by Carol Berg
She stiffened and drew away, the catch in her throat no longer healthy lust, but shock. My body’s demands were not so speedily dismissed. Great gods… I clawed the bright-woven blanket and clamped it in my lap. Perhaps I’d best keep babbling.
“Your kindness seems to have brought me back to life,” I said, as hurried fumbling took her clear of the bed. “My head so muddled…a lunatic…I thought you an—”
Tell her I’d believed her an angel, and she’d be sure I was mad and have me bound again. I could scarce argue with such a judgment. I had no idea of year or season, of where we were or what had brought us here. Only now were life and memory settling into some explanation of this eternity of pain and nightmare. Nivat. The doulon. Disease.
“You’ve cared for me all these wretched days…Iero’s hand of mercy…and I so disgusting in my perversions. I’d no idea that I had…I don’t know what to say.”
She didn’t run away. Scarce controlling my urge to wrestle her back into my arms, I could not but shove the wadded bedclothes tighter into my treacherous parts and shut my foolish mouth. A warrior woman of Evanore. She likely had a knife to hand—though where hidden in that gown I dared not imagine. What business had she in red silk instead of her habergeon? Yet truly, mail as sturdy as her father’s might not have resisted my urgency this day. Her father…Now there was a remembrance made my shaft begin to shrink.
The silence stretched long enough, I ventured a glimpse to make certain she was no stray illusion after all. She stood at the wide window, where the unexpected brilliance of sunlight split by mullioned panes had set off my befuddled misbehavior. Red gown in disarray, bronze hair tousled, she folded her arms and pressed one hand against her lips as her shoulders shook.
Just as I, shamed and regretful, returned my attention to the rumpled sheets, muzzled laughter burst that fine barrier and brightened the room even as the sunlight. “Dear Brother Valen,” she said, when her first spasms had eased, “when you wake, you wake. Though I must appreciate, and approve, your gracious conscience, I don’t know if I will ever, ever, forgive you for stepping back. I’ve imagined this occasion since I first took you walking out of Gillarine. Were I living in my grandmother’s day, I might have carted you off to my fastness that very night! Somehow you cause a woman to lose her mind and forgo all other…yearnings. Indeed your fingers carry magic.”
Unable to keep my gaze from her, I gaped, uncomprehending.
She shook her head in mimed rue. “What’s more, honesty requires me to confess that this is the first time I have visited you this tenday of your stay at Renna. Other tasks have occupied my time. It is Renna’s physician, Saverian, you must thank for your care. Though I’ll warn you: Play your finger tricks on her, and she’ll have you a eunuch before you can sneeze.”
The astringent angel. How could I ever have believed that sexless messenger of the heavenly sphere to be Elene, who was abundant earth itself? I felt ridiculous…and marvelous…and then, of a sudden, weak as a plucked chicken, as the sunlight faded into flat gray.
Elene produced a comb from her pocket and began to tame her hair. Chilled and chastened under my rumpled sheets and blankets, I curled up around my regrets and considered the mysterious certainty that had halted so fine a pursuit. I was no diviner. The only thing I’d ever predicted with accuracy was whether a sick or wounded man was like to live or die.
Life or death… I closed my eyes and recalled that core of heat beneath Elene’s silken skin…that core of life…My eyes popped open again. “Oh, good lady!”
My face as hot as the color of her garments, I motioned her near. What I had discerned might be more dangerous than any magical indiscretion. She approached my bedside, brows raised in amused speculation, her face at a level with mine. Not even the spider on the windowsill could have heard my whisper. “Mistress Elene, do you know you are with child?”
Clearly not. For a second time the sun vanished behind burgeoning clouds, and I existed once more entirely within the bounds of disastrous winter.
“You’re wrong! No god would be so cruel…so foul…the Mother would not permit it!” She spun in place, her arms flailing in helpless frenzy, until her bloodless fists gripped a warming iron and she smashed it onto the bed not a tenquat from my head. “Damnable, accursed madman! How could you know?”
I didn’t take the warming iron so much for a personal assault, as for a measure of shocked desperation. Her earlier confessions affirmed the child was not mine, begotten in some lunatic frenzy I could not remember. I kept a wary eye out for a second strike. “I’ve always had this instinct—”
I began to say it was a scrap of talent inherited from my mother, the diviner. But returning memory swept through me as a spring wind through an open door, swirling away dead beliefs like dried leaves. My hands trembled, no longer from frustrated lust, but from evidence revisited and truth laid bare. Josefina de Cartamandua-Celestine, drunken diviner, wife of Claudio, was not my mother.
“Valen, are you ill? Did I strike you? Holy Mother, I’m sorry. You’ve been so—I didn’t mean—Let me find Saverian.”
The warming iron clanked onto the floor, the noise making me wince. Elene streaked out of the room in a blaze of scarlet, while I flung off the bedclothes and examined my naked flesh. What did I expect to see? Blue dragons tearing through my skin? Surely the doulon sickness had unstrung my reason.
But my mad grandfather’s words popped into my head as clearly as I’d heard them that last night at my family’s home. Everything is secrets and contracts…I stole from them. A treasure they did not value. I had the right, but they could not forgive the loss of it…Only, Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria was not my grandfather. He was my father.
I stumbled to my feet and strode the length of the chamber, an expansive room of whitewashed stone walls, of clean curves and arches and broad paned windows. Swelling anger gave strength to limbs too long cramped and idle. My skin buzzed as if I’d been buried in a barrel of flies.
Thou canst not know! He’ll think I told thee…Claudio exacted such a price…keeping me from thee. His babbling made sense now. I could reconstruct the history: Janus de Cartamandua, whose pureblood wife was long dead, had brought home an infant, a child of his own body, and struck a bargain with his son, Claudio. Raise this child as your own, Janus would have said, and I’ll not announce to the world that the Cartamandua bloodline is corrupted. I will even supply unimpeachable birth witnesses for the Registry.
Claudio, furious, filled with hate for the man who put him in such a position, would have agreed in a heart’s pulse…on condition that Janus stay away…never tell the child the truth…never interfere. For seven-and-twenty years Claudio had pretended to the world that the loathsome child, whose very existence promised ruin to the family, was his own pureblood offspring. And all the anger he dared not show for his own father, he had expended on the child he despised—the son of Janus de Cartamandua and a Dané named Clyste.
“Spirits of night…” Truth pierced my heart like a sword of fire, as painful as any remnant of my madness: I had heard my true mother’s voice. Beyond a barrier of mystery in Gillarine’s cloister garth, I had felt the pulse of her lingering life…experienced her grief and wordless tenderness, heard her music that had touched places within me that I didn’t know existed. But I’d not known it was she, imprisoned for Janus’s crime…trapped, condemned to slow fading. So he had described her fate. Now she was dead, and I could never know her. And I…
I propped my hands on a long bare table of scraped pine, my whole body shaking.
“Return to your bed, and I can keep the others away from you for a while longer.”
In an arched doorway stood a tall whip of a woman, dressed in riding leathers. Though her height spoke contrariwise, her nose, as long and straight as my own, her skin, the hue of hazelnuts, and her hair, straight, black, and heavy, tightly bound in a thick braid, testified unmistakably to Aurellian descent. Pureblood or very near. Tangled as I was in the unraveling of long de
ception and a loneliness that threatened to unman me, I had no capacity to guess who she might be.
“On the other hand, if you roam the halls of Renna, I’ll take no responsibility for the consequences, especially if you insist on wearing naught but your skin. The housemaids rarely see such sights. Evanori are a modest people.”
The prospect of visitors and questioning nauseated me. “I thank you for the offer, lady, but I doubt Kemen Sky Lord himself could keep Prince Osriel away once he hears a report of my state.” Once he knew his captive half Dané could speak.
“What state would that be?” Decisive footsteps brought her up behind me, and her leather gloves skittered onto the table. “As a physician, I propose dead as your most likely condition and that what I see before me must perforce be an apparition. Surely no human body could withstand what you have gone through this tenday and stand here speaking as if he’d a modicum of sense.”
“Physician?” I whipped my head around. She stood three or four paces away, her brows raised. “You’re Saverian…” The astringent angel.
“Please don’t bother me with ‘What an odd name for a woman,’ or ‘How could such a young woman possibly know enough to be a physician?’ or ‘You must mean hedge-witch, do you not?’ or ‘How could a modest woman bear to mess about with such nastiness as physicians must?’ So, Magnus Valentia, are you human or apparition or…something else?”
I averted my face, propped my backside on the table, and rubbed my aching head. Someone had trimmed my hair short again, disguising its telltale curl—so unnatural for a pureblood. “I don’t know what I am.”
To my discomfiture, the woman briskly installed herself in front of me and held out one open palm as if to demonstrate it held no weapon. Then she touched me with it—raised my chin, felt my forehead, and lifted my eyelids, peering inside me as if I were a vat of odd-smelling stew.
“For one, you are a doulon slave,” she said, as she retrieved my hand from my groin where it was attempting to maintain a bit of dignity before a stranger. She attended the beat in my wrist veins as dispassionately as ever Brother Robierre the infirmarian had done at Gillarine. “No matter how remarkably fast you have sloughed them off this time, nivat’s chains will ever bind you. I would be remiss if I did not say that here at the beginning. A fool should know what his stupidity has cost him.”
I examined her face, all unrelieved planes and angles. A small mouth and ungenerous lips. The pureblood nose narrow and sharp. Small creases between her dark brows, and crinkled lines clustered at the outer corners of her eyes, as if she spent a goodly time at her books, though the smoothness of her dusky skin testified that she could not yet have seen thirty summers. Naught of warmth or passion in that face. Naught of disgust either, which spoke decently of her philosophy as a physician.
Using both hands now and spitting a few unintelligible epithets under her breath, she explored my neck, strong fingers poking and prodding in search of who knew what. Yet the annoying agitation of my skin dulled, even as she produced a silver lancet and glass vial from out of nowhere and nicked and milked the vein in my left arm.
“What does that mean?” I said, watching her stopper the vial containing my blood and slip it into her pocket. “About the doulon. I’d not dared hope—”
“It means you’d best put nivat seeds right out of your head. To touch or even to smell them risks waking your craving again. And it means that you must find some other way to deal with this.” She blew on her fingers and touched my ears.
The world exploded in sound. Bleating, crunching, crackling, drumming…the noise trapped inside my skull felt as if it were bulging my eyes from the inside out.
Birds scrabbled on the roof. Pots rattled in a distant kitchen. Two women argued. A sick man moaned and mumbled in drugged sleep. A rhythmic crashing could only be someone raking hay. Horses chomped…mice scuttered…this very structure—a house of wood, not stone—creaked as the wind pushed on it. My heart rumbled like an avalanche beside the woman’s steady drumbeat.
I cringed and clapped my hands over my ears. “Blessed Deunor!”
Saverian’s warm hands covered mine and, at her muttered word, mercifully damped the clamor. Strong, capable hands. I would never mistake them.
“Thank you,” I whispered as the din in my head subsided. To my relief, my voice remained a whisper and not the onslaught of a whirlwind. “For all your kindness these days.”
“Kindness had nothing to do with it,” she said, dry as the desert winds of Estigure. “Prince Osriel insists that he needs your functioning mind as soon as may be. Yet each one of your senses seems to suffer this same incontinence. This muting enchantment is a somewhat brutish remedy, but the only way I see to solve a problem I’ve been given no leisure to investigate. It is far from a permanent solution to your excess sensitivity, as it fades quite rapidly. Perhaps if you could tell me more about the progress of the disease. Do these symptoms vary?”
“When I was seven, attacks came every month or two, and lasted a few days at a time. Over time, they became more frequent, more severe, and lasted longer, but still coming and going. By fourteen…well, I started the doulon at fourteen, and after that…”
“…everything was a muddle. Yes. I would imagine.” She gestured insistently toward the rumpled bed and offered me her arm. “Elene indicated that the sunlight roused your member. Is that true? Is there some connection?”
Since I’d first discovered the merry art, I’d never understood why so many shrouded it with shame. But her brazen questioning made it sound as if one could set down a recipe for desire as Brother Jerome had seasoned stewing parsnips. Disconcerted, I refused her assistance and set out for the bed on my own. “I don’t—Perhaps. The light fed whatever—I’ve never noticed a connection.”
By the time I’d gone half the length of the chamber, I decided I should have kept her beside me instead of leaving her behind to observe my naked rump. Of a sudden I could not get myself back under the bedclothes soon enough. I certainly had no mind to tell her that it was the memory of her hands had done the rousing.
I sank to the low bed—a boxlike wooden platform, built right into the floor—dragged a blanket from the tangle, and bundled it around my shoulders. I was shaking again, this time from the cold. The sun had lost itself in the gray and white world beyond the window glass.
Saverian knelt by the hearth, threw three logs onto a heap of glowing ash, and snapped her fingers. The ash glowed brighter, but the logs remained inert. “Flagro, you misbegotten twigs!” she shouted with a certain cheerful virulence. Bright blue flames as high as my knee burst from the logs with a throaty roar before settling into a tidy, robust blaze.
“You’ll find clothes in the chest and cider by your bed. I’ll have food brought. Though you may yet experience nausea or poor appetite, you should eat and drink. Someone will sit with you until we’re sure my conjuring can sustain you, but by heaven and earth, keep your appendages to yourself! If someone had found you with Thane Stearc’s only child…You’d not like thinking on what meager bits of you would be left for me to study.” The woman retrieved her gloves from the table and moved briskly to the doorway. She paused, thoughtful. “You don’t fancy men, do you? Should I warn them as well?”
An abortive laugh burst through my heavy spirit. “Not in that way. At least, not recently.” Then again, one heard so many different tales of Danae. Who knew what was true? Some tales said Danae mated with the wind or the sea or with animals or kin. My stomach lurched unpleasantly.
“Osriel has told me your history, and of his theory as to your birth. I must tell you that I’m skeptical. Even if there exist beings who live for centuries and can conjoin themselves with trees or mud, I doubt you’re one of them. These past days…if you could have escaped the consequences of this unforgivable injury you’ve worked on an otherwise healthy body, you’d have done it.”
“Perhaps I just don’t know how.”
“Pssh.” She leaked skepticism.
As her
departing footsteps echoed in the passage, I tried to imagine what it might be like to yield my soul and body to a tree and be confined by its immovable bark and leaf or to find myself locked into the barren stone and blue-white ice of Clyste’s Well. I lurched from the bed to the night jar, threw off the copper lid, and heaved up bile from my empty belly.
Chapter 9
I held the spell fragments—the essence of the turned wood cup, the image of the large wooden bowl I desired, the linkages of power, the rearrangement of perception, the connecting threads of what was to what would be—and then, carefully, slowly, I unleashed the flow of magic. Nothing happened. I closed my eyes, focused on my fingers and on the warm center somewhere amid lungs and heart and spine whence I drew magic, and tried again, this time with less caution. Failed again.
A stupid test. But my question had been answered. Either the doulon sickness had drained me of magic or Osriel had somehow precluded my use of it. And without working magic, I could not begin to understand what the nonhuman part of me might bring to it.
I tossed the cup on the bed and ran my fingers about the window frame, searching in vain for the faint prickles that would indicate a barrier to sorcery. My fears that the power of Evanore might explode my small illusion or bloat my cup into a house now seemed absurd. Evanore…the haunted realm.
The view beyond my window was stunning—a sprawl of blue-white mountain peaks and plunging chasms, shrouded in wind-whipped cloud. Nearer, dominating a tortuous slope, a small, solid fortress backed up to a low bluff, the two appearing to have sprouted together from the stone core of the mountains. Scattered about the lower slopes, colorful tents billowed like the sails of a Moriangi fleet. Riders streamed from the encampment and the lower valley toward the fortress gates, banners fluttering, squires, servants, and soldiers trudging alongside.