“And?”
“And I discovered that it seems to mute power.”
“I see,” Laric said.
“Do you? Because it doesn’t seem like you had all that much muted.”
“I’m just saying I see what you’re getting at.”
Xavier nodded. “Good. Now. I want to be careful; I want you to make sure that you get out of here with your dragon.”
Laric’s jaw dropped. “You want me to leave?”
“You need to go. They cannot get the dragon. It doesn’t matter if they get anything else, but they cannot get the dragon. Haven’t you seen that already? Your dragon knew that and was willing to fight, and to die, and to—”
“I’m not going without my sister and my friends. And I’m not going until I can ensure that the town is safe. I returned from Korthal so I could do that.”
Xavier stiffened. “You did what?”
“I took a trip. On my dragon. And saw Korthal. Although I think I saw a different part of Korthal than you have been seeing.”
Xavier’s expression said it all. “You shouldn’t have gone there,” he whispered.
“You knew. You knew about the destruction? You knew about everything being wiped out? You knew about—”
“I knew,” he said. “Which is why I have been trying to keep Essan and the others from heading that way. They don’t have the trick.”
“Then it’s not a trick, is it? She gave you some portal passageway.”
“I don’t know if I would call it that, but you go into a cave, and you keep traveling, and you come out into a different valley.”
Laric shook his head. “And you didn’t want to share that information?”
“I didn’t see that it would make much of a difference,” Xavier said. “Not to them, especially because they didn’t know I didn’t have an opportunity to trade with those people. I have established relationships with them.”
“But you are trying to—”
“You should not have gone to Korthal.”
“Dragons were slaughtered,” Laric said.
“I’ve seen,” Xavier said.
Laric crouched down against the wall, and as he lingered there, he could feel something odd—some of the undercurrent of whatever energy it was that Xavier was wielding. It washed over him.
“Why not let people know?” he asked Xavier.
“Why do you think I dislike the mages as much as I do?”
“I guess I didn’t know.”
“I have been traveling to Korthal—the real Korthal—for a long time,” Xavier said. “I saw it back before it was destroyed, and I saw parts of it slowly changing, going from a place of peace, of people who simply lived differently than us, to the expanse of destruction. And do you know what happened?”
“I’m sure it was mages,” Laric said.
“Mostly. But there was something else.”
Laric frowned. “What else?”
“As far as I’ve been able to tell, betrayal. I don’t know all of it, and those in Korthal will not speak of it, but something changed.”
That had to be what Dizarn had been talking about. Or not talking about, such as the case may be. “So you were able to bypass it because my grandmother permitted it.”
“She put things in the cave that I was supposed to bring back. That was it.”
“That was the bargain.” Laric shook his head. “That was how you had your passageway?”
“Yes. And I don’t regret it. Think about what would’ve been lost otherwise.”
Laric couldn’t even argue with that. But the better question was, what was his grandmother sneaking out of Korthal? And could that have been tied to the reason that Dizarn had come?
“All right, we can deal with that later, but first we need to deal with the mages,” Laric said.
The sound of boots along the cobblestones rang out, and Xavier held his hand up. Laric immediately began to focus on a concealment spellslip, and it shrouded them in shadows. Xavier glanced over to him with a frown, but he nodded as if pleased by that.
It wasn’t until the sound of the boots moved past that Laric relaxed.
“Good,” Xavier said. “You’re a bit more capable than I had realized.”
