‘I didn’t see Alen go down,’ Garec said, huddling close to the kerosene heater. They were gathered around a Formica table in the sunny dining room of the Windward Restaurant in the Central Mall. A soda machine, unplugged, stood in one corner beside a red and yellow popcorn wagon and a portable ice cream cart with two flat tyres. Bright pictures of sundry deep-fried food adorned the wall behind the service counter in a fifteen-foot cholesterol frieze.
The kitchen was closed for the season and thankfully, no one, not even a security guard, had turned up for work that morning. From the pantry, Mrs Winter had pillaged some big cans of peaches, some warm cola and a few bottles of water. Those with a stomach for food ate from paper plates with the plastic spoons Steven had found behind the register. Jennifer brewed a pot of tea on a gas stove in the kitchen.
‘He must have given in to the cold,’ Garec said. ‘He looked to be swimming strongly when he went out after-’ He stopped himself. Milla was upset enough that Alen hadn’t come ashore; there was nothing to be gained by belabouring it now.
‘It wasn’t the cold,’ Steven said, ‘it was the Fold. He didn’t see it – couldn’t see it.’
‘He swam right in,’ Milla sniffed. ‘I didn’t want anyone to follow me. That’s why I ran off when you all were talking.’
‘How did you know where Mark would be, Pepperweed?’ Hannah asked. ‘We still don’t know what happened out there.’
‘He was dreaming about it,’ Milla said. ‘Gilmour and Alen asked if I could get into Mark’s dreams and I told them-’
‘Only if he went to sleep,’ Steven finished for her.
‘That’s right.’ Mark Jenkins, trapped in the body of Redrick Shen, the burly seaman from Rona’s South Coast, had torn down a rack of heavy curtains and had wrapped one around himself as he sat shivering beside Garec. ‘I- it hadn’t slept since we left the glen. I never imagined I could go to sleep, until it told me to.’
‘And you dreamed of the beach?’ Steven was reeling from the loss of both Gilmour and Alen. He hadn’t known Alen – Kantu – well, but that made little difference: two of Eldarn’s greatest heroes had perished that morning.
‘I did,’ Mark said, ‘the same dream of the same day, here at the beach when I was a kid. My parents used to erect a yellow umbrella, about a hundred feet from where you dragged me ashore. I saw Milla in the water. She was drowning, so I went in after her.’
‘And I went in after you,’ Milla said. ‘The other man, the one that was keeping you, he didn’t know I was coming.’
‘How is that, Pepperweed?’
‘Because I went into the water in Mark’s dream.’
‘But I watched you do it,’ Garec said, trying to understand the little girl’s paradox. ‘We all did. Hannah followed you into the waves.’
‘Yes, but the one holding Mark wasn’t here.’
‘Where was he- where was it, Pepperweed?’ Hannah, still confused, cocked an eyebrow at Mark.
‘It was between here and there, in the Fold, working with all the magic in that table,’ she said, pushing a piece of peach halfway around her plate, trying to scoop it up.
Mark handed his cup to Hannah and asked for a refill; he was glad to see her safe. To Milla, he said, ‘So when I was going in to save you, you were actually coming in to save me?’
‘I needed you to get into the water,’ Milla said, as if that explained everything.
‘Because that’s where you knew the creature would open the Fold?’ Hannah asked.
‘And because I am an excellent swimmer, silly. Didn’t you see me doing the scramble?’ She giggled and ate the wayward peach, Alen temporarily forgotten.
‘It was the ash dream,’ Steven said. ‘Who would have guessed that of all of us, she would be the only one who could manage it?’
‘Prince Nerak taught me,’ she said proudly.
Steven looked at the plate of peaches Jennifer was offering him and set them aside. It would be a while before he was ready to eat. ‘You were our true hero today, Pepperweed,’ he said softly.
‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,’ Mrs Winter whispered, peering at him over the top of her glasses. She wore them low on her nose, like a schoolmarm in an old daguerreotype. He had watched her attack the invaders. Steven didn’t believe she needed glasses at all.
‘Did you see what happened to Gilmour?’ Garec asked.
Steven wrestled back another bout of tears and nodded. ‘He just sat there. I don’t know why.’
‘Overwhelmed maybe?’ Hannah suggested. ‘Did he give up? Maybe sacrificed himself to slow them down?’
‘Perhaps,’ Steven said, uncomforted.
‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that either,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘He was probably trying to break into their dreams, to slow them, or stop them entirely. He might even have been successful, or partially successful, anyway.’
‘How can you say that?’ Hannah asked. ‘What are you even doing here? Who are you, anyway?’ She too was still in shock.
Steven interrupted to say, ‘Her name is Alfrieda Winter. She owns the shop next to the bank in Idaho Springs, and I will bet you a year of your life to a bacon sandwich that her middle initial is “L”.’
‘You’ve never been stupid, Steven,’ Alfrieda Winter replied, ‘and I’ve known you a long time, haven’t I?’
‘Holy shit, it’s Lessek!’ Mark stood, spilling his tea over the curtain he was wrapped in. ‘It’s you; you’re Lessek, aren’t you?’
‘I am, Mark, and I’ve been watching you and Steven for most of your lives.’
‘Why? How?’ Hannah couldn’t cope with this; she looked from face to face, trying to understand.
‘I was forced to leave Eldarn a long time ago,’ Mrs Winter – Lessek – began. ‘I did a terrible thing, inadvertently, but a terrible thing nevertheless. I’ve been here ever since.’
‘That virus,’ Steven guessed.
‘The worst Twinmoon of my life,’ the old woman replied. ‘Thousands died in Eldarn. My team and I planned to come back, to find a cure, a herb, something to stop the devastation, but I was sick myself, and I wasn’t able to keep them from conspiring against me. I escaped to Rome, and then to the Holy Land, where I had friends and colleagues, but without my writings and the spell table, I was unable to control the Fold. Harbach, a power-hungry businessman, and Gaorg, my own brother, ran me out one night, ushering a whole new Era of politics and corruption into the fledgling Larion Senate. I spent thousands of Twinmoons here, decades and decades, watching, listening and hoping to find a way home, when, one day about a hundred and thirty-five years ago-’
‘Your own keystone came to you,’ Mark said.
‘It was as if a bomb detonated half a world away and I felt the aftershock. I was living in a corner of Africa at the time, a place from where I discovered I could communicate with the most powerful of the magicians from the Larion Senate.’
‘At Seer’s Peak,’ Steven said.
‘That’s right.’
‘But Larion Senators had been coming here for generations,’ Hannah said, her brow furrowed. ‘Why didn’t you go back with one of them?’
‘That was several Eras later, over an Age had passed, and I was settled here by that time, Hannah,’ Mrs Winter replied softly, obviously leaving something unsaid. ‘I made a point to help Larion sorcerers when I could, guiding them, leading them to powerful sources of energy, information, research and knowledge. I was an outstanding resource for the Larion Brotherhood, but-’
‘You never revealed yourself to them?’ Jennifer asked.
‘No.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I was more useful here, even to Nerak – especially to Nerak, I should say. He was an astonishing talent from very early on.’
‘And then your keystone arrived,’ Steven said.
‘And things began to unravel in Eldarn. I would have tried to go home then, but Larion journeys across the Fold came to an abrupt halt. Apart from Seer’s Peak, there was little opportunity for communication-’
‘Except for images,’ Steven said.
‘And dreams,’ Mark added. ‘My dreams, the dream of this very beach. How did you do it? My head hurts just thinking about it.’ Mark tallied points on his fingers. ‘I dream of Jones Beach and my dad. You plant the dream in my head, convincing me that I’m Eldarn’s heir. I am taken by the evil minion ruling Eldarn and we end up here, invading my home on this very beach. It doesn’t add up.’
Actually,’ she peered over her glasses, ‘it adds up perfectly. Lessek’s key had been drawing members of your family to Colorado for generations.’
‘Those pictures,’ Steven said, ‘the ones in the hallway at your parents’ house…’
‘That trip,’ Mark agreed, ‘and my dad’s favourite photos.’
The Larion founder laughed. ‘You’re catching on, boys. You remembered Jones Beach, a day in your childhood when you and your father enjoyed each other’s company. I used the ash dream to comfort you that night, but no, I never imagined that you would one day invade Earth from this beach.’
‘It was in my head,’ Mark said, swirling tea in his cup. ‘The evil that took me just found it in there.’
‘It and all your analyses and conclusions about yourself as Eldarn’s heir,’ Steven said.
‘My goal was only to comfort you, Mark, to comfort you and to send you a message about your father; that was all. With you in Eldarn so unexpectedly, I had to act quickly, or else risk having you travel through Rona unaware of who you truly were. You chose the memory: the day, the beach, the time, all of it, probably because you happened to arrive on the beach outside Estrad when you fell across the Fold.’
‘After we’d been drinking beer at Owen’s Pub,’ Mark added. ‘My dad used to drink all day when we were at the beach.’
Hannah chuckled. ‘An important parallel.’
Mark went to the windows. The sun was high overhead now, but a cold wind continued to sweep the beach, kicking up the sand along the boardwalk. ‘So I have a vision of my dad, because you used the ash dream, but I picked the beach memory, serendipitously, most likely because I was on a beach outside Estrad. So far so good?’
‘Keep at it,’ Steven urged.
‘You continued to send me dreams and memories of my dad and Jones Beach and when I was taken, I had spent so much time thinking about this place that the minion controlling the Malakasian military decided this would be the perfect place to invade.’
‘True, but there were other reasons as well,’ Steven said. ‘When Nerak was in Colorado, ostensibly tracking down Jennifer, we assume he took numerous people.’
‘Gaining knowledge of Earth,’ Hannah said. ‘Taking you, the minion had everything it had learned from Nerak, plus what it gained inside your mind: knowledge of Kennedy Airport, Manhattan, the millions of people here, so many things. If it had taken me instead, this invasion force might have emerged up near Alamosa Pass, or maybe out on the prairie east of Denver.’
‘So here we are,’ Garec said, ‘living your dream, Mark.’
‘How did you get into my head?’ Mark asked. ‘I never came near any of that bark, or the ashes, or any of those shipments. How did you do it?’
‘The same way as Milla,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘The ash dream was the cornerstone of so many things I had planned to do for the Larion Senate. What a teaching strategy: imagine giving an apprentice a view of themselves, devoid of all the polish and subtle adjustments we apply to convince ourselves that our experiences are more special or important than they truly are. Imagine the learning, the emotional discipline-’
‘And the knowledge,’ Steven interrupted.
‘Most importantly, the knowledge,’ the older woman agreed, ‘because our most powerful magic hinges on knowledge.’
‘And my dream of the Air Force Academy and the almor?’
‘Again, you started the ball rolling yourself,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘I just interjected a key element.’
‘My prince,’ Garec said.
‘That’s right.’ She turned to him. ‘It was important for you to know who you were, Mark, certainly before you arrived here this morning. Just as it was important for Fantus to recognise his role as that of a teacher, and Kantu to understand his role as surrogate parent to Milla. The only way we could have turned back the evil that tried to take over our worlds today was for each of us to understand ourselves at our most fundamental level, to understand that we each have an important calling in Eldarn’s future. Garec, the king’s protector and sovereign of Falkan-’
Steven spat a mouthful of tea on the floor. ‘What the Hell-?’
‘Don’t ask.’ Garec shook his head.
Mrs Winter ignored them. ‘Mark, the Ronan prince-’
Steven wiped his mouth, then finished Lessek’s thought, ‘And Milla, the heir apparent to the Larion Senate, the prodigy.’
‘Not just Milla,’ Hannah said.
‘Certainly not.’ Mrs Winter smiled and finally removed her glasses.
‘What?’ Steven asked, ‘what am I missing?’
‘In your pocket,’ Hannah said. ‘You were willing to believe that Mark was drawn to Idaho Springs by the power of Lessek’s key, but you never bothered to wonder about yourself.’ She took a seat beside her mother; they huddled together under a blanket. ‘After hearing of your exploits from Brexan and Gilmour, I put two and two together.’
‘Two and two?’ Steven said. ‘Where’d the other two come from?’
‘From Alen.’
‘Alen?’ Steven unfolded the sheets of paper Hannah had given him that morning. They were printed out from an Internet cafe, somewhere in western Massachusetts. Across the bottom of each page was a common footer: a web domain. ‘What is this?’ Steven said, turning the first page over several times, trying to make sense of an ornate grid filled with unfamiliar names.
‘It’s from a genealogical website, a database,’ Jennifer said. ‘Look at it closely. What do you see?’
‘It looks like a printout of a family line, originating somewhere in northern England a couple of centuries ago.’
‘Look at the generations spanning the middle page there.’ Hannah pointed at the second sheaf. ‘The stuff between 1846 and 1881…’
‘There’s a family, Wakefield, from Bradford who married into the Kirtland family from Durham. They had four children, three boys and one girl, who in turn went on to have, two, three, five, holy shit, eleven grandchildren. It was a rutting brood – but so what?’
‘So look again,’ Hannah said, winking at Mark and adding, ‘He’s as thick as a bag of broken bricks sometimes.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Mark groaned.
‘Um, all right,’ Steven reread the page. ‘Whatshername from Bradford marries Kirtland from Durham and they have four, oh, wait, no, five! They have five kids and the last one – that’s the one I missed. Hold on.’ Mark reached for the pages and Steven relinquished all but the one charting the family line through the mid-1800s. ‘She doesn’t belong here. Who is she?’ He looked pointedly at Hannah. ‘The woman who married Thomas Robert Taylor of London in 1892 and moved to America, New Jersey and then to Ohio, before dying at the age of 87 in Denver, Colorado. Who was that woman? My great-grandmother, Margaret Rena Kirtland Taylor?’
‘Yes, she was your great-grandmother,’ Hannah explained. ‘Her name was Reia, not Rena. She was the daughter of Alen Jasper and Pikan Tettarak, the offspring of two Larion sorcerers, and the direct source of your power.’
‘Holy shit!’ Mark yelled, ripping the key page from his friend’s hand.
Steven didn’t seem to notice; instead he stared at Hannah, blinking, looking dumbfounded. ‘It- No, I can’t… It came from the staff; it had to!’
‘No, it didn’t,’ Garec said. ‘Mark and I have been trying to tell you since the fjord, since Traver’s Notch. The magic didn’t come from the staff; the staff just brought it to life. It was there all along. I knew it the night we spent in the cavern beneath the river.’
‘Cold beer and oil changes for $26.99,’ Mark said. ‘We were seeing across the Fold.’
‘Just like you did today.’ Mrs Winter took his hand. ‘Milla is not the only heir to the Larion Brotherhood, Steven, you are as well. You will both bring leadership and knowledge to the Larion Senate: Milla is a prodigious talent, certainly, but you are the Senate’s legacy.’
‘Old magic,’ Steven said, ‘that’s what Gilmour called these abilities, nonverbal spells and such.’
‘Yes, he did.’ Mrs Winter smiled.
‘Did he know?’
‘The clock.’
‘Sonofabitch.’ Steven didn’t fight the tears this time. Slipping to his knees, he cried out, ‘And I buried him. I buried him inside the Fold. I-’
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Mrs Winter, ‘he was inside their minds, inside their dreams when it happened. Fantus knew what he was doing.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘There’s your proof.’ She pointed at Garec.
‘Me?’ Garec looked around at the others. ‘What did I do?’
‘You didn’t die this morning. Why is that?’
Garec rubbed stiffness from his arm. ‘They were killing me. I figured it was over; I was heading for the Northern Forest, or whatever might pass for the Northern Forest around here, but I had to try and reach Milla. I don’t know why they stopped; they just left me alone.’ His face was a roadmap of cuts and bruises. He thought of Kellin, sailing somewhere along the Northern Archipelago, and wanted badly, right at that moment, to go home.
‘The ash dream,’ Steven whispered, pulling himself together. ‘So he did get in.’
Mrs Winter nodded.
‘And all this time, he doubted himself,’ Mark said.
Steven took back Hannah’s printout. ‘So Alen Jasper, Kantu, was my great-great-grandfather?’
‘He was.’ Hannah crossed to hug him. ‘And Pikan Tettarak, the woman he loved more than anyone else in these past five generations, was your great-great-grandmother.’
‘Did Alen know?’ Steven asked. It felt good to have Hannah against him, feeling the warmth of her, the shape of her, there, still alive, still with him.
‘No,’ Hannah whispered. ‘I’m sorry. I just never thought that he would be gone and he was so preoccupied with caring for-’
‘It’s all right.’ Steven hid his face in the crook of her neck. ‘It’s all right.’ He flashed back to southern Falkan. We are the Larion Senators.
‘Mrs Winter?’ Mark ladled out another scoop of peaches. ‘When Steven and I fell across the Fold, the far portal was left open in our house, with your keystone there on the desk. I fell through on a Thursday night; Steven joined me on what would have been early Friday morning-’
‘I didn’t fall through until Friday evening,’ Hannah added.
‘So why did you just leave it there, opened like that? Why didn’t you come up to the house and close the portal? Why didn’t you take the keystone?’ Mark stood. Steven looked up at him; Redrick Shen was noticeably taller than Mark had been.
‘I was monitoring the portal,’ she replied. ‘I knew where the keystone was, but I didn’t know if you had accidentally fallen into the portal, or if you had been invited into Eldarn by Fantus or Kantu, perhaps even by Nerak. I didn’t close the portal, because if I had and you returned suddenly, you might have found yourself swimming home from the Aleutians.’
‘Oh shit, that’s right,’ Steven said.
‘And I didn’t want to take the keystone, because if Fantus or Kantu had brought you across the Fold, I wanted the key available to them.’
‘And if Nerak happened to come through for it, unannounced?’
‘I would have known,’ she said, donning her glasses again, as if out of habit. ‘I actually went to the bank that morning, ostensibly to cash a cheque. Myrna and Howard were working the window and neither of them seemed to know that you had taken anything from the safe. So I didn’t imagine there was any cause for concern. I didn’t expect anyone would be going into your house; everyone assumed you were climbing Decatur Peak together. Howard breaking in that afternoon came as a complete surprise to me. I rushed over when I saw the flames, but I wasn’t permitted anywhere near the fire.’
‘Hold on,’ Mark interrupted, ‘Howard burned down our house?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
‘No,’ Steven said, ‘we had no idea. At first I thought it was Nerak, then I guessed maybe it was just a fluke, one of those things.’
‘It was Howard Griffin,’ she said. ‘He apparently left the stove on in your kitchen.’
‘I am going to beat the shit out of him,’ Mark muttered.
‘Friend of yours?’ Garec elbowed him in the ribs.
‘An abscess in my rectum,’ Mark said. ‘Howard is Steven’s boss.’
‘Disgusting, but I am proud to say that I know what all those words mean, in English. Fancy trick, this cross-Fold travel.’
‘Mrs-’ Steven started, then, ‘Sorry, Lessek, why didn’t you know if we had fallen through or if Gilmour had come over and invited us back?’
‘The portal wasn’t opened until late at night. I had been asleep, so I couldn’t determine if anyone had come through before Mark disappeared, and you were hanging around so long afterward, I thought perhaps you and he had coordinated something with Fantus or Kantu on the other side.’
‘I was a bit nervous before that first crossing,’ Steven admitted, blushing at the memory.
‘And when they came and hauled away the remains of your house, I tracked the portal and the key and I let them go.’
‘To the dump?’ Mark was incredulous. ‘Why?’
‘Why not? It was a damned-near perfect hiding spot: outside of town, buried in the mountains. Who would’ve thought to go looking for them up there?’
‘But the portal was closed!’ Steven shouted. ‘I nearly drowned coming back, landing in the ocean off South Carolina, and then I had to race across the country with Nerak crawling up my backside the entire trip. I found the house razed to the ground, and then I had to dig around up there, through that mountain of ice and frozen diapers and rotting food and shit until I found the stone and the portal. Why?’
‘I had to assume the worst,’ Mrs Winter explained calmly. ‘You hadn’t returned, so protecting the key meant allowing the portal to close. I am afraid, boys, that the keystone and the Eldarni family lines are more important even than the two of you.’
‘But aren’t we the Eldarni family lines?’ Mark said. ‘Isn’t he the incarnation of the Larion Senate? Am I not some errant Ronan prince?’
‘You are,’ she said, ‘but the line doesn’t end with you two. You were, sadly, more expendable than my keystone.’
‘Your sister.’ Steven pointed at Mark.
‘Your sister,’ Mark said.
‘Like I said, you’re catching on, boys. Losing you two was tragic; oh, I worried about you for weeks, but I couldn’t leave the portal open for ever. When the trucks came and hauled the debris up the canyon, I was actually glad: it meant I didn’t have to find another relatively permanent storage place for it. And knowing I couldn’t get it back into the safe, I let it go up the mountain.’
‘How did you get here?’ Jennifer had been trying to stay abreast of the conversation. ‘We didn’t know until yesterday that we had to be here at the beach. How is it that you’re here, all the way from Colorado, so quickly?’
‘I was following you,’ Mrs Winter replied. She considered another go at the peaches, then decided against it. ‘When Nerak arrived and nearly destroyed Idaho Springs, I delayed him long enough for Steven to sneak away towards Denver. It wasn’t much, a few fire trucks, a handful of police officers in the street, just enough to allow Steven to disappear.’
‘Why didn’t you kill him?’ Hannah asked.
‘I’m not strong enough for that, my dear,’ Mrs Winter said, ‘not here. It’s been a long time. I have been able to develop an interesting perspective on Eldarn and the goings-on there, but that’s taken me centuries to do. To kill Nerak, I would have had to open the Fold and I couldn’t do that without the spell table. When Steven fled with the keystone, I was more nervous than I’ve been in hundreds of years. I had to assume that with Nerak pursuing him, Steven was working with Fantus and Kantu. However, I couldn’t be absolutely certain, not until David Johnson died.’
‘Who’s David Johnson?’ Garec asked of anyone who might know.
‘A- Well, he would have been a friend of mine,’ Jennifer said, ‘from Silverthorn. Nerak killed him, and a woman who worked at his store, right in front of me. It was horrible, terrifying- but how did you know?’
‘I read about it in the paper,’ Mrs Winter said. ‘I knew Nerak was there and I knew that you had the portal. Steven had given it to you, and when you didn’t turn it over to Nerak, I knew you and Steven were working on the right side of the fence.’ To Steven, she said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say anything to you that morning in Idaho Springs, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what had happened since you had left. You could have been rushing home to retrieve the key for Nerak.’
‘But you didn’t try to stop me when I went to the landfill.’ Steven was nonplussed.
‘Of course not.’ Mrs Winter sighed, a little frustrated at trying to explain herself. ‘By that time, Nerak was in the bank killing people and leaving dead bodies all over town, the odious motherfucker.’ She paused. ‘Poor Myrna; she was just a kid. I couldn’t get to the landfill before you, so I had to trust that you were working with Fantus or Kantu. That was one of the more nerve-wracking days of my long, long life.’
‘And you couldn’t save Myrna?’ Mark asked sadly.
Mrs Winter shook her head. Nerak would have torn me to pieces. I’m surprised he didn’t sense my presence in town when he arrived. He probably thought it was the keystone, or maybe the portal.’
‘But you’re Lessek,’ Garec said. ‘We were told stories about you from the time we were kids. It was the stuff of great legends. You were the Larion Senate founder, the most powerful sorcerer of all time. You didn’t have enough strength to save those people?’
‘I had the ash dream,’ Mrs Winter said simply. ‘It was the primary building block for most of the common-phrase spells I researched and wrote during my Twinmoons at Sandcliff. It was my strength as a researcher and a teacher, the means for me to send messages to Kantu or Fantus, to lead Regona Carvic away from Riverend Palace the night Nerak killed Danmark and Danae. She ended up in Vienna, if memory serves.’
Mark perked up. ‘Vienna?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Sorry, go on.’ He ran a hand through Milla’s curls.
She did. ‘The ash dream was the way I made suggestions to Mark about his family, how I charted the evolution of your partisan struggle in Eldarn, even the way I encouraged those fire-fighters to block the on ramp to I-70 when Nerak was chasing Steven towards Denver. But that’s it. Oh, I can still dole out a significant blast; I was pleased with my efforts on the beach this morning, but my strength as a sorcerer, a magician capable of levelling a mountain, or whatever legends you might have heard about me in your youth, Garec, was founded on the spell table. I didn’t have the spell table, hadn’t seen it in nearly a hundred generations, so no, I didn’t have the power to subdue Nerak.’
‘So the ash dream, this key element in your abilities, is just the power of suggestion?’ Garec craned his neck, looking for more tea, but found the pot empty.
‘Oh no, the ash dream is the power of knowledge, the one common denominator in any spell. The more one can understand and manipulate perceptions around a body of knowledge, the more flexible and effective his or her spells can grow. If I could have brought one thing with me from Eldarn, well, all right, two, technically, I would have brought my keystone and that book.’ Mrs Winter gestured towards the leatherbound tome, wrinkled from so many dunkings in the past three Twinmoons.
‘And you followed me, followed the portal, instead of going back with the keystone,’ Jennifer added. ‘That’s why you were already here this morning.’
‘I did,’ Mrs Winter shrugged. ‘I followed you, because-’
‘Because you can’t go back,’ Steven guessed, ‘can you?’
‘No, Steven, I can’t. My… my so-called friends and colleagues arranged that in the wake of my disappearance, sometime around the beginning of the second Age, almost five Eras ago.’ She removed her glasses again and ran bony fingers over the lines etched in her face.
A heavy silence fell over the sunlit dining room. Two joggers, bundled up against the cold, passed by on the hard-packed sand near the waterline; neither noticed that the restaurant doors had been forced open. Beyond them, the North Atlantic, glittering gold in the sun, rolled with the tide, unconcerned that it had swallowed an army less than an hour earlier.
Garec, intrigued by the bright colours of the jackets and footwear, watched the joggers disappear into the distance. The world around him slowed, even time seemed to grow weary, trudging along to a soft dirge. They were done. They had won. He ought to feel better about it, but now all he wanted was to go home, to find Kellin and to sleep for a Twinmoon. He hadn’t felt safe for much of his life, not until this moment. He honestly hadn’t expected it, and now he was afraid even to consider what might lie ahead. How would he handle the realisation of everything he and his friends had ever worked to accomplish? The notion of success, hard-fought and harder-won, unnerved him. Garec decided he would go home and he would sleep. Then he would lock his bow and quivers away and ride for the Blackstones and Renna. The thought of his fiery little mare comforted him and he turned from the windows to ask, ‘What do we do now?’
At first, no one answered. The challenges they had met stood taller than those that now lay before them. Saving Eldarn – saving Earth – had seemed so unlikely a battle to win: none of them had ever thought they would live this long. Now, faced with the task of rebuilding Eldarn, of starting over again a thousand Twinmoons later, the breadth of the work ahead was staggering.
Mark, the history teacher, started on their list. ‘Education, public health, decent food supplies, shelter, clean water, working farms, shipping, roads, industry, a reliable judiciary, a set of reasonable laws – formative, not summative, not now, no way – and a representative government, right from the start. It might seem like it would be easier to start off with a monarchy and then switch over after a while, but that’s not the way to rebuild. They have to own it; there have to be some common values, simple – and I do mean dirt-simple – things the people of Eldarn can agree upon; we’re talking about a people with basic literacy, not the crew who spent the past fifty Twinmoons under Gilmour’s tutelage, but the rest of the population. That’s where you start a true grass-roots effort. Holy shit, it’ll take lifetimes to get that place put back together. I don’t… I can’t even get it all straight in my head. It’s too big a problem to even conceptualise without getting dizzy.’
‘Was there any beer in that fridge?’ Steven whispered to Hannah. ‘He works better after a beer or two.’
‘I’m sure the school board would be interested to know that little factoid, and no, there isn’t any beer back there. You’re home now; you can’t be drinking beer at ten o’clock in the morning.’ She slugged him playfully in the arm.
Mark ignored them. ‘And the Larion Senate, the independent states of Gorsk, Praga, Rona and Falkan, even Malakasia. There’ll be civil wars, border disputes. The shipping industry will probably come near to collapse before it rights itself again. People will starve. There’s no army to speak of, no one to police the populace. Jesus, it’s going to be a mess.’
‘What about Gita?’ Steven said. ‘She can probably help.’
‘Yes, her, certainly, we’ll need to find her,’ Mark said. ‘Man, this’ll take weeks.’
‘Weeks,’ Hannah said, ‘that’s not so bad. They can hold together for a few weeks.’
‘I mean weeks just to get it all written down, just to get the problems outlined and the resources listed. That’ll take weeks. We’ll all be old people with see-through skin and brittle bones before Eldarn gets to the stage where people are living healthy, productive, free lives.’
‘Oh,’ Hannah said. ‘Sorry, I misunderstood.’
‘Mark-’ Steven sat next to Mrs Winter, ‘Mark, is this truly what you want to do? Are you suggesting that you’re ready to go back, to take up the mantle of some leadership position you never asked for?’
‘Look at me, Steven. My own family aren’t going to recognise me. And what about you? Do you think there’s a place in this world for a sorcerer? You’ll be grossly misunderstood, or exploited; you’ll either be dead or locked up inside a year: prison, maybe, or some psych hospital.’
‘You’ve been through a great deal, Mark,’ Garec said. ‘Perhaps you ought to take some time before you commit countless Twinmoons of your life to Eldarni cultural reconstruction.’
‘It has to start somewhere,’ Mark murmured, not to anyone in particular.
Steven said, ‘But we’ve only been home for a couple of hours. We came a long way to get here; can’t we just enjoy this for a while? You can take a break: a month or six or whatever, get used to your new… self.’ Steven avoided looking at Mrs Winter. He hadn’t expected to feel selfish, but he couldn’t deny the sensation suffusing through him at the moment. His desire to protect Mark was equalled by his need for a few days’ of normalcy, some fried food and maybe a real mattress. He knew he would be returning to Eldarn if the opportunity arose, but bringing Mark along hadn’t crossed his mind, not since he’d been taken in Meyers’ Vale. Trying hard not to sound condescending, Steven added, ‘This is supposed to be where you ride into the sunset, cousin. I hadn’t thought about what we would do after today, but I promise it didn’t involve dragging you, or Hannah, back to Eldarn. That’s one mistake I prefer to make just once in a lifetime.’
‘It isn’t your choice to make,’ Hannah said quietly.
‘Hannah!’ Jennifer jumped up, looking startled and indignant.
‘Sorry, Mom, but if they’re going back, I’m going with them.’
Hannah’s mother glared at Steven; she would always blame him.
Garec interrupted, asking Mrs Winter how the Larion Senate could possibly rebuild without the spell table.
‘That’s a great question, Garec.’ The others postponed their disagreement to listen in. ‘You see, we don’t need the spell table to reconvene the Larion Brotherhood. All we need is Steven, Milla and that book.’ Again, she gestured to the leatherbound volume Gilmour had carried across half of Eldarn. ‘I was able, in my youth, to capture the essence of magical powers from different places, and all of it I channelled into the spell table. However, while doing so, I studied the magic of Eldarn, the lifeblood of our world, the energies and forces that ran through the very ground beneath our feet.’
‘Weren’t they in the spell table, too?’ Garec asked. ‘Would they have been lost when Steven broke it all to bits this morning?’
‘Steven?’ Mrs Winter raised her eyebrows. ‘Would you do the honours, please?’ She tossed the empty peach can towards the high dining room ceiling. Steven reached with one hand, captured the can in mid-flight and guided it gently back to the tabletop. There, the can crumpled itself into a compact silver ball and floated in a high arc, across the room, to land in a corner trashcan.
‘Nice shot, buddy,’ Mark said.
‘It was,’ Steven said, ‘but that wasn’t me.’
Mark held a hand out to Milla, who, uncertain what to do, simply stared at it.
‘It’s called a high-five, sweetie,’ Mark whispered. ‘Just give it a good whack.’
‘All right,’ Milla cried and wound herself up for a resonant slap.
‘So you see, Garec,’ Mrs Winter went on, ‘the magic of Eldarn is alive and well. Granted, the spell table is lost, but with my writings and the purity of Steven and Milla’s skills, I have great hopes for the next generation of Eldarn’s Larion Senate.’
‘All right, then,’ Mark said, clearing the table, ‘let’s go.’
‘Go where?’ Jennifer said.
‘To my parents’ house,’ he replied. ‘They’re about half an hour from here. We can stay there as long as we need to get our bearings and then, if that portal still works, we can go back, round up the key players and get busy. I don’t envy us the task ahead, but screw it, we were able to come this far.’
‘You think your parents will recognise you?’ Jennifer asked. ‘If they’re anything like me, they’ve never given up hope, but seeing you like this, do you think they’ll call the police and have you dragged off the lawn?’
‘I’m trusting Steven and Milla to convince them,’ Mark said.
‘Very well,’ Steven said, wrapping an arm around Hannah’s waist. ‘If we don’t help them, who will?’