Safehold 10 Through Fiery Trials

by David Weber

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you for my daughter’s life.”

  “Your Majesty, I—” Whytmyn broke off, looking over her head with a helpless expression as Cayleb and Alahnah rose from their own chairs. Then he drew a deep breath. “Your Majesty, it was Merlin who saved both of us. I only sort of … got in its way.”

  “And don’t think I haven’t already thanked him, too,” Sharleyan replied, never taking her head from his shoulder. “My family’s had a lot of practice thanking him. But you’re the only reason he had time to get there. And I know exactly what you did, Lywys. It was a lot more than ‘just getting in the way.’”

  There was an odd note of assurance in her voice, he thought. As if she spoke from personal knowledge.

  “It was, indeed, my son,” Archbishop Maikel said, entering the study from a side door with Bishop Paityr Wylsynn.

  Sharleyan released Whytmyn with a last squeeze and stepped back as the Dohlaran turned to face the prelates. Staynair extended his hand, and Whytmyn bent to kiss his ring, then straightened.

  “I understand you’re here for an explanation,” Bishop Paityr said as the younger man turned towards him. He didn’t offer his own ring, only waving his hand for Whytmyn to stay where he was, but he did smile in welcome. In fact, it looked almost more like a grin than a smile, Whytmyn thought.

  “The seijin is very good at making explanations,” Wylsynn continued with that almost impish expression. “He’s had a lot of practice. In fact, he made exactly the same explanation to me in this very study.”

  “He did?” Surprise startled the question out of Whytmyn, and the bishop chuckled.

  “Oh, yes! Not that he didn’t get a few surprises of his own out of the conversation.”

  “Don’t tease the boy, Paityr!” Staynair’s admonition sounded stern, but it was accompanied by an undeniable twinkle. “Curiosity’s eating him alive, and no wonder! His introduction to the secret was just a bit more traumatic than yours, if I’m remembering correctly.”

  “That’s certainly fair,” Wylsynn agreed more soberly.

  “Then why don’t all of us find chairs and let Merlin get started doing that explaining.

  * * *

  “This is going to take some getting used to,” Lywys Whytmyn said, the better part of three hours later, looking back and forth between Merlin, the archbishop, and the emperor and empress.

  “Is that what they call ‘Dohlaran understatement’?” Alahnah Ahrmahk asked from the chair beside his.

  Her expression was even more thunderstruck than his, but then again, he hadn’t just discovered he’d lived his entire life in the very midst of what was probably the greatest secret in human history without ever even suspecting the truth.

  “Merlin,” the princess continued, turning with the caution of three broken, tightly strapped ribs, to the tall, broad-shouldered seijin she’d just discovered had once been a woman named Nimue Alban—the woman her own middle name memorialized. “I’ve always known you and Nimue are more than human. I just … just never suspected how much more!”

  “We are what we are, Bug,” he told her, touching her cheek with the hand which had tied one of the pokers from the archbishop’s fireplace tools into a knot in a casual demonstration of his genuinely superhuman strength.

  “More importantly, Alahnah,” Staynair said gently, “they are who they are. Yes, their bodies—their PICAs—let them accomplish ‘impossible’ feats, but it’s the minds, the souls, inside those bodies that make them the remarkable people they are.”

  “Spare our blushes, Maikel,” another voice said dryly from the “com” lying on one corner of Staynair’s desk. “Poor old Merlin’s stuck in the same room with you, but I can always just turn off the com if you get too mushy.”

  Alahnah surprised herself with a giggle, and Bishop Paityr smiled encouragingly.

  “I admit it’s difficult not to venerate the pair of them, Your Highness,” he told her. “Fortunately, as you just heard, they don’t approve of that attitude. And given that you’ve been exposed to Merlin’s so-called sense of humor for your entire life, I’m sure you can understand how we get past our initial awestruck response to the truth.”

  “I don’t have that advantage, My Lord.” Whytmyn shook his head. “I think it’s going to be harder for me. And it’s going to be even harder to wrap my mind around the truth about Langhorne and the Church!”

  “It always is, my son.” Staynair’s tone was compassionate. “And that’s the true reason we try to be so insanely cautious about revealing that truth to just anyone. Not everyone takes it as well as the two of you have.”

  “I can believe that, Your Eminence,” Whytmyn said slowly, his eyes suddenly intent as he looked at the archbishop, and then at Cayleb and Merlin. “And I have to wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t taken it so well?”

  “It would’ve been … messy, Lywys,” Merlin said, looking at him levelly. “There was a time when our only real option would have been the one I’m sure just occurred to you.”

  “You mean you would’ve had to kill us.” Alahnah’s voice was soft and her eyes were huge and dark as she looked at her mother and father, but those eyes were also unflinching, and Merlin felt a fresh swell of pride as she proved once again that she was her parents’ daughter.

  “Once, yes,” he acknowledged, equally unflinching, before either of them could speak. “We have other options now, though.”

  “What sort of ‘options’?”

  “We try so hard not to tell anyone we aren’t certain can handle the truth,” Sharleyan said, taking her daughter’s hand in hers. “Sometimes, though, despite everything, we’re wrong about that.” She shook her head, her eyes suddenly soft with tears. “One of them was Ruhsyl.”

  “Ruhsyl?” Whytmyn repeated, his tone suddenly sharper. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but do you mean Ruhsyl Thairis? Duke Eastshare?”

  “Yes,” she said sadly. “He didn’t—he couldn’t—accept the truth about the Church. He tried. I think he really and truly tried, as hard as he could, because he loved me so much. But he couldn’t.”

  “Mama, Uncle Ruhsyl died,” Alahnah said, her eyes wide with horror. “Did you—you and Daddy and Merlin—?”

  “No, Alahnah. Ruhsyl didn’t die,” Merlin said, his own expression as sad as Sharleyan’s. “I’m not sure what actually happened isn’t almost as bad, in a way, but we didn’t have to kill him. His ‘heart attack’ was nothing of the sort, although it’s not the healers’ fault they couldn’t find a pulse when they examined him, and he’s in Nimue’s Cave right this moment, in the same sort of cryo sleep as the colonists who came to Safehold before the ‘Creation.’ He’ll be just fine—physically—the day we can wake him up again. But we don’t know how long that will be, and it’s entirely possible everyone he ever knew will be gone by then.”

  Whytmyn swallowed hard, trying to imagine what that would be like. To awaken fifty years, or a hundred—or, like Nimue Alban herself, a thousand—years into an unknown future. Merlin was right, he realized. It might almost be better to have died.

  “That’s the true quandary, Lywys,” Cayleb said, and Whytmyn looked at him. “We can’t tell anyone we don’t already totally trust—only the people who are closest to us or to other members of the ‘inner circle.’ Yet we always know that the instant we tell them—tell our friends, people we love—we may sentence them to something like what happened to Ruhsyl.” He shook his head, his own eyes sad, haunted. “Ruhsyl would have died for Sharleyan, for any of us, and we would have died for him. But in the end, we pushed him that one step too far, and I will always regret the fact that I was the one who cast the deciding vote.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Sharleyan said softly.

  “No,” Cayleb replied bleakly. “But you were against it. I should have listened.”

  “And if I’d been positive, I wouldn’t have agreed with you in the end,” she said unflinchingly. “We’re not archangels, love. All we can do is t
he best we can do, and that’s what you’ve always done.”

  “Are … are there very many others who reacted that way?” Whytmyn asked.

  “No.” Merlin shook his head. “No, there are actually only a very few—fewer than I would’ve expected, really—and we’ve been expanding the ‘circle’ for years now. Of course, we haven’t expanded it very quickly, and the Brothers of Saint Zherneau still vet our candidates for us. They’re very good at it—they’ve been doing it for a long time—and we normally think long and hard before we tell anyone. For that matter, we practically never deviate from the Brethren’s original policy of never telling anyone before their thirtieth birthday. Usually, at least. Sometimes, though, events … force our hand.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Cayleb said dryly. Whytmyn glanced at him, and the emperor chuckled. “They didn’t tell me the truth—not the complete truth—until I’d been king for almost four months! I’d been cleared for Merlin’s original ‘the seijin sees visions’ story, and that’s still incredibly useful to us, but the Brethren didn’t really want to tell even me the full truth. They just didn’t have much choice.”

  “Fair’s fair,” Merlin said mildly. “Maikel hadn’t told me about ‘Saint Zherneau’ until the day we both told you!” He looked at Whytmyn. “Trust me, there are plenty of layers to this onion, Lywys.”

  “And Cayleb didn’t tell me the truth—the full truth—until after Saint Agtha’s,” Sharleyan added. “The problem is that it’s not something you can un-tell someone, which is why we have to think so very carefully before we tell anyone.”

  “And if one of us, even both of us, hadn’t been willing or able to accept it, we would’ve had ‘heart attacks,’” Whytmyn said.

  “Not necessarily.” Merlin shook his head. “Or, not in the way you may be thinking, at any rate. Yes, you would’ve had to ‘die’ as far as the rest of Safehold knew. That’s what I meant when I said it would have gotten messy, especially if both of you suddenly dropped dead at the same time so soon after the great dragons. But it was Ruhsyl’s choice to go into suspended animation. We would have been perfectly willing to keep him under what I suppose you’d call ‘house arrest’ in Nimue’s Cave, where he would have had access to all of our books and records, and even to the SNARCs. We’ve done that in a few cases, as well. When we could cover for the person involved’s extended absence, we’ve even brought some of them home again after they’d had a chance to fully examine the evidence. We couldn’t explain away that long an absence in his case, though. And, even if we could have, I think it hurt him too much to know the truth when he couldn’t accept the truth.”

  “Ruhsyl never gave less than his complete heart to anything he believed in,” Sharleyan said sadly.

  “That’s true,” Bishop Paityr said, but his tone was brisker, more bracing than hers had been. She looked at him, and he shook his head with a sympathetic smile. “It is true, Sharley, but as I believe you just said to Cayleb, all we can do is the best we can do, and that’s exactly what you’ve always done, too. So instead of dwelling on the occasional inevitable moments when we come up short of divine perfection, let’s focus on what happens when things go right. Like tonight.” He smiled warmly at Whytmyn and Alahnah. “It seems to me it’s pretty clear neither Lywys nor Alahnah is going to opt for state confinement in the Cave!”

  “I believe you can safely assume that, My Lord,” Whytmyn said dryly. “Of course, if you hadn’t pulled out that ‘Stone of Schueler’ you’d only have my unsupported word for it.”

  “Handy things to have around, those ‘holy artifacts,’” Wylsynn agreed. “Especially since most of the ‘genuine’ artifacts really do work. Of course, there’s a downside to it, as well. That sort of evidence of divine intervention does give the stamp of approval to Mother Church, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. But it sounds to me like it can also turn around and bite the ‘archangels’’ original plan,” Whytmyn observed. “Like now, and the Stone.”

  “It’s still going to take getting used to,” Alahnah observed.

  “Oh, trust me, that’s something all of us understand!” Her mother gave her a quick hug. “All of us except Merlin and Nimue, at any rate.”

  “I believe you can safely assume the Commodore’s explanation to me—or mine to Nimue, now that I think about it—carried its own ‘what did you say?’ quotient,” Merlin assured her. “And I believe I just mentioned Maikel’s little surprise, for that matter.” He smiled at Alahnah. “Fortunately, you’ve got a pretty good support team to help you cope with it.”

  “To help both of you cope with it,” Cayleb said. “I think it would be a very good idea for all of us to take a family vacation in the wake of what just happened in Deep Valley. It’ll let us get away from the Palace for a bit and give us the opportunity to answer some of the dozens of other questions I know from personal experience are going to occur to you, Alahnah. I’m thinking that we might take the Ahlfryd out for a five-day cruise or so.”

  His daughter nodded, slowly at first, and then harder.

  “I think that would be a really good idea, Dad. Because right this minute, I’m still pretty dazed. I’m sure a lot of those questions are going to come along the instant I get over the stunned part of all this.”

  “Of course they will. They always do, trust me!” her father assured her. “And because that’s true,” he added with a wicked smile, “I suppose we’d better invite Lywys along so we can deal with his questions, too. Does that sound like a good idea to you?”

  “Yes,” Crown Princess Alahnah Ahrmahk said with commendable steadiness despite her slight but unmistakable blush. “Yes, Dad. I think it sounds like a very good idea.”

  AUGUST YEAR OF GOD 911

  .I.

  Five Islands, Maddox Province, East Harchong, Harchong Empire; and Nimue’s Cave, Mountains of Light, Episcopate of St. Ehrnesteen, The Temple Lands.

  “Sergeant Major?”

  Mangzhee Zhang looked up from the ledger with a frown as Tyngchen Zhu opened his office door and scurried through it. Zhu was in her late thirties, the widow of one of Earl Rainbow Waters’ veterans, and the quality he most strongly associated with her was calm. Or serenity, perhaps. She’d seen—and survived—enough that nothing seemed to faze her, and while her official title was simply “chambermaid,” she functioned as the assistant housekeeper and when old Madam Chyrzhi finally retired, she would undoubtedly move into that spot on a formal basis.

  But that serenity seemed in short supply this morning.

  “What is it, Tyngchen?” he asked.

  “Zungnan needs you,” She was actually wringing her hands, and Zhang realized she hovered on the edge of tears. No, that there were tears in her eyes. “He needs you now in … in the Earl’s bedchamber.”

  The majordomo stiffened.

  Countess Rainbow Waters was due back from the Temple Lands on the afternoon steam automotive, and the earl had announced that he intended to meet her at the station. He’d been more tired than usual for the last two or three five-days, and Zhang and Zungnan Tyan, his valet, had joined forces, presenting a joint front and insisting that in that case, he needed to catch a quick nap first. But from Tyngchen’s expression—

  Mangzhee Zhang shoved to his feet so violently his chair crashed over onto its back and headed out of his office at a run.

  * * *

  “I’m so sorry, Aunt Hyngpau,” Medyng Hwojahn said, wrapping his arms around her. “Sahmantha and I got there as quickly as we could, but he was already gone. In fact, he was gone when Zungnan went to get him up.”

  Hyngpau Daiyang nodded, pressing her face into his shoulder. There were no tears—not yet. She would save those until she had seen her husband. But that didn’t mean there were none in her heart.

  “I was at the Palace when they found him, Hyngpau,” Sahmantha Hwojahn said.

  Anything less like a typical Harchongese woman than Baroness Wind Song would have been hard to imagine. She was three inches taller th
an the countess, with dark blond hair, brown eyes, and a pronounced Temple Lands accent, but she’d adopted traditional Harchong fashion enthusiastically after her marriage. Indeed, Countess Rainbow Waters’ elegant, Zion-made gown was far more “eastern” than anything the baroness was likely to wear these days.

  And she’d known Earl Rainbow Waters since she was twenty-two years old … and come to love him just as much as her husband did.

  “I got there even before Medyng,” she continued. “I know it’s probably not a lot right now, but I think he went very peacefully.” Her voice trembled, and Countess Rainbow Waters reached out a quick hand to her without ever withdrawing from her nephew’s embrace. “He just … went to sleep,” Sahmantha said, blinking on tears of her own. “And he woke up with God, not us.”

  “You’re wrong, my dear,” the countess told her, squeezing her hand. “It means a great deal, knowing he had such an easy end.” She inhaled deeply. “After what those … those bastards did to him and the entire Host, he deserved to go easily. And you’re right about where he is right now, but, oh, I already miss him so!”

  “We all do,” Wind Song said. “I think it’ll be a long time before we realize everything we’ve lost with him, but we already know that much.”

  “We should’ve had at least ten more years,” the countess said, still holding Sahmantha’s hand and closing her eyes. “At least ten. Clyntahn and that pig Zhyou-Zhwo took those from us, too. Along with so much else.”

  “Yes, they did,” Wind Song agreed. “But in the end, it cost Clyntahn his life—not to mention his immortal soul! I’m fairly sure Langhorne’s not going to be all that eager to welcome Zhyou-Zhwo, either. And whatever the Archangels have in store for him in the next world,” the baron’s voice held nothing but grim satisfaction, “Uncle Taychau made damned sure he wasn’t going to enjoy his life in this one! How many men can lose half a continent out of sheer stupidity?”