Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel (9 page)

Gareth turned away to look at the horizon, black starred silk against black velvet, and pulled on his gloves, for the mountain air was chilly. Neither he nor Ivor had told Jandi they’d served on Ping’s ship before they’d met her in Mulmaster.

Gareth found himself wondering if Ivor would tell her, now that she’d thrown her lot in with pirates.

“Yes, I suppose,” he said at last. “You can’t avoid stepping on every ant. And maybe you did injure something in using the Key, but it’s over now, and they’ll likely forget.”

“Yes, very likely.” Jandi’s voice told him she wasn’t so sure. She swayed again.

“Careful of the edge,” said Gareth, guiding her to a stone knob. She didn’t sit but leaned on it, still twisting the torque in her hand.

“Are you all right?” He glanced at the rock beneath their feet and wondered if he was imagining the ambient green glow that seemed to cling to the contours of the rough stone. “Did … did it work?” He tried not to sound too eager.

She nodded wearily. “It worked, possibly in more ways than we’ll ever know. But your palace is warded to you, and I wish you the joy of it.”

He looked at the dull metal she wound between her fingers like a snake. Tentatively he reached out for it.

“Shouldn’t I—shouldn’t I hold that?”

Startled, she looked at him, then down at the torque.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But … do you mind if I hold it a while longer?”

Reluctantly he pulled back his hand.

“It’s drained me,” she said. “But now it’s over, I feel some of my strength return. And I’d like—I’d like to find out if it can give me any more information before you take it back.”

She looked down at it, brooding.

“I’d like to find out whom I’ve hurt. May I? Just for a while. I’ll give it back tonight.”

Suddenly Gareth longed for the brisk walk down and a slap of cool water on his face at the base of the Fist.

“Come on, then,” he said, taking her elbow. “Dinner and your sweetheart below, and then you can tinker with that Key as long as you like.”

Jandi made it down the rough-hewn stairway unaided, but Ivor persuaded her to mount the donkey for the short trek back to their campsite at the old oak. The donkey grumbled, but Jandi was light and there wasn’t far to go. She kept turning the bracelet over in her hands, and every once in a while the mark on her cheek shone green.

“We’ll need a name for it,” said Gareth to the company in general.

“A name for what?” replied Ivor as Jandi and the donkey were silent.

Gareth gestured with his thumb over his shoulder at the monolith.

“That,” he said. “The Giant’s Fist is an unwieldy name for a trading headquarters.”

“I have a name for you,” said Ivor with a suspicious glance backward. “Jadaren’s Folly.”

B
etween the lacework of the oak’s branches, Jandi, staring at the sky darkening from lavender to purple, stretched her neck before looking back down at the torque in her lap. The
presence
she’d felt while warding the Fist—or the Hold, as Gareth decided to call it on the hike back to the campsite—was gone, but the memory lingered of a great intelligence imprisoned, all too aware of its confinement. It gave her the unpleasant feeling of seeing a forgotten pet in a cage, staring at her with dumb, tortured eyes, mired with filth and too big for its shackles.

Ivor had ventured under the forest’s canopy to restock their wood, taking the donkey with him (“I should’ve thought of that yesternight,” Gareth had remarked), and Gareth was down by the stream, trying to trap a dove or some quail as a change from dried meat. Birds twittered in the elms, and if Jandi listened carefully, she could hear the distant chatter of the stream.

She didn’t hear the shadowed figure behind her, nor did she know the danger she was in until the thick leather cord snapped around her neck and was pulled tight. Jandi’s eyes opened wide and her hands flew instinctively to her throat, but her assailant’s fingers were strong. Jandi tried to wrest the garrote from her neck, but the leather bit deep into her flesh. She reached behind her head to try to grasp her attacker’s wrists and pull them away. But exhausted from the day’s work, she only batted weakly at the wiry forearms that twisted the cord ever tighter.

Desperately, Jandi tried to suck in air—to fill her lungs and call for help, speak a spell of protection, to live—but her windpipe was wrenched shut. She moved her lips, but no sound came out. The fire before her turned red as the blood beat behind her eyes, and black splotches floated before her. Her throat was on fire, and she felt as if her chest was going to explode. She could hear only the roar of her own heartbeat, desperate and fast, in her ears.

Finding her last reserve of strength, she bucked against the hard ground, thrusting against the figure behind her. The cruel grip loosened for a second, and she frantically drew in what air she could. She tried to focus, to make her will into a Key and unlock her assailant’s body.

She couldn’t do it. Her assailant recovered and pulled the cord tighter, cutting off her breath for good. Jandi struggled limply a few more seconds, but her vision was blacked out now, with only a few spots of light floating in front of her, and the pressure on her throat hurt like a raw wound. The fire in her breast was fading, and she didn’t even want to fight anymore. The roar in her ears slowed and faded until she could hear each individual
thump-bump
, slower and slower, weaker and weaker. Her heartbeat faded, faltered, and stopped.

Jandi was lying on the wet grass, her eyes glazed open, although she saw nothing, a black beyond the darkest night before her eyes. Something seemed to stir inside that blackness, something huge and malevolent. She was paralyzed, as in the terror of a waking dream when nightmare forces advance and the dreamer is powerless to move.

The presence, whatever it was, was made of darkness itself and was therefore invisible, but still she knew it shifted its thick, coiled body, raised its immense bulk, and considered her. Despair filled her as she sensed it gloating.

It was Bane or one of his servants. It did no good to flee Mulmaster and the dreadful bargains with the Dark Lord brewing there. He had hunted her down, and in her death he would take her.

Then, in the center of the blackness, came a spot of light—not the bright painful sparks she saw in her death struggle, but a gentle glow like a hearth fire. It strengthened and lengthened, a long thin oval, and she felt the invisible malevolence retreat, sullen and reluctant. The light grew brighter, until it was almost painful to look at. Then it blazed so brightly that she was as blinded by the light as she had been before by the darkness.

Jandi tried to blink, but her eyes remained open. She was faintly aware of her body, stiff and cooling, in the long grass, the campfire falling apart and dying before her.

She was supposed to keep the fire burning, wasn’t she? She tried to remember who had told her that.

The light faded until it no longer pained her eyes, and the shape in the middle shifted and resolved itself into
the tall and long-legged figure of a woman. Jandi watched with a detached curiosity as the woman approached and kneeled beside her.

The woman tilted her head and considered her. She wore a garment of some river-green fabric that flowed about her as if a breeze were blowing, and her scarlet hair was cropped close beneath her ears. Her eyes, a slightly darker green than her dress, were almond shaped.

The woman smiled suddenly, and her smile was like sunshine on Jandi’s cold flesh. Reaching out, she stroked Jandi’s hair, and her gentle touch broke the icy grip that kept her limbs frozen.

She blinked rapidly. The woman’s elfin features came into focus, and the blaze of light faded until she could see the grass she lay in, the trees beyond, and the dying, stone-banked fire before her. Everything was imbued with a golden, illuminated quality, as if the light had flowed into the landscape instead of dying away.

Jandi flexed her stiff limbs and found she could sit up effortlessly, although the movement made her dizzy. The woman rose and stood over her, still smiling.

“Who are you?” Jandi whispered, expecting her throat to hurt and surprised that it did not.

The woman reached out a long-fingered hand, and Jandi took it.

“You can call me Mandira for now,” she said in a voice that had the tremble of silver bells in it, pulling Jandi to her feet, and seeming to expend no effort doing it. Indeed, Jandi felt as if she were floating.

“I don’t remember …” she began, then, looking down, saw the crumpled body at her feet. The pale face with the
blue lips looked familiar, the eyes slightly protruding and staring at nothing. She had the impression of an insubstantial figure bending over the body.

“I don’t understand,” she concluded.

Mandira still had her hand, a touch so light she could barely feel it.

“You will in time,” she said. “But now you have a choice. You can stay here, tied to the flesh and its memories. Or you can come with me, and dwell a while in Brightwater’s gentle realm.”

The red-headed woman tugged her hand, the slightest of tugs, and Jandi let herself be pulled away one step, then two.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m waiting for someone. I’m waiting for …”

Ivor
. The name was a whisper in her mind. The woman smiled sadly at her, and Jandi knew she’d somehow heard it.

“It’s a cruel thing,” she said. “To be struck down when love is fragile and new, uncurling like a butterfly from its cocoon. Flesh is mortal and love is not.”

She tugged her hand again. “The lady grants this mercy, because love had found a home in your heart. You may find a home, for a while, with her. You may refuse. You may stay with this body, and see your lover grieve. You may haunt this place, searching ceaselessly for what you can no longer have while your body rots beneath the ground. It is your choice.”

Jandi glanced once more at the body. It seemed a thing utterly alien, nothing to do with her, and now it was fading like a face in the twilight. She saw a small circlet of dull metal beside the body, with a haze of sickly green about it.
She felt she should remember something about it, but the memory slipped away like a scarf in the wind.

The oak tree beyond the body was glowing now, its bark burnished gold. The forest beyond faded from view as well, save for individual trees scattered here and there that glowed with the same golden light as the oak. She could see their roots branching beneath the ground, and their leaves were amber and jade.

Jandi made her decision and looked deep into the woman’s eyes, drowning in emerald. The light from the trees grew more intense, until there was nothing but brightness and the distant sound of water.

A tall woman kneeled over the body of the young mage, not loosening the braided cord around her neck until she was sure she was dead. Finally, the woman released her grip and looped the garrote neatly, tucking it into her belt. The moon emerged from behind the clouds, illuminating a lean face with a thick red scar twisting the corner of the left eye and marring the cheek to the jawbone. She pressed two fingers beneath the still girl’s jawline, trying to detect any trace of a pulse.

Satisfied on that point, she plucked a bracelet from the grass. It had tumbled from the girl’s lap in her final struggle. She examined it. It wasn’t silver or gold, and the three red stones embedded in it weren’t rubies or even garnets. She tossed it away like a piece of trash, then rose to her feet.

She didn’t see the bracelet twitch a couple times, elongating and flattening until it became a long chain of links, which crept, snakelike, through the grass and coiled around the dead mage’s limp arm.