Son of Avonar

by Carol Berg

  But no one was listening to me.

  “And so, Sheriff,” said the king, straightening up again. “What is it that such creatures as this do?”

  “These scars indicate that this one claims to be a healer,” said Maceron, moving to Evard’s side. “In fact, sorcerers of his kind can indeed pull a passing spirit from the brink of death. What could be a more disgusting distortion of nature than depriving a soul that is done with life of its proper end? The sorcerer does it, not out of generosity, of course, but to create a spirit slave who has no choice but to do his foul bidding.”

  “And it causes this?” Evard curled his lip as he touched Karon’s arm. Karon jerked away and the guards twisted his arms tighter.

  “In all its perversity, it’s quite an impressive show. Would you like a demonstration, your Majesty? There would be no danger in it as long as Captain Darzid and I control him. He can do only one working at a time. And it would be inarguable evidence at his trial.”

  I looked from one to the other, trying to understand what they were saying.

  “I don’t see how you could make him do it.” Evard flopped onto the couch again, looking skeptical.

  “I know a very good way,” said Darzid. He whipped off Karon’s blindfold and nodded.

  Karon blinked, and his gaze flicked to something behind me. For the first time since I’d known him, I saw fear in his eyes.

  “Karon, what is—?” Fire exploded in my back, and roaring erupted in my ears. Karon yelling . . . Tomas, somewhere far away, cursing. My head spun. I couldn’t get a breath, and my knees turned to water. Only as I felt warm wetness spreading across my back did I begin to comprehend. “No . . . don’t . . .” I tried to warn Karon, but my tongue refused to obey me. There would be no going back if he did it. They had no proof unless he gave it to them.

  My knees gave way. Someone caught me. “Damn you. Damn all of you. Get a surgeon in here.”

  I floated in and out of awareness, the words and shouts drifting through my spinning head.

  “. . . a knife, clean and sharp.”

  No, Karon, no. They’ll not let me die. My tongue wouldn’t work.

  “. . . grace your son . . .”

  “Damnation, what is it he does?”

  “. . . fill my soul with light . . .”

  Fire ripped my arm. No, Karon . . .

  “. . . death to touch either one of them while he . . .”

  “J’den encour, my dearest love. . . .”

  I had been so cold sleeping, but now all was warm again. I lay on my back. A smile crossed my face. Connor Martin Gervaise was getting big enough that sleeping on my back was becoming uncomfortable. And the bed was so hard. I tried to roll over, but couldn’t. Karon was there. I felt him breathing. Tassaye, tassaye, he whispered. Softly. Softly. He was holding my arm so tight. I couldn’t move it, and my eyes fluttered open to see him leaning over me. What had happened to his face? Was it from the earthquake? Such terrible bruises . . . and blood all over . . . one eye swollen shut, and he was so pale . . . almost transparent like the day at Windham. . . .

  It all came flooding back to me. “No,” I said weakly.

  His eyes flicked open . . . such love in them. When he smiled, I felt the warmth of his life flowing in my veins. “Cut it now,” he said to someone over his shoulder. And to me, “It is a wonder. All of it.”

  My arm was released, but before I could reach out for him, they dragged him away, and there on Sir Geoffrey’s fine carpet, they beat him until he was insensible. Fear lent weight to their fists.

  I sat unmoving on the floor where they’d left me, and stared at the door through which they had at last taken him away. Someone came up behind me, and I flinched, but the hands that lifted me up and led me to the empty brown velvet couch were not rough hands. Tomas sat me down and knelt in front of me. No one else was in the room. “By Annadis’s holy sword, Seri, what is he?”

  I fingered the place on my arm where Karon had made the incision. There was no remnant of it but the fire in my memory. It would have been too difficult to hold me around the back where the knife had gone in. Better to make a new place to mingle the blood . . . the blood of life.

  Tomas spoke as if I were a child. “Has he bewitched you? Silenced you with some ensorcelment? Is that what happened three years ago? Did he control you even then?”

  I stared at my brother, trying to comprehend what he was saying. My mind was in chaos, horror and wonder entwined in a mortal embrace.

  “Seri, tell me you’re all right.” Fumbling, he examined my back. My gown felt damp and scratchy—stiffening as the blood dried where Maceron’s blade had gone in. “Holy gods, it’s impossible.”

  Finally I gathered words. “Tomas, you must help him.”

  Awkwardly he put his arm around my shoulders. “I’ll take care of you, Seri. We’ll find out what must be done . . . the priests . . . to purify you. Are you free of him now he’s away from you?”

  “No. You don’t understand. . . .” I tried to tell him about sorcery and the J’Ettanne. But the longer I spoke, the farther he withdrew from me, and by the time I noticed, it was too late. I had told him about our child.

  Tomas spoke in muted horror. “You let him do that to you? Plant you with his venomous seed? How could you live? Was there no knife, no sword to put an end to your debasement?”

  “Tomas, you’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”

  “I’ve heard enough. This is an entirely new situation. Evard must be told that taking care of the sorcerer is insufficient.”

  “Tomas!”

  “You’ll not burn. You’ll not die. You’re still of the house of Comigor, and Evard has sworn to me. But you’ve consented to evil beyond my imagining, and it will be undone.” He stormed out of the room, leaving me alone in the library.

  Sometime in the night I was taken to the palace and locked in a bare, cold room, such as scullery maids might live in. My locket and my wedding ring were taken from me, and my bloodstained green silk was replaced by a muslin shift and a plain black dress. I would not weep. I would not.

  CHAPTER 18

  The morning dawned cool and gray, as did most summer mornings in the Uker valley, but the rising sun burned off the fog early. I awoke cramped and tired from the night on the dirt floor of the charcoal burner’s hut, and the lingering disturbance of my dreaming was hard to shake. Stars of night, why could I not be rid of it? Perhaps if I could get the unpleasant prince and his annoying servant on their way, I could go back to Dunfarrie and bury it all again. Yet I wondered. My cottage now seemed as remote as D’Natheil’s Avonar.

  Tennice and Baglos were quiet that morning, too, brows furrowed and shoulders tight as we passed around chunks of dry black bread, spread with a paste of beans and leeks that was long past fresh. D’Natheil showed no interest in breakfast, but sat in the open doorway, intently scribing his wood chip with the point of his knife.

  “What is it he makes?” I asked Baglos, as I smoothed my still-damp clothes into some semblance of order.

  “I’ve asked, but he does not respond.”

  “Is he well? He looks ill . . . or, no, maybe thinner somehow.” The growing sunlight revealed a tracery of lines around D’Natheil’s eyes. I’d not noticed them before.

  Staying out of arm’s reach, Baglos questioned the Prince. D’Natheil shook his head, but rather than lashing out at the Dulcé as was his morning habit, he graced Baglos with his smile, the smile that was everything of good humor and unsullied delight.

  The smile was the only constant in D’Natheil. I had never known anyone to change so rapidly, not only in the seasons of his mood, but in his physical appearance as well. I could no longer envision him as he had been on that day he appeared naked in the woods behind my cottage, but I would swear by everything I valued that it was not as he looked today or yesterday or a week ago. I had thought him little more than twenty, and from the Dulcé’s tales I judged that close to accurate. And yet on this morning he looked almost of an age with
me, as if these past days had laid brushstrokes of years and care on the canvas of his face.

  Baglos denied it. “He is as he is, woman. Anything else is only your imagination.”

  I told him that my imagination had been unused for so many years it wouldn’t know how to invent such a business. But, then, after a fortnight without, the Prince had shaved his face this morning. Perhaps that was the difference.

  It took me a while after entering the gates of Yurevan to decide what had changed about the city since I had last visited. The mottled stone buildings of the University still dominated the city from its hilltop site, their cloisters welcoming the brightest thinkers from all the Four Realms. The winding brick streets were marked only by time, not war. Ironwork of intricately designed flowers and beasts still ornamented balconies and walls, and the flowers still bloomed in their charming niches. Quaint, tall houses peered down on passersby like old grandmothers inspecting their children’s children. It was the people were different, I finally decided.

  In the past every street corner had been occupied by a speechmaker haranguing the populace about excessive taxation or the indenture of children, or a student debating society arguing points of history or the origins of the universe. No tavern had lacked an aspiring poet to serve up verses along with his ale, and no sausage cart had failed to employ a young philosopher ready to argue about whether your sausage truly existed beyond your desires. And everyone had taken time to listen.

  No more. Now the citizens of Yurevan hurried about their business with averted eyes, and vendors offered no word beyond your transaction. Only on one corner stood a wild-eyed, shabbily dressed man, preaching that the stars foretold the doom of Leire and the coming of a philosopher-king. Mothers pushed their gawking children past the man quickly, and while Tennice and I bought sausage and cheese to take back to D’Natheil and Baglos, green-clad guardsmen dragged the man into the street and beat him silent.

  “Yurevan’s no different from any Leiran-ruled city any more,” said Tennice, hurrying me through an alley to avoid the guardsmen, who were laughing as one of their fellows relieved himself on the crumpled body of the madman. “Evard has set up his own man to run the University. He claimed rebels were using it as their lair, disturbing the freedom of the academics. He’s come near ‘protecting’ the place to death. Ferrante wouldn’t lecture there any longer. One of his friends after another disappeared when rumors of sedition touched them, and he decided it was safer to take only private students at home.”

  “I had no idea.” Conquerors had always paid deference to the University, even when the cultural centers in other cities were looted and burned, even in the death throes of the Vallorean kingdom. I had come to think it was some deep-rooted yearning to share in the wisdom tangible in its cloisters. “I always imagined that no matter what madness enveloped the rest of the world, Yurevan and the University would be exempt from it.”

  “That belief is what brought me here. But we were wrong. The madness is everywhere.”

  Thinking that four together would be too conspicuous, Tennice and I had come alone to seek out the J’Ettanni woman. We’d left our horses at a hostelry and made our way through the narrow, twisting streets that climbed University Hill. Tennice stopped at a bookshop that he frequented and asked the owner if he knew where he could find gymnea, a medicinal ointment used for failing eyesight. The bookseller directed us to an herbary two streets west and four streets north. They had a good selection, he said, though the shop was run by a “right prickly sort of woman.”

  Halfway along a bustling lane we found the tall, narrow shop with a wooden sign over the door that read HERBS, TEAS, MEDICAMENTS . The storefront sported two windows, each with its wooden planter box crammed with aromatic flora, and when we opened the shop door, we were almost bowled over by the hodgepodge of scents. The tiny room was filled floor to ceiling and on every wall with row upon row of shelves, each crammed with neatly labeled glass jars and tins and paper bundles. Two worktables crowded the rest of the room so that it was almost impossible to move. On one table was a stack of thin paper, a ball of string, a mortar and pestle, measuring cups and spoons, and a small brass balance. On and under the other table lay heaps of plants, stacks of jars and boxes, and innumerable trays of roots, leaves, stems, and flowers spread out to dry.

  Two well-dressed women stood by the weighing table chattering about the ague and the grippe, and the annoyances of servants who forgot themselves enough to get laid up. A small, dark-haired young woman measured a quantity of black seeds into one pan of the balance. She transferred the seeds to a sheet of paper, briskly folded the paper into a small packet, and exchanged it for a coin. “Anything else, Madame LeDoux? Have you fenugreek tea for Nidi’s throat?”

  “Plenty for now. Perhaps next week if she’s no better.”

  “Good day, then.”

  “Good day, my dear.”

  The two ladies fluttered out the door, and the girl turned to Tennice and me. “What do you need?” Her dark hair was cut short, and it hung straight, framing her high cheekbones and light eyes. Her well-defined chin and short, straight nose complemented her blunt manner. She could be no more than eighteen. When the girl stepped around the table, eyeing our disheveled clothing impassively, I was astonished to note that she wore trousers. I had thought my own split skirt bold.

  Tennice spoke up. “We’re seeking the owner of this place.”

  “Why?” said the girl.

  “We have business with her.”

  “You may tell me of your business.”

  “No, young lady, this is private business.”

  “The owner does no private business with strangers.” The girl’s words snapped like dry sticks.

  Tennice whispered to me, “Speak to her, Seri. You know I’ve never been adept at handling women.” An understatement to be sure. Though neither kings nor dukes nor judges could faze Tennice, a timid serving maid could throw him into a fluster.

  I started again. “Perhaps, if you’d be so kind, you could give the owner a message from us?”

  “I might.”

  “Tell Kellea that we were recommended by a friend. He says this is the only place to buy a rare herb to treat the gout. We would appreciate a word with her.”

  The girl looked at us strangely. “What word would you have with Kellea? If all you want is mycophila, then I can get it for you.”

  “Please, we wish to consult Kellea on a confidential matter. You understand. A bit embarrassing to talk about . . . Is there a time when we could find her here or perhaps a place where we could meet her? Our friend recommended her especially.”

  The girl shrugged her shoulders. “You’re speaking to her already. I’m Kellea.”

  No, no, no. The girl was too young. It had been almost twenty years since the destruction of Avonar. “There must be some mistake. Is there someone else by the same name? Your mother, perhaps? Or perhaps another herb shop? We were expecting an older person.”

  “There’s no other Kellea. My mother had a different name and is long dead, anyway, and this is the only herb shop in Yurevan. What’s your business? Tell me the name of your friend.”

  Tennice and I looked at each other in confusion. “I must have been wrong,” he said.

  “Kellea!” called a croaking voice from beyond a narrow doorway.

  “What is it, Grandmother?”

  “Tea, dear heart. Could you bring me a cup of nine-leaf tea?”

  “I have customers who are just leaving. As soon as they’re off, I’ll bring it.”

  I looked sharply at the girl. “Your grandmother. Is her name perhaps the same as yours?”

  “I told you, I’m the only Kellea. If you have business with me, state it.” She folded her arms tightly across her breast, her hostility shoving us out the door before our feet had moved.

  I hated abandoning our only clue. Kellea was the only one of the four—Then it struck me. The herb shop, shelves laden with medicines. The names. “Kellea,” I said, scarcely
restraining my excitement, “what is your grandmother’s name?”

  “This is ridiculous. What could you possibly—?”

  “It would be a great kindness. It’s very important.”

  I might have been dragging the answers from her with red-hot pincers. “Her name is Celine.”

  Context. How is it we can stand in two different rooms, hear the same combination of letters and sounds, and our minds construct such differing images? Tennice had spoken four names, but I hadn’t listened in the proper context. “Celine” was not a vanished stranger, one more unmarked name in a list of the uncountable dead. I knew her. “Please, Kellea. May I speak with your grandmother? My information was in error, and she’s the one I need to see.”

  “My grandmother sees no one. She’s quite feeble.”

  “I swear to you that I mean her no harm. I’m a friend of her friends. Take her the message I give you, and if she commands us go, we’ll go.” I took a deep breath and reached backward. “Tell her I knew a student of hers from long ago. He learned many lessons from her, but the most important one was to look at the whole person before judging the worth of their gifts.”

  As rigid as an iron spike, the young woman disappeared into the back room. She returned quickly. “She’ll see you. But only for a moment. You mustn’t tire her. She turns ninety next month.”

  Tennice and I followed Kellea into a tiny room that smelled of lavender and mint. A sunny window flooded the room with light and air and myriad other scents from a courtyard crowded with planter boxes and baskets of herbs and flowers. In a chair by the window sat an old woman, so withered and dry that it looked as if the slightest breeze could swirl her away like dust. Her head nodded continuously in the way of the very old, but her blue eyes blazed with curiosity. “Who is it speaks of long ago?”