The hour being well after midnight, Sindérian lay down to rest while Prince Ruan kept watch. Although she was convinced that anxiety and exhaustion would keep her awake, she sank at once into the oblivion of utter fatigue and woke with the morning sun in her face.
There was no breakfast, because their food supplies had disappeared with the horses. She spent the rest of the morning purging what remained of the poison in Kivik’s blood, while Ruan went off to the east to recover some of the horses. Aell remained in the camp with an aching head and one arm in a sling, refusing further treatment, and Sindérian could not help but glad of it. Meanwhile Skerry slept through the morning. She knew that when he woke there was still much to be done on his behalf.
Ruan came back shortly after noon, riding one horse and leading another. They made a hurried meal from the supplies he had recovered, before he went off to bring in the other horses while Sindérian and her father tended her patients. Skerry, she soon discovered, was burning with fever. There were purple weals where the puncture wounds in his chest had been, and she feared that whatever sickness infected the manticore had passed into him. But in the cool of the evening his fever broke, proving her fears were groundless.
It was obvious by the next morning that none of her patients were strong enough to ride. They would require at least another day to rest. Ill fortune continues to follow us wherever we go, she said to Faolein. Our entire party might have been killed.
And yet, he answered, with his usual calm, nobody was killed. The outcome could have been very much worse.
Even so, the delay might well prove fatal to all their hopes. I almost believed, she said, flinging herself down on the grass, that the winds of the world were beginning to blow in our favor.
Neither for us or against us, I think, he replied. I believe we have come to a period in time, however brief, when it will be possible to choose our own course. Let us choose wisely.
They rode out the following morning, setting a gentle pace for the sake of their wounded. As if in answer to their need, there were several days of mild, bright weather, almost springlike, during which Aell and the Skyrran princes rapidly recovered.
Then the weather turned again, and the wind blew colder. They spent one night in one of the ruined villages, in a building that was miraculously little damaged: three walls left standing, and most of the roof remaining. Another night, of savage winds and smothering darkness, they spent in the inadequate shelter of a knot of trees. The next two days were wholly occupied skirting a morass of black, oozing mud and wet green mosses.
“We are a little to the north of Ceir Eldig,” said Prince Ruan, after a week’s travel from the Whathig Wood. “Another day and a half should bring us there, if we don’t turn west and pass it by.”
“Let us wait until tomorrow to decide,” said Sindérian. There was something in the mention of that fallen city that set her heart racing, that sent an undercurrent of excitement racing along her nerves. As they topped a rise, a ray of sunlight struck through the clouds—and suddenly the Sight which had eluded her these many months returned to her, strong and true.
A great panorama of the earth spread out before her; distances were compressed; mountains proved no barrier. From the ground below to the vault of the atmosphere above, there was no impediment. She saw into the sumptuous chambers of palaces, and into the huts of peasants, into ships and cities, and into the nine underground kingdoms of the dwarves. Yet no mind could hold so much, and it passed so quickly that she could never hope to absorb or remember it.
Nevertheless, that brief vision left clarity behind it.
Be the lightning rod, Sindérian. So Faolein had said on the shores of the sea, and ever since then her resolve had been steadily growing stronger. Don’t be like the weathercock changing direction with every wind that blows. Be the lightning rod instead. She had known for many weeks what she must do. But now she knew the place and the hour.
When, at Sindérian’s suggestion, they stopped well before twilight, Prince Ruan saw no reason for concern. Everyone was weary of travelling, wounds were still aching, and they had reached a little grove of linden, birch, and hawthorn with a stream running through, where they could water the horses and set up a camp sheltered from the wind.
It was only after supper, when he realized that Sindérian had slipped away without him noticing it, that his suspicions were aroused. “Where has she gone—did anyone see her leave?” he asked the others.
No one had. Catching some of his uneasiness, they were all about to go out searching for her when she reappeared. Her dress was damp and her hair dripping wet; she had apparently found a spot, farther down the stream and screened by bushes, where she could bathe. Without a word to anyone, she sat down by the fire to dry her gown and comb out her hair.
The other men, sensing nothing amiss, returned to their seats on the ground and to the conversation that had occupied them before Ruan raised the alarm. But there was something about her—a strange, fey air—that continued to disturb him.
As the sun went down the western sky and the moon climbed above the trees, Ruan kept an anxious eye on her across the fire. She was humming a song he could not quite catch. And he knew, he knew, as he watched her throw herbs on the fire and plait her hair into a braid of seven strands, that there was something afoot that she was telling no one. Her eyes, ordinarily so candid, were full of hidden things, of wizardly mysteries.
Something she wore on her wrist caught the firelight, a glitter of silver and a glint of deep amber-gold. “I’ve not seen that bracelet before!”
Startled by his raised voice and abrupt question, the others swiveled their heads to look at him, and then, following his glance, at her.
“It was King Yri’s gift,” she answered quietly, sliding the silver band further up her arm until it disappeared inside the dark sleeve of her gown.
“Isn’t that…” Skerry began.
“What?” said Ruan, rounding on him. It seemed for a moment as if revelation hovered on the air. “What were you about to say?”
“Something Prince Tyr said about the jewelry the dwarves make.” Skerry shook his head. “I thought I recalled, but it escapes me after all.”
Disappointed, Ruan looked to Kivik. “As it seems that I was not there at the time, do you remember what he said?”
But Kivik remembered nothing. “It was so many weeks ago, and so much has happened since.”
Turning back to Sindérian, the Prince narrowed his eyes. “What reason had King Yri to give you such a gift?”
For a moment there was an answering spark, a swift rush of color into her cheeks. “You must ask him the next time you see him,” she said with something of her old defiant manner. “He said nothing about it to me. But it was there in my saddlebag when we left Reichünterwelt, and as it is beautiful, I choose to wear it.”
And hide it under your sleeve, so that the rest of us might not see it, thought Ruan. Yet for all that his suspicions were so thoroughly aroused, he could find no obvious threat in King Yri’s gift of a silver bracelet.
The first watch of the night being appointed to Aell, the others arranged their bedrolls around the fire and settled down to sleep. Ruan had insisted on the early morning vigil, with some idea in his mind that Sindérian might attempt to strike out on her own at dawn. Lying on his back, concentrating on the dark behind his eyelids, he willed himself to sleep. He thought that he succeeded, for it seemed a long time later that he rolled over on his side, opened his eyes, and saw that Sindérian had risen from her bed.
She sat alone at the edge of the camp, cradling something in the palm of her hand: a little black, fluttering thing, like a moth or the shadow of a moth. Watching that mothlike fluttering made him feel drowsy and curiously languid. So drowsy, indeed, that he could scarcely keep his eyes open. So drowsy that a dark wave of sleep swept over him, and…
He came awake again when someone shook his shoulder and spoke in his ear. It was not like him to wake confused and disoriented, yet this time it was an effort to drive the mists from his mind, to focus his eyes on Kivik’s face. “Is it my watch already?”
“No, it’s mine,” said Kivik. “I hardly know how to tell you, I am so ashamed. I nodded off. One moment I was sitting on the ground staring up at the stars, the next I found myself lying flat on the ground.”
Ruan levered himself up into a sitting position. A swift glance around the camp told him that Aell and Skerry were already up. He knew with a cold sensation at the pit of his stomach that something was seriously amiss.
Reading his face, Skerry nodded. “The lady is gone—not just wandered off, but truly gone. She has taken her horse with her.”
Ruan sprang to his feet. “Where is Faolein?” No one had thought to look, and it was Ruan himself who finally spotted the white owl asleep on a branch. “Take comfort,” he said to Kivik, as he strode across the camp to rouse Sindérian’s father. “You did not ‘nod off.’ She put a spell on us all.”
Ruan scooped up his sword belt and buckled it on. His mind was reeling with conjectures, with memories; things he had never connected before were falling into place—too late. He spat out a string of oaths. “Fool that I was, why did it never occur to me that she would do something like this? She has gone to do battle with the Furiádhin, leaving the rest of us behind.”
“But we are nowhere close to them,” said a bewildered Kivik. “She will not even know where to find them.”
“Will she not?” There was a flash of white and a beating of wings overhead as Faolein took off from the branch and disappeared into the night. “Do you know what passes between her and her father when they speak mind to mind?”
“But why?” said Skerry. By this time Ruan was saddling his horse, and the others hastened to do the same. “What possible reason could she have for going alone?”
Leaving his bedroll and all else behind, Ruan vaulted into the saddle, took up the reins. “Because she knows that we—that I—would prevent her from doing the thing she intends to do.”
He rode south, following the tracks left by Sindérian’s mare, which he could just make out by moonlight. Before long, he could hear the hoofbeats of Aell’s horse directly behind him. But it was only when the moon went behind a cloud, and he was forced to dismount and search the ground for hoofprints, that the Skyrran princes finally caught up with him, bringing with them all the things he had left behind. Swinging back up into the saddle, Ruan was confident now that Sindérian was heading for Ceir Eldig.
“Tell us what you think she means to do,” said Kivik as they all rode south together. “And why she would even imagine we would try to hinder her.”
“She knows that I would do everything in my power to stop her,” Ruan said grimly. “As she also knows that I, having been tutored by a wizard, could not watch her do what she means to do without understanding it.
“Before ever I left Thäerie to begin this journey,” he continued, “Elidûc said to me, ‘When you meet Sindérian Faellanëos, observe her well, for then you will be privileged to see the most gifted young wizard of her generation. She was born with such talents that if she had even the most distant left-handed connection with the royal house of Phaôrax, the wizards on Leal would have reared her from childhood to challenge Ouriána in fulfillment of the prophecy. As it was, they allowed her to pursue her own inclinations and devote herself to the healing arts. They let her go off at an early age to break her heart on the battlefields of Rheithûn, leaving all her other talents lying fallow.
“But I,” said the Prince, “have seen her grow in knowledge and in power all during our long journey. Yes, and I have seen what she does late at night when she thinks no one is watching—the ropes she weaves out of fire, the lessons in magic her father has been teaching her. She is far, far more than she was when we first met.”
“Strong enough that she feels she could survive a test of her own magic against three Furiádhin?” asked Skerry. It was clear from his tone that he did not believe it.
“No, not so strong as that. But then, she doesn’t intend to survive. When a powerful wizard or magician dies before his or her time—and particularly if he or she should be struck down by magical arts—a great power is released. It is as though a shock passes through the entire world of matter. All that he or she might have accomplished in the course of a lifetime, all the potential for good or evil, explodes into the world as a burst of energy. The effects can be felt by wizards across the world, and the effect on anyone in near proximity can be devastating—if spells are not already in place to contain that power. That is why wizards and mages so rarely confront each other in open battle. The outcome can be as unpredictable as it is terrible.”
“But if there is no way of predicting what will happen,” said Kivik, “why—”
“Because it sometimes happens that a dying wizard can seize the moment and imprint his or her own intentions on that burst of power,” said Ruan. The moon came out again, and he dug in his heels, urging his horse to a faster pace. “There is a rune they use to accomplish this—a rune so sacred that wizards never speak its true name—but they refer to it sometimes as the Rune of Unmaking. To make use of this spell is a desperate act, for it requires that the magician accept death willingly and make no last effort to survive, for which reason it is also known as the Rune of the Great Sacrifice. Elidûc told me that any least doubt, any fear of death that intrudes on the magician’s final thought, and the rune loses its power—worse, the spell could be reversed, doing harm where it means good, good where it means harm.”
“The bracelet,” said Skerry suddenly. “It is the kind of gift that the dwarves bestow on their dead. If only I had remembered that before!”
“If only I had recognized what she was doing all evening long,” said Ruan. “I see now that she was purifying herself, preparing herself for the ordeal ahead.”
“And you are very certain that she means to make this sacrifice?” asked Kivik.
Ruan’s hands curled into fists on the reins. “The spell is all but forbidden. Until tonight I never thought she would do this thing, but now I am convinced of it. Her plan, as I take it, is simple enough: to challenge Camhóinhann and the rest openly, suddenly, recklessly. She believes they will strike her down in the same fashion. They don’t know her, they don’t know who she is—how could they know when she hardly knew herself half a year ago? They will see a young, inexperienced wizard, overconfident, throwing down a challenge. And if she were truly no more than that, they could slay her with magic and take little or no harm from it.” He hesitated. “I have, as she has repeatedly told me, no shadow of a right to prevent her from doing anything she chooses to do, however my own heart might urge against it. But my greatest fear…”
When he did not continue, Skerry prompted him. “Your greatest fear?”
“My greatest fear is that she will do this and Camhóinhann will not be provoked into any ill-considered action. That he will take her prisoner and kill her some other way. In which case she will be just as surely lost to us—but she will gain nothing of what she hopes to accomplish by sacrificing herself.”