Standing beside Keir, confronting the window bars between her and freedom, he wished he’d managed to preserve—or create—better options. Perhaps better options simply could not exist within a troll stronghold. That was certainly the conclusion he’d drawn, over and over again, during his years in Belzetarn. The tower swallowed down hope like a dragon gulping knights errant.

Keir started to hand the iron droplet back to him, but then brought it closer to her, slowing her breath, and opening her inner vision again.

Gael followed her lead. “That’s strange,” he murmured.

“What’s strange?” she asked.

He took the droplet delicately between his fingers. “Do you see that the scrolling lattice is asymmetric?”

“I’ve not studied broken nodes,”she answered. “Couldn’t the asymmetry be characteristic of them?”

“Perhaps it is,” he said. “But watch while I turn the iron. I think . . .”

He shook his head and began to twirl the droplet slowly, scrutinizing the tiny array as it revolved. The energetic arcs did not maintain a static configuration as they spun. Rather, each curling scroll altered its position in relation to the others, so that the longest protrusion remained on the side of the node pointing to . . . what did it point toward? Gael worked out the orientation in his mind.

It pointed toward Belzetarn’s tower.

“What does it mean?” Keir asked.

Gael’s brows knit, then smoothed. “I have a hunch, but I’ll need to test it,” he said.

Keir gripped her lower lip with her teeth. “What does it involve?” she asked.

“No magery.” Gael smiled a little sadly.

“What then?”

“I must take it outside to different places within the bailey and check its configuration.” He nodded definitively. “And then I’ll come back and tell you what I see.”

Her mouth straightened in exasperation. “Can’t you just tell me?” she demanded.

Gael repressed a smile. “I could, of course. But I’d rather talk of a certainty than a mere possibility, and my test will not take long.”

She glanced at him sidelong, but gestured him toward the door.

Gael went on swift feet.

He got strange looks at every step of his test.

The guards outside Keir’s cell thought it odd that he would leave for only moments and then return. The opteon in the front room clearly thought the same. The sentries on the curtain walls watched and pointed as he walked to random locations in the bailey, stopped at each for apparently no reason, and then walked on to the next. And the messenger boy, who dodged around him at close quarters, saw him staring raptly at the small nugget of metal while turning it slowly in his fingers, and must have wondered if he were a madman.

But he was able to share the certainty he sought with Keir.

“No matter where I stand, it points always at the tower,” he told her.

“But it can’t be the tower that attracts it,” she stated. “That would make no sense.”

“It’s the gong,” said Gael. “The metal from which it came.”

“The lodestone from which it came,” corrected Keir, her expression wondering.

Gael nodded. “Yes. It has to be.”

“But how does that permit us to salvage . . . anything?” Keir asked.

“I’m not sure,” he confessed, “but there’s something—some idea, some possibility nudging at the edge of my thoughts—that promises an answer. This droplet”—he tapped its polished surface with one fingernail—“points the way, if only we can link the right pieces of our situation together.”

Tension tightened Keir’s face. “Gael . . . we don’t have much time to pull these pieces of yours together. I don’t have much time. Carbraes might push my sentencing until after the funerary rites and Dreben’s investment, but he also might not. He could sentence me this very afternoon!”

She was right, of course.

But Gael had the sense that just as the final snowflake falling on a steep snowbound slope might start an avalanche, so an idea inspired by the last two days of events might shift his perspective so radically that his way forward would not merely appear, but seem so obvious that he would wonder that he’d ever missed it.

He closed his fingers around the iron droplet, concealing it, and searched for words with which to reassure Keir.

“When I near the bottom of a tally sheet, with but a sliver of parchment remaining, I don’t require stacks of additional sheets to finish my tally. I need only one, and truly only the top of that one,” he said slowly. “I just need . . . a moment now, not a day, or an afternoon, or even a full turn of the glass. There’s something I know, or that I’ve seen, that I’m forgetting.”

Keir shook her head. “Gael, it’s not something you’re forgetting or that you’re overlooking. It’s something you’ve been resisting all along. You must leave Belzetarn. As must I.”

Gael shifted his stance, leaning one hand on the sill of the barred window. “How will that answer? Wandering the wilds until a band of renegade trolls cut us down? Or Carbraes’ own legions, sent to do just that? And should we escape either of those fates, a winter storm or a pack of wolves straying down from the northern wastes will take us.”

Gael had ruled out solitary roaming as a reasonable choice long ago.

Keir perched herself on the sill, facing Gael.

“But don’t you see?” she said. “The lodestone in the heart of the gong sat at the bottom of that ruined well in Olluvarde, lost and unused for uncounted ages. And yet, all the time, it was there for the finding. If only someone had been looking, we might have had healing for the truldemagar before I was even born. Our ancestors were not stupid! They must have created more than one solution in all the eons that have passed. We should be out there looking!” Her hand closed into a fist. “Finding that solution—or those solutions—is the one truly worthy thing we can do to end this long war between those who bear Gaelan’s mark and those who do not. Even if we seek and never find anything, we’ll have done the right thing, instead of merely tallying which evil is the lesser of the two wrong choices available to us.”

She was right again. His doubts and his caution seemed suddenly petty when viewed against the tapestry she portrayed. Doubt might be accurate, but a man could lose himself in always compounding for what was practical and prudent. He had lost himself. And Keir was offering a way by which he might seek redemption.

Yet he did doubt.

The quest she sketched was a young person’s dream, conjured by inexperience that had not yet seen how luck alone was rarely sufficient to solve even simple problems, let alone complex and longstanding ones such as troll-disease.

Keir’s gaze grew almost tender. “Will you help me? Can you help me? Can you get me out of here? And will you come with me when you do?”

Gael’s lips twitched. That ‘when’ of hers was telling. Even imprisoned, awaiting sentence of death, and surrounded by the whole of a troll citadel, she had confidence that Gael could assure her safety.

“I’ve been considering three different plans to remove you from your cell and from Belzetarn,” he said. “None are ideal. You do realize that it’s not the locks on your cell that pose the real difficulty? Those are trivial. A mere smattering of magery, and they click open. It’s the presence of fifteen-hundred warriors—plus guards—who comprise the real obstacle.”

“But will you come with me?” she persisted.

“Yes,” he said. That was a given, but too much else remained unsettled. Getting Keir free was only the start; he needed the steps that came after.

She leaned forward, resolution firming her expression. “Tell me your three plans. We should—”

He overrode her. “Keir, running away from Belzetarn isn’t a plan. Randomly searching for some unknown artifact of the ancients isn’t a plan. We need, I need, detailed and specific—”

The overlooked, disregarded, missing piece slotted into his awareness so abruptly he swayed, glad of the stone sill beneath his palm.

“The panels at Olluvarde depicted more than one lodestone!” he exclaimed. “Two, I think. Maybe three!”

*     *     *
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The Tally Master, Chapter 22 (scene 102)

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The Tally Master, Chapter 22 (scene 100)

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