by Carol Berg
"A most determined young woman."
"She's nothing like I expected," I said, sudden heat sending me to throw open the windows.
When my father's smirk broke into a chuckle, I suggested, somewhat resentfully, that we play a game of chess. I did not tell him the full contents of D'Sanya's message. But it was good to hear him laugh.
I won the chess game handily. In ordinary times he would have bested me in ten moves, considering the image that ruled my thoughts—D'Sanya's shoulder, left bare by the dark blue gown she had worn on our last evening in Maroth—but he could not seem to strategize more than one move at a time. "Perhaps a walk will clear my head," he said, as if he'd never heard my repeated urging of the past days. "I don't get out enough."
Activity suited me as well, and we left by his back gate, taking a path that led into the wood. Even within the enchanted bounds of the hospice, the grounds were extensive and varied. After a while, the path began to look familiar.
"It's good to see you smile, Gerick. I suppose I shouldn't ask the cause."
I felt the blood rise in my face yet again. "It's nothing. It's just nice to be out." The place should be just ahead.
But I decided I must have been mistaken about our location. The oak in the center of this sunny clearing lay rotting, its ancient trunk split, and its roots exposed nakedly to the sun. This was not the clearing where D'Sanya and I had played hide-and-seek.
Our walk was the kind I liked best, where you didn't need to say much of anything, not because you had nothing to say, but because the other's presence and companionship and shared appreciation of the moment were enough. By the time we wandered back into the hospice garden, I felt a little more rational than I had all week. "I've just time enough to ride down to Gaelie and fetch any letters Paulo's brought from Avonar," I said, calculating that I could be back well before my dawn ride with D'Sanya. "I could take any you've written for Mother, as well. Would you like that?"
"I've nothing to send." Though the day was warm, my father hunched his shoulders and drew his cloak tight as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. "Must you leave again so soon? You've things to do here. You've not tested me since you've come back."
"You've seemed so much better today." At least until that moment. "I hate to keep intruding on you."
"It's why I'm here, Gerick. We have to know. You were away for a long time . . . days . . . weeks . . . And the past few days have been wretched." He shook his head and rubbed his brow tiredly.
"Of course, I'll do whatever you want." I took his arm and turned back toward his apartments, dreading what I might find inside him.
This fretfulness tainted his thoughts—a restlessness, a chafing at confinement. The deadness of his senses was, if anything, more profound. Colors flowed together, one almost indistinguishable from another. I felt no variation in temperature, unable to tell whether we sat by his fire or in his garden. Sounds seemed flat, harmonies impossible to hear, and if his memory spoke true, he could no longer tell the difference between wine and water in his mouth, or bread and paper.
But as I withdrew, I couldn't decide if these were truly changes in him, or if they were the result of my own perverse vision. Only my image of D'Sanya remained fixed, while the rest of the world seemed more distorted by the hour. I said nothing of what I found. "Not much change," I said. Of course it was so. I willed that it be so.
These joinings were never easy. It took most of an hour to let the insistent hammering of my blood fall silent. Paulo always said it was only right, as "bodies and souls weren't meant to get taken apart and jumbled back together." I couldn't help but agree, especially when I was trying to ease back into my own body and felt the raw abrasion of flesh and bone as my mind reconnected with my own senses.
On this particular day, as I sprawled on his couch trying to remember how to pump air into my lungs and blood into my heart without thinking about it constantly, ray father riffled listlessly through a pile of papers on his desk. "Do you think . . . would you stay a while longer and help me organize the papers Bareil sent from Windham? I need another pair of hands and eyes."
"Of course. Whatever you want." I massaged my temples with fingers that obeyed my wishes only reluctantly.
"Bareil is a dear friend, but rather than getting only the papers I put on the list, the silly fool sent me every scrap of writing in my study. I keep putting off sorting them. It seems such an overwhelming task. But if I could get it done, then perhaps I could move on to something useful. Do some writing. Something."
To hear my father falter in his struggle to keep living distressed and unnerved me. He had always been so sure of himself, so easy and generous with his immense talents, so at peace and good-humored with his limitations. In that moment I began to believe that we were going to lose him, no matter the outcome of this venture. A detestable thought.
I jumped up. "I'll be happy to help. Show me what you want me to do. Anything."
For the next few hours we sorted out the five hundred or so pages of my father's manuscript. Words and phrases kept leaping out of his bold handwriting, snatches of the story he'd set down, the history of his— our—people and their life in the world where we were born. He had taken his own experiences and the stories he'd been told as a child and woven them together with the tales he'd learned from Dar'Nethi Archivists here in Gondai and the written histories of the Four Realms. The narrative was unexpectedly fascinating, and I was soon reading more than sorting.
"So what do you think?" asked my father, noting my distraction. "I wasn't sure you would find the story all that interesting."
"I'd never really understood about the Rebellion, that our problems in the mundane world were our own fault."
Hundreds of years before, the Dar'Nethi Exiles had actually ruled in the Four Realms for a few years, claiming they would bring justice and enlightenment to the kingdoms. But instead they had turned into worse despots than those they had supplanted, using terror and sorcery to bend the people to their will.
"Well, not entirely our fault, of course," said my father, "and it wasn't all of us . . ."
"You give such a different view of the Dar'Nethi," I said after he'd talked for a while. "It's hard to imagine that the Exiles, who came to live the Way so generously and so well in our world, came from this same Gondai."
"You've had no experience of ordinary life among us. How could you appreciate our better parts? And here . . . the long war affected souls as well as talent and power. They'll recover, though. Now the Lords are gone, of course they will. Power and passion . . . the balance of the worlds. Dassine once told me . . ."
Somehow touching on these subjects so close to his heart seemed to stimulate his faculties, so that we conversed as if his torpor had been only my imagination. The afternoon passed quickly into evening and dinner, and by the time I looked up, the sunlight told me it was too late to return to Gaelic So we kept talking about what I'd read, and whether or not the manuscript could ever be safely published in the Four Realms, and about the excerpts he'd prepared as university lectures before he'd fallen ill.
"From a time when I was younger than you, I dreamed of telling the story of my people at the University," he told me, staring at the red wine swirling in his crystal goblet. "I believed that those lecture halls housed the summit of all learning, lacking only the single discipline that was the most important to me—this history that even I knew so little of. Who'd have thought I'd come so close to accomplishing it?"
I knew better than to answer such melancholy with false hope. I wished I could say, "Perhaps you still shall. Perhaps another miracle will occur." It wouldn't. Not this time. I knew that now.
"If only someone could take these notes and do it for you."
A whimsical smile drifted across his tired face, and he settled back in his chair. "I've been wanting to talk to you about that. I stepped over the wall again while you were gone."
"Father!"
"No, you mustn't worry. I've not given up on our investigation …
or our agreement. It's just . . . something caught my eye, and I wanted to use a bit of sorcery. To see if I still could. I stayed only long enough to accumulate the power and spend it. A good thing I didn't need much. So I was able to step back before I became a gibbering idiot. Look in the top of that chest. You'll find a bundle wrapped in silk . . . yes, that's it. I've an idea about what to do with it, and I'd like your help . . ."
He had wrought a gift for my mother, and wished to surprise her with it at exactly the right moment. His plan was marvelous, its inherent charm and Tightness dimmed only by the fact that it must come to fruition after he was dead. We spent the next hour deciding how to go about it.
As I was pouring the last of the wine from the flask we'd shared at dinner so we could toast our plotting, we heard a quiet tapping on the door to his private garden. I had closed it earlier when the wind disturbed his papers. But his attendant always came from the public courtyard, never the private garden. Curious and careful, I pulled open the door.
"So you were holed up here. I hoped that might be," said the voice from the moon shadows. "The innkeeper said you'd not slept in the room for two nights running."
"What are you doing here?" I asked, hauling Paulo into the room and quickly closing the door behind him. "My not sleeping at the guesthouse for two nights does not constitute an emergency."
My father dimmed the lamps and made sure the curtains were drawn, then smiled and clasped Paulo's hand. "Gerick doesn't know you've been coming regularly to see me, Paulo. Though it's not your usual time. I thought you were off in Avonar."
"Not a regular visit tonight, my lord." He pushed my hand off his shoulder. "And it wasn't just the empty bed, though if you'd been whacked on the head again by whoever is the mysterious somebody you won't talk about, you might not take it so ill I'd taken note of it." He pulled a folded paper from his shirt and gave it to my father. "I've brought this from Prince Ven'Dar. He said it was important enough to send me right back with it before I'd so much as had a biscuit. That Je'Reint was with him"—Paulo always referred to him as that Je'Reint —"and he was worried as well."
While my father sat in his chair to read the letter, Paulo started casting his eyes about the place in a way no one who knew him could mistake.
"There's half a chicken and some plums left from dinner," I said, "and from the generosity of my heart, I'll sacrifice the last of the wine for you." I handed him my glass, which he drained in one swallow.
"Nub like you got no business drinking too much wine anyways," he said. "Lucky I grabbed a pie at Gaelie. Just need something to tuck around the edges."
"So you've been coming up here while I was gone?" He hadn't mentioned that last time we'd talked. What else had I missed in my distraction with D'Sanya?
"No use staying around Avonar with that Je'Reint in and out of the house every hour of every day. And Master Karon and I . . . we've had some business to see to. He seemed to think no one would notice me coming in or out of here if I was careful."
I waited for him to continue, but clearly no other explanation of their "business" was forthcoming. The chicken and fruit were gone almost as quickly as the wine, and Paulo had stretched out on the floor in front of the fire with his hands under his head and dozed off before my father looked up from the letter. I could tell from my father's troubled expression and his anxious glances at me that I wasn't going to like what he was about to say.
"So what is it? Has Je'Reint decided to reveal all to the Lady? Or perhaps set the Preceptors on me?"
"Another marshaled band of Zhid attacked a town in Astolle Vale," he said, folding the letter and tossing it on the table. "And they've had three independent reports of a massive force in the north. Reliable witnesses. Veterans of the war, who knew what they saw."
My dinner suddenly sat very heavily. "And Ven'Dar wants me to tell him how it's being done."
"Gerick . . ." He rubbed the tips of his fingers over his brow. "The Preceptors are at the end of their patience. They claim they need D'Sanya's power, her own formidable talents joined with the Heir's power that is hers by right, to put a stop to the Zhid rising, and so they're demanding that Ven'Dar abdicate in favor of the Lady D'Sanya now before his time is up."
"He mustn't do that! Not yet. She has secrets. And she isn't ready, even if everything is . . . honest . . . with her. She needs time. I need time. . . ." My words limped off into silence.
My father looked at me thoughtfully, closer than I wished, and I made some halfhearted attempt to put the remnants of Paulo's supper to rights, stacking greasy plates and bowls in the basket we left out for the attendant to take away. I had to explain.
"She wants to get the other hospice built. She's driven to help all these people and hasn't been interested in anything that might slow that down. When the time comes, she won't hesitate to take D'Arnath's chair. She believes it's her responsibility, but just now it's more important to her to . . . get her life in order … to feel right about it . . . find her place . . ." What had she meant in her message about foregoing her destiny?
"What does she say about the raids?"
"She doesn't like to talk about them. She wants to believe the Lords are defeated. She hated them . . . still hates them. She trusts Ven'Dar and Je'Reint."
"And if she were to be convinced that Ven'Dar is not capable of handling the Zhid? What would she do? Where would she start?"
"She doesn't like to run things by herself—detests having to choose between different ways of doing things. It's why she had so much trouble with the Builders in Maroth. One Builder would tell her one thing that made sense, and she'd do it, and then another Builder would tell her another thing. And that made sense, too. But she wasn't even sure enough of her decision to tell the first one she'd changed her mind. She understands this about herself, though, so I believe she'd get people to help her . . . like Ven'Dar and the Preceptors. Take their advice. But she believes .. . she is . . . D'Arnath's daughter, and if she decides she must take his place, she won't shrink from it. That's what I think. But I can't say for sure, of course, or we'd be finished here. I don't know." Could she forgo duty for anyone … for me?
My father nodded and picked up the letter again. "Ven'Dar's best minds, those who've studied the Zhid for their entire lifetimes, cannot explain these attacks. No one can find the villains. Fear is growing. Trade in the remote Vales and the new settlements is grinding to a halt. The recovery and resettlement of the Wastes is paralyzed. If you could come up with anything to help them understand it, you could give the Lady and Ven'Dar—and us—more time."
Time wasn't going to solve anything. Only truth. I had begun to need certainty as I had never needed it my life. "All right. I'll try."
"I know what I'm asking of you, and if there were any other way . . ."
"I said I'll manage."
I didn't dawdle. It wouldn't do to think too much. I set the basket outside the courtyard door, a signal for the attendant not to intrude, locked both sets of doors, and then I shook Paulo, a mug of hot saffria from the pot on the sideboard in hand. "Come on, I need you awake. Drink this."
"What's wrong?" he said, after the saffria and my prodding had him alert again.
"I'm going to try to remember some things. It will be hard, and I'll have to . . . concentrate … on some bad times."
He sat up straighter, no more traces of sleep. "Zhev'Na, then."
"I need you to make sure I don't take too long about it—no more than an hour—and that I'm … all right. . . myself . . . when I get back. It might take both of you. Father, you'll need to look me in the eye and command me to speak my name"—Paulo's eyes widened when I stuffed the handle of the poker in his hand—"and you make sure I answer the right thing. I mean it. Be sure. Don't let me see you before you do it, and don't hold back."
Paulo exhaled sharply as if he had stopped just short of speaking. I felt their dismay. But I didn't want to see it on their faces or give them any opening to argue. So I kept my eyes averted as I propped several bi
g cushions beside the brick hearth step and sat against them on the floor, positioned so the two of them could watch my face. I had to trust them.
I had come to need answers as much as Ven'Dar did. It wasn't any good telling myself I didn't care about Dar'Nethi history past or future. What I had just read and heard that afternoon from my father confirmed everything I had felt since coming to Avonar. I wanted to find something to explain why the world felt wrong and what was happening in the Wastes . . . something that had nothing to do with D'Sanya or me. And I had to find out the truth about her. You will not escape the destiny we designed for you. You are our instrument. . . Had Lord Ziddari said those things to her as well?
And so, on that quiet evening in my father's pleasant sitting room, I closed my eyes and ever so slightly relaxed the guards I had erected against the bitter record of the time I had spent as Dieste the Destroyer, the Fourth Lord of Zhev'Na. Only an hour had passed from the time I had stepped into the Great Oculus, the man-high brass ring that was the focus of the Lords' power, spinning its web of light and shadow in the depths of their fortress, until I had stepped out of it again, my eyes burned away, my soul withered, my mind and being one with the Lords. Scarcely more than a child, in one short hour I had become very old in the ways of evil.
For all these years my father had tried to convince me that the guilt with which I lived was not mine, that because I had been so young and inexperienced, I could actually have done very little evil on my own. But when the memories are a part of you, you cannot easily separate the things you actually did from the things you only remember. And now I needed to reduce this vague barrier even further, to explore that part of myself where I could not distinguish Gerick from Ziddari or Parven or Notуle. The Three. The Four.
As I called on my senses to prod the memories awake, it was as if I entered a long tunnel, and the light that was my current life—the healthy one that my parents and my friend Paulo and my trusting Singlars had so generously returned to me—slipped farther and farther behind me, rapidly dwindling into a pinprick until all I could see was midnight. I remembered midnight. . . .