by Carol Berg
“You don’t have to convince me, Gerick! It’s just something she has to consider, assuming she is considering any attachment at all. You know, I don’t claim to understand much of anything about women. Your mother has been challenge enough for one lifetime. Or three for that matter.”
A light meal of roast chicken and long peas was laid out on a sideboard, and I helped myself as he went back to his letters, smiling to himself as he read. Then he picked up a page written in a different hand. This one was clearly not so entertaining.
“Ven’Dar writes of another raid in the north. He says that witnesses saw Zhid riding toward the mountains afterward.” He looked up, frowning. “The rumor of a mountain stronghold has been repeated for years. If we could only find it . . .”
My father spent the next hour talking about Ven’Dar’s news, examining a map of Gondai we pulled from the bookcase, marking the locations of the recent attacks, and speculating on the location of the Zhid headquarters and what could be motivating their actions. Their duty, their desire, the function infused in them from the time they were made Zhid, was to serve the Lords’ wishes. I could not imagine them anything but half crazed with loss.
“Perhaps they just can’t believe the Lords are gone,” said my father. Ven’Dar’s half-unfolded letter lay between a basket of leftover bread and a pewter salt dish that held the crumbled bits of wax I had picked off the paper. “They obey the last commands they were given because they don’t know how to do anything else. Of course, that doesn’t explain the period of quiet and why they are revived at this particular time. You didn’t hear of any mountain—”
“I saw only the desert camps and spent time . . . trained . . . in only one of those. I never went into the mountains. Never heard them talk about secret encampments. Please, could we could talk of something else now?” I hated thinking of these things.
He leaned back in his chair and tossed a book onto the stack of maps and papers, looking at me far too closely. “Ah, Gerick, I’ve always believed that a great deal of this burden you carry is not related to your own past. Somehow, when you were joined with the Three, you took on responsibility for their deeds as well. If only you could touch their actual memories, make use of them to unravel these mysteries, that might make your pain worth something at least.”
My fingers played with the edge of his map, rolling it tightly across one corner. I clamped my lips shut and kept my eyes on the paper, waves of heat and chill and nausea leaving my skin clammy.
My father leaned forward and laid a hand on mine. “Gerick, what is it?”
“Don’t ask it. Please don’t.”
He blew a long slow breath of realization. “You can touch the Lords’ memories . . . earth and sky . . . all of them?”
“I tried it that night when Ven’Dar first told us about the Lady . . . when you were so ill . . . to see if I could retrieve some memory of her and avoid all this. Certainly in the few hours I was joined with them, the Lords weren’t thinking of her. But I couldn’t make myself dig any deeper into their past. You know the risk if I think about that life too much.”
To delve too deeply into unhealthy memories, to touch the kind of power I’d had, could waken desires that should stay buried—like digging through a charnel pit and remembering how much you enjoy the foulness, the stink, and the cold heaviness of the dead. And though I chose not to nurture and exploit the talent born in me, I knew I was no weakling child even without my three partners.
“I trust you, Gerick, no matter what the circumstance.” My father squeezed my arm and shook it gently, as if to wake me. “You have chosen the right in circumstances far more difficult than examining sordid memory. But the Preceptors and their Geographers and Imagers can pinpoint the source of these raiders far better than we’ve done here, and for the present the purposes and timing of the Zhid are matters of curiosity, not safety.”
For the present. But if they were to find out the Zhid were rising again . . . if they needed to know where the legions lurked or how the warriors could function without the Three, and they came to me . . . “I’m sorry, Father. I just can’t—”
A knock on the door interrupted us just then. A stocky, light-haired Dar’Nethi entered at my father’s invitation, and with a quiet voice and a pleasant manner asked if we had finished our meal.
“Yes. We’re quite fine, Cedor,” said my father.
“Thank you, as always.”
“My pleasure as always, Master K’Nor,” he said, sounding as if he meant it.
Once the man was gone, my father pulled out a chessboard and a rectangular wooden box. As he placed chess pieces of green agate on the board, he cocked his head thoughtfully toward the door through which the man had just exited. “I’ve at last unraveled the mystery of Cedor. Now why do you think a man who once taught natural history to the children of Avonar spends his days supplying meals and clean linen to a resident of this hospice?”
I shrugged and reached for a handful of the white pieces, happy we had changed the subject. “No idea.”
“He was Zhid. For some two hundred years. I asked him about the pendant he wears about his neck—a little brass lion. He said it was a symbol of D’Arnath that Lady D’Sanya gave him when she restored his soul. Evidently quite a number of the Restored work here.”
“Former Zhid here? Is that safe?” Of course, no external marks identified those who had once been Zhid. I had just never considered that any of them might be so close. My neck bristled at the thought.
“Quite safe, I think. Cedor was captured in the southern Wastes, nowhere near where I was held. And I’ve no contact with anyone else on the hospice staff. You don’t think—” He looked at me as if he’d forgotten until that moment who I was. “No, no. Even if they could remember anything of their years as Zhid, they would remember you as a child, not a man. Nine years it’s been.”
Most Zhid were Dar’Nethi who had lost their souls as a result of the original Catastrophe or in the early centuries of the war, as the Lords drove more and more of Gondai into ruin. Others had been transformed as the Lords perfected their Seeking, an enchantment that could creep through the countryside and even across the walls of Avonar to capture a person’s mind. Few of them had been given any choice in the matter. Only when my father became the Prince of Avonar did the Dar’Nethi come to understand that Zhid could be restored and take up a normal life again.
“Most of the Restored have long outlived their own families and friends,” said my father, shoving the green queen’s drone forward—his standard opening, though he seemed to have forgotten that white plays first. “Cedor says the Lady has given them a chance to earn their livelihood in a less public setting, and to feel as if they’re making some recompense for their past at the same time.
A generous, insightful gesture on her part. And truly, I could not ask for a kinder or more diligent attendant.”
I responded by shoving a white drone forward two spaces, and we talked no more of Zhid.
As my father and I walked in the gardens that afternoon, I caught a glimpse of the Lady, but she was hurrying away from us. I stayed a little later than usual, wandering around the stable and the paddocks, hoping she might reappear. But she didn’t.
Just before dusk, I left my father to his books and papers and headed back for Gaelie, wondering what we were accomplishing with all our elaborate secrecy. The journey was slow. Clouds had swallowed the full moon, and without the moonlight, the road was treacherous. Halfway down the road, a thunderstorm broke over the Vale. Having stupidly left my cloak at the hospice, I tried to wait out the rain under the trees rather than riding the last few leagues across the open fields to Gaelie.
By the time I arrived at the guesthouse stable, it was nearing midnight, and I was drenched. The rain had never stopped. The stable lad was just dashing out of the stable on his way home when I rode in, so I told him I would see to my own horse. Once the beast was dry, blanketed, and fed, I hunched my shoulders in my wet shirt and picked my way across t
he muddy stableyard in the dark and the rain. I wished Paulo had not left for Avonar that morning to take my father’s latest batch of letters. I wondered how I was going to proceed with my grand investigation if the subject wouldn’t show herself. And I hoped I might still be able to cajole the innkeeper into a hot meal to warm the chill that had seeped into my boots and my skin along with the rain. Halfway across the yard, just as I was passing an abandoned cookshed, a mountain fell on my head. . . .
Probably not a mountain, my fogged brain told me as my arms were stretched almost from their sockets, and my faced bumped and scraped over the rank-smelling roughness of mud, straw, and stones. A rock, perhaps, or a wooden cudgel across the back of the head. Something to knock me senseless long enough for my assailant to lash my hands to this beast that was dragging me through the muck and to bind my legs together so tightly, I could find no leverage to get to my feet.
The restless disturbance of large animals to either side and the change of texture from wet muck to damp straw on my face informed me I’d been dragged into the stable. I considered it a great victory to come up with that conclusion. When I lifted my eyelids, the world was blurry and dark.
The dragging stopped. Yellow light flared just beyond my head, so that if I could have lifted the damnably heavy thing, I might have seen who was ripping the gloves from my hands and holding a lantern close enough that my skin felt the warmth of it.
Dig in your feet and push . . . loop the rope around the bastard’s neck . . . Just need a little slack in the rope. Wet rope. Wet boots. Miserable. Conjure something . . . you’re a sorcerer. Hungry, too . . . surely the cook made something new tonight . . . hate that green-pea mess . . . A warrior’s belly should be lean . . . always on the verge of hunger . . . Swirling thoughts, blurry as the night. Nonsense.
Concentrating, I drew my knees toward my midsection and dug in my toes. The immediate result was a sound that could be nothing but the slap of an experienced hand on a horse’s rump. The beast lurched forward. The overstretched muscles in my shoulders began to rip, but when my mouth opened in protest, the mountain fell on my head again. . . .
Drowning! I coughed and spluttered and gagged, fighting for breath. Panic eased when I grasped that the water was knife-edged rivulets of cold rain running down my face and into my nose. What in the name of sense . . . ?
My cheek bounced on wet leather. The wind hammered a flap of scratchy wool onto my scraped forehead.
Rhythmic jolts bruised my aching gut and threatened to burst my pounding millstone of a head. The world smelled of wet horse. My disorientation slowly resolved itself into the realization that I was draped over the back of the beast. Upon consideration, drowning sounded quite appealing.
I couldn’t see my captor or where he was taking me, for a rag had been tied about my eyes. He needn’t have bothered. Everything had been blurry already. I knew better than to give any sign I was coherent, but I had to get the rain out of my nostrils before I puked my guts out—which was going to happen any time now. I cautiously rotated my face toward the rough saddle blanket, and my thoughts blurred as well.
Just when I was convinced that the dark, wet, miserable journey would never end, the horse jolted to a stop. Cold rain soaked my back. Ropes fell slack, and I was dragged off the beast by my feet. My face bumped its way across the saddle, and then I slid all the way to the ground in an untidy heap, unable to catch myself as I was still trussed up like a goose.
Accompanying an ineffective pawing of hands trying to catch me on my way down, I heard the first words from my assailant, not through my ears, but directly inside my head. I’m sorry. No, not sorry a bit, unless I’m wrong, which I’m not.
So my assailant was Dar’Nethi. No surprise there.
The fellow dragged me through wet grass and rocky mud, sat me up, and eventually wrapped my arms backward around a broad tree trunk, binding my wrists tightly. At least I was right-side up and somewhat out of the rain. Though my head was clearing a bit, I allowed my chin to droop. Before committing myself to any more serious action, I needed to learn whatever I could. I couldn’t see anyway, as the sodden rag was still in place about my eyes. So I listened.
Footsteps. He was light on his feet. The boots hardly made a sound. A soft cluck of the tongue and the two horses walked a few paces away. A rustling of branches . . . soft pats. The horses snorted and blew in a friendly way. The fellow was alone. Small. No strong-armed warrior, else why the head-bashing, dragging me about with a horse, and inordinately tight binding? I wasn’t all that heavy.
Footsteps again, back toward me. He crouched on my left side, close enough I could feel his breath on my wet hair. The warmth from his body smelled of horse, damp cloth and leather, and something else I ought to know, something not unpleasant. Fruit—
A sudden movement. Metal sliding on leather. A touch on my chest.
I slammed my head backward into the tree. “Who are—”
Flat, cold steel pressed first on my lips and then across my throat. I understood the implicit command, holding as still as I could, the back of my head hard against the rough bark. No one within range was likely to offer me any help anyway. If this person was going to kill me, there wasn’t much I could do about it.
The blade moved away. Not far. His breath came faster. Cold, damp fingers fumbled at my neck. The knifepoint pricked as the blade slit open the front of my shirt, and the fingers jerked the fabric apart. Though I squirmed inside, I held my body still. Pale white light leaked around the edge of my blindfold.
But then he stood up. Footsteps hurried away, quickly lost in the pattering rain. The light was gone.
Stars of night! Releasing a breath held too long, I wriggled and fought to get out of the ropes. No luck. So I was left with sorcery . . . and only a few hours gone since I’d used sorcery to examine my father for the fourth time in four days. In hopes I had recovered, I concentrated and scraped together what power I had left, but no attempt at loosening, breaking, or splitting the rope had any effect. When my fifth attempt left hair and cloth smoldering on my scorched wrists, I quit. Clearly my captor had used exceptional rope, and his prisoner was exceptionally inept.
As the chill and the damp seeped into my bones, the two horses crunched the grass, and the drizzle rustled the leaves above my head. The rain smelled of wet grass and flowers, and we’d climbed since Gaelie. The air was thinner. I was shivering in my wet clothes.
Soon I heard approaching footsteps. Slower than before. And two people this time, the second one heavier, but not by much. His feet shuffled a little in the wet grass, and his steps were uneven. Limping? Light glimmered. Not the white glow of a Dar’Nethi’s handlight, but the yellow flicker of a lantern. I stiffened, wary of what might come.
“Oh, child, what have you done?” The soft, chiding voice of a man no longer young.
Cold fingers forced open my clenched fists, somewhere behind the tree beyond my aching shoulders.
“Look here and tell me it’s impossible!” Demons and all perdition—a woman!
“What’s going—?”
My thick-tongued attempt at participation in the conversation was cut short by the knife pressing a reminder into my windpipe. “Silence, monster!”
“Stop it, Jen!” said the man. “Stop! These are just scars from the war . . . or from any number of things. You have to forget, child. Let it go. And let this poor young man go. Look what you’ve done to him.”
“Look at his hands, Papa. Only one thing ever caused scars like these. Look at the color of his hair. Remember it? Look at these other marks on him.” She yanked on my ripped shirt and held the lantern close enough that I could feel the warmth on my clammy skin. With the tip of the knife she traced a scar on the left side of my rib cage, and another on my right shoulder, one on my abdomen, and a long, jagged one on my right arm. How could anyone know of those scars, remnants of my childhood sword training in Zhev’Na?
“It’s impossible. He’s long dead.” But the man wasn’t so sure any more.
“He should be dead. Justice is a mockery in Gondai while the monster yet breathes. Yet he rides the roads of the world as if he has a right to them. I’ll see him dead, Papa. I will. The moment you acknowledge him, I’ll bleed him dry. Only three other creatures in all the world bore these same scars on their hands.”
I didn’t know who these two were, but they certainly knew me . . . and no word I could say could possibly assuage either the woman’s hatred or her fear. Not if she knew what the scars on my hands were.
“Even if . . . even if it were so,” said the man, “only the Heir of D’Arnath can condemn a man to death. You must not wager your soul for something so fleeting as revenge. And I can’t be sure. It’s been so many years. . . .”
“Perhaps if you look on his face, Papa. Look and remember. No one in authority is going to listen to me, but if a Speaker testifies . . .”
The cold fingers pulled at my blindfold, and at last I identified their scent: raspberries. By the time my eyes could filter out the lamplight, I had already cursed myself for a fool, remembering the retiring “youth” in the Gaelie common room and the dark-haired young woman who’d taken such an interest in my hands. Ten paces to my right stood the ghostly white ribbon of the hospice wall.
But my disgust at my blindness was quickly overruled by shock when I saw her companion. An old man with one ruined eye and a villainously twisted back stared at me, droplets of rain trickling down his face like a shower of tears. Even with eyes that refused to hold their focus, I knew him. I had last seen him when I was eleven. He’d been standing in the door of my house in Zhev’Na as I rode off into the desert with a red-haired Zhid warrior who would tutor me in the fine arts of murder, torture, and war.
“Sefaro,” I whispered, heedless of the woman’s knife. The kind, gentle chamberlain of my household, the slave forbidden to speak unless I gave him leave, yet who always smiled at me. The slave allowed to wear nothing but the vile steel collar and a gray tunic, yet who always told me how well I looked in my fine clothes. The slave fed nothing but sour gray bread, though he always made sure I had my favorite things to eat. The man I came near killing in a child’s pique, yet who looked in on me in the long nights when I couldn’t sleep, giving me comfort by caring that I was lonely and afraid. I had believed him one of the thousand victims of my training. . . .