Chapter

16

Susan

Tara’s innate hospitality wouldn’t allow her to leave our Council watchdog alone on the porch. She invited him in to supper and then barely seemed to notice him. His aloof presence might have quenched the warm laughter normally heard around this supper table. Tonight that wasn’t an issue. The dinner was far from normal. Kendra and Tristan weren’t speaking, and Tara’s red-rimmed eyes kept straying to Payton, as though pleading for reassurance he couldn’t give. Mark and I were lost in our own fears about Jake. Even Dustin and Aubrey were subdued. The Council guard was the only one to do justice to the soup and bread. When the rest of us stopped pretending to eat, Aubrey pushed her bowl aside.

“My turn.”

Tara focused blearily on the girl. “What?”

“My turn to say the Verses.” Without waiting for prompting, she launched into the creed and then the day’s Verses. I let my mind wander, expecting one of the long clan histories that were a common part of the People’s records, but brought my attention back when Aubrey stumbled over a word.

“He gives us . . .” She looked at Tara for help.

“Families. He gives us families,” Tara said quietly. Her hand stole across the table to rest on Payton’s arm. He covered her hand with his own.

“He gives us families out of His great mercy. He knows our hearts and never leaves His people alone.” Aubrey prattled forward without inflection, determined to complete her job so she could go play.

“Let love rule in your homes.” The words continued. I was surprised by their similarity to my own world’s verses. And why not? The truth of the One didn’t change from world to world. I looked around the table as Aubrey continued her recitation. Kendra’s tight anger was ebbing away, and she tugged at a loose thread on her sleeve. Tristan’s gaze flickered over to her, then back down to the table.

When Aubrey finished, she bounded from her chair.

“One moment.” Payton’s gruff voice stopped her. He turned to the stoic guard. “We are glad you could join us at our table, and I thank you for the protection you are giving Markkel and Susan. But we have some family issues to discuss. Would you please excuse us for a short while?”

“And when we’re finished, you are welcome to take lodging here,” Tara added, her care-taking nature reviving briefly, though without her usual warmth.

The young man nodded curtly and returned to his watch outside the front door.

Payton looked at all of us. “Let’s talk to the One,” he said simply.

Tara bowed her head and spoke first. “Holy One, you know exactly where Jake is right now. We trust him to your care. Keep him safe, and help Markkel and Susan find him.”

My eyes stung. She was wrestling with fears about Tag’s welfare, yet she focused her prayers on Jake.

“Creator of life, and joiner of families, I ask you to take care of Tag and Jameth tonight. Be their defense tomorrow.” It was Kendra’s quiet voice, offering the prayers that Tara and Payton needed.

Tristan cleared his throat. “We thank You for Your promises. Thank You for the Restorers You provided to our People in the past, and for providing a new one to us now. Watch over Kieran . . .” His voice trailed off.

I prayed in silence, and once again the quieting hand stilled my anxiety with a feather-light touch. Payton began a song, and the voices in the room melded into one sound. I no longer noticed Aubrey’s high-pitched chirp or Mark’s resonant baritone or Kendra’s wispy soprano. The music rose as one united voice.

When the last note faded, Payton leaned forward. He dismissed the children with a nod and then spoke quickly to Mark. “You’ll need supplies and directions. Tristan can help.” He gave Tara a steady look. “Will you pack food for Markkel and Susan and then prepare what we’ll need for tomorrow?”

She nodded and moved briskly toward the kitchen. Payton went to a closet and pulled out packs and spare pallets in neat rolls.

Tristan and Mark already had their heads together. “We’ll need a heat trivet, a light cube, and I’d really like to bring a scrambler,” Mark was saying.

Tristan frowned. “This isn’t Rendor or Lyric. Where would I find a scrambler?”

“I have one,” Kendra interrupted. Both men stared at her. “It’s at father’s house. I’ll go get it.” She winked at me on her way out the door. Tristan looked dazed, and I rubbed a hand over my mouth to hide my smile.

He pulled his attention back to Mark with effort. “No one from Braide Wood has ever crossed deep into Hazor, except for Kieran. I know he’s used a trail over the mountains, and he usually made trips to Sidian. It’s the largest city and so an easier place to blend in. I would guess that’s where he and Jake will be heading.”

“Are the borders patrolled?” Mark asked.

Tristan shook his head. “Not on our side. There’s a guardian at the outpost at Morsal Plains, but you can avoid that by climbing the mountains near the edge of the forest.”

“Guys, we have another problem to consider.” I jerked my head toward the door. “Our tail.”

Tristan rubbed his temples. “Your what?”

I sighed and spoke slowly, enunciating. “The Council guard.”

Mark nodded. “You’re right. He won’t let us cross the border.”

Tara leaned into the room from the kitchen. “Don’t give it another thought. I’ll take care of that problem tomorrow.”

Mark opened his mouth to ask her about her plan, but she had ducked back out of sight.

The next morning Tara served an early breakfast. Dustin rubbed sleep from his eyes, and Aubrey crawled onto my lap and shared some bread with me. Tara brought out mugs of clavo for the adults and juice for the children. I glanced at Mark, wondering what we would do to get away. Now that we had made the decision to track Kieran into Hazor, I wanted to get on with it. My toes clenched and then uncurled again inside my boots. I glared across the table at the Council guard. We were so close to Jake, but each moment he could be getting farther from our reach. I grabbed my mug of clavo with such force that it splashed over onto my hands.

I was blotting up the spill when I heard a thud. The Council guard’s head had dropped forward and hit the table. Everyone else jumped, but Tara calmly gathered up the dishes. “Let’s be on our way. He’ll have a nice nap. When he wakes up, Kendra can explain that she thinks everyone else has gone to Lyric.”

Tristan’s eyes stretched wide in alarm as he watched his mother traipse to the kitchen. Then he looked down at the contents of his mug and shoved it aside.

I stifled a giggle. The Braide Wood guardian was cursed with a family full of unconventional women.

Tristan shoved to his feet and confronted his mother in the alcove entrance. “How are you going to explain his little nap while everyone else disappeared?”

“The poor boy was up half the night guarding the house. He’s only human. No one blames him for needing some sleep. Kendra will explain that we couldn’t rouse him and couldn’t wait any longer to catch the transport to Lyric.”

“But what if he realizes what you did? What you used?” He rubbed his neck. “What did you use?”

Kendra laid a reassuring hand on Tristan’s arm. “It’s a good plan. Stop fussing.”

“Let’s go.” Mark brushed crumbs from his hands and stood. He and Tristan exchanged a few more words while I gave quick hugs to Kendra and Tara. Mark and I slipped out first, knowing that after Tristan said goodbye to Kendra, he and Payton and Tara would hurry to the transport station. Our path led the opposite direction.

Mark and I slipped from the house and into the woods like wraiths. After a short walk we scrambled down the steep switchbacks through the woods toward Morsal Plains.

Hiking felt comforting and familiar. Mark and I loved to hike the woods near our home. I could almost forget we were in a strange world, pursued by danger, and facing unknown hazards. We were finally doing something useful. Each step brought us closer to Jake.

Skirting the edge of the plains, we aimed straight for the mountains that stood guard over the clans and separated them from Hazor. Jagged black rock towered over us, daring us to climb. Two weeks earlier, the army of Hazor crested these peaks and began their invasion. They poured down these ridges on foot and with lehkan, blasting our armies with syncbeams. I’d felt terror that day, as well as the deep, spine-strengthening resolve to protect Braide Wood. For a moment I heard the echoes of clashing swords and screams of the wounded.

I reached for Mark’s hand, and he led me forward. As we trekked up the steep trail, I wondered what we would face on the other side of this forbidding ridge, and suddenly a children’s ditty flitted into my head.

“The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountaaaaaain, to see what he could see.” I started humming and then couldn’t help singing it. “And all that he could see, and all that he could see, was the other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountaaaaaaain, was all that he could see.”

Mark gave me a strange look.

“What?” I planted fists on my hips and stopped hiking. “You prefer The Sound of Music? We could sing ‘Climb Every Mountain.’”

And I started doing exactly that. Mark laughed and interrupted with “Rocky Mountain High.” By the time we’d run out of mountain songs, we were breathless from clambering up the rough ledges. We were about halfway to the summit when I called for a rest.

I eased my pack off my shoulders and sank to the ground. It was getting harder for me to breathe. A knot of pain tightened beneath my sternum. I resisted the urge to rub it. If Mark noticed, it would add to his worries. He was already keeping an alert eye on the peaks above us.

“Do you miss it?” he asked, turning to me.

I looked up from retying my boots. “Home? Of course. If I could, I’d be back at our kitchen table right this second, with Jon practicing piano and Karen giggling on the phone and lasagna in the oven and . . .”

“No. That’s not what I meant.” He looked at my sword.

I squinted at him. It took me a moment to understand. “Being the Restorer?” I bit my lip and shook my head so hard my hair swung into my face. “Never.”

“Are you sure?” Mark sank onto a rock near me, bracing one foot up. “The sense of purpose. The power. How can you not miss it?”

I looked down, and my words were quiet. “It wasn’t like that.”

Mark watched me and waited for more.

I considered how to make him understand. “How did you feel when the Rendor songkeeper told everyone the prophecy about you? Important? Special?”

Mark shuddered. “Confused, angry. A weight I didn’t want to carry.”

“Exactly.” I stood, dusted my hands off on my pants legs, and grabbed my pack.

Mark didn’t move. “But what if you could do it again?”

“Kieran is the Restorer now. My role is done.” How much convincing did he need?

“But what if that was a mistake? What if Kieran stopped being the Restorer? He’s not following the Verses or serving the Council. He’s not even part of the clans anymore. What if the One takes that power away from him?”

Where was he going with this? This whole conversation was bizarre. I stared at Mark. His hair was growing longer, accentuating the natural waves he usually kept trimmed short. His face was leaner than it had been before all our recent adventures. I felt again that I was struggling to understand a man I barely knew. “Has that ever happened before?”

Mark shrugged. “No, but I’m just asking. What if he died and—”

“Stop it!” I picked up Mark’s pack and shoved it at him with force. “Kieran is the Restorer. I’m not and never will be again. I don’t know why the One has called him and neither do you. Let’s find Jake and get back to the portal and go home.”

Mark pushed himself up. “I just wondered.”

I couldn’t read the thoughtful look on his face. He shouldered his pack and resumed climbing. I watched him with a worried frown, then hurried to catch up.

We reached the highest peaks before midday. We hid in the cleft of two large rock formations and ate a hurried lunch. Mark went ahead to search for any sign of Hazorite patrols and returned to tell me it looked clear. He offered his hand and pulled me back to my feet to begin the hike down into Hazor. From our altitude the land ahead looked dark and menacing. Thick forests appeared too dense to penetrate, and a marshland in the distance resembled the treacherous clay fields near Shamgar.

Mark had grown up knowing Hazor as a forbidden and frightening land. Tristan had told me a haunting story about Hazor’s destruction of Shamgar. From talking with Nolan, I knew that it was a hard culture with little compassion for the weak or small. They worshipped hill-gods, and those gods had promised them ever-expanding lands. Kieran had told the Council that Hazor believed their power came from the frequent human sacrifices in their temples. My only direct contact with Hazor had been when I had battled their armies. All I really knew was that their soldiers were skilled and ruthless.

“What will we find?” I mused aloud.

Mark met my eyes, his own reflecting a somber concern. “I don’t know. But it won’t be good.”

I wished he would go back to telling reassuring lies. My ability to pretend we were on a weekend camping trip dissolved. My skin prickled with cold, and I rummaged in my pack for my cloak.

Jake was ahead of us somewhere, in a very dangerous land. We were still a target for assassins from Kahlarea. Worst of all, the promised defender of the People, the new Restorer, had apparently thrown off his calling. He’d helped enemies into Lyric, been part of a murder, endangered Tristan’s own family, and now, as hideous as it was to believe, he may have kidnapped Jake. How angry and desperate would he have to be to do something like that?

I shivered and pulled up the hood of my cloak. “He wouldn’t.”

“Hmm?” Mark adjusted a tie on his own pack and repositioned the weight on his shoulders.

“Kieran wouldn’t hurt Jake, would he?”

Mark faced me squarely. “I think he’d do anything. Use anyone. Susan, he cut your throat when I wouldn’t help get him into the Council session.”

That wasn’t exactly the way it happened, but I conceded the point. Kieran was unpredictable and dangerous and didn’t bind himself to the ethics Tristan lived by.

My mind followed that path. What if he had some plan that involved using Jake as a hostage? What might we have to do when we found him? I knew from experience that Restorers were hard to kill. But if Kieran had allied himself to Hazor and Kahlarea against the People of the Verses, he would have to be stopped. Mark was right. Whatever was ahead wouldn’t be good.