Again there was a deep silence.
“My God!” Arnauld breathed at last. “That explains a great deal. A very great deal. About her plans, I mean, and her certainty that we could win.”
“It does, indeed.”
“But where is she now?” Brytnoth asked.
Jared’s eyes flashed at Arnauld. “She hasn’t come back yet?”
“No.”
Jared stared at him, and then slowly looked around the table. “Then she’s still on K’ilenfir. Alone.” His thoughts tumbled madly, and then suddenly crystallized. He turned to Rafe. “That’s why there have been no attacks on the city,” he said. “They’re waiting.”
“Waiting? Waiting for what?”
“For the Council to decide what to do with her.” He stood abruptly, and everyone else rose with him. “I’ve got to go.”
“Go where?” Arnauld asked.
“I need to think.”
“But, Jared, won’t you take a little food at least?”
Jared jerked his head no and strode out of the hall.
Outside, the sun was glaring in the western sky. Jared’s eyes glimmered, their silvery luminescence drowning in pools of darkness. Dusk was near, and he could feel the gentle brushings of the night winds beginning. He stood in the courtyard for a moment, breathing the last fresh air of the night. Then, suddenly and decisively, he turned and went back inside the Great House. He went past the dining hall, taking the winding corridor that wound around behind the hall to the kitchen.
The cooks were still busy at their work, and there was a noise of pots and an aroma of stewed meat and fruits. His stomach protested his fast, but he ignored it. He turned away from the kitchen, following a narrow passage that ended in an oak door. Once through this, a set of steep stairs greeted him, and he ascended them three at a time.
Without warning, the stairs ended in yet another doorway. Jared paused, listening. There was no sound of pursuing footsteps, and he heard no noise from within the chamber. A pungent smell seeped under the door, the smell of the spicy red globe fruit edulia that grew in the oasis gardens. Jared inhaled the fragrance, and a memory sliced into his consciousness.
Laughing. Sahara was laughing, staring up at him as he sat in the edulia tree, drinking in the smell of the ripening fruit.
“Why are you laughing, Sahara?” he asked, irritated by the interruption. “There’s nothing funny here.”
“It’s just…” Something seemed to make her suddenly awkward, and the color blossomed on her cheeks. “I’ve never seen a man so enthralled by fruit before.”
“That’s because you’ve never tried one of these before.” He plucked a fruit, heavy with juice and radiating a sweet, spicy scent, and then jumped down next to her. “Taste it, and you’ll understand.”
She took the fruit he offered and bit into it. As the juice exploded in her mouth, she looked at him. There was something in her face that he did not understand—fear, confusion, delight, surprise, tears. He bit into the other half of the fruit and studied her, feeling a gentleness that he had never known.
“Why are you crying?” he asked softly.
“You wouldn’t understand.” Her voice was fierce, but he felt its hollowness.
“Try me.” He took another bite, and then offered the fruit to her again. Her eyes met his for an instant, a silent no-but-yes-but-no in their depths. He opened his mouth to say something, but she was gone before he had the chance.
Jared drew in a jagged breath that restored him to the present moment. The stone stairwell, the heavy door, the spicy scent of edulia.
“God,” he muttered, shaking his head. “What’s wrong with me?”
Still unnerved by the force of the memory, Jared turned the handle and pushed the door open noiselessly.
Childir sat at the table, surrounded by piles of old manuscripts and dried bunches of herbs. A plate, heaped with slices of edulia fruit and a thick wedge of cheese, sat on the table next to his elbow. Though he did not look up and though Jared had made no noise, he seemed strangely aware of Jared’s presence.
“What business?”
“I need advice, my lord Childir,” Jared said, bowing low.
“You are welcome, my son. Come and sit.”
Jared closed the door behind him and went to the seat that Childir was indicating with the end of his quill pen. The old man returned to scratching some notes on a parchment as Jared took his seat. Jared clasped his hands, letting his head hang down almost to his knees, and waited.
“Now, my son,” said Childir after a moment, “speak the heaviness in your mind.”
Jared raised his head and took a breath. “My lord,” he began, but stopped.
Too many questions tumbled through his mind, and he still felt that he wasn’t in complete possession of his senses.
“The edulia disturbs you?” Childir asked, seeing Jared’s eyes fixed on the plate. “Or do you want some?”
“No, by God, or I won’t be able to speak!” Jared said quickly, shaking his head violently to suppress the memory that was threatening to intrude once more upon his consciousness. Childir studied him intently and Jared cleared his throat. He knew that if he didn’t say something quickly, uncomfortable questions were bound to be asked, so he blurted all at once, “My lord, tell me about the speech that travels between minds with no voice to utter it.”
Childir’s eyes flickered for a moment, and he set down his quill and folded his hands. “Why do you ask? It is not something one can seek, this power.”
Jared sighed. “I don’t seek it, my lord. It has sought me, and found me, it seems. And I want to know why, if possible.”
“How do you know it has found you?”
“Because I’ve used it.”
There was a long silence. Childir never moved, but his eyes fixed intensely on Jared. “With whom?”
Jared clenched his jaw for a moment. “With Sahara.”
“Ah. The outworlder.”
“Yes. My lord.”
Another silence fell, dragging on uncomfortably. Childir studied him with such insistence that Jared felt he was being read like one of the old man’s manuscripts. Though not easily intimidated, he shifted in his seat and cleared his throat again. The situation reminded him of a moment of similar discomfort in his youth, the summer he had served as Childir’s apprentice. He had been caught one morning eating a fruit that the sage was saving for a scholarly experiment, and he had been subjected to exactly this sort of silent interrogation.
“Do you love her, my son?” Childir asked at last.
Jared gaped at him. He could not help himself. The question was so utterly unexpected.
“Do you love her?” Childir repeated. There was no irritation in his voice, only a gentle insistence.
“I…I don’t know.”
Do I? he asked himself.
The old man sighed and rubbed his hands together slowly. “Perhaps what you’re thinking is mind-speech is only that heightened awareness of the other that love brings. Lovers can feel one another without touching, for example, or sense each other’s emotions.” His piercing eyes were back on Jared’s face. “Do you know what I mean, my son?”
Jared was silent, feeling again like a schoolboy caught doing something forbidden.
He didn’t know how much he wanted to say to Childir. It was true that he could sense Sahara’s feelings. His memory of her and the edulia tree made him painfully aware that he was also able to read her emotions, no matter how mixed up they were, and that he’d been able to do so for a long time.
And then there was the strange but undeniable fact that he had known somehow that she was lost in the desert and that she needed him. He’d never told her who had sent him to look for her. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had admitted that he was the only one who had known she was there. Putting the search in terms of a collective had been much safer for him, but he needn’t have worried. She didn’t believe herself worthy of anyone’s care or notice, whether his alone or the ent
ire planet’s.
And then there were the nights. He couldn’t forget the nights, filled with the gentle hushings of the sandstorms outside the city walls, when he almost thought he could hear her breathing as she slept, even though her quarters lay on the other side of the garden courtyard from his.
“You do know what I mean.” The old man interrupted his thoughts, and Jared came back to himself with a start.
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“So you do love her.”
“But that doesn’t necessarily follow, does it, my lord?” Jared realized how desperate his voice sounded, and that made him angry with himself.
Childir chuckled and bit off a piece of his cheese. “My son, you must figure that puzzle out for yourself. No one, not even I, can tell you the answer to that! As I said, it seems likely to me that what you think is mind-speech is nothing more than hyperawareness. But perhaps not.”
Jared sighed, not sure if he felt relieved to be out of the range of suspicion or not. “Can you tell me what mind-speech is, just in case?”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened to you?”
“I saw her as clearly as if I were standing in front of her, even though I wasn’t there. She was following me up a path, and the Dragon-Lords were lying in wait for her. They had captured me already and put me on a ship bound for the prison moon. And I watched as they killed her companions, one by one. She never noticed them fall behind. She was in danger. I called to her, but not with my voice. It was all in my mind, somehow. And somehow she heard me, my lord! I saw her fall to her knees…I know she heard me! But I couldn’t do anything more than that. No more words would come, and they seized her.”
His voice trailed off and he glanced up at Childir, who was still watching him steadily.
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
Childir grunted and pressed his fingertips together, sinking into silent thought. Jared stared down at the floor and waited for him to say something else. He closed his eyes, just for a moment….
“It seems you have a very strong connection to her, whether you love her or not.”
Childir was speaking again, and Jared woke with a start, ashamed that he had fallen asleep. The sage glanced around, his nose wrinkling ever so slightly, as if he smelled something very faint. “Even now, I feel something in the air. It’s almost a presence, but very thin.” Childir looked sharply at Jared. “Do you hear anything? With your mind, I mean?”
Jared shook his head. But hadn’t he just been dreaming something? He frowned and puzzled his brow. Clarity rushed through him, and his head snapped up.
“My lord, I dreamed of her. Just now.” He didn’t think anything of admitting he had been asleep—he wanted too badly to understand what he had seen.
“Tell me.”
Jared closed his eyes and studied his memory. “I saw her huddled in her cell on the prison moon. But she was smiling…almost at me, it seemed. But no, she was smiling at something in her hands. What was it? A jagged knife, and a ring of keys. And she said something to herself.”
Childir was leaning forward, his hands gripping the chair so that his knuckles showed white. “What did she say, my son? Can you hear her?”
“I think…” Jared’s eyes flew open. “She said, ‘I’m going home.’”
“Is that all?”
Jared closed his eyes again, and a line of concentration appeared across his forehead. He looked almost pained. “No, no, that’s not all.” He opened his eyes again, and a smile flooded across his face in spite of himself. “She said my name.”
Childir leaned back in his chair. “Ah,” he said, and then, “Does she love you, my son?”
Jared shook his dark head. “I can’t say, my lord. Sometimes she seems…but then she can be harsh too.”
“She has not known much of love in her life.” Childir thoughtfully stroked his beard. “And she has killed someone. That does something to the soul—wounds it, you know. Without the proper healing….”
Jared thought again of the edulia tree, and he felt suddenly that he understood what had happened—why she had wanted the fruit so badly, but refused it.
“You must teach her,” the old man continued.
“Why? Why me? Why not Arnauld? Or….” He choked on Brytnoth’s name before he could speak it. The thought of that was profoundly unsettling, for a reason too vague to put into words. He frowned and muttered instead, “Why me?”
Childir chuckled and shook his head. “My son, I sense that there is love on one side of this equation—maybe on both—but neither of you wants to admit that you are enslaved to it.”
“Enslaved?”
“You will have to figure out whether or not you love her, Jared,” Childir said, his voice suddenly sharp and brilliant, like a diamond. “Because she is coming back, and she will need you.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can put two and two together, Jared. What you have just told me of your dream explains something of what has been happening here. She is coming back, but not as a free woman.”
“What does that mean? If they haven’t released her, how could she come back?”
“There is an ancient privilege, my son, that the Dragon-Lords have ever held sacrosanct, but it has not been invoked in some time. This is the privilege of exacting blood for blood.”
Jared felt as if someone were strangling him. “What?”
“She has been made a blood-offering to the Dragon-Lords.”
“She’s a what?”
“A blood-offering. Her blood will be spilled in the stead of the rest of Silesia, and, most of all, in atonement for the death of the one she killed a year ago.”
Chapter 16
When Jared rolled over and opened his eyes the next morning, the sun was already bright against the softly billowing curtains. His gaze drifted around, slowly, remembering his own chambers, his own bed. He sat up, his stomach protesting the fact that he hadn’t eaten the night before.
The smooth floor felt pleasantly cool against his bare feet as he crossed the room and pushed open the curtains. As the sun flooded into the room, all the questions that exhaustion had driven out of his mind last night refilled his consciousness.
“First food, then questions,” he muttered to himself.
He dressed quickly and left his room, following the stairs down to the courtyard. Hardly noticing his surroundings, he crossed the green space, past the cheerfully sparkling fountain, and pushed through the heavy doors into the dining hall. It was utterly deserted.
“Where is everyone?” he grumbled, crossing the room and shouldering open the door to the kitchen. The stoves were cold, and the cooks were nowhere to be seen. He ran a hand through his dark hair in frustration and cursed under his breath. “I guess it’s fruit for me this morning, then.”
His stomach turned over strangely at the thought of eating an edulia fruit, half out of fear and half out of excitement that it would raise more nerve-shattering memories of the sort that nearly overwhelmed him yesterday. With a sigh he left the kitchen by the back door and strolled out into the oasis garden. The edulia orchard lay down a gentle hill, next to the gurgling river. The water glittered, refracting the strong mid-morning light so that its surface was almost too bright to behold, and the shade beneath the edulia trees on its bank was dense and cool. Jared picked a few low-hanging fruits and sat with his back against the tree, contemplating the play of the light on the water and the seductive scent of the fruit in his hand.
He geared himself up to take a bite. Suddenly, someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He jumped in spite of himself and darted a glance to the side.
“Brytnoth!” he gasped.
“I’m sorry, Jared…I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Brytnoth looked half-amused, and Jared swore under his breath and settled back against the tree. Brytnoth sat down beside him.
“What do you want?” Jared demanded. His irritation at his uninvited guest made him forget his reservation
s about the fruit, and he bit into it with a vengeance.
“I want to know more about Sahara.”
Jared swallowed and stared intently at the innards of the fruit in his hand. “Why?”
Brytnoth sighed. “I don’t know. She seems so…. I just wanted to hear more about her, that’s all.”
Jared studied him. Brytnoth was flushed again, just as he had been the night before during Jared’s story. A wave of loathing suddenly swelled up inside him and he felt a distinct and almost overpowering urge to punch Brytnoth right in one of his starry eyes.
“Why don’t you tell me who you are first,” he said, suppressing his desire for violence, “and then I might tell you what you want to know.” He shifted his gaze back to the river and took another bite of the fruit.
Brytnoth hesitated for a long time, and Jared began to wonder if he would ever speak at all. Finally, he said, “Well, I’m an outworlder, just like her.”
“I knew that already.”
“You did?”
Jared laughed and tossed the core of the edulia fruit into the grass. “Do I look as witless as all that? I mean, I know I was in prison for a couple of weeks, but I think I know an outworlder when I see one. Tell me something about you that I don’t already know.”
“Well…” Brytnoth frowned, puzzled, and then looked Jared in the eyes with complete and open honesty. “I don’t really know what else to say. My memory is…clouded…at the moment. I remember waking up surrounded by sand...I remember walking for what seemed like ages until I found myself here in your city.”
“Are you telling me that you don’t remember your life? Who you are or where you are from?”
“I know my name. As to where I’m from…. I lived on that ship almost all my life...my memory of my life before that is hazy. We were refugees from….” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “My memory is blurred,” he said. “I can’t remember…”
“What happened to your homeworld? Do you know that much, at least?”
Brytnoth’s face became strained, as if he were grappling with something. “I don’t…I don’t remember.”
The Outworlder Page 15