Vivian could comfortably manage speech without effort however. “So,” she ventured, reluctant to speak every word but trying to keep that to herself, “I suppose we’re properly in the mountains, aren’t we?”
“That we are,” Olvir agreed, with as little emotion as he’d displayed in Magarteach’s yurt—less, when Vivian considered the matter, because surprise didn’t enter into it. “I’ll have to ask you to stand guard for more than your share of the night. I doubt I’ll be of much use when I…make the attempt.”
“That won’t be a problem,” she said, leaving out the reasons she’d have been watching anyhow. “Do you know how you’ll do it?”
Olvir shrugged. “Not in detail, no. I’ll start by meditating.”
All priests were trained in that: a form of contact with their gods stronger than prayer but not as dramatic as a full invocation. Vivian had seen Olvir do it in the past, when he’d needed Tinival’s insight on the truth of a matter or, once, to translate a coded inscription.
“Seems like a good beginning,” she said and hoped that was all it took.
Invocations were hard on the priest, which would be a problem in itself with days of hard travel ahead. Even worse, they opened the world.
After Letar and Gizath had fought, the gods had imprisoned Gizath and retreated from their creation. Sitha had drawn the Veil of Fire between them and mortals. Prayer parted it, making a path to the realm where the gods dwelled.
Given Olvir’s burden, Vivian didn’t know what other places he might reach by accident if he drew the Veil aside.
She didn’t want to find out.
* * *
That night, they had a fire.
It was a small one, made of dry branches from the stunted pines that grew on the mountain ledge. Vivian and Olvir built it up against the stone face and behind a few large rocks, which, gods willing, would shield it from any prying eyes.
Olvir sat tailor-style with the flame at his back, telling himself that he’d meditated since he’d become a squire, meditated specifically on his strange powers after Oakford, and nothing had happened. It didn’t help: the situation had changed, or he wouldn’t be trying.
“Silver Wind, in your wisdom, guide my path,” he said quietly, doing his best to adapt a prayer he’d learned in his youth. “Clear my eyes and let me see what I must. Clear my mind and let me know wisdom, truth, and justice. Clear my heart and give me courage to face what’s before me. If all goes wrong, lend your strength to my comrade, Vivian Bathari.”
Olvir couldn’t see Vivian’s reaction. She stood at the side of the circle, watching him and the path at once, as much as she could manage.
His sword was across the campfire from him. It had seemed the best course of action.
Calmness settled onto him, not nearly the complete detachment he felt ahead of battle, nowhere near the serenity he was sometimes granted at prayers, but the necessary tranquility to go forward. Olvir closed his eyes, placed his open hands on his knees with their palms up, and inhaled deeply four times.
He sank into himself and found, at first, familiar ground. There was his body, its strength and its weariness, the desire for Vivian woven with the longing for warmth, sleep, and hot food, the scar on his middle back that ached in advance of the spring rains, his weakness for wine although he had a good head for ale, all the small physical notes that he’d grown accustomed to. Next came his mind: memories of home and Edda, of the knighthood and his missions, scraps of songs and stories, names of people he’d met a few times and likely would never see again, admiration of Vivian, attempts to plan for the future, and the realization that it was probably futile.
Olvir noted it all and put it all aside, sifting patiently. He’d know what he sought, or he hoped he would.
The turning point came after his sorrow about those who’d died beside him, the ones he hadn’t been able to save, and the melancholy of walking the ancient road. He sorted through his humor when he and Vivian had been speaking, his pleasure at the beauty of the view, and most of all his fears—that he’d die, that it wouldn’t be enough, that he would fail andnotdie. Ruin was lurking in the future, and death on a scale he couldn’t fully understand. He knew he’d be responsible for both.
He was sweating and half-sick by the time he got through that layer. Olvir had sat in contemplation once every four days since he’d started his training, but the sorrow never quite vanished, and the previous practice had only taken a little of the edge off the fear. The abandoned road and the long journey by night had honed it again, as was so frequently the case.
As he’d done since before his dedication, he broke through those doubts, that sorrow, and found his bond to Tinival. That ran through every part of his life and every aspect of the world surrounding him. Nahon had once described it as a light that shone wherever he looked closely, Morgan as a thread in fabric, but to Olvir, the tie to his god had always been harmony that gave structure to a complicated song.
That harmony was part of everything, but it was also, unmistakably, itself. Olvir had never been unable to hear it, never confused it for anything else, never found a pattern that even slightly resembled it.
Now he heard another. It wasn’t part of Tinival, but it was so close in nature that Olvir perceived it in the same fashion, at the same time.
Olvir couldn’t get nearly as clear a sense of that other as he had of his god. Simply noticing it took a curious mental or spiritual squinting. The edges kept going fuzzy and unclear even then—or maybe bits of those edges were missing. Olvir couldn’t tell.
He reached out for it, cautious but not tentative.
For a moment, he made contact. A series of mixed images and feelings flashed through Olvir’s mind, the best he could do to interpret an entity beyond the mortal world. He saw a vase smashing into large pieces. Sunset colors, orange and violet, flickered, formless. He felt the urge to grab whoever was nearest and didn’t know whether he meant to embrace or strangle. Vines. Chains. A tree with many branches. A starving dog tied to a stake. A gleaming metal and crystal bridge. A coin lying in a street, gleaming gold. Shifting, dizzying images, not quite resolving into any coherent pattern. An insect, not dead, with others eating their way out of its body. A dagger, shining red in the sunset.
He didn’t decide to stop. The power inside him didn’t throw him off either. Olvir sensed it reaching back with desperate curiosity. Then whatever part was doing the reaching fell away, too weak to cross the distance between them—as was he.
* * *
