"So this is what it's all about," King Kelmond said to the prisoners, pacing back and forth in front of them. "You plan to undo this magic. You plan to let it go to waste."
"Nothing goes to waste," Lisha replied in annoyance. "The magic of the pendants is fundamentally evil."
"And yet," answered the king, "I recall a certain someone telling me good things can be used for evil, and some evils can be used for good."
Lisha fixed his gaze, her expression that of an old teacher scolding a disobedient boy. "This is different," she said. "The magic of the Free Will pendant can be used for nothing other than oppression and tyranny."
"I will gladly oppress those who would do the same to my people!"
"That's still a war crime," Saryana remarked under her breath, but the king ignored her.
"Are you sure you can use it, Your Highness?"
They all blinked. The one who had spoken was Evariel of all people.
"This is the free will of an entire people, isn't it?" he asked. "What one will could be strong enough to control that?"
The king narrowed his eyes. "Are you mocking me, elf?"
"No, I suspect he may be right," Lisha answered. "I have never seen such magic used on free will before, but free will, by definition, hates to be controlled. Sooner or later it would control you. That says nothing about your willpower, Kelmond." She over-enunciated the rude form of address, making the guards wince. "No one will—not human, not elvish or dwarvish, not even divine—can hold against that of many thousand."
Kelmond was silent for a long moment. Then he sighed.
"But to send it out on such a search," he said, "it is madness. You will play it right back into the Colorless' hands."
"Do you have a better idea?" Evariel shouted back.
"Anything would be a better idea than searching for a myth while the Colorless are roaming the lands! You may be safe here, or in Elodia or Jadiria or the elf-cities." The king waved a dismissive hand. "But what will you do if your search leads you into the Snowy Mountains? What will you do if it leads into Colorless territory? Will you have this boy, this will-less puppet"—he gestured furiously at Edmian—"use the power of the pendant to keep them at bay?"
Edmian lifted his head. "I can try."
"You? The weakest will of all? Don't make me laugh!" The king's voice was harsh and cold, and he shrank back. "We must stop this. At least for safekeeping, the pendant goes to the Kingdom of Firland."
Marching towards Edmian, he extended a hand, ready to snatch it from his collar when Theor stepped in. "Wait, my lord," he said. "It may be dangerous. I beg of you, let me take it, at least until we know the risks."
Something gleamed in his eyes, something cold and blue, similar to the light that reflected in Edmian's eyes when he spoke of the pendant. Jolette pulled and tore desperately at the shackles around her hands and feet. But the metal was stronger than her. There was nothing she could do except pull and struggle and curse under her breath.
"Don't take it!" she shouted. "Don't take it, you bastards!"
"Don't take it, my lords," Aithal joined in. "It will do you no good, and others it'll do even worse."
"Or the contrary," Theor answered, his eyes still glowing faintly. "It can do us so much good that only a traitor would leave it around this boy's neck."
With that he unclasped the chain and lifted the pendant high up in the air.
Edmian gave a shout and struggled, then he abruptly went still. The blue light reflected in his eyes. Then they grew dull, and his face molded into a blank, soulless mask.
"Edmian?" Jolette called, hoping this was not what it looked like. "Edmian! You're still in there, right?"
There was no answer. Edmian's eyes were unblinking and focused on nothing. His entire figure was rigid and motionless and unnaturally stiff.
"Edmian!" she tried again. "Tell me you're not just giving up over that!"
But he made no answer.
Tears blurred her eyes. Her hands shook inside their shackles, her nails digging into the palms of her hands. All these struggles, all the worry, all the battle to keep him human. And now this. Now he was just another one of the Colorless People.
Eyeing his figure and then the pendant in his hand, Theor paused in thought, then fixed his gaze on the boy again. Edmian lifted his head.
"You will do as I say," Theor told him, "won't you?"
Edmian's eyes glazed over. He nodded.
"And you are on my side," Theor continued, "aren't you?"
Edmian hesitated, as if something inside him still strove against it. Then he nodded again.
"Good." Lowering the pendant, Theor turned to the guards. "Take him back to the dungeon, just in case. We don't know how soon his Colorless education will kick back in. The others may go free, but watch them closely. They are not to do anything I don't know of."
The guards saluted and followed his orders. Jolette yanked and pulled against the shackles and chains. "No!" she screamed. "Give him the pendant back! Let him go! Let him go!"
Nobody listened to her. She thrashed against the metal. Her wrists and ankles bruised and bled, but she barely felt it. "Edmian!" she called. "Edmian, look at me!"
Edmian's gaze met hers. Her voice faltered.
His eyes were flat now, blank, unfeeling. There was no trace in his face of the Edmian she knew, the frightened but selfless boy who had become her friend. The boy in front of her was completely, wholly Colorless.
"Stop shouting," he said in a blank, mechanical voice. "This is for the best."
Silent, unmoving, Jolette watched as the guards took him towards the door and pushed him out of sight.
Then she fell to her knees and knew no more except floods of tears and bitter frustration.
~ ~ ~
Something had to be done.
Jolette stared unseeingly into the garden. Her tears had dried, and her despair had merged into a grim resolve. It was not yet over. It could not yet be over. The Edmian she knew could not be gone that easily. He was still in there somewhere. If only she could somehow get to him, talk to him, she might be able to bring him back.
But the dungeons were closed off to her, and even that still wouldn't bring the pendant back. Theor had it, and he would not return it. Was there a way to steal it? She wondered if there was a way to find out where he kept it. Could one of them sneak in and take it back before everything got even worse?
Aithal might know; he had been here before. Or Lisha. And then maybe Saryana had a strategy for getting their hands on it. Where had they all gone? In her daze she couldn't remember. Maybe the archives, to find out things about the dragons. If there was even still any point to that as long as they didn't have the pendant.
If only she could do something. It was her fault they had ended up in this mess. Why did she always have to rely on the others to solve everything?
She was so lost in thought that she did not notice she wasn't alone until a shadow fell over her.
Blinking, she looked up into the face of the lady who had spoken to them in the dungeon.
Straightening where she sat, she wanted to snap at her, or scramble up and run, but before she could do either the lady stumbled back as if she, too, had not expected her there. Then she quickly turned and made to leave again.
On a sudden impulse Jolette spoke up.
"This is your fault," she said. "Don't you have to say anything?"
The lady stopped in her tracks. The white of her garments danced above the white of the snow under her feet.
"I won't ask for forgiveness," she said quietly, "because I know you will not forgive me."
"You bet I won't!" Jolette shot back. "Not as long as the prince keeps using Edmian's pendant to control him like a puppet!"
The lady did not turn, but her shoulders were tense. "I saw," she said. "But I have no right to tell him what to do."
Jolette narrowed her eyes. "So you can't do anything?"
"I'm a woman." The lady's voice turned bitter. "I never could."
"And that's why you don't even try?"
The lady froze.
Then, slowly, she turned around.
Jolette had expected her to be angry, but instead her face was almost...sympathetic. "A village-girl would not know," she said. "But at the Dragon Court, a lady's words have no weight unless they are repeated by a man."
Jolette stared in incomprehension. "That's stupid."
"That isn't for us to decide."
"But the men won't ever decide it's stupid if we don't make them see it." Jolette crossed her arms, then her face lit up with an idea. "Oh, I know! Why not convince a man that keeping the pendant is bad? He could convince everyone else!"
The lady sighed. "I tried," she answered. "But the only person who even listens to me sometimes is my brother."
"Great, then convince him—"
"My brother is Theor."
Jolette did a double take as the puzzle pieces fell together in her mind.
"You—" she blurted out. "You're a princess?"
Now that she looked at this lady, she could see it. Her pallor and bearing resembled those of the king, just like her pride. Even the tone in which she spoke resembled that of Kelmond, except quieter and less angry.
"I am," she said. "Not that it matters. If you wish to leave with the pendant, I cannot help you either way."
With that she turned to leave, and Jolette almost let her before remembering something.
"D'you know where the others are?" she called after her. "Lisha, Aithal, Saryana, Evariel..." She had almost listed Edmian too, out of habit, but stopped herself just in time.
The princess paused, glancing back over her shoulder. Then she nodded. "I will take you there."
~ ~ ~
"How does it look so far?"
Aithal looked up from the document he had been studying. "Bad," he said, pointing to the growing pile of those he had already read and found unhelpful. "The newest of these date back to the time of the war. I haven't even found proper records of the abandonment."
Saryana sighed. "Same for me. And then there's a whole pile I can't understand. I'm a soldier, not a scholar of Old Firlandic."
"Leave those for Lisha," Aithal said. "Or let me look through them later."
Saryana nodded, glancing over her shoulder towards the sorceress, who was currently digging through a pile of books and manuscripts. Not far from her Evariel stood scanning the shelves, visibly straining to understand anything. The elf had a good enough grasp of modern Firlandic, but when it came to thousand-year-old handwritings he was as lost as Saryana.
"This can't be right," he groaned. "There have to be records of it. And there has to be some explanation why no one seems to have the dragons since!" He forcefully shut a book, stirring up a cloud of dust and falling into a coughing fit. "Someone must have tried to check up on them," he said when he could speak again. "Aren't there any notes? Diaries? Anything?"
"Stop mistreating the books, Evariel, they are old and fragile," Lisha remarked without looking up from her manuscripts. "If there were any records, they may have been lost. One thousand years are a long time for humans."
"Not just for humans," Evariel muttered and then paused. Something had fallen out of the book he had so forcefully slapped shut.
Stooping down, he examined it as his eyes grew to the size of saucers. "Everyone," he said at last, "have a look at this."
The others put down their books and turned towards him. "If you have destroyed anything, Master Elf," Lisha began, "then—"
She caught sight of the page in Evariel's hands and stopped dead in her tracks.
"Give me that," she said, snatching it from him and scanning it twice. Her eyes, too, grew wider and wider as she read.
"What does it say?" Evariel asked, peeking over her shoulder.
"Not enough."
"What?"
"This is from a different book," Lisha said, her eyes still glued to the page. "This page was placed in another for whatever reason. Where the rest of the book is I cannot say."
Saryana edged closer from her other side. "Do you think it's still in here?"
Lisha shook her head. "I doubt it," she said. "This page looks like it was torn out and hidden on purpose. Possibly whoever did it wanted to save it from the same fate that struck the rest of the book."
Saryana clenched her fists with the anger any law-abiding Jadirian would feel at the destruction of important knowledge. "You think they destroyed it?"
"Most likely."
"So that only leaves this page," Aithal remarked. "Even if it is little and makes no sense out of context, what does it tell us?"
Lisha simply held it out for him to read.
"A barrier," he muttered, his eyes running over the page. "Magic...this part I cannot read...not cross the border." He furrowed his brow. "Then something...about...did I read that right?" He looked up. "Lisha, does this say they left the dragons in a place where they can't stay...on purpose?"
Lisha's face was grave. "Yes. They did it to ensure they wouldn't know where the dragons went from there, to calm their enemies' suspicion, I wouldn't be surprised." She sighed. "Even I did not know that."
"And the barrier," Saryana asked, "was it to keep the dragons out of Firland?"
"That's how it looks like." Aithal frowned at the page. "So we know now that, wherever they went, the dragons cannot have left over Firlandic territory. That only leaves southeast over Elodia, east or west across the sea...or north into the Colorless Land."
"Unless they stayed in the mountains, but left that valley," Evariel piped in.
Saryana pursed her lips. "Could they even find enough food in the mountains?"
"They could hunt goats," Evariel replied. "Or the reindeer just north of the mountains, or they could fly out to the sea and eat fish."
"Not the latter," said Aithal. "There was a sea route from Elodia to the Colorless Land before things got worse, and on the Firlandic coast there are countless fishers. No one ever saw anything."
"At least, not that we know of," Lisha reminded him.
"If anyone at sea recorded anything," Saryana mused, "there have to be copies of those records in Jadiria. No ship can enter our harbors without letting all the books on board be copied and archived."
Aithal lifted the page. "And maybe there's a copy of whatever book this was part of."
There was a pause. All of them knew what the others were thinking.
"If only those guards would back off at last," Saryana mouthed with a glare over her shoulder. "Then we could actually talk about the urgent things."
But the palace guards, who had been following them on every step, made no sign of budging. There was no telling if they were eavesdropping, or how much of their conversation they were paying attention to at all.
Looking around, Aithal snatched a blank page of paper from a stack and then pulled out one of the Jadirian pens he carried with him whenever he could. "Now that we found this page," he said, "let's continue our search." His fingers ran slightly over his collar, hinting at his own pendant. "How do we continue?"
Saryana's eyes grew wide with realization. "Do you still have everything you need?"
Aithal glanced at her, understood and gave a nod. "Yes," he said. "They took nothing from me. They aren't allowed to search ambassadors because we may carry state secrets on our bodies. I only had to tell them I did, and they let me change in and out of my clothes alone."
Saryana breathed a sigh of relief.
"Anyway," Evariel asked, "where do we find...everything else we need? Do they guard it somewhere?"
"If it's linked to power, they guard it heavily," said Aithal.
"What do we do then?"
"We shall see," said Aithal, scribbling on the paper. "First of all we should find out where everything is."
Evariel tilted his head. "So we search?"
"Yes, but not blindly. We should make educated guesses on where it is likely to be...and who keeps it."
The others bent over Aithal's notes. He had written nothing, but there was the rudimentary sketch of a circlet of the kind the princes of Firland wore. The hint was clear.
"And who guards it," Saryana continued.
Aithal scribbled down a key and nodded.
There was another pause. "And then?" Evariel finally asked. "What do we do when we found that out?"
"That depends on the situation."
There was a rush of footsteps, and then Jolette barged into the room. "There you are!" she burst out. "What are you doing? We should—"
Stumbling to a halt, she looked at the guards and closed her mouth. Behind her, some distance away, a pale figure hovered: the princess Lavilian.
"Thanks for showing me the way," Jolette said over her shoulder and bowed. It was not at all appropriate, but Lavilian cracked a tiny smile and vanished into the corridor.
"Come over here," Saryana called to Jolette, who stood confused among the rows and rows of books. "We found something about the dragons."
Jolette stumbled up to them with wide, curious eyes. She didn't look frustrated that no one seemed to talk about Edmian; she must have guessed that they could only discuss the subject in secret.
Aithal glanced over his shoulder in the direction into which Lavilian had disappeared.
"And maybe," he muttered, "we can ask someone in the palace for help."
~ ~ ~
Theor could not sleep.
Night had fallen hours ago, but his chamber was still filled with light. Blue light. A clear true-blue, bright and pulsating and reverberating through his very being.
It should be annoying him. He was tired and needed to sleep, and yet he had no problem with it at all. In the blue light's presence he felt wide awake, his exhaustion forgotten and dismissed as a flighty fancy.
All day he had been trying out the pendant's power, testing it, first on the captive Colorless boy, then on his own guards. It was simple. He only needed to hold onto the pendant and direct his will against those he wanted to control, and they did all he wanted. Even several at the same time.
What an opportunity, he thought. What a power! If he studied it a little more, he might be able to control armies. He might be able to force the Colorless to free Rivertown and stop all their attempts at war, and then he might convince the nobles who opposed him to go along with the reforms the country needed. He might get them to acknowledge Lavilian's skill. He could direct the very king at will. As long as he had this pendant, he was almighty.
Part of him protested at the thought. The pendant was not his to keep. It should be his father's as the king of the country. He had only taken it temporarily, and the king had not yet asked for it.
But deep down he did not want to hand it over.
Deep down inside his heart a thought sprouted up, a thought he knew he should call treasonous. Inside his heart he was already pondering to use the pendant's power against his own father to let him keep it.
And the thought was made of glowing blue.