Барб Хенди: Between Their Worlds

Magiere watched him by the dim light of Wynn’s cold lamp upon the little table, its glowing crystal illuminating the books and papers strewn around it. With Leesil’s back turned and shoulders hunched, his head sagged forward. The tail of his white-blond hair and the ends of a tattered green scarf tied over the top of his head barely reached past the collar of his hauberk, which was covered with worn and scarred iron rings. He stood there with his back to her, his arms folded across his chest.

Magiere couldn’t see his beautiful, half-elven amber eyes. She couldn’t see the old scars upon his wrist, from one frightening moment long ago when he had made her feed on him to save her life. And she couldn’t see the more recent scars that were now all along his forearms.

Leesil wouldn’t look at her.

Right then, Magiere almost did want to go home, to their little Sea Lion Tavern. Given time, he—she—might forget everything. She could have him, just him, and he could have her as he wanted her ... as his partner and wife, with nothing else between them.

Was that even possible?

Almost one year ago, Magiere, along with Leesil and Chap, had parted from Wynn, leaving her here in the safety of the guild. They’d had to travel north to hide the first orb they’d found half a world away. It was an artifact, a dangerous device of some kind that had served an unknown purpose to the Ancient Enemy in a war waged upon the world a thousand years ago. But in Magiere’s time, numerous portents were now hinting that this Enemy would return. She’d been determined to place the orb she’d procured far, far from any harmful hands that might try to use it. But this attempt had brought her more than she’d bargained for ... including her discovery of a second orb.

Magiere wasn’t ready to talk or even think about the horrors that happened on that journey. But after all that occurred, she’d come looking for Wynn. Not just to tell the sage about the second orb, but in the hope that Wynn might have learned something more about these artifacts, about what was coming. There had to be something in all those old books and scrolls Wynn had forced them to carry off when they’d seized the first orb in a lost castle in the highest peaks of Magiere’s own continent.

Chap had safely hidden the two orbs that Magiere had recovered—and only he knew their locations. Yet even this wasn’t enough for Magiere. What did the very existence of the orbs mean to the past and the future? Perhaps in all those dusty old books, taken from that icy castle, Wynn might have uncovered something more.

Magiere knew she couldn’t go home until she was free of her burdens: to hinder the Ancient Enemy and avert another war, to never allow her dhampir heritage to turn her into a pawn, and to follow her own path. But the path she was on now seemed never ending, and it continued to drag her forward.

The silence in the alcove—Leesil’s silence—grew more and more unbearable.

Tonight, Wynn had just told them that in the year they’d been separated, she too had found an orb in some lost dwarven stronghold ... and then she’d revealed that there were two more still to be found. This news had hit Magiere like a wall falling down. There were five altogether— five times the burden Magiere had thought she could be rid of when she’d left her home, again, to hide the first one.

Magiere knew she could not walk away from this, that she and her companions had to find the last two before anyone else. But she closed her eyes in near despair. It was too much to take in—too much for Leesil—and now, after Wynn’s question, he wouldn’t look at anyone, even his wife.

“Magiere?”

She raised her head, though it wasn’t Leesil who’d whispered her name, and she looked to the alcove’s nearest archway.

Wynn stood there, one small hand clutching the opening’s frame stones. Her cowl was tossed back, exposing soft brown hair hanging to her shoulders around an oval, olive-toned face. Those rich brown eyes of hers were too wide and fixed. Worry strained her features as she looked to Magiere, or maybe it was confusion.

Wynn glanced once toward Leesil.

Magiere didn’t follow that gaze. Instead, she noticed Chap watching her. He sat on his haunches beyond Wynn, where the outer passage’s deeper shadows made his fur look almost leaden instead of its true silvery blue-gray. The effect made him appear old and worn, but his crystal blue eyes caught the light of the cold lamp’s glowing crystal. Chap’s eyes burned with twin white sparks, too fierce as he watched Magiere.

Did he want her to answer Wynn’s question?

“What happened to you ... all of you ... in the Wastes?”

No memories rose in Magiere’s mind. Over their journey north, that had become Chap’s most common way to express his intentions. When there wasn’t time for more cumbersome ways for him to communicate, he’d slip into her mind and call up her own memories to try to show her what he wanted to say ... or command.

Magiere suddenly couldn’t take her companions’ scrutiny anymore. Perhaps Wynn expected her to say something, and Chap wished her to stay silent. But she couldn’t tolerate Leesil ignoring everything, everyone ... including her. She had to do something to end this lingering moment.

Magiere reached beneath her cloak, toward the small of her back. She gripped something cold and metallic hooked onto her belt, jerked it out, and slammed it on the small table.

Leesil flinched and spun around, but he looked at it , not her. Wynn stepped farther into the alcove, her gaze fixed on the object as her large brown eyes filled with more confusion.

Magiere had heard Wynn once call such a thing a thôrhk , a word having something to do with the dwarves. It was shaped like a circlet of thick metal—about a fourth of the object was missing—but it had been made that way. Its open ends had knobs or studs that pointed directly across at each other rather than in line with the circlet’s curve.

Wynn reached for it, hesitated, and raised her eyes to Magiere.

“What happened to it?” she began. “It looks so ...”

“It’s not mine,” Magiere said quietly.

Indeed, the one on the table was made of a ruddy metal, and the one Wynn referred to was something else. Magiere tugged open her hauberk’s collar, exposing another open-ended heavy circlet around her neck. But this one was made of a metal so silvery it was almost white.

Wynn’s eyes widened, and her mouth hung open as she looked down at the second thôrhk on the table.

A flurry of questions filled Wynn’s head so fast that the next blotted out the last. She’d always thought Magiere’s thôrhk , her orb “key” or handle, was the only one. In a deep cavern of severe heat, that object had been given to Magiere by the Chein’âs—the Burning Ones—one of the Úirishg, or five mythical races of the Elements. Yet here was another so different from the first. So worn with age it looked almost ancient, and it wasn’t made from the Chein’âs’s white metal.

Where had it come from? What did it mean? Did each orb need its own key? If so, why had Magiere’s been able to open the orb of Water, if her thôrhk wasn’t designed specifically for that one?

Or was Magiere’s thôrhk something special?

In lost Bäalâle Seatt, two of Wynn’s other companions, Chane and Ore-Locks, had found the orb—the anchor—of Earth. Somehow they’d beaten a wraith named Sau’ilahk to it, which had seemed impossible, for that spirit form of an undead, a Noble Dead, had gotten ahead of all of them. Ore-Locks and Chane hadn’t come back with a thôrhk , a key for that orb. If one had been there, perhaps it had been overlooked. Or maybe ...