Only the Bold. Морган Райс
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need to find a path where people live,” he insisted. He set his mind to it, even as he could feel his consciousness starting to fray around the edges.
There were so few good paths left. They seemed like a slender collection of silvery strands running through a world that was otherwise cloaked in darkness. The problem was simple: people like Altfor and his family, like the king, Carris, would do anything if it meant them holding onto power. What hope was there to get them to relinquish that hold without a fight that would drag everyone else down with them?
The thread for that was so narrow that Royce could barely believe it existed at all. He could see the elements that made it up, though, the decisions that went together one after another, so many that it would almost be a miracle if they all came together. He could see where it started, though.
He needed to find his father.
“Where, though?” Royce muttered. He could imagine his friends staring at him, thinking how mad he must look. He briefly had a glimpse of them there, looking back across the boat, their looks suspicious. What would they be thinking? What might they be planning?
Royce caught himself in time. Was that how Barihash had started? Was the sheer ease of seeing so much enough to push someone into madness? Forcing himself to focus, Royce pushed his attention onto his father, trying to see where he had gone when he left the island. It took everything he had to do it, the mirror’s view seeming to curl away from that one thing into possibility after possibility. Royce waded through them like a man through a snowstorm, trying to pay attention.
Clarity flickered through him, and he realized that he already knew where his father had gone. There had been papers among his father’s things, torn into scraps and seen by Royce for a matter of moments. There had been words on them, and now Royce knew what they meant, where they meant.
Royce could see all of it then, everything that he needed to do. He looked up from the mirror. To his astonishment it was dark when he did so, the stars glinting down, moonlight spilling over the water, and the Seven Isles no more than a dot on the horizon.
“Are you all right?” Mark asked, looking worried.
Almost immediately, all the wondrous details that Royce had seen in the mirror started to fade. The complex web of choices and decisions was too much to hold at once.
“I know where we have to go,” Royce said. He set his hand to the tiller, moving it and setting the boat turning onto a new course. He knew as surely as he could see the moon that this was the correct direction, and that his father lay ahead.
“What are you doing?” Matilde demanded.
Royce didn’t have the words to explain it, or rather, he could, but even attempting to form the words made all that he knew feel soap bubble thin, ready to burst into nothingness and chaos. He wanted to tell his friends, but telling them would change things in and of itself.
“We need to go this way,” he said. “My father… I know where he is.”
“Are you sure?” Mark asked. “We thought he would be in the Seven Isles.”
“I…” Royce couldn’t explain. He couldn’t. “Do you trust me, Mark?”
“You know that I do,” Mark said. Around him, the others nodded, one by one.
“Then we need to go this way,” Royce said. “Please.”
For a moment, he thought they might argue, that they might try to turn the boat back toward the kingdom, or tell him that he’d been addled by the mirror. But one by one, they sat back in place, waiting while the boat continued on its course.
They were going to find Royce’s father, and this time, Royce knew where he would be.
CHAPTER TWO
Dust wandered the island while chaos reigned around him, barely comprehending what was happening. Fire burst around his feet, and he simply didn’t react. Instead, he staggered on, rocks tumbling around him, the whole island imploding in the kind of entropy that Dust would never have believed in before he looked in the mirror.
“I was wrong,” he muttered to himself as he walked on. “So very wrong.”
Once, he’d believed in a world where priests knew everything, and kept fate on its single, set course. Then, he’d been so sure that he could pick a path through fate. He’d seen the horrors to come, and he’d seen the death that was needed to stop it.
Now, Dust didn’t know what to think.
He stumbled on, while boulders tumbled on around him. Dust didn’t try to dodge them, but they missed him anyway, some hint of unreasoned knowledge putting his feet into the right spots.
“How?” he asked. “How can anyone comprehend the vastness of it?”
He understood now why the mirror was said to drive people mad, although no one had told him that, had they? It had just been another thing that he’d seen. He’d seen everything, and everything was far too much for one mind to hold. He’d seen all that he had seen before in the priests’ smoke, and a million other things besides.
Lava burst near Dust, and he turned to face it almost blankly, eyes barely seeing it. There was no room for it when he could see all the things that might be, and had been, and would never be, tangled up in such a ball that it was impossible to pick them apart.
“I’ve done so much,” he said, clambering unseeing over a stand of obsidian and not even feeling the spots where it cut into his palms. “I thought…”
He could see exactly what he’d thought. First, he’d thought that the priests were right, and he’d done what they commanded. He’d done what the signs had seemed to suggest, even when it had meant killing people who had not been his enemies, who would never have been a threat to him. Even when he’d realized the games of the priests, he’d made choices that would hurt people. He’d poured ill fortune into a ring to cause chaos. He’d come hunting Royce…
“I deserve to die,” Dust said. “I deserve it.”
He staggered on, trying to work out the best way to do it, trying to work out what he should do. He wandered through a field of glasslike shards, not caring if they cut his legs. From the corner of his eye, he saw something running at him.
Dust turned without thinking about it, swaying aside from a spear thrust aimed at his heart. A lizard creature hissed at him, drawing back its spear for another blow. Dust stepped in close to it, striking up with stiffened fingers into its throat. It stumbled back gasping, and now Dust was on it, stabbing into its heart with a knife, so close to it now that he could feel the heat of its blood on him. It seemed to be the only thing that he could feel right then.
Even as the beast toppled, Dust cursed himself for fighting back. He could have stood still then; could have let the creature kill him the way he deserved for everything that he had done.
“You can still do it,” Dust said. He regarded the knife in his hands, the shine of the sun off its edge almost mesmerizing in spite of the dark blood that coated it now. It would be so easy to run the edge across his own throat, or across the spots where the body’s blood ran close to the surface. Would-be Angarthim he had trained with had done it before, when the efforts of the priests had driven them to madness.
If not the knife, then there were a hundred other ways to die. He could lie down at the feet of the lizard beings, or throw himself from a cliff. He could stand in the path of a falling boulder, or walk into a field of fire. He could even simply sit where he was. On an island like this, it was harder to keep living than it was to die, and yet Dust somehow managed to keep going.
He wandered, and as he wandered, he tried to make sense of all that he had seen, but there was no making sense of it. He’d thought in terms of one pure line of fate that he could pick out, but instead, there were choices, spreading out in a latticework of possibilities, until no one could say that this thing or that would always happen.
He’d seen all that he had seen before, with Royce’s brightness, and the darkness and blood that might follow, but Dust had also seen