Chapter 45
“Memory,” Algernon said as they settled, “is not housed in the mind. We have always believed it was—the mind as vessel, memory as content, a tidy arrangement, comfortable.” He folded his hands in his lap.
“Memory, as we have come to find, is instead a field. It exists in the space a person occupies, not inside them.”
He paused, his gaze drifting somewhere slightly past the room, in the way of men whose thoughts occasionally outpaced their company.
“This is why the grief-stricken feel the dead in rooms the dead once inhabited. Why a man who has lost his memory of a place still flinches when he passes it. The field persists. It can, under the right conditions, be…collected.”
Behind Algernon’s shoulder, the brass astrolabe ticked.
Ivan’s grip tightened once on the back of the chair, then loosened.
As he stared at the old Druid across the room, he felt something move into place inside him—the specific sensation of a thing that had been slightly askew for a long time finally finding its correct position.
He understood now why they had been permitted access to the north.
Why Dominic had brought them here specifically; to this house, to this man.
“Is there a point coming, or did we all gather here so a Druid may hear himself think? I am told it’s a popular pastime.”
“There is,” Algernon said, faintly amused. “Bear with me.”
He rose from his chair and crossed to the orrery on the worktable, its brass rings holding position.
“There is a place,” Algernon intoned, “that is not precisely a place. You may be thinking of the Void,” he said.
“Most do, when they hear of anything between. But the Void is a passageway. A connective dark. The space left where the realms of the universe press close enough to touch, but not enough to become one. In recent years, we have learned to cross it. Poorly, dangerously, and with far more confidence than wisdom, but we cross it all the same.”
He touched the diagram at the center of the table—lines converging from multiple directions onto a single point, redrawn so many times the paper had softened beneath them.
“The is not that.”
The words settled over the table like dust.
“Old Draoth texts called it An Fhilleadh. The Fold. A pocket in the substratic field—the underlayer of what exists, the stratum beneath manifest reality where consciousness resolves when it has nowhere else to go. It has existed since before the realms were created. Before any of us. It is simply…a property of how consciousness and field interact, when the conditions are sufficient.”
He looked up.
“Osin found it.”
The fire settled. Outside, the wind pressed at the walls of the house and found no purchase.
“He found the outskirts of it, more precisely, and he did what men of a certain kind of intelligence do when they find something they don’t fully understand—he used it before he’d finished understanding it.
He learned that if consciousness could be severed from its field by force—Draoth stripped out, memory separated from the plane that held it—the resulting field didn’t disperse.
It resolved. Into the fold. Cataloged itself there.
And he learned that what had been stored could also be drawn back out.
Re-impressed. Applied.” He paused. “áine, I’m assuming, showed him the door. ”
Sybil’s brows drew together. “The goddess of time?”
“Among other things.” Algernon turned a brass ring of the orrery a fraction of an inch, watching it catch the lamplight.
“The substratic field is part of her domain. It always has been. The fold lies within it—a fold in her, if one were inclined to be poetic about such matters. Time and memory are not separate things; they are aspects of the same continuity. So, when the question arises of how a mortal man came to find his way into a layer of reality he ought not to have been able to perceive, let alone manipulate, the answer is not difficult to locate. It only requires a willingness to look for it.”
Algernon’s hands settled flat on the table.
“What she gains by it, I cannot tell you. I have spent the better part of a decade asking, and the answers I have are guesses. I know only that she has done it, and that she continues to do it, and that whatever her reasons, she has set herself against the rest of her creation.”
“And her sisters,” Ivan said, and Algernon’s pale eyes lifted to his.
“Epona and Rhiannon have been quiet for an age; I had assumed it was simply the way of the gods—indifference, distance, whatever name one wants to put on it. But if áine has set herself against her sisters, then Epona’s silence is not silence but absence. ”
A wrinkle deepened between the old Druid’s brows. “It is, I believe, exactly that.”
Ivan scratched at his chin. “And you want to do what with this fold? Destroy it?”
“We want to do considerably more than that.” Algernon stared at him, those pale eyes again doing more than looking.
“We want to return what can be returned first. The memories that have been taken from the living. We restore what is restorable. And then we destroy the rest. The fold, the mechanism, the system itself. We collapse it so completely that he cannot open it again. And without the fold, he cannot make new shades. Cannot sustain the ones he has. His army—” he spread his hands, “—begins to come apart.”
A pause.
“And a great many souls will at last be permitted to go where they were always meant to go.”
Ivan set his jaw against the small, involuntary thing that moved in his chest.
Thane.
He did not let the name reach his face. The room was quiet.
“How long have you known this?” Ivan asked.
“Years.” Algernon turned back to the charts.
“The specifics? That has taken longer. The fold exists in a location that is not precisely a location. It does not sit in the world. It sits adjacent to it, anchored by three fixed stellar points.” He traced a line between three marks on the chart, widely spaced, connected by the obsessively redrawn lines beneath them.
“Find where those three points converge above the earth, at the precise moment of alignment, and you find the door.” He glanced back.
“The Hallowed was kind enough to assist with the mathematics, some time ago. Without knowing what she was assisting with, of course.”
At her title, something ugly moved through Ivan—heat first, then the cold bite that always seemed to follow when someone spoke of her as if she were a tool laid neatly on a table. He forced his hand to stay flat against the arm of the chair and said nothing.
A door off to the side opened.
Godfrey stepped in, spectacles slightly askew as if he had put them on in haste, then stopped short at the sight of the room already full. A petite dark-haired woman came in behind him. Her gaze moved quickly to Ivan.
Ivan returned her brazen stare. He knew that face.
Had seen it in the Pit through the smoke and the collapse and the fighting at the broken wardlines.
A figure had come at him from an angle he hadn’t expected and pressed something very close to his throat before he’d gotten clear.
He had thought at the time she was one of Dominic’s—she had not been wearing colors and had fought like someone who had learned by necessity rather than training, which was always the more dangerous kind.
She blinked at him. Her expression was not hostile. It was softer and more unsettling.
“Avis,” Dominic said, “and Godfrey. Thank you for coming. Sit down.”
Avis took the chair beside Tristan, who nodded politely at her. Godfrey didn’t sit. His jaw worked. He looked at his hands, then at the wall, then at nothing in particular.
Ivan watched him for a moment. “Why are we here?”
The nervousness shuddering off of Godfrey was its own kind of answer.
“The fold has a seal,” Algernon said. “A blood-seal, tied to the Hallowed.”
“I broke the seals binding her.”
Dario and Avis shifted in their seats.
“We know.” Godfrey’s lips curved—slight, tired at the corners.
“That was how we were able to get as far as we have. But this is different.” He exhaled, and the smile went with it.
“áine used her blood to lock the records when she built the system. The Hallowed’s blood—blood from her line, rather—is the key to the outer gate.
Without it, the fold cannot be accessed from the outside.
” His hands tangled in front of him, fingers pressing together.
“Fenlin found this. Working inside the regime, years ago. That was why we—” He stopped, reached up, took his spectacles off, and cleaned them slowly with the edge of his sleeve. “That was why he did what he did.”
The start of a migraine throbbed at Ivan’s temples. “She’s gone,” he said. “Past the Veil. You won’t reach her.”
“We know.” Dominic pushed off the wall and crossed the room. “Which means we need another source.” He looked at Ivan steadily. “Osin kept stores of her blood from the years she was held at Mordenhall. What he didn’t use in the rituals, he kept.” A pause. “We go in and take it back.”
“You’re proposing a raid on Mordenhall,” Sybil surmised.
“On what remains of it,” Dominic confirmed. “Which is enough for our purposes.”
Ivan looked at the diagram on the table. The converging lines. The single point. “And to get there,” he said, “you need a door.”
Algernon turned from the charts.
“Which brings us,” Dominic said, “to you.” He looked across the room at Sybil. “And to you.”
Sybil crossed her arms.
“You broke my wardline,” Dominic said. “I need to understand how. I need to understand it well enough to know it won’t happen again—and to know whether the same principle can be applied to what we’re attempting.”
Sybil was quiet for a moment. Then: “I’m always willing to assist those in need.” She paused. “For a price.”
Tristan closed his eyes briefly.
Ivan exhaled through his nose.
Dominic went still. “Name it.”
“Safe passage for myself and the two of them.” She tipped her chin toward Ivan and Tristan.
“Regardless of what comes to light during these conversations about Ivan’s history with your people.
Whatever he is accused of, whatever judgment is passed, we leave when we choose to leave. With what we brought.”
Dominic’s mouth tightened. “That is—”
“A reasonable request,” she cut in pleasantly, “given that I am offering to teach you something it took me weeks and the complete reconstruction of my scrying methodology to understand.”
For a long moment, Dominic only looked at her. His jaw worked once.
“I like her,” Avis said, to no one in particular.
Dominic ignored her with visible effort. “I will consider your terms.”
Sybil gave a soft, humorless laugh, and Dominic’s expression sharpened.
“I said I would consider—”
“Consider quickly,” she said. “We are all sitting here.”
Heat flushed his face before he forced it down. He looked to Ivan.
Ivan raised a brow. Your problem.
Dominic returned his attention to Sybil, though his voice had cooled by several degrees when he spoke again. “Are you loyal to anyone in this conflict? I want a straight answer.”
“I am loyal,” she said, “to no man.” Her eyes held his. “Or prince. Or cause. I am loyal to outcomes. And this particular outcome—” she glanced at Ivan briefly, then back at Dominic, “—is one I’ve decided I have an interest in.”
Dominic held her gaze longer than necessary. Then he looked away, which was the same as conceding in Ivan’s opinion.
“What is your father’s plan?” Ivan asked. “After. When the records are destroyed and Osin loses his army. What does Vredia do?”
Dominic’s gaze dropped to the maps and star-charts spread between them, as if he might find a cleaner answer inked among the constellations.
The fire crackled behind him, its light gilding the hard line of his face before the shadow took it back.
“We come out from behind the mountain,” he said.
“At last. We take back the realm. Then we rebuild.”
Ivan gave a short, humorless breath. “There it is.” He leaned back in his chair, the movement slow, almost lazy. “You let the south bleed, wait until the butcher weakens himself, then ride down from your pretty mountains to put a crown on the corpse. We do not need another Lord Sovereign.”
Dominic’s eyes flashed. “There will be no Lord Sovereign.”
“No,” Ivan said, his mouth pulling into something cold. “Only a prince with an army, a weakened king to blame, and a realm too tired to argue.”
Frustration moved across Dominic’s face, sharp and hot, before he mastered it.
“It would not be conquest. It is reclamation. We would restore peace. Restore the royal line. Return the cities and kingdoms to the people they were taken from.” His hand curled against the tabletop, then flattened again.
“We finally have the means to end this. I am asking you to help us reach that end.”
Ivan’s expression did not soften. “Where is it?” he snapped. “The convergence point. Where the three stars align.”
Algernon turned from the charts with irritating calm.
“That is the problem we have not yet solved.” He laid two fingers against the diagram—the converging lines, the neat central mark where they met.
“The mathematics are complete. The location is fixed.” He paused.
“It sits above the Jade Sea. Eleven degrees north of the drowned meridian, at an altitude no land mass reaches.”
Ivan’s eyes narrowed.
“There’s no ground there,” Algernon continued. “No structure. Nothing to stand on, and nothing to anchor a gate.” He folded his hands behind his back. “A rift needs a fixed point. Open air above open water offers none.”
Ivan looked back at the chart. At the point where everything converged—in empty air, above cold water.
He had opened rifts in places that should not have held them, had threaded the Void through spaces that were never designed for it, had felt the mechanics of it from the inside in a way that no one who had only ever used a ring could feel.
He had done it wrong enough times to understand, eventually, how it was supposed to work.
And in the Pit—with no ring and no tether and nothing but the darkness beneath his skin and the particular desperation of a moment where the alternative was worse—he had done it anyway.
He looked back at Algernon, and the old Druid smiled—the same dry, unhurried smile as before; the expression of someone who had been waiting, very patiently, for the last piece on the board to realize what it was—and sighed.
“Show me.”