She considered this with no sign of annoyance. "With Sax and Cya, is there any other option?"
"Well..." Aspen rolled his shoulders, turning over the possibilities. "I'm not saying it wouldn't be a challenge. Lifelong enemies, sky-high tempers, the no doubt vigorous disapproval of thousands..."
"The need for a very large bed." She was dry, but the slow smile curved.
"Well, we're not short of those," Aspen said delightedly, glancing at the central feature of the room. Lofty Fae needed furniture on a generous scale.
"Grand ambitions," was all she said, in a most ambiguous tone. She turned away, but he thought her not displeased. Enough for now.
"Was that a 'yes' on the breakfast?"
"It was."
He headed for the door, caring less about traps and mysteries than Jurasel, Chenar, Aloren. One bed, and Aspen. And the Diamond, of course. And Rua Ketu.
Grand ambition indeed.
Chapter Ten
It had long been Gentian's policy not to beat her head against brick walls. Accepting that some things were impossible and moving on had kept her sane. When presented with a sheer and glittering cliff, it was only good sense not to ram herself into it.
A few minutes of comfortable chatter with Rua had returned her equilibrium. It hadn't taken her mind off the morning's developments, but had made her feel more herself. The Atlaran, though physically very different, reminded her strongly of one of her first lovers: Thierry, a rare child of human and Fae, whose calm curiosity about all the world could make mountains into molehills. Thierry's reaction to the morning's scenes would be to open a bottle of ginger wine to celebrate. So what if Suldar wouldn't explain? She'd felt It. As for getting straight back to dagger's drawn with Aristide Couerveur, surely that was all for the good. She had, after all, resolved to give him up.
But when Aristide strolled into the kitchen, his apprentice at his heels, Gentian immediately found herself torn in two directions. It was hard to force yourself to not want a man when he was so unrelentingly...himself, and a mountain was stopping you from running from temptation.
Still, she couldn't relish this opportunity to try to explain just what it would mean for her to stay in Darest. Words had never made anyone understand, and she was finding her tongue strangely untrustworthy whenever she faced that eclipse. It did not help that she had never felt smaller in her life than she did beneath this mountain.
"Could we eat in the garden?" she asked, dishing out steaming portions onto the waiting plates. If she had to expose all her rawest parts, she'd prefer comforting surroundings.
"If you wish, Magister."
So they were back to being all neutral and polite. Gentian doubted he'd forgiven her little tantrum, but even if she'd killed any immediate chance of empathy, there was no hope for further delay. Handing them both a plate, she led the way outside, leaving Rua to take the rest upstairs.
Her morning explorations had shown the vegetable garden was linked to a very pretty formal area, all geometric symmetry. Steps took them up to a room of ivy-covered walls where stone benches were arranged in a three-sided square. The setting was more contemplation than confession, but it had a nice air, and she liked it.
"We should kidnap Captain Djol," she said, sitting down on the right and prodding scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes doubtfully. "My repertoire is strictly limited, and Rua says she can burn water."
"Smells fine to me," Aspen said, dropping on to the centre bench. He diplomatically took a big mouthful, then looked relieved. Edible.
Aristide avoided the issue by putting his plate down on the bench beside him, and casting. Word-magic this time, a sign of complexity since the man was a great-mage, so adept at the language of magic that he could cast many higher-level spells as a direct expression of will, as if they were straightforward true-magic. Gentian hadn't quite achieved that level of internalisation, but she did recognise the spell. A façade to not only keep their conversation wholly private, but also disguise itself so that they appeared silent rather than shielded.
During the wait Gentian started work on her tomatoes, but lost momentum by the time she reached the eggs, distracted by the opportunity to openly study Aristide while he cast. His skin had a wonderful quality: it made her want to touch his face to prove he wasn't carved of marble. Despite everything, she found herself enjoying her sudden passion. Even deciding against pursuing him wasn't enough to make her regret the emotion itself, just the circumstances.
"Am I too much for you, Magister?"
Gentian realised he'd stopped casting some time back and was watching her with that faint, ironic smile. But the edge of coldness was missing, and he seemed so completely entertained that she felt more heartened than embarrassed. He would not, of course, be able to fix anything, but she abruptly wanted him to see her properly.
"You do have a habit of framing yourself spectacularly," she said, making a vague gesture toward his arrangement of porcelain and charcoal against dark ivy and stone. "But, no – I was trying to think what to say. It's a long story."
"Then start at the beginning." Very focused now. There was a problem he needed to solve, and he meant to get on with it. Ah well. Sooner started, soonest done.
"When I'm in Darest...I'm woken just before each dawn by someone hating me, so much and so strongly that it's like being picked up by the throat and shaken. Ever since I was born – before, actually, judging from the last few days of my mother's pregnancy. It made me a less than easy child to raise, because I would wake without fail to scream myself blue, and have absolute hysterics if they made any move to comfort me.
"My parents tried to find out what was going on, of course. Put shields around my crib and sat up watching me, worked a thousand divinations, called in every healer they'd ever heard of. Fed me poppy-milk, even. And I would wake, and scream, and even when I was old enough that they could ask me what was wrong, there was little I could tell them. There was no sign of enchantment, of any outside influence or intent. It was just something I did.
"By the time I was, oh, four, I'd reached the point where I'd wake up and cry rather than scream, and would stop much sooner. My parents thought it was going away. And I...thought it was normal, I suppose. Hard to say. You can grow used to anything.
"At twelve I'd long since stopped crying about it. But for my complete disinterest in Shaping, and the little obsession about proving I was being attacked and hunting down whatever was doing it, I imagine I was everything my parents had hoped for. Perhaps more egotistical than they might wish."
Remembering that towering self-belief, she experienced a flash of wry amusement, then glanced curiously at Aristide, who offered her only polite attention in return.
"I wasn't nearly so capable with Elachar as I thought, but I considered myself ready to do some serious experimentation, and knew exactly what I wanted to try. What simpler solution to a rude awakening than to not be asleep at dawn? I always was, you see. I simply could not be brought to stay awake. Hardly natural, but again there was no sign of it being an outside attack. No hint of enchantment, no trace of lingering power. I was determined to prove this at least was being done to me and, being rather more ruthless than my parents, found a spell which would simply have to keep me awake, set up every divination I was capable of casting, and...was less than pleased with the result."
"What happened?" Aspen was leaning forward, as caught up in the tale as his master was not.
"I stayed awake all right, but my divinations still showed no trace of outside influence. And until the next dawn, until that unnatural sleep came again and It woke me, I could barely move from my bed. Not sleeping and waking was apparently bad for my health. My parents wanted me to swear never to try it again, and I refused. So they dragged me off to Tor Darest to see the Regent."
She carefully didn't look at Aristide, as much to hide her own memory of anger as to avoid sparking his. "Goldenrod's valuable enough to Darest that Lady Arista agreed to investigate my peculiarities. And my parents had me p
romise to abide by her conclusions, whatever they were. Which, after a week of watching me sleep, was that I was too sensitive, too powerful for my own good. That absolutely no outside influence was involved, and each morning I was putting myself to sleep. My mind, my strength, was turning in on itself. The enemy I had fought all my life, the thing that attacked me, brutalised me...was me."
Repeating Lady Arista's pronouncement Gentian didn't even try to keep flat bitterness from her voice, and wondered again how she had ever managed to fall for the woman's son. But then, she'd been more than impressed with Lady Arista, before the Regent had chosen the wrong answer. For it had been. Suldar, no matter how unhelpfully, had provided the final vindication. Gentian felt dizzy all over again, remembering that bolt-from-the-blue question.
Buoyed up enough to offer a ghost of a smile to the second Couerveur to completely overturn her, she said: "I didn't take her diagnosis well, particularly when she asked my parents if I was, perhaps, a not-very-legal Shaping experiment. I expect Lady Arista remembers me as a particularly vituperative little hellion. My problem was that I believed her. She'd used shields and divinations of such a high order, and she was so very certain. So I swore my oath and went home, and taught myself to accept that this was how it would be."
"When you are in Darest." Aristide said each word distinctly.
"Oh yes." She took a breath, then paused and frowned at him. "How did you know we were still in Darest, Lord Magister? I've never heard that the Couerveurs could sense the soul of the place."
The corners of his mouth curled up. Disdain. As if she had disappointed him, been offensive, or manipulative. But he answered.
"Darest is my charge, Magister," he said, very coolly. "Naturally I would know if I had left it."
Gentian tried to make sense of this, could think of only one explanation, and said "Crown bond?" in blank astonishment. Her mother had told her Aristide Couerveur had assumed almost full control of Darest during the long years of Lady Arista's decline, when she had lost interest in everything except battling her son. But he had never sat Darest's throne, never openly ruled, and now served a duly crowned King. How could he have formed the rare monarch's link with his land?
A glittering and entirely discouraging smile was the only response to her question. She stared at him a moment longer, then carefully went back to her own story.
"I didn't cross Darest's borders until I was fourteen, after my parents had allowed me flight spells." She passed a hand over her eyes, wondering how to explain this to people who didn't feel place. "Have you ever encountered a sound, not loud, which you've been hearing for so long you don't hear it any more? And then it stops, and only then do you realise that it existed at all? When I went to Ceria, something went away. A background, a thing always there – gone. Out of earshot.
"I flew back and forth across the border a dozen times, and each time I felt it clearer. A thing I recognised, that I knew all too well. It was diffuse, unfocused, but there every time I crossed into Darest. Hate."
Aristide shifted minutely, and Gentian glanced up at him again, then stared. He looked pleased. Pleased in the way a man might be if he had hunted his family's murderer all his life, and now had him tied helpless to a chair. Like he was about to choose the first of many knives.
Bewildered, she glanced at Aspen, only to find he shared her surprise. Less than comforting. This was neither the reaction she had hoped for, nor the one that she'd expected. Something quite different.
She went on uncertainly. "All the time I was looking for an enemy, looking for what hated me, I had focused on my morning trial and not recognised that I felt It every day, all the time, waking and sleeping. Every moment I was in Darest. Only in Darest. I spent the night in Ceria. And woke before dawn. But out of habit only, for the first time in my life without shrinking from that blow."
And she had been furious, feeling none of the joy that should have been hers. This land was more than the home of her family. It was where she belonged, part of Goldenrod's greater whole, wound completely through her. And it hated her. "I swore on my name never to set foot in Darest again," she finished, voice shaking.
"You broke name-oath to come back?" Aspen exclaimed, almost shouting. "Why?!"
"Because I heard about the destruction of the Rose, and knew it was linked to the borders. Because a corrupt guardian spell could possibly explain what I had experienced." She grimaced. "And I had no other way of testing. I accepted the consequences."
"Do you think that's why we're trapped in here?"
"Because I broke oath? No." It hadn't even occurred to her to link them. "This valley is about more than me." And with that she looked sharply back at Aristide. "Are you going to tell me what it is I've said that you were expecting?"
Those exquisite lips curled. "Darest is tainted," he said, still looking at her as if he was deciding where to make the first cut. "And Darest is cursed. They are two different things. The first we did not even suspect, until Queen Daseretel explained the Fair's reasons for presenting Darest to the Rathens. But the taint, whatever it is, only affects the Fair. The second is the malison."
"Malison?" The word did not have quite the same meaning as a curse, was closer to a kind of disease. A slow tingle ran up her spine. Two things which were not quite curses.
"It is, as I understand the matter, the pure ill-will of every Fae who did not want Telsandar given to humans, who wanted us gone. Purpose arguably without actual intent, sunk into the very bones of Darest. Seldareth, the Lord of the Fae kingdom to our north, first divined it centuries ago, and last autumn they admitted its existence. Until it is lifted, Darest will continue to fail."
"The Fair admitted this? That they knew?"
He ignored the question. "Their Tzel Aviar is pledged to assist my investigation, to help us lift it. We have worked on the task, separately and together, since autumn. And have yet to successfully replicate Seldareth's divination, to even sense it." Brilliant sapphire eyes met hers, the eclipse all-consuming. "I trust you had no plans to leave Darest in the near future, Magister."
The hook through her chest twisted savagely. He hadn't understood. Not properly. Just like her mother, who had continually campaigned for Gentian to return to live in Darest despite that morning blow. The expectation, the demand in those eyes was clear: she might be of use, might be vital for Darest's future, and should have no thought of leaving to avoid a few minutes' pain each morning.
And should she? Did she not love Darest, long to return to Goldenrod, to be in this land that was hers? If that was true, surely there was no choice about any sacrifice she could make. And perhaps Aristide and the Tzel Aviar between them might be equal to It, might finally free her from her own curse.
No. Some things are too powerful to be defeated, and against It she had always been senserel, a gnat. Aristide, for all his brilliance, was merely a larger gnat, and one who had failed to see her clearly.
It was as bleak a moment as when her twelve year-old self had been told she was her own monster. Not just because she was sure to alienate him further, but because despite her best intentions she had started to buy into the myth, to think in terms of the Diamond Couerveur, inhumanly infallible. He would have made a marvellous Atlaran god-king, well worth worshipping, but she could not let herself believe in him.
"I did, actually," she said, giving her answer with flat determination. "But it's a moot point at the moment."
Pale lashes dropped, hiding his eyes. Then, inevitably, that exquisite mouth curved.
"You are correct, of course Magister." The tone was pure, satirical appreciation. "For the moment, we are none of us leaving. Shall we begin testing with the next dawn?"
She shrugged, seeing no choice about that, nor justification for delay.
"So which is it that wakes you in the morning?" Aspen asked, looking worriedly from Gentian to his master. "The taint or the malison?"
"I don't know," she said slowly. "Both? Neither? The thing I feel constantly matches very well to th
e description of this malison. It is a formless hate. Whether what I experience on waking is the malison, focused, or this taint– " She broke off. "No, whatever else, what wakes me isn't the malison. Because the malison isn't here."
Aristide went for a moment entirely still. "Not here?"
"No. This valley is more intensely Darest than any other part of it I've been, yet when I came into it I left behind that constant murmur of hate. I thought, hoped I'd have an undisturbed night, but nothing about my morning had changed."
"And whether that is the Fair's taint has yet to be established." He wasn't even looking at her any more, but into abstract possibilities. "It seems we have more reason than escape to investigate this shield. Do you feel any echo of either, Magister, when you are in Suldar's presence?"
But Gentian had been distracted by Aspen, by magic suddenly drawn in great volume, its purpose well hidden.
"What are you casting?" she asked, faintly astonished.
No less than Aspen. "I'm not!" he exclaimed, staring down at himself. "I mean – I am, but I'm not!" He lifted hands in perplexed appeal, channelling power all the while. It streamed toward the house, the bubble of the façade shield turning pinkish at its passage.
As Aristide dismissed the façade, Aspen rose uncertainly to his feet. He seemed to genuinely not know what he was doing, to what purpose he was drawing all this magic, and Gentian couldn't feel even a shadow of intent. She glanced at Aristide, who was looking up at his apprentice through narrowed eyes.
"If he'd set an enchantment which has only now triggered?" she suggested doubtfully. Usually she could at least catch an echo of the original purpose of a casting, especially one involving this amount of power.
"But I didn't!" Aspen wailed, somewhere between indignation and panic. He turned between her and Aristide as if he didn't know which one to appeal to. "I haven't cast anything beyond a clean-face cantrip since I got here! I'm not doing this! It's just happening! And I can't stop it!" Beads of sweat had started out on his face.
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