“Will you ask the elves about it?”
“No,” Kieri said. “They will expect me to do it all at once, and I can’t.”
“So … when?”
“Why not now?”
Kieri and Paks bent their combined wills and prayers to the task. It was like walking in thick fog as vague shapes formed and faded around his mental image.
“I should know the way,” Paks said. “I have been there; I have seen the mountains, the great clefts in the rock. I saw the shape of Luap—I think it was Luap—on the rock arch. If I can just see it again—or the chamber inside, where the sleepers were—if Gird will guide me—”
All at once Kieri felt his will touch another’s … like a hand brushing his in the fog, then tightening to a grip, a sense of someone in peril begging for help. Did the sleepers dream? Did they yearn to awake?
“Paks …” he said, and glanced at her. She nodded, and now he felt, along the strand of his thought, something he could define only as an essence of her being as he had known it. He himself had never been Girdish; he had not fully grasped what Gird might be like, but now beside her he could sense a burly broad-shouldered figure, oak-sturdy, stubborn.
Abruptly, as if a curtain shifted aside, he saw a handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed man of apparent early middle age staring at him. Wide awake, not kneeling in enchanted sleep as Paks had described. The man was handsome, and yet … spoiled by something. Petulance marked his mouth, and yearning shaped his gaze. He wore a belted gown of what looked like embroidered white silk and a blue overrobe with silver embroidery marking out an entwined G and L. Beside and behind him were others, also awake: an older woman, dark hair heavily streaked with gray, in a rose-colored surcoat over mail, her expression grim and angry; two middle-aged warriors, man and woman, the man more slightly built and somewhat pale, as if from a wound. In the background, others, men and women and children, milled around, clearly frightened. What was this? Had the sleepers wakened already? But there were far more than Paks had told him of.
“That’s Luap,” Paks murmured. “In the blue and silver. He’s … he’s alive. This isn’t what I saw. This is … it can’t be before, can it?”
“Before?”
“Gird’s time … when Luap was still alive …” Her voice faded in awe. “What did we do? How did we do it?”
“I have no idea. But we must do whatever we do quickly. If this is the past and they are awake before the sleep, then we must …” His voice trailed away. He had no more idea how to put them to sleep than to waken them, but he knew he could not transport them as they were now. “The world would break,” he said finally. “And it must not.”
Kieri concentrated on the man staring at him—Luap, if Paks was right—and wondered how Gird could have been blind enough to trust someone so obviously flawed. Kieri felt, through Paks, the sorrow of that person—Gird, perhaps—at what had become of him. Kieri himself felt only anger, remembering what he had learned from the western elves. How dare the man abuse his people so? Leave them unprotected in the face of harm? Indulge himself at their expense? And he thought himself a prince? He would have blasted the man to nothingness if he’d known how, but Paks and Gird would not let him.
I knew his flaws. I had flaws myself.
That had to be Gird’s voice, as blunt and uncompromising as his appearance. So something—some worth—was there, some chance for—a use, a purpose?—was still in Luap, and without him this would fail. The man still had power, Kieri could tell, though he had no will to use it rightly.
And he looked at Kieri as if Kieri could save him, pleading in his eyes, in what was left of himself. Remorse, shallow as it was, in the thin shell of a self that allowed nothing deeper.
Kieri leashed his anger for the moment and concentrated on what he could discern of the situation. Where were the magelords he was supposed to waken … after they slept? But Luap’s silent pleading, the touches of power he kept using, broke his concentration again and again. It was like wounded soldiers who kept grabbing at a surgeon’s arm while the surgeon tried to work … he would have to find a way to hold Luap down, contain his panic, as men had to hold soldiers still for the surgeon to work on them.
It seemed to take longer than it should, speaking to the man, asking the questions he must ask, getting answers that only emphasized what was wrong. Kieri had to restrain himself, control his own anger, and in so doing he returned to his earlier thought, that with the magelords he could undo some of the damage he’d done by trusting Alured the Black in Siniava’s War. That seemed to make an impression on Luap; Kieri pushed aside for the moment his knowledge that his place was here—even more now that he was lord of an elvenhome. But still … perhaps the magelords could do it instead of him.