One of the men cleared his throat. “We want no arguments with sorcerers. We’ll deliver your messages.” Gathering up Orris—Addie couldn’t tell whether he was dead or merely unconscious—the men slunk away.
Shai took a deep breath. Slowly he opened his hands as if letting something gradually trickle through his fingers. Addie noticed that he was suddenly pale. “Are you all right, sir?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes, Addie,, I’m all right. Just a little tired. Gathering and throwing the power takes a lot of energy. Let’s get inside. Those men won’t be back to bother you.” He held out a hand to each of the children and they walked together into the house. Moving with an unaccustomed lethargy, Shai gave them each a nightgown and helped Lenny into his, tucking him into bed and giving him a comforting goodnight hug and kiss before he pulled the blankets up around his chin. The exhausted little boy was asleep instantly.
Addie, seeing that her little brother was safely asleep in his warm, clean bed, went to the fire and sat on the hearthrug, spreading her long, heavy hair to the warmth to dry. Shai picked up a hairbrush and sank wearily into one of the chairs. “Come here and I’ll brush your hair,” he said softly, and without thinking, Addie went and sat on his lap. Gently, the forester brushed the golden mass, separating the tangles with his fingers so as not to pull, fluffing it out as it dried and letting the curls run riot through his hands.
Her hair was soon dry with this treatment. Addie turned to face Shai. “What will we do tomorrow?” she asked directly.
“I thought we’d start lessons,” said Shai.
“Lessons!” said Addie indignantly. She hated lessons.
“Yes, you both have a lot to learn. Languages, for one. You must learn to understand and speak the language of the ravens and the foxes, because ravens are the wisest of the forest creatures and the foxes know what’s going on from one end to the other. And the language of the trees, if you like. Their patience is well worth knowing and something I think you lack, little Addie.”
She looked at him with wide eyes. “Trees have a language?”
“Oh, yes. But it’s very slow. It may take a tree a month to say a single sentence, and then it’s usually about the wind and rain and the rich earth. You have to go back again and again and remember what the conversation was about all summer. The trees mostly don’t believe in us, you know.” “They don’t believe in us?”
“No, we move too fast for them to perceive, and our lives are too short for them to really get to know one of us. To a being that may live a thousand years, we’re regrettably short-lived creatures, like mayflies are to us.”
Addie was fascinated. “What else are we to learn?” “Lenny must learn about people and how to make good men love him and evil ones fear him. He must learn stewardship of the land and its people. He’ll be a king one day, you know.”
“What about me?” she said shyly.
“That depends on what you want, little Addie. I can teach you all the things a woman needs to know to be a good wife and mother, cooking and sewing and taking care of children. Then when you’re grown up, I can find a good, kind man and give you to him to be his wife and live together with him all of your days, if that’s what you want.”
“But what if that’s not what I want?”
“Then you can stay with me and be my apprentice and I’ll teach you the healing arts and how to gather the power and throw it and how to bend men and animals to your will and how to use the beings of the supernatural to shepherd the people and to protect them. Then when you have learned your lessons—but it takes many years, Addie, and the work is very hard and often dangerous—I will go out of this forest and take up my place in the world of men in their halls of power. With you to help me and support me, I can make a real difference in the battle against evil and pain and cruelty.” The lethargy had sloughed away; Shai was lit from within by the power of his vision.
Addie felt the power of it and the glory and her child’s spirit caught fire. “Oh, yes, Shai!” she cried. “That’s what I want to do!”
He looked at her shining face and laughed for joy. “I hoped you’d say that,” he said, and held out his arms. Gladly she came to him, clasping him around the neck with her thin little arms and snuggling her little body against his broad chest. He cradled her gently in his strong arms. Laying her head against his shoulder, the little girl could feel the powerful beat of his heart and see, out of the comer of her eye, the ruddily flickering flames in the fireplace, and she sighed with the deep happiness of one who has at last come home.
Chapter 13
Adeiinda’s first sensation upon regaining the real world was of warmth and comfort. She sighed and stirred, and the comfortable warmness stirred too. She became aware that she was being held in someone’s arms, her head lying on a strong shoulder as if it belonged there, a warm breath ruffling hair on her temple as if it had a right. For a dreamy while she thought she was at home, lying in Dep’s arms as she had done two or three times, moments as precious in her memory as they had been in life. She sighed and nestled closer, and the arms around her tightened responsively.
Then she remembered. Dep was far away. Then with whom did she lie? It certainly wasn’t Len, as it had been once before when she surfaced from the overmind. The broad shoulder against which her head lay, the deep chest that supported her upper body, the powerful arms that held her snugly, most assuredly did not belong to slight and wiry Len.
It occurred to her that she might open her eyes and look, though somehow she was relucant to find out for sure who held her, as if the knowledge would bring the comfortable moment to an end. But it was necessary. She found herself looking into An-Shai’s compelling dark eyes, only inches from her own.
Indignation flooded her. She wrenched herself out of his hold, striking frantically out at him with her clenched fists. Instinctively, he clung to her, and she battered at his hands. When he released her, she flung herself halfway across the room, where she crouched, panting with fury and panic.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she spat defiantly, though if the truth were known, her anger was due more to her own response to that comforting embrace than to anything An-Shai had done. “You keep your filthy hands to yourself, you damned hypocrite!”
An-Shai had meant no harm. The emotional moment at the end of his scenario had affected him as much as it had Adelinda. He had escaped the overmind sooner than she had and come to her prison room, his usual cool aloofness overwhelmed with a powerful protective feeling. The little girl snuggling trustfully into his arms had touched a deep need to nurture that he was unaware of in himself, and the feeling had spilled over onto the real-life Adelinda. Without thinking that the adult Adelinda had far less reason to trust him than the child Addie, he had gathered her into his arms. He had, in fact, been holding her for several minutes before she awoke, much to Len’s amazement.
An-Shai was not a man who offered his friendship easily. If he had been asked to describe himself, he would have said that he was a cold man, unemotional, neither needing affection from others nor able to give it. In fact, never before in all his austere life had he opened himself to another with such unthinking sincerity. To have his tentative overture flung back into his face with such violent contempt lacerated his pride and exacerbated the sexual self-doubts that he had never given himself an opportunity to overcome since his adolescence.
He drew himself up and smoothed out the wrinkles in his robe. Without deigning to answer her question, he said haughtily, “You turned to me for aid quickly enough when
you really needed it.”
Adelinda straightened. The icy arrogance that An-Shai had assumed to cover hurt feelings inflamed her indignation even farther. “A child turned to an adult for protection. But I’m no child, and you’re certainly not Shai.”
“The perils you face as an adult are more deadly than the perils Addie faced. You need a more powerful protector, as much more powerful as I am than Shai. Admit it, woman, you’re beaten. You
were beaten when you agreed to go
home with Shai. You knew what was at stake when you accepted his protection, even if Addie didn’t.”
Adelinda turned white with rage. “I face deadly perils, all right, and every one of them has been created by you. Do something about evil and cruelty and pain, you said to Addie. But in the Vale, who summons all the evil and causes the pain? Who has the power to stop the cruelty with a word, and chooses to let it go on? If Shai and Addie could fight together against the world’s evils, you’re what they’d be fighting against! You’re condemned out of your own mouth!”
It was An-Shai’s turn to pale with rage. Adelinda’s blow had landed too close the mark for comfort. “You,” he said with icy calm, “don’t know the first thing about pain or cruelty. But you’re going to find out.” He wheeled and strode out of the room, the bars crashing into place behind him.
Len let out his breath in a long whistling sigh. “I really wish you hadn’t provoked him like that. Before you woke up he was holding you like a father holds a daughter. Why did you have to act like he was trying to rape you? If you’d handled him right, we’d be walking out of here free and clear right now.”
Adelinda gave him an agonized look, then sank onto the sleeping bench and buried her face in her arms. She had been far more shaken by An-Shai’s scenario than she was willing to admit. Len stared. He had never imagined that Adelinda could be so powerfully affected.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
Adelinda wiped her face on a comer of her blanket. “Don’t be. You’re right. I didn’t handle him well. I haven’t handled him well from the day I met him. He sets my hackles up somehow and then I do something stupid.”
Len hesitated and looked at Adelinda. Her expression was full of sorrow and misery. “In a way I don’t blame him for being angry. You must have really hurt his feelings. What happened after I fell asleep?”
“We were talking about the future. He told me what Lenny would have to learn to be a good king—you were the crown prince, did you know that?”
“I knew it but I didn’t think about it. I was pretty young.” “Then we talked about what I would be when I grew up. He gave me a choice, to go on and lead an ordinary woman’s life or to learn his magic and be his assistant. He was so good, so full of excitement, I couldn’t turn him down! I wanted to be his apprentice.” She bowed her head to hide the tears starting in her eyes again.
“There’s nothing wrong with that. He offered you a choice and you took the one that seemed best to you. Not everyone can be the leader. There’s no shame in being a worthy man’s assistant.”
She was silent for a while. Len paced restlessly around the room. Something strange was happening to him. He could almost feel the distress that Adelinda was feeling, could almost feel An-Shai’s raging, angry hurt. “What happened then?” he asked.
Embarrassment lanced through Adelinda, and Len winced with the impact of it. “He—he put his arms around me, and I laid my head on his shoulder, and he held me. I thought to myself that I had found where I belonged at last.” The last word was half choked into a sob.
“That doesn’t seem so bad to me. What is there in that to make you act like he’d turned into a poisonous snake?” Adelinda writhed. “When I woke up, I thought for a moment that he was Dep. I was so happy! Then I looked at him and he was An-Shai.” Then she cried out as a terrible blaze of confused resentment flared from Len. Linked as they were from their experience together in the overmind, the power of his bitter anger scored her sensitivities like hot acid. “Ah,” she gasped in pain, “don’t!” She threw up her arm as if to ward a blow.
No blow fell. She looked up, to see Len standing in the middle of the room, staring at her in silent, sullen rage. “You don’t know about Dep,” she began, almost timidly, fearing to provoke another emotional blow. “He was a— friend—of mine a long time ago.” Len stared stonily at her. “No,” she said, compelled to honesty by the smouldering eyes. “He was more than a friend, he was my lover. He was of the farmer folk, and I—I—•” She stopped and choked and at last admitted to herself more than to Len, “I loved him very much. He was kind and gentle and good and I miss him every day. 1 never loved anyone before him and I’ve never loved anyone since. I had to send him away. They found out about him, my brother and his friends, and they would have killed him.” She looked up at Len. The resentment was slowly being replaced with bewilderment.
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
It was Adelinda’s turn to feel bewildered. “Go with him? Where would we have gone? How could I have married him with nothing to bring to him? He had his own life to live and I had kept him from it too long. It was the right thing to do for both of us.”
“The right thing to do?” Len’s resentment flared again. “So you could get back to your parties and your fancy clothes and your friends? You said you loved him? You don’t know the meaning of the word. If you’d loved him you’d have gone with him.” He took a menacing step toward her. The bitter words spilled jerkily from his lips. “Dep was my uncle. I was fifteen when you destroyed him, old enough to know what you did. He loved you. He’d have stood up to your brother and all his friends for you. He’d have broken his back to make a living for you. He lived to be with you, and you sent him away without a thought.”
“It’s not true,” whispered Adelinda, cowering against the wall. She held up a hand to stop him, but he would not be stopped.
“You killed him. You broke his heart and cast him out and he wandered away. A few years later we got word that he’d drunk himself to death in a gutter in Eastend.” Len paused, breathing harshly. “There wasn’t anything any of us could do about it. You went on your merry way, and never even cared enough to ask about him.”
“I thought he’d gotten married. I thought he was happy. I thought the best thing I could do for him would be to leave him alone,” Adelinda moaned, beyond tears. She thought her heart would burst. She hoped it would, and that she would fall down dead in that instant and not have to hear what Len was going to say.
“You couldn’t be that much of a fool. He must have told you he loved you. You must have seen how happy he was with you. He was always so quiet, almost sad, except when he knew he was going to see you soon, and then he laughed and joked until he was like a different man.”
“I thought he was always like that. He had the kindest, most loving nature of any man I ever knew. Oh, please, Len...”
“He asked you to have his baby. Do you think a man asks that of a woman he doesn’t love with all his heart? He asked you to have his baby, and you laughed at him. That was when his heart broke, when he realized he wasn’t anything to you but a few moments’ pleasure. But he made excuses for you. ‘She doesn’t understand what I meant, Len,’ he told me. ‘She’s too young. She’s not ready to make a permanent commitment yet. I can wait. I’ve got forever.’ That’s what he told me, and the next day you sent him away. I only saw him once after that. He was gray and crushed and all the light in the world had gone out for him. You’d have been kinder to have killed him with your own hand. You’d do as much for a dog. But you left him to suffer until he died.”
Adelinda bowed her head beneath the lash of Len’s contempt. She deserved what he said. Young and heedless, she had used Dep and cast him aside, and had made herself believe that he was well and happy and that she had done the right thing to send him away. The bitter truth was that she had sent him away, not for his good, but because, infected by the prejudices of her class, she had been ashamed to love a farmer lad and too cowardly to trust him with her future. And the bitterest betrayal of all was that for years she had persuaded herself that he had been no more to her than a casual affair, one among many, denying to herself that he could have loved her or that she had loved him.
She had killed him. What Len said was the truth, she never doubted it, for she could feel his blazing sincerity. She had done a great wrong for which there could never be any atonement, for he to whom the w
rong had been done was beyond the reach of any reparations. She would carry the guilt and shame of what she had done to the end of her days. She groaned aloud in her agony.
She felt Len touch her shoulder. She winced beneath that feather touch as if it had been a mighty blow. His voice was changed from the voice of the bitter tirade. “Adelinda,” he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you loved him too. I was wrong to tell you what happened to him.” He sat down next to her. “I never meant to tell you. I was glad to get the job you offered and determined to put the past behind me. He never blamed you for what happened; he knew you better than I did, and he said, ‘They made her send me away, Len, and she can’t stand against her whole family.’ I thought I knew better, but I see that he was right. You hurt yourself as much as you hurt him, didn’t you?”
She was unable to answer his question; there was too much bitter truth in it that she had never understood. After a moment, he went on, “For his sake, you can count on me as a friend. I think he’d have wanted that. He never stopped loving you. I think he’d have been sad to know that I caused you such pain.” He touched her again, just a brushing of fingertips, and this time she didn’t flinch, but endured the kindness that was more painful than angry words. Len had been purged of his resentment. It would be a long lifetime before she would be purged of guilt.
Claudia J Edwards - [Forest King 02] Page 20