The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [197]
Beltan glanced down, then his head snapped up. “By the Blood of Vathris! Sorry, my ladies. Er, Travis …”
Travis pulled his mistcloak from the backpack he still had slung over a shoulder and threw it around the knight. His hands lingered on Beltan’s chest; it was warm and firm. “How do you feel?”
The knight gave him a wry grin, holding the cloak around him. “A bit embarrassed. But otherwise fine.” Then wonder crept into his eyes. “More than fine. Not even an ache or pain from any of my old battle scars.”
A chiming sound. The fairy drifted past them, toward Vani. It made a graceful gesture. Vani seemed to understand. She drew the gate artifact from her jacket and removed the prism. Travis could see the artifact was empty now.
The fairy took the artifact in long fingers and drew it close to its body. There was a flash, and a sharp, crystalline sound, almost like a cry, then the light dimmed, and Vani was holding the artifact again. It was no longer empty, but filled once more with dark fluid.
Vani replaced the prism, sealing the fairy’s blood inside. However, Travis noticed she made certain the prism was turned at an angle, so that its sides were not aligned with the sides of the artifact. He supposed she did this so the gate would not be activated.
“Thank you,” Vani said simply.
Travis moved to the fairy, gripping the Stone of Twilight, the Great Stone he had entrusted to the Little People of Gloaming Wood not long after last Midwinter’s Day. “You let the sorcerer capture you and take you through the gate, didn’t you? You did it so you could come to Earth and bring me Sinfathisar. But why?”
The fairy tilted its head, then words chimed around Travis, and inside him.
To choose what it shall be.
He didn’t understand. What was he supposed to choose? However, before he could ask, the fairy drifted away. The radiant being paused before Grace. Then, slowly, it bowed to her.
Grace lifted a hand to her throat, the light of the fairy shining in her vivid eyes. For a moment its light wavered, and the being seemed to reach a hand toward her. However, Travis must have imagined it, for the silvery corona that surrounded the fairy suddenly brightened, expanding like a star, then collapsed, leaving only a white-hot spark of light. The spark circled around them once, then sped away down the alley and was gone.
Travis gave Grace a questioning look, but she only shook her head, then moved to Beltan. First she lifted one of his hands, then the other, then studied his face.
“This is impossible. You were in a coma for two months, Beltan. Your muscles had experienced severe atrophy, and you were osteoporotic. And now”—Grace stepped back—“now you’re perfect.”
Beltan’s eyes sparkled, and he gave a bow. “Why thank you, my lady. So I’ve always liked to believe.”
“No, that’s not what I meant—”
He sighed, the mirth dimming in his eyes. “I know what you meant, my lady. My body is hale, that’s all.” The knight gazed down at his hands. “And I am anything but perfect.”
A note of alarm cut through the relief in Travis’s chest. What was Beltan saying?
Grace spoke again. “You said something about the fairy’s blood, Beltan, about them infusing you with it.”
“I believe so, my lady. There were tubes going into my veins when I woke in their fortress. They must have used them to put the fairy blood in me. I think … I think that was how I knew things I had no way to know, like how to speak their language.”
This struck Travis like a slap. Grace and he still had the silver half-coins Brother Cy had given them, and he had thought it simply the magic of the coins that had allowed him and Grace to understand Beltan. But Deirdre and Farr had been able to speak to Beltan as well, and Davis and Mitchell. So there had been another sort of magic at work.
“The chin-pasi at the fortress,” Beltan went on, “I think they put the fairy’s blood in it as well.”
“The chimpanzee?” Grace crossed her arms. “Yes, that has to be how they did it—that’s the delivery vector they were