Only the Bold. Морган Райс

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СКАЧАТЬ the stone sing and crossed the bridge to the tower. If anyone can make the old magic bend to his will, it’s Royce.”

      Royce almost laughed at that, but he didn’t, because he could see that his friends would believe that he was mad if he did. This wasn’t about bending the mirror to his will, because that was the mistake people made with it. It wasn’t a thing of will, but a thing of clarity, of possibility. Barihash had made it seem malice filled, Dust had recoiled in terror, but Royce saw just as many beautiful possibilities.

      “Maybe that’s it,” Royce mused in something that was almost a whisper. “It’s a mirror, so maybe it gives you back what you bring to it?”

      “Royce,” Mark said. Royce didn’t look up at his friend, because right then there was too much to see. “Royce, we’re going to steer the ship for home. Give me a sign that you can hear me.”

      Of course Royce could hear him; why wouldn’t he be able to? Royce made himself nod, but then held still, because even that small movement seemed to send ripples through some of the possibilities there, and Royce needed all of them if he was going to chart a way for them to follow.

      “What happens if things continue as they are?” Royce asked the mirror, trying to shape the vague thoughts he had into a question; trying to focus.

      He saw the answer to that reflected in the glass. He saw people dying by the hundreds, by the thousands. He saw blood and more blood, with a war that never seemed to end.

      He looked for a way to win that war, staring into the glass over and over, even though each attempt seemed to end worse than the last. He saw himself, and his friends, and the people who had come to support him die in a hundred different ways, and more. So many of the possibilities seemed to lead to blood.

      The things he felt for Genevieve seemed to be a part of the problem. The love he felt, and the things he was prepared to do for her, only seemed to drag Royce away from doing the right thing. The paths that led to her seemed also to lead to some of the greatest pain. Despite that, Royce found that he couldn’t look away from them.

      “I 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 СКАЧАТЬ