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She leaned toward him in the moonlight. “Merritt, I know exactly what I’m asking. I’m asking for a chance at life. Without trying, I’m going to die, you’re going to die, our people are going to die.
“You heard Naja. Those in power in the Old World seek to end the world of life. Even if their ideas are crazy, even if their plans are completely unworkable and impossible and they fail at accomplishing their ultimate aim, they are still slaughtering our people just the same. They still intend to rule the world of life one way or another. Untold thousands of innocent people will die in their attempts, and even more will die if they succeed in winning the war. If they win, at the very best, the people of the New World will be enslaved.
“And what if they really can succeed at what Sulachan wants to accomplish? What if he has the boxes of Orden and he uses them to end the world of life as we know it?
“The war is going badly. I believe it’s because the Keep is infected with spies and traitors helping the enemy. That’s what Baraccus wanted me to uncover. I now know who is at the center of it, anyway. It’s Lothain. He’s been hiding right under our noses, posing as our champion, prosecuting traitors.
“But if we kill him, his secrets die with him. If we capture him instead and he gives other names under torture, how would we ever know if they are really his accomplices? He might hold back the names of important spies, or accuse innocent people. How could we be sure? With something this important, how could we be sure that we have rooted out the entire nest of traitors and spies?
“If we don’t get all those who are helping him they will still be able to work from inside the Keep to undo our cause, still activate the dead to assassinate key people. If we kill the man at the head of it, we’ll never know who the rest are until it’s too late.
“But if I can get a confession out of Lothain, a true confession, and we can expose the extent of the subversion within our ranks, then we might have real a chance to counter it. We would have a chance to save the Keep.
“Think of what is going to happen to us and our people if we don’t stop the enemy wizards among us. They will breach the Grace. We won’t merely die. Our souls will be kept from crossing over into the underworld.
“We’ll be like those people of Isidore’s town of Grandengart. Our bodies will be used by the wizards from the Old World while our spirits are trapped between worlds. Our spirits will wander, lost, in this world. How many innocent people will be doomed to such a fate?
“So, are you trying to tell me that you think such a grim fate would somehow be better than the danger of trying, even if it means I die in the attempt? How? How is that better?
“Isn’t this the very purpose for which you developed the concept of a Confessor? Isn’t this the reason you believed so strongly in it that you argued before the council to be allowed to create a Confessor? Wasn’t it you who said that the risks were so great that we had to try?”
He stared at her from under a lowered brow without answering.
“Please, Merritt, don’t condemn me to a brief life of watching all that is good end because we lack the courage to try. Please don’t do that to me. Please don’t condemn us and our friends and our people to the horrific fate that Emperor Sulachan has chosen for us all.”
His gaze finally fell away. “Magda, you don’t know what you’re asking me to do. I just can’t.”
Tears trailed down her face. “Then it is you who has chosen our destiny, and that destiny is endless suffering, all because you are afraid of harming me. But the safety you want for me is an illusion. In trying to protect me, you are only bringing me to even greater harm.”
Gritting her teeth, she seized his shirt in her fists. “Well I’d rather die trying for life than endure the destiny you want to condemn me to. If you won’t help me then at least give me the Sword of Truth so that I can kill the bastard. Give me the sword and let me die fighting for what I believe in.”
His big hands closed around her wrists as he looked into her eyes for a long moment.
“All right,” he said at last. “All right, I’ll try. I’d rather die, too, than see you have to be a helpless witness to the end of all we hold dear. I’ll try, Magda.”
She threw her arms around him in gratitude.
After too brief a time, he pushed away, looking into her eyes again. She had never seen him looking so grim.
“Don’t be so eager to thank me. Doing it this way is nothing like the process when we created the sword. What I have to do is something very different from what I would have done to create a Confessor. We can’t do it through that process. You can’t really help me this time. You have to leave it to me to do.”
The sobering look in his eyes gave her pause. “What do you mean? What do you have to do?”
“You have to put your trust in me. No questions. You will have to put your life in my hands and let me do as I must.”
Magda swallowed back her rising sense of alarm and nodded.
“We really have no choice. We’re running out of time. Do it.”
He touched her cheek. “I wish there were another way, Magda, but if we’re to do this now, there is no other way.”
With a hand on her shoulder, Merritt gently eased her back against the trunk of the massive oak. Dark, crooked arms of branches stretched out overhead like some great monster about to embrace her in its clutches. The moon cast a cold, eerie light across the angular features of Merritt’s handsome face.
Magda heard a rustling sound and looked up to one of the great branches of the ancient oak. There, perched in a crook on the limb, a raven ruffled its feathers.
She looked into the raven’s black eyes as it sat quietly watching her. The last time she had seen a raven had been down in the maze when the dead man had been chasing her.
Merritt slowly drew the sword. The sound of the blade rang through the night, drawing her gaze back to him.
Magda wet her lips. “What are you going to do?”
“Use the Sword of Truth to help you be reborn a Confessor.”
Magda’s concern was growing by the second. “Reborn? How? What are you going to do with it?”
He almost seemed to be looking out at her from a distant world. “Do you trust me?”
She wished he wouldn’t keep asking her that. “I told you that I do.”
“Then please, Magda, don’t ask.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry. Tell me what you need me to do.”
With one hand, Merritt pressed her shoulders back against the tree. “I need you to let me do what I must.”
With the sword in his other hand, he placed the tip of the blade in the center of her chest.
She could see so much more in his hazel eyes than merely the glow of his gift. His eyes were gentle, yet at the same time they were charged with fierce intensity. More than that, though, she could see wisdom, integrity, competence, and the sort of rage she’d never seen before. Some of that, she knew, was coming from the Sword of Truth. Some, though, was all his.
She had seen the hint of that rage when
she had first met him and told him that Isidore was dead. His was a temper that had the potential to be devastatingly violent, and yet at the same time he was also a man able to control it and focus it.
He was focusing it now.
Combined with the rage from the sword, such fury was frightening to behold.
Magda glanced down and saw the blade glowing white.
“Merritt . . .”
The blade turned from a white glow to an inky black that was like looking into the depths of the underworld. The air around her crackled with threads of light, both the pure white light of Additive Magic, and the sinister void of Subtractive. They wrapped her in a cocoon of magic that dimmed the world.
Magda couldn’t seem to stop herself from trembling.
“Merritt . . .”
“Are you sure about this, Magda? Are you certain?”
Behind the shadow of quiet sorrow, she could see love in his eyes.
“Yes. With all my heart and soul. Who I was, who I will be, is in your hands.”
“Tonight, Magda Searus, you are reborn a Confessor.” A tear ran down his cheek. “If I fail, may the good spirits take me, for I would not want to live in a world without you.”
She blinked in surprise at his words.
Glowing white light and inky black darkness rolled up the length of the blade in dizzying, undulating waves.
“Now you must trust me,” he said with finality.
Magda wet the roof of her mouth with her tongue. “I do, Merritt. I trust you with my life.”
And then, as he held her shoulders back against the tree, he pushed the sword straight through her heart.
Thunder without sound silently shook the world around her.
Oak leaves and pine needles rained down in the forest all around as dust rose in a rapidly expanding ring spreading away into the night.
Magda’s eyes went wide in shock at what he had just done.
