by Carol Berg
It would do no good to ask him outright. He’d say, “Nothing better to be at,” and stay with me forever. And I couldn’t just send him away as if I were angry with him or tired of his company. He knew me so well, he’d never believe it. And that was what got me thinking about taking a wife. Paulo and I ate together, worked together, rode together, and when we had any occasion to talk at all, we needed only half the words anyone else might. But if I were to marry, all of that would have to change. It would give him a reason to look at his own situation, and not to have to worry so much about me.
So that became my plan. The only problem was, I had no idea as to how to go about it. I didn’t know many women. The Singlars were only just getting used to pairing up with others who cared for them in that way, and I’d never met a one of them who wasn’t so in awe of me that she could look me straight in the eye. And beyond that . . . well, the Queen of Leire was taken, even if we’d been willing to try cramming her ambitions and my strange history into one marriage. I didn’t know anyone else.
All this was on my mind when I sent Paulo through the portal to the Four Realms to find someone to teach us how to channel storm waters, and he came back the same day with the letter from my mother telling me that my father was mortally ill. And, of course, before you could brush a gnat from your face, we were in Avonar, Paulo stammering his heart out in front of the Dar’Nethi girl he’d worshipped since he was thirteen, and I faced with watching my father die.
I had never planned to go back to Gondai. I had no sympathetic feelings for the Dar’Nethi or their world; the place would just bring back bad memories.
Only my father came close to understanding the things I had been taught in my years with the Lords, the deeds I had done, what I had become when I joined with them. He had kept his promise never to reveal to anyone the horror of what I had been, even to my mother, from whom he kept no other secret. So he knew what it was he asked when he said I needed to use what I knew of Zhev’Na to test this Dar’Nethi woman. But he was willing to postpone his own dying, a release he craved as much as I craved forgetting the past, to make sure that the work we had done together was finished. I could not refuse him. We made a private bargain that day. If either one of us found that his part could not be borne another day, my father would let me go back to the Bounded so I could forget, and I would see him released from his suspended life and let him die.
And so, on our first night in Avonar, I worked with my mother and the Dar’Nethi Healer T’Laven to help my father endure one more night of illness. In order to persuade this Lady D’Sanya that he was willing to relinquish his freedom and his talent in exchange for relief of pain and postponement of death, my father believed it necessary to create in himself true desperation. I’ll not be able to hide that I don’t relish her gift, he said. But this way, if she reads me, she’ll see clearly that I have reason enough to accept it. In truth, feeling anything is preferable to the way I am now—neither dead nor alive.
When the sky turned gray, my father was dozing. T’Laven had left with the first birdsong to summon the Lady D’Sanya, while Aimee brought us cups of something hot that smelled of fruit and spices. My mother took a cup, sighed, and held it in her lap. Since my father had made his decision, she had said very little. Though she agreed that our plan was the only one that made sense, she was afraid of the cost.
I was sitting on the floor cushions, leaning against the bed. Aimee leaned over so I could reach the steaming cup perched on her tray. “Saffria,” she said quietly, when I looked up with that very question on my tongue. Her smile was much too cheerful for so early a morning, like a stray sunbeam that strikes your eyelids before you’re ready to wake up. “Spiced fruit cider. I seem to have made it especially pungent this morning. I’ve not been sleeping well of late, and it leaves me more careless than usual.”
I took the cup, not so much because I wanted it, but because her tray was tilted at an alarming angle and I didn’t want the scalding stuff in my lap. I was feeling groggy, numb, and half nauseated, as one does after so little sleep. “Thank you,” I mumbled, holding the cup with no intention of putting it near my mouth.
“You might try it,” she said. “My father always said saffria cleared his head when he had difficult thinking to do.” Then she crouched down beside me, whispering, “You must persuade your mother to drink some, too. She didn’t eat anything last night. And your friend . . . he sat outside that door all night, just fallen asleep in the past hour. My lord, will he be offended that I’ve laid a blanket over him? The morning air is so chill coming in through the courtyard, even in summer.”
“No. Not offended at all.” More likely he would go speechless for a fortnight at the thought of her touching him. Why was life so complicated?
Aimee hovered over me for a moment before tiptoeing out of the bedchamber. I didn’t really believe she would know one way or the other, but I took a drink of the saffria to please her . . . and almost coughed it up again. Far too sweet for my taste, but indeed pungent. It raced straight upward, eating away all the cobwebs, dust, and other detritus that clogged my head. “Thank you,” I croaked, even though she was no longer there to hear me.
I downed the rest of the saffria. Fully awake now, I was ready to do almost anything to get the matter of the mysterious D’Sanya over quickly. The sight of my mother resting her head on my father’s pillow made me hate Healers who had no remedies for disease, hate the Dar’Nethi who complicated everything with their self-righteous bickering over their Bridge and their throne, and hate myself for being unable to help my father in any meaningful way and for grudging him this single task that he had set me. Last night had been wretched for several reasons.
Sounds of doors and voices pulled me to my feet. My mother kissed my father’s brow, waking him gently with whispered words I tried not to overhear. We all recognized the fact that he was unlikely to survive this venture. Soon, much too soon for my mother, Aimee poked her head through the door to the side-chamber. “My lady, this way, quickly.”
My mother was to watch our meeting through a myscal, a Dar’Nethi mirror device that could show her what was happening without her being seen. We had deemed it too risky to expose her as my father’s wife when one touch on her shoulder and a simple probe of sorcery would reveal that she was not Dar’Nethi. Everyone in Avonar knew of Prince D’Natheil’s remarkable wife from the other world. Our venture would be ended quickly if the Lady guessed our identity. A corrupt princess was not going to reveal the truth to the man who had destroyed the Lords, and an innocent princess was not going to reveal truth to a man who had been one of them.
With a last touch of my father’s hand and a kiss on my forehead, my mother hurried out of the room. The door shut softly behind her. Then the Lady D’Sanya, purportedly the daughter of a king a thousand years dead, walked into Aimee’s house and eclipsed every thought, every plan, and every caution in my head.
She was every bit of my own height, slender and graceful as a dancer. The planes of her cheek and her jaw were fine and delicate, shaping the light as if its source lay within her. Her dark blue gown, close fitting and banded high at the neck, revealed nothing and everything of round breasts and long, slender throat. Her hands clasped a heavy silver pendant that hung between her breasts, yet my eyes did not linger even in so enticing a place, for a pale corona of hair illuminated the most remarkable eyes the worlds had ever produced. They were the sapphire blue of a northern Vallorean lake where the icy water was deeper than the bowl of the sky, yet so clear one could see the gentle movements of the mosses among the smooth rocks at the bottom. She did not smile as she entered my father’s room on T’Laven’s arm, but swept us all into the sympathetic embrace of those shining eyes . . . and left me breathless and gaping like a fool.
“With blessings of life, I greet you all,” she said, in a voice as clear as a snowmelt brook in the highlands. “Gentle lady, good sir, and you, sir . . .” She opened her palms and nodded her head to Aimee, to my father, and then to m
e.
Despite my every instinct and intention, I could not break the lock her eyes set upon my own. It might have been an hour I stared, discovering nothing I had expected to find in a mysterious Dar’Nethi woman come from Zhev’Na. I had steeled myself to see the Lords’ mark on her, the touch of lurid amethyst, emerald, or ruby lurking behind a golden mask, the hint of dark steel behind her soft words, the faint stench of corruption tainting her presence. But all I saw was kindness and wisdom so painfully won I believed I already knew the stories she could tell if ever she could bring herself to speak them. She broke our gaze first, shifting her attentions back to my father, who lay huddled on his bed, fully awake now and quivering with the effort of not screaming with each breath.
The Lady knelt gracefully on the floor beside him, and, after a brief hesitation—perhaps asking his permission without words—laid one hand on her breast and one on his forehead. If enchantment could ever be visible to the eye, then I saw her lay her magic around him like blessed armor against the assault of his ravening disease. His tremors eased, and in a shaking whisper, he said, “With blessings of life, Lady . . .”
She pressed a finger to her lips. “The good T’Laven tells me of your state, Master . . . K’Nor?” My father nodded at the false name we had chosen. “And of your belief that your life’s work is incomplete. He has told you of my offer and the conditions of it? I cannot cure this illness. If you leave the hospice, it will come full upon you again with all its mortal consequence. And while you stay with me, you will have no power of sorcery.”
“I’ll confess . . . that’s difficult. But I cannot . . . go on. . . .”
“You have discussed this with your family? Their support is very important.”
“My son has accepted my judgment. There is no one else.”
“I wish I could offer more. But time and peace are yours if you wish them. Life awaits you.”
“Can it be soon? Please, Lady . . .” As he had planned, his desperation was no sham.
“Give me your hand, sir. Your son may come to you five days hence, once you are settled.” Though speaking to my father, she nodded at me. “Thereafter he may come whenever he wishes for as long as you stay in my house.”
As if lifted from his bed by her slender hand alone, my father rose and stood by the Lady, then stepped with her through the shimmering portal that appeared in the center of the room. As he and the Lady D’Sanya vanished from the room, his voice lingered in my mind. Until we say enough.
Until then, Father, I said, staring like a mindless idiot at the spot where the portal had closed in upon itself.
As Aimee and T’Laven hurried off to inform Ven’Dar, my mother returned from the next room. Arms folded, she stood by the tall windows and glared at the bright, empty morning in Aimee’s garden. “I expected a demon,” she said after a long silence. “A hag, at least, that I could hate respectably.”
“She looks younger than Aimee.” Trivia . . . while my mind was reeling. Of course her appearance didn’t matter. What I saw, what I felt didn’t matter.
“How will you begin?”
The very question I’d been asking myself. I had been so sure I would recognize corruption. I would report it to my father and the prince, and then I could run away again and bury myself where I didn’t have to think of the past. But all of that changed when I saw her. The Lady D’Sanya had come from Zhev’Na; that part of her story was true. Her eyes had told me. And because of that I could not trust her. But if she was evil, then never had evil been wrapped in such marvels.
“I’m going to tell her I was raised in Zhev’Na.”
My mother spun about, her hair glinting in the early sunlight. “Is that wise? I thought you were going to keep it secret, to try to catch her in some knowledge she shouldn’t have.”
“I think she already knows,” I said. “Just as I would have known she had been there even if I’d never heard her story. I won’t tell her all of it, just that I was taken like other Dar’Nethi children, and lived there until I was rescued. As long as no one recognizes Father or me, she won’t know everything . . . unless she is even more powerful than Ven’Dar says, in which case none of this makes any difference.”
“Walk carefully, love. I need you a while longer.” As always, my mother’s trust eased my lingering doubts. She took my arm, and we left the empty sickroom behind, walking down the winding passageways of Aimee’s house in search of Paulo and breakfast.
CHAPTER 5
I left Avonar in the early afternoon four days after my father’s departure. My mother had already written ten letters for me to take to him, and filled my saddlepacks with warm shirts, books, and pastries and tea my father especially liked. She had wandered through our rooms in Aimee’s house all that morning, picking up this and that—a pen, a magnifying lens, a small sewn pillow filled with grain that Kellea had been able to warm with sorcery and then tuck in the bed with him to soothe the persistent ache in his back—asking if I thought he would want the things now he would be able to sit up and to walk. Before I could answer, she would throw the object down again in frustration.
“She said I could come and go as I please, Mother. And it’s only a day’s ride. I’ll be back and forth as often as you like. I’ll ask him what he wants and needs, and you can send it back with me.”
She tossed a pair of boots on the bed, sending two pillows bouncing onto the floor. “You know this has nothing to do with tea or boots.”
“I know.”
I kissed her and left her in Mistress Aimee’s charge. Aimee would need every bit of her cheer and patience to put up with her.
To venture out alone in Avonar felt awkward and conspicuous, so I had asked Paulo to ride along with me, feeling I needed his good eyes and ears to watch my back. If anyone recognized me, matters could get very unpleasant. No one could tell by looking that Paulo was not Dar’Nethi. But if anyone did happen to discover it, we could always say he was a former Drudge, freed by the death of the Lords.
He agreed to go, of course, and we set out with as good spirits as fine weather and excellent horses can lend to a dismal journey. Once we had passed through the gates of Avonar and into the rolling countryside of the Vales, I at least felt that I could breathe again. But the farther we traveled, the more morose Paulo looked. Every time we rounded another bend in the road, he heaved a huge sigh.
“You can go back if you want,” I said, after the first hour of it. “But I thought after so many days of inactivity, you might want to get away. Mistress Aimee’s house isn’t very lively, and when she isn’t being excessively hospitable, or excessively cheerful, she is excessively quiet. Worse than me.”
He popped his head up, scowling. “She’s not at all. Not unpleasantly so. Only refined. And with Master Karon so ill, she wasn’t going to—” He caught my look then, but couldn’t bring himself to leave the lady undefended. “She’s about perfect.” Then he nudged his mount to a brisk walk, as if riding ahead would punish my teasing. But I, in turn, spurred my horse deep and left him eating dust.
“Damnable belly-crawling worm-eater!” He raced me down the road until our judgment demanded we slow to spare the horses for the rest of the journey. It was the best thing we ever did together, to ride hard enough we could hear nothing but the roar of the wind and the chugging breath of our mounts, and could think of nothing but staying in the saddle, leaving every fear and worry subservient to speed and sweat and the dust of the road.
We arrived in the village of Gaelie near sunset. The houses and shops were tucked into the heavy growth of trees at the lower end of Grithna Vale as if they were shy of each other. It was a tidy place, everything neat and trimmed and freshly painted, unlike the Bounded, where the Singlars’ tower houses were very like the people who lived in them, awkward and lopsided for the most part, and were never the same from one day to the next. Our houses grew, and though most were ugly, every once in a while, on some particular day, you might see a cornice or a window or a section of wall that was extraordi
narily pleasing.
Gaelie was large enough to support a modest guesthouse frequented by the families of those in D’Sanya’s hospice. The proprietor was a stumpy woman with a face like a granite cliff. Though I was more facile with the Dar’Nethi language, Paulo never seemed to need all that many words. He arranged for a room and a meal without any trouble.
The two of us spent the evening in the bustling common room, hoping to pick up some gossip about the Lady D’Sanya, but there was little to be had. A handful of local fellows pursued a serious conversation about weather working that I might have been interested in had the complex sorcery involved not required immense reserves of magical power. The weather in the Bounded was dreadful and seemed to be getting worse this year. But I only used what power grew in me naturally. Power-gathering carried risks I was not willing to invite.
Across the common room, a large family was celebrating a grandmother’s birthday with loud toasts and speeches and much joking back and forth. They quieted only when one of them, a plain, blowsy woman whose fleshy body seemed anxious to escape her clothes, began to sing about sailing ships. I groaned inwardly. The woman’s voice was wavering and thin, and it was obvious that her saga was to be a long one.
People settled into their chairs, lit pipes, and let their eyelids droop. Faces took on a look of contentment, even awe, that seemed entirely unwarranted by the talent of the performer. But then, I wondered. . . . My father had told me of Dar’Nethi Singers—his mother had been one of them—but I’d never heard one for myself. He’d said you had to close your eyes. And so I did. . . .
“Close your eyes,” I said, after only a moment, slamming my hand on Paulo’s arm as he was digging his knife into a plate of mutton and mushrooms.
“You could come up four-fingered doing that,” he said, his mouth already full and his knife heading back to the mutton.