by ‘You know he’s going to mess us up first chance he gets?’ said Jay, eyeing Wyr sourly. The subject of his justifiable resentment was still in Emellana’s custody, engaged in some loud debate I had not bothered to listen to. But as I watched, Emellana released him — none too gently — and his gaze fastened instantly on Jay and I, obviously holding secret counsels without him.
‘I know,’ I murmured. ‘I’m counting on it.’
‘Wha—’ said Jay.
Slightly louder, I said: ‘I know, Jay, and you’re right to be concerned. Just don’t tell him about the Wand and the ring, all right? It’s best if he doesn’t know what was in that scroll-case.’
Jay, to his credit, only blinked once at me in confusion before his face cleared to impassiveness, and he nodded. His eyes shifted sideways to Wyr in a creditable display of craftiness.
Wyr gave no sign of having heard me. ‘Ready to go?’ he said, and I noticed he gave Baron Alban a wide berth as he passed.
‘Quickly, please.’
Miranda, to my surprise, spoke up. ‘One question, first. Whereabouts did you leave your new employers, Wyr?’
‘Lady Fenella? Truth be told, I haven’t seen her in a while.’
I thought I saw relief on Miranda’s face, before she turned away. No wonder. She’d defected to Fenella Beaumont’s miserable organisation, only to (hopefully) defect back; she wasn’t going to be popular with anybody, at this rate.
Course, one could rely on nothing Wyr said. Me, I counted on running into a few of our least favourite foes the moment we got anywhere near Torvaston’s Enclave.
Couldn’t be helped.
‘Tokens?’ said Wyr.
I’d noticed Alban stuffing handfuls of the things into his pockets soon after he had appeared, but those would doubtless be to whichever henges he’d yet to go in search of us. Not much use. ‘We will be travelling with Patel Windways,’ I said.
Wyr looked nonplussed.
‘That guy,’ I clarified, pointing at Jay.
‘You know that’s—’
‘Illegal,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘We know.’
‘You’ll be thieving in no time.’
I opened my mouth to object to this monstrously unfair charge, but had to close it again in silence. Not only had I given the sneak permission to plunder Torvaston’s Enclave at his leisure, I also proposed to divest the place of its most important and valuable artefact myself. We could argue semantics and historical-rights-of-ownership all day, and it would still all boil down to something uncomfortably close to theft.
Noticing he had successfully got under my skin, Wyr grinned at me. ‘Well, ladies and gents, we’re heading north,’ he said. ‘Far north.’
I wasted a moment in useless doubts. He was a back-stabbing little shit. Would even the promise of uncontested plunder of a lost king’s personal effects be enough to keep him in line? Was he taking us to the Hyndorin Mountains, or was he once again sweeping us away to somewhere else?
I shook the thoughts away. It was a gamble worth taking. The worst he could do was delay us (again); meanwhile, it could take us days or weeks to work out where to go without help.
‘Lead on,’ I said. ‘We’re right behind you.’
That he had indeed taken us far north seemed indubitable, a half-hour or so later. We exited the last of a sequence of henge-complexes, each decreasing in size, upon a windy peak somewhere bone-chillingly cold. Also distressingly short on oxygen.
Maybe this was the brilliant new plan. Drop us somewhere freezing and dangerously high up, and leave us to die of exposure.
No, he couldn’t do that. The way out was embedded into the rock, a circle of weathered, craggy stones swept clean by the wind. The landscape offered little else in the way of hope. We stood, miserably huddled, on a soaring mountainside, surrounded by nothing but more mountains. Bleak and beautiful, these peaks were of a deep, dark stone; snow dusted the tops of those on the near horizon, rising still higher into the mist-white skies.
‘This way,’ said Wyr, and set off, winding his way in between two jutting crags. He had his hands in his pockets, probably to protect them from the cold, but he seemed untouched by the conditions. He sauntered off, whistling.
‘Your ring is gone,’ said Alban in my ear.
That cost me a pang. Yes, I had deliberately hung it out as bait for the double-crossing thief. No, I didn’t love losing it.
‘Then I guess I’m stuck with pink hair forever,’ I said.
‘Luckily, it suits you.’
I smiled up at him. ‘You can definitely stay.’
‘That was the plan.’
We set off after Wyr, me keeping a weather eye on the horizon for any unhappy surprises leaping out of the air. I trusted Jay to keep track of where we were going, in case we needed to find our way back to the henge. ‘You do have the mysterious miscellany somewhere about your person?’ I said softly to Alban.
‘You mean the other… articles? Yes, I do.’
‘Thank goodness.’
He grinned. ‘Your faith in me is touching.’
‘Actually I had no idea if you’d thought to bring them along.’
‘…that was a gamble?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re a brave woman.’
‘Or stark raving mad. The point is the subject of some debate, at Home.’
‘Fair.’
‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before we left.’
‘Other things on your mind.’
True, but that was little excuse. I suppose the peculiar paraphernalia had seemed so random as to be hardly relevant, and I hadn’t set eyes on any of it since that last trip to Mandridore. I’d clean forgotten.
Fortunate that we had Alban to rectify that particular mistake.
Then again, if I had brought them with me, they would probably have disappeared into Wyr’s possession along with the scroll-case. Swings and roundabouts.
Wyr led us on a winding route, bearing steadily downwards towards a sloping valley below. We walked for the best part of half an hour, getting colder by the minute. By the time he finally stopped, my teeth were chattering. Even Alban looked uncomfortable.
‘And here,’ said Wyr, ‘is where we all part ways with the straight and narrow.’ He gestured at the ground, his hand tracing a vaguely circular shape in the air.
Without which clue, I might never have spotted the henge. It was so deeply embedded as to be virtually invisible, only the rough outlines of a ring of rock discernible. ‘More Ways?’ I said.
‘This one isn’t part of the official network, and you can’t buy tokens to use it.’
‘How did you know about it?’ said Jay. I saw his point. The stone circle was so well camouflaged, if I hadn’t known what I was looking for, I’d never have spotted it at all.
‘Old diaries, old stories, rumours and whispers and many, many weeks of searching,’ said Wyr. ‘None of which,’ he added with a twisted smile, ‘were conducted by me. I just bought the information.’
‘Nice when you can get away with that,’ said Jay sourly.
‘Extremely. Shall we go?’
Jay looked drawn and tired, and small wonder; we had worked him pretty hard even to get this far. But he was growing accustomed to the potency of the Ways out here, or so I assumed, for while he looked weary, he also looked composed. Sane. Not losing his marbles, as he had the first time he had travelled by henge complex.
Still, I felt a flicker of concern for him. ‘Are there many more?’ I asked of Wyr.
‘This is the last one.’
I looked questioningly at Jay, who nodded back. I’m fine, that meant.
Whether he was genuinely fine or just being a raging man about everything, who was to say? We didn’t have a lot of choice but to let him take us through.
‘I’m going first, with Ves and Alban,’ Jay announced.
Was he too tired to take all of us at once, or was this a precaution? I couldn’t read his expression. ‘Fine,’ I said, and stepped up to his side.
Alban joined us on Jay’s other side, and Jay began the process of summoning the Winds of the Ways. A swift breeze swept up, and blew back my hair. It smelled, oddly, of cherries.
‘Where does this one go to?’ I said to Wyr.
‘Into the Hyndorin Enclave.’
‘What? I thought you said it had been closed for centuries.’
‘Not the entire thing. Just the part that matters, that being wherever Torvaston and his friends settled.’
I wanted to ask more questions, specifically about what there was to expect in the mythical Hyndorin hideaway. But I was too late. In a whirl of Winds and a flurry of snowflakes — somehow — Jay swept us away.
And in that instant, Wyr made a lunge for us. I felt him fall heavily against my side — the side upon which my trusty satchel hung — and he clung to me as we travelled through the Ways.
When the whirl of motion ceased and the world stopped spinning around us, I opened my eyes to the sight of Wyr sprinting away from us.
Mellow sunlight glinted off the shape of my beloved Sunstone Wand, clutched tight in his hand.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘That got rid of him.’
Jay pressed my hand in brief sympathy. I suppose he knew what it cost me to turn those two treasures over to Wyr, and watch him abscond with them.
I reminded myself that retrieving them was not beyond the bounds of possibility, and that even if it was, they were well lost. This time, Wyr had played right into my hands, and I intended to capitalise on that.
‘We need to follow him,’ I said. ‘Quickly. He’s on his way to Torvaston’s doorstep, or my name isn’t Ves.’
‘Right.’ Jay gathered himself, and vanished.
‘Your name isn’t Ves,’ said Alban. ‘Technically.’
‘And you aren’t technically a baron.’
‘Touché.’
We had ended up somewhere I never could have expected. Considering everything — like the references to the Hyndorin Mountains, for one, and Torvaston’s hand-drawn map suggestive of rugged peaks — I had anticipated a properly mountainous landscape. Actually, we were in a green-and-golden valley, apparently in the height of summer. Tufts of feathery, heathery purple were dotted here and there, together with sufficient flowers to drown in. And while I am something of an enthusiast for flowers, I recognised exactly none of the species I saw around me.
Trees we had, too, the gnarly kind indicative of great age. Despite this, they were laden with blossom and swelling fruits — including something that smelled like cherries, even if they looked more like apples. That explained that aroma.
Meanwhile, despite the evidence of high summer going on all around us, the skies overhead were as misty-white as those above the peaks we’d just come through. And, most peculiarly of all, a light dusting of snow drifted steadily down from those skies, though it vanished or melted away before it could reach so much as a single blade of the grass upon the ground.
The flow of magick was significantly more potent. Not Vale levels, not yet. Chaotic enough to produce some odd and interesting effects, though. Strong enough to ease the skin-prickling discomfort and head-swimming disorientation I’d suffered ever since we had left the vicinity of Vale.
I liked it at once.
‘Strangest Enclave yet, by a mile,’ I said, keeping an eye on the direction Wyr had gone in. He was rapidly vanishing from sight. I wanted to hare madly after him, before he could disappear altogether into the mist.
But I also didn’t want to do this without Jay, and Em, and Miranda.
‘I’ve never even heard of—’ said Alban, holding out a hand to catch a bit of the uncanny snow.
But as he spoke, a gaggle of people exploded into the waiting henge: Jay, Em, and Miranda, with Pup struggling in Emellana’s arms.
‘Everyone okay?’ I said, looking especially at Jay.
Too out of breath to speak, he nonetheless managed a nod in answer to my question. I wished we had time to let him rest, but we didn’t.
‘Righto,’ I said. ‘Mir, can you send up your bird? We need to track Wyr.’
‘Done.’ Miranda gave a soft whistle, and something small shot up into the air in a blur of bright blue feathers.
I retrieved Pup from Emellana’s grip, and set her down. ‘Pup of mine,’ I said. ‘It’s your turn to save the day. Remember Wyr?’
Pup sat staring up at me, grinning and wagging her tufty yellow tail. A single snowflake settled on the tip of her stubby horn.
‘If you can catch him, you can bite him,’ I said, and pointed.
Pup gave a series of yaps, turned in a frenzied circle, and then tore off after Wyr.
‘And now we run,’ I said, praying for a burst of unnatural speed courtesy of my unnaturally magickal state.
Taking a deep, deep breath, I legged it after the Pup — and Wyr.
