"You can't!" Taur protested. "Father, you are ill, get some sleep. You'll change your mind when you can see again."
"Luna!"
She came to his side, took his hand. "Yes, Father."
He turned his head restlessly back and forth, searching for light. "You found Griffin Tormalyne?"
"Yes."
"He is here in this room?"
"He is here."
"And I cannot see… But I can hear. You know my wishes. Question him and then have him killed. I want it done here, now; I want to listen to him—"
"No!" Rising, Damiet threw her book across the room, knocking candles into the hangings. Servants batted hastily at flames. She stood over her father, stamped her foot. "Not Master Caladrius! He was kind to me. You killed his family—all this is your fault!"
"Then leave the room," her father said impatiently, "if you don't want to watch. Luna, you are my eyes, you are my mouth, your will is my will. Speak."
She looked at the guards. Silver flashed as one drew his sword before she spoke. Her eyes, reflecting firelight, suddenly transfixed them.
"I have not given you orders," she said. "You heard my father. I rule." She gave them her charming smile, and then, lifting one hand lightly, she extinguished the unruly random fires in the hangings with a gesture. "You will obey me." She looked at Taur; he sat down slowly under her bone-white gaze. "You may speak. Speak."
"You can't—" he began furiously.
"Be silent."
He was, abruptly, swallowing words, trying to push them out; a jewel dropped out of his mouth; a moth, with death's-heads on its wings, flew out. Nobody spoke. A guard swallowed, touching his throat. Damiet watched in fascination, smiling faintly.
"At least," Luna finished, "until dawn." She turned her baleful eyes back at the guards. "I can do many things," she said softly. "My father taught me all he knew. I learned more than he taught me. I learned from him many, many faces of death. I can kill with a rose. With a written word. With the tip of the hand of a clock. You taught me these things, Father. Did you not?"
"I did," he said, still searching restlessly for light. "Remember that, if you are tempted to the least betrayal of her rule. She will be my eyes past death."
"I will help you see now," she told him, and smiled again, her eyes turning their lucent green in the candlelight. She moved among the guards; they watched her, uneasy yet entranced. "Go now," she told them. "Open the bridges. Unlock the music school. Let the dead of Tormalyne House be buried, and leave the living to me."
"Yes, my lady."
"And Griffin Tormalyne?" the captain of the guard asked.
She looked at Caladrius. He saw, like one last glimpse of life, the garden in her eyes, the fragrant light, the cool shadows and resting places. "I think," she said softly, "that Pellior House has tormented Tormalyne House enough." She turned back to the captain of the guard. "Let Lord Tormalyne and his son go free."
Taur, coughing, his hands at his throat, loosed a line of dragonflies. Stranger noises came from the Basilisk, who, struggling to rise, stared blindly at his daughter, his face purple, a vein throbbing furiously above his brow. He tried to speak, produced only a long, inarticulate word that ended in a moan. He stiffened in amazement, one hand groping at his heart. The blood receded in his face; it grew paler and paler as he struggled for one last word until, falling back, he met the gaze of the basilisk above his head. He said nothing more. Only his eyes, growing fixed and lightless, told them what he saw.
The physician, with a sudden exclamation, felt for his heartbeat. Damiet, her hands at her mouth, looked down at him in horror and curiosity; she shivered suddenly and moved closer to her sister.
"He's dead, my lady," the physician said incredulously.
"What killed him?" Damiet whispered. Luna lifted a finger, touched her father's motionless hand; she could not seem to speak.
"Kindness," the physician guessed blankly.
Luna looked silently at Caladrius, the mask of her smile fraying at last to reveal the strength behind it, the bitter love and weariness.
He bowed his head, blind himself now with unshed tears.
"Thank you," he said. "My lady."
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Chapter Seven
« ^
The Basilisk was buried without fanfare.
Luna, considering the dead of the Tormalyne School, was crowned with a single flourish from the trumpets of Pellior House. Both ceremonies, Caladrius thought, were remarkable for their silence. He attended them at Luna's request, as Duke of Tormalyne House, though he still had to remind himself of his own name. The House, free at last to bury its dead, revealed itself to Caladrius little by little at various funerals. Students and magisters at the school were remembered with music from their cherished instruments. Standing under a cloudy autumn sky, with Hollis at his side, he listened to Nicol harp for one of the magisters and remembered the dead harper at Luly, who had called himself Griffin Tormalyne.
A sudden chill in the wind stung his eyes. He looked north across the burial field, as if he could see the vast, white, unfurling wing from which the wind had sprung.
Ravens in the trees lining the field called to the dead in their raucous, ungainly voices. Caladrius, listening to the mingling of harp and raven, felt again the strange shift of his body into wings, claws, singing bones.
You turned into a raven, Hollis had said. You tore the Basilisk's eyes out. Don't ask me to explain. That's all I know.
What was left of Tormalyne House after it ventured out of hiding into Luna's city was an assortment of distant relatives, whose wealth lay in the vigor and determination of their children. They gave Caladrius what they could, in gratitude; he could see in their eyes that Justin's tale of the Basilisk's blindness and death had lost nothing in the telling. They saw the raven in him and told him so: he was, they said, very like his father. With unexpected grace, Luna sent him a small casket of ebony and gold in which to lay his own dead to rest. He waited until the final trumpet had sounded over the last of the dead. And then, with Hollis, he returned to Tormalyne Palace.
They filled the casket with ash and bone in silence, and then they argued.
"No more funerals," Caladrius said tersely.
"There are people still living who knew them," Hollis protested. "They've been lying up here unburied for nearly forty years. You've brought back honor to the House, and that's the way they should be remembered, with proper dignity and ceremony. You can't bury them in the garden."
"Why not? They died decades ago. The House did its grieving then." He gazed into the open casket, saw the child in the hearth buried in ash, watching the Basilisk kill. He closed the lid gently.
"Because," Hollis said behind him, "you are not just burying your memories."
Caladrius turned. He smiled suddenly, put his hand on Hollis's shoulder. "Then you bury them. You may be better at this than I am."
"Better at what?"
"Ruling Tormalyne House."
Hollis slid out of his hold. "No," he said, with something of Caladrius's own unflinching gaze. "You are the heir of Tormalyne House; you can't go back to living on that rock. If you want the House to survive, you must stay. You fought for this."
"An empty palace and a casket of ash."
"Freedom."
Caladrius was silent. Rain blew on a gust of wind across the window ledge; in the gardens trees soughed like tide. Ash brushed across the floor where the nameless child had lain. He could still see a curve of Luna's footsteps in the ash.
He said slowly, meeting Hollis's eyes again, "Then I will need all your help. You saw what I have become."
Hollis said it after a moment, reluctantly. "Bard."
"I thought I knew once what the word meant."
"So did I."
"All I know is where to go to understand it."
Hollis closed his eyes, struggled with words. "Now?" he demanded incredulously.
> "Soon. I'll see you settled first. I won't be gone long."
"How do you know? You know what they say about the hinterlands."
"I'll come back," Caladrius insisted. "But I need you here, in my place, for a while. The Griffin's son, to handle matters of the House. What House we have, and what little we have to handle it with." He picked up the ebony casket, gave it to Hollis. "This first. I saw them die. I'll never bury what I saw, but I would try. You do what's best for the House."
"This first," Hollis said, and handed him his father's ring.
Nine magisters in black, with black ribbons trailing from their horns, lifted them in a fanfare for the dead that Veris Legere found among the manuscripts Caladrius had been sorting. What seemed to be the entire House attended the ceremony to place the bones and ashes of Raven Tormalyne, his wife, an unnamed child, and a dog into the vault that held the rulers of Tormalyne House. Luna sent Veris Legere to attend also. Caladrius spoke to him afterward.
"I never thanked you," he said. "You let me leave the Hall of Mirrors, that day."
"What I saw," Veris said slowly, "was between you and Arioso Pellior."
"You took a risk."
Expression, brief and intense, touched the dispassionate face. "So did you. Master Caladrius."
A few days later he was summoned to Pellior Palace.
He waited for Luna in a quiet council chamber, in which he noticed hanging on a wall a tapestry with a hole in it where an animal's eye should have been. While he was investigating it the block of marble behind it began to turn silently. He moved away, startled. Luna came out from behind it, carrying a rose.
"It's a secret chamber," she explained, sealing it again. "Where my father taught me things."
"To kill with a rose," he said, his eyes on it. She smiled.
"This one heals," she said enigmatically, and went to give it to an old woman he had seen waiting outside the door.
He drew breath, remembering the terror of that night she had found him, the mystery of it. She returned to him, her eyes cool, smiling faintly, though her voice was grave. She wore black, for her own dead. She seemed I composed as ever; but he glimpsed the constant watch-fulness that she had kept hidden behind her wayward smile.
"Master Cal—" She stopped.
"I hardly recognize my own name," he commented.
"Who named you Caladrius?"
"My great-uncle did, when he found me alive. He had some desperate hope that the child he gave it to might learn what to do with it."
"Indeed, he was right," she murmured. "I sent for you for three reasons. The first is to tell you that I have asked Veris Legere to return the music taken from Tormalyne Palace to the palace or the music school, according to your wishes."
"Thank you," he said, touched. "I am grateful. The school could give it better shelter than Tormalyne Palace. As you know, it may be some time—perhaps even a generation or two—before the palace will be a suitable place for much of anything."
"That is the second reason I sent for you. To discuss reparations for the damages done to Tormalyne House by my father." She held up her hand as he began to answer. "I know," she said gently, "you will tell me that no price can be put on such suffering. But I hope you will at least accept a few chairs to sit on in Tormalyne Palace. Windows to keep out the rain. Someone to clean the soot off the walls."
He felt the raven in his bones again, his hands turning into something other. "And the third reason?" he asked steadily.
"The third reason," she said, and stopped again. She linked her fingers. He saw an unfamiliar expression in her eyes, the first hint of uncertainty. "My lord Tormalyne, you and I have some very unusual powers. I hope that we will be able to live peacefully in Berylon. The third reason I sent for you is to assure you of my good intentions. And to ask you how far your unusual powers extend. My father could not have turned into a raven."
He answered her unspoken question first. He went to her, drew one hand free from the other, and raised it to his lips. "I owe you my life," he said simply. "And my son's life. I trust you. But I can't answer you. Not yet. I must leave Berylon first. And I leave Hollis under your eyes."
Her brows rose. "Where are you going?"
"North."
"For how long?"
"I don't know. No one ever knows."
She was silent, studying him, not smiling now, letting him glimpse again some sweet, green shade in her eyes, where leaves trembled with light but did not let it fall. "I hope, my lord Tormalyne, that you will let me know when you are leaving."
"I will." It seemed to him that his name had come to him at last, from some untroubled place, perhaps from within the leaves. "My lady."
In the Tormalyne School, Giulia was collecting manuscript sheets that had been scattered through halls and chambers during the invasion of the Basilisk's guard. Around her, students and magisters picked up books, mopped mud and spilled water off the floors, repaired battered doors, patched and restrung instruments. She put a pile of music, in hopeless disarray, with other piles of music in front of students who were trying to sort it; they glanced up and groaned. Justin, trailing a broom, appeared behind her as she turned. He snatched a kiss. The students groaned again.
"Magister Dulcet, I can't find the viol part to this piece anywhere."
"Magister Dulcet, the bust of Auber Tormalyne fell over and broke its nose off."
"Magister Dulcet…"
"Giulia," Justin said. "Come to the Griffin's Egg tonight. Play with us."
She thought about it, exchanging one chaos for another, and smiled suddenly. "Yes." Her smile faded. "But where," she wondered, "has my picochet gone?"
She searched, hoping that it had not met its fate in the streets. She gathered music as she looked in practice rooms, under tables. She found it finally in Hexel's study, where it had slid beneath his harpsichord. He had not seen it, she guessed; he had not tossed it out the door.
She found Hexel there also, unexpectedly sitting at his desk with a pen in his hand, another woven through his hair. He barely noticed her until she spoke.
"Hexel," she said, amazed. "How can you be inspired in all this confusion? What are you doing?"
He looked up at her and smiled. "Changing the ending," he said, and went back to work.
McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk Page 26