by Carol Berg
No sooner had the young Lord returned from Maroth than he caught me off guard with his little speech of gratitude. Furious with myself for letting down my guard, I trailed him up and down the road to Gaelie until I thought I would scream if I saw that guesthouse one more time. I was convinced his presence posed a danger to Avonar, but, in truth, my heart was no longer in the hunt.
Papa’s condition had deteriorated severely. He’d become irritable and snappish, complaining that I was gone too much, or that I was hovering over him as if he were a child. He called the food tasteless and the wine foul. When his irritation grew almost to the breaking point, he would collapse into sleep for long hours at a time. It was almost impossible to rouse him. Throughout all the agonies he had suffered over the past five years, he had never issued the least complaint, but when an afternoon storm blew raindrops through a window onto his book, he threw the volume across the room and let flow a stream of invective that should have made the air turn dark about his head.
Both Papa’s faculties and his spirits did seem to improve the longer I stayed with him. After a few days I asked what had been bothering him so. He had no memory of the incidents at all. A few more questions told me he remembered nothing of the past weeks, and, in fact, believed I had only just returned from Avonar!
I sat with him for a long time after he’d gone to bed that night, exhausted from a day of nothing, and I watched his sleep grow restless and uneasy. My mulish conviction that I could change the course of villainy felt incomparably ridiculous as I looked upon the only person in the world I actually cared about.
Tomorrow, I’d said to myself. Tomorrow I’ll tell the Lady about her lover, and I’ll ask her what’s wrong with my father, and then I’ll put aside everything but what’s most important.
I stayed the night at the hospice, so I could go to D’Sanya first thing in the morning. And that was the morning I woke to the man screaming.
I lowered myself the leg’s length back to firm ground and wandered over to the stables. That’s where they most often met—the young Lord and the Lady. But only F’Syl the groom was about. On most days I would spend an hour talking to F’Syl, just to prove his ferocious appearance didn’t bother me, even though it did. Today I just waved at him, wandered casually along the path around the stable, and poked my head into a little-used back door. The Lady’s gray stallion stood in its box, and in the next one over, the young Lord’s latest mount, a powerful chestnut gelding. So he hadn’t ridden back to Gaelie.
The rest of the day at the hospice proceeded little differently from any other. I moved through the quiet activity as if I were invisible. Spying was easy there. Eyes were always controlled. No one wanted to intrude. As in any great house, the kitchens were always busy, the attendants carrying meals to those who preferred to keep to themselves, while a few people made their way through the cloisters and gardens to the perfectly appointed dining rooms. In the afternoon one or two of the residents meandered over to the library or the artisans’ workshops in hopes of finding amusement, but they rarely stayed for long. Not one of the residents could pay attention to an activity for more than a few minutes at a time. Most stayed close to their apartments.
“Excuse me.” I accosted the consiliar, who stood beside the dining-room door. “When might I be able to speak with the Lady in private? I have some urgent news for her.”
“Her day’s schedule has changed somewhat,” he said, polite and concerned as always. “I’ll inform her that you wish to speak with her, and she’ll summon you when she has time. Will that be satisfactory?”
“Of course.” A few more hours’ observation might be useful.
A small carriage rolled through the gates about that time, and the Lady went out to greet newcomers. She wore her filmy white gown and her ever-present bracelets and rings, smiling as if they were the only people in the world and bestowing on them the favor of her unending conversation. Nowhere did I see or hear any evidence of a disturbance. Though the heart-twisting scream still echoed inside my head, I became convinced it had been a nightmare—the screeching magpies, perhaps, entwined in my sleep.
The young Lord did not show himself throughout that day. Five visits to the stables assured me that his horse was never taken out; nor was the Lady’s. The Lady attended a musical performance in one of the public gathering rooms in mid-afternoon. She listened attentively to the musicians plucking at citterns and harps, but never once looked about to see where was her constant companion of the past eight weeks. She never sent any messages to his father’s apartments. Never asked for him. Never received any message. So she, at least, knew where he’d gone.
The day passed into evening. Where was the man? I’d never seen anyone so efficient at killing. Four severely broken corpses left in the alley in Avonar, and he carried no weapon larger than an eating knife. Had he killed his father’s attendant, too, the man found sprawled in the paddock like a starved rabbit?
By the time the hospice settled for the night, I had received no summons from the Lady. Unable to face my bare room in Gaelie with the sagging bed and flyblown window, I chose to spend the night in my father’s apartments again. He fell asleep early on. I went walking in the sultry night. I’d left my horse tethered in a grassy copse of alder and oak saplings. So, as my thoughts and fears churned, I led her to a stream and let her drink and graze.
I had to give over this responsibility. How big a fool was I to think I could decipher the plots of a Lord of Zhev’Na on my own—I, who bore no talent, only suspicions and a paltry skill for sums?
The moon hung low in the east, blurred by a drifting cloud, and the wind was rising, making the dark outlines of the trees thrash and bustle as I hurried back toward the hospice buildings. My feet headed directly for the Lady’s house. I didn’t care that it was late. Her lamps yet burned, and she had always encouraged her guests or their families to come to her at any time.
Unlike on most nights, the Lady’s front gate was closed and locked. But I knew another way into the grounds, through a service gate on the east side of the garden. It had been very convenient for spying, buried discreetly as it was in the hedge and the wall. Though it was normally kept locked, I had discovered that by sticking my narrow blade through the iron scrollwork, pushing in with my hand on the smooth bar on the outside of the gate, and lifting up the bottom with the toe of my boot, I could dislodge the mechanical latch on the inner side. Tonight the small gate stood wide open.
Of course, I wasn’t planning to barge into the Lady’s house uninvited. But as I climbed the wide steps at the main entrance, ready to tug on the bellpull, I heard fragments of conversation from a second-floor window open just above me. One speaker was a woman and the other, fainter, scarcely hearable, was a man.
“Please, D’Sanya . . . must listen . . .” In an instant I knew that the scream that had waked me that morning had been no dream, and that this hoarse and desperate speaker was the one who had made it. Who was he? What had happened? I had to know.
“. . . deceived me . . .” The woman was furious.
Finding a secure foothold on a ground-floor window ledge, I scrambled up to a second-floor balcony, then crept along a stone ledge toward the open window. A deep violet glow illuminated the windowpanes.
Only when I stopped to catch my breath did I even realize what I’d done. I jammed my face into the stone wall and suppressed a moan, promising myself that I would listen only for a moment and then scoot right back down to the safe and solid earth.
“. . . time has come. I’ve decided on your sentence.” My spine shriveled when I heard the tone of the Lady’s voice, my own fears seeming quite small all of a sudden.
“Beg me,” said the Lady. “Grovel, so I can scorn you. Weep, so I can ignore you. I will bury you in the place where you were hatched, and you’ll live forever with what you’ve done.”
Not for the first time in my life I wished I were taller. My toes clenched inside my boots as I willed them to stay on the narrow ledge while I stretched f
or the windowsill just above my head. Come on, I told myself. Reach. The ledge is plenty wide enough. You won’t fall. The flagstone terrace seemed very far . . . wickedly far . . . below me. But I was determined to see.
I levered myself upward. When I poked my head around the lead-trimmed glass and peered over the sill, flickering beams of sapphire and violet light dazzled my eyes. My stomach curdled—height-sickness surely—and I closed my eyes and rested my head on the sill, gulping air to fight my nausea.
By the time I could open my eyes again, the colored light had vanished. But fifty guttering candles left murky yellow pools on the tiled floor. The illumination was sufficient to identify the chamber as a lectorium—a sorcerer’s workroom. Long tables lined the walls. Alongside rows of jars, flasks, small tins, and boxes lay piles of silver and brass rods, blocks, and sheets. Off to my right, in the corner of the outer wall, stood a massive hearth.
In the center of the room stood another long table. On it lay a dead man. I believed he was a man from the shape and size of his boots, which were pointed toward the window, and I believed he was dead from the way his arm drooped from the side of the table, his flaccid hand sporting three elaborately jeweled rings that glinted dully in the candlelight.
For a moment I debated whether I should try to climb through the window and take a closer look or perhaps raise an alarm. Surely the Lady knew he was dead. Perhaps she’d gone for help, yet no Dar’Nethi would leave a dead man abandoned. Before I could decide what to do, my toe slipped off the ledge.
I clung to the windowsill, scrabbling to find the invisible strip of stone below me. The only visible foothold was the outsloping edge of roof tiles to my right, across an impossibly wide gap of stomach-churning emptiness. Desperate, unable to find the ledge, I stretched my boot toward the roof, wedging myself between the edge of the roof and the opened casement. With a jolt, my boot slipped once more, breaking off a piece of a red clay roof tile and sending it crashing to the terrace below. I hung there breathing heavily.
“Get out of here.”
For a moment I thought the harsh whisper came from the man on the table, but I knew every aspect of death, and there was no possibility that person was anything but dead. Someone else was inside the room, deep in the shadows where the dying candlelight no longer reached. Though he spoke quietly, I knew at once that he, not the man on the table, had been the one arguing with the Lady, the one who had waked me with his cry of anguish that morning.
“Hurry. Go,” he said again.
“Why?” I suppose his whispering convinced me that he had no more authority in the Lady’s house than I did.
“You’ve no business here with your spying.”
“And you? What are you doing here? Nothing good, I’ll wager.”
“I am no concern of yours.”
“I can judge that for myself.” I twisted around, pulled up, and hooked my elbows over the sill, my boots relinquishing the slight reassurance of the roof edge in favor of imaginary footholds on the smooth-dressed stone.
“What’s happened here? Who are you?” I refused to make any guesses as to the identity of either the dead man or the voice from the shadows.
Just then, I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel paths out in the gardens, and a few shouts. A woman’s nasal voice called out, urgently. “. . . something breaking . . . an intruder . . .”
From inside the room, the man whispered again. “Get away from here. Not down. Go over the roof to the southwest corner. Where the roof joins the downslope from the cloistered walk, you’ll find a rain gutter. It drains into an overgrown corner where the dustbins are kept.”
His breathing was harsh and unhealthy, and I wondered again if the speaker was really the man on the table after all, but just on the verge of death.
“Do you need help?”
“Demonfire, will you just do it? I won’t have you—Just go. If you value your life, do as I say.”
Torches flared into life around the corner of the building. Someone shouted that the side gate had been left open. More shouts of warning. I was becoming more interested by the moment in the escape route he described, though truly, I told myself, I had nothing to fear from the Lady. Only embarrassment at prying into her business. Only a reprimand for violating the single strict rule of the hospice. Vasrin’s hand, what if my father was dismissed from the hospice or I was forbidden to visit him again?
I glanced downward and swallowed hard. “There’s only one problem. . . .”
“What now?”
“Heights. There’s no possibility I can get from here to the roof, much less traipse about on it. I’m about to toss my dinner just where I am.”
“You’re about to—Earth and sky!”
The shouts were coming closer. I clung to the wall, praying they wouldn’t look up. My right boot started to slide slowly down the smooth stone, and my heart slid upward into my throat along with my stomach contents and a choking moan. A well dressed man carrying a torch jogged to a stop far below me. But just as my fingers quivered and slipped, and my knees turned to mush, I experienced a mind-ripping reversal.
All at once every sense screamed at me: my skin was on fire, my ears deafened by a roaring tumult that could have been an avalanche on Mount Siris. My vision went out of focus, and then slammed me with a blinding cascade of images until I thought my eyes would be torn from their sockets. Worst of all, my hands screamed in pain as if the cool stone windowsill had been converted in an instant to molten steel. Their strength ebbed until I knew I must let go and fall to my death.
But these sensations passed more quickly than I could encompass what was happening, and then they were replaced by . . . something else. With a burst of strength I gripped the sill, halting the treacherous sliding of my boots. Then I lowered my feet slowly until they touched the narrow ledge below. I astonished myself with my own facility, flattening my face against the wall, clinging like a spider and creeping along the ledge until I could reach for the roof edge and swing my legs up onto it silently. Unfortunately this action resulted in my face pointing downward, right off the edge of the roof. I suppressed a moan of terror.
But the sight of a second servant conversing with the first and not yet looking upward gave me a motive to retreat and incentive enough to try it, though it was not at all the route I would have chosen with the slightest sober reflection. I slithered backward up the rough clay tiles, gradually rotating until I was pointed up the pitch of the roof. Then I crawled upward, catching the buttons of my tunic on the arced edges of the tiles, cutting my hands on a broken one, holding my face close to the curved tops that stretched before me like a miniature mountain range.
As soon as I was out of sight of the guards, I scrambled to my feet, and, not believing my own temerity, I ran lightly across the roof. I didn’t seem to give even a thought to which direction was southwest, but my instincts were right as I found myself in the valley between the pitch of the Lady’s roof and that of the cloisters that stretched off toward the main house. I followed the white stone rain gutter, and with no more care than if I had been taking a walk in a garden, I dropped off the low-hanging edge of the roof into the dark, weedy corner where the sickly-sweet smell of rotten fruit and stripped bones told me the dustbins lay. I landed right in the center of them, the only place I could have landed without knocking them over in a servant-attracting din.
I sped out of the wood-fenced enclosure and through the waning night, taking a long way around the gardens until I was sure I was not pursued. Not wanting to wake my father, I huddled in the corner of his garden and waited for the pounding of my heart to subside. Not too long afterward my knees turned to water and my bones to porridge, and I felt sick and weak and wholly unable to explain how I’d done what I’d done. I’d heard of the surge of the blood that makes men and women capable of deeds well beyond the limits of their strength and endurance when faced with great danger to those they love. But I had been in no such extremity of dread, only a cowardly fear of heights and a yearn
ing to avoid the embarrassment of breaking my neck in a place where I had no right to be.
I rolled over and heaved up my well-churned dinner into the well-tended begonias. Somewhere in the midst of this humiliating collapse, I acquired the idea that I had to go to Avonar and tell someone about what I’d seen. But it seemed so ludicrous, I didn’t pay it the least attention.
When the sun came up, I went in to Papa. He was still sleeping soundly, so I warmed the water in his bedside pitcher and cleaned myself up a bit. The night had been so strange; I was almost surprised to see my own ordinary face in the glass. How could I ever have run across a roof? I got height-sick when I climbed a tree any more. I knew exactly when it was I had lost my ease with heights—on the day I sat quivering in the highest branches of my favorite reading tree, mortally terrified that I would fall from my perch and land in the pool of my mother’s blood.
My father slept late. Unable to contain my curiosity long enough to submit my adventures to his sensible review, I wandered into the public rooms of the hospice, watching and listening for any sign of the Lady. Or any alarm about screaming men or dead ones. Or anything. I saw nothing but the usual busy morning of a great household, servants and attendants bustling about, a few residents and a few visitors, all with averted eyes, settling in their accustomed spots in the library or the sitting rooms.
After an hour of drifting about the place, keeping my ears tuned for any interesting word, I started across a small courtyard only to encounter the consiliar Na’Cyd speaking to a tall distinguished woman who stood twisting a kerchief in her fingers. In the ordinary event, I would have turned back to respect their privacy, but on one of her hands the woman wore three rings—elaborately jeweled rings identical to those worn by the dead man in the Lady’s chambers. I hurried past them to the doorway on the other side of the courtyard. Once through the door, I stopped and pressed my ear close to the door opening so I could hear what was said.