Alone with the outselves of a thousand mages, Danny suddenly became aware that they were screaming. And loudest of all, the huge and powerful outself of the Gate Thief. They weren't doing doing anything, but they were filled with fear and hatred and hope and hunger all at once, and they were screaming in his mind, and all that he could do was scream back at them until he dropped from the rope onto the floor of the gym, screaming and gasping and screaming again. He could not hear his own mind, no matter how loud he screamed. I am Danny, he was trying to say. I am Danny, this is anything, but they were filled with fear and hatred and hope and hunger all at once, and they were screaming in his mind, and all that he could do was scream back at them until he dropped from the rope onto the floor of the gym, screaming and gasping and screaming again. He could not hear his own mind, no matter how loud he screamed. I am Danny, he was trying to say. I am Danny, this is my my heart, not yours. It belongs to me. heart, not yours. It belongs to me.

It had never occurred to him, because he had not foreseen this outcome, that to take other mages' outselves into his heart would be the equivalent of a heartbound beast allowing the outself of a mage to ride him. And if Danny was not strong enough, not skilled enough, they would control him like a clant.

And Danny had no skill with this at all.

22.

JUSTICE.

Queen Bexoi seemed happy to see Wad when he appeared in the nursery. He had been watching her for more than two weeks, and she was never alone. He knew it was no coincidence, no accident. Whenever Prayard left her, she made sure someone else was with her-usually a court official, but when necessary, one of the nurses tending her child. Wad had seen her do exactly the same thing when avoiding the agents of Gray, only it had been even more difficult, of course, to avoid Wad, since he would know whenever she was alone and could get into any room. So when Queen Bexoi suddenly had not so much as a moment of privacy-she who had once had hours to herself every day, and who could could have solitude with a wave of her hand-Wad knew exactly what was going on. have solitude with a wave of her hand-Wad knew exactly what was going on.

Today, though, she had finally slipped. The nurse who was supposed to be in the nursery when Bexoi arrived had stumbled on the stairs and was now in the kitchen, having her wound bathed and bandaged by the day cook, Mast. So when Bexoi left her ladies-in-waiting at the door and came inside the nursery, she had no company but the baby, Oath. And, in a moment, Wad. They were alone together at last, unseen by anyone except the baby and whoever might be watching at the open viewport he had created in Anonoei's old room.

Yet Bexoi didn't bat an eye when he appeared. She smiled warmly, resting her folded arms across her huge belly, which was one month from delivery, and said, "Oh, Wad, I've missed you so much, my only friend, please, sit down."

He did not sit. He was here to make sure she knew that she could not harm Prince Oath with impunity. He had no time to waste. "I realize that things are over between us, Bexoi," he said, "and I am not angry."

"Over?" she said. "Friendship does not end. end."

"But I will never be in your bed again, and I'm content," said Wad calmly-as deceptive as she was, and better at it.

"I have a husband, now, of course," said Bexoi. "My lonely vigil is over. You have been such a blessing in my life, do you think I could ever forget your kindness? You have my friendship and loyalty forever."

Wad wondered how many times she had rehea.r.s.ed the speech, knowing that for any normal man it would be infuriating, would stir him to violence or ranting or grief. Was that what she wanted from him? Wad did not care-he was not here to follow her plans, but to bend her to his own.

"I came," said Wad, "to ask you whether Prayard's baby is doing well."

Bexoi smiled beatifically, opening her arms to stroke the sides of her own belly with affection. But Wad saw her also become more tense, more alert. "Why do you ask? Have you heard that I am unwell? That the baby is in danger of any kind?"

"How could a baby inside your womb be in danger?" asked Wad. "Who would dare to reach inside your body and pinch off the cord until the baby died? What kind of monster would do such a thing, even if there was a man who could?"

There. The threat was made.

She grew solemn. "I have a friend who makes sure that babies pa.s.s out of my body in their proper time, healthy and undamaged. He tends my body as well, so I suffer no ill effects. That friend is the most precious person in my life."

Oh, yes, my love, he answered silently, do remember how childbirth nearly killed you-would have killed you, without my help. Think of that before you raise a hand against my son. "Not more precious than Prayard," said Wad. "Not more precious than the baby you carry. Not more precious than the baby Oath whose birth has made you Queen and wife in fact as well as name."

"Who can measure one love against another?"

"That is my question," said Wad. "I have in my possession, you see, a woman who was once the King's beloved, who gave him sons that once he loved. These last two weeks, as you avoided me, I found it harder and harder to get food for them unnoticed."

"How unfortunate," said Bexoi, with real sympathy in her voice, if not her eyes.

"It occurred to me that perhaps it is time, now that you occupy your proper place as Queen, for me to bring forth the prisoners who have spent a year and a half in my care. These were children the King once loved with all his heart. Think how happy you would make him, to produce them for him in his own bedroom, and their once-beloved mother, too. How he would thank you for having kept them alive all these months."

Bexoi continued to smile, but her eyes were hard. "I thought they must have pa.s.sed from the land of the living many months ago. I know I asked you from the start to send them plunging to the bottom of the lake."

"What kind of warden would I be if I allowed such a misfortune to befall them? It's true that they could fall at any time, right out of their prison cell, but who knows where the gate that catches them might lead? Right now it leads to the top of the same cave. But it could lead here to the nursery. Or to the King's chamber."

"Why are you threatening me like this?" asked Bexoi softly. "When my husband's love is so new and fragile? You threaten my unborn baby, you threaten to return my husband's old lover and his b.a.s.t.a.r.d sons. Why would my friend betray me like this?"

"Why did you shun me?" asked Wad. "Why did you cut me off without a word? What am I to think, except that you are plotting something?"

"I couldn't face you," said Bexoi. Now her performance changed. Instead of happiness to see him, instead of utter innocence, she was now a helpless little girl, asking him for help, for understanding. "I thought you would be angry. I was afraid."

"You thought I'd take the hint and go away," said Wad.

"You helped me when I was in need," she said. "I was showing you I was in need no more."

"Telling would have been better than showing."

"Asking would have been better than showing up uninvited," she answered.

"You know I can't approach you openly. The kitchen boy? The castle monkey? The one that was named 'Wad of Dough' by the only one who loved him?"

"I loved you," said Bexoi. "I love you still."

Wad ignored her. He knew this game. "How quickly would they act to swat me away, to throw me out of Na.s.sa.s.sa? Or imprison me, if they thought I meant to speak with you alone?"

"If you know your place so well," said Bexoi, "perhaps you ought to have stayed there."

Her words stung him. "On the night when Luvix meant to poison you or stab you to death, should I have stayed in my place?"

"That night your place was with me."

"And when Oath was conceived, should I have been in my place?"

"Your place was in bed with me, because I bade you come."

"But now my place is back where I was before, as if you owed me nothing."

"You slept with the Queen of Iceway, sister of the Jarl of Gray," said Bexoi. "You have had your reward. There is no other. My need for you has pa.s.sed."

There it was, stated nakedly, without pretense. "Then all is clear between us," he said.

"No it isn't," she said. "You have threatened my unborn baby."

"You know I'd never harm a child," said Wad.

"You have kept two children prisoners in a cave, for a year and a half," she said contemptuously.

"You charge me with a crime that I committed for your sake?"

"For my my sake you would have murdered them. I don't know for whose sake it is that you have kept them alive for all this time." sake you would have murdered them. I don't know for whose sake it is that you have kept them alive for all this time."

"I didn't need to share your bed, Bexoi. I know that's your husband's place. I could have continued to be your protector and ally, if you had only asked me."

"Then I regret that I did not. I ask you now."

"Too late," said Wad.

"Alas," said Bexoi.

Wad expected her to attack him. So he was taken by surprise when she flicked a hand and the high-sided bed where Prince Oath slept erupted in flames.

Wad did not hesitate. He gated to the crib, his arms already outstretched to seize the child between his hands.

But the baby was not there. Instead, there was a mannequin, the doll that Wad himself had used to hide Trick's absences. And as he hesitated in the realization, Queen Bexoi engulfed the wooden doll in unnatural flame that created bitter smoke. The doll had been painted with something, and the smoke from its burning dulled his mind.

It was a clever enough plan, to make him think that he was saving his son, to use his own trick against him, and to place him for a long moment in the agony of fire and the stupidity of the drug.

How else could you murder a gatemage, except to entice him into the midst of poisoned smoke and hold him there until he lacked the wit to gate away?

The poison was not quick enough, the pain of the flames not sharp enough, his confusion not long-lasting enough. He gated out of the castle entirely, to a spot atop a hill overlooking Na.s.sa.s.sa from across the fjord. He was healed in that moment by the gate itself, so his mind was clear.

He had no more than a moment to wonder where the baby was, and how she had removed him from the crib without his noticing. Only a moment to realize that she must have arranged for the nurse to "stumble" and be absent, that Bexoi had used that decoy to distract him and, with luck, a.s.sa.s.sinate him. He had not discovered an opportunity to be alone with Bexoi, he had fallen headlong into the trap she laid for him. He had never been in control of anything; whatever the risk to her or to her second child, she wanted him dead before the child was born.

He could not think about this now, because from his vantage point he saw at once that a dozen men were being lowered over the castle walls on ropes, heading for each of a dozen caves that overlooked the lake below. In three of them, he knew, they would find Anonoei and her two sons. They had pikes. Their plan could not be clearer. And Wad remembered that he had told the Queen what the prison he had made consisted of, but had never told her that the three of them were separated, or which of the caves contained them.

Wad knew how to save Anonoei and her children, but he had no intention of bringing them back to King Prayard. That would only put their lives in danger, for the King was now besotted with Bexoi, who carried his child. If he had taken Wad's advice and watched at the viewport in Anonoei's old room, then he would know that Oath was not his child, that Bexoi had been faithless to him, that she knew who had captured Anonoei and her children, and that Queen Bexoi was a firemage. If he had not watched, he would not know. But either way, there was little hope for Wad's three prisoners if he brought them to a place inside Na.s.sa.s.sa. Bexoi would kill them if the King did not.

So instead, Wad cast his inner gaze to a place high in the mountains, where once he had found clothing left by a young girl's hands. But where were the girl and her family, who had picnicked by the tree where Wad had dwelt in silent dreaming for so many centuries? He knew that poor as they were, the family would take in the children and their mother. And the prisoners, for their part, would be so grateful to be free that they would accept whatever meager fare was offered them.

Later, Wad would come to Anonoei and her sons and tell them a useful story about who imprisoned them and how they were set free. Later, he would bring them to the people who still mistrusted Bexoi and believed the kingdom would be better served if Anonoei's children were King Prayard's heirs.

Once, fresh-hatched from the tree, Wad had shadowed the girl and her family along a mountain road. Wad had seen where they arrived. And now he was there, looking down a slope at the lonely house in s.h.a.ggy fields nearly ready for the poor harvest of the short growing season in the mountains.

He took the gate at the mouth of the cave where the dangling soldier braced his feet upon the sill, poised to jab with the pike into Eluik's body, and pushed the gatemouth up the sloping floor to swallow the child inside. At that very moment he had already moved the tail of the gate to a spot in the dry gra.s.s just up the hill from the house of Roop and Levet, and their brave and kind-hearted daughter Eko, who once had succored him.

Wad paused only long enough to see that Eluik was there and alive, then returned his attention to the face of the cliff. Another soldier now was poised at the mouth of the cave that held Anonoei, readying his pike to probe the woman who lay trapped and helpless before him.

At that most inconvenient moment, Wad felt a familiar stirring that he did not understand. It was a burning somewhere deep inside him, in the well from which five hundred voices cried to him. He did not know what the burning meant, or why the voices cried out when the burning came, or who they even were, but he knew that every time he had felt this burning during all his years inside the tree, the only way to still the hunger was to eat.

Not food, but the thing that burned.

Now, though, he was not in the tree. Now he was a woken man, a Gatefather who understood his own magery. So what he had experienced during his long tree-sleep as a burning and an eating, as unconscious as that of a babe inside the womb, he now understood quite differently.

It was the presence of another gatemage that had stirred him up. Or rather, it was the creation of a Great Gate that was not his own which caused him to burn inside. The new Great Gate led from a world that Wad had once known well, but now could not remember. He only knew that if that Gate were left in place, it would destroy everything that mattered in the world.

So Wad reached out, by instinct now, after so many years of habitual response, and ate it. He felt the outself of the other mage, the maker of the gate, react with surprise and try to pull away. He knew that he had felt the selfsame thing at least two dozen times while he had lived inside the tree. But this time he understood that it was a person, and that what he ate was that other person's heart, his outself, the part of him that made his gates. Wad swallowed that heart, and with it dragged inside himself the whole array of gates the other mage had made, sucked them in like noodles that dangled outside the mouth, only to be slurped inside. And in a moment he had them, all the gates.

There were so many. This one had so many gates, and yet they had not begun to exhaust his hearth.o.a.rd. Wad had never seen a Gatefather with so much potential. But, as usual, the gatemage was naive and did not understand what was happening with him. He had not learned enough to know how to resist Wad's strength and skill and wiliness.

But just as Wad was about to sever the connection between the gatemage and all the gates he would ever make, a strange thing happened. Out of the heart Wad held already in the jaws of his inner mouth, the other gatemage stretched open a mouth much larger than Wad's own, and snapped it over him, over his entire hearth.o.a.rd, over all the other mages' hearth.o.a.rds that Wad held inside him. The stranger snapped, he bit, the connection was severed. And Wad was helpless to resist.

If the other mage had not been so naive, he would have sucked in all of Wad's existing gates as well, but he did not. The gates that Wad had made remained. But he had no hearth.o.a.rd now, nothing with which to form another gate.

In that moment, Wad went from being the greatest Gatefather that the world of Westil ever knew to being one so frail he had no store of gates inside him, and only a handful of existing gates that he could manipulate.

The soldier stabbed into the cave with his pike, and Wad could not do anything at first. It would take a tiny bit of his outself even to move her gate the way that he had moved Eluik's, and he had no shred of outself left to do even this.

So he sucked Anonoei's gate into himself, to give himself some kind of hearth.o.a.rd, however small.

Her bleeding body tumbled from the cave mouth toward the lake.

Now Wad had enough reserve that he could move the mouth of Eluik's gate to a place just under the falling woman. It swallowed her; she disappeared in midair; but he felt her emerge in the snow near Eko's house, fully healed by the pa.s.sage through the gate.

He found the cave where Enopp had been held. The soldier there was drawing back his pike from the cave, and on the end of it Enopp hung, gripping it with both his hands, though it pierced him through the belly. If it had been his heart, no doubt it would have been too late to save him, but quickly Wad took back Enopp's gate, gaining even more power and quickness. Then he swung the mouth of Eluik's gate to swallow him. He disappeared.

But because Enopp still gripped the pike, it came along with him, leaving the soldier standing there, balanced between cave sill and taut rope, with empty hands.

Enopp emerged between his mother and his brother in the mountain gra.s.s. He was not healed by the gate because the spear still pierced his body and he still held on to it.

Pull out the pike, Wad shouted in his mind. But Anonoei and Eluik just stood there, shivering and terrified. Two years of prison had made them helpless, broken, unresourceful. They could do nothing.

Wad moved the mouth of the gate across the gorge until it swallowed Wad himself. He too emerged on the mountain slope. He pulled the pike from the writhing boy, then dragged the mouth of the gate from Na.s.sa.s.sa to this place and pa.s.sed it once more over the boy, depositing him only inches from where he started, but with no wound in his belly.

Wad stood revealed now before Anonoei.

"You," she said. "The kitchen monkey. Wad."

He turned to her. "Get your sons down the hill and beg these gentle souls for help! Are you a fool? Walk!"

But they could not walk. They could barely stand.

Wad gathered in more of the gates that he still had to work with, a tiny fraction of the outself he was born with, and made a gate to take them down to a spot just outside the door of the humble shack. "Open up!" he shouted.

No one came.

The house was empty.

Wad gated them inside the hovel. It would be warmer there than outside. It was all that he could do right now.

Because he had a greater concern, now they were safe. What had Anonei and her boys ever been to him, except his enemies and then his prisoners and finally his terrible burden of responsibility? For them as human beings he cared nothing, because he knew them not at all.

All he could think of now was: Where is Trick? He was not in the burning crib when I reached for him. Where did she put him?

Wad used the gate at hand, reversed it, and took himself back to the hill overlooking the fjord and Na.s.sa.s.sa's steepest wall. Then he closed the gate entirely, and gathered up all the other gates, the ones that once had been his pa.s.sageways to freedom in Na.s.sa.s.sa, the gates that once had led him to the Queen. Now he wished that he had been like the mage who swallowed up his hearth.o.a.rd, leaving hundreds of gates everywhere. If he had not been so tidy, he would have them now. Instead his entire hearth.o.a.rd was no more than that of a common Pathbrother.

How could I not have understood that I was the Gate Thief all along? What did I think those voices inside me were, that seething ma.s.s of rage and loss and fading memory? I did not think. I did not remember a time when they were not there. But there must have been such a time, because I stole them all. Somewhere among them was Hull's grandfather. So many others. Why was I doing this? Why was it so important that no gates be made in this world, or leading from another world to here?

Wad realized now that his old self, the self that still remembered things, must have hidden inside the tree so he would live for centuries, stealing gates and gatemages' hearts. Why had he become the enemy of all gatemagery? Why couldn't he remember? Had his memories seeped into the tree, lost to him forever? Or did they remain somewhere inside him, waiting to be found?