CHANGING OUTCOMES
Karigan leaned her staff against her shoulder and
drew out her moonstone. The light that blazed from her hand
reflected again on the inlaid quartz of the moondial, raising walls
of light around her companions. Attackers and the attacked were
startled alike, but only the Sleepers recoiled. Her friends sprang
to the advantage, running the unarmored Sleepers through with their
blades, running them through and hacking again and again till they
fell. They were hard to kill.
With each step that
brought Karigan closer, the light grew in intensity, forcing the
Sleepers to back off. A couple bolted. The others fell and her
companions finished them.
A pall of silence
hung over the chamber when it was all done and the light of
Karigan’s moonstone settled to a comparatively low, steady
glow.
“Where’ve you been?”
Yates demanded. “We could have used your help here.”
If only he knew how
much she had helped! If she hadn’t gone to the past and removed the
Sleepers of then, Yates would not be standing here now. “How long
was I gone?”
“Ten minutes at
most. Felt a lot longer.”
Traveling through
the white world did not obey the same rules as the normal world,
accounting for Yates’ estimate and the much longer time period she
felt she’d been away. It felt like years. In a sense it had
been—centuries, actually. She swayed, light-headed and
exhausted.
“Questions later,”
Ealdaen said. “We should see to wounds and our dead. Telagioth and
Lhean, guard the entrance to the corridor so we’ve no more
intruders.”
Telagioth and Lhean
trotted off across the chamber and down the corridor.
“There will not be
many Sleepers,” Karigan told Ealdaen.
“I know,” he replied
striding toward her. His armor was streaked with blood, but he
appeared uninjured. Lynx and Yates followed behind. Lynx had the
claw marks on his face she remembered from before, and Yates held
his hand over a bleeding wound on his arm.
“You
know?”
“You left with
Laurelyn. But what was before is beginning to fade. Let me see your
wrist.”
She gingerly
extended her hand to him and he examined her wrist with gentle
touches. “This needs a true healing,” he said, “in order for it to
work properly again.”
“Damn,” Karigan
muttered. That did not portend well for wielding her sword or
anything else.
“In the meantime it
must be set. How did it break?”
“A Sleeper. Crushed
it with his hand.”
Ealdaen nodded,
unsurprised. “Lynx, could you assist?”
Lynx moved around to
Karigan’s side, and before she could say another word or ask
another question, Ealdaen, holding her elbow, yanked on her hand
and she fell screaming into unconsciousness.
When Karigan came
to, she was lying on her back with one blanket rolled beneath her
head and another spread over her. The winged statues filled her
vision. She groaned as each individual pain flared to life; her
wrist hurt worse than everything else. It felt heavy and she saw it
was bound and splinted with white arrow shafts. There was something
ironic about Eletian arrows being used to help heal her wrist. As
much as she hurt, she was relieved to have accomplished her task.
She’d helped Laurelyn’s Sleepers escape to Eletia, preventing them
from becoming a dark, dangerous force in her own time.
She heard a
scritch-scritch beside her and turned
her head to find Yates working in his journal, the wound in his arm
neatly bound.
“What ...” she
began. She licked her dry, cracked lips. “What are you
writing?”
“Drawing,” he
corrected. He smiled. “Since my sight is much better, I’m drawing
details of this room, the moondial, that sort of thing. I did a
nythling, too, after Ealdaen took care of the ones that were
left.”
They’d been feeding
on Grant, she remembered. Yates flipped a page and then showed her
the picture of the nythling, sketched in realistic detail. Too
realistic.
“Ealdaen has no idea
how the eggs got in Grant’s arm,” Yates said. “He’d never seen
nythlings before. How do you feel?”
“Pretty
bad.”
Yates nodded.
“Ealdaen said your leg was all ripped up again. He was surprised
you could walk. You should really learn to take better care of
yourself.”
If Karigan had felt
up to it, she would have swatted him.
“Ealdaen wanted me
to make sure you had this when you woke up,” he said, showing her
Graelalea’s flask, the one that had contained the cordial. “And
this.” He then showed her something that took her aback, for it had
no context in this place.
“Is that what I
think it is?” she asked.
“If you’re thinking
it’s a Dragon Dropping, you’d be right. It’s from the gift King
Zachary had us give Graelalea the morning we crossed the
breach.”
Karigan
remembered.
“Ealdaen says the
chocolate is very restorative to Eletians, which is why they prize
it so much. He figures it means it’s restorative to non-Eletians,
too, so he passed one out to everyone. Who’s to say if it helps us
or not? Lynx and I didn’t argue the point. You should appreciate my
restraint, by the way. You don’t know how tempting it was to eat
yours and not tell you. I mean, how would you know?”
“I’d smell it on
your breath.” She swiped her Dragon Dropping from him and bit into
it. She rolled her eyes in pleasure, chewing slowly to savor the
experience of the dark chocolate for as long as possible. After so
long a diet of thin stews, gruel, hardtack, and dried meat, it did
prove restorative after a fashion. And it made her dream of another
favorite luxury, of a hot, languorous bubble bath. Maybe one day,
if they ever made it back to Sacor City.
Yates chuckled. “I
ate mine in one gulp.”
When she was ready,
he unstoppered the flask. “Ealdaen says that this is all that
remains of Graelalea’s cordial and that you are to drink all of it.
The dew of Avrath, he calls it.”
There were three
good mouthfuls left, and Karigan savored these, too, remembering
Graelalea with sorrow. She touched the feather still in her braid.
The cordial dulled her hurts and made her feel strong enough to sit
up. When she did so, she observed the corpses had been
removed.
“Where is everyone?”
she asked.
“Dealing with the
bodies, I guess,” Yates replied. “And keeping watch to make sure no
more Sleepers get in. Ealdaen wanted to properly honor the
dead.”
“All of
them?”
Yates nodded. “Even
Ard and the Sleepers. He said Ard had been a good member of the
company until he tried to murder you, and that it was no fault of
the Sleepers that they became what they’ve become. They were once
untainted Eletians.”
“Poets, artists, and
heroes of a distant age,” Karigan murmured, recalling Laurelyn’s
words.
“Yes, Ealdaen said
something very like that. I think he knew many of the individuals
who were asleep in the grove.” Yates paused, then said, “As for
Ard, the others were curious as to why he’d want to kill
you.”
Karigan froze, heart
thudding. “And?”
“Ealdaen told us
what he overheard, that you were a threat to the marriage of Lady
Estora and the king.”
“And?”
“I think the
Eletians just shrugged it off as one of those things our kind
engages in. Lynx, however, gave you a long, surprised look, but
said nothing.”
Karigan groaned.
Must everyone know? She thought she’d
been so discreet, hiding away her feelings. “What do you think about it?” she asked Yates.
“I was not quite as
surprised as Lynx,” he replied.
Karigan wasn’t sure
she wanted to know, but she couldn’t help asking. “Why
not?”
“That last night in
the forest when we were alone? You were kind of delirious. You
talked.”
“Oh, gods.” She
blushed and hid her face behind her hand.
He patted her
shoulder. “Don’t worry. We all have our unattainable
longings.”
Peeking between her
fingers she saw his earnest, sad gaze, and her mouth dropped open,
unable to say anything.
She was rescued by
the sound of footsteps. Ealdaen, along with Lynx, Telagioth, and
Lhean, entered the chamber, their expressions weary and
grim.
“How are you?” Lynx
asked Karigan when he reached them.
“All right,
considering,” she said.
He sat on the floor
beside her, leaning back on his hands, his legs sprawled out before
him. “Where did you go when you left us?”
“To the past and
then . . . and then to Eletia.”
“Eletia?”
Karigan nodded and
explained how she’d gone back in time to lead Laurelyn’s Sleepers
to safety in Eletia. The whole reconciliation of past and present,
especially trying to explain it, bent her mind in odd ways, and
left Lynx and Yates scratching their heads because they recalled
nothing of overwhelming numbers of tainted Sleepers attacking them.
The Eletians remained unperturbed. “I think I met King Santanara,”
she added.
The Eletians
exchanged glances among themselves.
“Did you notice
anything in particular about him?” Ealdaen asked in a deceptively
mild voice.
“His hand,” she
replied, lifting her own splinted and bandaged wrist. “It looked
very bad. Blackened and crippled.”
“You met King
Santanara, then,” Telagioth said. “His hand was thus injured when
he stabbed Mornhavon with the Black Star in the last battle of the
Long War. It was a wound no one, not even true healers, could fully
treat. It was a source of great agony for him.”
“Yes,” Ealdaen
agreed. “His only escape was to take the long sleep. You,
Galadheon, came to him as he contemplated staying abroad to lead
his people and succor them after the depredations of the Long War,
or sleeping to forget the agony of his wound and the dark that
clung to his spirit.”
“You . . . you knew
I was there?” Karigan demanded. “And you didn’t tell me what I was
going to do?”
“No, I did not know,
for you were but a blurring of the air. It was the king who told us
a Green Rider brought the Sleepers. The last mortal to set foot in
Eletia.”
Karigan opened her
mouth and closed it. This was not just bending her mind, it was
twisting it into knots.
“Why does Karigan
get to have all the fun?” Yates demanded.
“Fun?” She thrust her injured wrist into his face,
then returned her gaze to Ealdaen. “If you knew the outcome for the
Sleepers, why didn’t you tell us?”
“We did not know. It
had not happened yet. We were in a different thread of time. And as
old memories vanish, different ones emerge. We had suspicions,
however. There are those among us who can see across such threads.
King Santanara was one, and his son, Prince Jametari, is
another.”
“Paradoxes,” Karigan
muttered. “So confusing.”
“Your species is
limited by its linear and mortal mold. Eletians have eternity to
contemplate such complexities.”
“In other words,”
Yates drawled to Karigan, “give up trying to make sense of
it.”
“If we had told you
what we suspected,” Ealdaen said, “it might have created a false
sense of confidence leading to failure. There are thousands of
possible, ever-changing threads and we could have been wrong. This
was but one.”
Threads or no,
Karigan could not get over the feeling she’d been masterfully
manipulated yet again.