‘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.’