Daughter of Ancients

by Carol Berg

  “I will say it’s good to be up and about.”

  The room was well aired and comfortably furnished: a wide hearth, a small dining table, several couches and chairs, and a writing desk set to take advantage of the large windows. On the left a door led to a bedchamber similarly appointed. A pair of glass-paned doors opened onto a walled garden sheltered by spreading elm trees.

  “Let’s walk outdoors a while,” my father said, after showing me the finely bound volumes in a half-empty bookshelf and the marvelous plumbing fixtures that piped water into a small, carved basin and emptied waste from an enclosed water closet into a series of channels underneath the hospice buildings. “I can’t seem to get enough of the open air.”

  We set out through the formal gardens of thick shrubs and perfectly trimmed beds of flowers and herbs, and then turned onto a faint path that skirted the paddocks and led through the fringes of a stretch of woodland. Before any other conversation, he wanted to know about my mother. Only after he had wrung my brain inside out probing for every word she had spoken, every expression that had crossed her face and what I thought it might mean, did we move on to our investigation.

  “I remember almost nothing about my first hours here. Candlelight . . . a blur of colorful candlelight. Kind words. A hard bed. She kept me swaddled in hot blankets and her enchantments . . . a blessing, I’ll confess, but not so good for precise observation. And then, sometime around the second day, I believe, she and a man named Cedor brought me here and left me to sleep a great deal. I scarcely knew when I was awake and when I was asleep. Cedor brought my meals. He still does, and takes care of my linen and those sorts of things. But he doesn’t act like a servant.” He drew up his brow thoughtfully.

  “A spy?” I said. Something had to be wrong about all this kindness and generosity.

  “I don’t think so. He’s gentle, efficient, does his job, and makes no attempt at familiarity. But he’s not . . . servile . . . in any way, either. He is well-spoken, clearly intelligent, and shows an exceptional command of complexities like the plumbing. His demeanor is more that of a physician or a tutor, yet he performs the most menial tasks with good grace.”

  “You’ll need to be careful not to leave Mother’s letters lying about.”

  “Perhaps. But I don’t think Cedor’s a spy. He’s something else. I just don’t know what.”

  “I’m to speak to the Lady before I go.”

  “She’s very curious about you,” he said. “She asked me where you live, what you do, how old you are. Does she suspect, do you think?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s . . . When I saw her, I knew she’d lived in Zhev’Na. So that part of her story is certainly true. I think she knew the same about me.”

  We emerged from the woodland path, crossed a grassy lawn teeming with birds and butterflies, and wandered into an apple orchard. I had glimpsed a few other people walking in the gardens, but we had the woodland and the orchard to ourselves.

  “And so you’ve slept in your apartments after all this enchanting?”

  “Yesterday, I woke up in the morning as if I’d never been ill. You can’t imagine. . . . I rose, washed, ate. Crept about like an infant just learning how to walk, waiting for the onslaught . . . a twinge . . . something. But it never came. For the first time in three months, I could take a full breath without feeling like my gut had a grinding wheel in it. Cedor found me giddy and confused, and kindly reassured me that I was not mad. I supposed they explained the rules of the house to you, as well.”

  “She told me. So you feel normal? Healthy?”

  “I don’t feel anything. It’s so strange.”

  The path ended abruptly at the edge of the orchard. Beyond the straight line of the trees and across a short expanse of ankle-high grass stood the hospice wall, an unimposing strip of white stone no higher than my waist, stretching in both directions. I was ready to turn back, but my father walked on through the grass.

  “Do you sense enchantment here?” he said, running his hand along the top of the wall, where octagonal bronze medallions the size of my palm, each engraved with a flower, bird, or beast, were embedded at intervals.

  I brushed my hand on the smooth stone. The hairs on my arm prickled and stung uncomfortably, and I snatched my hand away. “Yes. It’s colder than it should be. Active enchantment, certainly.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t sense it. Yesterday afternoon when I was out walking, I climbed over the wall right there by that wild rose. Stupid thing to do. She had warned me. But after thinking of nothing but this wretched body for so long, to have no pain at all . . . I wondered if I was really dead and had just missed the whole thing! Well, I knew right away I wasn’t dead. Clearly there is no reversal of disease while one resides here.”

  “Someone found you?” I hated the thought of him lying in the grass in such pain.

  “Cedor. He says everyone tries it in their first days here, so he was keeping watch.”

  For a while we stood gazing across the grassy spread of the valley floor beyond the wall, threaded with streams, dotted with white clover, meadowsweet, and a few stubby hawthorns. Then we turned back and strolled through the apple, plum, and cherry trees, talking about nothing. Rather than returning the way we’d come, we wandered through sprawling vegetable gardens, encountering an occasional gardener who nodded or smiled as we passed. After a while, a cloud hanging over the distant mountains slid down across the valley and chased us inside with a drizzle of rain.

  “How does she do it?” I asked, taking up the only topic of real importance as if we’d never left it.

  My father had changed out of his wet robes into the more ordinary shirt and breeches I’d brought him and set about lighting a fire to chase the damp from my clothes. From the mantelpiece he took a small, lidded brass cylinder. A single living flame was visible through the perforated sides, and when he opened the cap and held the vessel next to his tinder, the flame leaped from the luminant and set the dry stuff ablaze.

  “The Lady says she doesn’t completely understand it herself, but that she has learned how to channel the power we ‘residents’ gather and bind it to her own, using it to shape the enchantments of the wall. She works the linking enchantment in our first days here. That’s why we have no shred of power left for our own use. I can’t so much as warm a cup of tea that’s gone cold or light a fire.” He said it lightly, but I knew that such incapacity was no trivial matter to a Dar’Nethi. “Cedor has to bring me this.” He capped the luminant again and set it on the mantel.

  “It’s like Zhev’Na, then,” I said.

  He shook his head as if to banish that memory, even as his hand rubbed his neck where the scar of his slave collar was now revealed by his open-necked shirt. “No. Not so crippling as that. I can gather power in the way I’m accustomed. It just dwindles away as fast as it builds.

  Truly I feel no evil in the Lady, and the beauties of this place are undeniable. To walk, speak, and eat free of pain, to read, write, and think . . . I never appreciated those things enough. But everything seems . . . different. I can’t grasp it. At least in Zhev’Na, I dreamed, but here, not once. Nothing.”

  He settled into a chair beside the fire and fell silent, staring into the flames. I didn’t know what to say.

  After a while, he glanced up at me. “One thing we must do each time you come: You must join with me, test me to see if I’ve changed somehow. My word won’t be enough.”

  “Are you sure?” I hated the thought of intruding on him again. Possessing him. When I joined with a person in that way, no thoughts or feelings could be kept hidden from me. I tried not to pry, but some intrusion was unavoidable. “We don’t even know if my ability will work here.”

  “Another good reason to do so. I know it’s awkward. But you mustn’t worry; I trust you.” He smiled, and motioned me to come nearer the hearth. “Come along. You know I’m right, so get it over with.”

  We sat on a small couch. Closing my eyes, I gathered what power I had, willing my
talent to rise, feeding it with power, and allowing it to swell up inside me until it felt as if my skin would split. Then came the unnerving separation of body and soul, the tearing loss as my detached senses failed, and the moment’s disorientation as I abandoned my own body and slipped into my father’s. My talent worked without difficulty, but I knew at once that all was not right with him.

  When I had joined with him at Windham, again as we had crossed the Bridge, and the third time on that last night at Mistress Aimee’s house, I had thought no one could endure such pain as his without madness. My soul had been seared with his longing for release, entwined with his grief at leaving us. Yet even in his torment, my father had been filled with the joy I had come to recognize as his unique gift. He treasured life so very much.

  But when I entered his body that rainy afternoon at D’Sanya’s hospice, I thought I might suffocate. He could see, but the colors of the world were flat. Objects had no substance and no meaning beyond their shapes and dimensions, none of the history, associations, nuances, or sensations that a Dar’Nethi absorbs with every breath of his life. I tried speaking in his mind, but he evidenced no sign of hearing me. My father was blind and deaf and mute and numb in every way of importance to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, after I’d left him and come back to myself, sitting on the floor shivering in the suddenly chilly room. “I’ll get this done as quickly as I can.”

  He smiled tiredly and leaned back in his chair. “So it’s not just my imagination. That’s a relief.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I left my father reading the stack of letters from my mother and retraced my way to the main house. The rain shower had left the sky gray, the cloisters dripping, and the courtyards smelling of damp earth. When I came into the public rooms, I wandered lost for a while, looking for someone to ask where I could find the library. The consiliar Na’Cyd glanced at me over the heads of two men in the dark blue tunics and black breeches that seemed to be the livery of the hospice staff. But he made no move and was soon reengaged in conversation.

  I opened a door that seemed likely, only to find a group of five or six chattering people clustered around a confused-looking elderly man. Mindful of the rules of privacy, I backed out of the room in a hurry, only to collide with someone who had walked behind me in the passage.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, managing not to fall on top of him by grabbing the doorjamb.

  Unfortunately, a paper packet flew out of his hand and split open on the floor, scattering its contents down the passage, red juice and pulp smearing the sand-colored tiles. A fruity scent filled the passage—raspberries. With a hiss of exasperation, my victim—short and dark-haired—dropped to the floor, snatched up the ripped packet, and began scooping the remaining berries into it. I crouched down to help.

  “You might find walking with eyes front somewhat more fulfilling on the whole.”

  Not a youth, as I’d thought at first, but a girl. Her dark hair, lopped off so short around her face and neck, had confused me. She didn’t look up. My own surreptitious glance revealed little—a slim untidy young woman wearing a wrinkled linen shirt of dark green, scuffed black leather vest, and tan trousers. I couldn’t see her face.

  Gathering raspberries enough to fill both hands, I stood waiting stupidly while she stuffed her own gatherings into the packet, got back to her feet, and held out the bag.

  “I was trying to locate the Lady D’Sanya,” I said, dropping the fruit into the soggy paper. “She said she would be in her library. Can you tell me where that is?”

  “Second door on the left, just . . . just beyond . . .” She stared at my hands, which were wet with sticky red juice. “Just beyond the fountain.”

  I shrugged and held my hands awkwardly away from my clothes. “Serves me right for being clumsy.”

  Her eyes flicked upward, but only briefly, allowing me a quick impression of dark eyes in a narrow, fine-boned face.

  “You can use this to wipe them,” she said, almost swallowing her voice completely as she offered a handkerchief she pulled from her trousers’ pocket. She kept her eyes averted.

  Assuming she was one of D’Sanya’s guests who wished to remain private, I kept my own eyes down while I dabbed at my hands. The white linen square was soon sticky and red. Ah, damn . . . I hadn’t thought. The scars across my palms were repulsive.

  Returning the stained kerchief, I quickly crammed my hands into my pockets. “Sorry again,” I said. “Good day.”

  I felt the woman’s gaze on my back as I hurried down the passage toward the door she’d pointed out, pulling on the thin leather riding gloves that I had looped over my belt.

  The library was immense: a high, painted ceiling, tall windows of colored glass, at least twenty lamps, and so many books that a staircase reached up to a walkway that encircled the room halfway up the walls. The Lady stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, looking from one side to the other as if trying to decide where to start.

  She had changed into a long-sleeved red shirt, a gray vest embroidered in red, yellow, and green wool, and an ankle-length skirt of gray leather, split like trousers. A gold bracelet worked like a vine wound up one forearm, bright against her red sleeve.

  I greeted her with a bow.

  “I keep thinking I should start reading all of these,” she said, “so I might understand everything that’s happened and everything that’s been learned since I was a child. But I never cared for reading books. My mother always said it was because I wasn’t grown-up enough. Even yet I can’t sit still for it. Do you think that means I’ve not grown up yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As a child at Comigor, I’d heard the kind of witty replies men make to such questions from a lady, but I’d never learned the art of devising them myself. It was critical that I make this woman’s acquaintance and gain her trust, but I was beginning to think even Paulo was better suited to it than I.

  “Do you ride?” I said, unable to come up with anything more clever, and unable to take my eyes off her.

  “I’ve been told I sit a horse quite fair.” Putting one finger by her mouth, as if to tell a secret, she leaned her head toward a gray-haired lady who sat frowning over a book. “Mistress S’Nara,” she said in a loud whisper, “do you think the young gentleman is asking me to accompany him on a riding excursion?”

  “Indeed, Lady, I do.” For a moment, the old woman reflected D’Sanya’s radiant smile. Her face crumpled into a knot as she went back to her book.

  “Well, are you, sir?” The Lady’s eyes sparkled with laughter.

  “I—Yes.” Demons, why was it so hard to talk to her?

  “I’d accuse you of reading my thoughts, but I think you might be reading my clothes, instead—certainly from your fixed glance. Or is it just you’ve never seen a lady’s riding skirt?” She spun about until the wide legs of her leather skirt billowed out like a wind flare. Then she patted the reading lady’s hand and waggled a summoning finger at me. “Come along, then. Let’s ride away.”

  As we strolled through the hospice and across the yards to her stables, she told me how she’d coaxed the Dar’-Nethi Builders into spreading her house across the meadow rather than piling it up tall as was the usual Dar’Nethi preference. “I didn’t want my guests to be stacked one upon the other, and the views are lovely enough from all the windows.”

  And she talked of the difficulties of bringing seventy people from every part of Avonar into one household and making them feel welcome, yet not compelled to mold their renewed lives into some image of hers. Her experiences made me think of the Bounded and the difficulties we’d had building a life there, and believed that she might be interested in hearing about those things, if ever I could trust her enough to tell her of them. For the moment, I simply listened. She never seemed to stop talking, as if she were trying to make up for a thousand years of silence in one day. Yet none of it was the nonsensical stuff my sometime mother Philomena had spewed endlessly when I was a child.


  We passed two elderly men trudging grimly down the path, and she greeted them gaily. “Blessings of life, gentlemen. Was not our rain refreshing after so hot a morning? Good Master Gerard, have you enjoyed the paintings I sent you for your apartments? I tried to find just what you described to me, but I’ll try again if they don’t suit; the modern styles are still beyond my comprehension.”

  Just as the woman in the library had, they brightened with her attention, agreeing with her assessment of the weather and the artworks. Neither man wasted a glance on me.

  “I thought you didn’t use names here?” I said.

  D’Sanya waved to a middle-aged woman strolling among the flowers. “Only with those who have given permission. Most of my guests who come together in the common rooms and grounds see no need for the restriction any longer.”

  A balding man with a horrid scar on his face met us in the stableyard with my horse. He bowed to the Lady and held open the tall painted door, unrestrained adoration in his gaze. As I mounted, D’Sanya disappeared into the clean-smelling stable for a moment, only to reappear astride an unsaddled gray stallion.

  “My brothers taught me to ride,” she said, smiling at my surprise. “We were something less civilized in those days.” Twining her fingers in the pale mane, she leaned slightly forward as if to whisper in the beast’s ear and shot out of the yard like an arrow from a master archer’s bow.

  I prided myself on my riding. Though not as instinctive a master as Paulo, who became as one with his mount, I had good balance and hands sure enough to convince a horse to do whatever I required of it. But D’Sanya left me feeling awkward and slow, a dead weight in the saddle. She gave a cheerful whoop as the gray soared over a stone fence and landed like a feather, scarcely disturbing the air as he flew, while I jolted my teeth and jerked the reins to straighten our course, wondering who had put lead in my horse’s hooves. I caught up with her halfway across the meadow, but only because she reined in, laughing over her shoulder. I halted beside her.