As he spoke, his voice had risen, and her body had grown rigid, her eyes sparking. She was T’gol; she could reach up and snap his neck with her bare hands before he could blink. In fact, she looked as if she wanted to do it right then. Beltan started to reach for her, but she shut her eyes and turned away, crossing her arms over her stomach.

“I know,” she said. And again, the words soft and broken, “I know.”

Travis wanted to harden his heart, to refuse to hear the sorrow, the regret, the anguish in her voice. Only wasn’t that what he had given up so much to fight against? Those whose hearts were made of cold iron rather than weak, mortal flesh?

The anger drained from him like the dishwater in the sink, leaving him empty and shaking. He felt Beltan’s strong arms wrap around him, and he leaned his head on the blond man’s shoulder.

“Maybe you’d better tell us why you’ve come,” Beltan said, the words gruff, and Vani nodded.

6.

Ten minutes later, they sat around the kitchen table, drinking mugs of coffee Beltan had brewed. Nim was in the living room now, lying on her stomach on the floor, drawing with a pencil and some paper Beltan had found in the desk. Before heading into the kitchen, Travis had paused for a moment, watching her. The pencil seemed far too large for her fingers, but she moved it across the paper with deliberate motions, sticking out her tongue as she concentrated.

“She seems older than three winters,” Beltan said. “She looks like five, and speaks as if she is older than that.”

Vani wrapped her hands around her mug. “She’s always been that way. She was born after only seven moons, as if she was anxious to be out and learning about the world.” She smiled, and the expression smoothed away some of the lines from her face. “She was only six moons old when she first spoke, and then not simply a single world. I will never forget it. I was cradling her in my arms, and she said, ‘Set me down, Mother.’ I did, and she walked over to a pebble and picked it up. I’ve never seen a child speak or walk so early.”

“I heard her,” Travis said. “When she was still in your womb, Vani. It was in Imbrifale, after you and Beltan had passed through the Void, when I spoke the rune of fire to warm you. To warm her. I heard her voice in my mind. It was so small, I thought I was just imagining it, but . . .”

“You weren’t imagining. What did she say to you?”

Wonder filled Travis, just as it had then. “She said, ‘Hello, Father.’ ”

Beltan’s eyes shone, and he gripped Travis’s hand.

There was so much Travis wanted to know, so many questions to ask—where they had been, what they had done—but before he could speak, Vani reached inside her leathers, drew out a small object, and set it on the table. It was a tetrahedron fashioned of perfect black stone.

“The gate artifact,” Beltan said, leaning over but not touching the onyx tetrahedron. “So that’s how you reached Earth.”

“My people have had it in their keeping these last three years,” Vani said. “I gave it to them when they came to Gravenfist Keep.”

“Before you left,” Travis said. The words sounded harsher than he intended, but he didn’t care.

“Yes,” Vani said, turning her gold eyes on him. “Before I left. Then, a few weeks ago, I went to my people, to ask if I might have the artifact back. I found them in the far south of Falengarth.”

Beltan picked up the coffeepot and refilled their mugs. “Were Sareth and Lirith with the Mournish?”

“I fear I missed them. My brother had taken a ship across the Summer Sea, to Moringarth, a week before I arrived, and Lirith had gone north with their son, Taneth, to visit Aryn at Calavere.”

Despite everything, Travis couldn’t help smiling. So Lirith and Sareth were parents now. A sudden desire to see them, to see everyone they had left on Eldh, came over him. Only that was impossible, wasn’t it? Even as he thought this, his fingers crept toward the fragment of the gate artifact on the table; he jerked his hand back.

“Why did you go to your people to get the gate?” Beltan said.

“For the same reason I left you three years ago and could not return.”

Travis took a breath. “And what reason is that?”

“I am fleeing the Scirathi.”

They listened, too stunned for speech, as Vani described in brief but vivid words why she had left Gravenfist that day three years ago, and where she had been in the time since.

She hadn’t known the sorcerers of Scirath were pursuing her, at least not at first. After leaving Gravenfist Keep she had journeyed south, sailing across the Summer Sea to Al-Amún, seeking out oracles and seers, trying to understand the fate her al-Mama had seen in the cards.

Your daughter is not yet born, the old woman had told Vani, yet already powerful lines of fate weave themselves around her. You dare not stay, lest you be trapped in the net.

It was there, in Moringarth, where the Scirathi first attacked her. Several of the gold-masked sorcerers had surrounded the hostel where she was staying. She was heavy with child then, and she could not have fought them, except that they seemed unwilling to harm her. They only wanted to capture her, to keep her from escaping. One cut himself and began a spell of binding. However, Vani managed to take his knife and cut him deeper, so that more blood flowed than he had intended. Many spirits came in answer to his spell, and they consumed his blood, draining him dry. The other sorcerers were forced to weave their own spells to keep the ravenous morndariunder control. In the confusion, Vani fled.

After that, she was vigilant, and they did not catch her unawares again. However, she was forced always to keep moving. By the time she gave birth to Nim she was on a ship sailing north. For the next three years she kept traveling from place to place, never staying in one spot for more than a month or two, and never daring to return to a location where she had been before, for fear they would be waiting for her.

When she finished, Travis and Beltan could only stare at her. Through the door they heard Nim humming as she drew. At last Travis forced himself to speak.

“So have you learned what the Scirathi want with you?”

“They don’t want me.”

“Nim,” Beltan said, his voice hoarse. He stood, pacing around the table. “It’s Nim the sorcerers want, isn’t it?”

Vani nodded, her expression haunted.

Beltan slammed a fist on the countertop. “The filthy Scirathi—I will kill them all with my bare hands.”

Sparks shone in his green eyes. Alarmed, Travis rose and moved to him, touching his arm. For a moment Beltan was rigid, then he sighed and his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Travis. It’s only . . . we’ve just met her, and now they want to take her away.”

Travis looked at Vani. “What do they want with her?”

“I would that I knew,” Vani said, gazing at her hands splayed on the table. “But whatever the reason, the Scirathi have grown more relentless in their pursuit these last weeks. I could not stay anywhere more than a few days before I was forced to flee. That was why I sought out my people and asked for the gate. I knew it was the only way to escape.”

Travis gazed at the piece of the artifact. “How did you open it, Vani? The gate.”

Beltan gave him a startled look.

Travis sat again. He slid his hands across the table toward her own but did not touch them. “The blood I filled it with beneath the Steel Cathedral would have been consumed when you and Beltan returned to Eldh. So what blood did you use to open the gate?”

Vani opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“It’s all right, Mother,” said a small voice behind them. “You can tell them. I don’t mind.”

Nim stood in the kitchen door, holding a piece of paper.