Destiny

The stones were sixteen feet high but looked even taller perched on a low mound of the valley’s usual blue-green soil. Favaronas staggered out of the hateful brush and dropped on his hands and knees. Robien went to the stones. He touched the nearest one lightly, staring up at its squared-off top. His enchanted spectacles could detect any trace of living beings, and they showed him that no one had touched the stone in a very long time.

The eastern mountains were still far away, two, perhaps three days even at Robien’s pace. Numerous ledges and plateaus were visible on the steep granite slopes. Any one of them might serve for viewing the valley, but Favaronas believed the monolith builders had created one specific place where the grand plan of the scattered stones would be plainly visible. He was certain Faeterus was seeking that spot and that spot alone. The sorcerer’s trail would lead them to it.

Tracking wary prey and avoiding the ghostly lights that haunted the valley required stealth, so Robien allowed no campfire. Favaronas resigned himself to another meal of dried fruit and venison jerky, and another night spent shivering beneath his meager blanket. He shrugged the heavy sack from his shoulder. It fell over and the three stone cylinders inside rolled out onto the ground.

Robien looked up from his own small pack. “The way is difficult enough for you, scholar. Why are you carrying rocks?”

Favaronas hastily shoved the cylinders back into the sack. He muttered something about “interesting mineral formations,” and Robien seemed content to leave it at that.

The strange cylinders weren’t rocks at all, but scrolls. Magically petrified, they unspooled only when exposed to filtered sunlight. Favaronas had discovered them in a tunnel while a member of Lady Kerianseray’s original expedition to the valley. By the time he puzzled out some of the text they contained, the expedition was leaving the valley. He had slipped away from the others and returned to the valley alone. He was still working to decipher the ancient books. The writing inside them was a severely abbreviated form of Old Elvish in which each word was reduced to a single syllable, such as om.hed.thon.dac, a phrase he recently had worked out to mean “the father who made not his children.” This epithet was used frequently in the texts and referred to the leader of those who had built the standing stones. Whether these builders had been colonists or prisoners, Favaronas was unsure.

He’d unlocked only a small portion of the scrolls’ meaning, but the implications of even that much were terrifying. His surreptitious return to Inath-Wakenti had been fueled by the desire to harness a great power and help his beleaguered people. Now all he wanted was to bury the knowledge as deeply as possible. No one must learn what he knew. He hadn’t told even Robien of his connection to the Speaker’s household and his acquaintance with Lady Kerianseray. Simpler if the bounty hunter thought him no more than an unimportant, wayward scholar. Fortunately, Robien was concerned only with capturing Faeterus. He showed little interest in anything that did not directly affect his search.

Robien settled down with his back against a monolith and braced his short, recurved bow. It was his nightly ritual. He never laid down to sleep without the bow, complete with nocked arrow, on his lap. Favaronas had heard it said that the best Kagonesti hunters could hear a leaf bend under a grasshopper’s foot. Close association with Robien taught him that was no fanciful tale. Robien could detect impossibly faint sounds and smells, and his eyesight, even without his enchanted glasses, was far more acute than that of any other elf Favaronas had known.

Favaronas lay down a few feet away, in the center of the triangle formed by the three stones. The scholar found the valley’s enormous silence very wearing on his nerves. The lack of night sounds made it difficult for him to fall asleep. To fill the void, he made conversation, asking Robien how long he’d been tracking Faeterus.

“Twenty-two days and twenty-three nights,” the hunter replied evenly. “The first three nights I spent in a cistern beneath Khuri-Khan.” Leaning back against the monolith, his eyes closed, Robien frowned. “Vile place.”

“When you find him, how will you hold him?”

He gave a small shrug. “By pinning his wings.”

With that, Robien was asleep. Favaronas envied his ability to fall asleep between one breath and the next. Although Favaronas lay quietly and tried to think calming thoughts, rest eluded him. His head was filled with a cacophony of questions and fears. An hour went by, and still he was wide awake. Perhaps a drink of water would help.

The tepid liquid tasted like the skin in which Robien carried it, and Favaronas wished it were wine. On his second swallow, it was—a potent red. Astonished, he choked, dribbling wine down his chest.

“That’s your favorite vintage, isn’t it. Black grapes of Goodlund, two years old?”