“A woman in the light.” Karigan thought her words wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else or under different circumstances.
“I find it interesting that you found your way to this chamber of your own accord.”
“Why?”
Ealdaen produced his moonstone and strode to the center of the chamber. The shadows cast by the moonstone shifted as he walked, making the statues seem to follow him with their gazes, their wings flexing for flight. Walls of translucent light rose from the quartz in the floor.
“You saw a small version of this in Telavalieth,” Ealdaen said. “You called it a moondial. This is Castle Argenthyne’s moondial.” He glanced at the skeleton near his feet. “I knew the defenders of this tower. They stayed to the last. Alas, the castle did fall.” He gazed around the chamber some more. “The gnomon is missing. Just like in Telavalieth.”
The phases of the moon shone in the light that bathed the floor, and the stars, too, transforming the floor into a celestial map. Beneath them, in the very center of the chamber, was a large round piece of quartz that had the shading and subtlety of a silvery full moon. It was, by magnitudes, larger than the moondial in Telavalieth.
“How would you awaken the Sleepers?” Karigan asked.
Ealdaen lowered his moonstone and there was that disconcerting sense of the world shifting with the light.
“We would sing to them,” he replied.
“That’s all?”
“There is a certain song, and a certain way of singing it. A calling it is. The Sleepers choose to heed or ignore it. But yes, that is all.”
Before Karigan could question him further, another light coalesced in the chamber, a liquid column of light just like the one she had seen that night in Arrowdale. But the figure within was clearer this time: a woman with hair flowing about her shoulders and her gown touched by no earthly breeze.
Ealdaen fell immediately to his knee and bowed his head. Every song and tale of Argenthyne Karigan ever heard flowed through her mind and this time she knew immediately who stood before her—Laurelyn, Laurelyn the Moondreamer; Laurelyn, the queen of lost Argenthyne, sweet Silvermind.
Ealdaen, the woman of light said, rise.
Ealdaen did so, though at first hesitant; he slowly raised his face to meet her gaze. “I thought never to look upon you again, my queen.”
Nor I, you, but it heartens me to see you here now for this unfolding.
They spoke at length in Eletian and although Karigan could not understand the conversation, she felt grief and anguish in their words. There was a shared history between the two, a history Ealdaen was reliving by having come home.
Excluded by their language and conversation, Karigan thought to leave them to give them privacy, but she was caught by surprise when Ealdaen spoke again in the common tongue.
“I am here to redeem myself,” he said.
So be it, Laurelyn replied. She turned her gaze upon Karigan, and Karigan was arrested by the queen’s eyes of midnight blue, her appearance far, far clearer than that night in Arrowdale.
Daughter of Kariny, you are here at last. My influence is stronger here, but still it wanes, and soon it will vanish entirely. The powers of the forest have striven to vanquish me altogether. I still fight, and here within the castle I am a little protected.
“How do you expect me to help the Sleepers?” Karigan demanded. “Why me?”
You can cross thresholds, the liminal line, and by doing so, you will lead the Sleepers to safety. Daughter of Kariny, you can step through layers of the world.
Karigan could not remember ever being told this, and yet she knew it as if someone had explained it all to her before. Her ability to fade was really the ability to stand on that threshold, but her ability was meager, even with her brooch augmenting it. It took some additional force to push her across, like the wild magic that had once allowed her to pass through the ages to the time of the First Rider.
“I do not know what to do,” Karigan said.
I will tell you, Laurelyn replied.
Just then, the other Eletians, along with Yates, Lynx, and Grant, filed into the chamber. Their eyes grew wide as they took in Ard’s body and the lady of light. The Eletians dropped to their knees as Ealdaen had.
Laurelyn swept her arm up and pointed, the light sparking with anger around her. Grant cowered away, hid behind Lynx. That one, she declared, brings evil into this place.
THE POTENT SNARL
Grandmother gazed in satisfaction at the dead bodies lined up before her, eight of the loyal band of groundmites that had escorted her to Castle Argenthyne’s grove, plus her own Griz. She’d plucked the white arrows from them all, the wooden shafts stinging her fingers. She’d also sensed that Eletian blood had been spilled in the grove and she believed it would only make her working stronger.
She had tied knots feverishly, using much of what was left of her yarn, holding in reserve a ball of the indigo should they survive this and need it for finding their way out of Blackveil. Lala had intently watched the tying of knots, helping and fetching as needed. Meanwhile, Grandmother had gotten Gubba to oversee the butchering of corpses, cold, still hearts placed into Min’s largest pot.
Even as Grandmother worked at invoking the power of the art, she felt the darkness of the forest press in on her, the intensity of its attention. The trees of the grove had gone rigid, and she heard the sound of cracking like the winter forest, moisture freezing within the wood.
After she tied the last knot, a complex weaving of command, she slumped exhausted and gazed at the snarl of yarn in her hands. The potent snarl.