The Keep of Fire (22 page)

It was Travis just as she had remembered him, wearing the same baggy green tunic, his sandy hair and beard still shaggy and wild. A thrill coursed through her. He had heard her! She started to call out again, to warn him that he was in terrible danger.

The words died on her tongue. The elation in her chest was replaced by damp fog.

Behind his wire-rimmed spectacles, Travis’s eyes were completely black. There were no whites, no irises. Only empty, borderless pupils. Tendrils of mist circled around him. Except it wasn’t mist, she saw now. It was smoke, and it was rising from his clothes.

He smiled at her. Then Grace screamed as the mist went red and fire leaped up to consume them both.

Grace sat up in bed, pushed snarled hair from her face, then fumbled in the dark for the top of the ladder. She climbed down to the floor. Coals still glowed on the hearth, guiding her like red beacons. She took a splinter of wood from a jar, held the tip against a coal, then guarded the resulting flame with a curled hand until she transferred it to a candle on the room’s table.

The borders of night retreated to the corners of the room. Grace sat in a chair, folded hands in her lap, and stared at the candle, letting the mundane light fill her vision. She was sweating—the heat of the dream
still—but she shivered in her underclothes all the same. The image of Travis and his black eyes would not leave her mind.

It was just a dream, Grace. A bunch of synaptic vomit, that’s all. Besides, even if Travis is in trouble, it’s not as if he’s anywhere you could reach him
.

Logic dulled her fear. Travis was on Earth now. Of course, there were plenty of dangers there—drunken drivers, crashing jetliners, rapidly mutating jungle viruses with no vaccines—but at least they were familiar to her. And perhaps it was a good thing Travis was a world away. Because if he were on Eldh again, Grace suspected he might find himself in a far different kind of peril.

She still wasn’t certain—not completely. It had been impossible, as always, to get definitive answers from either Ivalaine or Tressa while the two were here, and it was a topic Lirith had been flatly unwilling to discuss since her arrival. But all the evidence was there. Tressa had been both shocked and fascinated when he broke the rune of peace bound into the council table.
Runebreaker
, she had whispered. And Kyrene, well into her mad descent after being cast from Ivalaine’s favor, had approached him. Clearly she had thought that casting him under her spell would win her favor again among the Witches. But why were the Witches interested in Travis Wilder?

Grace didn’t know, but while Ivalaine was always an enigma, she had let one clue slip the day she had inquired about Grace’s relationship with Travis.

Why do you wish to know, Your Majesty?
Grace had dared to ask.
Do you think he might be the Runebreaker?

The queen’s ice-blue eyes had narrowed.
Where did you hear that word, sister?

Tressa said it at the council
.

After a long silence Ivalaine had spoken.
The one
called Runebreaker is a great evil, sister. And like all evil this one can wear many masks, some ugly, some fair. But if we are lucky his evil will not come to pass as has been foretold. That is enough for you to know
.

It hadn’t been much, but it had been enough to confirm Grace’s suspicions. Whoever this Runebreaker was, he was a concern of the Witches, and as a result they were interested in all who had the power to break runes. Which, from what Falken had told her, was a list of people that contained a single name: Travis Wilder.

But Travis was hardly a great evil. Whatever the queen said about masks, Travis had saved this world on Midwinter’s Eve, not harmed it.

Grace pushed herself up from the table and turned to pour herself a cup of wine. Maybe it would calm her enough so she could sleep again.

Self-medicating, are we, Doctor?

She ignored the thought, sloshed some wine into a goblet, hesitated, then filled the vessel to the rim. Regardless of what the Witches were up to, Travis was far beyond their reach. She lifted the cup to drink.

The goblet halted an inch from her lips. Outside the window, just beneath the slender crescent of the waning, almost-new moon, shone the red star. It stared back at her from the night like a crimson eye. If only there were a way to glimpse him—just for a second, just to make sure he wasn’t in peril.

But there was a way, and she knew it.

Don’t be an idiot, Grace. The last time you tried it you just about turned yourself into a vegetable. And this time Ivalaine is not here to rescue stupid beginner witches who get themselves into trouble
.

Even as she thought this, she set down the cup, moved to the mantelpiece, and drew an object from the leather pouch she placed there each night.

It glittered on her hand in the candlelight: the silver half-coin Brother Cy had given her back on Earth. Wherever he was, Travis had the other half.

She returned to the chair. Once before she had used the Touch to descry, not a living thing, but an object. It had been a knife, and the spell had taken her to the circle of stones south of the castle. There she had watched, bodiless, as Logren and Alerain plotted to murder one of the rulers at the Council of Kings. The experience had been remarkable, but she nearly had been lost in it, and she would have been had not Ivalaine called her back.

She gripped the half-coin in her hand and gazed into the heart of the candle’s flame.

This is pointless. Travis is fine. You’ll probably see him sleeping, or eating a bowl of cereal, or sitting on the toilet. Or more likely you’ll see nothing at all. You haven’t been able to Touch the Weirding once without it all falling apart, not since Garf died. What makes you think you can do this?

Except she knew she could, knew it was different, that touching the Weirding—the vibrant web of life that wove itself among all living things—was something beyond her just then. But this, an inanimate object, a thing of cold, hard, lifeless metal—this was something she could touch.

You should at least tell Lirith what you’re doing
.

But she did not rise from the chair. Instead, she shut her eyes, let the darkness fill her, and reached out with her mind to touch the half-coin. This time she felt it—almost like a tug, followed by a wet sensation of parting.

Then she was flying.

By the time she gathered her wits enough to look down, the ground was already far below: a textured canvas painted in blue tones of shadow. She glanced back—dimly noticing that this action required only a thought, not motion—and could just barely pick out
Calavere from the backdrop of stars. Only here and there did the spark of a torch flicker against the night. The town at the foot of the castle’s hill was no brighter, and of the villages she knew dotted the landscape around the castle, Grace could see no trace. The darkness was complete. It was utterly unlike being in a jet above North America at night, when one could look out the window and see the cities like glittering jewels strung along the gleaming strands of the highways.

Except this was no airplane she rode in. Right now her body sat slumped in a chair in a room in Calavere while the rest of her sped toward a destination she did not know.

A broad, black serpent undulated below her, its curves catching the faint light of the moon: the River Darkwine. Grace thought back to her fireside geography lessons with Aryn. Didn’t the Dimduorn flow east from Calavere to the marches of Toloria? Yes, she could still recall the charcoal map Aryn had drawn. Once it reached Toloria, the Dimduorn turned south, and a smaller river flowed into it. Just east of the confluence Aryn had placed a dot: Ar-tolor, the seat of Queen Ivalaine of Toloria.

Ar-tolor? Was that where she was going?

She forced her attention down, and even as she did she saw the great river curve sharply to her right. At the bend, nearly as Aryn had drawn it, a lesser river joined the Darkwine. Just beyond was a pale shape on a hill. Slender towers reached toward the sky and, unlike in Calavere, fires danced atop all seven of them. So the Witch Queen at least dared to defy the night.

Grace expected her descent to begin, but instead she seemed to move faster yet. Ar-tolor slipped past and was gone. Land flowed beneath her like dim water. Then jagged shapes heaved up before her, taking a ragged bite out of the starry sky. Mountains.

The air grew hot around her, until her whole being felt brittle and desiccated. In an instant it was no longer night; the sun burned in a sea of crimson clouds on the horizon. Dawn had come.

No, that wasn’t right. The sun lay behind her, to the west. Before her, a full moon, pink as a shell, rose above the mountains. Not dawn then, but sunset.

The peaks were close now, and she began to drop. At the foot of the mountains, on a thrusting outcrop of stone, stood a tower. So this was her destination. But what was it?

The tower grew to fill her vision, and she saw that her first impression was wrong. The tower was not simply built upon the pinnacle of stone. Rather, the spire had been hewn from it. The base of the tower merged seamlessly with the outcrop, while the three-horned summit soared above. All of it—stone, tower, turret—was as gray as mist.

A gray tower. Where had she heard of a gray tower?

There was no time to think. The ground rushed up to meet her. She came to a halt atop the ridge that led from tower to mountains. Then, for the first time on her journey, she heard a sound other than the rushing of the wind.

“He has defiled the runestone,” a deep voice, filled with anger, said. “The runestone, which is the heart of our tower and the source of all we are. His punishment has been decided.”

There was a pause, then another voice—sadder, more hollow—answered. “Then let the judgment be carried out.”

The gravity of the tower tugged at her, but somehow Grace turned around. They stood a dozen paces away, had she had feet with which to walk. A hundred men in robes as gray as the tower gathered in a semicircle. Two of them stood slightly ahead. One had black hair and a hard face crisscrossed with scars.
The other was white-haired and stooped, leaning on an intricately carved staff.

In front of the men, near Grace, was a standing stone, slender and about ten feet high. Its surface was incised with symbols she could not read. At the stone’s base was a pile of wood and sticks. Only after a moment did Grace see that there was a man bound with ropes to the stone. His head hung down, but she could see that he had sand-colored hair and a short beard. Even as she watched, a pair of robed men stepped forward, bearing lit torches, and approached the standing stone. Who was the prisoner? And what had he done to deserve this sentence?

“Have you any words to speak before the end?” the white-haired man asked the prisoner.

“He’s spoken enough lies already,” the man with the cruel face sneered, but a look from the older man silenced him.

All were silent, then the bound man lifted his head. Had she a mouth, Grace would have screamed.

It was Travis.

Her mind flailed about. How was he here? And what was happening to him?

“I’ve only told you the truth, Oragien,” Travis said in a quiet voice.

At these words, the old man pressed wrinkled eyes shut. The other one, the scarred man, made a sharp gesture with his hand. The two with the torches hesitated, then stepped forward and plunged the flaming brands into the pile of sticks. Smoke billowed up.

Travis turned his head away from the smoke, so that Grace could see his face. She feared his eyes would be black, as in the dream, but they were gray as his robe and frightened behind his spectacles. Then his eyes went wide.

“Grace!” he said in a hoarse whisper.

Shock crackled through her. She tried to speak his name, but she had no organ of sound. Had he seen her
somehow? But that was impossible; she wasn’t even there. Perhaps it was simply her name that he called at the end, out of terror and desperation.

The smoke was thicker. Flames crept up through the pile of sticks toward the hem of his gray robe. Travis turned his face forward again. No, he had not seen her. He clenched fingers into fists and shouted to the sky.

“Olrig’s hand will save me!”

He was wrong. No godly hand descended from the clouds to pluck him from the fire. The flames rose higher.

This couldn’t be happening. Grace reached for Travis, even though she knew it was no use, that she couldn’t help him. Travis’s body went rigid. He threw his head back, and a scream ripped itself from his lungs.

Then, just like in the dream, the flames leaped up to surround him. Grace was too close; the heat of the fire sucked at her. She struggled and somehow managed to turn around. There—stretching behind her into the distance was a faint, shimmering strand. The thread that bound her to her living body back in Calavere.

Her last conscious thought was to reach for the slender thread. Then Travis’s scream merged with the voice of the fire, and everything went red.

It was a pounding noise that woke her. At first Grace thought it was the beating of her heart, for it seemed to vibrate through her entire body. Then the sound came again, along with a muffled voice.

“Lady Grace! Are you in there?”

Slowly, her eyes opened. Crimson light flooded her
brain. Was it the fire then? No—she blinked and saw it was not flame that poured through the window but the light of dawn. It was morning, and she was still alive.

“My lady, unbar the door!”

She lifted her head, then gasped at the sudden, shocking jolt of pain that coursed through her stiff muscles. What had happened? It felt as if her mind had burned to ashes, but she forced herself to remember: the tower of gray stone, Travis, the flames. A new kind of pain filled her. This had been no dream. She could feel the hot metal of the half-coin clutched inside her right hand.

The pounding at the door ceased, and she thought she heard faint words through the wood:
I’m going to break it down
. With brittle motions, Grace rose from the chair. She shuffled to the chamber’s door, pulled back the iron bar, and opened it.