore fingers of her slap-hand. She had said little all day and was surprised now to find it somewhat easier to speak. Abeni grinned at her, ignoring her jibe, and came back down the slope to stand next to her. He placed his own large, dark hand against the whiteness of the wall.

“Very unusual,” he said. “It is like nothing Abeni has ever touched before.”

“Is there a door, do you think?” Tayna got to her feet and took a few steps off to the side, trying to follow the smoothness of the wall with her eyes, hoping to see if there might be a crack or maybe the tell-tale bulge of a secret entrance. But there was nothing to focus on. A huge looming white nothingness—nothing to see, nothing to catch the eye—set against a huge sky of white nothingness, and framed against a white hill of snowy nothingness. It was almost like being blind, but in shades of swirling white instead of the blackness she had always imagined blindness must be like. So it was a relief when she turned back to Abeni and her eyes could once again find purchase on real objects with discernible edges and differing colors—things she could actually focus on.

It wasn’t anything she heard or saw that made her look back. It was just a feeling. The low sense of dread that had been plaguing her all day suddenly fluttered at her mind—on the right side—and she turned toward it, looking up the long, icy slope. There at the top, framed against the sky was a tiny, black dot that winked out as soon as it had registered. Tayna twisted angrily at her wrist. They were being followed! And then a sick wave of recognition swept over her and she knew exactly who it was. “Run!” she cried.

Angiron had found them.

Tayna had only just convinced her rubbery feet to get moving when the air beside her was split by a wild crackling sound and Angiron stepped out of a brilliant, yellow gleam. The tip of his long, white staff whistled through the air where her head had been. Then her husband stepped forward triumphantly, ignoring the fact that she had evaded his attack. He strode toward her with the white bone staff held high, and a gleam of metal under his other arm. It looked exactly like one of Regalia’s urns. But there was no time to examine it. Angiron had found her, and she was trapped.

With nowhere to go and nowhere to hide, Tayna turned and bolted toward the protective bulk of the Wagon, where gravity still pressed its nose against the great wall. Between it and her, Abeni turned to confront the unwelcome Gnome, his eyes wide with rage.

“The First Prince has no honor,” Abeni snarled. “To attack a child is a cowardly thing! Swing your dragon leg at Abeni, if you dare! Abeni will prove the cowardice of princes!” With those words, the big Djin launched himself across the snow, his great legs driving him forward with his shoulders lowered, braced for impact. But Angiron barked out a short laugh.

And then he began to sing.

The effect was instantaneous. In one blink, Abeni was charging across the snow, narrowing the gap between himself and the Angiron-shaped sack of Gnome-meat, ready to dismember it. In the next blink, every muscle in the Djin’s body froze. No longer able to move his legs, momentum hurtled him face-first into the snow, where he rolled over onto his side, still locked in the pose of his murderous charge.

Angiron’s song caught Tayna too, just as she had reached the front of the Wagon. She’d been intending to slip under its bulk, hoping to put more… anything between herself and her crazed husband. But whatever the song had done to Abeni it had done to her as well, and Tayna froze in mid-crouch, bracing herself with one hand on the bubble of nothingness and the other on the Wagon in front of her. She couldn’t even see what was happening from this position. All she could do was listen to the scene playing out behind her.

Angiron paused his song, long enough to speak. “What made you think you could beat me this time?” he taunted. “You Djin are like salmon to my bear, with all your talk of honor and duty. Pah! I toss you aside. All of you. Any of you. Whenever I like, and as easily as I like. And like a salmon, my tossing does you injury each and every time.” Tayna heard a Gnomish grunt of effort and a dull thud that told her he had landed a vicious blow of some kind, but Abeni made no sound. Abeni! Tayna boiled inside. She couldn’t stand that he was being savaged by that monstrous little creep. It was all her fault and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Her right hand slipped slowly down the cold stone face of the Wagon, and Tayna realized that she was regaining the ability to move.

“No, let’s have none of that now,” Angiron called out, and then he immediately resumed his whiny, grating song, immobilizing Tayna’s arm once more.

Had he seen her move, or had Abeni moved? How could she do anything if everything happened behind her? Apparently the effect of his song didn’t last for very long, and he’d have to keep singing to keep the charm powered. Like Abeni’s Wagon chant. Could she use that information somehow?

“So my dear, we meet again.” Icicles of dread slid down Tayna’s back as that sickening voice came closer. Snow crunched under his feet as he approached. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t take more time with you back on the Arch. I’m afraid I was a little busy at the time. Although I did send you here. To keep you… safe.”

Tayna shuddered as she felt his hand touch lightly against her back. “But I have so much more time for you now,” he added. The hand moved up from her kirfa to paw at her hair. She still couldn’t see him, but he was close enough now that she could hear his breathing. She could even smell him—a revolting blend of coffee, cologne and decaying vegetables. He leaned in closer, and she could feel the hot dampness of his breath on the back of her ear. “I’m the King now. Have you heard? Everything is working out just as I planned,” he whispered, “and with you at my side—”

It was his nose that changed everything.

The first time Tayna had seen him, weeks ago, back at the Old Shoe in Grimorl, Angiron’s face had looked like that of a normal human man. Short, but normal. It was a trick, she’d later realized—a charm he worked whenever he traveled to Grimorl, to disguise his true Gnomileshi features. No Gnome could pass for human. They were just too… misshapen. Especially the almost comically large hotdog-bun of a nose they had, hanging in the middle of their face. But even though he must have some kind of charm to hide all that, Angiron didn’t need it here, of course. So that left his bulbous schnoz just floating there, filling the air between them. She could see it in the corner of her eye as he leaned in beside her, and then the damp, fleshy tip of it brushed against Tayna’s ear.

She felt it then. A completeness. A wholeness. As though all of her life had been a dream, waiting for this one single moment of waking clarity. She could feel it. Or them. Three different magics, like three different currents, pulling at different parts of her body. The unliving Djin magic of the Wagon, cold and weighty, seeping from the stone beneath her hand. The oily death magic of her leering husband that slimed against her ear. And between both of those, herself, filled with Wasketchin life magic. The magic of her own people.

Terrified as much by the thought of using it as not using it, Tayna reached out from within herself and took hold of the power.

When time unfroze, everything changed. No doubt, Angiron had been expecting to continue his sick little tête-à-tête with his child bride, secure in his complete and total domination of the situation. So it was probably something of a surprise when the frightened girl cowering before him in the snow whirled suddenly and buried her elbow into the small of his throat, knocking him backward, gasping and choking into the snow, struggling for breath. At least, she hoped it was a surprise.

Tayna darted past Garbage-Breath and hurried over to Abeni’s side. Now was the time to find out if her instincts were right. She knelt in the snow beside him and put a hand on his arm. Then she pulled, sort of. In her head. She could feel the knotted vim of Angiron’s charm song coiled inside Abeni, like a snake of stone under his skin, locking his muscles tight. So she drew it out, pulling it into herself, and undoing the knots as she went. Abeni’s rigor melted away and he rolled onto his hands and knees in the snow. There was a large red welt over his right eye, and he moved sluggishly, but he did make it to his feet.

“Come on, Big Whale. Get moving.” Tayna took him by the arm in exactly the same way a toddler might do with a telephone pole, and urged him toward the Wagon. Angiron had recovered his breath, more surprised by her blow than injured by it, sadly, and was now hunting through the snow for his staff. Abeni stumbled over a golden gleam at his feet, and the lid of Angiron’s fallen urn popped free as Abeni staggered forward. Whatever had been in it spilled out into the snow with a hiss, but Tayna paid it no mind, and hurried to catch up with her still-woozy friend.

Angiron cursed when he saw the empty container roll away from Tayna’s feet, and he renewed his struggle to stand up on the snowy slope. But he had not just spent three days tramping through the treacherous stuff, and his feet skittered and slipped, sending him to his knees several times.

Tayna looked quickly from Abeni to the Wagon. When she’d first drawn power from it, she had felt a response from the milky bubble wall as well. A sort of ringing. Like when you run your finger around the rim of a water glass. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but she was flying on instincts here, playing hunches like sure things. It’s all she had time for. She’d wanted to save both Abeni and the Wagon, but with Angiron about to rally, she could only take time for the living. So she grabbed Abeni by the elbow and turned him straight toward the Wall. “Change of plans,” she murmured. It took only three disoriented steps for him to reach the wall, and his nose was in imminent danger of being flattened by it, but instead of stopping him, Tayna took a deep breath and placed a hand firmly at the base of his back, where his bare skin peeked out from between his all-weather Djin vest and his belt. Then she shoved him forward.

“Water leeches and gormless fathers!” Angiron spat. “You will stop interfering in my plans, woman!”

“Bite me!” Tayna yelled, then she turned back to face him and dropped into a fighting crouch, bouncing on the balls of her feet, waiting to see what he would do next. She was taller than he was, but that didn’t count for much. He was probably heavier, and very certainly meaner. Plus, she was pretty sure her brief moment of power was over. She’d felt it drain away when she’d pushed Abeni through the wall. Still, she was through with running. If she could find a way to hurt him, maybe he would back off for a while. Even if she managed to break his freaking arm, she didn’t kid herself that it would keep him away forever. But she was tired of him popping in for these surprise visits like he owned her, and something had to be done.

Angiron looked at her and cackled with self-righteous delight as he advanced, raising the white bone staff above his head. He slipped sideways just a little on the slippery downward slope, but he didn’t even blink. Tayna saw it, though. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to remind her that she still had that one small advantage—she could move better on the snow than he could.

And that gave her options.

Tayna feinted toward him, making him pause, uncertain what she was doing. The moment he flinched, she turned and ran for the Wagon, dropping and sliding under its bulk just as a flash of heat burned past her hair and buried itself, sizzling and steaming in the snow beyond her. Fireballs? How was that fair?

But she was committed now, so she didn’t hunker down to wait. As soon as she had cleared the Wagon, she was up again, moving uphill. She passed the end of the Wagon and kept going, heading in the one direction he could not easily follow—up the slope. Maybe if she got some distance on him…

“You think you can run away?” Angiron yelled, moving toward the end of the Wagon so he could line up an easy shot. “Should I pick you off like I did your little friend? What was her name? Eliza?” Another bolt of smoking hate bit into the snow at her feet, and she stopped, but that wasn’t what stopped her. Tayna turned to glare down at him.

“What did you do to her?” she said. Her voice was quiet and low. Within herself, she reached out for power.

“Exactly what I plan to do to you if you keep running. Or if you keep defying me. Now come here!”

But there was no power there to grab. Tayna’s shoulders slumped. Where had it all gone? What use was magic power if it wasn’t there when you needed to brain your stalker husband? Defeat welled up from her stomach, and slowly, Tayna began to trudge back down the slope. Her head hung low and she loaded her glare with all the hate she could muster, blazing it out at his stupid, smirking face that waited below her.

It was an unexpected, happy smile, like the one that sneaks up on you when you find a book you thought you had lost. To line up his last energy bolt, Angiron had moved, and he now stood at the end of the Wagon, with his back almost up against it, glaring at her with all the superior smugness of a newly crowned king.

He was also directly downhill from her.

When she was still five good strides away, Tayna let out a yell and began her charge. Startled, Angiron backpedaled and slipped in the snow, falling to one knee and jabbing his staff down to try to keep himself from falling over.

But then Tayna hit him. With her arms crossed in front of herself, she slammed into the Gnome King with all the force she could muster, hurtling him backward to collide with the Wagon, then he bounced off it, twisting, and fell face-up on the snow.

Tayna dashed past him and grabbed hold of the Wagon with one hand. Then she stooped down low and grabbed at her dazed husband with the other hand, wrenching his nose savagely as she shoved the Wagon with everything she had.

Once again, she felt the circuit complete, recharging her. Her body hummed, stretched out between the power at each of her two hands, like the negative and positive poles of an enormous battery. She smiled. And once again, she reached out from within herself and gathered the power to her.

The moment she took hold of it, she flung it back, through the Wagon of Tears and up against the giant wall, which melted into nothing wherever the Wagon touched it, just as it had for Abeni. With no barrier in front to resist it, the Wagon lurched forward, sliding through the wall like a runaway freight train on skis, which is sort of what it was.

Tayna had thought she’d have time to climb aboard, but it all happened so quickly that she had only an instant to grab hold before it yanked her forward, as it began to disappear into the Wall.

“Consider this a divorce!” she yelled over her shoulder.

And then the milky whiteness of the wall sucked her in.

When Tayna and the Wagon had finished passing through the barrier, Angiron picked himself up and batted the snow from his knees, standing easily on the slippery slope. His gaze remained fixed on the point of her departure for a moment, deep in thought, then he nodded curtly and waved his arm in an arc, off to the side. A crackle of yellow light trailed his hand, and when he had closed the circle, the disk of air within it changed color and began to expand.

“You saw?” Angiron said, turning his head slightly, as though he were talking to the swelling disk of air.

“I saw.” The voice emanating from the disk was muffled, as though being spoken through the flames of a camp fire. The disk continued to expand.

“Stupid cow!” Angiron spat, shaking his head in irritation. “I was beginning to doubt your word that she would ever find it.”

The voice was silent.

“You’re sure the rest will work?” The Gnome King yanked his gaze away from the milky white wall to face the disk that yawned open beside him. It was now almost as tall as he was.

“She has felt the completion,” the voice said. “It will call to her. She will answer. It will grow.”

“It had better,” Angiron muttered. “But I don’t want that kind of power running loose once she has ripened.” Then he walked forward into the disk, where the other figure stepped aside to make way, coming into view as he did. It was the jet black shape of a man, slender, smooth and sleekly muscled, like a panther. The surface of his face was smooth and featureless, save for two stumpy black horns that protruded from the sides instead of ears.

Chapter 3