Chapter Twenty-Two

It is always spring in Numia. Wildflowers bloom in the morning and shut their faces to the night. As Li and I circled the vale we walked at the edge of the tree line, looking inward to view the peaceful motions of the people who existed in constant communion with the land and its magic. It was the third day of our guest right. We would be leaving the following morning, but that fact was a minor note to be tucked away and forgotten.

All that mattered was Li.

He hadn’t changed over the course of two days. I had. I had felt the myriad twinges as all the struts and strings within me that had come undone over the last months abruptly realigned. I had crystalized in this new direction, irrevocably. Knowing next to nothing about who he was or about the life he had lived didn’t matter. I had seen enough to know that I didn’t care.

“Are you sure you can’t tell me where we’re going yet?” I asked him, experiencing the sweet anxiety I always felt when he looked at me.

“I did tell you,” he smiled. “We are going to find the Wizard’s Council, only I have not yet decided how we are going to go about it in detail.”

“Aren’t we cutting it a little close?”

The plan, as he had explained it to me, wasn’t complicated. We needed help if we were going to keep out of Malice’s hands…or claws…whatever. There was hardly anyone left who was qualified. Only one group still existed that might be willing to openly oppose Malice and that Li was certain he could trust. That was the Wizard’s Council.

Unfortunately, they were a group notorious for their secrecy and almost impossible to find. The only way to contact them was for them to contact us, which meant we either had to get in their way or win their attention and then they would send us a signal. Because the magical world was so small, they presumably already knew of the events around Milton’s ranch and would have sent agents out to find us. Li had told me that the only alternative method of sending them a message, he was not yet willing to try. He had not elaborated, so we were waiting for a sign. Li’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “We have exactly as much time as we need,” he said. “When we leave tomorrow, everything that must happen will have.”

This was the sort of vague, inexplicable pronouncement he was so fond of making. It would have been infuriating if he wasn’t so beautiful.

“How can you be so sure? Do you even know what we’re waiting for?”

“Because I am, if I remember correctly, and yes.”

I groaned theatrically, which only amused him further. It’s not that he kept me in the dark. On many topics he was happy to expound well beyond what I was capable of absorbing in a single conversation. I knew more about what I thought of as “Magical Theory” after only two days with Li than I had learned in two months with Timothy. I felt a pain there, an egg of guilt and loss. Despite what he was involved in, I found it hard to believe that the sorcerer’s apprentice had been evil or insane, whereas Milton could have been both. I hoped he had gotten away. I wanted him to be alive and to forgive me. If he wasn’t, I was to blame. Li’s hand brushed my arm, cool and electric.

“Deep thoughts?” he asked. He could always tell when my mind was wandering. I just hoped he wasn’t psychic. I would die of embarrassment.

“No, I’m just worrying. I don’t like not knowing what’s ahead of me.”

“There has to be a little suspense in life. It’s no fun if you know everything all at once.”

“That can’t be your actual reason for not telling me. It cannot be.”

“Do not underestimate me,” he said, a branch cracking under his foot for emphasis. The crack had to be purposeful; he never stepped on anything he didn’t want to. His feet were bare, and he slid along the grass as much as walked. I had never seen him in a pair of shoes. Even the Numians had moccasins, but I had the idea he would have done without clothing entirely if he could have gotten away with it.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, fighting the color down from my cheeks. “Just trying to figure out whether or not you’re human.”

He smiled, and his eyes glittered. How does that even work?

“I am as human as you are,” he said, an answer which allowed for an uncomfortable amount of leeway. A quarter? Half and half? Not at all? I still hadn’t pinned down exactly where I stood on that particular continuum, although Li and I had discussed, at length, what it meant to be a dragon’s daughter.

It meant I had a Shadow.

It wasn’t another person or an alter ego per se. It was a bundle of instincts and emotions gestating in the back of my skull. It couldn’t replace me, but it could overwhelm me if the conditions were right. As I got older it would become stronger, harder to resist and more volatile. It could be held off, and eventually, it would plateau. When and why it did so was a mystery, but it was possible I could contain it forever. It was possible I would never change into anything like what my mother had become.

It was also possible that the Shadow would grow strong enough to make me change. If the dragon won once, Li had told me, it won forever. Even when I remembered I was human, I wouldn’t be the same again, not ever.

“Are you sad to be leaving?” Li asked me.

“I’m not sorry. They’ll be safe once we’re gone.”

Li nodded as if he had expected nothing else.

I spared a look for the vale. It was peaceful here. The children were off with Fletcher for some sort of lesson, and the men and women I could see were either weaving or gardening. The soil was always fertile and the plants always fruiting, so a few relatively small plots supplied the whole valley with vegetables. Only the Totem brothers ate any meat, and they did not bring their kills into Numia. It seemed a very easy life, a sort of perpetual retirement. They had no enemy nations or tribes, and they always balanced their desires with their means. It was a strange little paradise. Not an hour passed awake that I didn’t worry I would be the end of it.

“What about your nightmares?” he inquired.

“I haven’t had any.” The first night we spent in Numia I had told him about my recurring dreams. Li suggested that my subconscious was dealing with the problem of my Shadow. I had already come to that conclusion as soon as I realized that what I saw behind the mirror was real . Since then though, the nightmares hadn’t returned. Whether it was the Naiad protecting me from myself, or just being close to Li, the terrors had gone from my sleep. I was plagued by a new, less unsettling series, something I hadn’t dreamed about since I was very small. “I’ve been dreaming about horses.”

An eyebrow raised in incredulity. “Horses?”

“Yes. What? White horses.”

The eyebrow reached it maximal limit, settling in for a long stay.

“Fine,” I huffed. “’Unicorns; I dream about unicorns.”

He laughed far too long and much too loud.

“Hush!” I said. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Not that,” he said, “it’s not that.” He pulled himself together. “I apologize.” He took my hand. “That only tells me I have put something off long enough.”

“What?”

Of course, he didn’t answer. He was pulling me under the tree line, and as much as I didn’t mind the idea of him dragging me off into a secluded spot, I wanted an explanation.

“Li, what did you put off?” What about my dream had him so excited? Not for the first time I wondered what he dreamed about, or if he even slept. He wasn’t staying in any of the tree houses. At a certain point in the night he would just disappear.

“Do you remember what I told you about the Gates?” We were going along quietly, hopping over fallen limbs and twining vines. The baggy, wool-like clothes the Numians had given me were snagging on what I could only assume was every stray twig and thorn in the wood.

“I remember,” I said, tugging myself free of a hanging branch as I tried to keep up. “The Gates are all closed.”

It was Magical Theory 101. The Gates were like holes in reality, big and small. The energy required for magic flowed through these Gates, but during what was called the Wilding War so much power had been drawn that it nearly ripped the world to pieces. To end the conflict before that could happen, the Wizards of that age shut down all the major Gates. Ever since, magic had been fading, because not enough energy entered the world to replace what was used.

“And the Guardians?” he prompted me.

That had been one of my first questions for him. Esme had called him a Guardian. Why? Guardian, Gate Warder, Key Keeper; these were all the same. Lialanni was only another title in another language. They had been appointed by the gods in an earlier time, preceding the war. After the conflict ended there was no more use for them in any number, and no energy to sustain them if there had been a use. So the Guardians, like most other mythical beings, died away. Yet, there was still Li, like there were still sorcerers, like there was still my mother; the dregs of a once full cup of wonder.

“The Guardians make sure the Gates stay closed.”

The wood opened into a small clearing that ran into the sheer wall of a cliff, the furthest edge of Numia. Li released me, taking half a dozen long strides into the open before spinning on his heel to face me.

“One more thing,” he said, “and then I promise more of this will make sense to you.”

I waited at the border, hands moving unconsciously to my hips. “Li, what is it?”

He smiled, but it was an oddly sad manner of smiling. His eyes were not in it.

“The unicorns you dream of, what color are their horns?”

I squinted at him hard. “What?!” What a ridiculous question, not just because it has nothing to do with anything, but because unicorn’s horns are always…

Oh.

White horses, dark horns. I hadn’t thought about it. I had been glad enough to be dreaming about anything but mirrors not to examine the details. Now that he asked, I could see them galloping before my eyes as clearly as they had in my sleep. Some were white on white, the same as you’d see in any picture or story. But some of them were not.

“Li, why do you look so sad?” I wanted nothing more than to be able to run to him and hold him and comfort him forever, but I was frozen where I stood.

This time I saw the transition. It wasn’t really a transformation of the proper kind. It was more of an overlaying. For the briefest, most ephemeral instant the two entities occupied the same space. Li, the same prince I knew but with an unfamiliar tragedy in his vision, and the unicorn over top of him like a ghost. Then Li was gone, and there was only the unicorn.

“Oh,” I said.

It was smaller than I used to imagine, the size of a pony. Delicate and dexterous as a deer, its coat was white and snowy, but its mane was black. Rising from its brow was a spiraled spear so dark it could have been cut from the furthest reaches of lightless space or frozen out of the crushing depths of an abyssal sea. A line of unlight, a spear of neverness.

I suppose that explained the smudge on Li’s forehead.

The unicorn regarded me with overlarge, violet eyes of an all too familiar intelligence, but there was a difference, an enhancement. There was an agelessness stretching back into antiquity. Eons flourished and died as lifetimes passed with the alacrity of a winter’s frost, until my own scant years were indistinguishable from the duration of a breath. It was a sorrow I had never felt, and never believed I could feel, to look into those eyes. Death defined those years.

All that escaped me was a sob, but in the back of my mind, an unknown creature stirred.

In the moment it took me to move one step forward, the unicorn was gone. It might have never been.

Li was in its place, surrounded by a swiftly fading purple glow. I understood him a little better now, the sooty birthmark on his forehead, the eyes running into insatiable sorrow. There were no new Guardians he had told me. No more were born after the closing of the Gates. His body was untouched by age, but he was old; old enough to have watched his race die one by one and then live on. None of the history had ever struck me as true until I saw his other form.

“They put the last to sleep,” he said, “so there would be one remaining when it was needed to guard the Gates again.”

I took another step toward him. “Li, why didn’t you tell me?”

Suddenly, I felt sick and stumbled. Li did not move. He radiated stillness, but his eyes were wary. Why? A pulse of heat rode through me, and my head felt heavy. My vision blurred.

I watched the rest like the sequence of a dream.

There was a sound like iridescent steel dunked in water to cool, steam exploding. I seemed to be moving in bursts and jumps, striking, always striking. Lialanni was circling, retreating, dipping and gliding. He was pale and infuriatingly cool. Color bloomed; a red line on his cheek, the barest cut still sweet. Surprise and fear, coming closer, Shadow writhing as we fall, hands grasping at his throat.

There came a perfect note, clarion calling; the sound of purity and hope, ringing and ringing.

I cried out, and my hands came away as if burned. Memories like flickering monsters rampaged in my skull. Li lay beneath me, silken and cold and terribly sad. As I began to pull away he drew me down, and I curled on his chest, sobbing. He looked past the canopy, up into the endless blue, and absently stroked my hair as I cried. He paid no notice to the beads like crimson tears streaking the right side of his face, but they proved it had been real.

“Hush,” he said. “Hush. You didn’t mean it.” One arm laced tight around my side, a bar of ice.

Eventually, I was still.

“Why are you so cold?”

He laughed, and stopped stroking my hair to hug me close.

“I’m not, Abigail. Your temperature has gone up again. It will stabilize soon.”

I breathed deeply, smelling lilacs, and sighed. “What happened ?”

“This is why I did not show you right away. I waited to tell you,” he said, “because your blood remembers what I am and the rivalry between us.”

“Rivalry?”

“Lialanni preserves and Bolarian destroys. It is a contest as old as contests. Our races have always generaled opposing forces, killed each other at every opportunity. It has nothing to do with you, with us as individuals, but your Shadow remembers.”

I shivered against him. My Shadow? I could feel it now more clearly than ever before. For the first time I could separate it from myself, a core of hate and fear and hunger--quivering and horribly real.

“What am I going to do?”

He wasn’t looking at the sky anymore. I could sense the shift without seeing. He was looking at me and smiling.

“Nothing, for now,” he said. “But you know it better than you did. The dragon won’t take you except by surprise. You are stronger than it is, whatever you think, and I can help you hold it back.”

“Ok,” I said. “I take that as a promise.”

We lay there for what may have been a long while. He was infinitely patient, and I didn’t want him to let me go. I knew beyond any doubt that he couldn’t feel a fraction for me of what I felt for him, but I couldn’t help pretending. After all, he was what? A thousand years old? I still had no idea how long ages were supposed to be by modern calendar, but even if he was asleep for most of that, what could I mean to him? Protecting me, helping me, anything he did wouldn’t really be for me . It was a part of his duty, his quest that began long before my dad or Milton or anybody was even born and would continue on long after I was dead of old age or calamity. He was a Guardian. He had a purpose. I was auxiliary to that purpose and could never be an end in myself. Still, he didn’t feel as cold as he had, just soft and cool and lilac scented. It was nice to pretend.

Eventually, we stood. I brushed myself off awkwardly, not willing to look him in the eye, not sure if he could see what I was feeling.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It will not be able to catch you by surprise again.”

Good, I thought, he has no idea.

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