“Greetings, Willet.”
Ealdor didn’t walk out of the shadows this time. Maybe he’d decided to surrender that pretense, or maybe he just didn’t like the shadows here. At any rate, he appeared on the top step, sitting next to me as if he’d been there all along.
A beam of sunlight from a jagged hole in the roof illuminated my old friend, but I could see a stone buttress through his right shoulder, as though the little church, ruined as it was, possessed a substantiality that he did not. “You’re fading.”
He shrugged, and the buttress behind him waved like grass in a pond. “No one lives forever.” My friend paused for a moment, considering. “At least so far.”
Something in his manner, the diffidence combined with the slightest hitch in his voice, told me this was more than jesting. “Are you telling me someone is immortal? Who is it?”
He met my gaze, and his eyes held a depth of sorrow that all my misfortune couldn’t hope to match. “You know the rules, Willet.”
I nodded. “You can only tell me what I already know. Alright, is there any wiggle room in this rule?”
He put out his hand to catch a stray beam of sunlight, and I saw light on the floor beneath his arm. “Evidently not,” I sighed. “Then I won’t ask you any questions.”
I groped for what to say, hesitant to push my friend into forbidden territory. “You broke the rules when you came to us in Edring,” I said, my eyes stinging. “I’m sorry, Ealdor. I’m so sorry. Custos told us that we needed a circle, and I didn’t even try to put one together. I just called you.”
Ealdor nodded, and bit of sunlight flared behind his eyes, making them appear lit from within. “That was a mistake, but it was mine, not yours.”
“But I saw you,” I said. “You would have stayed if you could.” I paused. What I was about to say, I didn’t know, but strongly suspected. Would the rules allow him to confirm my intuition? “But if you’d stayed, you would have faded completely.”
Ealdor eyed me for a moment, and I reminded myself that he wasn’t really there in the church with me, but in my thoughts. I could almost feel him rummaging around in my head before he answered. “Yes. The rules are severe.”
“Who made them?” I asked before I could catch myself and thrust my hand out to keep him from answering.
“You don’t have enough information yet to puzzle that one out, Willet. Take a step back.”
I shook my head. “It’s impossible. There are too many questions screaming at me. I don’t know which ones are important, much less which ones I can figure out.”
“You’re a reeve.”
“Was a reeve,” I corrected.
Ealdor smiled. “I’m not talking about your profession or circumstances, Willet. I’m talking about your nature.” He sobered, and something unimaginably desperate hollowed out his gaze. “Please. There’s more at stake here than you can know.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and held up a hand in forbidding. “That’s not helping.” I took a pair of deep breaths that made me shudder as they came and went. I was rolling the bones with my friend’s life and countless others. “Alright, let’s go back to the beginning. Something has gotten loose from the Darkwater,” I said. “Cesla said he came to a lake and stood on metal. And he delved it.”
Ealdor nodded once, slowly.
I pulled a memory from my first conversation with Custos about my gift, how the ancients had described it as tunneling, like someone mining. The first commandment said not to delve the deep places of the earth. “It’s the same word for both, tunneling and delving.” Then I had it. “It’s a prison. The Darkwater is a prison, and when Cesla delved it, something inside the prison sensed it and took him.” I pushed myself off the dais, the room in the air too thick to breathe. Ealdor didn’t flinch. “Oh, Aer help us. That was why we weren’t supposed to delve the deep places of the earth. It was never about silver or gold, it was to keep whatever was locked in the Darkwater Forest from getting out.”
I stopped my frantic pacing. Something about that last bit didn’t ring quite true. “No.” I shook my head as if I could deny the disaster that was about to fall on the world. “If that was true, then there would be no need to continue luring people to the forest.” A memory of Myle holding a sliver of metal near a harp came to me. “Aurium. The prison is made of aurium, and whatever is inside isn’t truly free until the prison is breached.”
I sat down, horror draining the strength from my legs. I spat a curse. “Cesla. What kind of arrogance makes a man break the most basic commandment of the liturgy?”
Ealdor shrugged. “You already know the answer, Willet. Cesla placed his own ideas and inspiration above the liturgy. Perhaps he thought Aer had given him a new commandment.”
With an effort, I pulled my thoughts back from Cesla and his stupidity and concentrated on the clues that were in front of me. “It’s not hopeless,” I said looking at Ealdor. “If it was, there would be no point to you showing up.” An unexpected flare of hope blossomed somewhere in my chest—small, but there. “There’s a way for us to win.” Just as quickly, it guttered and died. “But if you can’t tell us, how will we find it?”
Ealdor stilled. “Let me point out two things you already know. Cesla is no longer himself. He is
