The Eighth Warden Bk. 03 Ch. 23-24

Corec eyed him. "She killed the ones we could see. I've never known you to be so eager to walk into danger before."

Bobo harrumphed. "It's Tir Yadar. I've been searching for it—or something like it, at least—even longer than Ellerie has. But, fine, I get your point."

#

Leena woke slowly, her head pounding. Leaning up on her elbows, she found herself on a cot in a Zidari tent. Grandmother Aruna was sitting nearby, pouring tea into two cups.

"I see you're finally up," Aruna said, pursing her lips. "You gave us all a scare, showing up in the middle of camp like that, with that blue thing on your head, and then passing out. Drain shock. I thought we'd need to send to Matihar for a healer, but we got you warmed up and that seemed to do the trick."

"Am I really here?" Leena muttered.

"Yes, and it's about time you came back. What is that thing?" Aruna was staring at Leena's forehead.

Leena suddenly remembered why she'd come. "Udit! Where is he? Is he safe?"

"Udit? He's fine. Hopefully he's still asleep—he stayed up half the night watching over you. He's been living with Rohav in case those men come again."

Leena lay back on the pillow and rubbed her temples. "I was so worried. I thought something had happened to him."

"Something could have. You should have stayed here with him. Where have you been? I checked with my family every week. They said you went to Tyrsall, and then across the sea." Aruna had come from a family of Seekers.

Leena hesitated, but Corec had never asked her to keep it a secret, and Aruna was family. "I can't protect Udit if I can't Travel. I went north to find a way to learn. There's a type of mage that can help other mages improve their skills. One lives in Tyrsall, but when I got there, the Seeking sent me to Cordaea instead."

Aruna's eyebrows rose. "You're a Seeker?"

"Yes, sort of, but my range is short, like yours."

"Then how did you end up in Cordaea? There's no way I could reach Cordaea. Or Tyrsall for that matter."

"I did a Seeking on where I should go next to find a way to protect Udit. It sent me north until I reached Tyrsall, and then it sent me to a ship."

"It doesn't work like that," Aruna said. "It's hard enough to Seek out a concept rather than an object, but you can't Seek something beyond your range. Directional Seeking gives you a longer range than precise Seeking, but not that much longer."

Leena frowned. Once she'd reached Tyrsall, Corec had always been within a few miles of her—if that was where her Seeking had been sending her—but that didn't explain how it had sent her to Tyrsall initially. Had she messed up somehow? She'd still been new to it at that point.

"I ... don't know," she said. "But I found what I was looking for—another of those mages. They call themselves wardens. I asked him for his help and he agreed. That's where the rune on my head came from. Usually I can make it disappear, but my head hurts too much right now."

"Here," Aruna said, holding out a cup of tea. "This will help."

Leena sat up on the edge of the cot and took it. "Thank you."

"So you found what you were looking for? No more of this blood feud nonsense?"

Leena shook her head. "No, Grandmother. I—"

The tent flap opened and Udit ran inside. "Leena! You're awake!" he shouted, hugging her. She winced at the noise and held the cup away from him to keep the tea from sloshing over the side. Rohav followed him in more sedately.

"How are you feeling?" her uncle asked, concern in his voice. "Whatever possessed you to Travel far enough to give yourself drain shock? What were you thinking? The last we heard, you were across the sea!"

She held up a hand to ward him off. "I'm sorry, Uncle. I thought ..." She looked down at Udit, not wanting to scare him. "I thought something had happened here. I'd already teleported six times, and was too tired, but I had to try."

"Six times! Leena! It takes years to build up to that sort of Traveling. You're going to get yourself ..." Rohav, too, glanced at Udit and changed what he was going to say. "You're going to give yourself a headache."

"I did. Nothing happened here? Those men didn't come back?"

"Not here. They tried a few of the other camps, but we were ready for them this time. The empress is allowing her Travelers to work from their own camps to aid in the defense, and she's assigned guards to the camps that were attacked twice."

Leena breathed a sigh of relief. "You killed some the first time, right? Were they Sanvarites?"

"Yes. Why?"

"I'm still trying to track them down." Leena ignored the scowl on her grandmother's face. "I ran into them again in Cordaea."

"Cordaea!" Rohav said. "What were they doing there?"

"They were locals—Cordaeans, I mean, from a place called Bancyra—but they had the same knives."

"I've been to Bancyra before," her uncle mentioned. "It takes me three jumps to get there. You teleported away from them? Is that how you ended up here?"

"No. The group I've been traveling with killed them all." She had to stop and tell Rohav her story about wardens and Seeking. Afterward, she continued, "The ones with the snake knives hired mercenaries this time, and told them we were bandits. We let a couple of the mercenaries go, but the ones with the knives are all dead."

Her uncle had been shaking his head while she talked. "I don't like this. This warden fellow isn't the first person to try to control a Traveler. We have rules about that for a reason. You know that."

"I asked him, and he didn't ask for anything in return."

"We'll see," Rohav said with a scowl. "So, these people are helping you track down the men with the knives?"

"Not exactly. We weren't expecting to get attacked, and we don't know why it happened."

"They were probably coming for you, if they're anything like the ones here."

"The warden—Corec—thinks they were after us all. The Seekers haven't found anything yet?"

"No. Someone's still warding them."

Leena sighed. Her brother was safe for the moment, but she still didn't have any idea how to keep him that way. Why had her Seeking failed?

Tell me where I need to go next to protect my brother. She felt a wave of dizziness and had to close her eyes. She shouldn't have tried Seeking again so soon.

It worked, though. There was a faint pinging fifty miles to the northeast, at the edge of her Seeking range. It was in precisely the same direction as Corec, though he was much farther away. The Seeking wasn't sending her to Tyrsall to catch a ship this time. It knew she didn't need one. She shivered.

Aruna said, "Well, now that you're back, you don't have to worry about it any longer. Let the Seekers deal with them."

"Grandmother, I still swore blood feud," Leena said. "I have to finish it." Plus, she had an obligation to Corec and Ellerie, and she liked the idea of exploring the ruins they'd discovered. She'd never done anything like that before.

"No!" Udit exclaimed. "Don't go away again!"

"Just for a little longer," she promised. "But I'll tell you what. Now that I'm learning to Travel, I'll come visit you as much as I can, all right?" She had to continue her resupply trips to Aencyr for another week or two, but after that, she could take a day where she wasn't doing any other Traveling. Hopefully that would be enough to get her home without any ill effects.

Udit nodded reluctantly.

"You're not going anywhere today," Rohav told her. "Not after your drain shock. You need to rest—the whole day."

Leena was tempted to protest, but she knew he was right. The dizziness from her Seeking had told her that.

"I'll stay for the day," she said. "Udit, you can show me what you've been up to since I left."

"Uncle Rohav is teaching me Traveling!" her brother exclaimed.

"The theory only," Rohav insisted. "We'll wait a few years before we try it for real."

"And today isn't Traveling day," Aruna said. "Today is reading and mathematics, with your cousins."

"Grandmother!" Udit protested. "I wanted to show her!"

Leena smiled. Her brother had recovered quite a bit since she'd seen him last. He almost seemed like his old self.

"Why don't you show me how you're doing on your reading and mathematics first," she said. "Then you can show me what Rohav is teaching you."

###

Chapter 24

"There's too much to explore, and now we've missed the whole afternoon," Ellerie said, speaking to a small group after the sun had fallen. "Without Leena, I guess we'll have to go back and resupply before we can do any more looking around."

Boktar said, "Even if Leena was here, we couldn't stay much longer. She can only carry so much, and we're already running low on oats for the horses again."

Ellerie sighed. "We need to have more time. Even another trip would only give us a few days. It's not enough."

"We can bring more wagons next time," Marco suggested. "How long could we stay here with five wagons full of supplies?"

"Eight to ten days," Boktar said. "It'll be hard to find that many mules for sale nearby, though. We might have to go back to Perga."

"Ten days still won't be enough," Ellerie said. "There's an entire city in there. At least, I think there is. Bobo and I need to take measurements and write up descriptions of everything we see. We've barely started exploring. If we go back to Tyrsall with just the location and a few small details, someone else might get here and do the real work before we can return. I'm not sure I can convince Varsin that the knowledge is more important than the location."

Marco gave a half-shrug but didn't contradict her. "Now that we've reached Tir Yadar, it's worth staying here as long as we need to. If there's anything of monetary value, it's better that we find it before we tell anyone where this place is. Those statues alone could make the whole trip worth it, but I don't know how we'd go about getting them back to Tyrsall."

Ellerie felt vaguely uncomfortable at the thought of moving the animal statues. The stormborn had done so in Tir Navis, relocating a number of statues to their museum, but Ellerie preferred keeping this batch where they were. Hopefully she could find something else inside the city to distract Marco.

"We're thinking about this wrong," Corec said. "We're not still searching for Tir Yadar; we've already found it. The next step is to ... claim it. That's not quite what I mean, but we should establish an outpost here. There's no reason for us all to leave the barrens. A small group would be enough. If we need a second or third trip after this, we don't even have to bring the mules and wagons with us—we'll just walk to Livadi or Perga and get more wagons to haul back what we need. The only reason we've got to take the animals this time is because they don't have enough feed to wait for us to get back."

"If we don't take our mules with us on the second trip, we're not going to find enough new ones to haul five wagons," Boktar said.

"To buy them, no, but we don't need to buy them; we can hire them—the mules and the wagons. The spring planting's done. The farmers can spare their older boys to drive a wagon here and back."

Ellerie grinned. "We wouldn't have to leave; we could stay as long as we need to."

Corec nodded.

"Who will go?" Boktar asked. "Me, I suppose? Nedley to help with the animals, at least on this first trip. Josip, how about you?"

"Sure," the guide said with a shrug.

"Then I'd say we've got a plan."

#

Leena kissed the top of Udit's head, then stood up. "I'll visit again as soon as I can, but it'll be at least a week, maybe two. You be good for Grandmother and Uncle Rohav, all right?"

He grumbled under his breath.

"What was that?" she asked, giving him a pointed look.

"I will," he said reluctantly, "but they never let me visit my friends. When can we go back to town?"

Leena pushed away the thought of her parents' burned home.

"How about when I return for good, we'll move back there?" she suggested. Four silver a day was more than she'd ever made before, and once she returned to Sanvar, the pay for a Traveler was even higher. She could save up enough money to buy a place rather than having to rent another apartment.

"Really?"

"Yes, but it may be a long time. I've still got some things I need to do."

"You're looking for the bad men."

Udit had overheard a number of conversations, but Leena hadn't been sure how much he'd understood.

"I am, but then I'll come back."

"What if they hurt you?"

"I won't let them do that. I'll Travel away if they try." She hugged him one last time. "I've got to go. Why don't you run along so I can talk to Uncle Rohav? Grandmother said she'd save you some coconut rice pudding."

After he was gone, Leena turned to her uncle. "I'll be back soon, at least to visit. I'll let you know if we run into those men again."

"You should stay tonight and get a good night's rest before trying to Travel again," he said.

"I slept for over twenty hours, and then sat around all day doing nothing. I'll be fine." She didn't mention the Seeking she'd done that morning. "I've got to get back. I never told them I was leaving."

He scowled. "Don't make any promises to those people. Traveling belongs to the Zidari."

"Not only the Zidari," she said. Sarlo was part-Zidari and wasn't much of a Traveler, but if he was out there, there had to be others. "And I couldn't have made it back here this quickly without Corec's help."

"Yes, you could have. You made it to Telfort on your own without even trying. All you ever had to do was believe you could actually go where you wanted to go."

"Maybe," she said, staring in the direction Udit had gone. "Or maybe this was what I needed so I could believe it. I chose this."

Rohav sighed. "Promise me you'll be careful. If you find the men who attacked the camps, let the clan know. Don't try to do anything yourself."

"If it's like the last time, I won't have time to do anything—the people I'm traveling with can protect themselves just fine. But I'll be careful."

Giving her uncle one last nod, she Traveled. She still remembered the location signature for the cave entrance, but she followed Corec's signature through the warden sense instead, in case the group had moved on.

She appeared behind him. She felt drained and was momentarily disoriented, as usual, but she didn't fall or faint. Apparently the distance to home wouldn't be an issue as long as she hadn't already spent the day Traveling back and forth.

This far east, it was later at night. The camp was mostly quiet, but Corec was talking to Ellerie, Boktar, and Josip. They hadn't seen her yet.

"I take it nothing interesting happened?" he asked them.

"It was all quiet," Boktar said.

Corec nodded. "You can go off shift. I'll wake up Katrin and Bobo."

"Bobo?" Ellerie asked.

"He volunteered, since I didn't think Treya would be up for it yet. I moved Sarette to third shift to help Razai and Shavala."

"Is she still all right?" It wasn't obvious who Ellerie was referring to.

"Yes. She's still—" Corec stopped talking and spun around. "Leena!"

"Leena!" Ellerie exclaimed, coming around Corec's side to get a better look at her. "What happened? Where did you go?"

Leena took a deep breath. She was suddenly embarrassed about the way she'd left. "I'm sorry—I should have told someone. My Seeking failed, and I thought something had happened to my brother. I had to go home to check on him, but it was too much Traveling. I passed out from drain shock."

"You just came all the way from ... it's called Matihar, right?"

"Yes, just outside Sanvara City."

"But your brother's all right?" Ellerie's eyes searched her face. "He must be, if you're here?"

Leena smiled. "He's fine. I told him about you all. He wants to meet Sarette—I may have mentioned that she could fly."

Corec chuckled. "I'm glad everything's all right. But what did you mean about your Seeking failing?"

"I came here because I'm looking for a way to protect my brother," Leena said. Corec nodded; she'd told him that much already. "Before, the Seeking always sent me with you, but this time, nothing happened. I panicked. I thought he might have ..." She didn't want to finish that sentence. "I had to go see him, so I did."

"The Tirs are warded against scrying," Ellerie said. "And this really is Tir Yadar. We haven't found anything mentioning the name, but it's got to be. There's an entire city inside the mountain!" The elven woman was more excited than Leena had ever seen her.

"A city?" Leena glanced at the cave entrance. "Like the dwarves build?"

"Something like that," Boktar replied.

"And the warding is why my Seeking didn't work?" Certain wards could block Zidari magic, but Leena had never studied the concept in any great detail.

"It could be," Ellerie said. "Though I don't know why it worked before. It should have blocked you the whole time."

"My Seeking range was too short to reach here. I always asked where to go next. Maybe that's why." Leena didn't mention what her grandmother had said about Seeking not working that way, or her own feeling that some intelligence was guiding her. The thought made her uncomfortable.

Ellerie pursed her lips. "After what you told me about your Traveling, I really thought the magic was keeping you with us so Corec could help you. I guess I was wrong."

"Or maybe it wanted me here for more than one reason." Leena wasn't sure why she said that, but it felt right. The fact that she'd been able to visit Udit and the rest of her family so easily proved she'd made the right decision, despite the drain shock.

Corec said, "Either way, we're happy to have you along."

She gave him a brief smile. She hadn't gotten to know him well yet, but Ellerie seemed to trust him. Hopefully Rohav's concerns were unfounded.

"You should come with us when we go in tomorrow," Ellerie said. "Some wards are fields, and cover a wide area, but others are barriers. Once you're past them, they no longer affect you. Maybe you can find what you're looking for."

Leena was tempted, but she still had responsibilities to take care of first. "Won't you need me to go to Aencyr?" she asked.

Boktar shook his head. "Josip and I are going to take the animals and wagons back to Livadi and hire some more wagons and drivers to haul supplies for us, for as long as we need to be here."

Leena nodded, estimating how much feed was left for the animals. "If you're hiring more wagons anyway, wouldn't it be faster to send me rather than go yourselves? Doing it that way, the new wagons could arrive before we run out of supplies."

The others exchanged glances.

"I'm not sure," Ellerie said. "You don't speak Nysan. Buying something from a shopkeeper in Aencyr is one thing, but for this, I don't think you could explain what we need."

"Josip can write it out for me."

"I can do better than that," the guide said. "When we were in Livadi, I got to talking to a man by the name of Lufton. He's an old caravan guard from before my time. He speaks trade tongue. You could hire him to help get everything organized."

"That would work," Boktar said. Then he grunted. "But it leaves a group of farmers driving wagons through the barrens without anyone to watch over them."

Corec said, "There's not much out there to hurt them, but you're right. I don't want to risk it. What about this? Leena can go to Livadi first thing in the morning. If Josip's friend thinks he can arrange everything, then you and Josip head out on horseback right after Leena returns. Without the wagons slowing you down, you can get there in four days, and the horses can carry that much feed for themselves. It'll take time for the drivers to get everything ready. You can meet them in Livadi and escort them back here."