by Carol Berg
I snatched up our blanket, and though my mouth was full of questions and good wishes, I did not spill them. Instead, I passed the blanket to Andero and jerked my head toward his brother.
“Who’s this naked jaybird walked out of the wilderness, my lady?” No crack in his robust basso revealed the tears streaming down his face as he threw the blanket across Dante’s shoulders.
“Andero…”
A reunion for all ages of the world. Dante was not at all surprised to find me living. “You weren’t there.”
The experience contained in those three words set me shivering. When some idiocy skipped off my tongue, something about prayers, he snapped one finger in the air. “No more of the peacock, lord. I know the man who saved me. The chevalier. The man of honor.”
The villagers, gratified but not surprised, rounded up their children and drifted back toward their homes. The five of us, for Andero caught Rhea before she could escape, sat on that hillock and talked.
We told him of de Ferrau and Will Deune, and how his reworking of Kajetan’s spell had worked. And we told him of Portier, and how we had discovered what had to be done.
“So he found what he wanted.” Sadness and weariness entwined a laugh. “Knew it was him. He called me student.…”
Dante had too few words that night to say much of his battle beyond the Veil. But he told a bit…and the ending struck both Anne and me very hard. “…I drove Dimios back through the gates of Gedevron and set the dead to hold him while I explored the construct of Ixtador. It was a girl of seventeen, dead long before her time, who led them, along with a faithful guard captain who saw one last duty for his noble chevalier. By the time I unraveled Ixtador, the gates of Gedevron were closed and the dead had scattered—all of them. I didn’t think it wise to open my eyes. Whatever I might see…” He twisted his mouth in wry humor. “Well, I didn’t want curiosity to make me stay. I wanted to go home. This”—he touched the pendant on his breast—“told me where I belonged.”
The sun kissed the horizon when we decided we could not utter one more syllable. Andero, Rhea, and I spread blankets on the grass, for it was a fair night under the stars. We left the lambing shed to Dante and Anne. Andero and I agreed, we’d allow no more talk of guesthouses.
Anne
CHAPTER 41
“Read it to me again. Please. There’s something…”
Dante had been restless the entire afternoon, the last before Andero and Rhea set out for Hoven, and Ilario, Dante, and I for Sabria. The two of us had taken long walks. We had explored the joyful awkwardness of love. We had sat with the elders to drink tea and shared more of our own stories with our friends. My heart soared so high, I felt one with the hawks and kites.
Dante’s ordeals had made him no more comfortable with politenesses and large gatherings where it was difficult to distinguish one stranger’s voice from another. And, after three months of seeing, he found it humiliating to be back to the beginning with eating and drinking and other simple tasks he had once mastered. He hated knocking over things or dipping a spoon outside a bowl. But he would bury his face in my hair and laugh at his own discomfiture. “I have been and will ever be a boorish oaf,” he said. “How do you put up with me?”
All I had to do was touch the nireal he wore around his neck and he would wind me in his arms. “Oh, gods, Anne…”
While I visited each family in the village, he spent a great deal of time walking in the swales. Sometimes at night, I saw him with Otro. In the sunlight, it was more often with one of the elders or Andero or even Rhea. He said Rhea had examined his eyes and told him the nerves were dead and would not recover.
“…but it’s all right,” he added quickly. “Unlike blessed Portier, I live. You are here at my side. And my brother. And my friends. Though I will protest to the gods that it isn’t at all fair that I didn’t get to see you all when I had both eyes to do so and a rational mind to savor it.”
With the elders he talked mostly of sheep and the land. “I’m going to have to find a new profession,” he’d told me that morning. “Sheepherding might suit. I like the quiet and the countryside. Though you’d have a dreadful time marking routes so I wouldn’t get lost.”
“I’m not ready for you to be gone so much,” I said, as I worked—very awkwardly—with the hand spindle one of the women had given me. “And I would make a terrible shepherd’s companion. I’m all thumbs at spinning, as well as needlework.”
“Then, no sheepherding. Perhaps I’ll take up smithing, persuade Andero to set up shop in Laurentine and hire me on as an assistant.”
We spent an hour talking of various occupations a former sorcerer of good mind and bad eyes might take on. And then he grew quiet. “Ah, Anne, I do miss it so very much. For one moment, the world doesn’t feel so very different; then it bludgeons me again…no voices…no friend of the mind…and I can’t conjure a feather.” He rubbed his fingers over the hornbeam staff and its carved crescents and stars and other symbols. Not even a spark resulted.
Though I had finally experienced the glories of his art, my own small loss was soothed by his presence. Dante had lost his life’s work.
That’s when he asked me to read the transcript of Portier’s memories yet again. I had read it to him at least five times already. Not that I minded…anything and everything to do with Dante was a joy. But the transcript had become an obsession with him.
“Doesn’t this strike you as something of a violation?” I said as I unrolled the paper I kept carefully in a hollow tube. “Like constantly peering into someone’s bedchamber.”
“Certainly not! Portier was a man of science and would wholly support—”
His cheeks displayed his acknowledgment of my teasing. “I keep thinking I’ll glimpse something beyond the words written. Are you sure you recorded everything the tetrarch recalled?”
“I wrote as fast as I could, and Andero listened, so he could supply the bits I missed. De Ferrau never hesitated. I suppose it’s a skill a Reader develops.”
“Aye…they’ll have a difficult change, too. We won’t need Temple Readers anymore.”
We lapsed into the shared quiet that swelled whenever we considered the implications of our deeds. Sometimes he would hold my hand to his forehead and pretend we could yet feel each other inside, even if the other voices were silent. In the rare times he was out of my sight, I would reach into the void in search of him and imagine I felt some unruly warmth just beyond the range of my senses.
We had walked out from the village to the hilltop where he had returned to me. It seemed a miracle we had come to this obscure little village to find Dante making his way back to living. Yet I decided this case was much like the tetrarch said of prophecy and destiny. To bring him back we had needed a place where one could reach across the barriers of time and memory to call or to hear. A place of quiet, of peace and simplicity, of harmony with the divine. This happened to be one such place. It could have happened at Pradoverde or in the summerhouse at Castelle Escalon. As long as I was there, he said. As long as he was listening for my call, I told him.
Our backs propped against a great rock, we bathed in the stretched sunlight. I scrunched myself into the hollow of his broad shoulder, a place quite near to Heaven, so I had discovered, though he always froze, startled for the first few moments when I took advantage of it.
When he had shifted a bit, exhaled, and snugged his grip on me, I began to read.…
Transcript of the Reading of Portier de Savin-Duplais. Beltan de Ferrau, Reader.
I focused on glimpses of the peculiar deep green color of the Seeing Stones.
First probe: “Go ’way.” The man was slitting my lost flesh with a silver knife. He smiled and pressed the cup to a shallow cut.…
First probe discontinued. This was the present, the subject’s encounter with Iaccar, Regent of Mancibar, in the bleeding chair.
Second probe: A battle raged…
Second probe discontinued, as the brilliant green that cued my attent
ion was a grassy hillside, not the Seeing Stones.
Third probe: The tent billowed in a dry breeze…
Dante had withdrawn his arm and drawn his knees up, forehead resting on his clasped hands. He lifted his head when I finished. “So Ferrau believed that these probes were in reverse time order. Newest first and on through the oldest.”
“Yes. He said that was always the way of it.”
“Then read me the last two again in the order he recorded them.”
I did as he asked. First, Os’s journey of the spirit and the cave painting that had given us the Seeing Stones, the key to our victory, and the answer to Portier’s long yearning. And the last, Ianne’s ordeal on Mont Voilline.
“Did you not think it odd that the order was Os first and then Ianne?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Ianne was his original identity, his first life, and thus the oldest story.”
“Would you—?” He hesitated. “I need to be alone for a bit. Think. Without the distraction of…companions.”
His expression gave nothing away. Each of us had needed thinking time since leaving Mancibar. But this was different somehow. A subdued eagerness gave his muscles life, as if he were on the hunt, tracking down another puzzle.
“All right. Certainly. You can find the path down.” His staff, just a walking stick now, would identify the well-worn track and help him down the steep. I knew better than to coddle him.
“Come back at sunset,” he said. “And bring the others…ours.”
“All right.”
As I stood, he caught my hand, kissed it, and pressed it to his eyes. “My only light,” he said softly, as he did every time we parted.
I puzzled over his odd behavior as I bargained with one of the women about buying one of her rugs to take home. We would rebuild Pradoverde around a reminder of warmth and welcome, starlight and holiness. Ilario had already contracted for their entire year’s output of fabric. I laughed inside while watching Ilario consult with Rhea, trying to nudge her toward colors more vibrant than dark blue, while she quietly moderated his inordinate love of yellow.
The three of us, along with every child in the village, gathered to watch Andero’s deft hands use oil, stone, and file to sharpen every nail and knife blade in the village while he bellowed a medley of marching songs. Rhea watched him closest of all, and when I looked at Ilario, he smirked at me, waggling his eyebrows in a most self-satisfied manner. Perhaps I’d been mistaken about the ties of affection forming in our little party.…
At sunset, the four of us trudged up the hill and found Dante sitting cross-legged in front of a small expanse of dirt. Laid out on the bare patch of ground were five small piles of dry grass. He hushed us before we could speak. At the wave of his hand, we sat in a half circle like children around a storyteller.
Once we were settled, he pointed to me and said, “Anne. You radiate light like a balefire.”
After a moment’s pause, he pointed to Andero. “You, my brother by blood and history and giving, you’ve a forge buried deep beneath an ocean of peace.”
Then Ilario. “And you, my chevalier, you who watched my back when I was truly blind, my brother by the faith of our friend who is not here. Your fire shines silver like the steel of your sword and with the brilliance of your honor.”
And Rhea. “You, whom I know least, you burn, as well. I sense it when you dress a wound or venture a question. You ever seek the truth behind the wound or the answer you’re given.”
His hand shook a little. “Listen to this story, passed on to me through the gift of one I called my enemy, drawn from the life of one we all called friend:
“Another winter coming…He had chained me near the top of the mount so I could look on the lands of men beyond the Ring…” Word for word, Dante recounted Portier’s last memory, Ianne’s memory, of an hour in his long prisoning on Mont Voilline back at the Beginnings of the world. “…but as the sun fell, I watched the green fires blossom against the night, spreading across the land and knew I had done right. A stone house snug against the wind. A knife kept sharp enough to carve a vine on a shepherd’s staff. A frightened child soothed with a hero tale that took shape in the hearth flames. Magic…
“Does it not tease you that this memory came from the earliest of all his lives?” Dante’s voice resonated like Merona’s bronze bells, like thunder in the deeps, sending heat down my limbs like power in the veins. “Why was Dimios punishing him for stealing what belonged to greater beings? It was likely centuries later, at a time when the war beyond the Veil cast the living world in shadow, that Os crawled into that cave and petitioned the universe, only to be dragged out holding the Seeing Stones. What was it our friend Ianne saw blossoming across the lands of men from the mount? The fire he had stolen. The fire Os begged to be renewed. This, I think.”
The warmth heating my cheeks belied the cool highland night. My neck prickled as Dante felt for one of the little piles and used his scarred hand to trace a circle around it in the dirt. He touched the pile of grass nearest him and did nothing we could see, save smile.…
No one spoke. The wind of early summer caressed our cheeks and the afterglow faded. And as the first star came out in the deepening sky, white smoke curled up from his finger. Moments later, a cheery flame of orange and yellow, threaded with dark green, had devoured his little clump of grass. Yet it continued to burn and followed his hand into the air, where it hung like a newborn star.
“Attend, students,” he said, “each of you whose fire burns so brightly, your first lesson. The night cools and grows dark. It is the nature of grass to dry. It is the nature of dry grass to burn. The aether is closed off to us, but keirna…essence…remains. Magic lies not in our blood, not in a random talent, not pouring through the conduit of Heaven’s fire, but hidden in this world itself. That is Ianne’s gift…Portier’s gift. To find it is our task—to discover our need, and then to bring will and intent, imagining, and our own inner fire to serve it. All of us here are capable. But we must begin again, here at the beginning.…”