Guy Kay - Ysabel

He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of one hand. She was up there. He knew it as surely as he’d known anything. And there was only him here, Ned Marriner. Not his aunt—whatever she’d done once, she couldn’t do it now. Neither could his uncle. His mom could treat refugees in the Sudan but she couldn’t get up this mountain in time or do anything at the top if she did. Ned was the one linked to all this, seeing the blood, smelling the memory of bloodshed.

You didn’t ask for the roles you were given in life; not always, anyhow.

He realized that he was clenching his jaw. He made himself relax. You couldn’t run that way, and he had running to do.

He swung his pack off, fished his iPod out and put the buds in his ears. He dialed up Coldplay. Maybe rock would do what bracelets and rowan leaves couldn’t.

He shouldered the pack and stepped onto the path again. He must have looked pretty alarming because two people—a husband and wife, it looked like—stopped suddenly on their way down and stared at him with concern.

Ned straightened, managed a wan smile. Popped off his buds.

“You are all right? You should not be going up now!” the woman said in French, with a German accent.

“It’s fine,” Ned said, wiping at his mouth. “Bit of a bug. I’ve had worse. I do this run all the time. Training.” He was surprised at how good he’d become at lying.

“It will be dark,” the man said, shaking his head. “And the climb is harder above.”

“I know it,” said Ned. “Thanks, though.” He put the earbuds back in, turned up the volume.

He ran. Around a curve he reached back for his water bottle in the side pocket of the pack and rinsed his mouth, then splashed some on his face without slowing down. He spat into the bushes. His head was still pounding.

Not going to volunteer for an Advil commercial, he thought.

Amused himself with that. Just a little. He was in too much pain for more. He wondered about the screening he was doing—when the draining effect Phelan and his aunt had warned about would kick in. He had no idea.

He ran, twisting through and past weekend climbers making their tired way down the mountain at day’s end. Above him, way above, he could see the big cross at the summit. He was going there, then left, down a ridge, up another, down to the right.

Or so Veracook had said.

One woman looked at her watch as he approached and gave him an admonishing sideways shake of her finger, that gesture the French loved. His mother, he thought, should take that one up.

He knew it was late in the day. He knew it was going to be windy and get dark…this wasn’t being done for the joy of it. Maybe he should have printed leaflets to hand out to all the finger-waggers.

He ran. After almost thirty minutes on the steady upward slant he realized two things. One was that he was feeling better. He didn’t have that overwhelming sense of the world rotting all around him. He’d hoped that getting above the level of the battlefield would help, and it seemed to be doing that. He felt like offering a prayer.

His head hurt, the world was red-tinted, even behind sunglasses, but he didn’t feel any more as if he was going to empty his guts with pain in response to putrefaction.

The other thing, less encouraging by a lot, was that there was someone behind him—and it was Cadell.

The Celt was just suddenly there when Ned did one of his quick inward checks for an aura. Nothing, nothing, nothing…then there he was: golden inside Ned’s mind, as in life.

And coming up the mountain.

They won’t be at their best, his aunt had said. Meaning something a lot worse than that.

She had ordered Ned to stop if they came up to him, either of them, and told him to leave. He’d known she was right about that and he knew it now. They might mean him no harm, but that was only if he didn’t get in their way. They were alive in the world to do one thing only: find her. Two hundred thousand people and more had died in a single battle between these two. What was a Canadian kid against that?

His heart was pounding, for all the reasons that had to do with running as fast as he could up a mountain, fighting pain and nausea, and pursued by someone who had so many lifetimes of white and burning need to get to the chasm first.

It had been the boar that had called them, he was certain of it.

That’s how Cadell was here. He had no idea why the animal had done it. You sure got a lot of questions in the world, without exactly getting the same number of answers. In fact, there was a huge gap between the two numbers. It made him angry again. He needed that, to fuel him, drive him on, push back fear.

He looked up again. There was a wooden sign ahead, symbols on it. The sloped path gave out here to terraced, switchbacked ridges. Vera had told him this. It got harder, angling back and forth because it was steeper now. He saw people still coming down, left and right, left and right, along the switchbacks. It was going to be slower, narrower, hard to run through them. He took the first cut to the right, got out his water bottle again to drink.

His phone rang.

He fished in his pocket, saw who it was on the read-out.

“Dad,” he said quickly, “I’m okay, I’m running. Can’t talk.”

He flipped the phone shut. He was supposed to tell them Cadell was behind him now? Was it a tough guess what they’d say?

It was pretty simple, really. Way Ned saw it, if the big man didn’t catch him, he couldn’t stop him or do anything to him, right? So you didn’t let him catch you. It didn’t always have to be complicated.

He thought of letting his screening go, but he didn’t know what might hit him—flatten him—if he did. How much the screen was protecting him from the mountain. He couldn’t afford to lose any time now.

And there was the other man, too. Ned didn’t for a second imagine Phelan wasn’t up here somewhere. Probably screened, like Ned. Cadell was announcing himself, trying to frighten Ned, maybe warn him off. Phelan was just…coming.

Could scare you more, that thought.

It was still bright up here, the sun setting to his right, the wind picking up but blocked a little because he wasn’t completely above the trees yet. He looked back over his shoulder. There was a lake or reservoir of some kind below, glinting in the light, and another one farther beyond. He was high enough to see a long way. The view was beautiful, and he wasn’t even halfway up.

There had been a fire on these slopes, Ned saw, maybe more than one. The mountain was more bare than it looked in those paintings Cézanne had done. Time changed things, even mountains. Even a hundred years could make changes—or however long it was since Cézanne painted this peak. Was that a long time or a blink of time?

He thought he knew what the two men and Ysabel would say. But he also remembered his mother and aunt on the path from the tower last night, and it occurred to him that they might think of twenty-five years as heartbreakingly long.

He didn’t have answers. He amped up his music a little more and he ran, zigzagging up the mountain as the day waned towards an ending.

AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of laboured, driving work, back and forth along the terraced slope, twisting his way through the last of the day’s descending climbers, he smashed, hard, into the inner screening wall he’d been warned about.

Too soon! he thought, but even as the thought came his legs gave out and Ned felt himself falling. He didn’t slide, this was still more a steep hike than a climb, but he lay in the middle of the narrow switchback, exhausted, drained, and it felt for a long moment like he wasn’t going to be able to get up.

And that wouldn’t do. With an effort he pulled his earbuds out and rolled to one elbow. His small running pack felt massive, a burden on his back. He worked to shrug himself out of it. There was a taste of dust in his mouth. Better than blood, he thought.