Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady

by Rebecca Bradley

  I recognized that particular quality of impatience, too. At last I could move. I took a few paces forwards into a patch of moonlight and stared up at her with my jaw hanging slack.

  She made a soft sound, something between a moan and a gasp. She stepped back and turned to run. I cried, "No!"—and leapt at the base of the cliff, and started doing my incompetent best to scrabble straight up the vertical face to reach her, managing by a miracle to get more than halfway there before crashing down again in a shower of pebbles. Above me, a cry. Panting on my belly among the stones, I heard rapid footsteps, and looked up to see that the clifftop was empty.

  "No!" I bellowed, "come back!"

  I raised myself as far as my hands and knees and took a ragged breath. There was a quantity of blood on the stones and I realized with no interest that it was mine. Head spinning, I staggered the rest of the way to my feet, took a few steps sideways, and lurched directly into a soft but solid object. After a confused moment, I flung my arms around it.

  It said in Gillish: "There is a path, you know."

  I jerked at the back of the veil until it pulled away from its fastenings and floated to the ground. Calm now and moon-pale, she stared back at me.

  "It's you," I breathed. "Calla, it's you."

  * * *

  27

  "YOU KNEW VERY well it was me," she said. "Are you hurt?" Stunned by the sheer wonder of finding her alive, I could not answer her at once, and I hardly noticed the tone of her voice and how stiffly she was standing in my arms. The golden mist that often signalled the Lady's interference in my affairs also began to gather inside my eyes and over the next few minutes the dry bushes around us budded and blossomed, but these minor matters did not bother me until later. I could entertain only one miracle at a time.

  I wanted to sing; I wanted to hold Calla, touch her, pick her up and leap about with her, and then collapse with her on to the grass that had mysteriously begun to sprout out of the bare rock under our feet, and wipe out once and for all the grief of the last six years. She stepped back and I moved with her.

  She struck my arms down and pushed me away.

  "Stop this. Let me be."

  Stunned, I peered at her through the golden mist. It had finally penetrated that she did not look all that happy to see me. Her chin was high, her eyes were narrow, her face was cool in the moonlight. She was, for all that, so beautiful in my eyes that I found it hard to breathe when I looked at her. For a moment it occurred to me that I might be dreaming, but I rejected that theory at once. This was no dream. In my dreams, Calla was friendlier.

  "Calla, it's me. Don't you know me? It's Tigrallef."

  "Of course I know who you are. I recognized you in the Sacellum."

  "Then why—?"

  "Why did you come after me?" she interrupted. "Why couldn't you leave me alone?"

  Honesty took over. "I thought you were someone else."

  "Someone else?"

  "Oh, yes. I thought you were dead." Remembering my grief, I tottered towards her again, half-crazed with the need to touch her, but she took another step back.

  "Better that you still thought so." She turned away.

  "Calla!"

  At the pain in my voice, she looked at me again, a long and thoughtful look, and her face softened—a little. "I'm sorry. I've had hours to think this over, but I suppose you haven't, not if you didn't know it was me. And you've already managed to hurt yourself! You're not one grain more sensible than you used to be." She raised her hand reprovingly towards my torn and bleeding chest.

  I flinched away, not because her touch would hurt, but because I knew the damage under my bloodstained tunic was already healing with embarrassing speed, by grace of the Lady, and I did not want to trade shock for shock. I caught her hand in both of mine. It was softer than it used to be.

  "Never mind about me, it's hardly even a scratch. But what's the matter with you? Look at me, Calla—stop treating me like a stranger."

  She did not take her hand away, but it had about as much warmth in it as an empty glove. "I'm sorry, Scion. Of course it's good to see you." Her voice was polite and very formal. "I'm happy that we can meet again as friends."

  I gaped at her.

  "What?"

  "I said, I am happy we can meet again as friends, after all this time."

  "Friends?"

  "I should hope so. To be quite honest, I didn't think you'd remember me so charitably—if you remembered me at all." Her mouth curved in a smile as thin and cool as a crack in a block of ice.

  "What?" My own mouth was doing a kind of gasping-fish imitation. I stopped it, and gathered my breath. Suddenly I was outraged. "Charitably! Friends! What kind of pious rubbish is that?"

  "Tigrallef—"

  But I was well away. "Remember you!" I snorted at the sheer breathtaking immensity of the understatement. "Remember you! How could I forget you? I'll forget my own name before I forget yours. There wasn't a night in the last six years when I didn't dream about you. Not a day went by that I didn't grieve for you. Charitably! Friends!"

  Her face hardened again. She snatched her hand back. "You must stop talking like this. You're making it harder for both of us."

  "Making what harder?"

  "Making it harder for us to part as friends," she snapped.

  At that my anger froze into terrible dread, the dread of losing her a second time. The golden motes were thick in my eyes now—the mountain was rolling uneasily under our feet, the white blossoms whipping on the bushes in a vicious, short-lived blast of icy wind. Calla shivered and pushed her long windblown hair back over her shoulders in a way that pierced me with its familiarity.

  "Listen to me," she said. "Six years is a long time. We're settled in different lives now, we're different people. I'm trying to be sensible about this."

  I stared at her for several moments. At first glance she looked prepared to be very sensible indeed. No nonsense about this astonishingly resurrected Calla: firm forbidding red slash of mouth, firm high-held chin, arms crossed like a barrier, a genuine certified one-woman fortress with her gatehouse securely locked and barred. I went on staring, however. Something struck me as not quite convincing—the depth to which her nails were cutting into her palms, for example. I peered at her through the golden motes, frowning, until finally her eyes were the first to fall.

  "Don't look at me like that."

  "But I think you're lying to me."

  "I am not! You assume too much. I'm leading my own life now, I'm happy in Vassashinay and I didn't ask you to come here. Go back to the Sacellum and never try to see me again." She pointed down the path with a theatrical gesture, not her style at all.

  Now, if I had thought she was telling even a small selection of the truth, I would have swallowed my agony, patted her on the cheek and walked away; but I am an expert in knowing when I'm not wanted, having had much experience in that regard, and Calla showed none of the telltale signs. It seemed to me on the contrary that, behind the fortress façade, it was breaking her heart to send me away.

  "I'll go if you truly want me to," I said slowly, "but at least talk to me for a little first. I have so many questions. How did you survive the shipwreck? How did you get to Vassashinay? Why didn't you return to Gil?"

  She said nothing.

  "Six years, Calla! Why did you let me go on grieving? Not so much as a word to let me know you were safe—"

  She kept her eyes on the ground. "I couldn't know you'd be fool enough to grieve," she interrupted primly. "After all, I was the one who betrayed you to the Sherank."

  "Odd, I hadn't thought about that in years. You weren't to blame, not really."

  She glanced up. "You blamed me then, Scion. Anyway, I knew if I left you alone, you'd forget me in time, and find a woman you could be happy with. And you see? I was right." The voice and the face were rock-hard, but I saw a single tear take shape at the corner of one eye and spill on to her cheek. I was beginning to understand.

  "You mean Rinn?"


  Another tear formed. I do not think she noticed she was crying.

  "Yes, of course. I saw her with you in the courtyard. She's very beautiful. I'm glad for you, Tig, I really am."

  I reached out and wiped the tear off her cheek. "Yes, you look glad." I started to shake. A great ball of laughter was jammed in my throat.

  "It's not funny. Stop laughing."

  "I see it all now. You think I'm in love with that gilded she-monster. You think I married her by choice. You're trying to be dignified about it—oh, this is rich."

  "Stop it!"

  "I'll wager you spent all afternoon thinking it over and deciding what to do. You came out here because you were too miserable to sleep. You weren't going to acknowledge that you were here, were you? You were going to hide behind your veil until we went away."

  "No!" A pause. "Yes." She was crying in earnest now. Suddenly she threw herself against me, weeping with great heaving shudders that shook both of us. I eased her down into the grass and lay with her in my arms, stroking her hair, staring up at the studded sky and at the white masses of blossom, which even at that interesting moment caused me a qualm of anxiety. Then Calla's sobs died away and she sat up shakily, and looked down at me.

  "You mean, you don't love that woman?"

  "Never did," I said happily, reaching up to push her hair away from her face. "My marriage was a political arrangement, forced on me by the Primate of the Flamens. You never met him, did you? Lucky Calla. No, I don't love Rinn. I love you. Do you still love me?"

  "You pocketing fool, why else would I have been so miserable?" she said—but tenderly. Then she started to sob again, which was confusing.

  "What's wrong now? I thought we'd just sorted everything out. We've found each other again, we're both alive, I love you, you love me. What could be better?"

  "But you'll be leaving Vassashinay soon."

  "When I leave Vassashinay," I said firmly, "you'll go with me and Rinn won't. I'm not losing you again. Now do you feel better?"

  She did not look exactly thrilled; she looked thoughtful. "It may not be that easy—I haven't told you everything yet."

  I sat up and looked straight into her eyes. "Neither have I." I was thinking of the Lady, who, it now occurred to me, was conspicuous by her absence. It was not like her to be tactful. I breathed my first prayer of appreciation in a very long time and put the thought of her away. "Never mind, we can bare all our secrets to each other later. We're going to have plenty of time, Calla, all the time in the world."

  "But it's important—"

  I stopped her protest by the simple, effective and personally rewarding tactic of fastening my mouth on to hers. She carried on trying to talk for a moment, then her arms moved around me and she held me as closely as even I could have wished; and at that point, a fire that I had carefully banked down and buried and tried to forget about for six long loveless years burst gloriously into flame.

  After the conflagration we lay together for a long time, head to head, toe to toe, on the convenient grass under the massed and uncalled-for blossoms, and only when dawn began to outline the grey edge of the Sherkin Sea did I say to Calla, tracing my hand down the satin skin of her back: "What did you want to say to me that was so important?"

  "Oh," she said drowsily, "I was going to tell you about your son."

  * * *

  28

  THE SACELLUM GLEAMED like a bank of new snow in the early morning sunlight. I paused by the main doorway to allow a file of white-veiled apprentice Daughters to come out, each with a pottery amphora slung on her shoulder. I stretched and yawned and tried to look casual, just a man returning from a brisk sunrise constitutional, but none of them seemed interested. Calla had taken a quarter-hour headstart and used a different entrance so there would be nothing to associate her arrival with mine. Secrecy, she told me, was vital.

  I knew that anyway, but I stupidly thought at first that it was only on my account. What I had not yet realized was that Calla and the child were as much prisoners in their own way as I was in mine; and I had yet to recognize the single greatest danger that faced us.

  A few Daughters were in the courtyard, busy at little morning tasks. I turned casually into the staircase leading to our quarters, then sprinted up the stairs three at a time. Nobody was up yet; the corridor was deserted. Rinn had obtained the Divinatrix's assurance that nothing would be needed from us until an hour before noon, and it seemed that the whole party was taking this opportunity to be indolent, including the Vassashin—masollar headaches in a few cases, I suspected. I slipped into Shree's cell and found him fast asleep. With all the abandon of sheer happiness, I poured about half a beaker of cold water over his face. He spluttered murderously as he came awake and caught sight of me. I beamed at him.

  "Someday," he growled, "I'm not going to realize in time who you are, and I'm going to split you from—"

  "Calla's alive."

  "—your chin to the nape of your neck, the long way round—what did you say?"

  I grabbed a nose-rag from the shelf and tossed it to him. "Calla's alive. She's here, in the Sacellum."

  Shree stared at me while he swabbed his face; then he closed his eyes. "Oh, yes."

  "Really, it's true. She survived the shipwreck, and she's been here ever since. I spent most of the night with her—I left her not half an hour ago."

  Eyes still closed, he clucked his tongue sadly. "I thought you said masollar didn't affect you."

  "It's nothing to do with the masollar." I shook him; he responded by turning over and appearing to go back to sleep, so this time I used a whole beaker of cold water. Shree sat up so violently that he grazed my chin with his forehead.

  "Tigrallef," he said dangerously, "you've had another one of your tupping dreams. You can tell me all about it later, but now I would like to sleep a little longer, if you don't mind."

  I turned to his jug for another beakerful of water. The threat alone was enough to get his feet menacingly on the floor, so I set the beaker down.

  "Listen to me," I said. "The woman in the courtyard yesterday, the one who dropped her jug of oil—I saw her leaving the Sacellum in the middle of the night and I followed her. I thought it was the shint from Iklankish, and that maybe I could talk to her and tell her what a gentle, sensitive person you'd become—yes, all right, perhaps I was going to stretch the truth a bit—but when I caught up with her, it was Calla. Calla."

  Shree's face was still sceptical. Then he noticed my torn tunic, still stained with a residuum of dried blood, and he nodded grimly.

  "I see you managed to have an accident as soon as you were out of my sight. Tell me, did you hit your head when you got that?"

  "No." Elated as I was, a certain irritation was setting in. Off to my right, something pinged. I looked over, startled, and saw a tiny cloud of smoke above the table where the beaker had been; as I watched, it gradually precipitated on to the table as a neat pile of terracotta-coloured dust. A moment later the water-jug did something similar, the water itself vanishing in a billow of steam. Shree and I stood there for some moments, looking at the table. Shree cleared his throat.

  "Did you do that?"

  I cleared my throat, too. "Not that I know of." Belatedly, however, I was beginning to see a pattern of sorts in all these unsolicited acts of the Lady, from the Primate's near-fatal encounter with a beaker of wine to the blossoms on a bank of dead bushes. Uneasily, with my eyes on the table in case it started acting up as well, I began to give Shree the bare bones of my story. At first his disbelief seemed to have vanished along with the water-jug, but when I got as far as Calla falling into my arms, he interrupted me.

  "You're certain it was really Calla? In the flesh, I mean; the original flesh."

  I was taken aback. "Of course it was Calla. How could I be mistaken about that?"

  "It's not a trick of the Lady's—or your own wishful thinking?"

  I squinted at him, not understanding.

  "I've seen you and the Lady bring legends to life,
Tig," he said gently. "What if this is—"

  "It's not." From the corner of my eye, I saw the table tremble. When I frowned at it directly, it stopped and looked solid again, an innocent construction of wood and iron with two little heaps of dust on top and no intention of misbehaving. "I'm sure it's not," I said loudly, and then added, with a touch of smugness, "anyway, there are details in her story that even I couldn't have dreamed up."

  "Tell me."

  I moved to the window and pushed the slats aside. The courtyard was empty now except for a pair of Daughters drawing water from the well in the corner. The processional door was propped open and someone was dimly visible in the chamber inside, scrubbing the floor on hands and knees. A peaceful, domestic scene.

  "Shree, the question you should be asking is how Calla survived and came to Vassashinay, not whether she's a product of the Lady plus my overheated imagination."

  "All right." He came to stand beside me, followed my gaze dubiously to the open processional door. "Tell me," he repeated.

  Deep breath. "To begin with, she recalls nothing about the wreck of the silver ship. I remember now—Lord Kekashr had her drugged just before she left the Gilgard, after that very decent chaos she created."

  "I remember," said Shree sombrely.

  "All she remembers is that she woke up in one of the silver ship's smallboats, all alone, bobbing around on an easy sea, in the middle of a mass of wreckage and drowned Sherkin sailors. She had no idea who put her there, or what had happened, or where she was, or why the smallboat hadn't been smashed to tinderwood along with the ship, and herself drowned along with the others. She was drenched, which means she must have been in the water at some point, but the boat did not have so much as a crack in the boards nor a drop of seawater in the bottom, and there was a cask of fresh water and a bag of rations under the thwarts—the kind your army used to take to battle, I suppose."

  Shree frowned. "All smallboats were stocked in case the crews had to take to them in a hurry. And they were sturdy little boats as well, but I remember the violence of those waves, Tig, and I don't believe—"