Chapter 13

With a curse, I threw myself at Var, hoping to catch her before she hit the ground. I gathered her in my arms and set her gently in the elf's armchair, sideways, so that her head was on one armrest and her legs draped over the other. Her face was pale.

I knelt beside her and tapped her cheek, but she was limp and cold. I glared at the elf. "What have you done to her? What is tamuril?"

Poldor shook his head helplessly. "She made me! It is a powerful poison, a potion—"

Blind murderous rage shook me. I launched myself at him, ready to kill him. But I didn't. Suddenly my body stiffened. I wasn't able to take a step, or to lower the hands that were stretched out in front of me, curved in just the shape needed to wring an elven neck.

A deep, melodious voice spoke from the door. "Poldor, my friend, whatever is going on here?"

Recovering some of his elven sang-froid, Poldor bowed gracefully to the figure in the doorway. "A misunderstanding, my lord Curunir. A dreadful misunderstanding."

I couldn't see the newcomer clearly, because my body was still frozen. But out of the corner of my eyes I caught a glimpse of him.

He was tall and stately, with a cascade of white hair that fell straight from the widow's peak on his forehead down past his shoulders. A long, hooked nose sat imperiously above an impressive white beard, and his liquid dark eyes glowed with intelligence and power. He wore shimmering white robes and carried a staff topped with a crystal orb set in a crown-like cage of black iron spikes.

He looked at Var, lying limp in the armchair and frowned. "That must be Var, the daughter of Gamil. Long have I desired to speak with her. In fact, I have come here today to speak with her in private."

His gaze traveled from Var to me, still poised in an attitude of attack, and the weight of his disapproval and sadness fell on me. But his question was addressed to Poldor. "What is wrong with her? Has this—dwarf—harmed her?"

Poldor shook his head. "No. She demanded that I give her tamuril as payment for a debt of honor that I owed her family. I am sorry to say that I did as she asked. She must have been out of her senses, to seek death in such a way."

Grief suffused the noble features of the man in white. "Var. Dead. Such a waste."

The invisible bonds that held me were suddenly released, and I nearly collapsed on the floor. I dragged myself to Var's side. "No. She can't be."

I didn't believe it. Couldn't believe it. I looked down at her face, the sweet soft lips, delicate eyelids closed over her bright blue eyes, the spun gold of her hair. How could she leave me, when I needed her so much? I touched her face and neck, cold with the familiar chill of death. Shock was beginning to numb my senses, making me feel cold as well.

Curunir the White was speaking to Poldor. "What reason did she give for this rash act? What did she tell you, to convince you to keep her from me?"

"No, that was not the way of it, Curunir," Poldor protested. "She refused to explain herself—and she did not have to, because I had promised to aid her without question."

"We shall see if you are speaking the truth," said Curunir, and raised one arm from the shoulder, fingers extended toward Poldor's forehead. He frowned at the elf.

Poldor gasped and writhed. The elf's eyes seemed to start out of his head, glazed with pain, and he jerked helplessly in an unseen grip. He cried out, "My lord, I have not lied to you! Please! This cannot be the way of the Istari."

Curunir's fingers wiggled and Poldor collapsed, sobbing, onto the stone flags of his study. The man in white stared down at him. "Do not presume to tell ME the way of the Istari. You are lucky, Poldor, that you have spoken naught but the truth. There have been others who have sought to deceive me. They were not wise to try."

Then the Istar, or wizard, turned to look at Var, lying on the chair like a beautiful broken doll. For a long moment he considered her, and then his eyebrows twitched up. He swung his gaze to me. "Who are you? And what do you know of Var's schemes?"

I just stared at him. It seemed safer that way—the less I said, the better.

"Very well then," he said with a sigh. He reached out his hand, fingertips outstretched toward me just as he'd done with Poldor.

A vast and powerful awareness pressed painfully against my mind, tearing its way into my thoughts with crushing force. My will crumbled under the overwhelming onslaught of the wizard's mind. Everything I knew, everything I had heard, seen or experienced, lay open to him. There was nowhere to hide. Every hint, clue and scrap of information I had was in his power. What I knew about Var, who she was, what she'd told me, and what she wanted—he had only to look inside me and he would know. And he began looking.

I could hear myself groaning, feel my body twisting in a futile effort to escape. But he was in my mind. My body was unable to rescue me. I flailed my arms helplessly, and one hand touched Var's cold, immobile skin. I knew it was her, and I held on.

Var. My Var—mine, all mine, no matter what or who she was. From the instant I'd first held her in my arms, she had been mine. Not his. She, and everything I knew about her, was mine and not this smooth wizard's property to despoil.

I could feel the wizard's mind slithering among my thoughts and memories, calling up words, ideas, and thoughts. Not feelings—he passed over every instant of leaping joy, every icy stab of anger and desolation. It was information he sought. So I ranged through my memory, calling up every sensual image I could: the sound of her voice ordering the others to set up camp; the sight of her bathing in a forest stream; the fiery feel of her lips on mine.

As I filled my mind with everything I felt for her, love, frustration, admiration, and desire, I felt the wizard's mind loosen its hold. I threw more feelings at him—terror and exhilaration as we jumped out the inn's window; the fury and pain of fighting off bandits; the pure ecstasy of wrestling passionately together on a bed.

The excruciating pain in my head vanished suddenly. I dropped, panting, face down on the floor.

The wizard's voice, heavy with contempt, spoke from somewhere high above me. "He knows nothing at all."

"Then there is no reason to kill him, my lord," Poldor said quickly.

Curunir snorted. "Very well, but your sentimentality does you no credit, Poldor."

A pause followed. I felt rather than heard the wizard come close to the armchair on which Var's body lay. "I wish I'd had the chance to speak with her. She had something I wanted. But what she knew of the matter died with her when she took the tamuril."

Fabric rustled as the wizard moved toward the door, then stopped. The dark melody of his voice sounded once more. "Pity the antidote for tamuril doesn't work on dwarves."

And then the wizard was gone.

I blinked. A tiny seed of hope unfurled inside me, and I looked up at Poldor. "Antidote?"

He spread his hands helplessly. "Curunir said it did not work on dwarves."

"But there is an antidote," I insisted. "So it looks like Var's plan was to take the tamuril, play dead, and then have you give her the antidote. Right?"

"Mayhap. But she never spoke a word about—"

"Oh, use your head," I snapped. "Of course, if she's being chased by an all-powerful wizard who wants her dead, the only way out would be to die. Apparently."

He shook his head. "Why would she not say—"

"She probably hoped you'd figure it out," I said patiently. For a centuries-old elven scholar, he wasn't making a very good impression on me at the moment. "Get the antidote. The least we can do is try it. No reason why Curunir would tell you the truth."

He nodded, and went to look on his shelves.

I furrowed my brow, and began thinking out loud. "What did she tell me? Bandits in Dunland, Rohirrim…and a dwarven jeweler who got a mysterious visit from an old man named Sharku who wanted to learn the secrets of the dwarven craftspeople. Hmmm. And then the jeweler died."

Poldor was clinking bottles around. "Gamil was a formidable gemsmith. But he was peculiarly obsessed with the spirit a talented smith could infuse in a gem. He believed that jewels were living things, in a way, and that one could actually place the essence of life itself in a gem and preserve it thus forever."

"I don't think Mahal would like that," I said doubtfully.

"Oh, it's quite impossible to make a stone come alive," Poldor said. "I told Gamil so, many times. He claimed that it was not so much a matter of bestowing life upon a piece of jewelry, as it was a matter of sharing one's own life-energy with the work. He said it is something we all do, whenever we make something new. We give it a piece of ourselves. Ah, here it is."

He showed me a small bottle with gooey black sludge inside it. I nodded, and he poured a spoonful or so between Var's teeth. We sat back. I stared at her face. Was it my imagination, or did she look a little warmer? I grabbed her hand, but it was still ice cold.

I kept thinking out loud. "Didn't the elves make rings that had powerful spirits in them? The essence of an entire race, hidden in a ring. So it can be done. Maybe Var's father was trying to do the same thing. And someone found out about his work and came sniffing around asking questions."

Poldor looked at me curiously. "If Var told you that someone had been visiting a dwarf jeweler in order to learn his secrets, then you already know enough to be dangerous to that person."

"Probably."

"I have heard that Sharku is another name by which Curunir is known. He has long desired power and knowledge," he said slowly. "He believes supreme evil can be fought only with supreme power. Perhaps he believes that the One Ring of Sauron might be countered by another Ring, of equal power."

"I thought that was just a legend," I objected. "I thought that Ring got destroyed long ago."

"Vanished, not destroyed," Poldor said. He was looking at me with a strange expression on his face. "If our guesses are correct, then the most learned and powerful of the Istari may be trying to create a Ring of Power for himself."

That was a scary thought. We stared at each other for a few minutes. Then I shrugged. "There are a lot of ifs and maybes and guesses in that sentence."

He frowned. "But if we can make those guesses, then others might be able to see the same pattern. And if Curunir's intention were to eliminate everyone who could connect him to this plan, then even the tiny scrap of information that you had—the fact that someone using the name Sharku had gone to a dwarven jeweler to learn esoteric secrets—might be reason enough to silence you, too."

"More ifs," I pointed out, uncomfortable.

"But how is it that Curunir did not see this in your mind? How did you manage to hide your thoughts from a wizard of such power?"

I shrugged. "Guess it was another one of those things that don't work on dwarves."

That brought my gaze back to Var's still, cold face. It looked like Curunir the wizard had been right—the antidote didn't work on a dwarf. Curse all this elven garbage, she needed something dwarven to bring her back to life.

Something dwarven. I jumped up and went to my traveling pack, and brought out my emergency flask of Aunt Nott's Mead.

"What are you doing? What is that?" Poldor asked.

"I just want to try this," I said as I tipped the contents of the flask down her throat. I lifted her shoulders up and thwacked her on the back to make it go down.

A moment ticked by. Nothing. A second, even longer moment passed.

Then she gave a huge, ragged gasp and started coughing and choking. I shouted in triumph and pounded her on the back again, just to clear her lungs. She was weeping and shivering, and I hugged her and stroked her hair. I couldn't stop laughing.

Poldor brought her a blanket, and we tucked her up tightly. It was a good thing that the elf was able to make some tea, too, because we all needed it. Ale would have been better, but I was too happy to care.

Late that night, after Poldor had shown us to a small guest room—it might have actually been an elven closet, because there were no windows, but that was fine with me—I held Var in my arms again.

I looked deep into her eyes. "Promise me you'll never, ever do that again."

She promised. I made her promise again later. And several more times after that.