“Did you hear other voices while you slept? Has anyone else spoken to you?” He doesn’t wish to worry the child but needs a better grasp on the strangeness.
“Galen talks to me,” he says, and Iohmar smiles again.
“That’s good,” he says, then allows the topic to drop. If something were frightening him, Lor wouldn’t be so disinterested in the conversation.
“I think Rúnda is mad,” Lor says, picking a mushroom and tying bits of grass around its stem. Iohmar presses his lips together. “She seems mad.”
Iohmar believed the boy asleep on his shoulder. Perhaps not. “How does she seem mad?”
“She scowls,” he says. “But not in the same way you do.”
Iohmar thinks of laughing and ruffles the boy’s wispy head of hair, sending petals flying. “I’ll speak to her.”
“What are you going to talk about?”
“Many things. Not entertaining for a little boy.”
Lor looks up from his delicate crowns, eyes large, expression serious. “About me?”
The question would be cute if his eyes weren’t so worried, a frown forming between his brows, and Iohmar doesn’t understand the sudden dip in mood. “Some. You are always on my mind, after all.”
Lor continues staring—long enough without blinking that Iohmar’s amusement fades to concern—but then returns to his flowers and says, “Galen is grumpy too.”
Tension relaxes from Iohmar’s shoulders, but he needs to watch him closer. “I’ll speak to him as well.”
At midnight, before finding Rúnda, Iohmar slips from the glass ceiling above his room. Lor is asleep, and Galen’s chambers are close by. The world is quiet. Far in the distance, Iohmar senses the rippling borders.
He finds his way to where he and Lor crawled from the cavern.
He slips among the dark trees until the clearing spreads before him, a swath of gentle shadows in the night. Grass brushes his legs, the soil spongy beneath his feet. He senses the place the earth was torn, a long scar so deep he loses the sense of it eventually. Remembering the press of the earth and the oppressive darkness overwhelming his magic, Iohmar shudders. He looks about, casting out traces of his magic, searching.
The crack is gone.
18
A Thousand Explanations
Iohmar stands where the crack formed, digging his toes into the soil. Grass has overgrown it, the earth below scarred but solid beneath a loose layer of peat.
Who in my lands shares my affinity for moving earth and vine and tree and sunlight and shadow? Grass could’ve sprouted overnight, but healing the earth? Many things about his lands and their magic confound him, but this is a new experience entirely.
Kneeling, he presses his palm to the ground, wriggling his fingers into the soil. He senses it still, the rip in the earth. It is not in his imagination. He sends roots and grasses and flower bulbs down but cannot reach far enough to find the cavern and finds no trace of anything living woven within the crack. No shadows. Healed, but barely. Gaps remain. Whatever magic this is, it is not of the same strength as his.
He stands and turns.
All around are trees and mountains: a ring of soft peaks and his mountain nearest, a sharp towering thing coated with trees and time. Clouds pass between the moon and the land and play with the stars. Iohmar breathes so deep his lungs near burst. Warmth from his people’s magic washes over him, a thousand moth wings. Lor’s presence is stronger. Lor’s and Galen’s and Rúnda’s, then those in his kingsguard, who have been so near to him since childhood. He can look over them individually, hundreds of lives under his protections. And past them, thousands upon thousands of animals and lone creatures such as Túirt and fae so small they have no thoughts past moonlight and flowers and the embrace of the night air.
Far into the deepest parts of his land, where Iohmar’s folk rarely wander, he brushes against the most ancient of trees, woods so grand they reach roots thousands of steps deep. Had Iohmar sought a child of his lands, as his folk believe Lor to be, he would’ve gone to those trees. Deep in slumber, they stir at his presence, and he withdraws. Some things are not to be disturbed until the need is great.
He stretches far enough to tease the borders of the human world and those of the ripplings. They are restful. He senses none of their cold bodies close enough to be a threat.
The sky he looks toward next, but finds only stray birds streaking the dark air, moths and other nighttime creatures, and the chill magic of the sky. Even the wind does not play tonight, and Iohmar finds nothing of use above.
Satisfied his magic is strong and eager and hiding nothing from his sight, he turns it downward, past fertile earth and into bedrock, past cool underground streams and delicate streaks of crystals. Pressing against the tunnels beneath his mountain, he still finds no trace of the woman who aided him. The grasses and trees about him dance at the overuse of magic, twining around his legs and fingers. Worms and beetles and centipedes and other crawling organisms wriggle from the earth to squirm circles about his feet. Moths are drawn from their forest flowers to land upon his skin.
Iohmar’s limbs vibrate with his magic. He is strong. No trace of illness resides in him, not even the sleepy shards that lingered when he walked the orchards with Lor. Could it have been caused by the expenditure of my magic? No. This is too natural to him. Too right. Too wonderful.
No, it must have been the shadows or the cavern itself. Or the dragon bones.
Even still, he finds little trace those things ever existed. A scar in the earth carrying on and on and on. The faintest hint of dragon bones and nothing more.
He relaxes, magic fluttering to him with satisfaction. Again, there is a familiar taste of it to the air. He expects to open his eyes and find himself in cold, oppressive earth. But the meadow remains. He recognizes the trace, yet it is lost to him. He must certainly have encountered it before. Years and memories blend, but he has always been sharp at recalling individuals and their talents.
How can I fail to recall something familiar to me?
It must have been long ago if he cannot call to mind the source, long enough he must have been a child. No older than Lor, perhaps. The only clear sources of power he remembers from the time were those of his parents and Galen. The collective warm haze of his guard and all those dwelling within the Halls. His own magic. Ascia’s. He remembers her soft and cheerful countenance. A warm, happy little spark of life who couldn’t intimidate a soul.
But she is lost to him as his parents.
Perhaps the taste of magic has nothing to do with the shadows and caverns at all. Perhaps it is of no consequence.
“Who are you?” he asks the grasses, feeling foolish for speaking to nothing.
No creature he calls to mind could heal a tear in the earth such as Iohmar created. He wanders toward his mountain, eyes on his feet, paying little attention to the swaying trees and grasses. Insects swarm him, but he brushes them aside, and they drift into the night with fat, lazy bodies.
Even with all its strength, Rúnda’s magic does not lend itself to manipulating the earth and living things. A dragon would have no difficulty, if the stories he was told in his youth stand true, but those bones haven’t held magic since before he was conceived. If any still exist, they are so far past even Rúnda’s kingdom and the rippling lands that he does not recognize them. In his heart, he believes they no longer exist.
