Daughter of Ancients

by Carol Berg

  “But then it ended. What happened?”

  Even with the steel foundation, her voice was shaking. Her gaze had lost focus again, telling me that she was reliving her horror just as I had. “I was taken before the Lords once again, to their throne room where the floor was like black ice and the roof was like the midnight sky. They were masked now, and their jeweled eyes gleamed hard and cold. They said they were finished with me. I was too ‘expensive,’ and as my father would be stubborn, he must be taught a lesson. I assumed I was to die and was glad of it. They told me terrible things, all their lies over again. Then they laughed until it violated my soul to hear it, and the world went dark . . . until I found myself wandering in the desert half a year ago.”

  “You remember nothing in between?”

  “Nothing. No. Nothing.”

  She was lying. Perhaps it was only that I was so conscious of my own omissions that I could recognize it so easily. Every word she had spoken was truth—until the end. Not all of the truth, but at least no lies. But when she claimed to remember nothing between her last visit with the Lords and her release, the very timbre of her voice cried falsehood. I couldn’t blame her.

  We sat for a long time, letting the cooling breeze brush away the horrors we had spoken and replace them with the cries of night birds, the rustling of the trees that bounded our meadow, and the quiet ripple of a brook that traveled mindlessly from the meadow down the steep hillside. Then, with no more words, I rose and gave her my arm, and we abandoned the remnants of our feast and walked slowly down the path. Somewhere along the way my arm found its way about her waist, and somewhere along the way her head found its resting place on my shoulder, and we kept our darkest secrets, yet drew some kind of comfort from what truth we had shared. Even after we collected the horses, we chose to walk, parting at last in the stable yard. Only then did she speak. Softly. Lantern light brightening her eyes as if the moon had fallen into a mountain lake. “You’ll come again tomorrow?”

  I nodded. “But tomorrow, I choose the games.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I was soon spending most of every day with the Lady D’Sanya. We rode. We walked. We picnicked in the hills. We ran races and told silly secrets. One magical afternoon we explored one of the caves that riddled the mountains of Grithna, D’Sanya casting a light so that we could follow the path to a milky-white underground lake. A forest of stalactites and stalagmites surrounded the lake, the shapes more fantastic than any sculptor could invent.

  Some days we stayed at the hospice in D’Sanya’s house or in the library or in the garden, looking at books or playing draughts. We tried playing sonquey, a game of strategy played with tiles and silver bars, but D’Sanya found it boring when I would not use enchantment to manipulate the tiles. She said that playing sonquey without the added dimension of sorcery made her feel like a child allowed to use building blocks only in the horizontal plane, forbidden to stack them one upon the other.

  On none of these outings did we ever return to the horrors of our past. The secrets we exchanged were innocent and childish. She adored flavored ices and had stolen them from the kitchens before her father’s royal feasts so there were never enough for the guests. I abhorred eating green things and had hidden them in my pockets for the washing women to find. She got abominably seasick. I had never kissed a girl. We both preferred being outdoors—riding or walking, running, or just sitting—to any other activity.

  My father smiled as I dashed in to greet him and deliver the latest packet of letters Paulo had brought from Avonar and then dashed out again before ever sitting down. He insisted that he did not feel neglected, but rather was pleased that I pursued my investigation with such vigor. Of course, I had not forgotten our purpose. We were close to an answer. I already knew more of D’Sanya than I knew of anyone save Paulo.

  Paulo worried more. He accused me of infatuation, warning that my distraction would reap trouble. I told him he was just jealous because his own infatuation was going nowhere, but I did heed his warning and worked harder to keep my head. That very day D’Sanya asserted that my mysterious friend who could read horses’ thoughts didn’t really exist and begged again to meet him. Though tempted to agree—wanting to please her, wanting to make things honest between us—I saw how blatantly stupid was that idea. I told her he was busy, taking care of my father’s business in Avonar. Not a lie. Not really.

  I never allowed D’Sanya to see the scars on my hands. Most of the time I wore gloves, claiming that a childhood illness had left my hands persistently cold. She teased that it was just another aspect of my shyness. I did not argue with her, just kept my palms out of sight when gloves would not do. If she saw my scars, then, like Sefaro’s daughter, she would know I had been one of the Lords. Every day it seemed more important that she never find out. Whether she loathed the Lords or served them, I would lose something I had never thought to find.

  D’Sanya teased me about Sefaro’s daughter, as well, saying she must be smitten with me the way she followed me around. Had I perhaps rebuffed the young lady’s attentions? Professing ignorance, I changed the subject quickly.

  One evening as I was hurrying to meet D’Sanya, I discovered I’d forgotten my cloak and reversed course abruptly to return to my father’s apartments. I slammed right into Sefaro’s daughter, grazing her shoulder against a brick wall and stepping on her foot. I started to make a comment about us needing to mark our current positions on a map, but checked my tongue when I met her gaze. Of course, she wasn’t going to appreciate levity. “Sorry,” I said.

  “What meaning can sorry have coming from you?” Along one fine cheekbone a ragged scar shone white against her angry flush.

  I crowded along the hedge as I passed so as not to touch her again.

  She lurked in the shrubbery, in the cloisters, in corners and shadows, her constant presence ensuring I didn’t forget the past in the pleasures of the present. Though I tried to dismiss her, I never made the nighttime journey from the hospice to Gaelie without keeping a close watch for mountains ready to fall on my head.

  D’Sanya and I spent one long, rainy afternoon in the library reading a book of Dar’Nethi legends. At sunset, Na’Cyd summoned us to dinner. Afterward, D’Sanya wished to take up the story again, so I returned to the library to fetch the book. Sefaro’s daughter was leafing through the pages. Seeing me, she threw it on a table as if it had scorched her fingers. “How dare you read of Vasrin and beautiful things!” she said, her cheeks a fiery scarlet. “What are you playing at?”

  As usual, I had no answer.

  “Before we set out for Tymnath, I have a riddle for you, my play friend.” D’Sanya dragged me up from the grass beneath an ash tree where I’d lain waiting for the past hour listening to locusts buzzing in the grass, unable to concentrate on my book for my impatience to be with her. A delicate strand of sapphires set in silver dangled from her wrist, the color matching the flowing tunic she wore atop her leather riding skirt. “Forgive my dawdling, but one of my gardeners—my stone gardener—was showing Na’Cyd and me the work he’s just completed. Now I want to share it with you.”

  “Stone gardener? That sounds like a riddle itself.”

  “You’ll see.” Waving to the ever-present consiliar, who stood watching us from the gate, D’Sanya led me across her lawn, up the wide steps, and into her house.

  “Does Na’Cyd ever do anything but watch us?” I had found the consiliar’s gray eyes fixed on me four times that morning: as I arrived at the hospice, as I left my father’s apartments, as I met D’Sanya in her garden, and now again, when he ought to be off about hospice business. “I’m beginning to see him lurking in my sleep.”

  “Pay him no mind. I believe the man considers himself my substitute father, ready to protect me from mysterious handsome fellows who constantly distract me from my work.”

  Beyond the sunny sitting room where we talked and played children’s games lay an enclosed garden, lush and green. It included three apple trees, a small lawn, a gravel
walk lined with beds of flowers, but its heart was a magical fountain where spraying water sculpted the misty shape of three swans taking flight from the pool. On my every other visit to this garden, the solid gate in the stone wall on its far side had been closed and locked. D’Sanya had told me it was a part of the house construction that remained unfinished. But on this morning the gate stood open, and the Lady motioned me to walk through, into a small courtyard. I gaped in amazement.

  Before us lay almost the exact replica of the green garden behind us, but in this courtyard, every flower and tree and blade of grass was gray stone, its surface as smooth and luminous as pearls. Even the magical swans had been duplicated in stone, their rising wings as light as if filled with air.

  “I’ve never seen stonework so delicate, so exact,” I said. I ran my fingers over the rose petals. Each flower was slightly different, just as true flowers grew, and the artist had captured the fine veins in the leaves, the motley blights and blemishes of real flowers, even a rose beetle here and there. The thorns seemed real, as well, sharp enough to prick my finger when I touched them.

  “You didn’t guess, then!” She stood behind me, her delight warming me more than the hot sun on my back. “But then perhaps you’ve never seen shellstone.”

  “No. Never. What is it?”

  She dragged me back to my feet and through an open doorway into a long, low-roofed building—a garden workshop. On one side were pots and shovels, barrows, barrels of dirt, and wooden tables on which sat trays of seedlings ready to be set out in the rich black soil of the valley. But one long table was topped with a slab of gray stone, and on it lay a variety of plants and flowers, feathers and twigs, each one partially encased in thin layers of pale gray.

  “Do you understand now? Though I knew of it from childhood, I’d never seen shellstone for myself until we found a deposit in Grithna Vale. If you lay an object—anything, a natural object or a model that you’ve made from wood or clay or steel—on the slab and don’t move it, the stone will grow around it, preserving the exact shape. Even as the stone grows thicker, the details are all retained. A fresh and lovely rose will look fresh and lovely forever.”

  I started to ask if she didn’t miss the smell or the color, but I didn’t want to spoil her pleasure. The sculptures were indeed marvelous. A natural material of this world—that explained why I’d felt no prickling or coolness to indicate enchantment.

  “The gardener, who is truly a Stone Shaper, takes the individual pieces—the flowers, the stems, the trellises, the insects or other creatures—along with sculpted pieces of his own invention, and he arranges and links them together to accomplish his vision.”

  Once I had expressed sufficient admiration for her “gardener’s” talents, we rode out for Tymnath, a sizable town with a bustling market three leagues south of Gaelie. Over the past weeks we had made frequent visits to Tymnath market. With the same amusement, wonder, and delight as the children who ran barefoot through the lanes, we had picked up and put down everything we found there: jewelry and fabrics, cooking pots and music boxes, games, artworks, and magical devices of infinite variety. I had never imagined such magical things existed, invented just to entertain or amuse. We had eaten every kind of foodstuff that was offered: little pastries filled with bitter fruit, sugared leaves, savory skewered bits of meat, shellfish in butter so spicy D’Sanya turned red and drank three cups of saffria before dissolving in laughter, and wine so potent I had to sit in the middle of the lane for a quarter of an hour before I could walk straight again.

  On this day several artisans had set up a display of painted silks, some already sewn into scarves and gowns, some raw lengths hung from frames taller than my head. The designs and rich dyes confused the eye, forming colors I could not name and shapes that were not imprinted on the fabric itself, but only on my mind.

  As we turned to go, I glimpsed Sefaro’s daughter leaning against the side of a sausage-seller’s cart, watching us. Did the woman truly travel so far just to spy on us?

  I took D’Sanya’s arm and led her away from the central market. A woman strolling toward us with a child at each hand stopped suddenly, staring at D’Sanya, her jaw falling open.

  “Ah, not yet,” D’Sanya murmured. “If we could have just a little while longer to ourselves . . .”

  “The Lady!” whispered the woman, trying to be polite without taking her eyes from D’Sanya’s face. Bowing awkwardly and raising her hands, she elbowed her children, a pale boy and a girl wearing a pink ribbon in her hair. “Your hands, J’Kor, Ma’Denne. It’s the enchanted princess.” The gaping children raised their palms and bobbed their heads.

  D’Sanya nodded quickly and hurried onward, propelling me through the crowded lanes of the market, turning her face toward my shoulder so people could not see her straight on.

  Someone always recognized D’Sanya on our outings. Word would spread through the market-goers, and before very long a crowd would gather around her, people begging for help, for healing, for blessings, for relief from their fears. Some people only wanted to touch her, or to have her say their names, thinking some wonder would come of it. She gave everything she could, always apologizing to me with a glance before delving into their problems: listening, healing, touching, comforting.

  I had worried at first that someone would be curious about me, start to ask questions I couldn’t answer, and uncover my false identity. But I soon learned that no one ever looked at me if D’Sanya was nearby. When she tired, she would glance at me over their heads, and while she told her petitioners where to apply for more help or when she might return, I would stretch out my arms and make a way for her to retreat through the press.

  We hurried into the quieter streets of houses and shops before the word could spread too far. “Perhaps we should just go,” I said, slowing her pace. “We could ride back through Caernaille. Stop at the ponds and watch the blue herons.” For some reason this day had felt sour from its beginning; I couldn’t bear the thought of the reverent, babbling crowd or all the Dar’Nethi magic that would grate on my spirit like sand in my boot.

  She smiled up at me and squeezed my arm. “I’ve never known anyone so shy as you. Behind your gentlemanlike manner you’ve the reflexes of a cat, the strength of a bear, and the eye of a seer. I’ve a guess that not ten men in all of Gondai could best you in a test of mundane combat, or even if they brought their own sorcery to bear for that matter. So it cannot be lack of confidence or fear for our safety that frets you so. Your voice neither stammers nor grates. You are ravishingly handsome and so graceful in posture it cannot be uncertainty as to your welcome . . .”

  “Lady, you flatter me too much.”

  She spun around to face me, taking my hands and walking backward down the lane, evidently trusting me to keep her from falling into potholes or tripping over gutters and lampposts. “. . . and certainly no dullness of intellect keeps you back. Your mind is as keen and bright as an enchanted blade, and new learning brings your face to life. I’ve learned that when you squint in just a certain way, your mind is racing, questioning and formulating answers, all inside yourself. Yet once we’re outside the hospice grounds, you never speak a word to anyone but me. I’ll wager a year’s breakfasts that you would never come to even so tame a place as Tymnath market if I didn’t force you.”

  “Most likely not.”

  “Well,” she said, taking my arm and squeezing it to her side, walking frontward again, “for today I will indulge your fancy, but in the future we shall work on your social skills. You must learn to enjoy yourself in all ways!”

  We strolled through the lanes that skirted the marketplace, poking into a luthier’s shop to watch the master steam and shape and join the thin slices of wood that would form the shell of a new instrument. We found a jeweler’s cart, and I bought D’Sanya a jade comb she admired—a gift she allowed only because it was unlike anything she already owned. She adored jewelry, never leaving her door without three or four rings on each hand, bracelets on her wrist
or arms or ankles, and something dangling from her neck. The pieces were most often pure goldwork or silver, sometimes set with gemstones, though never garish or overdone. But she wouldn’t allow me to buy her more, saying she had enough.

  When we came to the hostler’s yard at the edge of the town to reclaim our horses, we found a furor. Twenty people or more were clustered around a small party of horsemen. From the center of the crowd came thuds, grunts, and shouts. A horse squealed and reared. Curses and epithets flew through the air, along with rumbling blasts of enchantment that unsettled my stomach.

  “P’Tor, fetch the Winder!” a man shouted. A youth in bright red and green burst out of the shifting crowd and streaked past us toward the center of town, his long braid flying.

  A man screamed in pain as a sharp crack split the air above the fight, a streak of darkness that might have been the absolute reversal of lightning. Many in the group drew back. And then came a low, soul-grating hiss that chilled the day, shadowing the sun as surely as a rising storm cloud.

  “Sssslay us if you will.” The voice that shaped the hiss into words was harsh and brutal.

  “They are cowardsss like all Dar’Nethi vermin,” said a second voice, “sssneaking, binding with their pitiable magics. None dares challenge us with a blade.”

  Zhid.

  I stepped backward into the lane we’d just exited, ready to draw D’Sanya away from danger. But she shook off my hand and hurried across the trampled dirt and grass, leaving me no choice but to follow.

  “What’s going on here?” she called out. Her tone of command was irrefusable, as I well knew.

  Men and women turned to gape at her, stepping aside as she walked into their midst. Five or six men were struggling to force a bedraggled captive to his knees. The Zhid, a thick, shaggy man with blood smeared across his face, was half standing, refusing to go down. Backs and arms strained to retain their hold on the warrior’s brawny arms; boots scuffed the dirt as the Zhid shoved his captors inexorably backward. Zhid were wickedly strong and hard to kill. While one townsman held a roll of thick silver cord, two others were cutting off lengths of it to wrap around the captive’s wrists and ankles.