“Sing!” Merdigen urges him.
The mages help Alton find the song again, and he sings it as powerfully as he can, once again bringing confidence to the guardians. They drown out Pendric, coax unsure voices to join them. In a rising crescendo, he calms the voices, homogenizes them, and they become one. Pendric can no longer be heard. Now he is no longer an individual, but part of the wall’s chorus.
There are empty broken spaces in the wall, and try as Alton might, he cannot make them resound with song. The guardians in those places are dead. At least he has helped halt the cascade of destruction, and the guardians that remain sing together.
From Ullem Bay to the shores of dawn,
we weave our song in harmony
for we are one.
Sense of self flees Alton as he soars in the joy of the song. This is where he should be, singing among the guardians, rejoicing among the beauty of crystals, becoming a guardian himself and helping the wall remain strong.
Then, like someone grabbing his collar, Alton is hauled out of his contact with the wall and his consciousness thrown back into his body.
Alton flailed backward, tripping over rubble, and fell halfway beneath the arch. He stared at dust funneling up a shaft of daylight that pierced through a hole somewhere high above in the tower’s height.
“I should think that’s the end of the observation platform,” Merdigen said, following Alton’s gaze and stroking his beard.
“Observation platform?”
Merdigen looked down at him and crooked an eyebrow. “You don’t think the tower contains only this chamber, do you? That would be a terrible misuse of space.”
Someone coughed and Alton sat up. “Dale?”
“I’m fine,” she said, coughing again. Through the haze he saw her picking her way across the chamber, stepping over the fallen column, and patting dust off her sleeve. Her hair was gray with it. “I see you finally found a way in.”
“Yes, I—”
“Good. Then I don’t have to relay your messages all the time and worry about you pulling out your hair.”
“Pulling out my hair?” He stared incredulously at Dale, then at Merdigen. The wall may have just fallen and they worried about observation platforms and hair? “The wall!”
“What about it?” Merdigen asked.
“Is it…is it still standing?”
“Heavens, my boy. If it collapsed, so would this tower. It was shaken for sure, and the breach may be wider than it was, but with your aid I think we stemmed the tide. Remember, this wall was made of great magic, and a little jostle isn’t going to throw it down.”
“A little jostle…” Alton swiped hair out of his face. “What happened? What set it off?”
“A very good question,” Merdigen said. “The guardians were already in disarray, as you know, helped along in no small measure by the other Deyer, the Pendric fellow.”
“My cousin.”
“Well I know that. Off key, he was, and that’s putting it mildly, but I think he’s a tad more attuned to the wall now.”
“He trapped me,” Alton said.
“Yes, yes, but you defended yourself well, though in the end we almost lost you. If we had not pulled you out, you would have become like him, absorbed as a presence in the wall without corporeal form. And while that’s all fine and good, you’ll probably be more useful to us as you are now that the guardians are ready to deal with you again. But you must learn restraint so you do not lose yourself in the wall.”
Dale overturned a chunk of granite with her foot and it clacked on the stone floor. “Probably a good idea,” she said. “It wouldn’t make Captain Mapstone very happy if you up and sacrificed yourself.”
As light as Dale’s words were, they gave Alton a jolt. An image came to him of his red-haired captain working diligently at some task in her quarters. That ordinary sight led to memories of the Rider call drawing him from his life in D’Yer Province all the way to Sacor City and right to the captain’s door. He remembered little of the moment in which he became a Green Rider, except for the warm murmur in his mind, Welcome, Rider, and the sense of belonging that overcame him as he held the winged horse brooch in his hand for the first time.
What would he be doing now had he not been called? Attending socials, courting girls of noble blood, hunting, learning how to run a province…He’d be the picture of the perfect lordling with too much time on his hands, a young dandy whose greatest crisis was choosing what to wear to the next party. It certainly would not have prepared him for what he now faced.
He was grateful for the call and to be in a position to help mend the wall. It gave him purpose, something meaningful to do with his life. Thinking of the captain, thinking of himself as a Rider in green, brought him home, so to speak. It centered him. Even there in the damaged tower, even after striving within the wall with the guardians.
He touched his brooch and felt a comforting pulse of warmth and knew that what he was doing, and who he was, was as it should be. The anger and frustration that strangled him for so long evaporated and was replaced by a sense of peace. Now he could work.
“In any case,” Merdigen said, interrupting Alton’s reflections, “it is impossible to say what set off the guardians, though whatever it was, it was unfortunate the wall was in such a fragile state. Did you hear some of them? ‘She passes,’ they said. What it means?” He shrugged. “Perhaps we’ll never know, for we’ll not get useful answers from the guardians.”