The Keeping Place

by Isobelle Carmody

  The road began to lose definition.

  “You fade!” Maruman sent, though to my eyes it was he who was fading. “Come. Obey your vow….”

  “Maruman! Maruman!” I cried, but the road disappeared, and again I was falling and falling, but this time there were no wings to save me.

  I fell into a dream in which Rushton and I were on the deck of The Cutter, watching ship fish at play. I was leaning back against his chest, clasped securely in his arms, and it seemed that I was truly and utterly content for the first time in my life, wishing for nothing but what I had and uncaring of what would come.

  “It is said that ship fish have aided seamen who fall overboard by carrying them to shore,” he murmured into my hair.

  I turned and wound my arms about his neck, loving the feel of his body against mine. But his green eyes seemed as fathomless as the ocean and as unknowable, and there was a terrible sadness in them that smote at me. Then he began to fade, too, until he was no more than a translucent shimmer in the sunlight.

  “Where are you going?” I cried. “Don’t leave me.”

  The sunlight seemed to brighten, absorbing his glittering outline, and then once again I was falling into the light.

  “Wake, Elspeth,” someone murmured softly.

  I opened my eyes and found it was morning. Dameon was leaning over me. He smiled, sensing that I was awake. I thought of my dream, and a babble of words burst from me.

  “Dameon. I had such strange dreams. Maruman was there, but he faded right before my eyes, and then Rushton vanished, too. You aren’t a dream, are you? You won’t disappear? Everyone disappears in the end. Matthew and Dragon, Cameo and Domick…I always thought I would be the one to leave, but instead it’s I who am left.” I realized I was sounding hysterical, and with some difficulty, I made myself stop.

  “It’s all right,” Dameon promised huskily. “I am here, and I will not leave you.” I registered the distress in his voice with sudden dread.

  “What is the matter? Am I…” I looked around in bewilderment, not recognizing anything.

  “You are fine. You just fainted,” he explained. “You were…very tired.”

  “Tired? No…There was something….” A thrill of fear ran through me as shadows flickered around the edges of my vision. I was tempted to let them fold around me like a cloak and draw me away from the knowledge that seemed to be pressing just outside the edges of my consciousness.

  “What is the matter?” I made myself ask, but before he could speak, it came back to me.

  Rushton!

  All the strength in me seemed to trickle out like water from a leaky pot. Dameon laid his hand on my cheek, and I saw that his eyes were wet, though whether from my empathised grief or his own, I did not know.

  “I have heard it said more than once that you are a woman ruled by her mind to the detriment of her passions, Elspeth. But those who say so do not know you,” he murmured.

  “Rushton is—”

  “Ill,” Dameon interrupted firmly. “Very ill. But he lives. And while he lives, there is hope he can be healed.”

  I brushed my cheeks dry, loving the empath for his gentle optimism. “It was such an awful shock seeing him like that.”

  He nodded. “Kella said she could bring you round but that it would be better to let you wake naturally. You’re in one of the smaller rooms of the healing center.”

  “Healing center,” I echoed bitterly.

  “Forget what it was. It is now a center for healing, and in time, all of the dark memories imbedded in this place will fade.”

  “I can only think of it as the place where Rushton…” I swallowed a hard lump in my throat. “Kella said he had been drugged. I remember that much.”

  “Bruna has had some training in Sadorian medicines, and she thinks Rushton was given a powerful derivative of their spiceweed. It does not so much cause unconsciousness as a state of vivid hallucination through which the mind blunders until the drug wears off. In effect, if she is right, Rushton has been lost in an endless nightmare for so long that his conscious mind or his sense of himself has disintegrated under the strain.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “The drug is terribly addictive, and that convulsion you witnessed was a withdrawal symptom. But the physical withdrawal from the drug, though painful, is short-lived. The trouble is that a mind is not able to withdraw so easily from its influence.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Having existed in a delusional state for such a period, Rushton’s mind is simply mirroring it endlessly back to him. He now perceives it as normality.”

  I sat up and pushed away the blankets. Someone had left new clothing by the bed, good sturdy Land attire, including new boots.

  “You should rest,” Dameon protested when I swung my feet out of the bed.

  “I am not sick,” I said, pulling on the trousers. “What time is it? How long have I slept?”

  “It is near midday.”

  “Dardelan’s speech?” I threaded a belt through the waist loops and tucked in my undershirt.

  “Was made this morning. I have a scribed copy of it that you can read. It is to be posted all through the Land and contains a list of laws by which all people will temporarily be ruled. The list ends by asking people to make any suggestions that would better the laws.”

  Dameon shook his head in admiration. “They are fine and fair laws, truly, and I doubt much would better them, but they made less of an impact on the general folk than did Dardelan himself. The lad understands people and their deepest hearts the way sea folk know the hidden currents. I was monitoring the crowd. I saw hope rise in them with every sentence he spoke—and not just hope, but a kind of yearning for integrity and a cleaner way of living. He appealed to what was best in them. I could feel that they wanted to be their best, if only to please him. There is not a shred of cynicism in him, and people knew it.”

  “I am sorry I did not hear him,” I said. “Has he gone to Saithwold yet?”

  “He rode out about an hour past.”

  “Too bad. I should have liked to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?”

  I nodded. “We are leaving for Obernewtyn this afternoon.” Dameon looked startled, but I did not give him time to speak. “I want to get Rushton home to the mountains. If he heals anywhere, it will be there. And I want to see how the others are faring.”

  “Shall I let the others know we are to leave so soon?” he asked.

  “Tell anyone in the cloister. I’ll go outside the grounds and farseek everyone else when I’ve finished dressing.”

  Dameon nodded and withdrew. I pulled on the boots, thinking of what he had said about my being perceived as unemotional.

  I poured myself a glass of water from a jug and drank it, staring out at the cloister grounds without seeing anything. The water had an unpleasant metallic taste, but maybe that was shock distorting my senses. I did not feel myself, for all my apparent self-control. Every action seemed to require too much thought and effort.

  Brydda knocked at the door and entered the chamber.

  “Dameon said you want everyone to leave this afternoon. Is it true?” he asked.

  “As soon as possible,” I said.

  “You risk losing all the ground you have gained,” the rebel protested.

  “That can’t be helped. We need time to withdraw and reflect so that we can decide how to proceed,” I said.

  Brydda flung himself into a seat by the bed. “I hope you know what you are doing,” he said morosely. I said nothing, and he sighed, his expression softening to resignation. “‘Little sad eyes’ I named you when I first saw you, and your eyes are sad now. Maybe more sad than I have ever seen them.”

  “If I look sad, it’s because I have seen too much pain and death and plain hatred in the last few days. It fills me with despair,” I said. “It makes me wonder if anything will ever truly change.”

  “Elspeth, the Misfits need not feel tainted by their part in this
rebellion. In fact, the low number of casualties and injuries is entirely your doing, and Dardelan intends to make very sure the general populace realizes it. That’s why your staying is important. No matter what he says, people will think ‘monster’ when he mentions the word Misfit. If your people were here, Landfolk would be able to see that you are far from monsters. But with you gone…Elspeth, I wish you would reconsider. Can anything at Obernewtyn be more important than securing your place in the Land?”

  “If all we have done is not enough to ensure us a place in the Land,” I said brusquely, “I doubt our presence here over the next sevendays will change that.”

  Brydda shrugged. “You are resolved, and so I must respect your decision. It seems we always part this way, does it not? We should have at least shared a mug or two of mead to celebrate what we have achieved. It is no small thing to free half a land from black tyranny.”

  “I am glad for you rebels that the rebellion thus far is a success, but I do not know yet whether to be glad for Misfits,” I said. “Will you walk with me? I want to get outside the walls so that I can beastspeak the horses.”

  Brydda rose with a grunt, and we walked together from the healing center. There were many people about the gardens and outside the cloister gates; the streets were suddenly as busy as ever. Foolishly, I had thought the city would feel different with the rebels in control, but there was nothing at all to tell that the rebellion had even occurred.

  As if reading my thoughts, Brydda said, “If it looks the same, it is only on the surface. Underneath, everything has changed.”

  I sent out a probe to locate Gahltha and found him on his way to the cloister. “We are being led, for free horses are still liable to be enslaved,” he sent disparagingly.

  I looked at Brydda. “I did not have the chance to ask Dardelan what he intended to do about ownership and treatment of beasts.”

  He scowled. “He agrees that beasts must have their freedom, but he thinks we must introduce the subject of their emancipation slowly, lest we make our own position untenable. He says we cannot give power back to people by commanding them to do what they do not wish to do. We must find a way to change how people think about animals so that they will not want to own them any more than they would choose to own a human.”

  “If we wait until people learn to care about more than their own species, beasts will be slaves forever, and Misfits outcasts,” I said.

  “I feel the same and so does Sallah, but I understand Dardelan’s point, too. If the changes are made as he plans, they will be true and enduring changes. But if changes are made in swift heedless passion, people will resist them. Why don’t you speak to the others at Obernewtyn? Especially to Alad and the beast council. See if they can come up with any ideas. Dardelan is as eager as we are for change, Elspeth, but he is wise enough to see that it must be done carefully.”

  In less than an hour, Rushton was settled in the small covered wagon that would convey him to Obernewtyn with Kella seated by him. The healer had not wanted to leave the healing center, but she had agreed that Rushton could not be shifted without her.

  I did not want to think about Rushton and what it meant that he had been found in the Herder cloister. The others were silent on the matter as well. I was glad for their reticence, but trying to stop myself thinking about what had happened to him was like trying to keep a secret from myself.

  It made no sense that the Faction would force us to work with the rebels. Had they thought to turn us against the rebels entirely? Had it all been a diversionary tactic to distract us from some other plot? Unless the entire aim had been to capture Rushton and ruin him. But why?

  The only thing I could think was that if Ariel was part of what had happened, he might have arranged to have Rushton kidnapped as a way to manipulate me.

  If that was so, I had barely missed being given that dreadful choice.

  “How soon before this sleepseal wears off?” I asked Roland.

  It was late in the afternoon, several days after our return to Obernewtyn. Despite Maruman’s urgent summons and all that had befallen us, life had resumed a numbing regularity. It had been all I could do to function under the weight of a growing depression.

  Roland shrugged. “Kella was right to impose it on Rushton for your journey, but it is always hard to predict the effect of a sleepseal on a damaged mind.” He gave me a slanting glance. “I was thinking of speaking to Darius about him,” he added.

  “Darius?” I echoed blankly.

  “The gypsy beasthealer. It is a pity I could not persuade the gypsies to stay up here.”

  “Since you were unable to do so, I don’t see how you can consult Darius,” I said tersely.

  “I will ride down to the White Valley and see him,” the healer said.

  I gaped at him stupidly. “Are you telling me the gypsies are still there?” I demanded.

  “I thought you knew,” he said. “One of Garth’s people was in visiting the big house this morning, and he mentioned that your friend Swallow had dropped into the Teknoguild camp. The gypsies are building a monument to those who died in Malik’s decoy.”

  My heartbeat quickened at the mention of a monument, but at the same time, I felt a twinge of shame. I had not thought of the dead in the White Valley since riding to Sutrium. Malik’s treachery in the cul-de-sac, the screams of dying humans and horses, the whine of arrows, and the funeral fires in the misty morning had assumed a half-remembered nightmarish quality. Not even the recovering soldierguards and Misfits in beds in the Healer hall nor the injured horses on the farms could bring it into focus properly. More and more, I seemed to be seeing life through a fog, but I fought against it now to ask what Darius could possibly do for Rushton, given that he was a beasthealer.

  “That name is too narrow for what he does,” Roland said. “Better to say the kind of healing Darius does is especially useful to beasts. You see, when a beast suffers an injury, both mind and flesh are wounded, and the inner wound is the more dangerous of the two. Darius made me understand that a wound healed physically can still cause a beast to die, because the inner wound has been left to fester. At the same time, an inner wound that is healed can almost miraculously help a fleshy wound.”

  I thought of the livid red streak I had seen in Kella’s aura with my spirit-eyes and wondered if such dual wounding did not also happen to humans.

  “My point about asking Darius’s advice is that Rushton’s spirit and mind seem far more wounded than his body, so that is what needs healing. His spirit.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I murmured.

  “I’d like to take Gavyn down to see him anyway,” Roland went on. “Alad says he has been asking about Darius, and he so seldom even seems to notice humans, it is worth putting them together again. Oh, by the way, did anyone tell you that Gavyn foresaw that Seely was in danger?”

  That caught my attention. None of the futuretellers had foreseen anything of our people on the west coast. “Was the hideout attacked?” I demanded.

  “I doubt Gavyn could tell you,” Roland said regretfully. “His vision seemed entirely focused on Seely. Not on her surrounds.”

  “What exactly did he see?”

  “She was hiding somewhere and watching men searching. She was frightened. Gavyn thought the bad men were looking for her. That’s how he put it. ‘The bad men.’”

  “They must have been soldierguards,” I murmured. “Was Gavyn very distressed?”

  “Not truly. He told Avra and Rasial what he had seen, and then suddenly he smiled and said she was all right. Then he seemed to forget about it completely.”

  “What did he mean, she was all right?”

  “He would not say. I’d guess that the soldierguards left without finding her.”

  I made up my mind to have Avra speak with Gavyn about his vision. Anything we could learn of the west coast would be invaluable, and perhaps the boy had seen more than he said.

  Roland began to unwind an unconscious man’s bandage. I recognized him a
s one of the soldierguards from the White Valley. His foot had been amputated at the ankle, and Roland examined the livid pink flesh of the stump with professional interest, grunting with satisfaction before rebandaging it. The Healer guildmaster had asked Kella to delay her return to Sutrium until the soldierguards were fit for the journey, and she had agreed.

  “I have been thinking about Dardelan’s laws,” Roland said presently. “I’ve scribed a couple of suggestions of my own, which I want Kella to offer him.”

  I was ashamed to admit I had not read Dardelan’s proposed laws. Alad had told me that the beasts approved of them, though they felt that very specific laws would have to be made as to the use and abuse of animals by humans.

  “But they can see how the ground for such laws is being subtly laid,” the Beastspeaking guildmaster had said.

  I had been genuinely surprised to find that the animals understood Dardelan’s dilemma. Their only immediate requests were that the Council’s practice of gelding not be resumed and that a law be made to forbid deliberate physical and mental abuse of animals. They did not demand that all beasts be freed by their masters, as I had expected. Avra merely commented that this must come in time, but her primary concern was to ease the lot of animals in captivity. Pragmatically, she pointed out that many animals would need to learn how to be free, and that would take time, too.

  Alad had further suggested that in addition to learning to read and scribe their letters, all children ought to be taught both Brydda’s fingerspeech and the simplest of the animals’ physical movements upon which it was based so they could understand what beasts were saying. His hope was that, as in Sador, once people understood that animals were intelligent, it would be harder to mistreat them.

  “Elspeth?” Roland said.

  I realized I had been standing there lost in thought. “My apologies. What did you say?”

  He sighed in exasperation. “Honestly, Elspeth. I said why don’t you ride down with us to see the gypsies? At least you could be assured of some good, deep sleep.”