Kinshield's Redemption (Book 4) (4 page)

He waved her back down. “Bad dream. Go back to sleep.”

She pulled on her boots instead. “It’s almost sunrise. We might as well get started.” After climbing to her feet, she put one foot on Cirang’s hip and rocked her back and forth. Gavin cringed sympathetically, certain Daia was hurting her. He’d seen the scars from Ritol’s claws on Cirang’s hip and, judging from her limp, the damage was permanent.

Cirang awoke with a start and pushed Daia’s foot off. “Ouch! What did you do that for?”

“Get up. It’s time to go.”

“I would appreciate it if you found a different way to awaken me.” Cirang ran a hand over her unevenly chopped hair, brushing away the dried sprigs of bur grass.

Daia snorted. “Perhaps you’d prefer I stroke your face lovingly as I sing you awake?”

“You could wake me up like that,” Gavin said. He tried to smile, but his melancholy turned it into a grimace.

After a few hours’ ride, they reached the waterfall where the Flint River started. The gray and brown mountain rose up before them like a wild stallion rearing defiantly. A short distance to the north where the landslide had caused the leak in the wellspring, they dismounted and tied their horses’ reins to a tree. While Gavin would have liked to let Golam wander around to nibble the forest undergrowth, the horse had a tendency to get lost. Gavin turned his attention to the mountain, searching for the water that Cirang claimed was leaking from the Well of the Damned.

“Where’s this leak?” Daia asked.

“There,” Cirang said, pointing to the rock face. “Do you see that dark line?”

Gavin didn’t see it with his normal vision, but with his hidden eye, the source of his mystical vision, he saw a sparkling, vertical line, as if the mountain dripped flecks of glass like tears down its face. They stepped and stumbled over the pile of rubble that used to be the mountainside in order to get closer. Sure enough, a constant flow of water streamed down the rocks and spilled onto the ground. Beneath the leak was a sizable pool expanding outward with each passing moment.

“It’s flowing faster than before,” Cirang said. “When I was last here, it was only a steady drip.”

They stood back, careful not to stand in the puddle. “Don’t let the water touch you,” he said, “Just in case that’s all it takes.”

“Look. It starts way up there,” Daia said.

Gavin followed her pointing finger up the rock face towards the boulders on top that resembled an eagle preparing to take flight. Roughly three-quarters of the way up, perhaps a hundred yards, a line began, slightly darker than the soil around it. Cirang had said it was too high to climb to, but Gavin hadn’t understood how high that actually was.

“I wonder if it’d be easier to get to from the top.” With his magic, he could pull and push objects, which was how he planned to plug the leak, but from the ground, he couldn’t see well enough to know where to put the mortar.

“No,” his champion said sternly. “I can’t let you climb down that mountain. Besides, we haven’t any rope.”

He shot her an impatient look. “I wasn’t planning to climb down it, only to place the putty into the hole. I can’t get a good look at it from here.”

“The angle from above won’t give you a better view of it. It’s a sheer drop.”

“I can do it,” Cirang said. “I can climb down and tell you where to place the mortar. I used to climb the sheer cliffs north of Ivarr Ness as a girl, with waves crashing below.”

“Were you a girl?” he asked. “I thought you grew up a boy in Nilmaria.”

“I have the memories and skills of both Cirang and Tyr. Only the body belonged solely to Cirang, and it’s strong and fit, despite the limp.”

He wondered whether she offered so that when the job was done, she could simply let go and fall to her death. Although her haze was no longer the dark and turbulent one of the kho-bent person she’d been before drinking the water, something in it remained unsettled. It could have been guilt eating away at her, but until they fixed what she’d done to Feanna and the others, he wanted her alive.

“Well, you’re not climbing up there either,” he said. “I’ll just have to do my best.”

He lifted his mystical vision up into the air. Because the hidden eye wasn’t physically attached to his head like normal eyes were, its vision wasn’t limited to the physical scope of his body. Below, he saw Daia’s haze, clear blue with its unique orange tendril snaking out from its middle, and Cirang’s cloudy white one. He pushed the hidden eye towards the mountain and studied the spot where the glimmering water started to flow out from the rocks. On closer inspection, he saw it was an area about two feet in diameter where several trickles converged into a stream. He didn’t have enough putty to cover the entire area, so he would need to be precise about where to put globs of it.

He returned to his normal vision. “This isn’t going to be easy. I wish one o’you could use your hidden eye to guide me.” Everyone had a hidden eye, but few ever learned to use it.

“With my help,” Daia said, “could you do both? Use your hidden eye to help you place the putty?”

He’d never developed the ability to do two magical tasks at once. Even doing something as simple as riding his horse while using his hidden eye had been more trouble than it was worth. “It would be like standing on a shifting board while juggling knives. I don’t think I can.”

“It’s worth a try. You might surprise yourself, Gavin.”

He grinned. “You’re starting to sound like Edan.” He turned towards the tree-line where the horses were waiting, chose a pine cone, and pulled it with his will. It flew through the air, and he caught it one-handed. “Let me try with this afore we mix the mortar.” He felt nervous, unsure whether he could concentrate on both tasks simultaneously.
I can do this. I’m a mage now.

First, he pushed the pine cone from his palm into the air. It shot forward about a dozen feet before landing on the rocks with a soft crunch. “Oops. Too strong.” He’d pushed and pulled objects, but never had he tried balancing a push and a pull at the same time. This was harder than he expected. After a half hour of trial and error, he learned to hold it steady in the air. He practiced moving it up and down by gently pushing or pulling from below.

His head pounded from the exertion, but once he let the pine cone drop, his healing magic started lessening the pain. “That gave me a headache. Guess I’m not used to concentrating that hard.”

“Ravenkind used to get terrible headaches when he did certain kinds of magic,” Cirang said. “If he had good-quality gems, it wasn’t as bad, but if he didn’t, the headaches would send him to his bed for hours afterwards. You took that book from my secret cellar, remember? The one about spiritual consequences of practicing the dark magics? Have you read any of it?”

“No,” Daia said, “we were too busy trying to keep you from murdering people.”

Cirang’s face fell. “It’s a worthy treatise. I haven’t read the entire book, but what I’ve read suggests that magic is divided into two kinds: hard and soft. Soft magic is fueled by light life force, whereas hard magic is fueled by dark life force.”

Gavin raised his eyebrows. “Magic has khozhi?”

“Is that the same property as in people’s hazes?” Daia asked.

Gavin nodded. The Elyle hadn’t mentioned that the first time he’d visited the midrealm and learned about the khozhi. They’d only said sentient beings had it. No, that wasn’t quite true. They’d also said that emotions were kho or zhi. He wondered what else was governed by this balance of hard and soft.

After a moment’s rest, he started again. He had an idea. By envisioning his haze having two long arms to brace it, he found he could move it about more easily. Confidently, he shut his eyes and opened his hidden eye. The cone stayed right where it was.

“Got it,” he said. “Found a much easier way to handle it.”

“How’s the headache?” Daia asked.

“Not bad. The healing magic is making it bearable.” He swiped a finger under his nose. When his finger came away bloody, he wiped it surreptitiously on the pine cone before tossing it aside. “Awright, let’s mix up the mortar.”

Daia emptied the sand mixture from a bag into a stitched leather bowl and poured enough water from their water skins into it to mix it with a wooden spoon into a putty. Gavin used his hands to form it into five equal-sized balls.

More confident now, Gavin tossed one large ball of putty up and held it steady with his magic. Being heavier than the pine cone, it took more concentration. He needed to hurry—the putty would harden quickly. He pushed the putty ball up, slowly enough to control but quickly enough that within seconds it was about even with the source of the leak. Moving the putty into position was like trying to make a marionette juggle with his eyes closed. When it was hovering inches from the first leak, he slammed it into place. Rocks around it shifted, and a few fell, bouncing down the mountainside.

“Look out,” Cirang cried.

Daia grabbed him by the arm and pulled him backwards. He stumbled over the rocky slope and flailed to regain his balance. When he reopened his hidden eye, he saw that the leak had opened up, and the water flow was at least double what it had been. “Damn it to hell. I made it worse.”

“How did that happen?” Daia asked.

“I shoved the putty in too hard,” Gavin said. This wasn’t going to work. He needed a giant bucket of mortar to pour down the mountain from above, but unless he sprouted wings, that wasn’t a viable solution. To return with the mason and a wagon of mortar mixture would give the pooling water another three days to find its way to the Flint River.

“Next time,” Daia started, “just—”

“No, I can’t risk it again. We don’t have enough mortar to keep fixing bigger holes.”

“We can’t let it flow into the Flint or form a river of its own,” Cirang said, fear raising the pitch of her voice. “If it makes its way to Ambryce, the city will be lost.”

“Let me ask the Guardians for advice,” Gavin said.

Daia nodded, but Cirang’s mouth dropped open. “You’re going to pray for guidance? My liege, I respect your desire to worship in your own way, but this is a real-world crisis. We need a solution now, and gods aren’t exactly known to answer prayers swiftly.”

He shook his head as he started towards his horse. It would take only a moment to explain it to her, but this was a woman who’d used people’s own faith against them, including his wife’s. She didn’t deserve an explanation.

On Golam’s back, he started up the trail they’d taken a few days earlier, when he and his companions had been tracking Cirang after her escape. Curiosity had won over prudence then, and he’d wanted to see the supposed Well of the Enlightened. Cirang called it the Well of the Damned, which had a ring of truth to it. It wasn’t long before Gavin started to think of it that way too.

The two women battlers mounted and hurried after him.

Chapter 4

“Lord Edan? Might I have a word with you?”

Edan looked up from the agriculture report on his desk, thankful for the interruption. His eyelids had grown heavy, and his mind had begun to wander. Gavin’s eldest nephew, a tall boy with his father’s dark, wavy hair, stepped into his office, hands clasped behind him. “Of course, Jaesh. Come in. Make yourself comfortable. Is everything all right?”

Like his brothers and mother, Jaesh had taken his father’s murder hard. It didn’t help that Gavin looked so much like his brother, but if there was a benefit to Gavin’s absence, it was in giving Rogan’s family a reprieve from the constant reminder of their loss.

“Oh, yeh. I found this book in the upstairs library. It looks really old, and the ink’s faded on a lot o’the pages.” He took a seat in the plush chair opposite Edan’s desk, laying a dusty, brown tome upon his lap and caressing its cover.

Edan raised his brows, pleased yet surprised that the boy was taking such an interest in learning. By taking the initiative to look for gems in what they came to call the wall of pulp, a bookshelf full of loose papers and books in various states of disrepair, Jaesh was setting a fine example for his brothers and adopted cousins.

“I-I wasn’t snooping. I was looking for information about King Ivam for a report my teacher assigned.”

Edan chuckled. “Certainly, and I’m glad of it. There aren’t many intact books left up there, but I plan to begin sifting through that mess someday to find the ones worthy of restoration. It’s almost like a treasure hunt, isn’t it?”

“Yeh, almost.” Jaesh offered the old book to Edan. Its pages were wrinkled and discolored and its stitching loose within the tattered leather cover. Many pages had torn loose completely and sat between their adjacent sheets like prisoners awaiting their opportunity for escape. “It has names in it. People with the same given name as my papa and grandpa, and my name too. Are any of those people related to me?”

“Hmm,” Edan said, turning the pages carefully. The ink was so faded in the first three-quarters of the book that it was nearly impossible to read without careful scrutiny under a magnifying glass. Towards the back, however, was a list of names and dates, most faded beyond legibility, some quite clear. The names Rogan and Gavin stood out, as well as Cuttor and Jaesh, the names of the Kinshields Edan had known personally—or known of—though their surnames were listed as Beresfard.