The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (21 page)

They left him behind and walked in virtual silence until they were beyond the parking lot and across the street. Virtual silence, because Mama kept trying to talk and Danny gave her a sharp
sh!
and walked faster. Finally they were so out of breath from keeping up with a young man who was, after all, a sprinter that they couldn’t have spoken if they tried.

“I told you the terms,” said Danny. “I told you that I’d come for your answer. I told you not to come for me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no Great Gate for you. You’d have been too dangerous, anyway. The two of you.”

“We aren’t the ones the Family chose,” said Baba. “I’m not Odin anymore.”

“They took back Gyish? Or was it Zog?”

“It was Mook,” said Baba. “They couldn’t trust me to make an unbiased decision because I was your father and because they all know now how we plotted to keep you even after we knew you were a gatemage. We’re lucky we aren’t in Hammernip, for putting the family at such a risk.”

Danny wanted to say, Boo-hoo. But he realized that Baba was telling the truth. He and Mama
had
taken a risk, knowing about him but not killing him. They had risked everything.

“So Mook will have an answer for you. We’re not invited to the councils,” said Mama.

“Why are you here, then? To ask for a private passage through the Great Gate? Here’s news for you—it hasn’t been built yet, and I meant what I said. No special favors for anyone, no extras.”

“It’s not about the Great Gate,” said Baba impatiently. “It’s about us. As your parents. What did you expect us to do? We hoped you’d be a gatemage. All right? We didn’t hope for any baby at all, we hoped for you, very specifically. A tricky, mouthy, linguistically brilliant brat with no loyalty to anyone, because that’s what gatemages
are
. We hoped you’d open a passage to Westil, yes. Of course we did. Before we knew you, we expected to be able to use you.”

“And you still do,” said Danny.

“Because we’re not insane,” said Baba. “You exist. Everybody wants to pass through a Great Gate. What do you expect, that we alone, of all the Westilians in Mittlegard, would care only about our beloved boy, with not a thought about the gates that we created you to make?”

“I don’t expect anything from you,” said Danny, “which is a good thing, because ‘anything’ was what I never got.”

“Danny, we gave you all we could,” said Mama. She came closer. “And I don’t just mean life itself. We had Mook and Lummy look after you. Feed you when you stayed late. Listen to your questions and answer them. Watch out for you to give you warning if you did something dangerous. We made sure that Thor was in charge of the watchers, so that if you needed to get away, you wouldn’t be caught.”

“If we stayed close to you,” said Baba, “then the Family would never trust us to be impartial when it came time for decisions about you. We could either have the power to protect you, or we could be your loving affectionate parents. Not both.”

Danny knew that this was true. He had always known it.

Mama interpreted his silence as a kind of victory, and she pressed the advantage. She placed her hand on his upper arm, not gripping it, exactly. Just holding him.

But he had been touched by enough women in the past twenty-four hours. He was done with being betrayed by his natural reaction to physical touch. A bit of physical affection from his long-absent mother? It sent a thrill of relief through him. He wasn’t having any of it. He shrugged away and backed up a step.

“Touch me again and you’re out of here,” Danny said.

Mama gave something like a sob and stepped away, holding the hand that had held him in her other hand, as if she had been devastatingly wounded, as if the hand were pumping out blood and the injury could not be healed.

“We were proud of you,” said Baba, not even glancing at his wife’s reaction. “You were so clever. You understood your danger—not gatemage danger, but drekka danger. You kept your head down. You kept trying to find ways to survive. We saw it and admired you and respected you. I don’t know if I would have had the self-control to handle myself as you did. The trickster boy you were as a child disappeared completely, swallowed up in the careful, careful young man who finally found his power and used it to run away and save his life.”

“How nice of you to admire me from such a distance,” said Danny. But his father’s words of praise filled him with light and brought tears to his eyes.

We human beings are such
machines
, thought Danny. All the emotions are available at the flip of a switch. Predictable as robots.

“Danny,” said Mama. “I get it that you hate us. I do understand it.”

But Danny didn’t hate them. He was angry with them, had been hurt by them, but no, he didn’t hate them. After everything, all he really wanted was his mother’s affection and his father’s approval. Now they were offering exactly what he wanted. Only these things had been so long withheld that Danny refused to trust the fulfillment of his longing.

“Whatever you want from me,” said Danny, “I don’t have it. Or if I do, it’s not for you, not anymore.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” said Mama.

“I told her not to expect anything better than this,” said Baba.

For a moment, hearing such finality in Baba’s voice, Danny believed that this whole meeting had been a trap. That, having failed to win him over, they would now unleash whatever assassination they had planned for him.

So he gated fifteen feet away.

Mother burst into tears.

“We aren’t going to betray you,” said Baba coldly. “How could we, even if we wanted to?”

“Let’s go, Alf,” said Mama.

“Yes,” said Baba. He led her away toward the family pickup—which looked even more beaten-up now, having spent a short time buried in a crevice in the earth.

Watching them walk toward the truck, Danny saw them for the first time, not as the crafty leaders of a group of ruthless mages, but as a middle-aged man and woman, weary of everything, having been repudiated by the ungrateful son who blamed them for having done only what was possible for him, and nothing more.

Danny passed a gate over them. He did it smoothly, carefully. They did not miss a stride. If they felt anything, he would have been surprised. But their steps looked younger, not so tired as they continued to the truck and got inside. He did not wish to punish them. He had thought he did, but now he felt no such desire. He just wanted to stop wanting them to love him. Because now they were saying that they did, and he was hungry to believe them; but they had so many motives to lie that he could not trust a word they said or a thing they did.

12

M
ITTLEGARD

Wad and Anonoei were back and forth about what to do with the boys. Eluik and Enopp were young and powerless, but they were the most valuable prize. Without these two sons of King Prayard, potential heirs, Anonoei herself had no leverage in the kingdom. Her personal powers were unsuspected, a necessity for a manmage who wished to stay alive. Only the boys mattered.

Anonoei wanted them kept safe at all costs. So, for that matter, did Wad. But what constituted their safety was where they disagreed.

“You say it’s not even your own gate, not under your control,” said Anonoei.

“It’s not under anyone’s control at the moment,” said Wad, “but it exists. It works. There is no danger from the gate. Do you think I’d deceive you about such a thing, when I mean to make the passage with you?”

“When they’re needed, we’ll need them
here,
” said Anonoei. “Who is King Prayard in Mittlegard? What protection will being his sons offer them there?”

“More to the point,” said Wad, “their father’s nothingness in Mittlegard will
be
their protection. No one in Mittlegard has any reason to want them dead, or any motive to capture them. They’ll have the safety of being nobody. While here, everything depends on your being able to trust whomever you leave them with. Who is that person?”

Anonoei named several, but Wad had spent too long as the castle monkey, seeing what everyone did in their private moments. He told sadly true tales about every man and woman that she mentioned. She was soon near tears. “I never had friends,” she said.

“No one has friends,” said Wad. “I was as true a friend to Bexoi as anyone has ever had. But I kept you alive when she wanted you dead.”

“For reasons of your own,” said Anonoei.

“I made no claim of generosity,” said Wad. “I make none now. But I want your sons alive, and I will trust strangers on Mittlegard more than anyone known to you in Iceway or anywhere on Westil.”

“Then I’ll stay here myself, watch over them, and wait for you,” said Anonoei.

Wad rehearsed the facts to her yet again. How their magical arrival in this high mountain village could not have gone unnoticed. The story would spread, had already spread, would soon float down the Graybourn until it came to the capital city, Kamesham, and then to the castle, Nassassa. There would be no lack of wits in either place, and soon they would put together the woman and two boys who appeared in the high mountains at just the time when a woman and two boys vanished from caves in the cliff face below the castle while soldiers of Prayard attempted to kill them.

“I’m not leaving you here to die,” said Wad. “I’ll need to move these people who took you in as well, or they’ll surely be tortured to find out information that they do not have.”

“By ‘here’ I didn’t mean I would stay in this very village. I meant here on Westil, here where we don’t have to pass through any gates.”

“Stop wasting my time with fears as ridiculous as this. If you were really afraid, you’d try to use your manmagic on me, to get me to comply with your will. But you don’t, so clearly you don’t mean it.”

“Would my manmagic work on you?”

“Until I realized what was happening and gated away, of course it would. I appreciate your showing me the respect of not trying. Likewise, if I wanted to I could gate you and your boys against your will to the mouth of the Great Gate and push you through, and you couldn’t do a thing about it. Instead, I’m
talking
to you, because I’ve treated you as pawns and captives long enough.”

“I’ve heard what happens to gates,” said Anonoei.

“What have you heard? How could you hear anything? There hasn’t been a gate on Westil, except of my making, for more than fourteen centuries.”

“There
have
been gates,” said Anonoei. “Everyone knows the stories. A gatemage learns to go from here to there, and then suddenly the Gate Thief comes and takes them all away. What if that happens while we’re—”

“Haven’t you understood anything, woman?” demanded Wad. “
I’m
the Gate Thief. Me. That’s why I could keep you locked up behind my gates for more than a year, and no one took the gates from me.”

“If you’re the Gate Thief—and yes, I understood you, but why should I pay attention to such ridiculous brag?—then you must have been alive for more than a thousand years.
You
, a mere boy—”

“Why would anyone bother to become immortal in an
old
body?” asked Wad. “But I’m not immortal. I was in a tree. More precisely, a treemage persuaded a tree to let me gate into the living treeflesh between the bark and the dry wood. There I made the tiniest of gates, which moved me slowly upward through the tree, rising with me, rising far more slowly than a fingernail grows. Passing through a gate heals you. I healed myself, I healed the tree, minute by minute, day by day, year by year. The tree lived and I lived, never aging, never ill. And I watched. Every gate that was made, I sensed. At first my powers were magnificently strong, as yours will be if you ever make up your mind to go through a Great Gate. But that boost in power fades with time. I had to watch ever more closely, concentrate ever more tightly. My outselves roamed the world, alert, watching. After the first five hundred years, I sensed nothing from Mittlegard; after the second thousand, gates on Westil were like a distant whisper, except for the making of a Great Gate. That was like a shout, as the gates entwined and roped and rose into the sky. Then I reached out and swallowed them. That’s your Gate Thief. The husk of an ancient man, kept alive within a tree, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, only an endless watchfulness for the making of a Great Gate, with only the captured gates of long-dead mages to keep me company.”

“So you’re not as young as you seem,” said Anonoei. And then she smiled, so he would know that she understood the bathos of her own remark.

“I came out like an adolescent orphan, hardly remembering anything of my life before, not even understanding that I was the Gate Thief, and for a time not knowing what a gate was. I ate gates by reflex then. I made them the same way. A kind woman took me in and I made a mother of her, until someone murdered her for refusing to cooperate with an attempt to poison the queen.”

“You’re talking about Hull?” asked Anonoei.

“Please don’t tell me that you knew beforehand about the killing of that good woman,” said Wad. “Unless it’s true. If you lie to me we can’t be friends.”

“So many rules you have,” said Anonoei. “I lie to you all the time, and you lie to me. We’re human and we lie, because that is the only way people can possibly get along with each other.”

“You’re wrong,” said Wad. “We can tell each other the truth, as far as we know it. We might be wrong about what we believe is true, but we can speak our best understanding to each other. Hull did that with me, and I with her.”

“She knew you were the Gate Thief?” asked Anonoei. And when Wad didn’t answer, she smiled. “I see—you told her the truth, except when the truth might make her like you less.”

“So what is it that
you
aren’t telling me?”

“That I think you’re right, the boys will be safer on Mittlegard, and if I can’t take the risk of trusting you to get me through a Great Gate and back again, I might as well give up. If you’re not trustworthy then I’ve got nothing, but if I refuse to trust you then I’ve got nothing. So I might as well trust you and hope that you amount to something.”