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Avender woke the moment the wind stopped howling past his ears. Instead of the hard blumet mesh of the airship, he and Hubley were now lying on a soft bed. Night filled the window behind them; his lamp gleamed pale and thin around the room.
He recognized where they were at once. Hubley’s spell had brought them back to her bedroom in Castle Grangore, the very spot they had been trying to escape in the first place. If Reiffen was home, Avender doubted they would get away a second time.
Thinking to wake the child, he rolled onto his side. Hubley slept beside him but, unlike Avender, she was below the covers. And the collar around her neck was the white of a clean nightgown, not the dirty dress she had been wearing on the airship. Or was it? Rubbing his eyes, he looked again. He could have sworn the collar was white before, but now it was dark brown. As he watched, it changed again, flickering back and forth between the two shades as quick as a blink. Small changes flashed across her face as well. A smudge on her cheek came and went with the same rhythm as the collar; her hair switched between tangled and combed.
It was almost as if there were two Hubleys sharing the same space, the one who had brought him here from the Abyss, and the other from...where?
Or when.
The night ended. Avender’s lamp faded as full morning sprang up around him. The other Hubley disappeared. The one in the dirty dress took her place completely. Now she was lying on top of the quilts the same as he was, and the bed was made up as if no one had slept in it for days.
She opened her eyes. “Are we there?” she asked hopefully. Before Avender could answer, she went on. “I had the strangest dream. It was like I was in two places at once. Here, and here in my bedroom again, only it was the middle of the night. It was like I was remembering another of my old memories.”
“I’m sure that’s what it was,” said Avender, not wanting her to ask anything more. Who knew where she’d take them if she realized she’d almost cast the Timespell. “Just another one of your dreams.”
“Of course that’s what it was,” said a new voice. “What else could it be? She’s been having strange dreams every night. Why, just yesterday—”
“Durk!” Hubley leapt up from the bed, dragging Avender with her. One-handed, she lifted the stone from his velvet pillow while Avender unwrapped the strap still holding them together.
“It’s so good to see you!” she went on. “Avender’s come back and rescued me! We’ve been to Malmoret, and the Stoneways, and fought sissit—”
“Rescued you?” asked the stone. “From what? Too much cake and presents?”
“Father’s been holding me prisoner in Castle Grangore for years and years.”
“Sssh.” Avender put a finger to his lips. Removing Durk from Ferris’s hands, he dropped the stone into his pack before their voluble friend could utter another word. “We have to get out of here,” he whispered. “It would have been a lot better if you’d brought us to Valing. If your father’s here, we’ll never get away a second time. Can you do the invisibility spell?”
“Of course. That’s the first thing I got Plum to teach me. How do you think we were able to steal so many cookies all the time?”
“Cast it then. At least that way we’ll have some chance of getting out of here.”
“That really won’t be necessary.”
For the second time, a strange voice intruded on Avender and Hubley’s conversation. Looking up, they found Mindrell leaning against the doorway. Despite the bard’s casual attitude, he regarded Avender warily. Given what had happened at their last meeting, Avender could understand why. Like Hubley, Mindrell didn’t appear to have aged a day since that last meeting, either. Avender wondered if Reiffen had given him a Living Stone as payment for what he’d done. Or maybe he was using one of the other, messier, ways of keeping someone alive.
Pulling Hubley behind him, Avender reached for his sword. “You better let us pass.”
Gracefully, the bard waved his arm to show they were free to go. Then he followed them into the next room. “Reiffen’s not here. He disappeared into the cellars two days ago and I haven’t seen him since.”
“He’ll be back,” said Avender. “He has a charm that allows him to track Hubley wherever she goes.”
“I know. I’ve been waiting for him to return with her. But you showed up instead. That was a pleasant surprise, especially the part about you having both your hands. I really did regret having to do that, you know. And the burying, too.”
Avender was thinking it might be time to show Mindrell what being one-handed was like when Hubley tugged on his arm.
“We should take him with us,” she urged. “That way Father can’t make him tell we were here.”
“He’ll only help your father get us back if we do,” Avender answered.
Mindrell shook his head. “No I won’t. I told Giserre I’d protect her granddaughter, and that’s what I’ve been doing. You think there’s any other reason I’d have stayed here all this time? I’ve barely been outside these walls in thirty-one years.”
Avender didn’t like it, but he saw no alternative. Not unless he killed the harper in front of the child. Twice now Mindrell had nearly slain him. When the third time came, Avender was determined the chance would be his.
“All right, we’ll take you with us. Hubley, can you cast invisibility on all three of us?”
The child concentrated, her forehead furrowed.
“Hide us like it’s darkest night.
Hide us so we’re out of sight.”
“Some day, Hubley,” said Mindrell as they disappeared, “I’ll have to teach you to be a better poet.”
With the child holding each man’s hand, they hurried through the empty halls. Avender expected Reiffen to descend upon them at any minute. Invisibility could hardly be expected to stop so powerful a magician, especially in his own castle. If they got outside it might be a different matter. But why hadn’t Reiffen returned? His charm had to have told him where Hubley was. The fact he hadn’t shown up made Avender almost as uneasy as if he had.
By the time they reached the front gate there was still no sign of the magician. Opening the wicket, Mindrell led them outside. Avender thought about how Hubley had been with them the last time he and Mindrell had passed this way, though neither of them had known it at the time. Mindrell still didn’t. She might have saved them all a lot of trouble, herself included, if she’d simply kept Avender from going inside. But that, as he was learning more and more every day, wasn’t Mims’s way. Still, no matter how much trouble she got him into, things had a habit of turning out all right. Flexing the fingers on his left hand, he decided to keep following her instructions.
“Our footprints in the road are going to give us away to the first person we meet,” said Mindrell as they followed the dusty lane across the empty fields surrounding the castle and into the woods.
“I’m not worried about that.” Avender looked up through the leafless trees at the clear blue sky. “At least while we’re still invisible Reiffen won’t be able to see us unless he’s close to where we are.”
“As long as he has that charm, we really can’t hide.”
Avender turned to where he thought Hubley was. “Do you know how your father tracks you?” he asked.
“No,” the child answered.
The bard shook his head as well. “It’s probably her Stone. I doubt Reiffen would have made it anything she could get rid of easily.”
They walked on, their boots scuffing the road. Birds flew back and forth across the blue sky; a badger, who would never have been so bold had he been able to see the three travelers, shuffled across the road not two strides in front of them. Avender told the bard everything that had happened over the last two days.
At the Grangore Road they debated which way to go. Hubley was for continuing up the mountain to the Sun Road, but Avender and Mindrell disagreed. Grangore was closer, and the Granglough was there as well.
“We don’t have to go all the way to Issinlough to find Dwarves,” Avender pointed out. “And your father’s magic doesn’t work on Dwarves.”
That convinced Hubley. The three of them in agreement, they started down the mountain toward the town that none of them had seen in a very long time.
Not until they were well into the farms outside did they meet anyone. They ignored a girl driving three sheep along the side of the road, but she didn’t ignore them, and stared intently at the marks their feet left in the road as they passed. After that they started walking in the dry grass on the roadside.
“We’ll never make it all the way into town like this,” said Avender. “Sooner or later we’re going to run into a dog.”
“The spell never works with dogs,” said Hubley.
“I know. You’re father told me that a long time ago.”
Making sure no one saw them reappear, Hubley removed her spell. A lazy hawk circled the sky high above, but, if Reiffen was the hawk, he didn’t show it. The party made it the rest of the way to Grangore unmolested.
They found the town much larger than it had been thirty years before. Most of the streets and buildings they remembered had been torn down to make room for new ones. Granglough, however, hadn’t been moved, and they found it after only a few wrong turns. A pair of sentries guarded the entrance just as they had when Avender had first visited the place forty years before. Their black armor was the same too, though Avender assumed the men inside had changed. Had they been standing guard outside Castle Grangore he wouldn’t have been so sure of that at all.
“We’ve come to see Huri,” he said when the guards asked why they wanted to go inside.
“A lot of people want to see Huri. That doesn’t mean they get in.”
Hubley subjected the two guards to her haughtiest stare. “I’m the magicians’ daughter. In case you’ve forgotten, my father’s been keeping me prisoner up at the castle, so it’s very important I get to see my mother. Ferris, you know. If you don’t let us in, I’m going to tell her to turn both of you into toads.”
The guards exchanged glances but, when neither of them started hopping, they snickered behind their visors.
Hubley clenched her jaw, which reminded Avender of both her grandmothers at the same time. “Rust,” she said. The guards laughed some more.
Without another word, she marched right past them. Expecting the worst, Avender leapt after her. The guards tried to stop them but, stiff as statues, toppled to the ground instead.
“Very impressive.” Mindrell stepped over them as the guards rocked awkwardly back and forth in feeble efforts to stand, their armor locked tight as rusted pipe.
Once inside, they had no trouble finding Huri. A boy escorted them to the Minabbenet, then ran off to fetch the Dwarf. Avender’s lamp provided enough light to lead them down the steps into the large cave, but it wasn’t enough to interfere with the glow of the gems arranged in patterns on the ceiling like the stars in the summer sky.
Huri recognized Mindrell and Hubley at once when he joined them, which was enough to persuade him to contact Issinlough on the Granglough mirror. But Avender had changed enough that the Dwarf only accepted who he was on the word of the other two humans.
The curious gathered as Huri went off to make his call, mostly humans but a few Dwarves as well. Though Mindrell had been seen from time to time by the women who had brought food to the castle, Reiffen had kept himself and Hubley locked up so long that most of Grangore wasn’t sure they even existed. Hubley, who hadn’t been around so many people in years, cowered by the table in the middle of the room as Avender and Mindrell held back the crowd.
A lane opened through the hall as a woman appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Mother!”
Hubley dashed across the room. Ferris met her in the middle, her daughter leaping into her arms. As if trying to make up for all they had missed in the last thirty years, they kissed a hundred hundred times. Desperately, Hubley clung to her mother’s neck; Ferris wept with open joy.
Avender found himself sniffling too, and saw more than a few other eyes glistening in the crowd. Beside him, Mindrell cleared his throat several times.
Only after giving her darling another ten score kisses did Ferris greet anyone else, and that only because Hubley dragged her over to Avender by pulling on her dress.
“Aren’t you even going to say hello, Mother?” said the child. “Avender’s the one who rescued me.”
The light bright against Ferris’s face, Avender shaded his lamp with his hand, but the magician didn’t recognize him at all.
“Avender? Is it really you? Have you come back too?”
“It’s me.”
“You must have quite a story to tell.” Ferris hugged her daughter once again. “Too bad we don’t have time to hear it. I still have to get Hubley safely back to Valing. Are you coming with us?”
“Where else would I go?”
“We have to bring Mindrell too,” said Hubley, her arms still wrapped around her mother’s waist. “He’s on our side.”
Ferris considered the matter. Avender saw that, like Mindrell, her eyes were the oldest part of her, with years and years of sadness bottled up behind them.
“All right,” she said. “Mindrell’s done what Giserre asked him to. He can come as well. Let Reiffen just try to get you away from me now.”
She offered Avender and Mindrell her hands. The humans in the crowd shuffled back a few steps in the face of the magic they knew she was about to cast. With Hubley holding one hand and Avender and Mindrell the other, Ferris carried them home.
Giserre and Redburr were there to greet them when they arrived. Hubley hesitated for a moment, clutching her mother’s skirt, unsure who this old woman with steel gray hair might be. Avender was also surprised. No one else he had met had changed at all, and to finally see someone who had was a shock. Giserre’s beauty and bearing, however, were just the same. Recognizing her grandmother as soon as Ferris told her who she was, Hubley rushed to give her a hug. A quick embrace for the bear as well, and she was back at her mother’s side.
In the meantime Avender let Durk out of his knapsack and set him in the middle of the nearest table.
“It’s about time,” huffed the stone. “And just as things were getting interesting, too. But, I tell you, I don’t believe a word of it. Reiffen, holding his own child prisoner? Preposterous. Maybe in one of the more improbable melodramas you might get away with that sort of thing, but never in real life. Am I right? Excuse me, but is anyone listening? And what are you all going on about, anyway?”
When Durk, and everyone else, had quieted a bit, Giserre approached the bard. His dry amusement at all the sentiment being displayed around him vanished the moment the lady offered him her hand.
“I thank you for your service,” she said simply. “Any gift that is in my power to grant is yours.”
Bowing deeply, the bard brought her ladyship’s fingers to his lips. “The opportunity to serve you, milady, is reward enough for me.”
Avender grimaced. Unlike Giserre, he wasn’t nearly as inclined to forgive Mindrell for what he’d done.
“And my son?” she asked as the bard let go her hand.
He shrugged. “I haven’t seen him in two days.”
“Have you?” The regal old woman turned to Avender.
“We’ve been running away from him, milady, not looking for him.”
Giserre regarded Avender and Ferris with serene surprise. “Do neither of you find it odd that Reiffen has let Hubley get away so easily? Or that he is not paying us a visit at Tower Dale right now?”
“I do,” said Avender. “I was thinking the same thing when we left the castle. But once we got safely away, I stopped worrying.”
“Reiffen has made his own bed,” said Ferris. “Let him lie in it.”
“No, Mother.” Hubley, who had gone back to Ferris’s side the moment she left Giserre, looked up into her mother’s face. “We have to find Father. What if something terrible’s happened to him? What if the Wizard has him?”
Her mouth pinched, Ferris looked away. Giserre moved closer. Avender searched the magician’s face closely for a sign of what it was she didn’t want to say.
“If you know something, Ferris,” said Giserre, “you must speak.”
Ferris glanced at Avender as if for help, her eyes flickering between him and Hubley. “I’m not sure what I can say.”
He understood her problem at once. “You met Mims, didn’t you. I’m not sure how much you can say, either. But can you at least tell us what she told you about Reiffen?”
The bear lumbered forward. “That much ought to be safe.”
“Who’s Mims?” asked Durk.
“The magician who helped Avender rescue Hubley,” said Ferris. “The one Redburr and I found when we tracked her to Gray’s Pond.”
“She’s very powerful,” said the child. “And a little scary, too.”
“Perhaps if Hubley left the room,” suggested Giserre, “you could speak more freely.”
“I’m not leaving.” Hubley looked defiantly at her mother. “If you’re going to rescue Father, I want to help. I’m remembering new magic all the time. Avender, tell them how we got past Huri’s guards.”
Kneeling, Ferris took her daughter firmly by the shoulders. “You’ve done enough already, dear. You need a bath, and dinner, and then maybe a long nap. But, whatever we decide, you’re not coming with us. I love you far too much to let you take any more risks.”
“Come, dear.” Giserre reached for her granddaughter’s hand. “Your mother is right. This is a discussion you cannot share. But Ferris, if I ever learn you did not help Reiffen when you could, especially when he has not been himself for so long, I think I will be angrier with you than I have ever been with him.”
“That’s right, Mother,” agreed Hubley. “Just because Father’s been mean, he’s still Father.”
Their point made, grandmother and granddaughter marched out of the room.
Redburr was the first to speak after they were gone. “I’d be on your side, Ferris, only this may be the best chance to kill Fornoch we’re ever going to get. Giserre’s too old to come with us, but otherwise, if Reiffen is already with him, we’ll be the same crew that killed Usseis.”
“Oh?” said Mindrell. “I’ve volunteered, have I?”
Ferris gave the bard a scornful look. “None of us have, yet.”
“What did Mims tell you?” asked Avender.
“That we would be seeing Fornoch again before this was all over.”
“And Reiffen?”
The bear settled back on his haunches and licked his paws. “She said nothing about him. But we all know only one thing could keep Reiffen away from Hubley once she showed up in a place he could travel to.”
“The Wizard.”
“Yes,” said Ferris. “The trouble is, she didn’t tell us where he is, or I’d have taken every one of the magicians I’ve trained over the last thirty years and gone after him then and there. Instead I’ve scattered them all over the world trying to find him.”
Avender raised his left hand. It was a moment before either of his friends noticed the thimble, and another before Ferris thought to ask the obvious question.
“Where does it go?”
“To Fornoch. At least that’s what Mims told me. And if she told you we had to see the Wizard before this was over, I’d advise doing it. She knows what she’s talking about. Hubley and I had a lot of trouble, but it all came out fine in the end. I take it she told you who she is.”
“Yes.”
“And where she’s from,” growled Redburr.
“Well she hasn’t told me,” said Durk.
Avender looked at the stone for a moment, then put him back in his pocket. “Durk’s the last one we should tell any of this to. If he knows, everyone’ll know.”
Ferris agreed. “The last thing we need is every magician trying to figure out the Timespell for themselves. It’s bad enough I had to tell them humans can make Living Stones.”
“Timespell?” Mindrell’s eyebrows rose. “And who is this Mims you keep talking about?”
Avender checked to see if Ferris agreed before he went on. She nodded. He supposed the bard had as good a right to know what was going on as anyone if he ended up coming with them. And, if he didn’t, Avender would make sure he never told anyone anyway, now that Hubley was no longer in the room.
“She’s Hubley,” he explained. “An older Hubley, who knows how to travel through time.”
“Travel through time?” Not inclined to disbelieve anything after thirty years of living with magic, Mindrell took a moment to think about what Avender had said. “Does that mean she already knows how this all turns out?”
“She gave us no guarantees, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Ferris. “Hubley may know what happens, but I don’t.”
“She’s very careful,” said Avender, “to say nothing about that sort of thing. She says that knowing about what’s going to happen always makes it worse, especially if it’s bad.”
“Whatever we do,” said Redburr, “we need to make up our minds. If Reiffen has been taken by Fornoch, the sooner we get to him, the better.”
Avender remembered the feeling of cold, dry earth falling over his face. His wrist throbbed. He had no more urge to forgive Reiffen than he had to forgive Mindrell. Nor did he wish to rescue him from Wizards a second time. But Hubley expected it of him, both grownup and child. And Giserre expected it too.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“You agree with Redburr?” said Ferris. “You really want to do this?”
“If I can think we should rescue Reiffen after what he’s done to me,” said Avender, “I think you can too.”
“How dare you! He cut me off from my child for thirty years!”
“He cut me off from everyone for thirty years.”
Like a shaggy boulder, the Shaper rolled between the quarreling friends. “Enough. This isn’t about you two, it’s about Hubley and Giserre. They’re the ones we’re doing this for. And would either of you really just leave Reiffen to the Wizard? Would you do that to anyone?”
Avender wanted to say yes, but he knew it wasn’t true. There were worse things than being buried alive.
“Fine,” said Ferris.
“Do we even know for certain Reiffen’s with the Wizard?” asked Mindrell. “From what you’ve said earlier, I gather you’re only guessing.”
“Do you think we’re wrong?” Ferris gave him her most patronizing stare. “After you’ve lived with him for thirty years?”
“If he isn’t with Hubley,” added Avender, “that’s the only other place he could be.”
“Are you with us?” Redburr asked the bard.
Mindrell glanced at the door that had closed behind Giserre. “If you insist. I never did want to live forever. But I’ll need a sword. Preferably heartstone.”
“Me too,” said Avender.
“There are several on the bottom shelf.” Ferris pointed under the desk that ran along the workshop’s northern wall.
When the men were armed, everyone grasped Avender by the hand. His fingers were already on the thimble when he remembered Durk.
“It wouldn’t be fair,” he said, removing the stone from his pocket and placing him on the table, “to make Durk come too.”
“Of course not,” answered the stone. “But it’s even more unfair to keep putting me in your pocket every time you talk about something important. Where are you going, anyway?”
“To fight Fornoch.”
“Really? Well, good luck to you. Quite right to leave me be—”
The stone’s last words were lost as Avender twisted the thimble off his finger and whispered, “Return.”
***
Grumbling, Hubley followed her grandmother down the stairs. At least there were new things to see out the windows: waterfalls, the shimmering blue lake, pigs rooting through the orchard. The views of Aloslomin and Ivismundra from Castle Grangore, so spectacular to most people, had been boring her for some time. At least now she knew why.
“Bath or dinner?” asked Giserre.
Despite a sudden yawn, the gnawing in Hubley’s stomach prevailed. “Dinner.”
When they entered the kitchen, an enormous man, almost as large as the bear, stood up from the table. Soup dripped from his mustache.
“Hubley?” he asked. “Is it really you?”
“Yes.” Hubley frowned severely. “Who are you?”
“Baron Backford,” he said. “Willy.”
Her lower lip trembled. For the first time she realized just how much things had changed. Everything she remembered was gone. Her grandmother might have become an old woman, but then Giserre had been an old woman from the start as far as Hubley was concerned. What had happened to Willy was much worse. Willy was her friend, and was supposed to be her own age. They should have grown up together, gone to dances and weddings and balls. But here he was, an old man with gray hair and more than a little bit of tummy bulging over the top of his breeches.
Burying her face in her grandmother’s apron, she began to sob.
“I’m sorry.” Baron Backford knocked over his chair as he backed hastily from the table. “I didn’t mean any harm. I just thought, if you really had escaped, I might be able to say hello. All the magicians have gone, and I guess I should have gone too.”
Giserre waved Willy back into his chair. Sitting beside him, she pulled Hubley onto her lap and rocked the child back and forth, crooning a wordless song. A nod to the cook brought more bowls of soup and sliced bread with butter. Baron Backford fidgeted uncomfortably, no more sure what to do for Hubley now than he would have when he was twelve.
She stopped crying after a while. Feeling more like a child than she had since she was at least five, she rubbed her nose on the back of her hand.
“It’s not your fault,” she told the baron. “Everything’s just so different.” Pulling at the bridge of her nose, she fought off another surge of tears.
Giserre wiped her granddaughter’s cheeks with a handkerchief. “And how is Lady Breeana?” she asked, turning to the baron. “As hale as ever?”
“Mother is doing wonderfully,” said Willy, glad of the chance to talk about something different. “She’ll be thrilled to hear you asked about her. She’s three-score seven next spring, you know.”
“Does she still practice her archery?”
“Every day. How good of you to remember, milady.”
“I remember too,” said Hubley. Plucking the handkerchief from her grandmother’s hands, she blew her nose. “Especially that time she won the contest on your ninth birthday. That was the best ever, the way she showed all those stupid men she was just as good as they were.”
The baron shook his head. “I haven’t thought of that in years. But I guess you wouldn’t have thought so well of it if it had been your mother showing off like that. I was mortified.”
“I’d love it if my mother won an archery contest. She just learned boring things when she was a girl, like ironing and how to bake pies.”
Willy looked very serious, which made his mustache wag. “There’s nothing wrong with knowing that sort of thing too. Mother taught me how to cook and sew. You can’t imagine how important that is when you’re out on a campaign and don’t have anyone around to do it for you.”
“Doesn’t your wife cook and sew?”
The baron looked down at his hands. Old as the hills though he might be, he was still Willy. “Wives don’t go campaigning with you any more than mothers. Besides, I’ve never married.”
“You’ve never been married? Willy, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard!”
Willy pulled at his mustache. “Father didn’t marry Mother till he was sixty-one. I’m only forty-three. I have plenty of time.”
Hubley yawned. “I guess the girls are even sillier now than they used to be. You were the nicest boy I knew, and I’m sure you’re the nicest man too.”
“That is enough catching up for now,” said Giserre. Hubley’s soup and bread lay untouched on the table. “Bath next, then bed. You two can talk more this evening, when everyone returns.”
Hubley didn’t miss the private look Giserre shared with the baron as her grandmother took her hand. She knew perfectly well how dangerous fighting a Wizard was. But, if no one else was going to talk about it, she would be strong and not talk about it either.
“See you later, Willy,” she said.
The baron knocked his chair over a second time as he stood and presented her with a military bow.
Her bath was waiting for her upstairs. Giserre added some soap flakes to make bubbles, then went off with Hubley’s clothes. Probably to be thrown out, she said, because they were too filthy to be cleaned.
Sighing, Hubley lay back in the tub. Everything was going to be better now. Her mother and father would slay the Gray Wizard, just like they had the Black and the White before him. Then her father would stop being mean and they could all go back to Castle Grangore and everything would be the way it used to. Though it might be fun to visit Tower Dale from time to time. Giserre had said there was a wonderful pool for swimming at the bottom of the Small Fall, much better than Nolo’s Glen. And maybe Hubley’d be able to come whenever she wanted, now she knew the traveling spell. No one would ever keep her locked up again.
Eyes closed, she lowered herself deeper into the tub until only her face showed above the steaming water. Thick vapor filled the room, which was the main reason she failed to notice the greasy cloud hovering just outside the open window. Black spots like bruises clung to it as the mist began to seep inside. Her nose twitched at the sour smell as the cloud settled gently around her and the tub, but by that time it was too late.