Tamlin fell to the ground. An aching pain burned deep within his chest. He rose to his knees and felt his back. His hand came away bloody.
"My lord!" called a guard in red armor. "Please, now that you have quelled the Vault, won't you allow Lady Malaika to tend that wound?"
Tamlin allowed the man to help him walk out of the dark chamber, past a set of sturdy gates. He looked back to see the now-familiar gate, without the blue seal that blocked passage from Stormweather Towers.
He was wearing Aldimar's clothes, and the men around him were Aldimar's soldiers.
Yet they had no idea that Aldimar was dead.
"Yes," said Tamlin. "Send her to the tower. I return there immediately."
"My lord," said the guard. "Your scepter."
Tamlin nodded as he accepted the heavy wand with its winglike blades. At its touch, he knew its power to drive his own spells and transform them into greater, more varied incarnations. He uttered the words to his flying spell as he touched the feather token on his harness. He knew it would be there, for he remembered all his old dreams. Despite his terrible wound, for the first time in his life he felt complete.
Likewise, he knew the way out of the basement, through the great Stillstone Hall, and up to the highest tower. Seeing the places around him, concrete and real, brought back a flood of assurances that his forgotten dreams had never been dreams at all.
Malaika.
Something about the word was a charm to speed his remembrance. Strangely, he couldn't hold an image of the woman in his mind.
Everywhere he flew, the inhabitants of Castle Stormweather scurried out of his way, falling over themselves to make obeisance to their master as he hastened to the defense of the fortress. At last, he surged up through the central tower and flew up above its roof. Desperately, he searched the battle-churned scene for his parents.
Dead guardsmen lay scattered over the roof, and among their bodies a score more fought on. Their opponents were elves armed with spears and swords. More of them descended from long dark ropes depending from an enormous creature floating overhead.
Skwalos, Tamlin remembered. Those are their tongues.
Beside the dangling tethers hovered more elves hurling magic down at the human defenders.
Another wave of elves joined those on the roof, but they were still outnumbered by the armored humans. Among the elves, Shamur fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Erevis Cale. Between them lay the slumped and bloody figure of Tamlin's father.
"No!" Tamlin screamed. Then, to his soldiers, "Stop! Fall back at once!"
No one heard his cries amid the clashing blades and exploding spells. He calmed himself and thought of the spell to enhance his voice. He spoke the word and blasted his voice to all within sight.
"Cease fighting! Fall back now! I call for truce!"
The warriors were slow to respond, but gradually they backed away from the elves. Tamlin looked all around to see that everyone was staring at him.
He felt highly vulnerable. Before he consciously decided he needed protection, his fingers were already tracing the glyphs and his lips already forming the arcane words.
He finished the spell just in time, as a pair of lightning bolts shot through him from points near the dangling tethers from the flying creature. He felt the hair on his neck rise, and his eyes burned from the flash, but he was little worse for the attack. Apparently the invulnerability he enjoyed in the Stormweather nexus was considerably less potent outside its walls. He followed the lingering afterimage of the bolts back to their origin, where an old elf woman and a younger elf man gestured toward him.
"Wait," he called. "Truce, I say. Let us hold a while and speak of terms."
"Never," shouted the young wizard who had attacked him. He pronounced his words precisely, as if they were the few he knew in the common tongue, and he'd practiced them often. "We will never surrender to you."
"Listen to him!" cried a sweet voice from below.
On the rooftop, amid the smoking carnage, stood a lithe brown elf with hair as dark as a still pool on a moonless night. She must have arrived by magic, for heaps of bodies blocked the path from the stairs.
Malaika, thought Tamlin. That's your name, but who exactly are you?
"I call for truce, not surrender," called Tamlin, wresting his gaze away from the beautiful elf. "Come, let us each tend to our wounded, and let us meet and speak of peace."
The elves hesitated, suspicious of a trick. One of them barked out a laugh so harsh that Tamlin couldn't imagine the sound emanating from an elf. Considering the cruelty Tamlin had witnessed in his dreams-or visions, as he was coming to think of them-he could hardly blame them.
"Here," he said, holding the winged scepter out before him. In it, he knew, lay the greater store of his warlike power. Without it, he could still hurl spells, but not endlessly. "I offer this as a token of good faith."
"Beware," warned the old woman mage.
Despite her warning, the younger wizard flew forward, hesitating only as he drew near his sorcerous adversary. Tamlin met the elf's gaze with his own, trying to show his honest intentions without seeming overeager. The young man snatched away the scepter and flew back to hover near the old woman, holding the weapon as triumphantly as if he'd wrested it from the foe. The old woman gazed curiously at Tamlin.
"We will recover our dead and tend our wounded," she said, "until the hour when we parlay. Name it."
"Dawn, two days hence," he said. "A time of new beginnings."
The Vermilion Guard lowered their weapons and turned to gape up at their master, allowing the elves to place their fallen on the long fronds from their creature-vessels. As the elves retreated, Tamlin flew down to his parents. Malaika met him there.
"My lord," she said. "You are wounded."
"Tend to my father first," he said.
Malaika started at the word "father." Her hopeful eyes lingered on Tamlin as she knelt beside the fallen man. She looked to his several wounds and pressed her hands upon the horrid sword-cut in his breast. She closed her eyes and raised her voice in song.
Tamlin moved to kneel beside her.
Shamur blocked his way, and a glowering Erevis Cale raised his sword to Tamlin's breast.
"Tamlin?" said Shamur. "How do we know it's really you?"
Tamlin struggled for a proof. "I don't know, Mother," he said. "Do you have any suggestions, Mister Pale?"
Cale shrugged and lowered his sword.
"That is good enough for me," he said, then he muttered something with the word "impudent" in it.
Shamur raised a hand to Tamlin's face and said, "When did you-?"
"I will tell you everything later. Now, we must look after Father and get back to Stormweather."
"He is dying," said Malaika.
"No," said Tamlin. "He can't be."
"He was wounded before the fight. His heart is failing."
"You must save him," said Tamlin.
"I cannot," she said. "Not here. He has the blood. You must take him back inside."
"What?"
"Do you remember where we met?"
"I don't… Malaika. It is you, isn't it? That's why I can't remember you."
She nodded sadly as she rose and put her hands to the wound in his back. She sang the ragged edges back together as he cast his own spell, conjuring a levitating, concave disc to convey his father down to the portal between the worlds.
Tamlin gestured to Cale to help him lift the Old Owl gently into the concave disc.
"What are you two talking about?" insisted Shamur.
"Mother, meet Stormweather. Stormweather, this is my mother. Now, let us hurry."
"Where is the elf woman?" asked Shamur. She looked around the Stormweather nexus with a disappointing lack of awe. Everyone except Malaika had arrived through the gateway in the Ineffable Vault and stood within the strange version of the mansion they called home. "I thought she was right behind us."