Keir (29 page)

“As you wish.”

The crystal fell silent. The Emissary squeezed it until it splintered and a small shower of glittering particles trickled from his fingers to fall as shimmering dust to the floor.

* * * *

Twilight brought yet another surprise. As daylight dwindled, several small lanterns lit the house inside and out. Keir was sitting in the kitchen as the lights came on and dropped the guide to the table in shock. The sudden clatter startled a gasp from Quin before she shifted it to a nervous giggle.

“Sorry,” Keir muttered, feeling somewhat foolish as he retrieved the device and checked it for possible damage.

“Don’t worry.” She laid a plate of food before him. “The lights surprised me too. Now eat.”

Quin had done her best with the dried provisions supplied, creating something edible, if bland, for their evening meal. “We’ll have to put the field guide to good use tomorrow,” she suggested as they finished eating. “Try to save the packets for future use.”

“You think we will be here a long time.”

“I think that’s the intention. Once we’ve found some food, we should explore the island. See if there are others nearby.”

“We could build a raft, if they are close enough,” Keir suggested.

The prospect gave him a shiver of excitement. He remembered a summer’s morning spent watching the stable lads building one from emptied barrels and broken boards in the courtyard below his apartment. They had returned later that same day, drenched and battered with their craft apparently wrecked, but the shrill laughter and chatter of their adventure had filled his ears and left him longing to do the same.

“That will take time.” Quin sighed. “We’ve no idea where we are, or where we’re going. There might be people looking for us, and we won’t know who’s friend or foe.”

“So do you intend to wait and see who comes for us here?”

“No! I’d rather try to reach the palace and open the gateway home.”

“What about a gateway from here?” It struck Keir as odd that the idea had not already occurred to her.

“I can’t open one here. I don’t have the power,” she confessed. “The gateway room on Lyagnius is special.”

“Special, how?”

“There’s a power source built into it. Don’t ask me how it works, because I really don’t know. Sky would probably be able to explain it. I can open a gateway from there to anywhere, but I can only take the same path back again. I can’t open a new one. Besides, even if I had the power, my control isn’t that perfect. It’s unlikely I’d make one home. Not on the first attempt anyway.”

“I did not realize.” Keir stirred the last few grains left on his plate in thought, surprised by her admission.

“It isn’t something I tell people. Why give away all my secrets? Especially a weakness.”

“How did you learn? Could you always open them?” He stared at her curiously. His own attempt had been done in such desperation he found it hard to recall the details. He knew he had taken the knowledge straight from her mind, but the understanding of the process failed him.

Quin dropped her gaze. “Darion taught me,” she told him, her voice so quiet he barely caught the words.

Keir sensed her pain and dropped the subject, instead rising to clear their empty plates. Even thinking of her husband caused her deep sorrow, and he had no wish to make her suffer with it as R’hellek had.

“We should get some sleep,” she suggested, once he had cleared away the dishes.

He followed her through to the bedroom with reluctance, his heart pounding so fiercely it felt as though someone was pummeling his chest with mailed fists while also attempting to yank out his stomach.

Without preamble, Quin lifted the netting aside and lay down facing the window. Keir hesitated, uncertain as to the etiquette of it all. Relationships with anyone were a closed book to him–his parents had made an uneasy, often volatile, alliance during his childhood. And what opportunity had he had since to learn?

Quin had already made herself comfortable and seemed oblivious to his dilemma, or else ignored it deliberately. He climbed into bed on the other side and lay on his back, arms folded across his stomach as he stared up at the ceiling. The long timbers of the roof ran in thin bands the length of the room, the golden wood veiled by the sheet of netting strung above. Painfully conscious of the warmth of Quin’s presence and the sound of her breathing over the thunder of his own heart, he closed his eyes and prayed the morning would come swiftly.

When Keir woke to the pale glow of dawn, Quin had already gone. He used their link to find her. She had gone to the waterfall to replenish the empty water bottles from the day before. If he concentrated, he could catch a glimpse of what she saw and feel something of what she felt–images of flowing water and the sense of early morning air. The scent of greenery crushed underfoot and a faint floral perfume from the blue flowers lining the water’s edge. It tugged a smile onto his face to share those things with her, but he quickly closed the contact. What right had he to trespass in her head like that?

And yet a few moments later he found himself there again. A song danced through her head and with it a fleeting image of a green-eyed man who held out a hand to Quin.

Darion.

He snatched himself away. More than any, that was a memory he should not intrude upon. Anxious to do something equally practical, he took the field guide out among the trees to search for fresh food. He soon found a patch of fruit bushes that were not only safe but in season. He made a holder out of the end of his top and filled it with elongated purple fruits the length of his thumb, returning his bounty to the kitchen before venturing out a second time with a small digging blade in hand. Closer to their temporary home, he found and began to dig up some tubers he recognized from an image in the guide.

After shoveling a mound of the black earth aside, he tossed the trowel behind him and dug with his fingers around the tangled roots. Inside the dirt, something moved, and Keir yanked back his hand. From behind his feet, he retrieved the trowel and prodded the moving shapes. A writhing worm-like creature went into a coiling paroxysm at his assault, and with a deft twist he flicked it from the hole and watched it slither off among the greenery.

The deep earth gave up its gifts with reluctance. Hard nodular shapes showed red beneath the coating of soil and a cluster of thread-like roots. By the time he arrived back at the hut, he was thickly covered in dirt, and Quin had returned from her own tasks.

“What happened to you?” she asked, a slight frown of concern creasing her face and her wet hair hanging in dark tangles.

Keir lifted his makeshift bag of treasure and she grinned her approval.

“Not bad,” she smirked, “but you didn’t have to bring the dirt back with you.”

Keir looked down at himself, smeared from shoulder to waist in mud where the sweat of his labors had mixed with the island’s black soil. “I will go and wash,” he promised, grinning back at her. He deposited his finds on the veranda to be cleaned and headed inside.

* * * *

Quin found herself staring appreciatively at his back–sweat had made his shirt cling tightly to the expanse of muscle–and caught her breath. Embarrassed, she forced her gaze aside and busied herself with the results of their foraging, hoping to hide her blushes as he fetched clean clothing from the bedroom.

“Can you give me the guide?” she asked as he emerged, keeping her eyes averted. “I found some berries on the way back that I need to look up.”

He passed the device to her as he stepped off the veranda and headed for the pool, oblivious to her admiring gaze as she found herself unable to resist another look. The dappled light of the bamboo forest played off the muscles of his arms and the twisted black lines of his tattoos, and she realized with a start she was holding her breath.

“Behave yourself, Quin,” she told herself reprovingly, but could not stop herself from staring until he had vanished from sight.

Using a bottle of water to rinse off the tubers, she cleaned them before storing them in the kitchen. She brushed her hair through with her fingers, then knotted it at the back of her head before preparing breakfast, taking a thorough inventory of their stores as she did so. Keir returned scrubbed clean and dressed in gray, and hung his washed top on the veranda to drip dry.

They ate quickly, packed food and water, and set off to explore. The small mountain on the western side of the island blocked their outlook in that direction, even when they ventured to its base in the hope of a better view. Quin decided that the only alternative was to climb it, if that was possible without any proper gear. ‘Mountain’ was probably a misnomer, Quin mused. It was more a ragged black fragment of one. The seaward side of it had been sheared off in the past, perhaps by the ravages of the waves that crashed against its feet. The lower two-thirds lay swathed and hidden in foliage, making it impossible to see anything other than the path in front of their feet but providing an easier climb with plenty of greenery for handholds. They spent the morning zigzagging up the eastern side, making steady progress through the undergrowth despite its thickness.

Hot, sweating and tired, they stopped to eat and drink in the shade when the sun stood directly overhead–their only guide to the passage of time. They waited until it moved to the other side of the mountain to leave them in cool shadow before starting off again. With all their energy focused on hiking as far as possible before nightfall, they walked in silence.

It was early evening when they struggled above the tree line and reached the more difficult, rockier terrain. Their island lay stretched out below them. The curved crescent of the bay where they had been deposited merged into a wide band of trees. A ridge rock formed a black spine along the centre of the island, from the farthest tip of the crescent to the mountain on which they stood. From this angle, access to the north shore looked difficult, if not impossible by land.

Beyond their small island, empty sea stretched to the horizon in all three visible directions. Quin felt her spirits sag. Their options were seriously limited by this discovery. Not only did it commit them to climbing to the very summit of the mountain, but a difficult and dangerous ascent might lead to nothing if no land lay to the west.

Quin squatted back on her heels, gazing out across the island. The adrenalin of the climb was wearing off and unease burrowed into her chest. Would they be forced to remain here and await their captors’ return? Or was their strange imprisonment a punishment in itself, with no set term for release?

* * * *

Keir followed her gaze, her expression stern as if reprimanding the island for its lack of nearby companions. Threads of bitter disappointment brushed his mind even through his shields but he found himself unable to share her feelings. He found it beautiful here, with lush and colorful plant life in all directions and a sea bluer than Adalucien’s–although he had never spent much time near it. It was warmer here too. Even summer on his own world had had its chill winds and cold nights, especially for him, out in the darkness and alone. Here, it was peaceful and picturesque and he found himself imagining what it would be like to stay.

“It is a beautiful place,” Quin murmured.

Keir snapped out of his reverie, unaware that his thoughts had been so audible. He sat beside her, still admiring the view even as he sensed her disquiet.

“Perhaps one day, we could come back here,” he suggested. “This is a good place. I would like to live somewhere like this.” He looked at her sidelong and saw the frown etched on her face. “But I do not believe you would.”

Quin sighed, resting her arms across her knees and leaning her head on them as she continued to stare out to sea. She used the fingers of one hand to wipe away the strands of hair plastered to her face by the sweat of their climb.

“When I first started traveling,” she said distantly, “I had no choice. I was thrown through one gateway, and fell through another. With my home destroyed, I started searching for Ryan because I felt I owed him that. Darion gave me a reason to make somewhere a home, but then I lost him too. I’ve lost so much along the way, and yet I can’t stop.”

“Do you really want to?”

“If I had a reason, I would.”

“Like what?”

Quin hugged her knees tightly. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I feel so trapped here. It is a truly wonderful place, Keir, but to me it still feels like a prison. I feel that time is wasting away, and that we’re in danger. All I can think of is ‘why?’”

Keir could feel her desperation growing, a sense of impending disaster that drove her on. “What about tomorrow, when we reach the top? There may be nothing beyond the mountain.”

“Then I’ll have to get used to the idea, won’t I?” she said, her tone flat. She went through her bag, pulling out two packets and handing one to him. “I think these are cereal bars, or something similar. It’s too late to start a fire. Trying to find wood up here in twilight will be too dangerous.”

Keir nodded his agreement and accepted the packet, eating in silence. Already it was difficult to see as the sun set behind the mountain, leaving them caught in its ever-deepening shadow. The chill of it seemed to steal the last traces of tropical heat from their camp, yet neither complained. They sat and watched the stars come out, fiercely brilliant in the dark sky, and listened to the rushing of the sea far below.