said. 'We may begin.'
'Come and sit down, Kellen,' Idalia said in a low voice, indicating the empty chair beside her. Reluctantly, Kellen took his seat. He still wasn't entirely sure why he was here, and he felt incredibly grubby and out of place. They were probably all staring at him, wondering what the gardener was doing here. He and Idalia were the only ones wearing ordinary clothing, and she wasn't sweaty and filthy from work in the forest.
For a moment all of them regarded one another without speaking.
'I have found the source of your problem,' Idalia said at last. 'I know why nothing the Elves have done has broken the drought.'
There was a stir of consternation from the Elves, and Kellen wondered why Idalia didn't just come out and say it, if she had the answer. But she almost seemed to be hesitating, as if when she gave that answer, it would change everything, and not for the better.
'Someone has created a kind of magical dam or diversion in the mountains to the north, forcing the natural weather patterns to shift. To the north of here, the high desert is getting soaked with what ought to be Sentarshadeen's rainfall, as the clouds pile against an ethereal barrier created by baneful magic. This does as little good to the desert and its inhabitants as the drought does to the Elvenkind. And while that barrier remains, no drop of rain will reach Sentarshadeen.'
Suddenly it seemed as if all of the Elves wanted to talk at once-Andoreniel held up his hand for silence.
'If you know who is causing this, Idalia, you must tell us,' he said gently.
'I'd hoped I was wrong, but I'm not,' Idalia said, still unwilling to come to the point. 'I made very sure of my facts before I came to you, Andoreniel. But there can be no possible doubt. Shadow Mountain wakens again. It is they who have caused your drought.'
The name meant nothing to Kellen, but the Elves all recoiled as if Idalia had just emptied a basket of poisonous snakes onto the center of the table.
'Now that I know what's wrong, I can craft a spell to fix it,' she said, hurrying on, before any of them could break their shocked silence. 'It will be tricky work and demand a very high price—'
'Of course we will pay it, Idalia!' Andoreniel interrupted staunchly—'All the price, if we can, yours and our own. Only show us how.'
Idalia smiled wanly. She looked exhausted, Kellen thought, more so than he had ever seen her, and if there was still spellcasting to be done, her work had hardly begun.
'I will,' she promised. 'If I could not count on the cooperation of all of you, the task would be doomed to failure before it began. But I told you this wouldn't be a simple matter, and it isn't. I can craft the spell here, but it can't be cast here. It will have to be placed in a keystone which will have to be formed by magic. That much I can do, with your help—Then the keystone has to be carried to the place where the Barrier is, and triggered there to release the counterspell—by a second Wildmage.' She glanced toward Kellen for a moment. 'Naturally, it will be Kellen who goes into the mountains with the keystone.'
Me? Kellen did his best not to look as stunned as he felt, and hoped he succeeded.
'But surely you should go instead, Idalia.' One of the Elven councilors seated beside Morusil spoke up for the first time. 'Kellen is barely more than a child.'
'Perhaps in Elven terms, Tyendimarquen,' Idalia answered—rather sharply, Kellen thought. 'But he is equal to this challenge and I would gladly trust my life to him. And you will have to, because I will be needed here. Once Shadow Mountain's spell is broken there will be storms across the land such as perhaps even you have never seen. And when the spell-dam is broken and the rains come, I will have to be here in Sentarshadeen to call the weather back into its normal patterns once more, and shelter the city from flood and wind. Unless you want Sentarshadeen to drown instead of wither away, you'll need me to guide the weather from the moment the Barrier breaks, and I do not know when that will be. Or you can start building boats.'
Kellen barely heard the rest of what Idalia was saying. He'd been stunned at first at the notion that he'd been chosen to perform this vital task. He'd gotten used to following Idalia around for so long that it was a shock to think of going off alone to do something so important. What if he failed?
But now that it was starting to sink in, he was excited. And proud. And relieved, in a way, because there finally was something he could do, something constructive, something more than carrying buckets.
And something that Elves can't …
He couldn't help that thought, but there it was. Elves couldn't do this; Elves couldn't be Wildmages. Of all of the folk here in Sentarshadeen, only he and Idalia could do this. And Idalia was needed here. She'd said so. And that left him.
He could do this—he knew he could. Idalia wouldn't have chosen him if she didn't think he could. At last, here was something he could do because he was a Wildmage, something he could do that no one else could!
