by Carol Berg
“No, you need to experience this. Close your eyes.” I closed my own again . . .
... and the blustering wind riffled my hair, and the white sails snapped and billowed above my head, sharply outlined against a cloudless blue sky. One of my hands gripped the rough, damp hemp of the bow lines, the other the polished rail. With a wet, booming crash, the bow dipped into a deep trough, and I shivered when the salt spray wet my thin shirt and runnels crept into my boots. . . .
“Cripes!” When I looked again, Paulo’s hand was suspended in midair, a mushroom dangling from his knife dripping thick gravy on the table. His mouth hung open for a moment, until he blinked and lowered his hand, staring first at the Singer and then at me. “That’s damned marvelous. Can you do that?”
“Certainly not. It’s one of the Hundred Talents.” Which meant that only those born to it, as I was born to soul weaving, possessed the skill. And even if singing was your primary talent, surely you had to have some reservoir of memory . . . of decent things . . . of beauty . . . to make such a vision. That would eliminate me. I sawed off a piece of the stringy mutton, watching the face of the blowsy woman as she sang. Her expression shifted subtly: shadowed, then light again, worried, then peaceful, changeable as I had read about the sea.
“There’s nobody in this whole blasted world that’s just ordinary,” Paulo mumbled. “Singers. Soul Weaver. Horsemasters. Of all things . . .” He dug the point of his knife into the table.
“Don’t you start that. She’ll see what she needs to see. Just . . . when you go back to Avonar, talk to her. Tell her about all the things you do in the Bounded. No one in this world can do half the things you can. Don’t think you have to race right back here as if I can’t get my feet in my boots without you.”
A noisy party burst through the door, informing the proprietor that they were Gardeners and Tree Delvers returning to Avonar from the borders of the Wastes. As the Singer continued her performance at one end of the room, the newcomers settled around a table, grumbling at the difficulties they’d experienced in getting their latest project to take hold. A man with a beard down to his waist joked about harvesting a bucket of Lady D’Sanya’s tears to set their trees growing.
A few other people lingered in the corners: a slight, dark-haired youth huddled over a bowl of soup at the small table crammed up next the stairs, an old man and a young couple with their heads bent over ranks of brightly painted cards laid out on the table between them.
Not long after the Gardeners arrived, a knob-jointed fellow in a shabby velvet doublet carried in a heavy leather bag and asked one of the serving girls for the proprietor. Pulling a large, well shaped wooden bowl and a graceful hand-spindle from his bag and setting them on the table next to Paulo and me, he asked the formidable Mistress A’Diana if she needed an experienced Wood Shaper to serve her guesthouse. “Fine repairs or new work, indoors or out, for little more than my keep, mistress,” he said, wrinkling his brow as he drew thumb and first finger around the battered corner of the table, leaving it smoothed and nicely angled.
“Have you references?” asked the big woman, examining his samples. “I’ve things need doing, but I don’t hire without references.”
“I’ve worked for a number of guesting houses,” he said to her back, as she bent to see the repaired table corner. His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “But the folk who could recommend me are long dead.” He looked wan and anxious, as if the dead proprietors were waiting to pop out from under the table and grab him.
“Long dead . . .” The proprietress looked up sharply, then straightened, snatched up the bowl and the spindle, and shoved them into the man’s arms. “Get out of here, arrigh scheide!”
Two of the Tree Delvers growled and stood up, and the Weather Worker spun in his chair to look, almost toppling it in his haste. The pale Wood Shaper grabbed his bundle and scurried out of the room. The guests returned to their activities, but the conversation at several tables turned grim and quiet enough that we couldn’t understand it.
“What did she call him?” asked Paulo. “Meat-eater?”
I shook my head. “Flesh-eater. It’s an old Dar’Nethi name for the Zhid.”
“But he wasn’t—”
“No. Not any more. I guess some people don’t care to do business with those who might have spitted their brothers on sticks.” I sopped up the last of the gravy in my bowl with a hunk of bread, but then dropped the soggy bit without eating it.
As his gaze drifted over the other guests, Paulo wiped his knife on the last piece of bread. “But it wasn’t their fault. And they don’t even remember what wickedness they did, so Master Karon says. Might as well kill them as heal them if you’re not going to let them live and work.”
I shrugged. “Some of them wanted it. Liked it. They may not remember. But some wanted it.” And I wondered if the restored Zhid truly forgot . . . deep in their bones . . . even if they knew it wasn’t their fault.
We left before the Singer had finished her tale, as I was dozing in my wine. Anxious and unsettled, I’d not yet caught up with my sleep after sitting up with my father through his last night of illness.
“I can always tell when we’re off on another chase,” Paulo said as we trudged up the steep, narrow stair. “Always starts with you not sleeping right and me getting dragged off someplace I’d rather not be.”
His turn to tease. But I hadn’t forgotten Roxanne’s letter, so I didn’t laugh as I might have another time.
I decided that my first visit to the hospice had better be a careful one since I didn’t know the lay of the land, so I left Paulo in town to listen for gossip while I rode alone through Grithna Vale. I wasn’t prepared for the Vale of Grithna any more than I’d been prepared for the Lady D’Sanya.
The Vales of Eidolon are a series of broad valleys that seam the mountains ringing the royal city of Avonar. Each of the fifteen Vales has its own character, wild or cultivated, forested or grassy, dotted with towns and villages or sparsely settled. Grithna is a rugged area to the north of the city, one of the “lost Vales” that was destroyed either in the Catastrophe itself or in the early years of the war. Where limestone cliffs had once risen from thick forests and fertile meadows, nothing was left but dead trunks, parched earth, and blasted rubble.
But five months before, so Ven’Dar had told us, D’Sanya had come to Grithna and touched its barren earth with her tears. Now her Vale sported a woodland in its prime. Intermingled with a new growth of rowans and birches, the lifeless trunks of thick-boled oaks and ashes had developed wide, spreading canopies of green. Shrubs heavy with bright red berries grew thickly in any thread of sunlight, massing in colorful ranks along a rutted roadway that led up the heart of the valley.
As always when I saw such a place, my mind went out on its own, assessing where watchers could get the best view of the road, locating the rock piles where archers could take effective cover and harass an oncoming force, noting the crowding trees where warriors divested of noisy armaments could lurk and move unseen alongside their prey until the word was given. Unwary travelers along this road would be easy blood for the taking. The Lord Parven had been a master of military tactics. Though the Lords were no longer a part of me and their voices were long silenced, their lessons had not died with them.
In late morning, I reined in at the top of a long rise. Below me lay a well watered valley surrounded by barren peaks. Broad, green, stream-threaded meadows and a swath of woodland. Some cultivated fields. And a cluster of structures centered by a sprawling white house with a red tile roof, its walls hung with ten years’ growth of ivy. A low wall of white stone completely surrounded the house and a vast expanse of the valley floor, some of the enclosure left in pasture, some carved into gardens and orchards. The wall had only one break, a single gate with two upright pillars and a stone lintel.
The day was fine and hot as I rode down the hill and across the half-league of meadow. The glare had me squinting. After five years living in the ever-night of the Bounde
d with its purple lightnings and green stars, I wasn’t used to the sun. I didn’t miss it all that much, not the way Paulo did.
The gate was not guarded. A child jumped down from her perch on the wall and pushed open the white iron-work as I approached. Before I’d even dismounted in the gravel yard, two Dar’Nethi men hurried out, offering to tether my horse in the shade of a spreading beech tree alongside two other mounts. If I had not fetched him in an hour, they would take him down to the stable to tend him. The Lady D’Sanya herself waited on the wide columned steps to greet me, a tall, slender, gray-haired man standing just behind her.
“Blessings of life,” she called, smiling. “Welcome, sir.”
“Lady.” Halfway between the house and the tether rail, I bowed and extended my hands, and then awkwardly retreated after my horse to retrieve the things I’d brought. I yanked two bags from my saddlepacks and held them up as if to explain why I had not rushed to her feet right away. “Some things for my father.” I felt like a ten-year-old.
“Of course.” Her gown floated as she moved, a gauzy thing, pure white, which set off the brilliant eyes that almost made me forget my purpose in coming. “Did you have a fair journey?”
“Quite fine,” I said, as I walked across the gravel yard. Investigators had found two dead Zhid half a league from the place where she had walked out of the desert with blood on her tunic and a knife in her hand. I needed to remember that.
“You’re staying in Gaelie? At the Hawk’s Bill, I suppose. Mistress A’Diana looks grumbly, but is very kind.”
“Yes.”
Tongue-tied dolt. I couldn’t come up with anything to say. How was I ever going to question her? And I had been giving advice to Paulo!
Stepping aside, her gown swirling about her like smoke, she extended a hand toward her companion. “May I present Na’Cyd, consiliar of this hospice, the dear gentleman who makes my life purest ease and pleasure. I have but to voice an idea, and Na’Cyd executes it more perfectly than I could imagine.”
The man extended his palms, and I returned his grave politeness.
The Lady motioned to the wide doorway that centered the porch. Every one of her fingers had a silver ring on it, not gaudy but fine and delicate. “Please come in, Master . . . ?”
“Gerick. Please, just Gerick.” Probably foolish to use my own name, but neither my father nor his Preceptors had ever published my name in Avonar, believing anonymity was safer for me. As poor as I was at this spying business, I wasn’t sure I could manage a false name.
She smiled, and the sweat trickled down my neck. “I’ll have someone bring you wine. Or perhaps cold ale would better suit this warm day?”
“Ale . . . yes. Please.”
“Consiliar, if you would . . .” The tall gray man bowed and vanished through the wide doorway.
The Lady smiled and motioned me to follow. “Welcome to my home, son of K’Nor.”
I stepped inside, and she led me through a series of rooms and passages.
In my days with the Lords, I’d had the power to take any form I wished and explore the most hidden and remote places of the earth. On one of my journeys, I had taken myself to the deeps of the ocean and swum in the form of a fish through a series of cold stone caves: smooth, clean lines, uncluttered and pleasing, one space easing into another—that’s what I remembered of it—the dim, green-flecked light sufficient for my fish’s eyes to see my way.
D’Sanya’s house had a similar feel. The curved lines of the smooth white walls, not one square corner anywhere, were simple and pure, uncluttered as you passed from one comfortable space to another. The peace and quiet soothed the lingering aggravations of the unfamiliar saddle and the too-bright noonday, and a soft breeze filtered through the shady passages, cooling the sweat of the ride.
We came to a round, high-ceilinged chamber with at least six arched doorways that opened onto long passages. Above the doorways were rounded window openings that had no glass or shutters to filter the bright sunlight. The narrow dome was a well of light.
The consiliar Na’Cyd was waiting for us, a Dulcé at his side. “You will find your father in his apartments or his private garden,” he said. “Bertol here will show you the way once you have refreshed yourself.”
I shifted both bags into one hand as the Dulcé pressed a glass goblet filled with amber ale into the other. I hadn’t even removed my riding gloves yet.
“Whenever you come here in the future, you must go straight to your father,” said D’Sanya. “This is his home now, and you are welcome in all these public rooms and gardens. Here, let me show you. . . .”
D’Sanya was already halfway up a short straight stair. The consiliar and the Dulcé remained behind while I hurried after her to the top of the stair and onto a curved balcony with an iron railing. From this vantage we could look out over the entire compound. Most of the hospice was built on one level, neat, narrow arms leading out from this main house and surrounding many small courtyards and gardens. At the westernmost end of the place, across a wide green lawn, stood a modest house of three stories enclosed by its own small garden.
“That’s my residence,” she said, as if she had followed my eye across the red tile roofs. “The wings of the main house are for our guests. Out that way”—pointing with three ringed fingers, she indicated a cluster of tidy buildings set off from the others out beyond the orderly rows of a large orchard—“are the attendants’ quarters, the storehouses, and such. The tall whitewashed structure is the stable, and the square of buildings to the right of them are workshops for metalworking, pottery, and all manner of activities. Even lacking their true talents, some of our residents enjoy pursuing their former occupations, and they enrich us all by their work. In this building you’ll find the common rooms, the dining room, the library, sitting rooms, and studies that all may use.”
“It looks very comfortable.” I clutched the sweating goblet, but didn’t drink.
She drew me down the stair again, scarcely giving me time to take in one thing before showing me something new. “The families of my guests are always welcome here. All I ask of my visitors is that they do not intrude on the residents who wish to remain apart.”
She guided me through a warren of rooms with comfortable seating, colorful rugs and hangings, and many bookshelves, each room giving onto elaborate gardens thick with flowers, trees, and fountains. Though the consiliar was no longer in sight, the Dulcé trailed after us.
“It is perhaps one of the more difficult aspects of the hospice, that those who live here must inevitably lose a measure of their privacy. I try to help them maintain it as they wish. I share no names unless permitted, and provide each resident with a private apartment and an attendant to see to his or her needs. Only if they desire company do I invite them to join us in the common room to dine, although I do encourage it. Companionship can be helpful at those times when their families cannot be with them. They say the reasons that bring them here are often less clear when they are alone.”
“I think—” I tried not to stammer. “I believe it is important to my father to remain private. He was a Healer before this illness felled him, and it makes him uneasy to take this road when he has left so many others. . . .”
“You’ve no need to explain. I have not and will not pry into his affairs, though I must confess a slight violation of my own rules already.” We had arrived at an open foyer that I believed was the place I had first entered the house. She tilted her head to one side, and wrinkled her face in mock dismay. “I did ask your father about you. Only a small misdemeanor. I didn’t ask him about himself, you see. But there was something when we met the other day. . . .”
I swallowed uneasily. “And what did he say?”
“He apologized profusely, saying that as you had passed the age of eighteen by several years and had gone out on your own, he, as any father, must refuse to answer any more for you. He is a most charming gentleman, your father. Tell me”—she laid a hand on my arm—“would it be insufferably impe
rtinent if I were to invite you to walk with me this afternoon? You need not feel obliged.”
This was exactly what I had come here for, a chance to question her, yet those deepest instincts that warn us away from mortal danger demanded I run away; even through my sleeve, her touch set my arm afire.
“Perhaps after I’ve seen my father,” I mumbled, my feet already retreating. I set my untouched ale on a marble table and shifted the heavy bags again into both hands. “I’ve brought him some books, and a few of his clothes.”
“Of course, you must go to him first! I’ll be in the library should you decide to indulge me after. Anyone can show you. Bertol, please show the gentleman to Master K’Nor’s rooms.”
The Dulcé stood waiting in the doorway behind me. I felt the Lady’s eyes on my back as he led me down the passageway, but I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder. I wanted to make sure I could still do as I pleased. She could not be trusted. She had come from the heart of corruption.
We walked across two wide courtyards and down a marble cloister paved with flagstones that were delicately carved with vines and flowers. At last the slight, dark-eyed man bowed and pointed to a doorway tucked behind a vine-covered arbor. The door stood open.
I thanked the Dulcé as he withdrew.
Peering inside, I tapped on the open door and called out. “Father?”
I stepped from the glaring sunshine into the cool dimness of a spacious room. Before my momentary blindness allowed me to locate the bedchamber door, a shadowed figure rose from a chair next to the windows.
“No need to look farther. If nothing else, I’m set free of my bed for the moment.”
He wore a simple high-necked robe of dark blue, and though pale and gaunt, he showed no sign of the pain that had made even so simple an exercise as standing unsupported impossible a short week before.
“Are you all right?” I dropped the bags on a settle and embraced him. He was scarcely more than bones, a man who had once been a warrior unmatched in the history of any world.
