“I’ll take you to a place that I believe will be as safe as anywhere on Westil. More than that I can’t promise. I won’t be there to watch. It’s the best I can do.”
In the end, had they a choice? They gathered their few possessions, and Wad made a public gate for them, and they stepped through it, one by one.
Anonoei watched them do it, she and her sons.
Wad turned to her, when the last of Roop’s and Levet’s family had gone. “Now you know what it looks like,” he said.
“Going through a gate?” Anonoei asked. “I have fallen through the gate of my prison a hundred times.”
“What trust looks like,” said Wad.
“They’re not mages,” said Anonoei. “What choices do they have?”
“I don’t know what powers those children might have, and for all I know the father has some power with vegetables, or the mother a way with snakes. They have choices, as many as you have.”
Anonoei laughed. “I have as few as they, you’re right,” she said. “Perhaps they seemed weak to me because they love each other.”
It was such a shocking thing to say that Wad had no answer for her.
“I lived too long at court,” said Anonoei. “I have seen people owned, desired, and coveted, and I have seen people used, but few were loved, and few were loving.”
“You love your sons,” said Wad.
“I barely know my poor broken children,” said Anonoei, resting one hand on Enopp’s head, the other on Eluik’s shoulder. “Aren’t you going to follow those farm folk, and introduce them and the treemage to each other?”
“He’ll know who they are because they came through the gate, and they’ll know him because the gate has led them straight to him.”
“What if they come back through the gate?” asked Anonoei.
“The gate is gone. I took it back. I husband my gates carefully these days,” said Wad. “A few are all I have. You see, the Gate Thief got the rest.”
She looked at him sharply. “You said that you-”
“I was the Gate Thief for a thousand years or so,” said Wad. “I burgled one hearthoard too many. I am punished now, and the punishment is just.”
Wad turned to Eluik, who was not looking at him. “Whatever you are or might become,” said Wad, “passing through a Great Gate will strengthen you.” But the older boy gave no sign of hearing.
“He’s still singing to himself,” said Enopp.
Wad and Anonoei waited for the younger boy to explain.
“Alone in the cave, with all the falling,” said Enopp. “We sang to ourselves.”
Wad wondered if Enopp had some connection with his brother that allowed him to know what he was doing during their many months of isolation.
“That’s what you did, is it?” asked Anonoei.
“Of course,” said Enopp. “I sang every song I knew. You should have taught me more of them, Mother.”
“I’m glad you’re not still singing them now,” she said.
“Oh, I am,” said Enopp. “I hear them all the time. I just don’t listen to them. Eluik does, though. He’s still trying to understand the words.”
“But they’re all in plain language,” said Anonoei.
“Not the words of the songs,” said Enopp impatiently. “The words beneath the songs.”
“What words are those?” asked Wad.
“I didn’t understand them either, not at first, but I was little. There were many words I didn’t understand, when I was little.”
The words beneath the songs. Wad thought he might have some idea what words those were, and who spoke them. The gates that held the prisoner, that surrounded them-they were connected to Wad, to his hearthoard. To the place where the thousand gates of other mages were imprisoned. They had shouted all the time, Wad hardly heard them. But it was possible that these voices carried with the gates. That an isolated child, with nothing else to occupy him, might have heard something. Especially if there were gates in his own hearthoard, gates that he was yet too young to use. But the captive gates cried out to the captive boy, and if he was a gatemage himself, he would have heard them in the same way that Wad, at the height of his powers a millennium ago, could sense the location and the owner of every gate in two worlds.
Wad took the boy by his hand. “Would you like to come with me and your mother now?”
“And my brother,” said Enopp.
“Him too,” said Wad.
“Of course,” said Enopp. “It’s good to be out of the cave. Eluik is even happier than I am. He’s eager to go with you.”
Again Wad looked from the younger boy to the silent elder one. If Eluik objected to his little brother’s speaking for him, he gave no sign.
Enopp took his older brother’s hand, and Anonoei held him on the other side. Wad passed a gatemouth over them, and they were standing in the stone circle where the Wild Gate now shone plainly, obvious for anyone to see and use. It was good that the place was scarcely inhabited, that people shunned it. Stone circles were shrines no longer. Since the Great Gates were taken, they were regarded as dark places of ill fortune. They were avoided. All to the good. But that could not last forever. Someone would figure it out.
“Don’t let go of hands,” said Wad. And then, after a breath, he stepped through.
The Great Gate swallowed up the four of them, and they were standing in a barn, with cows around. A woman was attaching a machine to the udders of a cow.
“Is someone expecting you?” she asked politely, in a heavily accented version of the ancient language of West Ylly Way. Wad understood her, because he had already spoken to Danny North and Ced. There was no hope that her words would mean a thing to Anonoei.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” Enopp answered her, imitating her accent.
Another sign the boy might grow into a gatemage, to have a knack for languages.
“I’ve come to speak with Danny North,” said Wad.
“He isn’t here,” said the woman, turning her back.
Angry at this stranger for such treatment, Wad gated to the other side of her. But before he could speak to her, a cow kicked him hard in the leg. He cried out and fell, then passed a gate over himself.
“The only way to punish a gatemage,” said the woman, “is to take him by surprise.”
“Punish me for what!”
“I know who you are, Gate Thief,” said the woman. “I told him never to bring you to Mittlegard, yet here you are. Do you think because you have these darling children with you, I won’t hurt you? Especially the damaged one-why did you bring him here, except to protect you from me?”
“I didn’t know you were here,” said Wad, “and I don’t know who you are.”
“She’s my wife,” said a man’s voice. And in that moment, Wad was falling into a crevice in the Earth. Not a wide one, but it was enough to swallow him.
Wad gated to the loft of the barn. “I’ll never die by falling,” said Wad.
“Didn’t my wife inform you that our stepson is away?”
“He’ll be here,” said Wad.
“How can you be sure of that?” asked the woman.
“Because he’s been sensitized by passage through a Great Gate. He knows when someone passes through any gate in the world.”
That was when Danny North strode through the open door into the barn.
13
Danny was getting dressed for another morning practice when he felt it: Something had happened at the Wild Gate.
He stopped pulling on his running shorts, froze in position. The feeling didn’t come again. He tried to think what he had actually experienced. It came from that portion of his outself that was entwined in the Great Gate in the Silvermans’ barn.
It felt like when Veevee or Hermia passed through his gates. Only far stronger.
Why? Because it was a Great Gate?
Because it was more than one person going through a gate at once.
He had felt it before when his friends went through his first Great Gate, but had not been able to think about it then because he was immediately engaged with the Gate Thief.