River of Souls

by Beth Bernobich

  Once, she added, “Do not be afraid to tell me the truth. I promise I shall not laugh.”

  There were many mornings when he thought truth might spill from his mouth, but always his throat turned dry before he could speak. It took only a moment of wetting his tongue before the words vanished, and he found himself mired in the details of mundane dreams, and not those of Adele. It was as if he could not speak the truth until she did.

  I am not certain I could, even then.

  At last, as the summer passed into early autumn, she seemed to lose interest.

  “Shall I go?” he asked.

  “No. Not yet. We have not yet exhausted our mutual stubbornness.”

  Later, Minne said, “She no longer writes. Not for the past few years.”

  Minne was no bondsmaid, he had learned. She was a distant cousin from northern Veraene who served as Duhr’s secretary, companion, and sometimes nurse. Asa wanted to know what Minne meant by, She no longer writes. Of course Duhr wrote. Every day when he reported to her presence, Duhr had paper and pen and that same small writing stand. More than once she was writing swiftly as he appeared.

  But he remembered the discarded sheets, and how their number grew and shrank over the weeks.

  Then, one morning a month after he had arrived, he came to Duhr as usual, only to find her distracted and staring toward the east. He waited, but she did not give him the usual command to recite his dreams. After a few moments, he wandered toward the wall that surrounded the rooftop. Autumn had arrived without his being aware. Crimson and russet dotted the northern hills, and the plains had taken on the dusty brown haze of plowed fields cleared of their harvests. Asa stared south and west, following the highway as it looped over the plains toward the indistinct horizon. Somewhere, in faraway Ysterien, his mother waited, expecting his return. Somewhere the bones of his horse whitened under snow and sun.

  He must have spoken that last out loud, because she said, “What happened to your horse?”

  Asa turned to meet her intent gaze.

  “The truth, Asa. This one time. Please.”

  …I would have no lies between us…

  It was this memory, in all its incarnations, that tripped him at last into speech.

  “I killed it,” he whispered.

  She nodded, in a way that reminded him of Zayaa. “Tell me more.”

  Slowly, with many false starts and additions, he recounted the day of the bandit attack. He had left the last wayside hostel behind a few days before. It had been an uncomfortable experience, with the sense of many eyes upon him as he set off into the true mountains. But he told himself he had his sword and knives, the spells his cousin taught him.

  And my stubbornness.

  Duhr said nothing, not even a gesture to urge him on.

  He continued with more fluency, describing the state of the trail, the frost and patches of ice, even on that late spring day. The silence of the hills. The echo of his gelding’s hooves over the stone. The first itch of fear when he realized his situation. Then followed a swift recounting of the pursuit, the spells he used, the decision to kill his horse and sent its body over the cliff so the bandits would believe him dead as well.

  “It made me sick afterwards,” he said. “I cannot be sorry I did it. But I can be sorry I needed to.”

  Eventually he found the courage to turn around. Tanja Duhr beckoned him closer. He did not resist as she took his hand and pulled away the glove he had not removed in her presence. His hands would never be beautiful. The frostbite had marked him with scars, and cracks that refused to heal. As she turned his hand over, he flinched. At last he dared to look.

  Faint red reflected from his palms. Just a moment, then it was gone.

  “Thank you,” Duhr said.

  “For what?” he whispered.

  “For even this much of the truth.”

  * * *

  He spent the afternoon in his rooms, brooding over what she meant by even this much. In the evening, he tried to walk himself to distraction, but nothing helped. He returned and ate the dinner Yvonne the cook brought to him, hardly tasting it. Toward nightfall he fell into a doze.

  Minne woke him at midnight. “Go to her.”

  Confused, he said, “Where?”

  “In her garden, of course.”

  Minne lit the lamps in the stairwell with a word of magic. A strong green scent coiled upward, following Asa on the familiar route. By the time he reached the top landing, the sleep had cleared from his head.

  Outside, moonlight washed over the garden path. Tanja Duhr sat on her bench, wrapped in loose robes. She was bent over her writing desk, staring at a fresh blank sheet of paper. Her face was wrinkled in irritation or concentration, he couldn’t tell which. There were no discarded papers on the ground, only a few sheets with writing stacked beside her on the bench itself.

  “Tell me more dreams,” she said without looking up.

  “You woke me for that?”

  She shrugged “You are young. You won’t miss your sleep.”

  “What about you?”

  Now a shadow showed her faint smile. “I am old. I would rather work than sleep until my death. Now, tell me your dreams, or admit you’ve been lying to me.”

  He hesitated. He knew what she looked for—life dreams, those fragments of memory from the past. Wasn’t that the reason for his journey? To understand his dreams?

  A lamp sparked into life in the palace, far to the east. Its light filled a high arched window, in a tower somewhere in the middle of the grounds. Asa stared at that window. With a start, he realized it was the window where he and Tanja had spoken, that day before Adele marched to Károví with the others.

  Stay silent, stay safe, said his other self.

  He laughed to himself. If he had wanted safety, he would have stayed in Ysterien, in his mother’s household, where the greatest danger he faced was an inaccurate balance between yesterday and today. Even such mistake was unlikely, certainly not fatal, since his mother would surely assign another to check his work. So what was the truth?

  The truth is I wanted freedom. I wanted…the chance to make my own mistakes, outside the nest of family.

  And he had, in choosing to sell his passage on the ship, in choosing to travel overland, in spite of the journey’s dangers. He began to understand Adele, and himself. A little.

  But Tanja waited for his reply. She would wait patiently, but not forever.

  “I never said good-bye,” he said softly. “I meant to, that morning. But you had not slept well for weeks before. I wanted…I wanted to give you the gift of peace.”

  Silence. Not even the hush of her breath.

  He went on to describe that morning, the preparations Adele and the other soldiers hurried to complete. He, she had meant to return to their quarters, to steal a few moments for a proper farewell; but then came an unexpected summons from the general. They would march at once. No more delay.

  “I wrote,” Asa said. “many letters. It was not enough. I meant to return. I could not.”

  He stopped and closed his eyes, waiting. The silence stretched between them. So tight, it was as though the air shivered. At last he heard a faint scratching. He turned to see Tanja Duhr bent over her desk, writing.

  * * *

  He had expected everything to change after that. It did, but not as he had imagined.

  Minne waited until midmorning to wake him. She set his breakfast tray on the table and flung the curtains open. The midmorning sun poured through. “She wants you again.”

  Asa grunted. He had spent a restless night after leaving Tanja Duhr. There had been dreams, but of an ordinary kind, filled with murky shapes, like waves rolling through a sea of night. He rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand and hoped the tea was strong.

  “You have a letter, too.”

  That brought him awake and sitting up. “Who sent it?”

  Minne ignored his sharp tone, but her shrug was expressive. “It came with one of the merchant caravans. A runner
brought it to the house. It’s on your tray.”

  He waited until she closed the door to leave his bed. Even then, he found himself moving with the slow caution of an old man. Oh, yes, he knew the sender. It could only be his mother.

  Minne had tucked the letter under the small pot of tea. It was a thick envelope of yellow parchment, the wax seal imprinted with the mark of his mother’s house. His name and Duhr’s were written in a strong slanted hand—yes, his mother’s. Other than one or two thumbprints, the paper was unmarred by its long journey. Eyeing it, Asa poured a cup and drank a scalding mouthful to clear his head. It would not do to approach this letter half asleep.

  The tea burned his throat. Yvonne the cook had predicted his needs this morning, evidently. He finished off the cup, then warily picked up the letter. Magic ran over the surface, nipping at his fingers. Immediately the outer covering fell open to show two more, smaller sheets inside. Asa took them up and scanned the first.

  To my son Asa, I write this knowing you will have reached Duenne. I have no news for you—not of good fortune or bad. I only wished to send you this note of recommendation to House Yasemîn. With it, you may draw money as you need.

  The second was just as she described, a formal recommendation of Asa, fifth son of House Dilawer, to those who governed House Yasemîn. Many complicated phrases followed that one declaration, but the sum of their meaning was clear. He would have whatever funds he needed, with no restriction. House Dilawer pledged not only all restitution, but the good will of the house for as long as Benaw and her daughters governed.

  An alliance. She offered them an alliance.

  It was such a valuable thing that his skin prickled, in spite of the warm autumn day.

  She thinks to bribe me to come home.

  He nearly crumpled both letters and tossed them out the window. But as his hand closed, he stopped himself with a sour laugh. This…this was undoubtedly a bribe, but a subtle one. And he might need the money.

  That thought, which came too easily to him, gave him pause. Nevertheless he set the letters aside and devoured his breakfast with greater appetite. Then he washed his face and dressed in clean shirt and trousers. Tanja Duhr waited for him.

  She waited, but not as she had on previous days. She sat under the trellis, with her desk on her lap, writing. Rose petals drifted down from the vines, a soft rainfall of yellow, crimson, and dusky red. There was a faint edge to the breeze that blew from the north.

  “You asked for me,” he said at last.

  Still writing, she nodded. Her hand gripped the pen with assurance, but her skin seemed more transparent than usual, and the lines in her face stood out much clearer. A trick of the sunlight, he told himself; but he noticed signs that the night had taken its price from her, as well. The sharper angle of her wrist bones, the bruises under her eyes, the slight tremor when she set her pen aside.

  “Your mother sent a letter,” she said.

  He nodded. Minne had told her, obviously.

  “She wrote to me as well,” Tanja said. “A precaution, in case yours went astray.”

  He snorted. Tanja’s mouth quirked into a smile.

  “Beware the enemy,” she said softly. “But first, be certain who your enemy is.”

  With that, she dipped her pen into the inkwell. “No dreams, today. Today I would like to hear about your future.”

  * * *

  Of course Asa could not predict his future. What Tanja wanted, she explained, were those ephemeral glimpses of what might be. The future blooms from the seeds of our desires, she said. A hundred different answers occurred to him, all of them like the trivial dreams he first recited at her command. She wants the hardest truths. She always did.

  So, the truth. He met her gaze directly and said, “You asked me what I desire. You. You are what I desire.”

  For the first time, she appeared shaken.

  So was he. Until today, he had only comprehended the most obvious reasons for coming to Duenne. His dreams. Their love interrupted. The need to bid farewell to the past before he could truly face the present. He had no wish to recall the words, however. They were true. Nor could he utter facile declarations of love. Theirs was an uncommon desire, divided by death and years and the void between lives.

  “I desire you,” he repeated. “Not as we are, but as we might be someday, in some life.”

  Tanja shook her head. “The gods make no such promises.”

  “How could they? We are the ones who make our futures. We make them from all the moments of today.”

  Now she smiled. “We have changed our roles, it seems. You speak immortal words, while I stutter about the commonplace.”

  “Is that what I did?”

  “At first.”

  And so the conversation wound through the morning, easy and comfortable, ranging through dreams and memories of past lives. For the first time since he arrived they dined together in the early afternoon, and again that evening. They spoke of lives together, of those long separated, though these were fewer. Asa remembered more of the wartime years. Tanja told him about those in Duenne, after the Empire suffered its defeats, and those she learned from correspondents in Károví and elsewhere. It was like stitching together a cloak from many varied pieces, a thing that could never be whole. And yet was.

  The pattern continued throughout the autumn and into winter. As the season changed, Tanja Duhr retired to an airy room just under the rooftop garden. She no longer went barefoot, and the number of robes she wore increased, even though Minne built generous fires in the fireplace, and lit several braziers around the room. Of that time, Asa remembered the flames illuminating Tanja’s lined face, the murmur of her voice, the scent of magic and oil. His dreams lived on as well, more vivid than before. These fed the conversations, which in turn called up new memories of past lives. In between, she wrote, the script flowing onto the paper, while Asa watched in silence.

  It was a midwinter day. The snow had been falling since dawn. Minne had closed the shutters. The flakes hissed against the wooden slats, and the room was like a warm glove around them.

  “Asa.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am dying.”

  She spoke so matter-of-factly it frightened him. Asa reached out, and she clasped his hand within both of hers. Slender hands, once strong, but now he could feel the bones beneath the wasted flesh.

  “How do you know?”

  “I dreamed it. I dreamed of buds unfolding and a thousand stars. Or you might believe my physician, who tells me to expect death before summer.” She closed her eyes a moment. The pulse at her throat betrayed a much stronger emotion than her voice. “You must go before then, Asa. No, do not argue. Please.”

  He had no answer for that. He knelt at her feet, robbed of words for a very long while. Tanja Duhr did not speak either. It was a gift of hers, to make the silence as easy as their conversations. But then she had often told him that a poet must choose the spaces between words as skillfully as they chose the words themselves.

  As the bells of Duenne rang the first evening hour, however, she stirred. “We have some more weeks and months together. Think about where you would like to travel next.”

  He shook his head. “Do I have a choice? My mother wishes me home.”

  “And perhaps you might go home—someday. Think about it, Asa. That is all I suggest.”

  * * *

  And so he considered his future, his desires, in between their conversations. Those intervals grew longer as her strength failed. Some days Minne came to his door, only to report that Tanja Duhr was sleeping, or with the physician. She would see him tomorrow, if tomorrow allowed it. Asa took to helping Minne with her work in keeping the books, paying bills, running errands into the city. But even as he worked he thought about the possibilities and impossibilities of his life.

  Where might he go?

  Not home. Not directly. Nor could he remain in Duenne.

  Briefly he considered Károví, but although Erythandra and its former p
rincedom had signed a truce, the borders remained unsettled.

  So he climbed the steps to the roof, and, daring the winds, surveyed the surrounding lands, as if his gaze could penetrate the distance between Duenne and the borders. He could dismiss the north at once. He’d had enough snow. South lay the richest provinces of the Empire, those that traded in silks, coffee, and spices. Winter never touched those shores. No, he thought. The south would be too much like Ysterien. Farther along that southern coast was Fortezzien with its rocky mountains, goats, and houses painted in bright colors. But like Hanídos, the mood in Fortezzien was restless, and there were rumors of uprisings.

  Which left east.

  “What do you think of Tiralien?” Tanja asked the next time she could receive him.

  She sat propped against pillows, several pages covered with writing spread over her lap. Asa suppressed a start at her question. Minne must have told her about his visits to the roof, but how had she guessed the direction of his thoughts so precisely?

  Because she knows me, she knows the Empire.

  “It’s a pleasant city,” he said. “But I cannot find any reason to choose it over another.”

  Silent laughter shook her. “What a demanding young man you are. Pleasant isn’t enough. You want a grand reason. What if I gave you a little reason?”

  He shrugged, but she only laughed more.

  “Stubborn.”

  “It is my best quality.”

  “It is.” Her tone, suddenly serious, caught his attention. “That is why I would suggest you visit my dear friend. His name is Linus Delf and he’s a scholar. I knew him from Court. He tired of the city and moved east to study in quiet.”

  “And why should I visit him?”

  “Because he is an interesting man. He studies ancient philosophy, but takes interest in a number of other subjects, including poetry.”

  She went on to explain that Delf required an assistant to organize his books, transcribe his notes into readable documents, and to perform small tasks of research. “It would be a different kind of education than your tutors provided you. It should also give you enough money to live as you pleased. As long as you were moderate in what you pleased.”