Page 72 of Crossroads Magic
I dropped his hand. “You are telling the truth.”
Trevalyan smiled, and the ancient sadness fled. I glimpsed what he might have been like, many years ago, when Maximilian was in his life. The mischievous, joyful man. “Well done.”
He slipped his arm through mine and turned to walk alongside me. “Now you must learn whoislying.”
“Easier said than done. Everyone hides things.”
“Not something like this. Not from you.”
We walked a few steps in silence. I heard birds in the trees to either side. The whisper of wind in the bare upper branches. It should have made me feel lonely, but instead, my racing heart slowed as peace filled my bones.
“I miss her,” Trevalyan breathed.
“Me, too.”
A dozen paces later, he cleared his throat. “This place, Haigton…it gets into your blood, you know.”
“Like an addiction?”
“More than that. By now, I should be an old man crippled by arthritis to the point where I need a nurse to feed me. Rheumatoid arthritis runs in my family. My mother couldn’t walk because of it. She was put into full term care when I was in my thirties.”
“But you seem fine,” I pointed out, glancing down at his fingers.
“It’s this place. The lodestone. The greenway. Perhaps it’s the wards, which tap into a power no one properly understands. Or maybe it’s all of them, and we happen to be on a ley line—”
“Are we? On a ley line?”
“I don’t know,” Trevalyan said, his tone dismissive. “Ley lines are a pop culture thing. Lines on a map with magical properties?” He waved his other hand like he was shooing a fly. “But there is something about this place that staves off…well, many things. Disease. Bad luck. Financial ruin.”
I thought about that and about Trevalyan’s true age, which I had glimpsed, holding his hand. I couldn’t say how old he was in years, but he was older than he looked…and he already looked very old.
“And perhaps the Crossing simply wants us to stay and makes sure of it,” Trevalyan added. “It has arranged things so we can do nothing else.”
“It…guards you?”
“The wards do that.” He squeezed my arm and let go. “You’ll understand soon enough.”
And he halted in the middle of the road.
Twenty yards ahead, the road ended. Triangular, waist-high concrete barriers had been placed across the road, and a red and white road sign with the international symbol for stop—a circle with a line across it—discouraged anyone from going further.
Although, beyond the concrete barriers, I could see that the road had once continued on. There was a gap in the trees, leaf-filled, that ran on, until it curved out of sight. Scattered branches lay along the abandoned length, and weeds had crept to the very edges. The road was being returned to nature, year by year.
“You’re stopping here?” I asked Trevalyan. “The road ends there.”
“The road does, but the hamlet ends here.” Trevalyan pointed to the asphalt at our feet.
A round, smooth rock sat on the road a few inches from our toes.
“That’s the ward?”
“One of them,” Trevalyan said. “There are many of them, surrounding the settlement.”
“You had to renew all of them?”
“I worked with one of them. It fed the others. Like a network.”
I nodded. “It looks very ordinary.”
