“As for you, dear girl, I knew you to be a child of great promise, exactly as I’d heard. Now I see that your gifts are cynically wasted, and that you are in fact no child at all. Now I believe you are a prize of even greater importance than opposing Remigius or throwing out the pathetic Trumbert.”
“Oh please, I beg you…” Trumbert began. For the first time in her life, Talysse heard a grown man blubber. She was repelled, but she felt sorry for him. Saveric did not need to be cruel. She also did not like being called a ‘prize’ any more than she had a ‘creature.’
“Oh, do shut up,” Saveric said. Casually he swung his cane, sending Trumbert crashing into a bookcase several feet away. The Prevôt fell with a groan and did not get up. Talysse didn’t dare move.
“Your pardon for that,” Saveric said. “He irked me. He is not dead, but he is done here and is of no further consequence. You are my concern now, dear girl. My primary concern.”
“What do you want from me?” Talysse asked. She folded her arms across her chest and tried to look brave.
Saveric laughed—cordial and hearty, friendly laughter, but it was still a scorpion laughing.
“What do I want from you? Why, nothing at all! On the contrary, I offer something to you.” He held his hands out as if proffering a gift. She wanted to believe the gesture sincere, but the outstretched hand could just as easily be reaching to grab her.
“Paris,” he said.
She stared at him, trying to understand and doubt at the same time.
“There now, you see? I try to be dramatic and clever, but I only confuse. Hear me out, and I will explain.”
“I’ll listen,” she said, not meaning it.
“I belong to the Syndicat… has Remigius told you of us?” He cocked his head.
“We live at the edge of the world, not outside of it,” she said, putting a sneer in her voice.
“Oh, good, quite good,” he exclaimed. “Once more you prove there is more to you than anyone has guessed. But, as for the Syndicat, we are an association of practitioners dedicated to exploring the further limits of our craft. Unlike other wizards, we do not seek power or fame, but only knowledge and skill. I believe you yourself are something of an explorer.”
His voice slid through the air as smooth as oil.
“In Paris we have a kind of school, not so very different from a cenobitum, in fact, but with more resources than you have here. There we have more than just books; we have a library. We have more than teachers—we have an entire conlegium. Here you have austerity and isolation, but in Paris you can have luxury, challenges, friends. I would take you there, Talysse. I would take you from this desolate place into the grand halls of the world.”
She knew he was trying to dazzle her, and it was working, but one homely word amid the glitter clutched at her heart: friends. She had Detta, of course, but the gnome was a compagnon, which was something different, however much she liked her. What she did not have was friends. She wondered if the wizard knew this and was trying to use it against her.
“Where is Remigius?” she asked, struggling to gain some sort of control over the talk.
“Talysse!” Trumbert broke in. He struggled back to his feet in order to glare at her, and he swayed unsteadily. “I beg you to overlook her manners,” he said, trying to catch Saveric’s eye. The wizard waved his free hand dismissively.
“You have already established she is rude. I trust I have already established that I do not care.”
Trumbert cowered. Saveric never looked away from Talysse.
“Remigius is away on an important mission for the Syndicat,” the wizard said. “I chose to step in on his behalf, to witness your Demonstrandum.”
Talysse knew it was all a lie. Dissonant notes had been striking since morning and now she was hearing them all. Not merely the unexplained absence of her patron or his strange substitute, but how Trumbert cowered before this wizard. The gens d’armes so unnecessary in a cenobitum. Even the generosity of the Paris offer felt suspect.
Saveric pressed forward in her silence. “Come to Paris, young lady. Let me lift you up, take you to new horizons. You have been told all your life of your great promise; this is your chance to realize it, even to exceed it.”
Whenever she was unsure of her ground, Talysse instinctively dug in. Now, she dug in with both heels.
“No,” she said.
He grimaced as if he had bitten into something sour. “Your Prevôt wants to cast you out. Would you become an orphan again?”
They were trying to box her in with threats. “I am not an orphan,” she declared. “I will go find my parents.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
His face went hard—eyes narrowed, lips tight. His third eye flicked open, then closed at once. Panic flooded through her, setting her heart to racing. Why had he opened his third eye? What did he see?
Without moving, he seemed to reach out for her.
“The Prevôt has given you into my care, Talysse. I shall take you away from this… place,” he made the word an insult. “You will learn to control your power and exploit your gifts, many of which you scarcely know you possess. I am your patron now.”
The last door closed. She was captured. Heart and mind, she threw herself against the prison.
“Remigius,” she managed to whisper.
“He is unimportant,” Saveric said. “He has neglected you, but I shall not. Prevôt Trumbert told me you are a child of great promise, but you are no child, as you have said. We shall see if you show promise.”
“Let me go,” she said, though no one was touching her. She felt cold iron around her. This wizard would take her to some far place, away from the only home she knew. Away from Detta. He had done something to Remigius, she was sure. Something awful.
“I will not let you go,” Saveric said. His voice was warm, but unbending. “I will not have you be orphaned again. I will not have such untrained talent be risked in the wide world.”
Who was he to say what was to happen to her? She wanted to be angry, but feared those dark eyes and the black cane. She wanted to run, to escape into the blue sky over white hills.
She was scarcely aware when he took her by the arm.
“I have pressing business,” he was saying. He spoke with a kind firmness, like a father putting a child to bed, but to her ears it was the voice of a jailer and she felt a cold resolve in his fingers. Her feet moved without her permission even as her brain screamed for action.
The wizard led her to the door, his cane clicking against the stone floor. Beyond, the guards lounged on the lower stairs, awaiting their master and his prize. Saveric nudged her through the doorway. A guard moved toward her. He had laid his helmet aside; his face showed a long, white scar.
At that instant, her heart spoke.
Up.
Her body and mind heard its single word, and responded. She yanked her arm away from Saveric’s grasp. The guard reached out for her as she sprang to the right and took the stairs three at a time. She left the warm glow of the chamber, running into the darkness of the tower.
Run, flee, escape, her heart chanted. Up.
The gens d’armes cried, “After her!” and Saveric cried, “Wait! Come back!”
Talysse ran, and her heart tried to outrace her. She knew from her first steps that she was trapped. She could not hope to resist the armed men once they caught up with her, but she was like an animal flushed out by beaters, and the urge to run consumed her.
The armed men thundered behind. She glanced back. The red-bearded man was in the lead, clanking like kitchen pots, with the scarred man close behind. Talysse raced up the stairs two at a time. At the next level, the red beard was closer. He wore no chain mail to slow him down. Twice he reached out, nearly grabbing her shift. She gulped at the air, pushed hard with her legs, but could not open any distance between them.
Then she remembered the step. One level short of the top was a step that had been crumbling for years. No one fix
ed it because everyone knew it was there. You just stepped over it. Talysse stepped over it, but the red beard did not. She heard him go down, heard the scarred man crash into him. She managed to smile between gasps.
Terrible curses echoed from the stone walls, but the gens d’armes untangled themselves and continued their pursuit, slower, more carefully, panting between oaths.
She came to the ladder and scrambled up, emerging through a hatch onto the top of the light tower. The sun stood high and warm in a cloudless sky. Seagulls wheeled below her. Below them, wavelets whispered to the sand.
Around the outside ran a walkway protected from the wind by a chest-high brick wall. Handholds were placed every few feet, for the siròc winds could blow a man right off. In the center stood the lighthouse itself, empty now. At sunset old Evrard would climb up and light the oil and take up his perch to stare out to sea. She would miss Evrard. He was always kind to her.
Shouts came from below. The men were coming up the ladder.
Talysse used a handhold to climb onto the top of the wall. She crouched against the wind blowing steadily in from the blue sea. Detta, I’m so sorry. A hundred feet above the salt marshes and the sea, she perched at the edge of freedom.
She jumped.
CHAPTER FIVE
Into the Blue
Talysse fell. For two long seconds she was a stone plummeting before she felt the shape of the wind. She swooped like a starling just above the water that swirled at the foot of the light tower, then rose on the strong breeze. Her heart pounded as if it would burst from her chest and fly away on its own. Delirious with freedom and strength, she rode the wind in triumph, a creature of the air.
The sea spread beneath her, a wide, undulating carpet. Gulls and pelicans darted like airborne fingerlings. A small voice inside worried about what had just happened, and about what was happening now, but she didn’t care to listen. She sailed between blue sky and blue water, and nowhere were there walls or rules or strangers seeking to take her away. A grin spread across her face and would not leave.
Awareness of the wind filled her senses. It sounded like laughing, tasted of salt, felt like the sinews of gods. Its movements came to her as premonitions, telling her when and how and where to move. And something more: an additional sense that flowed throughout her body like her own blood, that talked to the wind and heard it sing replies. Her fear lessened and she gave herself over to the song.
A flock of petrels cut across her path, chittering with concern at this largest of birds. She laughed and called out reassurance, but they sheared away. Their flight brought back awareness of herself. She had flown without thought, carried by joy, all her senses tuned to the flex and twist of the wind. Now thought returned. She wondered exactly where she was, and looked back.
The cenobitum sat like a toy at the far end of a wide blue room. Land was no more than a thin line, like an uneven, white scar. If her pursuers were to look out to sea, she would be only a small dot in the distance. Just another bird.
She had gone too far.
Surprised and alarmed, she began a wide, ragged turn. Where the birds curved gracefully, Talysse had to work her way across the face of the wind, which was as uneven and treacherous as the face of a mountain. She jolted from one current to the next, losing height between but regaining it again. It was an unlovely turn, but she managed to get pointed landward again. Her muscles ached as if she had been running for hours.
For most of its length, the seashore of the Camargue was a tangle of marshes, lakes, and islands. In places one could go miles before finding solid ground. No waves broke; the sea surged and oozed its way through countless channels between wide islands of reeds and grasses, to end in the big, square salt pans or to merge with the countless mouths of the Rhône River. With a following wind now, Talysse swept swiftly toward the marshlands, where there were a hundred places to land and a thousand places to drown.
A couple of miles to her right stood the cenobitum and its light tower. A single road ran arrow-straight across the marais, barely above the water. Scattered among the marsh grasses were thousands of flamingos, brilliantly pink, feasting on shrimp. As she swept above them, their muttering squawks mingled with the rush of air. A herd of black cattle grazed off to her left; she was close enough to see their white horns.
Talysse had never flown so far; would not have thought it possible before today. Her heart labored. Her breath kept catching as if she were sobbing. Either the wind made her eyes water, or she really was crying. The salt hills were only a few hundred feet ahead, but they might as well be miles away. Her arms and legs trembled. The thick muscles of the air currents were turning to slush, but she kept her eyes on the hills. She could not risk landing among the marshes, where the mud underneath was endlessly deep and grasping.
A new current, hardly more than a thread, lifted her a few feet. Not much, but it would have to be enough. A low run of salt hills lay straight ahead. Her face grimaced with effort and hope.
Thunder erupted beneath her. At once the salt hills disappeared behind roiling clouds of pink and scarlet and black. Wild, honking cries drowned out the sound of the wind, and a thousand wings smothered its currents. Talysse fell as if shot, crashing into birds, scattering feathers and shrieks. The air filled with color—sky blue, flamingo pink, mud brown—then water slammed into her. She hit the ground on her side, tumbled onto her back. Flamingos swirled above, honking outrage.
Mud edged up her body, like cold, gloved hands. Realizing she was sinking, she started to get up. Pain shot through her left shoulder, making her cry out. Flamingos replied as they flew away. More carefully now, she rolled onto her right side and got to her knees. There she swayed, trying to sort out sensations. The pain in her shoulder was bright white. The stink of brine and birds filled her nostrils, and the cold mud continued to grasp at her. The retreating flamingos still croaked their indignation, but Talysse did not dare look up, for her head was spinning and she feared she might tip over. She looked down instead.
“I’ve got to get out of you, anyway,” she told the mud. She got to her feet, careful as an old lady, in awkward stages, uttering small yelps of pain and giving a sigh of triumph once upright.
Nothing around her looked familiar, save for the row of salt hills still some distance away. The pain in her shoulder shoved at her, and her legs were shaky. She started toward the hills, and nearly pitched forward into the muck as she stumbled at the first step. The mud was grabbing onto her feet.
“Pay attention,” she told herself. She said it aloud to give the advice more substance. “Watch the mud now, the hills later.” Her next step was more stable, and the one after that. Always the mud pulled at her, making her glad of the Demonstrant sandals that laced up her calves. She could have done with more clothes, though.
The pain in her shoulder moved from searing white to a fiery ache. She kept her arm limp as best she could, but her balance was poor and her arm would fly out instinctively when she wavered. This was followed by the only curse word she knew:
“Merdre.”
Worst was the cold, though. The wind that had welcomed her when she flew was now a cold hand gripping her muscles, grasping at bones. It made everything ache. And underneath both pains lay an exhaustion as dangerous as the mire, tempting her to rest, taunting her at every step that she could not take another.
But she did. And another after that, even as she wondered why she should be so tired. She was too tired to wonder for very long. So tired that she had gone several steps before realizing she was on solid ground. She stopped.
A wide track ran gnome-straight for a hundred yards in either direction. One side was mud and rushes, but the other was rimmed by salt. The water itself was sunset red, stained by minerals. The colors reminded her of flamingos and she pushed that image away. Dividing the reddish waters was a whole web of low dikes. Salt workers walked these narrow ridges easily, but Talysse did not trust herself and she had no desire to get even wetter by falling. She carefully turned in p
lace, looking for landmarks.
There was Saldemer, gratifyingly distant—she could see only the tower. No wonder she was so tired, she reflected; she must have flown for miles, much farther than she ever had. That wizard would never find her. Now all she needed to do was find herself.
The salt hills meant a good path, wide enough and dry enough for the salt carts to pass. And the hills would shield her from prying eyes, if there were any. She shivered. She needed to get dry and get warm. She knew of only one place in all the wide marshes of the Camargue where she might find warmth and shelter: in a cabano, a cabin of the gardiens.
She chose a direction, then checked the sun—two or three hours of daylight remained. She set her jaw and squared her shoulders, which was a mistake.
“Merdre.”
She un-set her shoulders and waited for the bright white pain to fade a little. “Stumbling forward is better than standing still,” she told herself, then added, “Now I sound like Detta.” That only made her picture the gnome waiting disconsolately at the gate of the cenobitum, wondering why her Lyssie had abandoned her.
“I didn’t run away, I was chased away.” She continued to speak aloud; it heartened her.
“I’ll come back for you, tante, when it’s safe. Or I’ll send word somehow. I promise. But first I have to get somewhere warm. Then I’ll go to Arles. I can send word from there.”
She was dimly aware that sending a message might cost money, which only reminded her she had none. Nor did she know the way to Arles, though she knew it was but two days from Saldemer. She wondered if that was riding or walking.
“Or flying,” she added aloud with a chuckle. That movement set off her shoulder again.
“Merdre.”
After that, she found it harder and harder to keep a steady line of thought. She concentrated on keeping a steady line of walk, looking no further than the end of her toes. She reached the salt hills at last and sat between two of them until the throbbing in her shoulder drove her out again. The outer world nearly ceased to exist, but a rendering of it was vivid in her mind. She navigated in there, with messages arriving from outside as if by post rider.
A Child of Great Promise: An Altearth Tale Page 4