I might have made plans not to be seduced by Khanaarre of the Black Mask, if it had ever occurred to me that it might come up. In defense of my forethought, I don’t think that she had planned to do it. It had just … happened. And on a very immediate, personal level, I was extremely glad that it had. I felt grounded, and alive, and human. The intimacy and the exertion had done as much to restore my life and equilibrium as the cool water and the soft earth and the summer night, and I think that she felt the same. And she had already been my favorite of the Prince’s Fighters. On a larger scale, thinking longer-term, it just made things harder and more complicated.
I considered asking her to join me in my tent, but she rose and dressed and left, leaving me with a tender kiss, before either of us found use of our words. I followed not very long after. Though we had both slept much of the early evening, the day had been exhausting and “enough” sleep was not an option available.
Despite what I might have hoped, I woke before the dawn. Being, apparently, done with sleep, I immediately set up my scrying ball.
My first divinations confirmed my guess that Lynqxaemass would not be able to find aid before tomorrow, and that she would not be able to return to the gate before the day after. I was certain of my ability to open the gate in that time frame.
My next divinations were less fruitful. Even here, at the bleeding edge of the veil, my sight beyond was limited. I could only confirm that this was, indeed, near where Arcmedus the Diviner had crossed, and that the charnel ground where the Tomb of Xadaer had been raised would be found to the east of our crossing.
Inevitably, once my crystal ball had been unveiled, it was only a matter of time before that familiar presence brushed against my mind. I sighed, and permitted his face to appear. Those long, sharp features that I had loved for so long. That straight, silken black hair that had pooled across my chest. Those dark eyes that had once so enchanted me, darker every day since he had bound himself to the Shadow Realm.
“It has been some time,” he said. “Have you been avoiding me?”
I grimaced.
“No more than for the past decade,” I said. “Did you need something from me?”
His image in the crystal ball smiled.
“Your quest is dangerous,” he said. “I feared that some harm had befallen you in the company of the prince.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I hid my companions from you,” I said, “And my precise location, lest you change the plan on me again, but you have known perfectly well that I am alive and have no real reason to believe that I am in distress.”
I paused.
“Unless,” I said, “you are the reason the guardian would not let us pass?”
He grimaced.
“I must confess that I am,” he said. “I have been using the Throne to ferret out traitors in my court. But I miscalculated, and things were set in motion, and many of my immediate plans were disrupted, as well.”
Then he smirked.
“I could have warned you,” he said, “If you had reached out to me more often.”
I sighed.
“I never thought that you would try to micromanage me the way you did your assistants in the Library.”
Aemillian sighed.
“As you will,” he said. “You are at the gate, now?”
“Yes,” I said. “We will cross into the Holy Lands today or tomorrow.”
Even as I said those words, everything went awry. Perhaps, in my exhaustion, I had failed to ward my tent against entry. Perhaps Veralar Tann was as immune to my locks as other Shan Khul masters were said to be immune to magical fire and lighting.
“Breakfast is ready,” she said, pushing her head through the curtain doorway. “And Shadow has returned.”
There was no mistaking what she heard or saw. The image in a crystal ball is not like an illusion cast upon the ground. From the far side of the tent, she saw the same thing that I did: the smiling and easily recognizable face of the Usurper Aemillian Solirius. Still, I might have been able to spin some kind of fable, but Aemillian lashed out with a levin bolt.
Even battered and half-broken from yesterday’s fight with a dragon, Veralar shrugged off the bolt of magical force like it was nothing. That she did not shout in rage or warning to the others was my only salvation: she just stepped into the tent, the katana flying from her back and into her hand as quickly and thoughtlessly as I released the scrying link between myself and Aemillian. She was half way to me in the time it took me to raise my hand. I didn’t have time to think. I just lashed out with the first curse that came to mind.
“You forget yourself,” I said in the language of the priestesses who had raised me. It was an Immortal Tongue, as magically potent as Heavenscript or the language of the earth-gods, and I poured further power into it.
Veralar staggered.
“You know not who you are,” I went on. “You know not what you do.”
She dropped her sword and swayed on her feet.
“You wander in exile, searching for the one who will remember your name.”
It was an ancient and terrible curse, used chiefly by the priestesses on sorcerers and xian g`ul warriors too powerful or too politically valuable to kill outright. In truth, it featured more often in literature than in history, where those who survived to regain themselves returned more powerful than they had been before and usually wrought terrible vengeance upon those who had laid them low.
Well, if that was my doom, so be it. That was a problem for future me.
Hastily, I threw a blanket over my crystal ball, and I managed to get around my wizard’s chest just in time to catch Veralar before her legs gave out beneath her.
“Khanaarre,” I called out, “Elana! Help!”
Noble and dutiful, they came running.
“What happened?” asked Elana.
“She walked in on me while I was divining our path,” I said, which was almost true. “What she saw damaged her mind.”
“What do you need?” asked Khanaarre.
“Sedatives,” I said, knowing that a Black Mask wizard always carried a few drugs.
“Who are you people,” demanded Veralar, her body trembling in my arms. “Where am I?”
“We’re your friends,” said Elana. “We’re in the Wolfwood.”
“I don’t know you,” said Veralar. “I don’t know any Wolfwood.”
“I’m Derrek,” I said. “This is Elana. Khanaarre, the elf, went to get something that will make you feel better. You walked in on a magical experiment and you were hurt.”
“Magic?” she recoiled, though she did not quite struggle out of my arms. “Are you a wizard?”
“I am,” I said.
“How did this happen?” demanded Elana.
“I don’t know,” I said, telling half the truth. “Either she walked through my wards or I forgot to set them.”
Elana Traiana stared at me. The look on her face told me that she was remembering the dragon’s words: “You all smell of ambition. Half of you reek of lies. One of you is a traitor.”
Khanaarre’s return broke the tableau. In one hand she held a small vial. In the other she held a crystal lens in a gold and silver setting. She knelt beside us and placed a gentle hand on Veralar’s shoulder.
“Oh, Veralar,” she said. The curse trembled under the weight of the name, but the first condition had not been met – she had not yet wandered in exile – so the curse could not yet be broken. “My name is Khanaarre. Let me take a look at you, then I have something that will make you feel better.”
“Thank you,” Veralar said, relaxing a little under Khanaarre’s attention.
Khanaarre held the lens to her eye. This was a moment of risk. I had no idea what sort of tool that lens might be, or what a rhu xian priestess’ curse might look like to the eyes of an elven wizard. In the end, though, she just shook her head.
“I have never seen anything like this,” she said. Then she held up the vial to Veralar. “This is a mild sedative and pain reliever. It will help you feel better so that you can think better, so that you can decide what you want to do.”
Veralar nodded and took the vial, downing it in a single swig.
Khanaarre and I helped her to her feet and helped her walk to the cook fire, where the breakfast she had come to promise me still waited. Rennin, Orland, and Shadow waited there, as well, their faces somber and impatient. They knew that something had happened, but not what.
No one was particularly surprised that it was Shadow who spoke first.
“What has happened to Veralar Tann?”
“She walked in on my divination,” I said, helping her to sit. “I don’t know what visions she saw, but they seem to have injured her mind.”
Veralar looked around at us.
“My mind works perfectly fine,” she said. “I simply do not remember any of you. Or me.”
“Fuck,” said Orland, looking aghast.
The glare Rennin sent me was pure hate. He, too, probably remembered the dragon’s warning, and was jumping to very inconvenient conclusions about who the traitor might be. What he said, though, was: “Is there anything we can do?”
Khanaarre and I shook our heads.
“She needs a healer,” she said. “A wonderworking priest of Enhyl or Shiithaia or Venthiir.”
“Well, there’s none of those, here,” Rennin observed dryly.
“No,” I said to him. Then I turned to Elana: “What is your will, your grace?”
Elana pondered for a moment, then came over to Veralar and knelt before her, taking her hands.
“Veralar, my friend,” she said, “I am afraid that we must make decisions about you without your consent. We are on a dangerous quest, and it would be cruel to take you with us, not knowing what you are fighting for or how you came to be here, assuming that you can still fight at all. I would leave you with Shadow, who brought us here but who will be coming no further. He can tell you some of who you are, and you can decide if you will stay with him and his people, or if you will go elsewhere.”
Veralar sat still for a moment, looking down at the younger woman. Then she nodded.
“That sounds like sense,” she said. “A part of me feels like a coward for not pressing forward, but …” She stopped, looking at each of us for a moment. “I was clearly a fighter of some sort, but now I cannot seem to remember any of that any more than I remember you. I fear I would be a burden.”
Elana kissed Veralar’s hand.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “When I am emperor, I will find you, and find a way to make this right.” Then she turned to our uurnigath guide. “Shadow. Will you do this thing?”
He met her gaze unflinching.
“Yes,” he said. “I will see her back to the safety of the Black Ears Pack. Perhaps packleader Songlover can help. Perhaps the prophet can. If not, then, Veralar Tann, I will guide you anywhere in the Compact that you wish to go.”
“Thank you,” the women said in unison.
“Well, wizard,” Rennin said in an angry, hoarse voice. “Was it worth it? Did you learn anything of value?”
I dew a deep breath. However ill I took his tone, Rennin had a right to his rage.
“I confirmed,” I said, “that we have today and tomorrow to open the gate before there is any chance of the guardian returning. When she returns, she will bring allies. No, it was not worth it.”
We finished our breakfasts in somber silence. Each of them eyed me in turn, wondering if I had really been so careless, if it were possible for the Shan Khul to simply walk through a ward the way they walked through fire or lighting, or if I were the traitor the dragon said we harbored, if I had deliberately robbed us of our strongest fighter just before the quest became exponentially more dangerous.
When I had finished eating, I left my companions to check my tent and properly stow my scrying orb. Veralar had exposed it to sunlight; I would need to check the orb for sun-damage before I used it again. Stowing the orb, I also withdrew my kit of investigative tools. The lingering marks of my wards around the tent were all old. Veralar had not cut or slithered through my wards. In my exhaustion from the battle and the afterglow of sex, I had simply been careless.
“Fuck.”
Taking my toolkit in hand, I went to resume my investigation of the pillars with the guardian’s arrival had interrupted. Khanaarre joined me after a short while.
“They blame you,” she said to me quietly, “for the loss of Veralar Tann.”
I sighed and refused to meet her eyes.
“They are not wrong to do so,” I said. “Even if she used Shan Khul arts to slip past my wards, I should have waited until after breakfast and made certain that everyone knew not to interrupt me.”
In that moment, I did not want to admit out loud to the degree of my failure.
“Perhaps,” she said, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder. “But they will come around. This was a tragedy, not an act of malice.”
It was both, actually. But I could never say that.
“Thank you,” I said instead.
The inscriptions were overwhelmingly in Heavenscript. As we set to work, we discovered a few key sequences in Draconic. Neither Khanaarre nor I knew much of the dragon-tongue, but Khanaarre had brought her dictionaries, and we knew enough Heavenscript between us that we were able to work out the formulae by the end of the first afternoon. To open the gate would take more blood than most wizards had. But I … I had made myself the perfect vessel for this task years ago, without ever knowing where it would lead me.
Khanaarre and I brought our conclusions to Elana and Rennin.
“My divinations indicated that the guardian will not be able to return until the day after tomorrow,” I told everyone. “But I can now open the gate at any time.”
Elana and Rennin shared a glance.
“Let us cross now,” Elana said. “We do not know what dangers await us, there, but we know what lies here. Let us be quit of it.”
I nodded.
“Then let’s strike camp,” I said. “And there is one other thing I must do before we go.”
That other thing was a gift for Veralar. I collected her two swords, and her lacquered fighting sticks, and laid them in a row, along with the figure I had made to hide her from the eyes of Aemillian and his allies when we had first left Liddarn. I chanted over them carefully, anointing each with my blood and hers, and then spoke the words of power. The weapons blurred and merged, becoming a single black staff, traced from end to end in runes which would hide her from her enemies and which would reveal her location to me with a thought. I made it all up on the spur of the moment, and it came together beautifully. Hopefully I would not quickly regret that expenditure of power.
“This will be easier to carry than the armory,” I told her. “And attract less of the wrong kind of attention. In the heat of the moment, it will become whichever weapon you need.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“I only wish that I could do more,” I said. “I am so, so sorry for what I have done to you.”
And that was the gods’ own truth.
We said our goodbyes to Shadow and Veralar, both of whom surprised us all with powerful hugs. We checked and re-checked the clearing, making certain that we had not left anything we might need or with which we might be traced.
It was late afternoon when Khanaarre and I approached the gate pillars in earnest. The sun in west cast long shadows that seemed to point toward our destination. We said the words. We spilled our blood. I poured power into the gate. The blood that poured from my arm along with that power ran red, then gold, then white before the wound closed.
The portal opened, and something changed inside me forever.
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