“So get in your cars,” said Danny, “and get away from here.”
“I thought that was what we’d do if we said no,” said Laurette.
“I don’t want Hermia’s people to know about you. Not yet. Go. You’re my friends. Your intervention worked. We’ve told you everything that we know. We didn’t pretty it up. And you chose to stand with me. So the first thing is, if I say get out of here, you get out. So they can’t use you as hostages to control me.”
They nodded.
“Don’t act like drowthers,” said Hermia impatiently. “He doesn’t want nodding. He wants going!”
And with that, Danny gated them all, one at a time, out to the cars.
After a moment of disorientation and confusion, they scrambled into the cars and drove away.
“That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” asked Hermia. “You wanted me to tell them, right?”
“I didn’t know that’s what I wanted until you did it,” said Danny. “But yes. They asked for the truth. They’re not children, they’re people. They deserve to have the knowledge to choose for themselves.”
“They made a stupid decision,” said Hermia.
“True,” said Danny. “But all the decisions are stupid. I’ve made nothing but stupid decisions. You too.”
Hermia grinned. “When there aren’t any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.”
“Your Family is coming, right?” asked Danny.
“I can’t imagine they’re not.”
“Then it’s time to move to a different location,” said Danny.
“It’s time for me to move to one place, and you to another,” said Hermia. “Until we’re ready to set up the meeting we want. Because they’ll always know where I am, and we don’t want them to know where you are.”
So Danny gated Hermia to a place she knew in Paris. Then he wrote a note to the Greeks and left it on the table in his own little house in Buena Vista.
“I will let you send two people through a Great Gate,” said the note. “Go home and wait for my messenger. After today, anybody from any Family who comes to this town will be sent to the Moon. Leave now.”
Danny opened the front door, so they wouldn’t have to break it down. No reason for the landlord to lose money.
Then Danny gated to Washington, DC, then on to Staunton, to Lexington, and then to Naples, Florida, gathering in his gates behind him so they couldn’t trace him if they happened to have a Gatesniffer that Hermia didn’t know about.
Veevee knew at once that he had come through a gate into her condo. She came up from the beach through the gate he had left there for her. “Just in time for the season finale of The Good Wife,” she said.
“Is that a TV show?” asked Danny.
“It’s pure fantasy,” she said. “There are no good wives.”
“What about good husbands?” asked Danny.
“We’ll see-when you grow up. Want a sandwich?”
“I’ll make my own,” he said. “We told all my friends about what I can do.”
“Well, that was selfish and stupid of you.”
“They insisted,” said Danny.
“That was stupid of them, but they didn’t know what they were asking. You have no excuse.”
“I know,” said Danny. “But other people are going to be involved whether we like it or not. Might as well have some of them on our team, on purpose, by their own choice.”
Veevee shrugged, then laughed. “It’s going to be so entertaining, to see how this all comes out. Right up to the moment when everything goes up in smoke.”
“We’re gods,” said Danny. “What could go wrong?”
4
Wad was so very old that even his own grief and rage could not hold him deeply, not for long. The being who had dwelt inside a tree for fourteen centuries, watching for only one thing, a gate between worlds, was not fully engaged in being a human being, not yet, perhaps not ever.
Wad was a watcher above all. Yes, he had been taken as the lover of a queen. Yes, he had loved his son, had tried to protect him, and then had been outwitted by his lover, his enemy, Queen Bexoi, and his son was dead. Yes, he had imprisoned an innocent woman and her sons, then set them free. Surely this qualified as having been truly alive.
But Wad was still watching. Not only seeing what lay outside himself, as he had done creeping through the castle at Kamesham, but also what was happening inside himself, where his gatesense lay.
In his early life as Loki, and then for centuries as the Gate Thief, Wad had captured and held the gates of other mages, but never had a gate of his own been taken from him. So he had not understood what it was like to have his outself captive in another mage’s hearthoard.
Of course it was well known what happened to other mages when their outself was taken captive. How they lay inert, comatose, waiting for their wandering self to return.
But they were not gatemages. Their outselves were usually indivisible. Only the greatest of mages could control multiple clants or ride several heartbeasts at once-and even they suffered from the self-division.
Gatemages, though, were divisible by nature. They could leave bits of themselves here and there forever, as gates that others could use, always aware of where they were, but never putting their whole attention into any one gate.
Which is why, when Wad stole all the gates from mage after mage, he did not leave their bodies empty and helpless. They were able to continue their lives almost normally. Wad had therefore believed that he had done them no real harm. They were still themselves, still alive and aware, still able to control their own bodies.
He had not understood.
When the new Gatefather from Mittlegard stole most of Wad’s gates from his hearthoard, including all the gates that Wad had stolen from others over the years, at first Wad could only think about the handful of gates that he still had under his own control. He had used those gates to save Anonoei, King Prayard’s concubine, and her two sons, Eluik and Enopp. He still had some power. He was still a mage.
But now, without an urgent task, he realized what he had not understood before. More of the gatemage is in his gates than Wad had ever supposed. For he was still aware of his stolen gates. He still knew exactly where they were. He felt them all the time. He just couldn’t do anything with them.
Yet, like the outself of a beastmage, riding with the heartbeast, or like a clant raised from plants or stones or sand or water or fire, his stolen gates were aware, alert, sensing what the possessor of the gates was doing, seeing, hearing.
And the longer Wad concentrated on his stolen gates, the more he was able to get glimpses of what the other gatemage wanted, what he planned, what he needed, what he hungered for. It was not quite words; always the words remained just out of reach. Unless this thief, this Gatefather, this Danny North spoke his thoughts aloud, Wad could not gather them up and study them. But as surely as if he were a beastmage, Wad could feel the inner longings of this man-no, this boy.
He could not change anything, could not take control of him-Danny North was master, and there was not enough of Wad within his captured gates for him to hope to take control. The deepest self of a gatemage was not in his outselves, the way it was with other kinds of mages. This was why gatemages could raise no clants. But the gates were still a part of him, and so now he was a part of Danny North.
And all the gates that Wad had stolen over the centuries, they had felt the same. The mages were not as strong as Wad, and so perhaps they had not felt themselves inside him as clearly as Wad now felt himself inside Danny North. But they must have been aware.
And because Wad had lived on and on inside the tree, the captured gates had not faded and died after their mages died. They were all still alive.