by Carol Berg
As if lifted from his bed by her slender hand alone, my father rose and stood by the Lady, then stepped with her through the shimmering portal that appeared in the center of the room. As he and the Lady D'Sanya vanished from the room, his voice lingered in my mind. Until we say enough .
Until then, Father , I said, staring like a mindless idiot at the spot where the portal had closed in upon itself.
As Aimee and T'Laven hurried off to inform Ven'Dar, my mother returned from the next room. Arms folded, she stood by the tall windows and glared at the bright, empty morning in Aimee's garden. "I expected a demon," she said after a long silence. "A hag, at least, that I could hate respectably."
"She looks younger than Aimee." Trivia .. . while my mind was reeling. Of course her appearance didn't matter. What I saw, what I felt didn't matter.
"How will you begin?"
The very question I'd been asking myself. I had been so sure I would recognize corruption. I would report it to my father and the prince, and then I could run away again and bury myself where I didn't have to think of the past. But all of that changed when I saw her. The Lady D'Sanya had come from Zhev'Na; that part of her story was true. Her eyes had told me. And because of that I could not trust her. But if she was evil, then never had evil been wrapped in such marvels.
"I'm going to tell her I was raised in Zhev'Na."
My mother spun about, her hair glinting in the early sunlight. "Is that wise? I thought you were going to keep it secret, to try to catch her in some knowledge she shouldn't have."
"I think she already knows," I said. "Just as I would have known she had been there even if I'd never heard her story. I won't tell her all of it, just that I was taken like other Dar'Nethi children, and lived there until I was rescued. As long as no one recognizes Father or me, she won't know everything . . . unless she is even more powerful than Ven'Dar says, in which case none of this makes any difference."
"Walk carefully, love. I need you a while longer." As always, my mother's trust eased my lingering doubts. She took my arm, and we left the empty sickroom behind, walking down the winding passageways of Aimee's house in search of Paulo and breakfast.
Chapter 5
I left Avonar in the early afternoon four days after my father's departure. My mother had already written ten letters for me to take to him, and filled my saddlepacks with warm shirts, books, and pastries and tea my father especially liked. She had wandered through our rooms in Aimee's house all that morning, picking up this and that—a pen, a magnifying lens, a small sewn pillow filled with grain that Kellea had been able to warm with sorcery and then tuck in the bed with him to soothe the persistent ache in his back—asking if I thought he would want the things now he would be able to sit up and to walk. Before I could answer, she would throw the object down again in frustration.
"She said I could come and go as I please, Mother. And it's only a day's ride. I'll be back and forth as often as you like. I'll ask him what he wants and needs, and you can send it back with me."
She tossed a pair of boots on the bed, sending two pillows bouncing onto the floor. "You know this has nothing to do with tea or boots."
"I know."
I kissed her and left her in Mistress Aimee's charge. Aimee would need every bit of her cheer and patience to put up with her.
To venture out alone in Avonar felt awkward and conspicuous, so I had asked Paulo to ride along with me, feeling I needed his good eyes and ears to watch my back. If anyone recognized me, matters could get very unpleasant. No one could tell by looking that Paulo was not Dar'Nethi. But if anyone did happen to discover it, we could always say he was a former Drudge, freed by the death of the Lords.
He agreed to go, of course, and we set out with as good spirits as fine weather and excellent horses can lend to a dismal journey. Once we had passed through the gates of Avonar and into the rolling countryside of the Vales, I at least felt that I could breathe again. But the farther we traveled, the more morose Paulo looked. Every time we rounded another bend in the road, he heaved a huge sigh.
"You can go back if you want," I said, after the first hour of it. "But I thought after so many days of inactivity, you might want to get away. Mistress Aimee's house isn't very lively, and when she isn't being excessively hospitable, or excessively cheerful, she is excessively quiet. Worse than me."
He popped his head up, scowling. "She's not at all. Not unpleasantly so. Only refined. And with Master Karon so ill, she wasn't going to—" He caught my look then, but couldn't bring himself to leave the lady undefended. "She's about perfect." Then he nudged, his mount to a brisk walk, as if riding ahead would punish my teasing. But I, in turn, spurred my horse deep and left him eating dust.
"Damnable belly-crawling worm-eater!" He raced me down the road until our judgment demanded we slow to spare the horses for the rest of the journey. It was the best thing we ever did together, to ride hard enough we could hear nothing but the roar of the wind and the chugging breath of our mounts, and could think of nothing but staying in the saddle, leaving every fear and worry subservient to speed and sweat and the dust of the road.
We arrived in the village of Gaelie near sunset. The houses and shops were tucked into the heavy growth of trees at the lower end of Grithna Vale as if they were shy of each other. It was a tidy place, everything neat and trimmed and freshly painted, unlike the Bounded, where the Singlars' tower houses were very like the people who lived in them, awkward and lopsided for the most part, and were never the same from one day to the next. Our houses grew, and though most were ugly, every once in a while, on some particular day, you might see a cornice or a window or a section of wall that was extraordinarily pleasing.
Gaelie was large enough to support a modest guesthouse frequented by the families of those in D'Sanya's hospice. The proprietor was a stumpy woman with a face like a granite cliff. Though I was more facile with the Dar'Nethi language, Paulo never seemed to need all that many words. He arranged for a room and a meal without any trouble.
The two of us spent the evening in the bustling common room, hoping to pick up some gossip about the Lady D'Sanya, but there was little to be had. A handful of local fellows pursued a serious conversation about weather working that I might have been interested in had the complex sorcery involved not required immense reserves of magical power. The weather in the Bounded was dreadful and seemed to be getting worse this year. But I only used what power grew in me naturally. Power-gathering carried risks I was not willing to invite.
Across the common room, a large family was celebrating a grandmother's birthday with loud toasts and speeches and much joking back and forth. They quieted only when one of them, a plain, blowsy woman whose fleshy body seemed anxious to escape her clothes, began to sing about sailing ships. I groaned inwardly. The woman's voice was wavering and thin, and it was obvious that her saga was to be a long one.
People settled into their chairs, lit pipes, and let their eyelids droop. Faces took on a look of contentment, even awe, that seemed entirely unwarranted by the talent of the performer. But then, I wondered. . . . My father had told me of Dar'Nethi Singers—his mother had been one of them—but I'd never heard one for my self. He'd said you had to close your eyes. And so I
did
"Close your eyes," I said, after only a moment, slamming my hand on Paulo's arm as he was digging his knife into a plate of mutton and mushrooms.
"You could come up four-fingered doing that," he said, his mouth already full and his knife heading back to the mutton.
"No, you need to experience this. Close your eyes." I closed my own again . . .
. . . and the blustering wind riffled my hair, and the white sails snapped and billowed above my head, sharply outlined against a cloudless blue sky. One of my hands gripped the rough, damp hemp of the bow lines, the other the polished rail. With a wet, booming crash, the bow dipped into a deep trough, and I shivered when the salt spray wet my thin shirt and runnels crept into my boots. . . .
"Cripes!" Whe
n I looked again, Paulo's hand was suspended in midair, a mushroom dangling from his knife dripping thick gravy on the table. His mouth hung open for a moment, until he blinked and lowered his hand, staring first at the Singer and then at me. "That's damned marvelous. Can you do that?"
"Certainly not. It's one of the Hundred Talents." Which meant that only those born to it, as I was born to soul weaving, possessed the skill. And even if singing was your primary talent, surely you had to have some reservoir of memory … of decent things … of beauty … to make such a vision. That would eliminate me. I sawed off a piece of the stringy mutton, watching the face of the blowsy woman as she sang. Her expression shifted subtly: shadowed, then light again, worried, then peaceful, changeable as I had read about the sea.
"There's nobody in this whole blasted world that's just ordinary," Paulo mumbled. "Singers. Soul Weaver. Horsemasters. Of all things . . ." He dug the point of his knife into the table.
"Don't you start that. She'll see what she needs to see. Just . . . when you go back to Avonar, talk to her. Tell her about all the things you do in the Bounded. No one in this world can do half the things you can. Don't think you have to race right back here as if I can't get my feet in my boots without you."
A noisy party burst through the door, informing the proprietor that they were Gardeners and Tree Delvers returning to Avonar from the borders of the Wastes. As the Singer continued her performance at one end of the room, the newcomers settled around a table, grumbling at the difficulties they'd experienced in getting their latest project to take hold. A man with a beard down to his waist joked about harvesting a bucket of Lady D'Sanya's tears to set their trees growing.
A few other people lingered in the corners: a slight, dark-haired youth huddled over a bowl of soup at the small table crammed up next the stairs, an old man and a young couple with their heads bent over ranks of brightly painted cards laid out on the table between them.
Not long after the Gardeners arrived, a knob-jointed fellow in a shabby velvet doublet carried in a heavy leather bag and asked one of the serving girls for the proprietor. Pulling a large, well shaped wooden bowl and a graceful hand-spindle from his bag and setting them on the table next to Paulo and me, he asked the formidable Mistress A'Diana if she needed an experienced Wood Shaper to serve her guesthouse. "Fine repairs or new work, indoors or out, for little more than my keep, mistress," he said, wrinkling his brow as he drew thumb and first finger around the battered corner of the table, leaving it smoothed and nicely angled.
"Have you references?" asked the big woman, examining his samples. "I've things need doing, but I don't hire without references."
"I've worked for a number of guesting houses," he said to her back, as she bent to see the repaired table corner. His voice dropped almost to a whisper. "But the folk who could recommend me are long dead." He looked wan and anxious, as if the dead proprietors were waiting to pop out from under the table and grab him.
"Long dead . . ." The proprietress looked up sharply, then straightened, snatched up the bowl and the spindle, and shoved them into the man's arms. "Get out of here, arrigh scheide !"
Two of the Tree Delvers growled and stood up, and the Weather Worker spun in his chair to look, almost toppling it in his haste. The pale Wood Shaper grabbed his bundle and scurried out of the room. The guests returned to their activities, but the conversation at several tables turned grim and quiet enough that we couldn't understand it.
"What did she call him?" asked Paulo. "Meat-eater?"
I shook my head. "Flesh-eater. It's an old Dar'Nethi name for the Zhid."
"But he wasn't—"
"No. Not any more. I guess some people don't care to do business with those who might have spitted their brothers on sticks." I sopped up the last of the gravy in my bowl with a hunk of bread, but then dropped the soggy bit without eating it.
As his gaze drifted over the other guests, Paulo wiped his knife on the last piece of bread. "But it wasn't their fault. And they don't even remember what wickedness they did, so Master Karon says. Might as well kill them as heal them if you're not going to let them live and work."
I shrugged. "Some of them wanted it. Liked it. They may not remember. But some wanted it." And I wondered if the restored Zhid truly forgot . . . deep in their bones . . . even if they knew it wasn't their fault.
We left before the Singer had finished her tale, as I was dozing in my wine. Anxious and unsettled, I'd not yet caught up with my sleep after sitting up with my father through his last night of illness.
"I can always tell when we're off on another chase," Paulo said as we trudged up the steep, narrow stair. "Always starts with you not sleeping right and me getting dragged off someplace I'd rather not be."
His turn to tease. But I hadn't forgotten Roxanne's letter, so I didn't laugh as I might have another time.
I decided that my first visit to the hospice had better be a careful one since I didn't know the lay of the land, so I left Paulo in town to listen for gossip while I rode alone through Grithna Vale. I wasn't prepared for the Vale of Grithna any more than I'd been prepared for the Lady D'Sanya.
The Vales of Eidolon are a series of broad valleys that seam the mountains ringing the royal city of Avonar. Each of the fifteen Vales has its own character, wild or cultivated, forested or grassy, dotted with towns and villages or sparsely settled. Grithna is a rugged area to the north of the city, one of the "lost Vales" that was destroyed either in the Catastrophe itself or in the early years of the war. Where limestone cliffs had once risen from thick forests and fertile meadows, nothing was left but dead trunks, parched earth, and blasted rubble.
But five months before, so Ven'Dar had told us, D'Sanya had come to Grithna and touched its barren earth with her tears. Now her Vale sported a woodland in its prime. Intermingled with a new growth of rowans and birches, the lifeless trunks of thick-boled oaks and ashes had developed wide, spreading canopies of green. Shrubs heavy with bright red berries grew thickly in any thread of sunlight, massing in colorful ranks along a rutted roadway that led up the heart of the valley.
As always when I saw such a place, my mind went out on its own, assessing where watchers could get the best view of the road, locating the rock piles where archers could take effective cover and harass an oncoming force, noting the crowding trees where warriors divested of noisy armaments could lurk and move unseen alongside their prey until the word was given. Unwary travelers along this road would be easy blood for the taking. The Lord Parven had been a master of military tactics. Though the Lords were no longer a part of me and their voices were long silenced, their lessons had not died with them.
In late morning, I reined in at the top of a long rise. Below me lay a well watered valley surrounded by barren peaks. Broad, green, stream-threaded meadows and a swath of woodland. Some cultivated fields. And a cluster of structures centered by a sprawling white house with a red tile roof, its walls hung with ten years' growth of ivy. A low wall of white stone completely surrounded the house and a vast expanse of the valley floor, some of the enclosure left in pasture, some carved into gardens and orchards. The wall had only one break, a single gate with two upright pillars and a stone lintel.
The day was fine and hot as I rode down the hill and across the half-league of meadow. The glare had me squinting. After five years living in the ever-night of the Bounded with its purple lightnings and green stars, I wasn't used to the sun. I didn't miss it all that much, not the way Paulo did.
The gate was not guarded. A child jumped down from her perch on the wall and pushed open the white ironwork as I approached. Before I'd even dismounted in the gravel yard, two Dar'Nethi men hurried out, offering to tether my horse in the shade of a spreading beech tree alongside two other mounts. If I had not fetched him in an hour, they would take him down to the stable to tend him. The Lady D'Sanya herself waited on the wide columned steps to greet me, a tall, slender, gray-haired man standing just behind her.
"Blessings of life," she called, smiling.
"Welcome, sir."
"Lady." Halfway between the house and the tether rail, I bowed and extended my hands, and then awkwardly retreated after my horse to retrieve the things I'd brought. I yanked two bags from my saddlepacks and held them up as if to explain why I had not rushed to her feet right away. "Some things for my father." I felt like a ten-year-old.
"Of course." Her gown floated as she moved, a gauzy thing, pure white, which set off the brilliant eyes that almost made me forget my purpose in coming. "Did you have a fair journey?"
"Quite fine," I said, as I walked across the gravel yard. Investigators had found two dead Zhid half a league from the place where she had walked out of the desert with blood on her tunic and a knife in her hand. I needed to remember that.
"You're staying in Gaelie? At the Hawk's Bill, I suppose. Mistress A'Diana looks grumbly, but is very kind."
"Yes."
Tongue-tied dolt . I couldn't come up with anything to say. How was I ever going to question her? And I had been giving advice to Paulo!
Stepping aside, her gown swirling about her like smoke, she extended a hand toward her companion. "May I present Na'Cyd, consiliar of this hospice, the dear gentleman who makes my life purest ease and pleasure. I have but to voice an idea, and Na'Cyd executes it more perfectly than I could imagine."
The man extended his palms, and I returned his grave politeness.
The Lady motioned to the wide doorway that centered the porch. Every one of her fingers had a silver ring on it, not gaudy but fine and delicate. "Please come in, Master … ?"
"Gerick. Please, just Gerick." Probably foolish to use my own name, but neither my father nor his Preceptors had ever published my name in Avonar, believing anonymity was safer for me. As poor as I was at this spying business, I wasn't sure I could manage a false name.
She smiled, and the sweat trickled down my neck. "I'll have someone bring you wine. Or perhaps cold ale would better suit this warm day?"