Dotty thought she understood what she saw on his face.
“But you’re angry,” she said. “You feel manipulated and betrayed. You aren’t sure what he did was a good plan. And while you are a wizard, you aren’t one who could build anything like this. You face the dilemma of whether to give people assured peace or free will.”
“Yes,” Jaco confirmed softly.
“Kural,” she said.
“Yes?”
“You mentioned that the power it would take to do this would be extraordinary. Is there any way we could possibly recreate it and make it work this time?”
Whether the wizard saw where she was going or not, she wasn’t sure, but he did not equivocate. He shook his head. “The researcher in me wants to say yes. But…no. I am almost certain we could not.”
“Then our path is clear,” Dotty stated. “We don’t have an ethical dilemma at all—which I, for one, am glad about.”
“Yes,” Jaco said a little desperately, “but what do we do?”
“We begin working for peace,” Dotty told him crisply. “The old-fashioned way, mind you, with common interests and face-to-face negotiations. Roll your sleeves up, everyone. This will be some of the hardest work you’ve ever done.”
Chapter Five
Jaco led them through empty corridors to his study. Dotty walked beside him.
“So, they intended this place to be inhabited,” she said.
“Yes.” He was subdued. “I miss him, you know. I…do.”
She smiled sadly. “But?”
The man glanced at her. “But, indeed. But he didn’t truly like us humans and elves as much as he thought he did. If he had loved what we were, he wouldn’t have controlled us all.”
Her expression neutral, she nodded.
“I’ve struggled with it,” he admitted. “I haven’t been comfortable with the idea since I learned what the spell did, but since he died, the doubts have become stronger. His magic…suppressed them. And that seems wrong to me.”
“It is wrong,” she agreed. “That’s why you weren’t comfortable with it. You said it earlier. He controlled people’s minds. That’s what this was.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “And I’m…glad their spell didn’t work. I’m not glad that he lost his lover, though. It broke him and he continued to mourn for centuries, but if they’d succeeded, everyone would have lived in a cloud forever.”
“That doesn’t sound like a struggle,” she told him. “Your mind sounds quite clear to me. Or is the struggle simply that you want to think well of him?”
Jaco walked in silence for a moment. “No,” he admitted. He looked at her.
“It’s…that I can see an argument for renewing the spell.”
“What?”
“I was grateful when Kural said it couldn’t be done. You must understand, I’m not as good a wizard as he is. I never have been so I knew I couldn’t do it, but I didn’t know if it was possible for someone else and—”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Dotty stopped, her hand on his arm. Behind them, the others drifted to a halt, too engaged in their discussion to notice why. “You were thinking of renewing the spell?”
The man heaved a sigh. “Yes. And I think, if you consider why for a moment, you’ll understand better. You said yourself in that room that there was no dilemma if there was no option. Why did you call it a dilemma?”
She groaned. “Okay, yes, I get it—if the world is at peace, people don’t die in wars, and that’s good. But you know it would be a terrible thing to do. Controlling people’s thoughts?”
“Yes,” he agreed readily. “It disgusts me as an idea, it does. But it’s not an abstract right now—or it wasn’t for me when I thought it might be possible. If I could guarantee that no one would be robbed or murdered, that there would never be any wars or famines…what do you think people would say if they found out I could and I didn’t?”
Dotty opened her mouth to retort but bit the words back and thought about it. During her eighty-four years on Earth, she’d lived through more than one war. She had seen people return in boxes, or come back in body but not in spirit, or not come back at all. After one of John’s friends was murdered by her husband, she had sat with her son for hours. There was so much pain in the world.
“People like to say that the pain in life gives meaning to the rest,” Jaco said, “but none of them have ever had a choice to live any other way.”
She shook her head slowly. “I’m glad we don’t have a choice,” she admitted. Even contemplating this for a moment made her head and her heart go to war.
“Me as well,” he said. “When he said no, it was like a great weight had lifted.”
They resumed walking until they entered a beautiful room. Silks had been draped to bring the ceiling lower and give it a homey feel, and plush carpets covered the floors. In actuality, it was an ornate room—the kind of place in which she would normally feel uncomfortable touching anything. In there, however, any touches of color or hominess felt cozy. She kicked her shoes off and sank onto one of the couches with a sigh.
Jaco smiled and rang a little bell as he murmured under his breath. An assortment of food appeared on a nearby table, complete with mugs and a steaming pitcher of tea. As the others helped themselves to the food, he dragged a low table closer. He secured a map on it with little weights on the corners which he retrieved from his desk.
“Cool,” Justin said. He held a plate piled high with a variety of ornately shaped pastries and dumplings. When people looked confused, he swallowed a mouthful of food and gestured at the map. “I always wanted to be at one of these war-planning meetings.”
“Okay, but remember,” Tina told him, “this is an un-war planning meeting. Anti-war? War un-planning?” She frowned at the sky. “The opposite of a war plan.”
“Yes,” Dotty said. “That.”
She leaned forward to look as she ate a spiced pastry that tasted of cloves and cinnamon. Insea was immediately visible, as it was marked with an ornate ring of golden ink. It took her some time to find Berghold and even longer after that to guess where the orcish lands were.
Jaco retrieved several markers and placed one on Berghold, one in the center of the orcish lands, one in the human lands, one at the northernmost edge of the map, and one in a place that wasn’t marked with anything at all. When he saw her looking at it, he smiled bitterly.
“That is the so-called capital city of the new elvish faction.”
“Oh, those,” she said. “I met some of them and killed some of them.” She smiled blandly. “Did you know they killed one of the senior dwarven councilors?”
Lyle smothered a snort and fixed his attention on his cup of tea.
“I had heard as much,” the man said with enough casualness in his tone that she couldn’t tell if he was uninterested or bluffing. He gestured at the board. “Now, these markers represent the major powers of the world—the orcs, the dwarves, the humans, the elves, and the fae.”