Ghost Fields - Book One of The Fields of Mendhavai Trilogy

Chapter Seventeen

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Mivius still looked haggard and weak. His recovery had been long and a small part of me felt a little sorry for him. He'd been moved to one of the guest rooms where a guard posted outside his door was busying himself with a game of solitaire. The door had been left ajar and I found him in his bed reading. I tapped on the door frame.

“Rinda!” he said hoarsely, looking up and setting the open book pages down on the bed beside him. “Please come in.”

The old man started coughing and hacking and I found myself at his side patting his back gently. He waved me aside and reached for a cup on the bedside table, which he spat into.

I grimaced. “Are you all right?”

He nodded. “Most of the time. Veyga says I have several more weeks to recovery and I'm to rest all day, every day. And when the weather warms up, I'm to spend time outside in the sun.” He raised his bushy gray eyebrows at me in surprise. “Thank you for your concern.”

I grunted and pulled a chair close to the bed. He didn't look anything like the Mivius I'd known and hated and his manner was more… soft. His skin clung to his joints and hung loosely in other places, still papery thin. His eyes were that of a gentle grandfather, not hard, calculating and cruel as they’d been before. He did seem to be regaining his color and the blue circles that had been around his eyes the night he'd nearly drowned were now gone, though they were still sunken. If it weren’t for the beak nose, bushy eyebrows and Nivetta's identification of him, I'd have thought him perhaps a very distant cousin of the man I’d known.

“You wanted to see me?” I asked. It felt odd that I was no longer angry or annoyed with him, but he still had to win my trust; our years working around each other had done nothing to earn it.

“Mm. I understand you've taken it upon yourself to have the temple ruins rebuilt.”

I hesitated, looking out the window while watching him from the corner of my eyes. What, exactly, was his interest in them? My answer was curt. “I have. They're not complete though.”

“But the arch is?”

Suspicion and mistrust were beginning to build in me again. But I could not bring myself to lie, even to him. “Yes, but it's not functional.” Yet, I thought.

“Oh, that has only a simple remedy which I could perform for you,” the old man said eagerly, smiling gently.

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“There's a simple spell to open the Portal, my Lady,” he explained unnecessarily. I nodded. “I already have it memorized,” he said tapping his temple with one finger and smiling again. “And I have the capability to channel the magic needed to complete it.”

“As have I!” I snapped without thinking.

Did I? I had the healing magic and the mind speech. Was it all the same? Was my ability to communicate with the Ancient’s souls within the stone enough to open it? I was unsure.

His eyebrows went up again. “I suspected as much, seeing that I managed somehow not to die of cold.” He smiled to himself. “It was you then.”

A sudden chill ran down my spine and I sat up rigidly in the chair frozen in place.

Danger! They come! I identified the voice as Tilly's, Murdro's hawk.

My stomach lurched and I clutched the chair as the ground dropped out from under me. A sight washed over my eyes as I found myself aloft in the warm spring air looking down on Garli Harbor. I shook my head to clear the double vision but it would not diminish.