How Ambrose had gotten everything in there defied rational explanation. Which shouldn’t surprise me, as everything about Ambrose defied rational explanation. I raked my hands through my hair, digging my fingers into my scalp. It didn’t help dredge up better questions, whatever the fuck that meant.
“Sondra,” Ambrose called, “would you like a cookie? They’re excellent.”
She waved a hand in dismissal without turning. Ambrose sighed, then fed a cookie to Vesno, who took it with delicate precision, munching happily.
“She’s locked me out,” I said. Not a question, but it helped to think it through. “Literally, by having Ibolya bar my way, but effectively before that. At first she seemed to be talking to me—” Pretending to care, but maybe she’d been trying to say goodbye? “—but all along she was edging me out the door. She’s messed up, not like she was before. I mean, I don’t expect her to be magically better, but…” But that would be useful magic. I lifted my head to stare at Ambrose. “I think she’s dying. Or not fully alive. I don’t know. What can I do to help her?”
“Ah. That’s a better question.” He wagged a cookie at me, then popped it in his mouth, munching thoughtfully. I waited while he chewed, swallowed. When he reached for another cookie, my hand shot out of its own accord to seize the wizard’s wrist.
“And the answer?” I prompted.
He smiled sadly, then was no longer in my grasp, instead sitting back some distance, cookie in hand. “A better question helps to elicit a useful answer, but is no guarantee of one,” he remarked. “I might return the question to you. What can you do to help Lia?”
Sondra might have made a snorting sound, but she didn’t turn around. No help there. I set my teeth. “This is what I’m trying to find out.”
“Or, to put it another way, can you give Her what She needs?”
“Yes.” I’d give Lia anything, whatever she needed. “If I know what it is,” I amended.
“Ah, and that can be the sticking point. Very often we need the people who love us to give us what we need before we know what that is ourselves.”
“Which means those of us with no one to love us are pretty much fucked,” Sondra muttered darkly.
“How do I figure out what Lia needs if she can’t tell me herself?” I asked. I agreed with Sondra, in theory, but I couldn’t dwell just then on the painful truth that Lia didn’t love me in return. I’d gone over half my life with no one loving me—I could hardly start dwelling on it now.
Ambrose sat up, poured tea into a fresh cup, handed it to me, then reclined again. “You are a man of action, Conrí, which is your strength and your weakness.”
“Yeah. And?”
“You can’t force Lia into full health. You can’t make Her want to live. Some things are beyond even your might.”
“This is what I’ve been trying to tell him,” Sondra muttered.
“Of course Lia wants to live,” I said, ignoring Sondra.
“Does she?” Ambrose asked Sondra, who shrugged but looked grim.
“So what are you saying?” I looked between them. “I should do nothing?”
“Oh.” Ambrose waved a hand vaguely. “Did I say that? I really don’t think I did.”
“Lia is a woman driven by duty and responsibility,” I explained carefully, reining in my temper. “She wants to live, if only to protect Calanthe.” I knew that much about her. But … did I? Calanthe is crumbling, out of control—it will not be fine. I dropped my face in my hands, groaning. What if she couldn’t repair Calanthe? She’d never forgive herself. “I need her, and so do her people. Calanthe is coming apart at the seams, just as she warned us.”
“Oh, I know,” Ambrose said. “The situation is probably even worse than you realize.”
Wonderful. Just fantastic. Never go to a wizard for reassurance.
“Did you find Merle?” Sondra asked. She’d turned around, finally, and leaned against the sill, apparently uncaring of the cold rain blowing against her back.
“It’s never been a question of finding Merle, so much,” Ambrose replied with a rare frown. “That’s where I was when you dropped by to visit. But Merle is the only thing holding Calanthe back right now—and will be unless and until Her Highness can take over.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid his strength won’t hold much longer. And that’s not including other complications.”
“How much longer?”
“That’s difficult to put in human terms,” Ambrose mused. “You see, Calanthe exists in several dimensions of reality at once. In some, She is a goddess; in others, a monster; in others, a landmass.”
Sondra and I exchanged glances, and she shrugged in her confusion. That left me to take a stab at it. “I’m going to say Calanthe is a landmass in this reality.”
Ambrose wagged a finger in the air. “Aha! Not so fast. These realities are not separated by impermeable barriers. They’re more like … colors in a rainbow, ever shifting, leaking into one another, blurring the lines.”
“Sounds like magic—dragging stuff from one reality into the other.”
Ambrose turned his head and smiled at me, beaming as if I were a prize pupil. “Conrí! At last you begin to understand how magic works. I’d rather despaired of you.”
I decided not to touch that one. “So: How long do we have before this goddess-monster-landmass sinks into the sea?”
“From the tales I’ve studied and what Her Highness confided, it might be more of an erupting and rampaging than a sinking,” Ambrose corrected. When I growled, he hastened to continue. “Regardless, we’re talking about a combination of metaphysical and geologic time scales, which have very different linear functions than time as humans understand it. Putting it in terms you’ll understand is an approximation, at best.”
“Try,” I said drily.
“Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, eons. They’re all arbitrary measures.” Ambrose sat up, warming to his subject. “If you theorize that metaphysical time operates on a logarithmic scale, then—”
“Ambrose,” I interrupted, “from what we’re seeing out in human reality, it’s looking closer to weeks than eons. Can we narrow it to one end of the spectrum or the other?”
“Did you know,” Ambrose said, tapping his oddly long fingers together, eyes bright, “that some propose that we should think of time as a circle, rather than as a spectrum? So eons would at some point merge into nanoseconds, which means—”
“Ambrose.” This time Sondra interrupted him, a wary eye on my twitching fingers, which I’d seriously been considering wrapping around the wizard’s throat, if only to stop the flow of words making my brain ache.
“Point taken,” Ambrose conceded. “It helps to have Her Highness present on the island, so things aren’t progressing as fast as when She was gone. I’d say days. No more than a week.”
There. Was that so fucking difficult? I throttled back the accusation, however. “Can you do anything?” I asked bluntly.