He drew his thumb and forefinger down his smooth chin. “This kind of magic did more than transmute flesh into marble, like an alchemical reaction. No, this spell was another form of magic that allowed the slowing and stopping of time, petrifying flesh as if thousands of centuries had passed. I need to consider this further.”
For the rest of that day, Nicci and her companions learned that there were many other towns in the mountains connected by a network of roads, and many of those villages had been served by the same traveling magistrate. Nicci feared that the Adjudicator had petrified other people as well, but with the spell now broken those populations would also be reviving.
Perhaps this entire part of the Old World had just reawakened.…
“Saving the world, just as the witch woman predicted, Sorceress,” Nathan mused.
“You had as much to do with that as I did,” she said.
He merely shrugged. “A good deed is still a good deed, wherever the credit lies. I left the People’s Palace to go help people, and I am happy to do so.”
Nicci could not disagree.
The unsettled townspeople drifted apart to explore their abandoned homes and find their lives again. Nicci, Nathan, and Bannon joined the innkeeper and his wife for a meal of thin oat porridge made from a small sack of grain that had remarkably not gone bad.
Bannon remained extremely distraught, though, and he struggled in vain to find his contentment and peace again. He was short-tempered, skittish, brooding, and finally when they were alone in one of the inn’s dusty side rooms, Nicci asked him, “I can tell you are still suffering from the ordeal. What did you see when you were trapped in stone? The spell is broken now.”
“I’ll be fine,” Bannon said in a husky voice.
She pressed him, though. “The expression of guilt on your face looked worse than when you told us about Ian and the slavers.”
“Yes, it was worse.”
Nicci waited for him, encouraging him with her silence until he blurted out, “It was the kittens! I remember a man from my island. He drowned a sack of kittens.” Bannon looked away from her before continuing. “I tried to stop him, but he threw the kittens into a stream, and they drowned. I wanted to save them but I couldn’t. They mewed and cried out.”
Nicci thought of all the terrible things she’d endured, the guilt that she had lifted and cast away, the blood she had shed, the lives she had destroyed. “That is the greatest guilt you feel?” She didn’t believe him. A greater halo of pain than what had happened with Ian?
His hazel eyes flashed with anger as he spun to her. “Who are you now, the Adjudicator? It’s not up to you to measure my guilt! You don’t know how much it broke my heart, how bad I felt.” He stalked away to find one of the unoccupied rooms where he could bed down for the night. “Leave me alone. I never want to think about it again.” He closed the door against her continuing questions.
Nicci looked at his retreating form, trying to measure the truth of what he had said, but there was something wrong about Bannon’s eyes, about his expression. He was hiding the real answer, but she decided not to press him for now, although she would need to know sooner or later.
Everyone here in Lockridge had been through their own ordeal. Weary, she went to find her own bed. She hoped that they would all have a quiet sleep, untroubled by nightmares.
CHAPTER 34
After leaving the Lockridge villagers to pick up the pieces of their lives, Nicci, Nathan, and Bannon followed the dwindling old road deeper into the mountains. Though preoccupied with helping his people, Mayor Barre had confirmed for them that Kol Adair did indeed lie over the mountains and beyond a great valley. The ordeal with the Adjudicator had made Nathan even more determined to restore himself by any means necessary.
What had once been a wide thoroughfare traveled by commercial caravans was overgrown from disuse. Dark pines and thick oaks encroached with the slow intent of erasing the blemishes left by mankind.
Bannon was remarkably withdrawn, showing little interest in their journey. His usual eager conversation and positive outlook had vanished, still festering from what the Adjudicator had made him see and suffer. Nicci had faced the consequences of her dark past, and she had overcome that guilt long ago, but the young man had far less experience in turning raw, bleeding wounds into hard scars.
Nathan tried to cheer the young man up. “We’re making good time. Would you like to stop for a while, my boy? Spar a little with our swords?”
Bannon gave an unusually unenthusiastic reply. “No thank you. I’ve had enough real swordplay with the selka and the Norukai slavers.”
“That’s true, my boy,” he said with forced cheer, “but in a practice sparring session you can let yourself have fun.”
Nicci stepped around a moss-covered boulder in the trail, then looked over her shoulder. “Maybe he thinks the actual killing is fun, Wizard.”
Bannon looked stung. “I did what I had to do. People need to be protected. You might not get there in time, but when you do, you have to do your best.”
They reached a fast-flowing stream that bubbled over slick rocks. Nicci gathered her skirts and splashed across the shallow water, not worried about getting her boots wet. Nathan, though, picked his way downstream, where he found a fallen log to use as a bridge. He carefully balanced his way across and arrived on the other side, then turned to face Bannon, who crossed the log with barely a glance at his feet.
Nicci kept watching the young man, growing more troubled at his worsening inner pain. A companion so haunted, so preoccupied and listless, might be a liability if they encountered some threat, and she could not allow that.
She faced Bannon as he stepped off the log onto the soft mosses of the bank. “We need to address this, Bannon Farmer. A boil must be lanced before it festers. I know you’re not telling the truth—at least not the whole truth.”
Bannon was immediately wary, and a flash of fear crossed his face as he drew back. “The truth about what?”
“What did the Adjudicator show you? What guilt has been eating away inside you?”
“I already told you.” Bannon stepped away, looking as if he wanted to run. He turned pale. “I couldn’t stop a man from drowning a sack of kittens. Sweet Sea Mother, I know that may sound childish to you, but it’s not your place to judge how my guilt affects me!”
“I am not your judge,” Nicci said, “nor do I want to be. But I need to understand.”