Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

"I won't do it again, so there won't-"

"You, Xantcha? Don't speak nonsense. This was my brother- the first shadow of my brother. You could not have found him without me."

"I'm not speaking nonsense! You had nothing to do with this, Urza. This was my idea, my bad idea. His name was never Mishra. His name was Ratepe, son of Mideah. I bought him from a slaver in Efuan Pincar."

Urza appeared thunderstruck. Xantcha leaned forward to straighten Ratepe's other leg. Efuands buried their dead in grass-lined graves that faced the sunrise. She'd helped dig several of them. There was a suitable spot not far from her window where she'd see it easily and lament her folly each time she did.

Unless she left ... soared back to Efuan Pincar to do battle with the Phyrexians in Ratepe's name. If the cyst would still respond to her whims. If Urza didn't destroy her when his thoughts finally made their way back to the world of life and death.

She reached for Ratepe's crooked arm.

"A slaver? You sought my brother's avatar in a slaver's pens?"

Avatar-a spirit captured in flesh. Xantcha recognized the word but had never consciously used it; it was the right word, though, for what she'd wanted Ratepe to become. "Yes." She straightened Ratepe's elbow. "Mishra was a Fallaji slave."

"Mishra was advisor to the qadir."

"Mishra was a slave. The Fallaji captured him before you got to Yotia; they never freed him-not formally. It's in The Antiquity Wars. He told Kayla, and she wrote down his words."

Xantcha had never told Urza about her chest filled with copies of his wife's epic. He hadn't asked, hadn't volunteered any sense of his past here in his home, except what arose from his tabletop artifacts. He didn't appear pleased to hear Kayla's name falling off her tongue. Xantcha sensed she was living dangerously, very dangerously.

She took Ratepe's hand. It was stiff; rigor had begun. Gently, she uncurled his fingers.

They resisted, tightened, squeezed.

Before she could think, Xantcha jerked her hand away-or tried to. Ratepe didn't let go, and she stayed where she was, kneeling beside him, breathless with shock. She looked down. He winked, then kept both eyes shut.

"Waste not, want not," she whispered and cast her glance quickly in Una's direction but Urza was elsewhere.

"I did not tell you to read that story." His voice came from a cold place, far from his heart. "Kayla Bin-Kroog never knew the truth and did not write it, either. She chose to live in a mist, with neither light nor shadow to guide her. You cannot believe anything in The Antiquity Wars, Xantcha, especially about Mishra. My wife saw her world through a veil of emotions. She saw people, not patterns, and when she saw my brother ..." He didn't finish his thought, but offered another: "She didn't mean to betray me. I'm sure she thought she could be the bridge between us; it was too late. I honored Harbin, but after that, it was all lies between us. I couldn't trust her. You

can't either."

Before Xantcha could say that Kayla's version of the war made more sense, Ratepe sat bolt upright.

"I've heard it said that there's no way a man can be absolutely certain that his wife's child is his and only one way he can be cer-tain that it's not. Kayla Bin-Kroog was an attractive woman, Urza, and wiser than you'll know. She did try to become a bridge, but not with her body. She was tempted. I made certain she was tempted, but she never succumbed, which, my Brother, begs one almighty question: How and why are you so certain Harbin was not your son?"

Suddenly, they were all in darkness as Urza's golden light vanished.

"You've done it now," Xantcha said softly and with more than a little admiration. She'd never gotten the better of Urza that way. "He's gone 'walking."

But Urza hadn't 'walked away, and when the light returned it flowed from an Urza that Xantcha had never seen before: a youthful Urza, dressed in a dirt-laborer's dusty clothes and smiling as he reached out to take Ratepe's hands.

"I have missed you, Brother. I've had no one to talk to. Stand up, stand up! Come with me! Let me show you what I've learned while you were gone. It was Ashnod, you know-"

Ratepe proved he was as consistent as he was reckless. He folded his arms across his chest and stayed where he was. "You've had Xantcha. He's not 'no one.' "

"Xantcha!"

While Urza laughed, Xantcha got to her feet.

"Xantcha! I rescued Xantcha a thousand years ago-no, longer than that, more than three thousand years ago. Don't be fooled by appearances, as I was. She's Phyrexian-cooked up in one of their vats. A mistake. A failure. A slave. They were getting ready to bury her when I came along; thought she was Argivian at first. She's loyal ... to me. She's got her own reasons for turning on Phyrexia. But her mind is limited. You can talk to her, but only a fool would listen."

Xantcha couldn't meet Ratepe's eyes. When they were alone and Urza belittled her, she could blame it on his madness. Now there were three of them standing outside the cottage. Urza wasn't talking to her, he was talking about her, and there were no excuses. All their centuries together, all the experiences no one else had shared, and he'd never conquered his distrust, his disdain.

"I think-" Ratepe began, and Xantcha forced herself to catch his attention.

She mouthed the single word, Don't. It didn't matter what Urza thought of her, so long as he stopped playing with his tabletop gnats. Xantcha mouthed a second word, Phyrexia, and made a fist where Ratepe could see it. She hoped she'd told him what mattered, and that it wasn't her.

Ratepe cleared his throat. He said, "I think it is not the time to argue, Urza," and made the words sound sincere. "We have always done too much of that. I always did too much of that. There, I've admitted it, and the world did not end. Not yet; not again. You think we made our fatal mistake on the Plains of Kor. I think we made it earlier. After so long, it doesn't matter, does it? It was the same mistake either way. We couldn't talk, we could only

compete. And you won. I see the Weakstone in your left eye.

Have you ever heard it singing to you, Urza?"

Sing?

Anyone who'd read The Antiquity Wars would know that Urza's eyes had once been his Mightstone and his brother's Weakstone. Tawnos had brought that scrap back to Kayla. Ratepe claimed he'd read Kayla's epic several times, and between two stones and two eyes, he could have made a lucky guess. The Weakstone had, indeed, become Urza's left eye. But sing? Urza had never mentioned singing.

Xantcha couldn't guess what had fired Ratepe's all-toomortal imagination, but as Urza frowned and stared at the stars, she guessed it had propelled him too far.

Then Urza began to speak. "I hear it now, faintly, without word, but a song of sadness. Your song?"

Xantcha was stunned.

Urza continued: "The stone we found-the single stone- was a weapon, you know: The final defense of the Thran, their last sacrifice. They blocked the portal to Phyrexia. You and I, when we sundered the stone, we opened the portal. We let them back into Dominaria. I never asked you what you saw that day."

Ratepe grinned. "Didn't I say that we made our mistake much earlier?"

Urza clapped his hands together and laughed heartily. "You did! Yes, you did! We've got a second chance, brother. This time, we'll talk." He opened his arms, gesturing toward the open doorway. "Come, let me show you what I've learned while you were gone. Let me show you the wonders of artifice, pure artifice, Brother-none of those Phyrexian abominations. And Ashnod! Wait until I show you Ashnod: a viper at your breast, Brother. She was their first conquest, your biggest mistake."

"Show me everything," Ratepe said, walking into Urza's embrace. "Then we'll talk."