The Keeper of the Mist (21 page)

“
Brann
tried—” Words seemed to fail him.

“Yes,” Keri repeated. “He thinks the Wyvern King is going to win, so he thought he would give me to him and then Aranaon Mirtaelior would do whatever he wants to me, and the succession would go somewhere else. To Brann himself, of course. At least,” Keri added, “I think that's what he thought. I'm not completely sure, because it's—”

“Utterly insane?”

Keri found herself smiling. “Maybe a little ill considered.”

“And I
missed all this
? In
one morning
? Unbelievable.” Lucas looked her up and down. “Though you seem to have come through it all remarkably untouched, sister dear.”

Keri didn't feel as unscathed as all that. But she nodded. She said, “So I thought of you.”

Lucas frowned at her. “Does that follow?”

Keri took a deep breath. Then she raised her eyebrows and gave him her mother's look, the one that said,
I already know what you're not telling me.
“Lucas, you don't really expect me to believe that your mother cut all her ties with you when she left Nimmira? That when you disappear for a day or three, or a week or three, you're visiting some girl? Why would you hide that so carefully?”

“Well, I imagine they might get jealous of one another if they knew I scattered my charms so widely. My delightful Mina, and pretty Rose, and sweet little Pellia—”

“Oh, stop.”

Her brother closed his mouth and looked at her steadily.

“She's your
mother,
” Keri said to him. “I lost
my
mother, you know. She died.” She meant,
Your mother didn't die.
She meant,
I'm sure you still know how to find her, because she's your mother.

Lucas cleared his throat. He picked up the puppet gently and untangled the strings. Then he laid it aside again and said, not quite looking Keri in the face, “All right. Yes, you're correct. There's a gap. The player's crack, they call it. I mean, the players call it that. Or the mouse gap. It's not exactly a hole in the boundary. It's more like the boundary…folds in right there. In and out, very fast, a tiny little involution that lets you step across the miles. Players can recognize it. One learns to perceive such uneven places in the air, you see, when one learns to build illusions. Player's magic is all about perception and illusion, of course,” he added, a trifle apologetically. “The most minor of all sorcerous arts, you may say, and you would be right, but in a sense also the truest, for player's magic is the one kind of sorcery that does not depend on the theft of blood from a man or of magic from the land itself. And those are the arts that deflect attention from players in Eschalion. Otherwise, they would be forced to live only in Tor Carron and Nimmira, and, you know, the homeland of all players, and of all true sorcerers, is Eschalion.”

“I see,” said Keri, who wasn't entirely sure she did. She focused on the important part. “So your mother used that…involution…to step across the miles between Glassforge and someplace in Eschalion. And you know just where it is, don't you?”

“There's no danger to Nimmira from small, narrow gaps like that,” Lucas assured her, his tone a shade too emphatic. “No danger at all. As I say, it's not a true hole anyway, just a cut, like a tiny slice through folded cloth.” He held up his hands, pretending to fold cloth and stretch it out again, illustrating how someone might take a single step and yet cross not only the boundary, but hundreds of miles. “It's not the sort of thing that true sorcerers are in any way likely to notice, either,” he went on earnestly. “My mother explained all this to me. Their very strength makes it hard for them to see such minute unevennesses in the air. And no player would show an involution of that kind to a sorcerer. They know how to keep secrets, in Eschalion.”

“I expect they do,” Keri said. “So do you, obviously.” She hoped it was all true, everything Eline had told her son, everything Lucas was telling her now, but she wanted very much to see this tiny little involuted fold in the boundary for herself. She said, “You know where your mother's minute gap is, of course, and how to open it, and you know the people on the other side. Your mother's there, of course. Of course she'll help you, if you ask her. She'll help us. With her special magic of perception and illusion, with her gift of coming and going unnoticed. She can help us slip unseen into whatever place Eroniel has Cort imprisoned and sneak him out again. She can, and she will, because you're her son and you'll ask her. After you show us the way through this little mouse gap.”

Lucas had begun tracing small circles on the table with the tip of one finger. Now he glanced up, his expression guarded. For once, there was no hint of mockery or humor in his eyes. Keri fixed him with her mother's firmest look to encourage him to tell her the truth.

He said after a moment, “You're right. That gap opens to a town called Yllien, in Eschalion, in the far north. That's where my mother lives now, sometimes, when the players aren't traveling. Her winter home is there. And, yes, I visit her.” Lifting his eyes at last, he gave Keri a sharp look. “In Eschalion, I'm a puppeteer, a player, Eline's foreign-bred son. Hardly anyone there's ever heard of Dorric or of Nimmira. Most people think my father was from Tor Carron. I mean, where else? Everyone knows there's no other land between Eschalion and Tor Carron.”

“No wonder people here say you're…erratic,” Keri said. She looked at her half brother, feeling for the first time that they might really manage to save Cort. If Lucas would help her. If he could indeed be trusted to get his mother to help. She was sure that with Eline's assistance, they could find Cort and get him away. But Eline had no loyalty to Nimmira, plainly. Lucas…Lucas had a whole life with his mother, one nobody in Nimmira knew about. His role as Eline's son might even be more important to him than his role as her half brother. But surely he cared about Nimmira, too.

Lucas could help. He could help in ways
no one else
possibly could. Keri decided she would
make
him help her.

“Fickle,” said Lucas. His mouth had twisted slightly, a sardonic expression. “That's what people say. Undependable.”

“The kind to vanish for a day or a week,” Keri agreed. “The kind to make up wild stories about where he's been, and about what business, and let everyone assume he was seeing a girl—or two, or three. Mina and Rose and sweet little Pellia, indeed!”

Lucas actually blushed.

Keri shook her head. “You know, I've heard people say you sometimes slip off to visit a player girl. I guess that's actually true. It's just that the company is in Eschalion, and the
girl
is your mother. She must have taught you all about the sorcerers of Eschalion and the Wyvern King….”

Lucas's mouth crooked slightly, though still with scant humor. “Hardly. No one knows much about the Wyvern King. Except that it's wise to stay out of his way. And out of the way of his sorcerers. Staying out of their way is easy enough, for most people, at least in the prosperous towns of the north. The Wyvern sorcerers do as they please among the benighted villagers, but in a wealthy town, life can be very comfortable. Very secure. So long as you are well-to-do, and polite to your neighbors, and obey the law of the Wyvern King, of course.” He shrugged. “I'd never met a sorcerer before Eroniel. I thought,
How interesting!
But then when I met him, I realized…”

“That he might recognize your mother in you?”

Lucas shook his head. “I realized I
had
seen him. Not to know him, nor to know his name. Not for him to know me, I'm almost sure. But I'd seen him. I'd seen him visiting my mother.”

“Ah,” breathed Keri.

“She always had a knack for attracting powerful men,” Lucas said, a touch grimly. He gave her a hard look—wary, she could see, of any hint of criticism.

Keri said, “Your mother is a dancer, an acrobat, a player….Powerful patrons are important for a woman like that. I guess probably even more for players in Eschalion than here or in Tor Carron.”

She could see how her brother relaxed slightly at this. He said, “I don't think that it was ever more than that. Some of the great sorcerers patronize the arts. They are contemptuous of player magic, but they do think of us—them—as artists. Eroniel Kaskarian has always been ambitious. Supporting a company of players is probably part of the image he cultivates. I think that's what it was. No matter whom she knows, though, my mother is a player, not a sorcerer.”

Keri nodded. “I'm not contemptuous of player magic,” she said suggestively. Then she waited. The seconds ticked by, stretching out to minutes. She let them stretch.

“Very well! Perhaps players have a little more magic than they admit,” her brother said at last. He spread a hand above the sprawled sorcerer puppet. Its wooden limbs twitched and moved; it sat up and shook its head as though awakening, then scrambled to its feet, strings dangling limp.

“Oh,” said Keri. She didn't leap from her chair and back away, but she did twitch a little. That puppet had been spooky
before.
She said, “No, you definitely didn't get that from our father, did you?” She looked at the puppet closely. The way it held itself, the way it angled its head, was very like Eroniel Kaskarian. She shivered. “That's a bit…Look, would you mind not doing that with that particular puppet?”

“Sends cold shivers over your skin, this one,” agreed Lucas, smiling, not very kindly. She had made him show her this; he plainly did not mind unsettling her a bit. But he closed his hand into a loose fist, and the puppet collapsed, strings trailing. It was just carved and painted wood after all.

“So you learned that from your mother,” Keri said slowly. “Along with how to slip back and forth between Eschalion and Nimmira like a little mouse. What else did you learn from her? How to find someone Magister Eroniel has kidnapped? How to get into whatever prison he took Cort to and get out again?
Will
your mother help us do that?”

“Keri—”

“Lucas, we're
all
going to have to take risks now. It's too late to hope we can stay safely at home. Sometimes,” she said, looking him in the eye, “sometimes the mice have to dare the wide world, even though they know there are cats.”

“
You
can't leave Nimmira,” he said sharply. “Don't even think it, Keri! You hold all our magic in you. You daren't carry that to Eschalion.”

Keri hated that he was right, but she was glad he'd said so—his protest made her a little more sure that she could trust him, that he wouldn't betray her. She liked how he'd said
our
magic,
just like that, quick and urgent and not thinking about it, as though it had never occurred to him to regard himself as belonging to any land but Nimmira. But she only said, “I know that. I know, all right? But whoever does go will have help. Osman the Younger, maybe. I'm not sure who else. I'm still thinking about that….”

“Yes. You know…” His tone, which had been edged, became gentler. “You know, sister, Magister Eroniel will almost certainly have given our Doorkeeper straight into the hands of the Wyvern King. And then there's no knowing what Aranaon Mirtaelior will do to him, or with him. Or how long it will take him to do it.” He didn't say,
Cort may already be dead, or stripped of magic, or made over into something that neither you nor I nor even his own brother would recognize.
He didn't have to say anything. It was too obvious.

Keri didn't want to think about any of those possibilities. But she made herself meet her brother's eyes. “That's all the more reason to move quickly, isn't it? Cort can close himself off, I think, for a while. He'll lose the magic Nimmira invested in him, but not immediately, according to the Timekeeper. We need to get him back before that happens, but we don't have even that much time, because really we have to get him back before Aranaon Mirtaelior can find a way to open him up and strip the magic right out of him. We
need
Osman the Younger, but we can't
depend
on him. Or at least, I don't want to depend on him. He's not one of us. We need someone of our own, someone we can trust.”

“Not me,
oh
no. Listen, Keri, I'm a terrible coward—”

“Oh, you are not.” Keri fixed her brother with a steady look, the kind her mother would have used to pin an importunate male customer in place. She was satisfied to find that it pinned this wild brother of hers as well. She said, “
I
can't leave Nimmira. You have some magic of your own, magic not bound to Nimmira, and you have special knowledge of Eschalion, and you can get your mother and the other players to help us, if anyone can. So we require your assistance in this.
I
require your assistance in this. I remember plainly you offered me your service, Lucas. Well, I'm claiming it now.”

“You're an uncomfortably decisive girl. Has anyone ever mentioned that to you?”

Keri only wished that were true. “I'll take that as a compliment. You're going, Lucas. You're my brother, and you belong at least as much to Nimmira as to anywhere else.” Meeting his eyes, she said firmly, “I trust you.”

“
Brann
is your brother and belongs to Nimmira.”

“You're not Brann.”

His mouth twisted in irony, but he gave her a small acknowledging nod.

“If Magister Eroniel has Cort somewhere, or even if he's already given him to the Wyvern King, you might know where—or your mother might, or one of her friends. Or they can find out. Aranaon Mirtaelior won't be guarding his citadel against us. Why would he? I don't think he'll expect us to do anything whatever. You know how Magister Eroniel was, how he took us all so lightly.”