“You’ve never loved anybody?”
“There was a girl once, with lively eyes and hair like fire. I can’t say if I felt love, but I felt longing. My heart would pound if I caught sight of her, and if she should smile at me? I was the wealthiest boy in the land. I knew if I ever felt the touch of her hand on my cheek, even just that, I would die happy and fulfilled.”
Fallon snorted out a laugh. “Nobody dies from love.”
“Oh, but they do, from where love may lead them or what it may ask of them. And so I never felt her hand on my cheek. I made my choice.”
“Maybe you did love her because you were a boy, and now you’re old, but you remember her.” She ate the last of her eggs. “How old are you?”
Mallick sat back, looked her directly in the eyes. “I was born on the third day of the third month in the year six hundred and seventy-one.”
“Come on.” Out of habit, she started to reach for his plate to clear it. “If you don’t want to tell me, just—”
He clamped a hand on her arm. “I was born to a witch, sired by a solider whose own mother had elfin blood. I have little memory of him, as he died in battle when I was barely weaned. I was her only son and, like your mother, she wept when I was called. I had ten years when I left her. And ten more while I trained and studied and traveled. Ten more to practice, to live in solitude.
“Then I slept as the years passed and the world changed, and magicks hid or died as those who held them were persecuted or reviled, or ignored. Until the night I awoke to the sound of a single drop of blood striking the first shield, of the shudder of it cracking beneath the sacrifice. And my time began again as yours would come.”
She believed him, and belief made her heart hammer. “You’re saying you’re immortal.”
“No. No. I bleed. My life will come to its end as any man’s. But I was asked to train and serve and defend The One, she who would take up the sword and shield, she who would bring the light and restore the balance. I said yes. I took a vow. I made this choice. I will never break that vow. I will never betray you.”
He rose, cleared the plates himself.
“What’s the first shield and how did it crack under a drop of blood? How many are there? Where are they? How did—”
“You’ll learn. For now, gather your things and saddle the horses. I’ll deal with the dishes.”
“Give me one answer,” she demanded. “One damn answer.”
“Ask the right question.”
She hesitated, then asked what she realized weighed heaviest. “What if I’m not good enough? What if I’m just not good enough or smart enough to do all of this?”
“Then I would have failed. I don’t intend to fail. Don’t dawdle. We have a long ride ahead.”
She rode a full hour in silence. Not sulking silence, but thinking silence. She knew some faeries could live more than a hundred years. Like old Lilian at home, who claimed to be a hundred and twenty. Elves could have long lives, too, and children of mixed magicks … there hadn’t been enough time since the Doom to know for sure.
But she’d never heard of anyone who’d lived for more than a thousand years. He’d said he’d slept, she remembered. Like hibernation?
And if it was all a choice, why had he been called all the way back to train somebody born more than fifteen hundred years later?
It was really confusing. Not understanding wasn’t ignorance, she assured herself. It was just not understanding.
They rode through woods, across fields, over roads. Some of the roads still had cars abandoned on them. She saw hills and houses, even a few people, and what she realized was a village, larger than the one she knew, with buildings and the places where they’d once sold gas for cars and food to travelers.
Though for the most part, Mallick stayed off those roads, away from buildings, she’d spot them in the distance.
And wonder.
She’d studied maps and globes and the atlas. She’d seen DVDs that showed a world, showed lives, that seemed so distant and different and exotic.
But the world, once you were out in it, she realized, was so much bigger than anything imagined.
It just went on and on. She couldn’t believe it had ever been filled, that cars had streamed along those wide roads she knew had been called highways.
It seemed like make-believe, like the movies on the TV.
“Did you see it?” she asked. “When it was full of people and cars and planes?”
“Yes. And though I had looked in the crystal, though I’d been shown, it was a wonder.”
“Is it really a choice, could I have really said no?”
“It’s always a choice. I won’t betray you, and I won’t lie to you.”
“Then if you were called so long ago—before there were cars and planes, before the world was so full—how could that happen a zillion years before I was even born?”
“Powers greater than mine, greater than even yours will be, foresaw what might be. It’s the nature of people, magickal and not, to wish for peace and march to war. It’s the nature of those with darkness in them, more than the light, to plot for war, to covet power. If the dark had failed that night and the shield remained whole, I might have slept another millennium, and The One would not yet be born. But at some point in time, it would happen.”
“Did you dream?”
He smiled a little. “I lived lifetimes in dreams. And I learned, even as I slept, of the world and its changes.”
“That doesn’t seem very restful.”
He let out a laugh, rich, full, unexpected. “It wasn’t,” he told her. “No, it wasn’t restful.”
Together they crossed a fallow field at a brisk canter, then rode up a steep slope to a blacktopped road.
“How much farther?”
“Another two hours. The rain will come at nightfall, but we’ll be there long before.”
“Sooner—for the rain,” Fallon said.
He gave her a slow, haughty glance. “Is that so?”
“We’re riding southeast, and the wind’s coming from the east, bringing the rain with it. Unless we change directions, we’ll have the rain at least an hour before nightfall if we’re traveling this way another two hours at this pace.”
She glanced at him with a shrug. “Farmers know the weather. The rest is just math.”
He said, “Hmph,” and continued to ride.
“Somebody’s—”
She broke off when he threw up a hand, as he heard the engines, too. He cursed himself for taking this stretch of the road—to save some time—with little to no cover on either side.
Even as he considered options—the first to lead her in a gallop back over the field—three motorcycles topped the rise of the road, barreled down it.
“If I tell you to go, ride and ride fast, back over the field. I’ll find you.”
Something in her quivered; something in her steeled. “There are six of them, and one of you.”
“There is only one of you in all the world. Do as I say. Do not speak to them, and if I say go, ride.”
They rode two to a bike, Fallon noted. Three with sidearms, three with long guns. Four men, two women.
All Raiders, she concluded, with the skull symbols painted on the bikes.
The one in the lead swung his bike across the road so that she and Mallick stopped the horses. He wore a bandanna covered in skulls around his brown hair, a pendant of another around his neck.
He’d groomed his beard into two long tails.
The woman behind him bore the slash of a scar over her left cheek. Like her companions, she wore dark glasses to conceal her eyes.
She tossed a leg over the bike, slung the rifle from her back, and held it in casual threat.
Fallon scanned the others, tried to keep her heartbeat steady as the throaty sound of the engines shut off.
The leader swung off his bike. “Well, what do we have here?”
“My granddaughter and I are traveling south to look for work.”
“Is that so? Hear that? They’re looking for work.”
The one on the second bike tipped down his sunglasses, sent Fallon a wink that made her skin feel sticky.