It was incredible how someone could misread the past.
A banner in the hall swayed with a draft of wind. A single metallic cuckoo squawked above, from somewhere near the now-uncovered entrance to the balcony.
Misread the past.
I felt the memory of the dark, the brush of a wing. I smelled perfume and decay. For a moment the room around me blurred. Then it returned. The lights were even brighter, the colors more intense. It had fallen into place, that memory.
“Bayard, quickly! What was that prophecy of yours?”
“This is no time for mysticism!” Sir Robert stormed. “By the horns of Kiri-Jolith, I shall hang myself before I let another Path warden clear the threshold of my house!” Sir Ramiro grabbed his old friend and wrestled him away from. me.
“Please, Bayard! I’m sure it’s important!”
Bayard spoke after a silence in which the big, torch-lit room seemed even more vast, even more desolate.
“As I have learned it from my young days of exploring the library at Palanthas, the prophecy went so:
With that, he paused, having aired the future and found it confusing. We all faced each other, standing at the sides of one of Sir Robert’s long and elegant tables. Somewhere in the depths of the keep a mechanical whir and a whistle burst forth, then silence.
A strange look of puzzlement took residence in the face of each Knight.
Then, of course, they looked at me, as if I were a disinterested observer, or someone capable of telling true prophecy from false.
“Honestly, sirs. It’s in there somewhere. I’m sure.”
“Listen again, Galen.” Bayard insisted. “Maybe there’s something I’ve missed all along, something so obvious it would take a child to notice.”
Not a very flattering reason to ask my opinion, but I listened nonetheless, as the same tired old verses rushed over me, filled with their puzzles and wooden rhymes. I sat in Sir Robert’s enormous ceremonial chair, dangled my feet over the edge, jostled the dice in the pouch of my tunic.
The Knights stood attentively after the recital, waiting for my judgment, my answer. I squirmed and huddled at the back of the chair.
“For Huma’s sake, boy,” Sir Robert began testily, “your protector is not in a bardic contest here! We’re trying to recover my daughter, and we’re looking for clues, not reveling in bad rhymes!”
“If you please, sir, I am just over a near-fatal fever,” I began, but Bayard interrupted.
“Begging your pardon, Sir Robert, but I don’t think the boy is playing literary games.”
He turned to me and continued, kindly but urgently.
“Go on, Galen.”
“It’s what the Scorpion said. Or didn’t say. I don’t think he ever said that the prophecy was wrong, just that you were wrong about it, Bayard. Indeed, now that I think on it, I believe . . . no, I am absolutely certain, he said that there was more than one way to read it!
“So the question becomes not how you’ve been reading it all these years, Bayard, but how the Scorpion’s been reading it.”
I had always wondered if anything Gileandos had taught me would come in handy. Taking a deep breath and rising from the chair, I launched myself onto the dreadful paths of conjecture, pacing back and forth in front of the assembled Knights.
“Look, it all comes from something he said to me about his ‘own bright blade.’ Apparently, he thinks that if Bayard isn’t the bright blade of the prophecy, then it’s a real blade indeed.”
I turned again to Sir Robert.
“As I told you, sir, he said that before he threatened to kill your daughter.”
“So?”
“So he’s trying to lift a curse, too. Look, he certainly doesn’t like returning from the dead to gnaw at your family tree once every generation. I don’t think he has much of a choice.”
“I don’t follow,” said Sir Robert, walking toward his chair and sitting down. “We don’t invite him back. He is, after all, our curse.”
“And you are his!” Brithelm exclaimed, and I could see from his expression that he was catching on to what I was after. “After all, the two Gabriels deep in the di Caela past didn’t play fairly with old Benedict. One disinherited him, the other—regardless of what the di Caelas say about slaying him in battle and all—defeated him at the Throtyl Gap, then pursued him east to the pass at Chaktamir and killed him.”
Sir Robert nodded.
“Very well. The Pathwardens are right about the family . . . mishap four centuries back. It’s embarrassing—indeed, almost dishonorable—what Gabriel the Elder and Gabriel the Younger did, but I don’t see why we need to haul that skeleton from the family closet.”
“Because the skeleton has hauled itself out and is visiting the family once every generation, Robert!” Sir Ramiro replied with a low chuckle.
“Very well! Very well! What does it have to do with the prophecy, damn it!” Sir Robert snapped.
“The di Caelas are Benedict’s curse just as much as he is theirs,” Brithelm responded. “And he thinks that what he’s doing will free him and destroy the family who has wounded him.”
Sir Robert leaned back in the chair and fell silent. Again a cuckoo whirred somewhere on the ground floor of the castle. Outside, thunder rolled, and I could feel a closeness, a prospect of rain, gather in the air.
“Could the Scorpion be right?” Sir Robert asked evenly, locking his hands behind his head and staring up at the balcony. “Are we, not the Scorpion, the curse?”
“We’ll have to go to Chaktamir to find out, sir,” I replied.
“Chaktamir?”
“Remember what the prophecy says?” I asked. “‘When things have reached their darkest pass’?”
Sir Robert nodded distantly, his mind still on the prospect of prophecy turned around, of the foretold end of the di Caelas. Wearily he shook himself from his musings, rose to his full patrician height, and paced across the room.
“I can’t imagine things any darker than this,” he declared.
“But maybe it doesn’t just mean ‘things have reached their worst state,’ Sir Robert. Maybe whoever wrote the prophecy had in mind a real pass through real mountains.”
Sir Robert paused and took that in. Distant thunder rumbled once again.
“Perhaps. But how do you know it’s Chaktamir, Galen? Why not somewhere in the Garnet Mountains, or the Throtyl Gap?”
“I don’t know, sir. At least not for sure. But it adds up, doesn’t it? The pass at Chaktamir is dark to begin with because folks seldom use it any more, after Enric’s battle with the men of Neraka. It’s dark with Solamnic and Nerakan blood.
“Dark with Benedict’s blood, for that matter. After all, Gabriel the Younger caught up with him in the pass at Chaktamir.
“Finally, it’s dark because your history has made it dark. If the story is spread that Benedict died in the Throtyl Gap, then it’s easy to believe he died in battle, rather than in some shabby and questionable di Caela hunt.
“I’d say the darkest pass by any reading is Chaktamir, Sir Robert. And I believe that’s where you’ll find the Scorpion. And find your daughter.”
I looked about me. Brithelm was smiling, seated in a hard, high-backed chair, feet propped up on a table. Sir Ledyard and Sir Ramiro stood at either side of Sir Robert di Caela. Both these strange new Knights were nodding—agreeing with me. Bayard stared at me, his face impassive.