The Fall of Neskaya

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  No, as the moments passed, she realized it was more than that. It was choosing to live blind and deaf, or in a world without taste or color. There was no way she could make it up to him, no matter how much she loved him. She had not thought any of this through. Perhaps she had wronged both of them in asking.

  But she had asked, with her heart rather than her reason. It was all she had to give him.

  The flames parted, and he stepped through, a man of fire and flesh. The fire died, leaving only a pale man collapsing in her arms.

  44

  Taniquel stayed in Neskaya for the rest of the season, a guest along with Coryn in one of the richer houses, until falling night temperatures threatened an early winter. As it was, she stayed longer than she should. Word had come that Acosta’s occupiers surrendered after only a brief siege. She was needed there. Julian was still in her uncle’s castle, safe but growing into a sturdy boy without her. Their separation ached like a wound in her heart. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she would look out toward Thendara and feel as if she were being torn in three different directions at once. Then she would look down at Coryn, sleeping, the few remaining patches of blue fire casting a pale illumination across his features, and know that she would not for all the world have chosen differently.

  Coryn would not be able to travel for some time. After he had tumbled into her arms in the Overworld, she awoke beside his physical body to find him regaining consciousness. For many tendays after that, he drifted in and out of sleep. Each time he awoke, Demiana and the others were able to reduce the luminous patches further and strengthen his ravaged energy channels. Often it took all his stamina to eat, meditate, and take the small amount of exercise allowed him. Demiana had absolutely forbidden him to leave Neskaya until the fiery patches had disappeared. Now Taniquel had to accept that would not be until the spring thaws, but she could not wait that long.

  As Taniquel prepared for the journey to Acosta, sitting with Coryn in the chamber they shared and going over the lists of supplies while he dozed, a commotion from below drew her attention. Exclamations from their host’s adolescent daughter blended with men’s voices, indistinct but recognizable as belonging to her Acosta guards. Taniquel got to her feet, the papers sliding off her lap. Coryn’s eyes opened.

  “It’s all right, beloved. I’ll see to it,” she said, then paused as she noticed his smile. He did not smile very often, the lines etched deep crevasses into the landscape of his face. She had been afraid it was news from Tramontana, where the devastation had been even worse. Several of his closest friends, including a man named Aran, had been badly hurt in body and mind. It was the nature of the laran injuries that sometimes improvement was followed by an abrupt turn for the worse.

  “No,” he said. “Let her come.”

  Her?

  Footsteps clattered down the corridor, heavy boots and a lighter tread, then a knock sounded. Taniquel drew herself up and lifted the door latch. Outside stood Esteban’s nephew and another Acosta man, little Raquella, and a woman with startling green eyes and straw-pale hair, disheveled as if she’d just come from a long and windy journey. She wore a half-length cloak over a jacket and a skirt split for riding, all of thick soft chervine wool, dyed dark blue and edged with snowflake embroidery, the sort of warm, beautiful clothing Taniquel would have chosen for travel at this season.

  “Excuse me, vai domna,” the woman said without the slightest trace of deference, and slipped through the door. Only the hem of her cloak brushed against Taniquel. Her unselfconscious poise reminded Taniquel of Lady Caitlin.

  The next instant, Taniquel recovered herself. Who did this woman think she was, comynara or commoner, to enter here without leave? She glared at Esteban’s nephew and drew breath to command the woman’s removal.

  But the green-eyed woman had rushed to Coryn’s side and taken him in her arms. Over her shoulder, Taniquel glimpsed his face, eyes closed in an expression of uncomplicated joy. He hugged her with equal fervor, rocking gently. She murmured something Taniquel did not catch.

  Regaining her composure, Taniquel dismissed the guards and closed the door on the host’s inquisitive daughter. In a matter of minutes, the story would be through half of Neskaya and all the old busybodies of both sexes would want to know who this stranger was. A sister, perhaps? She frowned, for none of them that he’d mentioned fit this description. Especially not the one who had gone off with her uncle’s men to join the Sisterhood of the Sword.

  “I never thought—” Coryn murmured.

  “Of course, I had to come,” the woman said, then drew back, regarding him with a practical and unabashedly fond expression. “Even at Linn, we heard what happened.” Her eyes flickered to Taniquel’s flushed cheeks. “You should introduce us, you know.”

  “I’m sorry. Tani, may I present Liane, leronis of Tramontana Tower, once my enemy and now my oldest friend.”

  Taniquel felt giddy with relief. She inclined her head. She barely heard Coryn’s next words, only the gentleness in his voice as he called her my beloved. Liane gave her a smile so radiant and without jealousy that Taniquel immediately began to like her.

  Liane, it seemed, was Liane Storn. High Kinnally, her home, had fallen to Deslucido even as Coryn’s had, and like Verdanta had thrown off its oppressors in the wake of the Hastur victory. She’d spent the last few years at Linn, a hostage against her family’s good behavior. When word had come of the fall of King Damian, she had taken back her parole. No sooner had a contingent of Rafael Hastur’s men crossed the border between Linn and Ambervale than the vassal lords rose up in a body and ousted their wardens. She’d departed the next day, with Lady Linn’s best horse and traveling clothes.

  “Ah, you were much better prepared than I,” Taniquel said, laughing.

  They told stories and compared journeys until Coryn tired. Taniquel went with Liane to see her settled with the other laran workers. “I am not here to gawk at the ruins,” Liane said, her eyes hardening, “but to work. I am a trained monitor and needed here.”

  Taniquel felt a surge of sisterly understanding for this determined woman. They had each been blessed with useful work beyond the alliances or sons they could produce. Of Liane’s devotion to Coryn, she had no doubt, and she was heartened when Liane insisted on nursing him herself.

  She left them on a frosty morning. Liane had let Coryn have the last meat bun, having argued with him in a ruse to tempt his uncertain appetite. She walked to the door with Taniquel and brushed her lips against her cheek.

  “I will keep him safe and make him as whole as I can,” Liane said. “But he is wounded in ways I cannot, with all my monitor’s skill, heal. I can only pray that time and your love will do the rest.”

  Coryn waited for Liane’s visit, dressed for walking. He’d decided that as long as the weather permitted, he would exercise. Movement helped him regain his physical balance. His eyes still saw the sun and the brightness of the day, his ears still brought him the laughter of children and the harmonies of the rryl, he could still form coherent words, and yet some part of him had gone blind, deaf, and dumb.

  He strolled with Liane through the streets of Neskaya, limping a little from muscles damaged by the inward erosion of the flame patches. She tilted her head toward him, as if catching his thought but too tactful to ask him. They’d discussed his condition, monitor to patient, so many times, they’d worn out the words. He knew what had happened to him, the damage from the massive overload to his energon channels and nodes. He also knew that it was too soon to know how much had been burned out, or if there might be some slow recovery over time. Neither one of them had spoken aloud the truth that hung between them, which was that he would never again be capable of a Keeper’s work, or in all likelihood of any capacity in a Tower.

  My life will be with Taniquel, at Acosta.

  Now, as they skirted the area from which the jumbled ruins of Neskaya Tower could be seen, he realized he had never asked Liane what she meant to do.

  “I am not sure,�
� she said. “At first, I thought to help out here with monitoring and healing, for that was the most pressing need. But, after this winter, there will be only you and Bernardo who need more care, and his kin at Armida have asked him to join them.”

  “I can’t see him retiring,” Coryn said. “Dreaming away the rest of his life at someone else’s hearth.”

  She shook her head. “Neither can I, but his heart cannot take the strain of circle work. He could do much good as a teacher of novices, but where would he go? Any place another Tower might offer him would be charity, and he’s too proud for that.” She sighed. “It’s as if Neskaya and Tramontana, everything we built and dreamed, is being scattered to the winds. I suppose after you’ve left I will go home and make my family happy with a marriage.”

  “Is that what you truly want?” Coryn searched her wide green eyes for her reaction.

  “You asked me that once before, at Tramontana,” she said, laughing a little ruefully. “And no, then as now, what I want is to do the work I was trained for. But the world goes as it will, and not as you or I would wish it.”

  “Perhaps a place could be found for you at another Tower.” His right side had begun a slow, crawling burn, and he was forced to pause. Beyond the river, the piled rubble of Neskaya still smoldered.

  “Ah, how simple things are for you men. I am doubly beholden to my family, both as a woman and as a daughter of Storn.”

  Coryn heard the quiet acceptance in her voice. She, too, had changed in the last few years. The captivity in Linn had sobered her, even if it could not steal her dreams.

  His eyes rested on the pale blue stone that had once been a tower of such soaring beauty. In his imagination, he saw the blue fires lighting it from within. It would take a generation and the will of a Hastur lord to rebuild it, if ever. Meanwhile, Darkover would lose all that precious laran, those finely trained minds. Women like Liane and Demiana would tend babies instead of matrix circles. People would die because there were no skilled healers or not enough workers to keep the relays going or make enough fire-fighting chemicals.

  He and Taniquel shared a dream, and more than a dream. There must be a way to make our lives whole, she’d said on their last night, lying in his arms.

  Coryn turned to Liane and saw reflected in her face his own dawning hope. “Perhaps there is another choice . . .”

  Taniquel rode along the narrow spit of land and through the front gates of Acosta to a hero’s welcome. Despite the dusting of snow, people lined the roadside as if they’d been waiting for her for days. Men and women, babies and stripling youths stood red-cheeked in the cold, cheering wildly. At first, she smiled and waved, caught a nosegay of dried flowers. The crowd went on and on.

  Waves of adoration battered her. Her jaw muscles ached with smiling. By the time she reached the courtyard, her face was wet with tears.

  It is too much, she thought numbly. How could one person receive so much concentrated gratitude, as if all their pain and hope were poured into her at once?

  To them, I am not a person. I am a Queen. Yet, for those blissful tendays back in Neskaya, she had been only a woman in love. She would forever hold those memories in her heart, no matter what happened now.

  Gavriel and the coridom, as well as Rafael’s officers and senior staff, waited for her below the steps leading to the castle. The Hastur captain bowed, but Gavriel bent his old knees to kneel before her. She saw from the way he moved and the wetness in his age-rheumed eyes how difficult it was for him. Although she wanted nothing more than to run to her old chambers, shut the door behind her and bury her face in the comforter she’d had as a child, she held herself immobile as she listened to his formal welcome.

  She stooped to raise him and say in a voice only he could hear, “Old friend, the past is forgiven. I want no shadows of Deslucido between us.”

  In slow procession, she greeted each of the people who had taken back her home and held it for her. Many had waited for her return before starting back to their own homes.

  “There is not one among you,” she told them, “who has not earned a place here, for himself and his family, whenever there is need. Acosta will forever honor those who have served so faithfully in such desperate times.”

  As I make a home for Coryn, I will make a home for them all. This, too, was what it meant to be a Queen, to have sovereignty over her own kingdom.

  In the days that followed, she had many occasions to make good on that promise. One man, a grape farmer, had lost a leg to a festering wound in the retaking of the castle. Another brought forward his brother’s widow. Still others had lost the goodly portion of their farms or livestock to Deslucido’s army. Taniquel, working with Gavriel and the coridom, found a way to help them all. There was enough work to fill her days and send her into exhausted sleep each night.

  Each morning, she watched the path of the sun as the days grew shorter. With the turning of the seasons would come new calves and foals, crops of fine grapes, wheat and barley, and perhaps of babies. With spring, too, would come Coryn.

  Julian arrived before the first deep snow, brought by his nurse and a small entourage. After he was asleep, she walked the now-empty castle halls, remembering the sound of children’s laughter. But whether it was an echo of her own or a promise of children yet to come, she could never be sure.

  After everyone else had fallen asleep, Coryn Leynier, once laranzu and under-Keeper of Neskaya Tower, now consort to Queen-Regent Taniquel Hastur-Acosta, stood on the battlements of Acosta Castle. Below, new spring green glimmered in the moonlight. Absently, he rubbed the nubbled scar along his right side where the last of the blue fires had had to be cut away. It had been five years since the disaster at Neskaya and sensation was slow returning to the thickened tissue, but it was returning. Still, at times like this when he awoke sweating from half-formed terrors, he could not help running his fingers over it, a fleshly symbol of how he was forever changed.

  He was struck once more at the contrast between the timeless stillness of such nights and the ebullience of the days. From dawn until well past dusk, Acosta Castle hummed with activity, not restricted to the reordering of the kingdom. Almost independently, he and Taniquel had conceived the idea of opening Acosta to the workers from Neskaya or Tramontana, a place where they could continue their studies as they healed. One of the soldiers’ barracks had become an infirmary ward and workshops set up for retraining. An outlying building was still in use for laran practice for those whose talents were not completely burned out.

  Bernardo had been the first to come, accompanied by Liane, but he had died in his sleep the first winter. She had been preparing to return home when news of a marriage had arrived from Verdanta. Her elder brother, now Lord Storn, and Eddard had hesitantly agreed to explore the possibility of an alliance and taken to matchmaking like two gossipy old women. They had first thought of marrying Liane to Petro, but after a few visits back and forth, Petro had fallen in love with her acid-tongued younger sister and the bargain sealed in that way.

  Liane, now an extraneous elder daughter happily destined to become a spinster aunt, had just been offered a place at Dalereuth and would be leaving in a few months. Bronwyn had never come to Acosta, but had taken a post at Hali as soon as she could travel.

  Of the old circle from Tramontana, only Aran remained. He would bear the deformity of his shattered leg bones to his grave, but still rode like a centaur. Only this afternoon, he had ridden out with young Julian, teaching the boy to master his new pony. Julian, now seven, had taken a particular liking to Tessa’s firstborn, sent here for fostering, and for his “auntie” Liane, who was utterly charmed by him. In less than a decade, the boy would be giving them all heartaches and early gray hairs.

  “I will not leave you, bredu,“ Aran had said when it was clear his own psychic abilities had survived, although in lesser degree than before. He remained adamant in his belief that someday Coryn’s laran would recover. Perhaps he had something of a catalyst telepath in him, for sometimes Cor
yn could almost sense his thoughts when they were together.

  As for Coryn himself, he could not complain he was adrift. Five seasons flew by, filled with rewarding work. The skills he had absorbed along with his mother’s milk, the management of an estate, supervision of staff and smallholder, training and care of livestock, all these things now came into daily use. He was as much Taniquel’s paxman as he was her consort.

  Taniquel . . .

  He sensed her presence on the stairs behind him, although she moved soundlessly. He did not know, dared not hope, that this meant some portion of his laran had returned. Perhaps that was why he ran his fingers over the physical scar, testing that faint return of sensation as proof that healing could occur.

  With a rustle of skirts and the kiss of breath on his skin, Taniquel slipped her arms around his waist. Lips brushed against the base of his neck, where the neckline of unlaced summer shirt lay open. The tension lacing his nerves softened, as it always did in her presence.

  “Bad dreams?” she murmured.

  “Rumail again.”

  She turned him to face her. Her eyes shone like polished steel. “He is dead, love. I saw his shade in the Overworld, remember? They are all dead. And the dead cannot harm us, not a single one of that whole nest of scorpion-ants.”

  He wondered, not for the first time, if she were right, if that disquieting sense of Rumail’s presence were no more than lingering memory. It was natural to have such fears, the healers had told him, as the mind accepted what had happened, made order of tragedy and prepared to move on. But the image and the gut-wrenching reaction had seemed so real . . . He shook his head as if to clear it, and his hand went unconsciously to the invisible wound over his belly.

  “We have won, truly won,” she went on, her voice a shade strident now. “You can see that every day in the eyes of our people. Deslucido’s terrible secrets died with him, and that is the end to it. Darkover is safe, thanks to all of us. Now we have the future ahead of us. We are together, which I never dreamed possible. Isn’t that enough?”