“Is it not possible?”
He didn’t want to imagine it. Sekkady alive? In a body he would not even recognize? His children, those sweet infants, stolen to become slaves, tormented as he had been? He struggled to find an objection. “Why would he come here? He had … I heard him say … he had never traveled over the sea and never meant to.”
“Perhaps he had not … perhaps he would not … but you escaped him. He must have been angry when he found you gone. Are you certain he never looked for you?”
“No.” He had not thought about it once safe in the great forest; he had known somehow that it would protect him. Now he knew that was because of his elven heritage; the taig knew him for the Lady’s grandson. And once he reached Halveric Steading, and Estil took him in, and then Aliam taught him to fight … he had known he would never again cross the sea, and he had believed Sekkady would never come.
“If he is alive, if he knows that you are now a king, and a father—” Paks went on,
He started to say Sekkady would have no way to learn either, but the sea trade the Pargunese and Kostandanyans carried on had brought him to this safety and could as easily carry word back. A cold chill ran up his spine, born of the old terror and pain.
“It was not my intent to upset you,” Paks said, leaning forward. “You are not a child now; you are a seasoned warrior, and you have elven magery and the elvenhome’s protection.”
“No—no, you did right to mention it. I should have thought—” But his eyes were shut tight, and the images that filled his mind were all horror and despair. The elvenhome had not protected his mother, a full elf, the day she died or the Lady herself from iynisin attack. “I will take … precautions,” he said at last. He forced himself to look up in those candid gray eyes and smile at Paks. “But for tonight, I think it’s time we both sought our beds.”
“Of course,” she said.
Paks did not bring up the subject again, to Kieri’s relief, and he buried himself in his duties as king and his study of elven magery as the days passed. He was uneasily aware that he was still expected to wake the sleeping magelords in Kolobia, and he still had no idea how he was going to accomplish that.
About half-Summer, as leaves lost their first freshness, she asked how his studies in the various mageries were coming along.
“Dorrin is helping me with the magelord part,” he said. “And the western elves their king sent have taught me much about elven magery. But the real problem I see is that Kolobia is so far away. I can’t imagine it—either the distance or what it’s like. Magery at a distance requires the ability to focus, to see, at least in the mind, what is there. I can now direct my magery to something I cannot touch—I could set a flame to that kindling in the fireplace, for instance, from another room. But I can imagine the kindling. I cannot imagine Kolobia.”
“I see it in my mind,” Paks said. “Is there no way to send the image from one of us to the other?”
“Not that I know,” Kieri said. “Can you draw it?”
Paks could not. Her attempts to draw either a map of the route to Kolobia or an image of the underground chamber looked like a child’s first attempt to make marks with a stick in the dirt, Kieri thought. He did not tell her that; her expression told him she knew it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can see it … I just don’t know how to show it.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I still need to find a way to access the Old Human magery they said was latent in me.”
“Couldn’t you use the transfer pattern you said was here and come out there?”
“No,” he said. “I’m oathbound to this land, and since I made the elvenhome here, leaving might damage it. The elves tell me it might disappear and leave here—the land I gave my oath to—without its protection. Whatever I do in Kolobia must be done at a distance, from here. I suppose that’s why I need all three mageries to do it.”
Paks brightened. “I’m all Old Human as far as I know; our family’s lived up on the edge of the moor forever. And I have paladin’s magery. Maybe that will work. If I focus on what I remember seeing and we try to merge your magery and my memory …” Her voice trailed away.
Kieri thought about that. “Suppose we tried that just to give me an image to work from later. After all, I don’t have the Old Human magery working at all yet, nor can I work at greater distances than from one room to the next. So it would be less magery, less disturbance … and might not affect the babies at all.”