“I have to go after him,” Par said into her shoulder, feeling her stiffen at the words. “I have to try to help him.” He shook his head despairingly. “I know it means breaking my promise to go back for Padishar. But Colls my brother.”
She moved so that she could see his face. Her eyes searched his and did not look away. “You’ve made up your mind about this, haven’t you?” She looked terrified. “This is probably a trap, you know.”
His smile was bitter. “I know.”
She blinked rapidly. “And I can’t come with you.”
“I know that, too. You have to continue on to Firerim Reach and get help for your father. I understand.”
There were tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want to leave you either.”
“Are you sure it was Coll? Absolutely sure?”
“As sure as I am that I love you, Damson.”
She brought her arms about him again. She didn’t speak, but buried her face in his shoulder. He could feel her crying. He could feel himself breaking apart inside. The euphoria of finding Paranor was gone, the discovery itself all but forgotten. The sense of peace and contentment he had experienced so briefly on getting free of Tyrsis was buried in his past.
He pulled away again. “I’ll come back to you,” he said quietly. “Wherever you are, I’ll find you.”
She bit at her lower lip, nodding. Then she fumbled through her clothing, reaching down the front of her tunic. A moment later she pulled forth a thin, flat metal disk with a hole in it through which a leather cord had been threaded and then tied about her neck. She looked at the disk a moment, then at him.
“This is called a Skree,” she said. “It is a kind of magic, a street magic. It was given to me a long time ago.” There was fire in the look she gave him. “It can only be used once.”
Then she took the disk in both hands and snapped it in two as easily as she might a brittle stick. She handed the loose half to him. “Take it and bind it about your neck. Wear it always. The halves will seek each other out. When the metal glows, it will tell us we are close. The brighter it becomes, the closer we will be.”
She pressed the broken half of the disk into his hands. “That is how I will find you again, Par. And I will never stop looking.”
He closed his fingers about the disk. He felt as if a pit had opened beneath him and was about to swallow him up. “I’m sorry, Damson,” he whispered. “I don’t want to do this. I would keep my promise if I could. But Colls alive, and I can’t—”
“No.” She put her fingers against his lips to silence him. “Don’t say anything more. I understand. I love you.”
He kissed her and held her against him, memorizing the touch and feel of her until he was certain the memory was burned into him. Then he released her, retrieved the scabbard for the Sword, picked up his blanket, rolled it up, and slung it over his shoulder.
“I’ll come back to you,” he repeated. “I promise I will.”
She nodded without speaking and would not look away, so he turned from her instead and hurried off into the trees.
Chapter Eight
It was nearing midafternoon of the day following the separation of Par and Damson when Morgan Leah at last came in sight of the borderland city of Varfleet. The summer was drifting toward autumn now, and the days were long and slow and filled with heat that arrived with the sun and lingered on until well after dark. The Highlander stood on a rise north of the city and looked down at the jumble of buildings and crooked streets and thought that nothing would ever be the same for him again.
It had been more than two weeks since he had parted company with Walker Boh—the Dark Uncle gone in search of Paranor, the Black Elfstone his key to the gates of time and distance that locked away the castle of the Druids, and the Highlander come looking for Padishar Creel and the Ohmsford brothers.
Two weeks. Morgan sighed. He should have reached Varfleet in two days, even afoot. But then nothing much seemed to work out the way he expected it these days.
What had befallen him was ironic considering what he had survived during the weeks immediately preceding. On leaving Walker, he had followed the Dragon’s Teeth south along the western edge of the Rabb. He reached the lower branch of its namesake river by sunset of his second day out and made camp close-by, intent on crossing at sunrise and completing his journey the next day. The plains were sweltering and dusty, and there were pockets of the same sickness that marked the Four Lands everywhere, patches of blight where everything was poisoned. He thought that he had avoided these, that he had kept well clear in his passing. But when he woke at dawn on that third morning he was hot and feverish and so dizzy that he could barely walk. He drank some water and lay down again, hoping the sickness would pass. But by midday he was barely able to sit up. He forced himself to his feet, recognizing then how sick he was, knowing it was necessary that he find help immediately. His stomach was cramping so badly he could not straighten up, and his throat was on fire. He did not feel strong enough to cross the river, so instead he wandered upstream onto the plains. He was hallucinating when he came upon a farmhouse settled in a shady grove of elm. He staggered to the door, barely able to move or even speak, and collapsed when it opened.
For seven days he slept, drifting in and out of consciousness just long enough to eat and drink the small portions of food and water he was offered by whoever it was who had taken him in. He did not see any faces, and the voices he heard were indistinct. He was delirious at times, thrashing and crying out, reliving the horrors of Eldwist and Uhl Belk, seeing over and over again the stricken face of Quickening as she lay dying, feeling again the anguish he had experienced as he stood helplessly by. Sometimes he saw Par and Coll Ohmsford as they called to him from a great distance, and always he found that try as he might he could not reach them. There were dark things in his dreams as well, faceless shadows that came at him unexpectedly and from behind, presences without names, unmistakable nevertheless for who and what they were. He ran from them, hid from them, tried desperately to fight back against them—but always they stayed just out of his reach, threatening in ways he could not identify but could only imagine.
His fever broke at the end of the first week. When at last he was able to open his eyes and focus on the young couple who had cared for him, he saw in their faces an obvious relief and realized how close he had come to not waking at all. His sickness had left him drained of strength, and for several days after he had to be fed by hand. He managed to stay awake for short periods and to speak a little when he did. The young wife with the straw-blond hair and the pale blue eyes looked after him while her husband worked in the fields, and she smiled with concern when she told him that his dreams must have been bad ones. She gave him soup and bread with water and a small ration of ale. He accepted it gratefully and thanked her repeatedly for looking after him. Sometimes her husband would appear, standing next to her and looking down at him, bluff and red-faced from the sun, with kind eyes and a broad smile. He mentioned once that Morgan’s sword was safely put aside, that it had not been lost. Apparently that had been part of the nightmares as well.
At the end of the two weeks Morgan was taking his meals with them at their dinner table, growing stronger daily, close to returning to normal. His memories lingered, however—the feeling of pain and nausea, the sense of helplessness, the fear that the sickness was the door to the darkness that would come at the end of his life. The memories stayed, for Morgan had come close to dying too often in the past few weeks to be able to put them aside easily. He was marked by what he had experienced and endured as surely as if scarred in battle, and even the farmer and his wife could see in his eyes and face what had been done to him. They never asked for an explanation, but they could see.