Anne Bishop - Sebastian

“But…Mother—”

“There are things I must tell you about our family, but not now. Not yet. Just shift your landscapes’ anchors to some other place, and do it swiftly.”

“What about Lee?”

Nadia hesitated. “When the time comes, he’ll have to go to the school to train as a Bridge.”

“Another necessary risk?”

“Yes. Another necessary risk. You’ll need a Bridge you can trust.”

“You’re placing a large burden on a young boy.”

Sadness filled Nadia’s eyes. “No, Glorianna. It isn’t Lee who will carry the burden.”

Glorianna shook her head as if that would clear away the thoughts, the weight of despair.

Its influence. There was too little of her left within these walls to fight against the feelings It coaxed to the mind’s surface in order to fill the heart with dark emotions.

She had to leave.

Crouching beside the fountain, she studied the tumbled stones in the bottom of the pool. Most of them were just stones without power. But…

Pushing up her sleeves, she plunged her hands into the pool, shifting the stones to find the three that contained bridges Lee had created for her.

She’d done what Nadia had asked. She’d found that safe, secret place and made another garden that became her link to the landscapes that were in her keeping. But she came back here, just once, while Lee was in school, and left the three stones. She’d been afraid for him because of his ability to impose one landscape over another. If the Instructors at the Bridges’ School had discovered Lee could control even a small piece of a landscape to that degree, they might have handed him over to the wizards for the “good” of Ephemera.

So she’d placed the stones in the fountain to give him a way to escape if the Instructors—or the wizards—turned on him.

She rose to her feet and studied the stones in her hands. The agate provided a bridge to the school. Turning to face the wall, she threw the stone as hard as she could. It arched, met the resistance of the magic that kept each garden private, then disappeared.

She didn’t know where the stone had gone. Maybe it dropped on the other side of the wall. Maybe it had ended up somewhere else. Or nowhere else. There was no telling what the wizards’ power would do to anything that tried to get over the wall from inside the garden.

The second stone, a piece of red-veined black marble, provided a bridge to the Den of Iniquity. She put that one in her trouser pocket.

The third…

She tried to move her hand to put the smooth oval of white marble in her pocket, but she couldn’t. Something within her trembled—a kind of knowing the mind couldn’t put into words. It was a feeling that went through her whenever Ephemera intervened to stop her from doing something that went against some primal knowledge that lived within her heart.

That was the other part of the answer of how she’d escaped being walled inside her garden. Ephemera had intervened by showing her something irresistible.

She’d been working hard in her garden, creating anchor points to the landscapes that resonated for her, even in distant lands. When that staggering wave of darkness had pressed against her mind, her first thought was that she was coming down with some kind of illness. Then the coaxing whispers began, trying to fill her with desolation, trying to convince her that the desolation sweeping through her was the only thing that belonged in her garden. Desolation. Isolation. Food, clothing, shelter. Yes, those things should be part of her landscapes. But not people. She should always be one step removed from any contact with people.

Alone. Forever alone. That was all she deserved.

But something Dark and powerful had risen up inside her. Something primal that recognized those whispers—and hated them. Before those Dark currents flowing inside her could be shaped and manifested in the world, the ground next to her altered, forming a perfect circle filled with grass and unfamiliar wildflowers—and currents of Light that resonated so strongly they were impossible to resist.

The whispers faded, no longer important, as she stepped into that circle and crossed over from here to there…

…and found the first of the many Places of Light that would call to her until she brought them together as connected landscapes known as Sanctuary.

She stayed for two days, being given company and solitude as each were needed, until the currents of Dark and Light that flowed in her felt balanced again. Then she returned to her garden, bringing with her an ornamental stone so that she could return to that distant landscape and learn more from the people who cared for the Place of Light.

And then, about a month later, she had used the sundial anchor point to return to her room for the rest of her books and had discovered, instead, what the wizards and Instructors at the school had tried to do.

Glorianna sighed. The wizards hadn’t succeeded in sealing her up in tiny, desolate landscapes, but more often than not, she did feel one step removed from other people, even when she walked among them. More often than not, she did feel alone.

Get away from this place before it warps something inside you. You may have escaped them, but the resonance of what they tried to do still lingers here.

She dropped the stone that provided a way to Sanctuary back into the pool.

Then she walked away from the fountain, her mind focused on the place she needed to be as she took the step between here and there.

She had to go to Aurora, had to warn Nadia that the Eater of the World was once more hunting in Ephemera.

Long after he’d lost sight of her, Gregor stood on the path that led to the archway, a sludge of fury filling his mind. He wanted to run after her, wanted to pin her to the ground and hammer his fists into that beautiful face, wanted to rip out handfuls of that silky black hair, wanted to…wanted to…

Vile creature. Nothing but a vessel of power that was a perversion of the magic that provided some stability in their ever-changing world. There had been others like her in the past, and the wizards had done their duty for the good of Ephemera and had sealed those perversions within their gardens, leaving them just enough access to the landscapes that they would be able to find food, clothing, and shelter but creating boundaries around those patches of Ephemera that couldn’t be breached.

What the wizards did when the perversion of magic surfaced in a student Landscaper was no different from what the first Landscapers had done to contain…contain…

Vile creature. Vile, vile creature. The only perversion who had managed to escape the Justice Makers.

He hawked and spit.

Then he stared at the gob of phlegm on the flagstone, feeling queasy, feeling as if he’d just spit out something poisonous. Which was foolish. He was just feeling contaminated by having touched her, having spoken to her.

But Lukene had believed the Instructors and wizards had made a serious mistake in how they had dealt with the girl. That they had judged without knowledge—and by doing so, had destroyed any chance of learning why a fifteen-year-old girl would create something like the Den of Iniquity.

Fifteen years later, they still didn’t know why. And they still didn’t know how she had done it.

The wall has been breached.

Ridiculous. That wall would stand forever. Had to stand forever.

Warn the Landscapers, Bridge.

She was probably behind the incidents—the unexplained alterations in some of the students’ gardens; the girl who woke up screaming each morning because, she said, there were spiderwebs all over her skin, and when her skin was completely covered, the spiders would burrow under her skin and eat her alive; the two boys who had tried to create a bridge to some dark street in a nearby town in order to have a tankard of ale and had, somehow, crossed over to a place so frightening that, after they managed to get back to the school, they were too terrified to use any kind of bridge.