“But the link between body, mind, and soul was and is more complex and delicate than we understood.” He shrugged.
Allta nodded, but whether in agreement or simple acknowledgment, Pellin couldn’t tell. “Then how could Mark succeed?”
Pellin eyed his guard. “How could a boy succeed in saving a dwimor when all the skills and effort of the Vigil failed? If you know enough to ask the question that way, then I suppose you know that answer already.”
“He loves her,” Allta said.
“Yes,” Pellin nodded. “I’ve suspected for some time that Mark held within him a capacity for such extravagance. It was his heart that guided him to Elieve’s rescue. Think of it, a young woman with no past, given a second chance at life.”
He turned to face his guard, surprised at the clarity of conviction that came upon him like a thief. “What is your primary purpose, Allta?”
“To safeguard the Vigil, no matter the cost.”
“Good.” Pellin nodded. “Then perhaps you will understand my next command in that context. You must keep Mark alive above all else. My heart tells me the future of the Vigil rests with him.”
“He does not hold the gift, Eldest.”
“A temporary deficiency that I intend to correct when the time is right. Do you understand and agree?”
Pellin waited until the growing silence coerced Allta into giving him one slow, grudging nod before he returned to his contemplation of the sea.
Chapter 8
In the days after Ealdor’s miraculous appearance and even more startling disappearance, Toria peppered me with questions and speculations as if I could divine meaning from Ealdor’s strange behavior. After the second day of her interrogations I took to greeting her with my bare arm extended, my offer to be delved plain.
Two times she accepted. After that it became pointless. Even Fess, new and cruelly young to the Vigil, delved me at Toria’s insistence. If I hadn’t been scared witless by Ealdor’s appearance and behavior, I would have wept at his solemnity. After the fifth day I changed my mode of greeting. When Toria and Fess passed me in the hallway, I said, “I don’t know,” as their lips parted to ask yet another question that I couldn’t answer.
Bolt kept his accustomed place at my side, but I hardly noticed. Somewhere in our expansive villa north of Cynestol, he’d lost his habit of dispensing soldierly wisdom. Perhaps Pellin’s sudden and unexplained disappearance, as though he’d become one of the Fayit himself, had something to do with it.
Wag seemed to care for nothing except when we might hunt next. His thoughts carried visions from his dam of running the border of the forest, his strides eating the ground until his paws hardly touched it. With Custos having returned to his research within the Vigil library in Cynestol, only Gael, ever and always Gael, sought my company. I could no more answer her questions than Toria Deel’s, and she trusted me enough to know that I’d said everything I would or could, but that didn’t keep her from asking them.
“What happened to him, Willet?”
Despite the events of almost a week past, she still had the power to shape my name in a way I felt with my skin as much as I heard with my ears.
I rolled my shoulders as if I could shed the weight of responsibility that rested there. “I don’t know. When I saw him in the Everwood, Ealdor looked perfectly normal.” Ironic laughter burst from me for an instant. “Normal for him, anyway. He didn’t leave footprints, and he managed to move through the church without disturbing any of the debris.” I shook my head. “But when I saw him in Bunard afterward, he did something he’s never done before. He walked through me to prove he existed only in my mind.”
“Why would he need to do that?” she asked.
I’d already had this conversation with Toria and Fess, but they hadn’t worded the question exactly that way. We’d taken the question of how to bring him back and had pounded away at it until nothing remained, but we’d never asked what Ealdor needed. I came to a stop, afraid that if I kept walking I might lose the opportunity to see . . . something.
“Need,” I said. “Suppose Ealdor needed me to believe he wasn’t real.” I shook my head. “But why? I believed he was real for years before Bronwyn took me to his church and showed me it was impossible.” Even now, I could feel the absence of my friend like a hollow place in my chest. “In all the years of celebrating haeling and confession I was as certain of his reality as I was my own.”
Gael nodded. “What changed?”
I thought back. “The Everwood.” The answer might have come from someone else’s lips it was so quiet. “He told me something I didn’t know.” I looked at Gael, at the glorious shining blue of her eyes and gave voice to the insubstantial thread of intuition that ghosted through my mind. “I think Ealdor broke the rules when he told me about the bation leaves.”
She nodded. Gael knew the sequence of events from that point nearly as well as I. Without the bation leaves to keep Wag alive, we would have never been able to track Cesla to Vaerwold, where the only remaining witness to Elwin’s murder was being held. Only Branna had survived the string of killings in Bunard that had wiped out those who could identify Elwin’s killer.
“We’re almost back where we started,” I said. “Cesla is alive, and knowing that was so important that one of the Fayit was willing to risk . . .” I stopped. “What? What’s he risking?”
“His life?” Gael asked.
“Or worse,” I said. “Maybe he’s risking his existence. You saw him. He wasn’t dying, he was fading, as if he couldn’t hold on to himself anymore.”
“It couldn’t have been the first time he broke the rules,” Bolt said.
I turned, surprised to find him leaning against the wall, but of course he’d never left. “What do
