by Glenda Larke
Davron swallowed the bile. Deliberately, he allowed his desperation to drag at his voice. ‘One task, at the time of your choosing. Is that not punishment enough for any man?’
‘No, not good enough. You will disappear into a stability and I will never see you again. You must swear to spend three-quarters of every year here in the Unstable. And if you do not keep your word, if you kill yourself, then I shall taint your daughter, or any ley-unlit issue of yours, any descendant through all time, when they come to do their pilgrimage. My word on it. Now do you accept my side of the bargain?’
He paled, knowing he would be saying goodbye to the life he had led. He plunged on, unable to think of an alternative. ‘Yes, if I have your assurance as the Unmaker that after I have performed your task, I—and mine—will be safe from your harm for all time?’
He smiled. ‘The only harm that will come to you and yours will be what you will do to yourselves, Master Davron.’ He began to nod in a self-satisfied way. ‘Yes, I think I begin to like this. It has possibilities… Do you accept, then?’
It was worse than Davron had hoped for, but he knew it was all he was going to get. ‘I accept,’ he said. And the shame he felt at his capitulation began.
Five years further on he finally cried for what he had lost that day, cried because another woman had asked him why he could not see his children.
~~~~~~~
Keris wanted to take him into her arms, she wanted to hold him, comfort him, love him. She wanted to banish his pain, his tears. Instead she stood helpless, aware that he shrank from being touched.
She waited.
Finally he calmed, walked to the stream, washed his face, wiped it dry with his hands. He lowered himself to the ground with his back to a tree, his head tilted back to lean on its trunk, his knees bent to support his forearms. And briefly, he told he what had happened that day in the ley line, when he had lost his world. ‘She will not permit me near my daughter,’ he finished, his voice flat, ‘and she has hidden my son from me.’
She went to kneel at his side, still not touching him. ‘I don’t understand.’
A long pause. And then: ‘Alyss forbade me to see Mirrin ever again, forbade me ever to see the child she was bearing.’
She searched for reasons, to excuse the inexcusable. ‘She feared for their safety—’
‘She knows Carasma is always bound by the terms of his bargains. No, she was…ashamed. Ashamed that I knew she’d been willing to sell her soul to save herself, so she had to blame me, punish me. And she despises me too. Despises me because I couldn’t protect her as it was my duty to do, couldn’t protect our children, without selling myself to Carasma.’
‘You judge her harshly.’
He said in sudden anguish, ‘I would have forgiven her anything, understood anything…except what she did to Mirrin and Staven. She could have turned me in to Chantry there and then and I would have understood. Applauded her courage, even. Loved her still more, knowing the depth of her sacrifice to save the world from what I might do to it. And I cannot blame her for blaming me! Maker, how could I condemn her for something I do myself, every day of my life? No, it was what she did to Mirrin and the boy that I can never forgive. Never.’
She waited, understanding at last that he hated his wife.
‘Mirrin, she was only three. Think about it, Keris. Think about what she saw and heard that day. Her own face on the shoulders of a monster. The Unmaker threatening her, and her father powerless to save her. She saw me strike her mother senseless. And then Alyss forbade me to see her, forbade me to explain anything, forbade me even to say goodbye. ‘Come near her again, and I shall tell the world you wear the Unmaker’s sigil,’ she said. So I left, turned my back on my daughter and her trauma. I accepted that, I accepted it as the price I had to pay. As my punishment, if you like. She will have her mother, I thought. Alyss loves her as much as I do. Alyss will be her support and her comfort.’
He paused, still not looking at Keris, and she knew she still hadn’t heard the thing that had turned his love for Alyss into a cold rage against her.
‘I left them there, and rode off with Scow. He offered to come with me. A few days later I met Meldor for the first time, and we’ve been together ever since. I have a bargain with him, too. I help him and he kills me when the time comes.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Not much of a bargain, is it? But I can’t kill myself without endangering the future of my children, and my children’s children.’
He dropped a hand to the ground and began to sift soil aimlessly through his fingers. ‘Alyss went on to Tower-and-Fleurys. But instead of staying with her parents, she left Mirrin and rode off to the chanterie in Middlemass. It’s a closed kinesis order that sends chantoras to the chain, and she told them she wanted to sever her marriage to me and replace it with one to them, as a kinesis-chantora. They told her the dissolution of her marriage was only possible if she sacrificed something of great value. So she gave them our baby. Our son. When he was born she offered him to Chantry. He was taken from her, given another name, and sent elsewhere. She never even put him to the breast. And now he is untraceable, destined never to know his origins, destined to be a chantor.’
She drew in a sharp breath, and turned involuntarily to look at the house on the other side of the river.
‘The girl was Mirrin,’ he said, ‘but the boy was her cousin, not my son. I have never seen him and never will. I will never know where he is, or even know his given name. I—I call him Staven.’ He raised his face to look at her, and his gravel-voice broke. ‘Mirrin lost her father in circumstances that were inexplicable to her. Just when she needed Alyss most, she was rejected by her as well, with breathtaking callousness. My son was given over to strangers who only care to raise chantors for their cause. Mirrin and Staven will never know one another. For that, for all that, I shall never forgive Alyss of Tower-and-Fleury.’
He looked at her with helpless eyes, and she dropped her gaze. In her heart she cried for him, and knew that had she stood in Alyss’s shoes his children would have been the most precious beings alive. How could she have done that to her own flesh and blood? To his children?
‘I don’t know why,’ he said, as if she had spoken aloud. ‘I suppose she feels that offering her son to Chantry will help to expiate her sin. Perhaps she would also have offered Mirrin, if her parents had allowed it. I don’t know why she did the things she did. I don’t know what stops her from telling Chantry about me anyway. Perhaps she’s afraid I would then tell the world exactly what she was prepared to do.’ He shrugged. ‘If so, then she knows me little. I have told no one that. Not Meldor, not Scow, no one—until now. And I’m not sure why I’m telling you. Perhaps—’ His voice caught as he looked at her. ‘Perhaps it has become important to me that you say you understand why I did what I did, if you can.’
She did not hesitate. ‘Yes.’
The immediacy of her reply took him by surprise and he stared, then laughed. ‘Oh, Keris, dear, is there anyone as—as wonderfully forthright as you are?’
‘I didn’t need to think. Most women would have honoured a man who did what you did for her and for your daughter.’ I would have.
‘Oh Keris—’ She wasn’t sure what she had done, but she heard some of the burden was gone from his voice, and was glad.
He stood, giving one last reluctant glance at the domain house. ‘Let’s go. Was Letering out when you called? Were you wanting to ask him about trompleri maps?’ She accepted his need to talk about something else, a neutral topic. ‘Yes. And not just that. He has an ingenious way of showing the land height with lines and numbers. I think he must use some form of vertical triangulation, using a theodolite. I have long thought it possible—’
She chattered on, trying not to think how much she would’ve liked to kill Alyss of Tower-and-Fleury for what she had done to this man at her side. She knew now who had put the polish on the obsidian blackness of his eyes.
~~~~~~~
She went to him that night.
He opened to her knock immediately, as if he’d been wide-awake and waiting. There was even a candle burning by his bed. He gestured for her to enter, but he remained remote, standing away from her. ‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked.
She shook her head dumbly.
He understood then. His face changed, darkening as he flushed. ‘Oh no, Keris. No. I thought you understood! I thought you knew it’s not possible.’
‘I thought— I thought— I know your wife was beautiful, and I’m plain, and I have no experience…’
He groaned, and she stumbled into embarrassed silence. ‘You don’t understand,’ he whispered. ‘Sweet Creation, you don’t understand. It’s not possible.’
She rushed on. ‘I’m not asking for anything permanent. I know you’re a Trician, and I’m just a mapmaker’s daughter, but I thought— You did want me, I know you did!’
‘Keris, Keris. Hush. Of course I wanted you. Want you. I’ve wanted a lot of women in the five years since I was bonded to the Unmaker. I’ve never taken one of them, and I never will. I am cut off from the tainted, and from the normal, and from the ley-lit. Carasma’s little joke on me, you see, because I didn’t specify it in our bargain. I can never lie with anyone as long as I wear this.’ He touched the sigil on his arm. ‘Except a Minion, I suppose. And that I will never do.’
She looked at him, uncomprehending, not wanting to understand.
Gently, so very gently, he took up her hand and, eyes never leaving her face, he allowed his lips to brush the back of her fingers. She felt the first jolt when he touched her hand, but that was just the beginning. His lips were burning incandescence. The pain screamed through her, searing, pulsing deep, molten metal being poured into her veins. It lasted only for the sliver of time he held her, for the briefest breath of his kiss to her fingers, but it had her sinking to the floor, dragging in deep breaths at the memory of the agony.
Gradually the beating of her heart calmed. She looked down at her hand: it was unmarked. She stumbled to her feet and stood before him. Her eyes filled with tears. When he reached out again she refused to flinch, but all he did was stroke her hair. Tenderly he twisted a strand around his finger, touching the only part of her that would not feel the wounding fire of his touch.
She turned away then, blindly groping for the door. She barely heard his whispered words as the door closed behind her, but they echoed on in her head as she ran crying along the corridor until she did not know whether they had been her words, or his.
‘I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Forgive me.’
~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty-One
She has magic in her colours, despair in her heart and gives beauty she does not have. She will vanquish the Lord or die in the ley because of him. In her hands is both salvation and death.
Predictions XII: 2: 23
Ley-life but I feel old, Keris thought. How long ago was it that I left Kibbleberry? Four weeks? No, it must be more like six. Yet I feel I’ve aged ten years… I was a child, and now I’ve grown up.
She looked across at Davron, where he rode to the side and slightly ahead of her. His clothing was, like hers, stained with dust and sweat. His seat on his crossings-horse was relaxed, yet there was something about the way he held his head that told her he was alert and watchful. I am beginning to read him so well. Is this what it is like to be in love—to look at someone and know how they feel?
They were riding through a land that seemed utterly without redemption. Dry, harsh red in colour, slashed through with bottomless fissures and crazed with cracks, land so desolate it was easy to think of it as being already partially unmade. What had Portron said? I keep on thinking I’ll come across a hole in the world… A place where there is nothingness… Well, there were holes enough in this landscape to make him think his worst nightmare was coming true.
The chantor was riding beside her, his shoulders slumping a little with fatigue. He had lost weight in the weeks since they’d left the First; his paunch had slimmed to a more flabby, less noticeable roundness. She wondered idly why it was that he was so protective of her. There did not seem to be any reason she could see. She’d never given him any encouragement to think she might be amenable to Chantry interference in her life, and she didn’t think he was guilty of falling in love with someone thirty years younger than he was.
Her eyes strayed back to Davron. Solid, sorrow-laden, troubled Davron. I must have been mad. Whatever made me think that he felt anything for me? It was just the reaction of a virile man who hasn’t had a woman for five years… It wasn’t me he wanted, it was just relief. I wish knowing that made a difference—but it doesn’t. Before, I just wanted him; now I love him, and it hurts…
Ley-life, how I love him…
Creation, his courage. The only way he could find freedom would be to change the whole world, and that’s what he was trying to do, knowing all the while he’d probably lose. And yet refusing to surrender.
Helpless to aid him, she considered the way he wrapped himself around with his protective shell, the way he kept himself under tight control all the time, waiting, endlessly waiting, knowing that his life could end in his madness as he attacked all he cared to maintain and protect. His life could end with a dishonourable act of horror, anathema to a man who placed great store by his honour. The courage he must possess just to go on living was heart-rending.
‘Chaos dammit!’
Disgust riddled Chameleon’s voice, coming from behind her. She turned and, as always, found herself disoriented by her first impression. He blended into the landscape so perfectly his horse appeared to be riderless. ‘Another of those damn fish-net bridges,’ he said. ‘Keris, will you hold my hand this time?’
‘Are you mind-tainted? I’ll be too busy holding on to the ropes.’
That wasn’t quite true; usually she had both hands fully occupied with dragging a reluctant, blindfolded horse across a rope-and-board bridge that was about as stable as a tattered pennant flapping in the breeze. Luckily there were always tainted Unbound bridge guardians to help, but even so it was an ordeal. Ahead Davron and Meldor were already dismounting to talk to those at this bridge, probably the same individuals who’d originally built it. Bridges never lasted long. The landscape changed around them too much and too often.
‘There seem to be so many more people in the Unstable here than there were north of the Wide, don’t there?’ Quirk remarked as they drew up. ‘We keep bumping into the tainted all over the place.’
‘Others beside the Unbound, too,’ she agreed, dismounting.
‘Yeah. Those renegades yesterday, for example. None of you ley-lit ever did explain to my satisfaction just what happened to the clothing of that couple of spike-headed bastards who were leading them.’ A group of excluded thieves, led by two stubble-tonsured thugs, had tried to rob the fellowship, only to think better of it when Meldor had released a bolt of colour from his fingertips that had set their leaders’ clothes smouldering. Neither the Chameleon nor Corrian had seen the ley, but they’d seen the effects of it.
Keris grinned. ‘Meldor took a dislike to their fashion-sense and performed a little sleight of hand, that’s all.’
Quirk wanted to question her further but was interrupted by Portron, who was dismounting beside him. ‘Davron’s negotiating with this lot on a price for use of that cat’s cradle, I suppose,’ the chantor said, eyeing the bridge ahead with considerable misgivings. He wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. ‘Creation, what I wouldn’t give for a bath!’
To Keris the discussion between the guide and the tainted bridgemen did not look like a bargaining session over the toll. As far as she could tell, the Unbound
greeted Meldor and Davron as old friends. In fact, after a few minutes, the two men were invited into one of the tents in the camp erected some distance away.
She’d noticed before that Meldor appeared to be well acquainted with many of the tainted they’d met since they’d left the Fifth Stab behind. Some of them had even seemed to treat him as if he was still a knight. Women ran alongside his horse, just to touch his foot, men reached for his hand or knelt at his feet. As for paying to cross any of the numerous bridges they’d been forced to use, as far as she could tell no money had ever changed hands. On the contrary, once she’d even seen what appeared to be a bag of coins pass the other way, from the Unbound into Davron’s hands. Although she supposed she could have been mistaken about its contents.
Still…
She glanced towards the tents, but there was no sign yet of Meldor and Davron emerging. Scow was talking to some of the others there, and after a while he took something from one of them and headed back to where she and the rest of the fellowship were waiting.
‘Probably wining and dining him,’ Portron said, referring to the Unbound and Meldor. He sounded sour. He was even less enamoured of the blind man since his further usage of ley against the bandits.
‘Very likely,’ Keris agreed. He’s being entertained as if he is among his own people… Her own thought startled her. His own people? These Unbound, once pilgrims, now wanderers forced to roam the Unstable, seeking a way of making a living, seeking a place where they could be safe for a while? These scattered groups of refugees they’d encountered—the outcasts of the stabilities: the thieves, the deformed, the blind, all those excluded from stability by the Rule? Yes, perhaps they were his people. He too was an outcast, rejected by Chantry. Not that you’d ever know it now. Meldor did not act like anyone who’d been rejected, in fact, he seemed to have grown in stature since they’d left the Fifth. He’d become more regal, more confident, as if he was shrugging off a disguise he’d been wearing and was now assuming a different mantle, that of leader. A respected leader.
