She had found captives tied together and staked to trees, or the ground, to keep them from running. Many more were chained. Some she recognized, but many more she didn’t. Most were kept in groups and under guard.
Abby never once saw a guard asleep at his post. When they looked her way, she acted as if she were looking for someone, and she wasn’t going to go easy on them when she found them. Zedd had told her that her safety, and the safety of her family, depended on her playing the part convincingly. Abby thought about these people hurting her daughter, and it wasn’t hard to act angry.
But she was running out of time. She couldn’t find them, and she knew that Zedd would not wait. Too much was at stake; she understood that, now. She was coming to appreciate that the wizard and the Mother Confessor were trying to stop a war; that they were people resolved to the dreadful task of weighing the lives of a few against the lives of many.
Abby lifted another tent flap, and saw soldiers sleeping. She squatted and looked at the faces of prisoners tied to wagons. They stared back with hollow expressions. She bent to gaze at the faces of children pressed together in nightmares. She couldn’t find Jana. The huge camp sprawled across the hilly countryside; there were a thousand places she could be.
As she marched along a crooked line of tents, she scratched at her wrist. Only when she went farther did she notice that it was the bracelet warming that made her wrist itch. It warmed yet more as she proceeded, but then the warmth began fading. Her brow twitched. Out of curiosity, she turned and went back the way she had come.
Where a pathway between tents turned off, her bracelet tingled again with warmth. Abby paused a moment, looking off into the darkness. The sky was just beginning to color with light. She took the path between the tents, following until the bracelet cooled, then backtracked to where it warmed again and took a new direction where it warmed yet more.
Abby’s mother had given her the bracelet, telling her to wear it always, and that someday it would be of value. Abby wondered if somehow the bracelet had magic that would help her find her daughter. With dawn nearing, this seemed the only chance she had left. She hurried onward, wending where the warmth from the bracelet directed.
The bracelet led her to an expanse of snoring soldiers. There were no prisoners in sight. Guards patrolled the men in bedrolls and blankets. There was one tent set among the big men—for an officer, she guessed.
Not knowing what else to do, Abby strode among the sleeping men. Near the tent, the bracelet sent tingling heat up her arm.
Abby saw that sentries hung around the small tent like flies around meat. The canvas sides glowed softly, probably from a candle inside. Off to the side, she noticed a sleeping form different from the men. As she got closer, she saw that it was a woman; Mariska.
The old woman breathed with a little raspy whistle as she slept. Abby stood paralyzed. Guards looked up at her.
Needing to do something before they asked any questions, Abby scowled at them and marched toward the tent. She tried not to make any noise; the guards might think she was a Mord-Sith, but Mariska would not long be fooled. A glare from Abby turned the guards’ eyes to the dark countryside.
Her heart pounding nearly out of control, Abby gripped the tent flap. She knew Jana would be inside. She told herself that she must not cry out when she saw her daughter. She reminded herself that she must put a hand over Jana’s mouth before she could cry out with joy, lest they be caught before they had a chance to escape.
The bracelet was so hot it felt as if it would blister her skin. Abby ducked into the low tent.
A trembling little girl huddled in a tattered wool cloak sat in blankets on the ground. She stared up with big eyes that blinked with the terror of what might come next. Abby felt a stab of anguish. It was not Jana.
They stared at each other, this little girl and Abby. The child’s face was lit clearly by the candle set to the side, as Abby’s must be. In those big gray eyes that looked to have beheld unimaginable terrors, the little girl seemed to reach a judgment.
Her arms stretched up in supplication.
Instinctively, Abby fell to her knees and scooped up the little girl, hugging her small trembling body. The girl’s spindly arms came out from the tattered cloak and wrapped around Abby’s neck, holding on for dear life.
“Help me? Please?” the child whimpered in Abby’s ear.
Before she had picked her up she had seen the face in the candlelight. There was no doubt in Abby’s mind. It was Zedd’s daughter.
“I’ve come to help you,” Abby comforted. “Zedd sent me.”
The child moaned expectantly.
Abby held the girl out at arm’s length. “I’ll take you to your father, but you mustn’t let these people know I’m rescuing you. Can you play along with me? Can you pretend that you’re my prisoner, so that I can get you away?”
Near tears, the girl nodded. She had the same wavy hair as Zedd, and the same eyes, although they were an arresting gray, not hazel.
“Good,” Abby whispered, cupping a chilly cheek, almost lost in those gray eyes. “Trust me, then, and I will get you away.”
“I trust you,” came the small voice.
Abby snatched up a rope lying nearby and looped it around the girl’s neck. “I’ll try not to hurt you, but I must make them think you are my prisoner.”
The girl cast a worried look at the rope, as if she knew the rope well, and then nodded that she would go along.
Abby stood, once outside the tent, and by the rope pulled the child out after her. The guards looked her way. Abby started out.
One of them scowled as he stepped close. “What’s going on?”
Abby stomped to a halt and lifted the red leather rod, pointing it at the guard’s nose. “She has been summoned. And who are you to question? Get out of my way or I’ll have you gutted and cleaned for my breakfast!”
The man paled and hurriedly stepped aside. Before he had time to reconsider, Abby charged off, the girl in tow at the end of the rope, dragging her heels, making it look real.
No one followed. Abby wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She wanted to carry the girl, but she couldn’t. It had to look as if a Mord-Sith were taking a prisoner away.
Rather than take the shortest route back to Zedd, Abby followed the hills upriver to a place where the trees offered concealment almost to the water’s edge. Zedd had told her where to cross, and warned her not to return by a different way; he had set traps of magic to prevent the D’Harans from charging down from the hills to stop whatever it was he was going to do.
Closer to the river she saw, downstream a ways, a bank of fog hanging close to the ground. Zedd had emphatically warned her not to go near any fog. She suspected that it was a poison cloud of some sort that he had conjured.
The sound of the water told her she was close to the river. The pink sky provided enough light to finally see it when she reached the edge of the trees. Although she could see the massive camp on the hills in the distance behind her, she saw no one following.
Abby took the rope from the child’s neck. The girl watched her with those big round eyes. Abby lifted her and held her tight.
“Hold on, and keep quiet.”
Pressing the girl’s head to her shoulder, Abby ran for the river.
There was light, but it was not the dawn. They had crossed the frigid water and made the other side when she first noticed it. Even as she ran along the bank of the river, before she could see the source of the light, Abby knew that magic was being called there that was unlike any magic she had ever seen before. A sound, low and thin, whined up the river toward her. A smell, as if the air itself had been burned, hung along the riverbank.
The little girl clung to Abby, tears running down her face, afraid to speak—afraid, it seemed, to hope that she had at last been rescued, as if asking a question might somehow make it all vanish like a dream, upon waking. Abby felt tears coursing down her own cheeks.
When she rounded a bend in the river, she spot
ted the wizard. He stood in the center of the river, on a rock that Abby had never before seen. The rock was just large enough to clear the surface of the water by a few inches, making it almost appear as if the wizard stood on the surface of the water.
Before him as he faced toward distant D’Hara, shapes, dark and wavering, floated in the air. They curled around, as if confiding in him, conversing, warning, tempting him with floating arms and reaching fingers that wreathed like smoke.
Animate light twisted up around the wizard. Colors both dark and wondrous glimmered about him, cavorting with the shadowy forms undulating through the air. It was at once the most enchanting and the most frightening thing Abby had ever seen. No magic her mother conjured had ever seemed … aware.
But the most frightening thing by far was what hovered in the air before the wizard. It appeared to be a molten sphere, so hot it glowed from within, its surface a crackling of fluid dross. An arm of water from the river magically turned skyward in a fountain spray and poured down over the rotating silvery mass.
The water hissed and steamed as it hit the sphere, leaving behind clouds of white vapor to drift away in the gentle dawn wind. The molten form blackened at the touch of the water cascading over it, and yet the intense inner heat melted the glassy surface again as fast as the water cooled it, making the whole thing bubble and boil in midair, a pulsing sinister menace.
Transfixed, Abby let the child slip to the silty ground.
The little girl’s arms stretched out. “Papa.”
He was too far away to hear her, but he heard.
Zedd turned, at once larger than life in the midst of magic Abby could see but not begin to fathom, yet at the same time small with the frailty of human need. Tears filled his eyes as he gazed at his daughter standing beside Abby. This man who seemed to be consulting with spirits looked as if for the first time he were seeing a true apparition.
Zedd leaped off the rock and charged through the water. When he reached her and took her up in the safety of his arms, she began to wail at last with the contained terror released.
“There, there, dear one,” Zedd comforted. “Papa is here now.”
“Oh, Papa,” she cried against his neck, “they hurt Mama. They were wicked. They hurt her so …”
He hushed her tenderly. “I know, dear one. I know.”
For the first time, Abby saw the sorceress and the Mother Confessor standing off to the side, watching. They, too, shed tears at what they were seeing. Though Abby was glad for the wizard and his daughter, the sight only intensified the pain in her chest at what she had lost. She was choked with tears.
“There, there, dear one,” Zedd was cooing. “You’re safe, now. Papa won’t let anything happen to you. You’re safe now.”
Zedd turned to Abby. By the time he had smiled his tearful appreciation, the child was asleep.
“A little spell,” he explained when Abby’s brow twitched with surprise. “She needs to rest. I need to finish what I am doing.”
He put his daughter in Abby’s arms. “Abby, would you take her up to your house where she can sleep until I’m finished here? Please, put her in bed and cover her up to keep her warm. She will sleep for now.”
Thinking about her own daughter in the hands of the brutes across the river, Abby could only nod before turning to the task. She was happy for Zedd, and even felt pride at having rescued his little girl, but as she ran for her home, she was near to dying with grief over her failure to recover her own family.
Abby settled the dead weight of the sleeping child into her bed. She drew the curtain across the small window in her bedroom and, unable to resist, smoothed back silky hair and pressed a kiss to the soft brow before leaving the girl to her blessed rest.
With the child safe at last and asleep, Abby raced back down the knoll to the river. She thought to ask Zedd to give her just a little more time so she could return to look for her own daughter. Fear for Jana had her heart pounding wildly. He owed her a debt, and had not yet seen it through.
Wringing her hands, Abby came to a panting halt at the water’s edge. She watched the wizard up on his rock in the river, light and shadow coursing up around him. She had been around magic enough to have the sense to fear approaching him. She could hear his chanted words; though they were words she had never heard before, she recognized the idiosyncratic cadence of words spoken in a spell, words calling together frightful forces.
On the ground beside her was the strange Grace she had seen him draw before, the one that breached the worlds of life and death. The Grace was drawn with a sparkling, pure white sand that stood out in stark relief against the dark silt. Abby shuddered even to look upon it, much less contemplate its meaning. Around the Grace, carefully drawn with the same sparkling white sand, were geometric forms of magical invocations.
Abby lowered her fists, about to call out to the wizard, when Delora leaned close. Abby flinched in surprise.
“Not now, Abigail,” the sorceress murmured. “Don’t disturb him in the middle of this part.”
Reluctantly, Abby heeded the sorceress’s words. The Mother Confessor was there, too. Abby chewed her bottom lip as she watched the wizard throw up his arms. Sparkles of colored light curled up along twisting shafts of shadows. “But I must. I haven’t been able to find my family. He must help me. He must save them. It’s a debt of bones that must be satisfied.”
The other two women shared a look. “Abby,” the Mother Confessor said, “he gave you a chance, gave you time. He tried. He did his best, but he has everyone else to think of, now.”
The Mother Confessor took up Abby’s hand, and the sorceress put an arm around Abby’s shoulders as she stood weeping on the riverbank. It wasn’t supposed to end this way, not after all she had been through, not after all she had done. Despair crushed her.
The wizard, his arms raised, called forth more light, more shadows, more magic. The river roiled around him. The hissing thing in the air grew as it slowly slumped closer to the water. Shafts of light shot from the hot, rotating bloom of power.
The sun was rising over the hills behind the D’Harans. This part of the river wasn’t as wide as elsewhere, and Abby could see the activity in the trees beyond. Men moved about, but the fog hanging on the far bank kept them wary, kept them in the trees.
Also across the river, at the edge of the tree-covered hills, another wizard had appeared to conjure magic. He too stood atop a rock as his arms launched sparkling light up into the air. Abby thought that the strong morning sun might outshine the conjured illuminations, but it didn’t.
Abby could stand it no longer. “Zedd!” she called out across the river. “Zedd! Please, you promised! I found your daughter! What about mine? Please don’t do this until she is safe!”
Zedd turned and looked at her as if from a great distance, as if from another world. Arms of dark forms caressed him. Fingers of dark smoke dragged along his jaw, urging his attention back to them, but he gazed instead at Abby.
“I’m so sorry.” Despite the distance, Abby could clearly hear his whispered words. “I gave you time to try to find them. I can spare no more, or countless other mothers will weep for their children—mothers still living, and mothers in the spirit world.”
Abby cried out in an anguished wail as he turned back to the ensorcellment. The two women tried to comfort her, but Abby was not to be comforted in her grief.
Thunder rolled through the hills. A clacking clamor from the spell around Zedd rose to echo up and down the valley. Shafts of intense light shot upward. It was a disorienting sight, light shining up into sunlight.
Across the river, the counter to Zedd’s magic seemed to spring forth. Arms of light twisted like smoke, lowering to tangle with the light radiating up around Zedd. The fog along the riverbank diffused suddenly.
In answer, Zedd spread his arms wide. The glowing tumbling furnace of molten light thundered. The water sluicing over it roared as it boiled and steamed. The air wailed as if in protest.
Behind t
he wizard, across the river, the D’Haran soldiers were pouring out of the trees, driving their prisoners before them. People cried out in terror. They quailed at the wizard’s magic, only to be driven onward by the spears and swords at their backs.
Abby saw several who refused to move fall to the blades. At the mortal cries, the rest rushed onward, like sheep before wolves.
If whatever Zedd was doing failed, the army of the Midlands would then charge into this valley to confront the enemy. The prisoners would be caught in the middle.
A figure worked its way up along the opposite bank, dragging a child behind. Abby’s flesh flashed icy cold with sudden frigid sweat. It was Mariska. Abby shot a quick glance back over her shoulder. It was impossible. She squinted across the river.
“Nooo!” Zedd called out.
It was Zedd’s little girl that Mariska had by the hair.
Somehow, Mariska had followed and found the child sleeping in Abby’s home. With no one there to watch over her as she slept, Mariska had stolen the child back.
Mariska held the child out before herself, for Zedd to see. “Cease and surrender, Zorander, or she dies!”
Abby tore away from the arms holding her and charged into the water. She struggled to run against the current, to reach the wizard. Part way there, he turned to stare into her eyes.
Abby froze. “I’m sorry.” Her own voice sounded to her like a plea before death. “I thought she was safe.”
Zedd nodded in resignation. It was out of his hands. He turned back to the enemy. His arms lifted to his sides. His fingers spread, as if commanding all to stop—magic and men alike.
“Let the prisoners go!” Zedd called across the water to the enemy wizard. “Let them go, Anargo, and I’ll give you all your lives!”
Anargo’s laugh rang out over the water.
“Surrender,” Mariska hissed, “or she dies.”
The old woman pulled the knife she kept in the wrap around her waist. She pressed the blade to the child’s throat. The girl was screaming in terror, her arms reaching to her father, her little fingers clawing the air.