“How nice of you to admire me from such a distance,” said Danny. But his father’s words of praise filled him with light and brought tears to his eyes.
We human beings are such machines, thought Danny. All the emotions are available at the flip of a switch. Predictable as robots.
“Danny,” said Mama. “I get it that you hate us. I do understand it.”
But Danny didn’t hate them. He was angry with them, had been hurt by them, but no, he didn’t hate them. After everything, all he really wanted was his mother’s affection and his father’s approval. Now they were offering exactly what he wanted. Only these things had been so long withheld that Danny refused to trust the fulfillment of his longing.
“Whatever you want from me,” said Danny, “I don’t have it. Or if I do, it’s not for you, not anymore.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” said Mama.
“I told her not to expect anything better than this,” said Baba.
For a moment, hearing such finality in Baba’s voice, Danny believed that this whole meeting had been a trap. That, having failed to win him over, they would now unleash whatever assassination they had planned for him.
So he gated fifteen feet away.
Mother burst into tears.
“We aren’t going to betray you,” said Baba coldly. “How could we, even if we wanted to?”
“Let’s go, Alf,” said Mama.
“Yes,” said Baba. He led her away toward the family pickup-which looked even more beaten-up now, having spent a short time buried in a crevice in the earth.
Watching them walk toward the truck, Danny saw them for the first time, not as the crafty leaders of a group of ruthless mages, but as a middle-aged man and woman, weary of everything, having been repudiated by the ungrateful son who blamed them for having done only what was possible for him, and nothing more.
Danny passed a gate over them. He did it smoothly, carefully. They did not miss a stride. If they felt anything, he would have been surprised. But their steps looked younger, not so tired as they continued to the truck and got inside. He did not wish to punish them. He had thought he did, but now he felt no such desire. He just wanted to stop wanting them to love him. Because now they were saying that they did, and he was hungry to believe them; but they had so many motives to lie that he could not trust a word they said or a thing they did.
12
Wad and Anonoei were back and forth about what to do with the boys. Eluik and Enopp were young and powerless, but they were the most valuable prize. Without these two sons of King Prayard, potential heirs, Anonoei herself had no leverage in the kingdom. Her personal powers were unsuspected, a necessity for a manmage who wished to stay alive. Only the boys mattered.
Anonoei wanted them kept safe at all costs. So, for that matter, did Wad. But what constituted their safety was where they disagreed.
“You say it’s not even your own gate, not under your control,” said Anonoei.
“It’s not under anyone’s control at the moment,” said Wad, “but it exists. It works. There is no danger from the gate. Do you think I’d deceive you about such a thing, when I mean to make the passage with you?”
“When they’re needed, we’ll need them here,” said Anonoei. “Who is King Prayard in Mittlegard? What protection will being his sons offer them there?”
“More to the point,” said Wad, “their father’s nothingness in Mittlegard will be their protection. No one in Mittlegard has any reason to want them dead, or any motive to capture them. They’ll have the safety of being nobody. While here, everything depends on your being able to trust whomever you leave them with. Who is that person?”
Anonoei named several, but Wad had spent too long as the castle monkey, seeing what everyone did in their private moments. He told sadly true tales about every man and woman that she mentioned. She was soon near tears. “I never had friends,” she said.
“No one has friends,” said Wad. “I was as true a friend to Bexoi as anyone has ever had. But I kept you alive when she wanted you dead.”
“For reasons of your own,” said Anonoei.
“I made no claim of generosity,” said Wad. “I make none now. But I want your sons alive, and I will trust strangers on Mittlegard more than anyone known to you in Iceway or anywhere on Westil.”
“Then I’ll stay here myself, watch over them, and wait for you,” said Anonoei.
Wad rehearsed the facts to her yet again. How their magical arrival in this high mountain village could not have gone unnoticed. The story would spread, had already spread, would soon float down the Graybourn until it came to the capital city, Kamesham, and then to the castle, Nassassa. There would be no lack of wits in either place, and soon they would put together the woman and two boys who appeared in the high mountains at just the time when a woman and two boys vanished from caves in the cliff face below the castle while soldiers of Prayard attempted to kill them.
“I’m not leaving you here to die,” said Wad. “I’ll need to move these people who took you in as well, or they’ll surely be tortured to find out information that they do not have.”
“By ‘here’ I didn’t mean I would stay in this very village. I meant here on Westil, here where we don’t have to pass through any gates.”
“Stop wasting my time with fears as ridiculous as this. If you were really afraid, you’d try to use your manmagic on me, to get me to comply with your will. But you don’t, so clearly you don’t mean it.”
“Would my manmagic work on you?”
“Until I realized what was happening and gated away, of course it would. I appreciate your showing me the respect of not trying. Likewise, if I wanted to I could gate you and your boys against your will to the mouth of the Great Gate and push you through, and you couldn’t do a thing about it. Instead, I’m talking to you, because I’ve treated you as pawns and captives long enough.”
“I’ve heard what happens to gates,” said Anonoei.
“What have you heard? How could you hear anything? There hasn’t been a gate on Westil, except of my making, for more than fourteen centuries.”
“There have been gates,” said Anonoei. “Everyone knows the stories. A gatemage learns to go from here to there, and then suddenly the Gate Thief comes and takes them all away. What if that happens while we’re-”
“Haven’t you understood anything, woman?” demanded Wad. “I’m the Gate Thief. Me. That’s why I could keep you locked up behind my gates for more than a year, and no one took the gates from me.”
“If you’re the Gate Thief-and yes, I understood you, but why should I pay attention to such ridiculous brag? — then you must have been alive for more than a thousand years. You, a mere boy-”
“Why would anyone bother to become immortal in an old body?” asked Wad. “But I’m not immortal. I was in a tree. More precisely, a treemage persuaded a tree to let me gate into the living treeflesh between the bark and the dry wood. There I made the tiniest of gates, which moved me slowly upward through the tree, rising with me, rising far more slowly than a fingernail grows. Passing through a gate heals you. I healed myself, I healed the tree, minute by minute, day by day, year by year. The tree lived and I lived, never aging, never ill. And I watched. Every gate that was made, I sensed. At first my powers were magnificently strong, as yours will be if you ever make up your mind to go through a Great Gate. But that boost in power fades with time. I had to watch ever more closely, concentrate ever more tightly. My outselves roamed the world, alert, watching. After the first five hundred years, I sensed nothing from Mittlegard; after the second thousand, gates on Westil were like a distant whisper, except for the making of a Great Gate. That was like a shout, as the gates entwined and roped and rose into the sky. Then I reached out and swallowed them. That’s your Gate Thief. The husk of an ancient man, kept alive within a tree, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, only an endless watchfulness for the making of a Great Gate, with only the captured gates of long-dead mages to keep me company.”