He took her hands and massaged them in his own, willing warmth back into her frighteningly cold fingers. “Ariadel,” he said, and she made a soft noise, her face contorting. Her pallor and reflexive grimace threw him back twenty years-his mother, a dried husk from grief, standing at the bedside of Relarion, his oldest brother. He was ten years old…. “Ariadel,” he forced himself to urge again, hoarse. “Do you have…” his voice rasped and he swallowed. “…brothers or sisters?”
“No,” she said, confusion wrinkling her brow. She cleared her throat, but it was a weak sound. “I-my parents had two children, before I was born. They-didn't survive.”
“They got sick,” he said quietly.
Her chin tipped down once in the shadow of a nod. “Blood plague,” she whispered.
Ruby's indrawn breath behind them lifted his head. She stood, her arms wrapped around herself, a handful of emotions warring on her face. He knew that expression well; the Rulorats had parted from their Sea Kingdom brethren to support the Alorean Emperor seven generations ago, but seventy years ago Vidarian's great-grandfather had further parted from sea custom by marrying a fire woman. The rigid Sea Kingdom rites weren't always so practical, but the stricture against interelemental marriage centered around a single purpose: avoiding the specter of blood plague.
The disease came on suddenly and usually took children, but cases had been documented in adults as old as thirty years of age. When Vidarian had turned thirty, three years ago, and survived, a peace had come over his mother. On her deathbed two years ago she said that she could die happy, knowing she wouldn't lose him as she had his brothers.
Ariadel was twenty-eight.
Jealous, jealous elements, the Starhunter whispered. How they fight when I'm not around… .
A cold chill penetrated the heat of Vidarian's grief. “What are you saying?” he said softly, ignoring the confused looks that Ariadel and Ruby turned on him.
You know what I'm saying, she laughed coldly. Set me free, and she lives.
Vidarian lifted his voice. “When was the first case of blood plague recorded?”
“It's ancient,” Ruby said, her tone dismissing the question. “Two thousand years.”
Has it been that long? the voice mused. Man, time flies.
“Two thousand years ago,” Vidarian said, willing strength from his hands into Ariadel's as he tightened his grasp, “they shut the Starhunter behind the gate.”
After wrapping Ariadel in every blanket they could find, and convincing Thalnarra to use a small amount of fire magic in a persistent spell to keep her warm, Ruby and Vidarian loaded the flying craft in silence. On the far side of the river was the start of a grassy plain, and Ruby, no longer hiding her facility with water magic, walked across the surface of the river to collect fodder for the horses from the other side. Arikaree complimented her on her technique, but her only reply was a flush that could have been pleasure or anger, and seemed probably both.
Vidarian wasn't convinced that the sightwolves wouldn't find some way to break into the old barn, but they could only fortify it minimally with the available materials and hope for the best. The horses and verali, for their part, seemed content and relieved to be housed and not traveling. By early afternoon all was prepared, and they were taking to the air.
The gryphons lifted with a will after their respite through the mountains, and Ariadel occupied Ruby's previous place at the bow. It seemed odd that they had never flown the craft without one of them being incapacitated, and an ill omen for a ship named Destiny. Vidarian's mother had been a superstitious keeper of sea adages, and in spite of his rational inclinations otherwise, at such times it was as if a small voice inside him whispered fear, caution, just-you-wait.
Ruby came to stand next to him at the stern, taking an interest in the ingenious galley hardware as he had on their first journey. Now that she had let go of her stubbornness regarding the gryphons (she even seemed to be developing a hesitant kinship with Arikaree), she was discovering the wonder of the altitudes.
“It's a bit like being at sea,” she observed, looking down over the clouds. “You can almost imagine it's fog over the water.”
Vidarian blinked, shaking off the malaise of superstition-a construct, he knew, to distract him from the fast-approaching choice he would make, and how Ariadel's fate tied into it. “I suppose it is,” he said, following her gaze. The clouds were thin here and whipped by beneath them, catching on the craft and splitting around it. A moment later, the sky opened up beneath them, clear, and their breath caught simultaneously. At the involuntary leap in his heart, the storm sapphires rumbled from the pouch at his side, answered immediately by a growl from the sun rubies. He closed his eyes, stretching control around them-an act that was becoming increasingly difficult the longer they stayed in his possession. Exhaustion, mental and emotional, tugged at him, and the stones seemed to realize his weakness and surge up in response.
“They're exhausting you,” Ruby said, pointing at the pouch.
Vidarian looked at her closely, wondering if he'd been unwittingly projecting his thoughts, but then realized they must have been written across his face. He nodded, moving forward and sitting down on one of the leather benches.
Ruby took a seat beside him, a thoughtful expression on her face. “If you gave the rubies to me, would they harass you so much?”
He blinked again, surprised. And again he searched her eyes for motivation, even as he felt a pang of regret for doing so. There was only a friend's concern in her eyes. “I'm not sure,” he said, opening the pouch. He reached inside slowly, touching the stones one at a time, and withdrew one of those that pulsed warm to his fingers. “Keeping them in separate packs doesn't seem to help.” Carefully, he extended his hand, holding it out to her.
Ruby accepted the stone with equal care, cradling it between her two cupped palms. She looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. “Any better?” When he shook his head ruefully, she grimaced and turned her attention back to the stone. As she pressed it between her palms, her eyes lit with surprise at its warmth, and she lifted it to the light, staring into it. “What are these things?”
“I've wondered that,” he said, drawing one of the storm sapphires from the pouch and resting it on his palm. By far the sapphires were the most volatile of the three types of elemental stone he'd seen firsthand. Physically they were identical in size to the rubies, but to his mind they felt “bigger,” as if they had more space inside them, however that was possible. “If they opened the mountain, and can open or close the gate, they must be keys of some sort, but it's related to their energy patterns, not anything physical.”
She snorted. “You sound like a priestess.”
“Or a gryphon,” he agreed, and she gave him a sharp look.
“Your sun emerald,” she said, before he could pursue the look, “the one you left with An'du.” Ruby's eyes had looked fit to pop out of her head when they'd told her, in the hospital, about their trip to the An'durin. “You said that it was bound to you, somehow.” He nodded cautiously, and she continued, “Could you bind this one to me?”
The swirl of his thoughts echoed through the storm sapphire, which flashed with ricochets of internal lightning.
“It's going to be mine anyway,” she said lightly, mimicking avarice. Then her voice lowered with seriousness. “And if it were bound to me, I suspect I could control it. You're going to need all the mind-strength you can get for what's coming, I'll wager.”
“I've only seen it done once,” he warned, “and I hadn't any sense at all at the time.”
Ruby laughed, a sudden shock of brightness in what had been a dark journey. “As if you do now.”
Vidarian punched her knee, then regretted it, as the sapphire echoed with a new round of thunder. “You know what I mean.” He looked at the sapphire in his hand, attempting to fathom its nature anew, aware of the headache that was growing in the back of his head as he reached with his mind to control it. They were becoming more frequent. “I could try,” he said at last.
She passed the ruby back to him, and he slipped the sapphire back into its place in the pouch. He lifted the ruby, looking through it and to Ruby herself beyond it, then stretched his senses into the stone. As it was warm to the touch, so it was warm to his mind-alive with a flickering energy that perpetually sought…something. He felt a sudden urge to touch Ruby's hand, but knew that Endera had not done so when she'd bound the emerald to him, and so he worked to keep his free hand at his side. He reached through the stone with his senses until he encountered Ruby's energy-a familiar tumbling roar, an ever-moving pattern of the living sea that lived just beneath her skin.
Carefully, he curved his own sense, siphoning a piece of that roiling pattern back toward himself, and into the stone. It surged into it, and Ruby gasped, closing her eyes-feeling, he was sure, the dropping of her heart that he had felt when Endera bound him to the sun emerald. For a moment he was gripped with a terror that he wouldn't be able to stop the transfer of her essence into the stone, that it might take all of her-but the stone seemed to “know” how much it should contain, and released her of its own accord.
When Ruby opened her eyes, an echo of the ruby's energy glowed in her pupils, and he knew it was done.
The craft shuddered, and both of them reached for the support rails, riding out the sudden movement.
// VIDARIAN, // Thalnarra barked, and as he looked forward Vidarian saw that the disruption had come from her agitatedly beating wings. // Tell me you didn't just do what I think you did. //
“We were discussing it for the last several minutes,” he said, stung. “I thought gryphons had superb hearing.”
// This flying business is not as easy as it must look from back there, // she snapped. // I was focusing. //
“It's fine,” Vidarian said hotly. In fact, it was better than fine. He passed the stone back to Ruby, who looked at it with renewed wonder. Now that it was bound to her, it did seem to be paying more attention to her than to the sapphires, if rocks could be said to have attention. “Isn't it?”
// By luck only, // Thalnarra growled. // Binding magics can go awry more easily than you can imagine. And you knew nothing about that stone! Some elemental stones are extremely dangerous. //
// He is being the Tesseract, // Arikaree offered, though the hesitancy in his voice said that he, too, questioned the wisdom of what Vidarian and Ruby had just done.
// You're all going to be the death of me. //
“Whether or not we're the death of you,” Vidarian said, “I want to know how we hold Ariadel's fate.”
The sudden wave of sympathy that emanated from the gryphons caught in his throat. It was a sudden sensation of soft wings enclosing him, and for a long moment he wanted to sink into their strength. That desperate yearning opened the crevasse of reality before his feet; he wanted to unmake the last several weeks, to do anything if it would mean her illness could be averted.
// Her condition is grave, // Altair said.
“I'm told,” Vidarian said, forcing air past the lump in his throat, “that she can be cured by the opening of the gate.”