Joanna opened her mouth protestingly, his image in the firelight and shadows suddenly blurring with her tears. He put out a hand and brushed her tangled blond hair.
“Joanna, there was never a shred of proof that things were as we said they were. Even the DARKMAGE files are gone now.”
Crushed and miserable, she looked away. After a moment, he gathered her in his long, bony arms, holding her against him, the fabric of his shabby purple doctor’s robe and the ruffled shirt he wore beneath it soft and scratchy as an animal’s pelt against her cheek. She wondered what had happened to her, whether it was the pain and shock of her burns in spite of the wizards’ treatment of them or whether she was simply too weary to go on fighting. She seemed to have come to the end of her subroutines. For the first time, she understood that she, too, stood in danger of imprisonment or execution in this world—that she, too, faced punishment as Antryg’s accomplice. But she felt only exhaustion, her mind too tired to grope for the next possible course of action. It was very odd, she thought detachedly, only to sit here in the strong ring of his arms, comfortable in the single present moment, and let events take their course into a black and hopeless future.
Past her shoulder, she heard Lady Rosamund say, “Minhyrdin has gone to Larkmoor, with Issay Bel-Caire, to deliver your confession to the Regent and to ask for clemency for the girl. Whether that perverted mad dog will grant it or not, I cannot say; but beyond a doubt, before they return, the Regent’s messenger will arrive with the orders concerning the manner of your death.”
Joanna felt Antryg shiver, but he only murmured, “Thank you.” A moment later she heard the two Church wizards reenter and the whisper of the Lady’s black robes as she passed down the stairs.
“Why did you let me live?”
Caris was a little surprised at the weakness of his own voice. Once the words were spoken, he doubted they had carried as far as the carved armchair between his bed and the window, through which the bare trees of the windbreak could be seen clawing the dun-colored sky. But the old lady who slumped there like a bag of black wool raised her head, the thin light catching silvery on the cap of her hair. The steady click of her ever-present knitting did not stop.
“Tush, boy,” was all she said.
“Whatever you told the Regent, you know I broke my vows,” Caris went on, finding every word an effort against the lassitude of weakness and drugs. “I may have turned my back on the Way of the Sasenna, but I know what it means. They say a sasennan who breaks his vows, for whatever reason seems good, proves nothing about that reason, but only that he is a man who will break his vows. And then,” he added, moving his bandaged hand on the coverlet, and wincing against the stab of the dulled pain, “I don’t imagine the Council had much use for broken sword blades. No one does.”
“Nonsense.” The old lady gave her knitting a tweak to clear its tangled strands and glanced sidelong at him with those faded blue eyes. “All things have their uses—even broken sword blades. Was your reason so good?”
“I thought so.”
Partly from weakness and partly from his bitter self-recrimination, he spoke half to himself, barely audible, and perhaps the old lady did not hear, for she lapsed back into fussing with her knitting like any old granny by her hearth, muttering to herself as she did. “I knew him,” Caris heard that thin, wavery old voice mumble. “Not well, but I knew him—no one really knew him well but that poor boy of his. And I knew your grandfather and the Emperor, that was the Prince then, and so handsome. I talked to Antryg when he signed all those papers they wanted him to sign last night—meddler, oathbreaker, and mad, yes, completely mad. But I knew them all.” Her weak blue glance flicked to him, suddenly disconcertingly bright. “You do as I say, little son. You get well...”
“For what?” he burst out desperately. “To live as a cripple? I was no good as a wizard, and now as a weapon, too, I am flawed...”
“Then be just a man.” She seemed to forget that her yarn had become tangled in her too-long black sleeves and resumed the steady clacking of her needles, her little white head bent over them, her face in the crossed lights of the window and the fireplace nearby like a very wrinkled apple at the bottom of the winter barrel. “Is it so hard?”
Caris said softly, “Yes.”
“Are you sasennan of the Council?”
There were times when Aunt Min reminded Caris of the old weapons riddle among the sasenna—that hatpins could also draw blood. After long silence he stammered, “I vowed to be so, to the end of my life. But I don’t know.”
She made no reply to that. Caris realized the clicking of the needles had stilled and, turning his head on the pillow, saw that she had fallen asleep.
For a long time he lay still, staring at the play of honey-colored firelight on the red cedar of the rafters overhead. He felt as if his life had been laid down on the coverlet beside his remaining hand, and that it was now his choice as to whether he would pick it up again.
The numbness of his soul, cracking these long weeks, had broken like spring ice, and pain welled through like a dark fluid—the pain of a child whose soul will not bow to the responsible rhythms of seedtime and harvest, no matter how he loves them and those who try to teach them to him, the pain of a youth whose inner magic is simply not strong enough to make him a mage. At the age of sixteen he had vowed away that pain, the pain of choosing and of wanting. As a result, he was aware now that he had little experience of either.
Tears leaked from his eyes, hot on his temples—not the stifled, hurtful tears of anguish shed at his grandfather’s murder, but tears of weariness and of deeper grief that leached from his soul poisons of which he had long been unaware. As a sasennan, it was expected of him that he refuse to continue as a cripple in his life—he who, like a fighting-dog, had been trained for nothing else.
And yet...
As if a door had been opened, he seemed to smell again the fragile sweetness of the dried herbs in Antryg’s medical pouch that had been left behind, with so many other things, in the chapel on the north bank of the Glidden. The kinesthetic memory of sifting salts and powders together came back to him and Antryg’s deep voice, speaking of the qualities of certain plants—ground holly for rheumatism, slippery elm for disorders of the bowels, the white berries of mistletoe for bleeding. He recalled the way his hands had warmed when the healing light passed from them into the body of another and the shattering touch of a newborn child’s mind on his...
He was not aware that he had slept until he began to wake again, floating, it seemed, a few inches beneath the surface of dreams, aware that the firelight had deepened to amber with the turning of the afternoon light. He was aware of the small warmth of Kyssha lying curled against his side, her nose under what was left of his bandaged hand, and of the strength of Pella’s fingers over his own. From somewhere in the room, he heard the rustle of silk taffeta and Pharos’ voice saying softly, “I thought I should find you here.”
The hand over his flinched, but did not release its hold.
“I just thought you ought to know, my little Princess, that Leynart has indeed fallen ill with smallpox. The mage Bel-Caire is with him. So it seems you did save my life.”
He heard her take in breath to answer, then hesitate for a moment, as if not sure what to say to those inscrutable blue eyes. Then she spoke, her deep voice like an alto flute in the gloom. “I’m sorry Ley is ill.”
Pharos sniffed. There was the muted click of high heels on the parquet of the floor—Caris remembered, half-dreaming, that the Regent walked very quietly—and the overwhelming waft of orris-root perfume. “Tedious little bitch. I expect if he survives, his looks will be gone, though I’ll see he gets some reward for his devotion.”
Pella’s voice was angry. “He only did it for love of you.”
“Let himself be made a dupe? Tried to work magic on me that he didn’t understand, on the bare word of someone he didn’t know that it was for his own good and mine, and not my heir’s? That silken rat you call
a dog has more brains—more courage, too.”
“That’s still no cause to be cruel.”
“As far as I’ve ever been able to ascertain, my little—Pellicida...” Caris heard him change his form of address to her and knew that, again, he had met her eyes. “...the world has never had any cause to be cruel to me or to you. But I think we’ve both suffered a certain amount of pain anyway. I’m sorry,” he added, his voice halting on the words. “You did not have to save my life. I pay Kanner to do things like that. Hurting the weak is a habit with me—a bad one, like biting my fingernails. I’ll try not to do it to you again. You had at least one good reason to wish me dead—was this young man another?”
“No.” Pella’s hand closed more tightly around Caris’ fingers, and he heard the slide of her hair over her satin shoulders as she bowed her head. “Neither of us wished you dead.”
“Ah.” The way she had spoken the word “us” was, even to Caris’ ears, unmistakable. “I thought I did not recognize him as one of my men, in spite of the uniform.” There was a slight, undefinable shift in the harsh voice. “They say you’re with child. Is this true?”
Again he heard the dry slither of her hair.
“Mine?”
“Yes.”
Caris opened his eyes, to see those two forms silhouetted in the amber light, Pharos standing like some pretty doll in black and gold, two white fingers emerging from an explosion of sable lace to rest lightly beneath Pella’s chin. The girl was gazing up into his face, her green eyes unwavering, looking very young and yet very calm, as she had in the clash with Leynart—the face of a sasennan who is also a queen.
Pharos’ mouth twitched in a wry expression. “A pity, in a way,” he said at last. “A madman, a credulous fool, and an idiot are no advertisement for a dynasty, whatever our respective families might say. I am not good myself, any more than I am a man for women, but I do know goodness when I see it—and I know that the good are often happy as well.”
There was a long pause as he studied her, this girl whose spirit he had never been able to break, and the scorn in his eyes with which he looked upon a hostile world seemed to abate, as it had abated a little in the study at Devilsgate.
“Well,” he said at last, “God knows I have little use for a woman, except to bear me an heir, and you seem to be fulfilling that part of what strikes me as a rather agricultural custom. So I will ask of you only that you raise my child and whatever other children you may happen to bear, with a sense of responsibility for the Empire and whatever happiness you can manage to give them as well.” Picking up her other hand, he kissed it, turned in a great rustling of black silk ribbons, and walked toward the door.
Pella rose, holding out her hand. “Pharos...”
He paused, looking back. “Yes, Pellicida?”
“What about Antryg and Joanna?”
The Regent hesitated for a long moment, the old vindictive paranoia gleaming once more in his pale blue eyes. “They betrayed me,” he said at last, with soft and vicious finality in his voice. “Both of them.”
“They were trying...”
“We have Windrose’s confession,” Pharos cut her off, his shrill voice suddenly harsh. “That same document exonerates your friend here...” The diamonds of his rings glittered sharply around the great, cut hematite in the middle, live stars circling a dead one, as he gestured to Caris. Then, he went on quietly, as a ruler explaining a decision to a counselor he trusts, “You must have known there was never hope for his reprieve. The messenger has already left for the Silent Tower. Sentence on them both will be carried out tomorrow.”
“Both?” protested Pella. “Joanna...”
The small hand waved aside her fear. “Oh, never fret. It isn’t your affair...” Pella started to rise, and Pharos went on hastily, “Of course, nothing fatal will be done to her—banishment—imprisonment...” But Caris saw his pale eyes shift from hers as he turned toward the door and heard the careless evasiveness of the voice. Caris knew that Pharos lied.
Even through the thick walls of the Silent Tower, Joanna heard the stormwinds rise, groaning in the wheel-spoke rafters overhead. As Antryg had said, even in the summertime, the Tower was icy cold; now in the dead of winter, the wind slipped like black snakes through the barred and hidden ventilation slits to drain the warmth of the room. She and Antryg had sat for a long time before the fire, sharing his scruffy cloak and one of the quilts from the bed, while the two hasu watching them shivered slightly, having indignantly refused Antryg’s offers of other blankets.
They had talked, of California, of Mellidane, of Antryg’s village of Velskonoe on the edge of the taiga forest deep in the Sykerst, whence Suraklin had taken him as a child, of Star Wars and the different types of magic, and of the possibility of Joanna’s imprisonment for a greater or lesser time in this world.
“I tried to do what was best,” Antryg said softly, his breath stirring the ends of her hair on top of her head. “Unfortunately, it’s something I’ve never been terribly good at. I couldn’t leave Caris, and if I’d simply sent you away, you wouldn’t have gotten far before the wizards caught you anyway. There were still abominations about, too.”
“And I wouldn’t have gone.” She raised her cheek from his chest long enough to push clear one of his trashy glass necklaces, then settled it back again.
“Oh, Joanna.” He sighed, and tightened his arms around her shoulders. “I did want to keep you out of it, as much as I could. It isn’t the first time my friends have been hurt through my meddling. It’s just that I needed you too much...”
“Hey, they always said computer consultant was a high-demand field.”
He laughed softly and looked down into her face. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
She knew it hadn’t been and felt her throat tighten again with tears. But all she said was, “I knew the job was dirty when I took it.” She wondered, feeling the hardness of muscle and rib through the baggy folds of the robe beneath her cheek, how long they would keep her prisoner here, and if she would ever make it back to California. Her old life seemed very strange and distant to her. The thought of being here alone made her feel weak and frightened, but it was totally peripheral to that blacker grief she resolutely refused to contemplate, the knowledge that Antryg was going to die.
She had fought it as a rearguard action for so many months that at times it seemed completely unreal, and his perfectly genuine cheerfulness tricked her mind away from it still further. But she’d seen it in the eyes of the Church dogs and heard it in the whispers of the mages who guarded her cell. Antryg was going to die and, in all probability, die tomorrow.
After tomorrow, she would never see him again.
Except, perhaps, in dreams.
In the darkness of the twisted stairwell, Joanna heard the moan of the wind and then the Lady Rosamund’s voice, raised in indignation, “Don’t be absurd! The Regent has no intention of letting her go and you know it!”
Then she heard old Minhyrdin the Fair’s creaky little wheeze, coming closer with the scuffle of her laborious feet. “Nonsense. What know you of the Regent’s plans—or care?” The two women, lady and crone, appeared in the darkness of the doorway. With an impatient sign, the Lady Rosamund dismissed the two guards. Aunt Min peered up at the elegant Lady with a shrewd old eye and added, “Or do you care what Pharos thinks?”
“Of course not!” her Ladyship retorted hotly. “But simply to go against his orders...”
“His orders have not yet arrived,” the old lady pointed out blandly, turning her head a little, because of the stooping of her bent back, to look up at Lady Rosamund. “How are we to know his intention? His messenger has been delayed by the storm.” Aunt Min’s black robe was wet through and her cloak, patched, shabbier even than Antryg’s, was covered with flakes of melting snow and ice. She was drawing off her knitted red and green mittens and getting the ends of her muffler tangled in her eternal knitting, which, clotted with ice, was still in its basket under her arm.
Lady Rosamund’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “When I scried the skies this morning, I saw no trace of a coming storm.”
Antryg smiled graciously from his seat beside the hearth and chipped in, “Well, these things come with practice.” Joanna almost stifled, trying not to laugh at the way the Lady’s green eyes flared with rage.
Unperturbed, Aunt Min continued, “But since we have received no orders, run along now and fetch what I asked you.”
“We have no right...”
The withered little ancient drew herself with some effort to her full height—an inch or so less than Joanna’s five-foot-barely. And Joanna, looking at that old, seamed face in its thin tatter of white hair, suddenly understood why she had once been called Minhyrdin the Fair by all. In a voice totally unlike her usual vague mumbling, she said, “I am the Archmage. I have the right.” Then she dropped her knitting and bent laboriously to pick it up, dropping the needles as she did so. She fumbled for them. The Lady Rosamund bent to help her, and Aunt Min waved her fussily away. “Oh, let it be, Rosie! Now run along and do as I asked.”
Stiffly, her Ladyship straightened up and strode with an indignant billow of black robes into the darkness of the stair. Joanna and Antryg both got to their feet and went to help Aunt Min, Archmage of the Council of Wizards, collect her scattered belongings.
“Thank you,” the old lady said, shoving the sodden tangle of wool haphazardly back into her basket and sticking the needles into it at random. “Thank you, my dears.” She had to twist her spine to look up at Antryg’s great height. She reached out to pat his big, crooked-fingered hand. “You always were a good boy.”
He smiled down at her and held out his hand to help her to a chair. “No,” he said, with genuine regret. “But I always did want to be. I never thanked you for speaking out for me at the end of summer when they brought me back here...”
The Silicon Mage Page 32