“And there will be no Summer?” was the soft, soft question that followed. It came from Anduvin, not Meralonne.
She hesitated. “Understand that the roads were meant to contain and cage those who would not—or could not—leave these lands when the Covenant came into being; it is upon those roads, and no other, that the gods and their offspring might walk without losing their way.”
“I understand the Covenant and its cost far better than one who is merely mortal,” Anduvin replied; his voice was Winter ice. The Kialli were famed for their pride—for those who knew of them at all—with reason.
“And the hidden ways?” was her soft rejoinder. “Then I will not bore you.”
“Bore me in his stead,” Meralonne told her; the words, however, were soft and shorn of impatience.
“They have been broken in subtle ways. I am not immortal, but I have walked the roads—in both Winter and in the Summer that is long, long past.”
“How subtle?” the mage said, when she fell silent. He gestured the embers of his pipe into a brighter orange and once again lifted stem to lips.
As if his action was at once both comfort and irritation, she continued. “The containment is cracked. The mortal world seeps into the hidden and the wild; the hidden and the wild will seep, in return, into mortal lands.” One sharp breath left her lips, and when she spoke again, she spoke with urgency. “I have not seen it all, APhaniel. I have looked, and I have not seen it all—but the war you fought here was not the end; it was only barely the beginning.”
“What have you seen?” His voice was the mage’s voice; the brief anger that had informed it was gone.
She swallowed. “The firstborn,” she replied; the word barely carried. “In the North, in the Empire, in Averalaan Aramarelas, the oldest who have lived on those paths are . . . waking. If you cannot hear them now, you will hear them soon.”
The mage’s eyes were like silver in sunlight. “Many, many things sleep beneath that city; the city itself is not unaware of the things that are buried.” His eyes narrowed; smoke drifted in rings from his lips.
“One of the eldest has already begun to move, APhaniel.”
“In Averalaan?” The question was sharper, harder.
Cloth brushed cloth as she nodded.
“It is hard to believe that the gods would allow it, if they were aware of it at all; there are ancient things the city protects, and we cannot afford to have them waken. I will speak with Sigurne.”
“Meralonne—”
“The worst of the battle here is at an end, tonight. We have had one victory and one defeat—and the defeat is subtle, Evayne; the Annagarians will barely countenance it as a loss.” He glanced at what remained of the last of the trees. “Indeed, for them it might be simple boon; they have never seen the Summer Queen, and their brief experience of the Winter was not to their liking.”
“Return to the North,” she told him. To the bard’s surprise, he nodded gravely.
She turned to Kallandras. He waited; he did not speak.
After an awkward pause, she did. “How old will I become, while I walk this path?” She could not quite guard her voice; he heard the fear and the weariness that informed her words.
“I do not know,” was his grave reply. He spoke softly and without anger because he now could; in his youth, he had not been capable of that much kindness. No one had injured him as gravely as Evayne a’Nolan in her youth. But he was farther from that youth than she herself, this eve; he could afford this small act of generosity.
She lifted her hands and finally pulled her hood from its peak, exposing her face and the entirety of her expression. He studied her face, as she intended.
“Twenty years.”
“. . . Twenty more years.” The words were an echo of his, but they had a different texture, a different meaning. She closed her violet eyes, lifted one hand to briefly touch the pendant that hung around her neck.
“It will not hurt you as much in two decades.”
Her eyes opened, rounding. “Will I forget?” she asked. She made no attempt to hide what she felt; even the two silent witnesses could easily grasp her apprehension. “Will I forget what drove me to walk this path at the beginning?”
“I do not know; you have not—yet—spoken to me of your motivations.” He lifted one hand. “I can only guess, Evayne, and it