I shook my head. “Are you two done?” I looked back the church. “The glad tidings are that we can win. Ealdor wouldn’t have come to us otherwise.”
Bolt nodded, but his eyes were hooded, suspicious. “And the ill?”
“He can’t tell us how. The rules binding his existence forbid him from answering our questions unless we can satisfy the strictures of summoning. That means assembling a circle of perfect gifts or talents. If he tries to break the rules again, he may disappear completely.” I pulled a shaky breath. “He’s lost so much of himself already.”
Gael’s hair lifted in the breeze, mirroring her frustration. “That’s not overly helpful. That leaves us to guessing. We could spend lifetimes trying to find a way to fight the Darkwater.”
“If it were impossible, he wouldn’t have come to me,” I said. “And we won’t have to guess Cesla’s intentions. Whatever has gotten loose from the forest will strike at whatever threatens him most.”
“Kreppa,” Bolt said. “And we’re supposed to magically interpret that into some course of action?” He shook his head in disgust. “‘When your enemy dictates the course of war, you’ve lost.’”
I recognized his military adage from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. “Whose is that?”
“Magius, one of the generals who fought Agin and lost in the Gift of Kings War.”
“That’s not exactly heartening to know,” I said. The Vigil’s answer to Agin had been to create something new, the dwimor, assassins who couldn’t be seen except by children. Whatever had taken Cesla had gained access to that knowledge. Three times I’d almost been killed by people I couldn’t see when they were right in front of me.
Chapter 10
We didn’t speak much on the road back to Edring, consigned as we were to waiting for Cesla’s next strike before plotting our course of action. For reasons I couldn’t quite define, I didn’t make mention of Ealdor’s question about how I knew his name. That it carried unimaginable importance, I couldn’t deny; Ealdor had risked and lost some of his nebulous existence to ask it. Yet it wasn’t the loss of a bit more of his presence that scared me so much as the implications of the obvious, terrifying answer.
If Pellin, with over seven hundred years of existence and experience with the gift couldn’t find the memory of learning Ealdor’s name in my mind, that meant there was only one place it could be.
Inside my vault.
Somewhere within the black scroll lay the knowledge of Ealdor’s name and more—or else he wouldn’t have risked the last of his life to tell me. To get to that knowledge I would have to allow Pellin or Toria to break my vault and hope that against all odds and experience, I survived. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, two others accompanied it. A memory came to me of Bronach, a simple tanner woman from Bunard sitting on her stool, her mind shattered beyond repair after I’d broken her vault. Tearing the unreadable black scroll into pieces too small to reckon had robbed her of the last vestige of her humanity.
Just as it had every other vault I or the rest of the Vigil had broken, save one—Queen Cailin.
Toria or Pellin would have to make the attempt. I would never allow Fess to break my vault, though I trusted him more. At ten and six, he was the second-youngest person ever to come to the gift, despite the hopelessness of his upbringing in the urchins. I carried the burden of every soul I’d consigned to mindlessness and death. Fess had already endured his share and more of misery in life. He didn’t need any more.
The wind picked up out of the south, lifting the wealth of Gael’s black hair to wave like a cape of darkest velvet. A stab of grief pulled the air from my lungs. The gift of domere that I owned would extend my life for centuries while she would live out her allotted decades. I had another impossible task to go with finding a way for us to live out our lives together. Not only did I have to let the Vigil break my vault, but they had to do it in a way that left the knowledge it contained intact.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed, gales of grief and rage flooding out of me at the ridiculous unfairness of my situation.
“Willet?” Gael moved her horse closer to mine, put her hand on my arm.
I gasped for breath. “It’s absurd. The whole thing. It wouldn’t even make for a good tale because it’s unbelievable. Only the mind of Aer could create it.”
Gael caught my mood first. She knew me that well, knew what I needed so desperately in that moment. Catching my gaze, she lifted her chin and laughed as tears coursed down her cheeks, sharing her grief for her sister, Kera, for me, but refusing to let it define her. She laughed.
Rory joined in a moment later, his voice warbling between the clear high tones of boyhood and the deeper thrum of the man he would become. His losses and failures were known to me. Abandoned, he had headed the urchins, an informal guild of child beggars, thieves, and pickpockets who’d wrested life, however temporary, from the poor quarter.
Only Bolt didn’t laugh—though I thought I saw longing in his gaze. I’d never delved my guard, had no idea the depth of sorrow that he must have carried. I’d seen him laugh, genuinely laugh, exactly once in all the time he’d guarded me. It had looked painful.
We made our way back to the Edring, where Toria would no doubt pester me with questions about my conversation with Ealdor. The one thing a traveler could rely on in this hillside region was that the roads never ran in a straight line—instead they’d been laid out as if they followed the flow of water from the frequent rains. Newcomers spent weeks learning their way around the cobblestone paths that ended
