Toward Ealdor’s home.
“I’m sorry, Ealdor,” I said to the air. “Too much has been lost. We don’t know enough to summon you according to your rules.”
Though I suspected my friend had a flair for the dramatic, this time he didn’t make me wait, and he didn’t step from the shadows. He simply appeared.
I pointed to the stole around his neck, the tattered purple one he wore whenever we celebrated haeling together. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” I said. “Why does it look like that? Even the poorest priest keeps his stole in pristine condition.”
He gave me a smile, his blue eyes twinkling with mirth and more emotions than I could put a name to. “Do you really want me to expend myself on that question, Willet?”
Surprised laughter came from me almost before I realized it. “Even that?”
He sobered, as though his usual levity had become a burden. “I could tell you what you need to know, but you need to see what happened. The rest of the Vigil can delve any of you for the story.”
I delayed. “This is it, isn’t it. You won’t be able to come back anymore.”
A rueful smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Any question I answer will detract from what I’m about to show you, Willet.” He sighed. “It will be brief, too brief, but I’ll show you all as much as I can.”
My eyes stung. “I’m sorry, Ealdor.”
The inside of my head exploded into a chiaroscuro of light and sound, but first I heard Ealdor’s voice.
Chapter 46
“Among the Fayit there were those of us who could sense ripples in time, echoes of the future reaching into the past,” Ealdor whispered into my mind. “That inexplicable gift from Aer made me a general when the war broke out. When you came into the forest and when Cailin came after, I felt something in you, a pull from times yet to come that said you would be needed. Perhaps I was just lonely. Millennia ago I stood on the edge of eternity and swore I could bear my solitude, believing my desire for retribution would be enough to sustain me. I was wrong. Time is an implacable torturer.”
Tremors still rolled through the deep places of the earth like waves upon the ocean, reminders of cataclysm and war that had fractured the continent. Ealdor strode from the ruined halls with his lieutenants at his side—brothers in spirit, if not by blood—only two at the last.
“Is everything ready?” His voice came harsher than he intended, but grief and ruinous victory clogged his soul as the dust of annihilation filled his lungs. Across the far reaches of their world, nothing remained but ruins.
The fellow priest on his left, who owned the title of the Dara, second priest of Aer, dipped his head and reached out with his bare hand, tempting Ealdor to laughter. Dark in the way of the south, the Dara’s height lent elegance even to ordinary gestures. Ealdor sighed. What mattered their manners and deference now, when all was unmade? He thought of the centuries ahead and the long, long grieving yet to come and hungered for speech, as if he could somehow keep sorrow at bay for a moment longer.
“In words, please,” Ealdor said as the Dara’s thoughts began to convey themselves into his mind.
“As you wish, Altera.” Even to the end they used their titles of the priesthood rather than names. The Dara’s voice, oddly melodious in the midst of gray choking dust, almost had the power to banish visions of countless dead and destruction. How did one mourn the death of an entire world?
“The last prison is ready.” His fellow priest paused. “Your brother and his wife are waiting there for you.”
“Why?” Ealdor asked.
The Fayit on his right, similarly titled the Trian, the third priest of Aer, answered in a voice deep and resonant enough to match his bulk. “He’s your brother, Altera. He wanted to see you once more.” And as he always did, the Trian went on, striving for a deeper meaning that lay beyond the mundane. “Cuman knows that your positions could easily have been reversed, had Gretan survived the last attack.”
Ealdor stopped, his feet slipping a bit in the dust and ruins, to bow his respects to the name of his dead wife. Would she have desired Cuman’s choice? For a moment grief and doubt overwhelmed him, and he stumbled to find solid footing in the debris around his feet.
“Where have you placed the prison?” he asked. Thinking about his dead wife or the long duty that lay before him served no purpose. He and his lieutenants, bereaved priests like himself, would undertake the peace as they had the long, long war, by shouldering the burden one day at a time until all had been accomplished.
“Two hundred leagues northwest,” the Trian said. “As far away from the quakes as we could manage. There’s a slip in the earth where the soil runs nearly half a league deep.”
“I pray that it holds forever,” the Dara said.
Ealdor nodded, but until recently, distinctions of time had held no meaning. For the barest fraction of an instant he sensed the infinite branchings of possibility that overwhelmed him with countless outcomes of a distant future. One stood out from the rest, but it failed to resolve. He shivered. Aer had spoken to him.
“I pray that it does as well,” he said, but out loud his voice carried the hollow timbre of doubt.
The Dara and the Trian, ever perceptive, bowed to him as they sketched the profession of belief on their forehead—a single vertical line intersected by a horizontal. “What did you see, Altera?”
Ealdor, weary, waved at the air with one hand. The smell of dust and debris filled his nose. “I sensed a possibility, an impression only, too distant to resolve.”
“Good,” the Trian said.
“How so?” the Dara asked. “Aer has hinted at a future purpose that
