“Rather unfortunately, I could not seem to find where I had put it. Or caused it to be put. I have trouble remembering things sometimes. The passing of the years does that to you—even if you are a shade. Then this morning, I remembered and transferred the Stone back into your pocket.”
“And played games with me!”
“Drisker,” Cogline said in an admonishing tone. “It’s what shades do. You know this, so don’t act so surprised. What matters now is you have the key to the door that bars your way back into the Four Lands. All is well. Except…”
Drisker felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Except what?”
“Except for one small complication that will surface sooner or later, so you might as well know about it now. We ought to visit the archives so you can see for yourself. Come along. Follow my lead.”
He started off at a rapid glide, hovering just off the stone flooring. Reluctantly, Drisker followed, trudging after him as they passed down numerous hallways and descended several sets of stairs to the lower levels of the Keep. As he walked, Drisker kept one hand firmly fastened around the Black Elfstone and its pouch where they lay nestled inside his pocket. Shades were mercurial in their behavior, and there was nothing to say that Cogline might not choose to move the talisman about yet again—perhaps just for sport.
When they reached the archival chamber, Drisker triggered the locks and listened to them release, one by one. As he stepped inside, Cogline simply passed through the stone—as if to demonstrate how much easier everything was for a shade. The Druid ignored him, moving to the center of the room. “Well?”
Cogline shuffled his feet. “Clizia took something else that wasn’t hers. From here, in the archives. She did so when you were otherwise occupied. It was a quick and furtive theft. She obviously knew what she was looking for and where to find it. I saw her commit her crime, of course. If I could have, I would have transferred that artifact out of her possession, as well, but there are limitations to what we can do as shades, and I did not yet know for sure that she would succeed in her efforts to take the Black Elfstone from you. So I knew it was better to concentrate on preventing that.”
He pointed to a small cubicle set into the wall in a shadowed area where the light did not quite reach. Drisker peered at it and saw that the door was cracked slightly open. He tried to remember what it had contained. “What was in there—”
“Have a look,” the shade said, interrupting him. “See if you can remember.”
Drisker crossed the room, knelt to open the door all the way, and reached inside. “So she took whatever was in here, did she? I can’t seem to recall…what was…”
He trailed off, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “No,” he whispered.
Cogline nodded slowly, his entire body shimmering with the movement. “I’m afraid so.”
FIVE
Before the last stones of Paranor’s ancient walls had faded, Clizia Porse was well away from Paranor’s graveyard and its few Skaar survivors and traveling south toward Varfleet. It wasn’t where she wanted to end up, but she had contacts with people who could provide her with the supplies and transportation she needed. After all, she had been forced to abandon most of her possessions in Paranor, leaving with little more than the clothes on her back and a sizable number of credits in her pocket. At present, she was traveling with a goods caravan come down out of the villages and farmland west of the Mermidon—a collection banded together for safety against the raiders that had plagued foot and wagon traffic along the river for years. If she had been thinking more clearly, she would have arranged transport from somewhere closer to the Keep, but at the time she had been more focused on her plans for disposing of Drisker Arc.
Drisker, after all, was the sort of man you needed to pay close attention to if you planned to kill him.
That she had deceived the former Druid so utterly was something of a triumph—and a rigorous test of her acting abilities. She had to be entirely convincing in her insistence that they work together to protect the Druid legacy and the Keep. She had to pretend she knew nothing of Ober Balronen’s increasingly erratic behavior or why Ruis Quince had acted so recklessly when confronting the Skaar, when in fact she had been the cause of both. That she had not been instrumental in advocating for the young Skaar spy Kassen to be allowed into the Keep so he could set the stage for its fall. That her intentions for the future of Paranor were in keeping with Drisker’s own. If he had suspected the truth about any of this, he would have dispatched her so quickly she might not have even seen it coming. Drisker was trusting but unforgiving of betrayal. If he hadn’t been so passionately committed to saving Paranor and evicting the Skaar from her corridors, he might not have been caught off guard so completely.
But whatever had undone him—whatever the nature of his failure to recognize her intentions, whatever blindness he had developed to her larger, more personal goals—it had cost him his life. He might survive the deadly passing of the Guardian through Paranor’s halls (although she seriously doubted it) or even linger on a few years afterward living off supplies that would normally provide for an entire Druid order and would be more than enough to sustain him. But in the end he would succumb. Drisker was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.
Not while she had possession of the only magic that could allow him to escape his prison.
Which left her free to pursue her own goals without interference.
“Soup, Grandmother?”
A young boy held out a bowl of steaming liquid and a spoon. She took both with a nod and leaned back against the wagon wheel. The traders and their families had been more than kind to her, not even asking who she was or where she had come from. They had picked her up close to Paranor the day before, seeking transport to Varfleet and willing and able to pay for it. She could have gotten where she was going more quickly by air, but she was content to travel slowly and disappear into the populace of the Borderlands while she pondered the path she had set herself upon—one that had begun with the destruction of Paranor and would lead to a rebuilding of the Druid order in a way that would better suit her own purposes. Her journey was just beginning, and it would be a long one. But even though she was old and her years were numbered, she had the time to do what was needed and the patience to let it all play out properly. Rushing was never a good idea. Rushing caused mistakes, and mistakes could undo you.
She sipped her soup and thought briefly of the now demolished Druid order and how things might have gone differently if Drisker Arc had stayed on as Ard Rhys. As a leader, he was both capable and wise, but his inability to recognize fault in others was crippling. He wanted to believe the best of people, while she knew well enough that it was the worst that always surfaced sooner or later. She had seen the rise of Ober Balronen coming long before Drisker, and realized that if she was to change the direction of the order, she had to make an unappetizing alliance with him. She hated doing so—hated choosing Balronen over Drisker—but the latter simply wasn’t strong enough to survive what was coming.