We set off early in the afternoon, on horseback, laden with food and other provisions – including all those clothes that Oceantree ordered for us. He and an armed escort saw us as far as the boundary wall of Stonesands, but no further; Oriana rejected the offer of guards beyond that point, and he didn’t argue. All the bluster seemed to have gone out of him. I only hope he can achieve what we need him to.
Now we’re on the road, just the five of us, the town receding behind us. Thick slices of rain hiss from the sullen yellow-grey sky, making it hard to see more than a little way ahead. No one speaks. I took a small amount of satisfaction, back in Oceantree’s house, from remaining in the background and nobly not saying a word while Oriana informed the others that I was right, and that we had to leave. Yet it was short-lived, because what we’re leaving is too important for anything other than worry: a brewing war, and a lone man tasked with stopping it.
“It feels like we are running away again,” Oriana says softly, when we stop for a short break. “Always running.” And no one argues with her.
This journey reminds me of the one I made with Fabithe, back when I first arrived in Endarion. The rain and the mud are very similar. So is the landscape, desolate fields with occasional farmers and animals struggling to eke out a living. The road, if anything, is worse than last time; we’re avoiding the coastal path that would eventually lead us to the Citadel and following a lesser route south-west, one that was only ever a simple dirt track to begin with and is now a waterlogged rut. The main difference is Oriana. When we fled with her from the Citadel, she was barely conscious; this is the first time we’ve returned to Sapphire territory since. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her watching our surroundings with an expression of naked misery. She knew what effect the endless rain, increasingly unchecked by the power of the Sapphire, was having on her people. She told us so, in Bridgehold. But that isn’t the same as experiencing it for herself.
I’d hoped we might find another abandoned cottage in which to spend the night, but in the end – as the daylight fades and further travel becomes something to avoid – we have to settle for a dilapidated barn. The roof, which was thatched, has almost entirely fallen in, but Luthan spills some blood to create a makeshift half-roof from the boards of an old lean-to, which is enough to keep off the worst of the weather. All the same, by the time I’ve finished applying salve to Toralé’s hand, I’m already stiff and numb from sitting on the ground. Other than that first unpleasant night outside the watchtower, since my return to Endarion I’ve spent my nights in the comfort of a bed. I’d forgotten quite how uncomfortable some aspects of my home world can be.
Still, once Fabithe has a fire going and something savoury cooking over it, and we’ve hung up our waxed outer layers to drip-dry, it feels cosy enough. Too warm, if anything, with four horses at one end and us crammed in at the other under the quilted blankets given to us by Oceantree. We’re certainly better supplied than we were after the fire. Maybe the diversion was worth it. Definitely, if it means that Oceantree can intervene with Cinemand on Oriana’s behalf.
After we’ve eaten, while the others are beginning to prepare themselves for sleep, I sneak out of the door. Oceantree’s healer supplied me with plenty of fresh linen and watermoss before we left, for which I’m struck all over again with gratitude. Definitely worth it. I hate to think how I’d have handled menstruation if it had caught me in the middle of the wilderness instead of in Stonesands. Dealing with it on the road, in a rainstorm, is bad enough when fully equipped.
Once I’ve made the necessary adjustments, I crouch down under the eaves at one end of the barn. The wall is cold, thick stone with no hint of the warmth within, but voices and smoke drift up through the broken roof. I should go back inside – no point shivering out here, fur-lined cloak or not. Yet there’s something else I want to do, and I’d rather no one saw me doing it.
Carefully, I reach for a particular thread in my mind.
“I’m sorry,” the man at the door says, in a tone that suggests he is anything but. “The Roden is far too unwell to receive visitors.”
The man’s name is Sathis, and he is a healer. He was brought here some years ago to be consulted on the subject of Ariamé’s indisposition, and Iodocus was pleased with his work, so he stayed. That is all Dakion has needed to know of him, up until this point. But now, confronted with a smile like a barely veiled insult, Dakion brings to mind one more fact that should, perhaps, have been of concern to him sooner: it was Ifor who recommended this particular healer to their father.
“First,” he says, “you will address me as my lord. Second, I visit my father every day, no matter his condition – and I will not have some little upstart tell me otherwise.”
“I’m sorry … my lord.” The pause was just short enough that Dakion cannot pick him up on it without seeming foolish. “I cannot approve your request. The Roden – ”
Dakion leans forward, speaking with soft menace. “The Roden is my father, and I will see him whether you approve or not. So stand aside, before I have you flogged.”
The healer’s eyes widen, yet still that smile lingers on his face. “It is not within my power. The Roden himself has signed a declaration barring you from his chambers.”
He thrusts a piece of paper into Dakion’s hands. The signature is correct. The royal seal. And the wording sounds about right, bitter humour wrapped in irascibility. My firstborn son will leave me be, or I will personally see to it that the heir we spoke of becomes a physical impossibility. Yet something is awry. It is in the healer’s smile. It is in the stench of sickness drifting out from the room behind him. Most of all, it is in the warning that Iodocus gave Dakion just a couple of days ago. Ifor is a good deal more inventive than you are.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, my lord,” Sathis says. “I have work to do.”
Before Dakion can object, the door closes in his face and the bolt shoots home. His fists clench. Call the guards. Have them break down the door –
But what does he have to give them as evidence of something wrong? Only a feeling. And he would be setting that against a direct order from the Roden himself.
No. He will need to get in another way.
I sigh. I can’t leave Dakion alone. His presence in my head is like a scab that I can’t stop picking. Because I have a whole family out there, a father and a mother and a brother who didn’t exile me to another world. They don’t realise I’m gone; they believe I’m still with them, mentally incapacitated and in need of care. I didn’t expect that to hurt, but it does. How can they not have noticed? How can they not know the difference between their own kin and a stranger? I want Dakion to miss me. To love me properly, not just with the twisted kind of affection that Ifor shows me. Dakion seems cold and ruthless and … well, like a Darklight, but at least he doesn’t talk to me when I’m inside his head. I still don’t know how Ifor does that, but it terrifies me.
And that isn’t the only thing. By now, I’m used to being pulled in by the strength of people’s emotions. I’m also used to connecting to their minds at will. But when Ifor let me into his mind, back in Stonesands, it wasn’t through his emotion or my choice. He called me in. He directed his thoughts to me, and even though we weren’t near each other, I heard him. Then, when he tired of having me in his head, he pushed me out again. It’s as if some part of that strange connection we had, when I was in the other world and he was nowhere, still lingers … and he is in control.
I shiver. No wonder the others don’t trust me. I don’t even trust myself. If only I could switch the threads off for a while – but I can’t. They’re with me, all the time. A multitude of hopes and fears, thoughts and dreams and feelings; constant whispers at the edges of my awareness, waiting for me to choose them. Like prayers directed at a god.
“I’m losing it,” I say out loud. “One hundred percent, utterly and totally losing it.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Fabithe says, rounding the corner of the building beside me and making me jump. I glare at him.
“Don’t sneak up on me!”
“That was just ordinary walking.”
“What do you want, Fabithe? I’m in no mood to – ” But I stop, struck by an echo of those words. I am no longer in any mood to have you haunting my head. Maybe the Darklight arrogance is genetic after all. Maybe I’ve grown too used to playing Ariamé. Or maybe those are simply excuses for being rude instead of trying to make amends to him.
He doesn’t acknowledge my question, or its sudden termination. He keeps walking, past me and out into the rain, where he begins to set up his rain-collectors. I sit quietly and watch, letting my heart rate return to normal. My complicated emotions towards him and his towards me tangle in the silence between us. Finally, I blurt out, “Fabithe – ”
“What?”
“I – ” But my courage fails me. “Does it rain like this everywhere?”
He looks up from his task, eyebrows drawing together. “You’re asking me about the weather?”
“Toralé says his people believe the mainland is under a curse.”
A one-shouldered shrug dismisses that idea. “It’s just the way things are. I saw flooding in the Westlands, years ago. Iridene, more recently. Rainstorms that last for days. But it’s never been as bad as it is in Castellany.”
“Why?” I ask. “Why is it like that?”
Turning back to the rain-collectors, he repeats, “It’s just the way things are.”
I let the subject die. Yet when he’s finished, I say quickly again, “Fabithe.”
He folds his arms. “What now?”
“I – are you all right? After what I told you about Rys …”
“I’m fine.” His voice drops to a mutter. “Nothing I can do about it anyway.”
We look at each other. His expression is closed. I’ve more than learned my lesson when it comes to prying into his heart, and so I don’t probe any further. Instead, I swallow hard and make myself take the plunge. “I’m sorry. Truly. For who I am and what I did. I honestly don’t mean you any harm, and – and I hope one day you can forgive me.”
He hesitates. I can feel him wanting to walk away rather than get drawn further into this conversation. But instead, reluctantly, he sits down beside me.
“I’ve never liked it,” he says. “The spying.”
“No.”
“And when I found out that it led Ifor to me – ”
I wince. “I know.”
“It’s hard to see how to forgive you,” he says. “Except that if you’d not done it, I’d never …”
His voice fades. He shoots me a defensive glance. But I hear the words he didn’t say: I’d never have met Oriana.
“I don’t know that I even deserve that much credit,” I say with a sigh. “It sounds like the pattern would have brought us together no matter what.”
“Pattern?”
I tell him everything that Luthan and Toralé told me. I expect him to react negatively, but he doesn’t say anything for a while – and when he does, it’s soft and abstracted, as though his thoughts have led him on a long journey.
“Alyssia, have you ever met someone and felt like you already knew them?”
“All the time.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “Right. But I mean … more than that. A bone-deep familiarity, a kind of belonging, like … you know. Home.”
Yes. That’s exactly how Toralé feels to me, though I don’t know why.
“Maybe,” I say cautiously. “But I’m not sure I trust it.”
“No.” That’s all he says. I can’t tell what he’s feeling – if, like me, he isn’t sure whether there’s any way to tell the difference between his own emotions and those dictated by the pattern, or whether that even matters. If Ifor is right, our path is already laid out before us. But does that mean we have no choices at all?
“It’s not meant to be like this,” Fabithe says, half to himself. “Rebirth.”
“It has rules?”
“Way I was taught it, yes. We’re reborn to learn the lessons we failed to learn last time round. Every life is different, and separate from the others. We’re not meant to repeat ourselves, like puppets being moved through the same old performance. Else what would be the point?”
It’s all getting a bit metaphysical for me. I’m not sure I even believe in rebirth, so the idea of it having a point is one step too far. I shake my head helplessly.
“We should go in,” Fabithe says, with a forbidding look in my direction as though he regrets saying half as much as he did. “It’s getting cold out here.”
But he waits for me and we walk in together, which I account a victory in itself.
The next morning, we set off at daybreak. Toralé is riding with Luthan this time – part of his insistence on not incurring too much of a debt to any one person – and although I miss both his company and his sure hand on the reins, it leaves my mind free to wander. I find myself mulling over everything I’ve learned about the Five, the pattern and the cycles of history: what Luthan told me, what Ifor told me, the other bits and pieces I’ve picked up along the way. I think I’m beginning to see the shape of what we’re facing, and I’m not sure I like it.
We chose the route we’re taking to be as little-used as possible, striking across country to reach Oakelm approximately where Luthan and Isidor enter it when returning from their travels: south of the river and Easterwood, but north of the Oaken Keep. Once we’re in the forest, we’ll be safe; Isidor’s magical protections will kick in and ensure we make it to Othitali without harm. First, though, we have to get across Emerald territory – and that’s the dangerous part, particularly given that Esolin must by now have received Cinemand’s letter demanding safe return of his daughter. Running into Oceantree was stressful, and required us to think on our feet, but ultimately it was safe. We were on Oriana’s home ground, with a man who owed her allegiance. If we encounter an Emerald lord out here, the outcome will be very different.
Yet as it turns out, we don’t see anyone at all. Crossing the border is, if possible, more of a non-event than it was on the main road; I don’t realise we’ve done it until Oakelm looms near enough that even someone as geographically inept as me couldn’t fail to twig that we must be in Emerald territory. To be fair, the countryside is indistinguishable from the Sapphire’s in its barren bleakness – which makes me wonder about the Emerald itself. Oriana said that the Sapphire is increasingly failing to protect its people from the relentless rain, even though it’s meant to have power over Water. So what can the Emerald possibly do against it?
“There is no rain barrier over the Oaken Keep,” Luthan says when I ask her about it. “But the power of Earth keeps its crops green and growing, for all that.”
In the lands belonging to the Keep itself, maybe – but I’d guess not outside them. And Bridgehold was a Diamond town, and that wasn’t any better. All three of the jewels have faded in power over time, until they can do no more than preserve the environs in which they are housed.
There used to be four, I remember Luthan saying. Four jewels, and four castles. Another thing to think about.
We reach the forest as the daylight begins to fade, only to find Isidor waiting for us just inside the treeline. Presumably he saw us coming. Presumably, also, he knows or has guessed that by now we are all aware of his magical secret – because the idea that he stumbled across us here by coincidence would be too much for him to expect anyone to swallow. Out of habit and curiosity, I extend my thoughts towards his, and … nothing.
It didn’t occur to me before, but I’ve never seen anything through Isidor’s eyes. There’s a thread there for him, in my mind: bright and silver, like the rest. I should be able to connect to him, to read his thoughts and emotions. Yet every time I reach for that connection, it slips out of my grasp. Perhaps it’s a magical technique, something Luthan will also be able to achieve with practice. I don’t know. I only know that consciously or unconsciously, he’s blocking me.
Confused, I watch him. Yet I should know by now that his outer façade gives as little away as his inner self. He shows almost no emotion in greeting his daughter, even after her long absence. He welcomes us all as calmly and as quietly as if we’ve been for an afternoon picnic. Still, despite my complete inability to read him, I feel safe for the first time since returning to Endarion. Oakelm is our refuge, and always will be.
We introduce Toralé to Isidor, but other than that we don’t linger. On foot and leading the horses, we pick our way along the narrow forest paths in the direction of Othitali, taking the same route that Isidor and Luthan always take. Only when it’s nearing full dark do we make camp for the night, setting up fire and shelter before finally stopping for a bite to eat. It’s very quiet. Or perhaps quiet is the wrong word – there are plenty of sounds, after all. The rain on the leaves and the wind in the branches, the rustling of small creatures in the undergrowth. A forest is never silent. But it has a remoteness about it, as if it isn’t wholly connected to the rest of the world.
“The trees are beautiful,” I say to Toralé, who’s sitting next to me. “Old and twisted and mysterious. Do you have forests on Ilemane?”
“We have groves of trees,” he says. “Useful trees. Sources of firewood and fruit. Not forests you can get lost in. I used to read about those in books, and dream – ” He catches himself, before finishing in carefully neutral tones, “Dream of seeing one for myself.”
I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back.
“Still,” he adds with a smile, “reality is never as good as imagination, is it, tek’adar? At least this way I don’t have to be disappointed.”
It would be so easy to fall in love with Toralé. Too easy. As I said to Fabithe, I’m not sure I trust it.
I glance at Fabithe. He and Oriana are sitting on a fallen tree trunk on the other side of the fire, sharing biscuits from a waxed packet. As I watch, he says something to her in a low voice, and her face lights up with laughter … and something a lot like envy squirms in my stomach. Not of her – Fabithe and I argue far too much for that – but of him. I want to make Oriana laugh that way. I want her to be my friend again. I want …
Get a grip, Alyssia. You can’t be attracted to all your friends.
I turn away from them in time to catch Luthan holding up her left hand, showing Isidor the healed line of the wound across her palm. Meeting her gaze, he nods once. That simple, wordless exchange fills me with sudden certainty that all Luthan’s suspicions about the pattern are well founded. Our matching scars really do mean something, and Isidor knows what. In which case, my own darker suspicions may be well founded too. That’s why, when everyone else is settling down for the night and I see Luthan step aside to speak to her father in private, I don’t hesitate to listen.
Luthan casts a nervous glance over her shoulder towards the circle of firelight and the silhouetted figures around it. She doesn’t think any of them noticed her leaving – or if they did, they thought nothing of it. It’s natural that she and Isidor should wish to talk alone after all these weeks. All the same, she can’t help feeling watched.
“You wanted to speak to me,” Isidor says.
“Yes.” Her stomach is churning, because she already knows the answer to the question she will ask. At least, she thinks she does. And she really doesn’t want to hear it spoken aloud. “I wanted to ask you about the pattern. I wanted to ask – ”
She can’t get the words out, but Isidor nods anyway. “You want to know if it is your task to fulfil.”
“Yes.”
“I believe so, Luthan. You are marked, the five of you. There is no denying that.”
Gods. She swallows, hard. “But – surely it can’t be – ”
“Recite the pattern to me.”
Always as much teacher as he is father. Yet she has been too well taught ever to disobey a request for recitation. The words fall from her lips without much conscious thought.
One marked with betrayal
Again by sacrifice
One marked with a secret
Again to pay the price
One marked with forgetting
Again to set flame free
One marked with a blood-bond
Again by destiny
One marked with an ambush
Again to lose them all
World about to crumble
Their lives against its fall
The last word fades halfway through. Uneasy, Luthan searches her father’s face. Isidor looks back at her. As always, she is the first to break.
“Then – you think – ”
“What do you think?”
“It fits. It does fit. That’s why I … but the words are so vague. How can we know for sure? How can anyone?”
He holds her gaze. “Perhaps there is no evidence that could ever be strong enough for you. Yet all the same, I think you do know.”
No. It can’t be. I’m not – But she cuts off the automatic denial, because Isidor is right. Somewhere at the heart of her, where her most fundamental truths are kept, she feels it: the sharp-edged shape of it, the weight and the terrible brightness. It fits with everything she knew, the night she became a mage. And in the face of that, denial is useless.
“Then I am the fifth,” she whispers.
He nods. “You know what your role must be, and theirs.”
“I may not be strong enough for this, Father.”
“Of course you are.” Isidor remains as calm as ever. “You are descended from the greatest mages who ever lived. Tarmora. Meré. Like them, you will tread the path that the gods laid down, many ages ago. There can be no greater honour.”
“But how can I lead my friends where we must go, knowing – ”
“You will do what you have to, Luthan. You were strong enough to become a mage, and you will be strong enough for this.”
“I’m not sure that’s true. I …” She hesitates, stomach roiling harder. Yet she has to confess. Staring at her feet to avoid seeing his disappointment, she says in a rush, “I’ve already broken the five laws. All of them. I compelled the Blades in Bridgehold. I tricked my way through the Retreat. I drew power from the blood spilled on the Arc, and used it to burn ordinary soldiers alive. I cast the Arc itself into the ravine so we couldn’t be followed – ”
She can hear her own voice becoming faster and more hysterical, the longer she talks. With a sob and another glance over her shoulder, she falls silent.
“Luthan,” her father says. “Look at me.”
Reluctantly, she lifts her head to meet his gaze. A hint of something, worry or sadness, creases the corners of his eyes; but his voice is steady.
“By the very nature of who you are, you will have to face difficult choices. Sometimes you will get it wrong. All you can do is keep trying to follow what I have taught you.”
She nods. It’s more or less what she would have expected him to say, but she tries to let it comfort her, for all that.
“In truth,” Isidor adds, “for you more than any other, the five laws cannot be binding. You carry the fate of the world on your shoulders, Luthan! What matters is that you win.”
And that, she would not have expected. Never before has he presented morality to her as a flexible concept; he has always taught her to do the right thing, no matter the cost to herself. It’s why he lives the way he does, isolated and frugal, following every one of the five laws to the letter. If he believes they can be broken in the right circumstances, what is it that’s stopping him from embracing the Otherpower and seeking power for its own sake?
Clearly, he reads her confusion; he grips her shoulders, looking deep into her eyes.
“You are the most important person living in the world today,” he says. “And if I had known that, perhaps I would have taught you differently … Dear one, you stand between the rest of us and destruction. For you, as for no one else, the end outweighs the means. Do you understand?”
The endearment, as much as anything, tells her that he means what he says – because such words are rare, from his lips. She feels curiously light, as though a weight she didn’t even know was holding her down has suddenly been lifted away.
“I understand,” she says. “The pattern must be fulfilled. Then … should we tell them?”
“What they need to know, yes,” Isidor says. “I suspect we will have little choice.”
He’s right about that. I rub my eyes, determination settling on me as I try to cling to as much as possible of what I saw. I thought the pattern was only a concept; I never realised it was an actual poem with words and everything. And if it’s about us, we have a right to know what it means. Not only that, but Isidor basically just told Luthan that it doesn’t matter what else she does, as long as she fulfils it – which seems like a very dangerous thing to say.
Before they can finish their conversation in real time, I scramble to my feet and make my way over to them. Luthan looks shifty, but Isidor seems to have been expecting me.
“You have questions about the pattern,” he says. That takes the wind out of my sails a bit.
“I – um. Yes.” I pull myself together. “What exactly is it?”
“A prophecy, of a kind. No … that gives the wrong impression. It is more like an observation, one that has been passed down through the generations. An unending pattern, a cycle that repeats across the ages.”
“And you believe that the marks it talks about are our scars?”
Isidor nods. “There seems little doubt.”
I think he’s pleased. It’s as if he wants us to be who he thinks we are, even though I’m almost certain by now that it’s a difficult and thankless role to play. Why? He just called his daughter the most important person living in the world today – is it as simple as that? Reflected glory? No … I suspect I’m doing him a disservice, there. It’s a more academic interest than that; the same kind of interest a war historian might feel upon being allowed to observe a key battle first-hand. All blood and death, of course, but history in the making nonetheless.
“Can you tell me the pattern again?” I ask. “It’s always hard to remember details when I experience them through someone else.”
Readily enough, he recites it for me; I repeat it over to myself, trying to make sure I’ll remember it later. Marked with betrayal … again by sacrifice. With a secret … to pay the price. With forgetting …
That sounds like me.
“So each of us will be marked twice,” I say, looking up at Isidor.
“That is how it has happened before, yes.”
“And after that?”
“After that …” For a fleeting instant, a shadow crosses his face, but then he meets my gaze with an untroubled countenance. “After that, you win.”
“As simple as that?”
“More or less.”
I look at him. I’m not completely lacking in perception, I want to say. You’re hiding something. And in this situation, I’m pretty sure it makes sense for me to add two and two together and make five. But I’m not sure I trust Isidor to tell me the truth – or at least, I think he’s quite capable of spinning it into something that sounds like one thing and means another. So I say nothing more. I simply wish them goodnight, and go to bed.
In the morning, I ever-so-casually arrange things so that I’m walking with Luthan at the back of the group. Then, soon after we set off, I accidentally-on-purpose stumble and fall, so that she’ll have to stop and help me. Which I admit was rather a Darklight move, but sometimes a little cunning is necessary. And besides, it genuinely hurt. I appear to have landed on an actual buried rock and bruised my knees for real. Which just goes to show that deception sows the seeds of its own downfall, or something equally annoying.
“Are you all right?” Luthan asks, offering me a hand.
I glance ahead to make sure the others are out of earshot, before getting to my feet. My sore knees give me an excuse to walk slowly.
“Fine,” I say. “But while I have you here, can I ask you something?”
She gives me a look. She isn’t imperceptive either. The very fact that I’ve raised the question tells her that this was all a ruse to get her alone. I almost think she’s been expecting it – at any rate, I sense more resignation than alarm. “Go on.”
“All right.” But I hesitate. Now it’s come to it, I’m not even sure I want to know … no. Of course I do. It’s always better to know. “When were you planning to tell us that according to your pattern, we’re going to die?”
Luthan stumbles – genuinely – but catches herself and turns wide-eyed to face me. Her expression of guilty surprise would be satisfying, except for the fact that it confirms my fears.
It was obvious, once I started putting the pieces together. They turned back the darkness, she said of the Five, when we were in Stonesands. They defeated the Otherpower so thoroughly that it has never fully risen again. And I remembered how Oriana told that same story, after we left Othitali for the first time and visited Spirits’ Rise. Four of them died here on the hilltop, sacrificing themselves to defeat the dark magic that threatened to overrun the land. If we are following in the footsteps of the gods, as Luthan put it, the implications are pretty clear – particularly after the conversation I saw last night.
You know what your role must be, and theirs.
How can I lead my friends where we must go, knowing …?
“We’re going to die,” I repeat, stopping altogether and holding her gaze with mine. “It’s the last part of the pattern. Each person becomes vulnerable as soon as they receive their second mark.” That much also seems obvious, from the pattern and her own thoughts, as well as what Ifor said. “I’m right, aren’t I? Tell me the truth.”
Asked for it directly, she will give it to me – I know that. Sure enough, her head drops and her shoulders hunch defensively.
“That’s how it’s always happened before,” she mutters. “They give their lives for the cause.”
“But not you.” The fifth. That’s how she described herself, and how Oriana described Qaemantono: the only one of the Five who couldn’t be destroyed, since she embodied the One’s own power of creation. “You get to survive.”
She looks up, heat in her eyes. “Do you think I like it? Knowing what has to happen. Knowing I’ll be the only one who …” She stammers to a halt, shaking her head. “This is why it’s better if you don’t know about these things!”
Better for who? I turn away from her, pacing a few steps to try and control myself. She thinks we’re going to die. She thinks it has to happen. And Isidor smiled while he answered all my questions, knowing he was leaving out the one fact that mattered. What’s wrong with these people? How can they accept it so calmly? I should be frightened, yet instead I’m angry. After all I went through to rescue Oriana and Toralé, now I find out it was only so they could die at a more suitable time? So we all can? Fuck that. Fuck that. I’m not going to let my friends die if there’s any way I can stop it.
Still, I don’t say that. There’s no point – not until I’ve armed myself with enough information to work out how to stop it. How to beat Ifor without dying ourselves. How to break an apparently centuries-old cycle of fate.
Shit.
“Are you all right?” Luthan asks uncertainly. It’s so well-meaning, and so inadequate, that I have to stifle an inappropriate giggle. She’s still my friend, after all. It isn’t her fault she believes in ridiculous things like people being destined to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the world.
“Fine,” I snap, pivoting on my heel and walking back towards her. “But I don’t care what you say – you have to tell the others. Or I will.”
“I don’t think – ”
“I heard what Isidor said to you,” I go on relentlessly. “The end outweighs the means. Is that why you don’t want them to know? Because you know they won’t accept you doing whatever it takes to keep them alive so they can die at the right time?” I fold my arms. “Up to and including setting people on fire?”
Guilt surfaces in her, a writhing darkness that gnaws at our bond, before she pushes it resolutely back down. “It was necessary.”
I try very hard to see it from her point of view. Fabithe has killed people. Oriana and I killed that soldier in Bridgehold. Why should I judge Luthan any more harshly than the rest of us? Yet at the same time, part of me is judging her hard. Because the difference is that she believes in capital-letter Good and Evil. And the trouble with believing in Good and Evil is that by definition, if you’re on the side of Good, you can’t do anything wrong.
“There’s a saying, in the other world,” I tell Luthan. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Maybe it’s better that you don’t have a stave any more.”
She gives me a look that I’ve never seen on her face before, though plenty of times on Fabithe’s: the one that says Are you serious?
“Not if it means we lose, Alyssia!”
Depends what you mean by lose. “If you can set people on fire without a stave, I’d hate to see what you could do to them with one, if you really tried.”
“I could have sent them to sleep,” she says, with a certain amount of exasperation. “I could have made them think us insignificant, like I did in Bridgehold. If I’d been a mage for longer, perhaps I could even have forced them to turn on each other – ”
She stops.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she tells my pointed silence. “Surely you know that. I still smell their flesh burning. I still hear the screams. I will try to keep to the five laws, as much as I can.” Her head droops; I can barely hear her final words. “But I won’t let us fail.”
Depends what you mean by fail. But I’ve pushed her hard enough, for now, so all I say is, “You have to tell the others. If you want them to fulfil your pattern, they have a right to know.”
And I have a right to try and keep them alive. Pattern or no pattern.