The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Then she withdrew from rapport, just as her legs buckled beneath her.

  He caught her around the waist with a muttered oath and lowered her gently to the straw. “I’m—it’s fine,” she managed, barely a whisper.

  “I shouldn’t have let you do this! You shouldn’t have risked your health this way. It’s not—”

  She pushed a hand feebly toward his lips to silence him. “It’s done,” she whispered. “Gendaia is healed. It’s only that I discovered something while in rapport, and I…I had to stay longer to study it. I had to know.”

  “She’s…she’s well?” Hope and amazement warred for purchase in his tone. “Truly?”

  “Truly.” Alyneri smiled. “See for yourself.” When he hesitated to release her, she laughed, adding, “Go on, then.”

  Reluctantly he moved to the horse. After a moment, he said, “You’re right. The swelling is already abating.”

  “By tomorrow I should be surprised if she is not ready to run again and quite fighting you to do so.”

  “Alyneri…” She felt him kneel once more at her side, and her heart took a little leap. He drew her hand into his own. “Alyneri, how can I ever thank you?”

  “Thank me?” she laughed. “Did you not save my own life, Ama-Kai’alil? I fear I am still very much in your debt.”

  “No,” he returned, his tone quite serious and sincere. “There is no gift you might’ve given greater than this.”

  She smiled softly. She wished she could look upon him, this man who was so incredibly sincere, who made her feel at once safe and cherished and whose mere presence filled her with such excitement. It amazed her to admit it, but she realized with not a little apprehension that she might just be falling in love with a man she’d never laid eyes upon.

  But why am I surprised? I’m doomed to love men who can never love me in return.

  “We should get you back to bed,” he said, and before she had time to formulate a protest—not that she’d intended to—he scooped her up into his arms and carried her from the barn.

  “Ama-Kai’alil,” she said as she rested her head happily against his strong shoulder, “once I’ve rested and eaten, might you sit with me again? I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Anything, Alyneri,” came his reply, so golden and warm.

  She caught her lip between her teeth and smiled.

  Later that afternoon he came to her bedside. After eating and napping, she felt restored and wanted anxiously to tell him her plan. As he sank down onto the mattress, she reached for his hand, and he twined her fingers within his own. She waited until the thrill of excitement at his touch abated to a manageable simmer and asked then, “Do you know much about the Healer’s art?”

  “I’ve a cursory understanding—only that you find a man’s pattern and repair it, and in doing so, repair his body.”

  “That is a fair representation,” she complimented. “One of the harshest realities of being a Healer is the knowledge that you can’t heal yourself.”

  “I’ve heard that, but I don’t really understand why.”

  “It’s the inability to see your own pattern. It’s part of you, you see. Like standing within a forest, you’re never able to be exterior enough to yourself to see the entire framework.”

  “Ah.”

  “And yet…” She chewed on her lip. The knowledge and her excitement over it were fairly bursting out of her. “And yet, this morning when you and Gendaia and I were all linked, I saw Gendaia’s pattern, your pattern…and my own.”

  He returned in amazement, “But how can that be?”

  She’d been thinking hard about how to explain it to him. “Imagine looking into a mirror. You see only yourself and what’s behind you, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now imagine looking through a window at a mirror on a distant wall. You’d see not only yourself, but also the back of the wall that contained the window, and maybe even a reflection from the window itself.”

  He understood immediately. “Gendaia was reflecting your own pattern back to you?”

  “I think it was something like that. I don’t fully understand it myself. I’ve been linked in rapport with other Healers and never experienced that mirroring effect. I suspect it has something to do with her animal nature—her pattern being different enough from a human pattern that she isn’t merely a mirror but a window to a mirror. I definitely looked through her lifeforce to see your pattern and then my own.”

  “Is that what you were looking at when you almost fell?”

  She nodded.

  He relaxed his tense grip on her hand. “I thought you were over-taxing yourself. I was worried.”

  “No,” she sheepishly admitted, “I was just so surprised, I nearly lost my composure. Sloppy of me. My mother would give me a hard ear’s lashing.”

  “Where is your mother now?”

  “She died when I was thirteen.”

  “Oh…I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I miss her terribly, but...well, the ache of her loss isn’t as it once was.”

  He squeezed her hand to convey his condolence. After a moment of silence, he admitted, “I know so little about you.”

  She laughed. “I am as forthcoming about my past as you are, I fear.”

  “Yes…we must change that.” Something in his tone made her heart beat wildly against her chest.

  He told her then how the Emir had taken him in and treated him as an adopted son. How he’d come to wage war against the Nadoriin and their allies, how he’d become a leader of the Converted.

  When his tale ended, Alyneri sat in stunned silence. His story was both exotic and heartbreaking—to have lived for so many years alone in a strange land, knowing nothing of his past…she couldn’t imagine how hard that would be. And here she’d imagined him looking like her father—almond-skinned and dark-eyed—when in fact he could be as like any man she met on the streets of Calgaryn.

  “You’re shocked,” he said, sounding dismayed.

  She shook her head. “I’m startled…staggered by your courage,” she replied. “All that Yara has ever said about you is true.”

  She felt his lips press a kiss against the back of her hand. “Thank you for that,” came his soft reply.

  Tingling from his touch, which gained tenfold the sensory impact in her blinded state, she braved a smile and exhaled. “I suppose it’s my turn now.”

  “Only if—”

  “No, I want to tell you.” So she told him of the past five years of her own life. How her mother had died when her ship was lost at sea, how the boy she’d been betrothed to had died upon the same ship, while the boy she’d loved had been spirited away for his safety, and how she’d lived an orphan among the peerage in Calgaryn, never accepted, only tolerated for her talent and for the grace of her king.

  “It seems we’ve both been alone too long,” he remarked.

  “It becomes a part of you, I think,” she observed, “that sense of isolation.”

  “Yes. Yes, it does.” In the silence that followed, she felt the warmth of his gaze, and correspondingly felt the tide of attraction rising within her. Her heart beat a rapid cadence, and her skin felt alive with the touch of his eyes. She smiled and blushed beneath her bandage, thinking herself ridiculous to feel so attracted to this man, who by some definition might still be called a stranger.

  “But you said you’d a favor to ask of me,” he finally said, rescuing her from a burgeoning hunger that had nothing to do with her stomach.

  “Yes, I…I want your help—and your trust.”

  “You have it.”

  “What I mean is…I’m going to do something I’ve never attempted before, and it might be a little dangerous, but I don’t think too dangerous.”

  “You’re going to try to heal yourself.”

  His quick perception and deduction amazed her. “Yes.”

  “If I agree to help, will you promise to do nothing that risks yourself in the process?”

  “Yes. I p
romise.”

  “Very well.” He squeezed her hand. “What should I do?”

  “Sit with me. Stay with me.”

  He did, and she began, not realizing that the process was healing more than just her body.

  Now that she knew what to look for, Alyneri found her own pattern quickly, and with Ama-Kai’alil at her side for support, she began smoothing her own pattern’s frayed edges.

  It required minimal skill but was incredibly taxing. Even as she used her energy to repair herself she depleted her own reserves, so the process in the beginning was slow. Yet once she’d repaired a strand of her own pattern, she remained that much closer to being fully healed—and that much stronger. Thus she made steady progress.

  In between sessions, as she was resting but before sleep claimed her, they would talk. Sometimes they spoke about little things, like how much he loved thunderstorms or how she thought goats looked a little like dragons, which really made him laugh for reasons he wouldn’t explain. But sometimes they spoke of deeper things, of fragile moments held closer to their hearts.

  One time as she was drifting into sleep, he asked her, almost too softly for her to hear—as if both desirous and fretful of her answer, “Alyneri, what of the boy you said you loved?”

  “Mmm…?”

  “What happened with him?”

  She roused herself somewhat to answer, “Oh…I thought I loved him.”

  “Did he love you back?”

  She considered the question from the fringes of sleep and confessed after a moment, “He humored me, I think.”

  “That seems cruel.”

  “No, he’s not unkind,” she said, lulled by her exhaustion into admitting things she might not otherwise have had the courage to confess. “He’s compassionate when he wants to be, and generous…and quite unexpectedly brave. I think he just never understood how much I cared for him, else he might have realized that it was worse what he did—sort of pretending to adore me. When I turned thirteen, I was betrothed to his brother—however unwillingly at first…and I tried to forget loving him. Only that didn’t work out…neither of them did, actually.” She blushed beneath her bandage, and rousing to sudden awareness, admitted with an embarrassed laugh, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I never speak my mind so!”

  He chuckled. “I find that hard to believe, your Grace,” he said in the common tongue.

  He’d never used this form of address with her, and hearing the words from his lips aroused her in startling ways.

  “Well,” she remitted, blushing profusely, “…at least not about a thing so close to my heart.”

  After a minute of quiet where Alyneri heard nothing but the rapid thrumming of her pulse, he caressed her hand with a brush of his lips and observed, “Women…endure, don’t they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I knew a woman—a most amazing woman—who harbored great sadness in her soul. She said that men came into her life and left again, but she endured. I knew another woman, a slip of a girl, who braved her father’s considerable wrath and exile for love.” He pressed her hand to his lips again, letting their closeness linger so she felt the warmth of his breath upon her skin. “You’re miraculous creatures. The strength you possess…it’s a tensile, pliant strength, like the pine saplings that bend to the capricious north wind but never break…”

  But Alyneri missed the end of this thought, for she slipped away into sleep.

  Twelve

  “The lion and the lamb may lie down together,

  but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”

  - An old desert proverb

  Tanis walked with Pelas down from the Solvayre hills and through a quaint provincial town, which boasted a different winery’s café on every corner. He had to admit that it was a lovely walk.

  Tanis just didn’t understand the enigma of Pelas.

  Worse, he didn’t understand his own response to the man, and in some ways, the latter troubled him more than the former. He’d seen the man do terrible things. He knew he was intent on destroying their world—albeit perhaps not immediately—yet Tanis…liked him.

  When he wasn’t consumed by the darker side of his nature, Pelas resonated amiability. His genuine interest in the world engendered similar interest in others. He laughed easily and often, and he gave money and compliments with equal generosity. Several times that day alone, Tanis had looked at him and wondered how he could’ve ever been afraid of such a genteel man. It really frightened him, in truth, that he could be so quickly appended to a man who had just days ago tried to kill him.

  This dual aspect of Pelas’s nature had Tanis terribly confused.

  Pelas spoke of new experiences like Tanis spoke of adventure, yet he claimed any emotion he felt as a result—even obvious joy—was only an illusion. Tanis thought that the pursuit of happiness was in itself a purpose for life—it certainly seemed enough of a purpose for a lot of people—but Pelas only saw any attempt toward happiness as an expression of fear of death, an attempt to delay the inevitable.

  He liked to converse on the matter though, and Tanis held out hope that one day he might find something smart enough to say to change the man’s mind. He still had no idea why that sense of duty never left him, only driving him to stay close to Pelas, but Tanis thought getting the man to see anything true about their world would certainly be a worthwhile endeavor.

  They were quite involved in a discussion of such concepts as they walked the back streets of town in search of an alley where Pelas could call his doorway, so neither of them noticed a group of men coming out of a tavern. The men noticed them, however, if told from the way their eyes lit with greed. To be sure, Pelas made a grand target with his expensive clothes and elegant manner befitting a courtier. With avarice casting them forth like bolts from a crossbow, the men split up and moved to follow.

  In the midst of a dissertation on how all men secretly craved death, Pelas had just turned down an alley that looked promising when Tanis saw the thieves. He spun a look over his shoulder and found more men coming up from behind. They all carried sharp blades and looked none too respectable, and they were coming fast.

  “Sir?” Tanis said urgently.

  Suddenly alert, Pelas swept the lad between himself and the wall and turned to receive the first man just as the latter raised his sword. Pelas caught the blade with his bare hand and ripped it from the man’s grasp. He flipped the weapon, caught the hilt, and drove it deep into the man’s chest. Another launched at him, and he grabbed the second man’s sword out of the air, once more ripping it from his attacker’s startled grasp as the man stumbled. Pelas flipped the weapon and caught the hilt. Now he had two blades.

  He made short work of them after that.

  Minutes later, five men lay dead or dying—in either condition no longer a threat. Pelas tossed their weapons into the dirt and brushed his hands together. He wasn’t even bleeding. His copper eyes mercilessly scanned the defeated. “I think this proves my point on men craving death, does it not?”

  Tanis admitted it certainly seemed true in this case.

  “Come, little spy.” Pelas found an abandoned corner wherein to call his doorway, and moments later they were emerging from darkness onto a jungle track. What sky could be seen between breaks in the high green canopy was a brilliant orange-red, but night had already claimed domain among the trees.

  “Where are we, sir?” Tanis asked, not liking the myriad foreign and frightening sounds accosting them from the jungle’s depths.

  “Bemoth,” Pelas answered. He looked around wearing a smile. “Is this not a fantastic forest, little spy? Can you hear all of the animals making their twilight calls? It is a most impressive display of life.”

  Tanis found this remark utterly baffling. “But I thought you said everyone only headed toward death.”

  “Oh indeed, indeed,” he agreed, “yet there is something fascinating to me about the forests and the jungles, the way such creatures carry out their doomed lives entrenched
upon a pattern they cannot comprehend, always flying toward the light but never reaching their freedom before the ice claims them.”

  Tanis felt that sometimes Pelas’s philosophies were as indecipherable as Master O’reith’s.

  Pelas placed an icy hand on the lad’s shoulder. “Come, we are just in time to make a grand entrance.”

  Tanis went with him, but he asked as they walked along the trail, “Sir, why didn’t you just use your power to kill those men?”

  Pelas cast him a discerning look. “I cannot use my power indiscriminately. My brothers and I are all agreed upon this point. If I destroyed those men with my power, others would find their bodies. Soon come the Empress’s Red Guard to investigate, and the next thing we know all of Agasan is looking for us. That’s why we had to leave Rethynnea so quickly.”

  Tanis arched brows in surprise. “What? Why?”

  Pelas shook his head, his eyes suddenly piercing and dark. “My brother Rinokh...” he muttered. “He is ever careless. He was fine so long as he played his games in the deserts of Avatar, but to bring him in among the cities…Shail should have known better than to involve him. Except…I wonder…” but he didn’t finish this thought, only frowned heavily instead. Tanis could tell the wheels of his intelligent mind were spinning, for the boy caught flashes of images, forceful thoughts full of fire and fury. But the images made no sense to him.

  “What did he do?” Tanis prodded after a moment’s pause wherein the noise of the jungle seemed to increase in inverse proportion to the volume of their own conversation. “Your brother Rinokh, I mean.”

  Pelas cast him an irritable look. “Worked our power—and destroyed most of the Temple of the Vestals in Rethynnea in the process.”

  Tanis’s heart fluttered at this news. The pirate Carian vran Lea had been investigating a node in the Temple of the Vestals, and Raine D’Lacourte had been preparing a small army for some kind of confrontation. The lad couldn’t help wondering if maybe Rinokh was the one who’d nearly killed Prince Ean at their villa…what then had happened at the Temple to make Rinokh work his power again? Had the prince awoken?