by Ellyn, Court
Thorn leaned over the crib, flipped back the corner of a blanket and smiled at the round pink face crowned with black curls. “Pretty little thing.”
“Hush, m’ lord, we only just got her to sleep.”
“Did you?” Thorn reached down into the crib and lifted the swaddled bundle.
“On your head be it,” Grieva snapped, wagging a finger at Kelyn.
“Mine?”
“You may go now,” Thorn told the nanny, cradling his niece at half an arm’s length so he could examine her.
Grieva huffed, about-faced, and swished out the door.
“I wasn’t aware you’d ever held a baby,” Kelyn said and, as Grieva had warned him a hundred times, made sure those fire-wielding hands supported his daughter’s head properly.
“Worry, worry. It’s not so difficult. Now, let us see what we have here.” Thorn blinked and his eyes seemed to focus on the air itself. What could those avedra eyes see? His gaze traveled up and up toward the fifteen-foot ceiling, and he gaped a little. “Ah. You might not be happy about this.” He offered an uncertain half-smile.
It took Kelyn only an instant to catch on. “Goddess, you’ve got to be joking.”
“I wish I were. Last week Saffron told me she felt a nexus—”
“A what?”
“A convergence, gathering of magical essence.”
“That’s no clearer.”
“Never mind. She abandoned me for a day or so. When she returned and told me where she’d been, I had to come see for myself.”
Feelings of disappointment seeped in unbidden. Kelyn could accept his brother’s strangeness, but for that same strangeness to be lurking inside his own little girl? He’d had no reason to think her anything but perfectly normal.
Thorn turned away quickly, and Kelyn realized he’d not been able to hide his feelings fast enough. “You don’t have to worry. I remember how Da slighted you. I won’t be guilty of the same thing. I’ll spoil her rotten.”
Offering a smile, Thorn said, “How could you not? What did you name her?”
“Carah,” Kelyn said, rolling his eyes. “Rhoslyn got creative, you see. It’s her father’s name spelled backwards.”
Thorn chuckled. “Harac would be pleased. It’s a pretty name anyway. And fortuitous. Means ‘healer’ in the old language. If our names have any bearing on our paths, then Her Grace chose well.” Gazing on his niece, he added, “All right, I know you’re not sleeping. Open up, lemme see.”
As if she understood the request, Carah’s swollen eyelids squinted open. A delicate frown developed between traces of eyebrows as her eyes tried to focus on her uncle and examine him in return.
“Aye, they’ll be blue.” A trace of giddiness flitted across Thorn’s face.
“How can you tell already?”
“Elvish blue,” Thorn assured. “Just like her Uncle Thorn’s.”
Not quite sure she liked the comparison, Carah’s pink face crumpled up, and she inhaled for a wail.
“No, no,” Thorn said. “None of that.” He tucked his niece into the crook of his arm, lowered his face close to her own, and their eyes locked. Kelyn listened in vain for the message passing between them. Carah didn’t cry.
“Can you stay around and do that every hour or so?”
Thorn grinned and strolled the room with her, whispering sweet nothings.
“Is anything difficult for you?”
“Not for us,” Thorn answered, still talking to the tiny ears. “We’re a genius, aren’t we?”
Carah cooed.
“She agrees with me.”
Kelyn scrubbed a hand over his face. “Ach, don’t fill her head with that great pile of dragon shit.”
Thorn’s hand shot over Carah’s ear and he folded himself into the rocker. “Da has a dirty mouth, yes. You just listen to Uncle Thorn …”
Head spinning with his brother’s return and the news he’d brought, Kelyn needed a moment to think, to breathe. He turned to leave the two of them alone and nearly collided with Rhoslyn in the doorway. She might have been gaping at a tiger who’d stalked into the nursery. That’s right, Kelyn thought. She hadn’t seen Thorn since that day almost three years ago when he’d stormed from Windhaven. Cold blue fire. Shattered glass raining from the sky. Even now it pained Kelyn to remember.
“Grieva told me,” she whispered. “I couldn’t believe it. How long has he been here?”
“Only just.”
“He looks so … is this how he looked when he helped you in Fiera?”
Kelyn nodded. The four golden stripes in Thorn’s dark hair gleamed bright in the afternoon sunlight.
“Does your mother know?”
The question comforted Kelyn somehow. “I don’t think so.” Understandably, Alovi held a grudge against her absent son. Every time his name came up in conversation, her eyes saddened.
Thorn overheard the whispering; his glance lifted from Carah’s ten perfect toes and fell upon Rhoslyn. The rocking chair broke its rhythm. It soon resumed, however, and the toes became the object of interest again.
Kelyn had expected a bigger reaction. A flustered, blushing reaction, a headlong flight from the house, something. But Thorn’s serene expression changed not at all. He tucked Carah’s perfumed little head under his chin, laid his head on the backrest, and appeared to doze off.
Well, one way or another, Kelyn would get a row out of somebody. He took Rhoslyn by the elbow to escort her out. “I need to tell you something.”
~~~~
Thorn dreamed of the Light again. For the first time, he didn’t drift in it alone. A beautiful little girl drifted alongside him, laughing in delight. Wings the size of castles, seen and then gone again, stroked with the soft sound of thunder, stirring the bright clouds. The little girl reached for the wings, but she was so small and they so far away. “They are not ours to touch,” Thorn told her, and the girl’s eyes welled with disappointed tears.
He woke with a jolt. Kelyn stood over him, a hand jostling his shoulder. Bundled on his chest, Carah had started to fuss.
“How did Her Grace take the news?” he asked.
“Better than I thought she would, but that doesn’t mean she’s feeling friendly. Anyway, Mother found out you’re here. She’s on her way. I don’t want her yelling at you in the nursery. Out.”
“Yelling?” Thorn handed off the baby and climbed from the rocking chair. “Oh. Yes, I suppose she would.” He wasn’t two steps into the corridor when he saw Alovi barreling down the corridor, loam-dusted hands balled into fists, head lowered between her shoulders, mouth a tight white line.
“You!” she shouted. “Get in here.” She flung open a sitting room door and marched inside.
Thorn remembered the time he and Kelyn had gotten too rambunctious in the solar on a rainy day and knocked over her table of beloved herbs. Her reaction had looked much the same, and the resulting sting on his rear had lasted all afternoon. With a glance, he appealed to his brother for help.
“I can’t go into battle, I’ve got a baby.”
“Some father you are, using her as a shield.”
“Good luck.”
Thorn slinked into the parlor. Alovi whipped off her weeding apron, balled it up, and tossed it into his face the moment he rounded the door. “Three years and not a word from you! I lose your father, then you disappear like a word tossed to the winds, and what am I to think? I might have lost you, too. Mighty avedra, brokenhearted little boy, you didn’t consider anyone but yourself, did you?”
His hands fidgeted with the apron. Pink primroses were embroidered along the hem. “No, Mother, I didn’t.”
His honesty, his lack of an argument, appeared to surprise her. She raised her chin. “And you wouldn’t have come today if it weren’t for that child. Am I right?”
He sighed and sank onto a settee so old and well-loved that the velvet had long vanished from the arms. “I wanted to come home, Mother. But it was too awkward, too painful.”
Alovi crossed her ar
ms, determined to continue glaring and failing. “And now?”
“I’ve accepted it all. Them, I mean. Are they happy?” He hadn’t wanted to ask, warned himself not to look too closely and not to care. “I never thought they would be.”
Alovi’s green eyes narrowed dangerously. “Yet you encouraged their marriage. Yes, Kelyn told me how you showed up and urged him to see to his responsibility. Did you secretly hope to see them miserable? Maybe that would have satisfied your sense of vengeance.”
Thorn surged from the settee. “Mother!”
“Well, I’m not sorry to see you disappointed. There is a measure of peace in this house again, and if you mean to turn that upside down, you can take yourself back to wherever you came from.” Her chin trembled.
The sight of it broke his heart. He cupped her earth-smeared and sweaty face in his hands. “That is not why I’ve come. Carah is avedra.”
She went as still as stone between his hands. “Oh, Mother’s mercy, I knew it.” She grasped his fingers, kissed them, squeezed them with more strength than he thought she possessed. Perhaps it was fear. Perhaps forgiveness. “From the first time I held her, I knew. Maybe it was her eyes. They seemed to focus on things almost immediately. She seemed to understand what she saw. It reminded me of you. Well, because of you, Kelyn will be more understanding than your father was.”
“He said as much.”
She dropped his hands, inhaled deeply, and seemed to grow several imposing inches. “Good. Does this mean you’re staying?”
“For supper, at least.”
That was not the answer she wanted, but it was all he could give. “So what am I to call you? Must I use the name you chose for yourself?”
“Whatever you prefer, Mother.”
“How about Truant?”
~~~~
Supper was an uneasy affair. When Thorn showed up in Fiera to help Kelyn’s armies, the commanders had behaved nervously around him, and he thought it vastly entertaining, even humorous. Not so the tension at his brother’s dinner table. The reasons for it were far more personal and painful.
The small dining room off the Great Hall sat twelve. Kelyn occupied the head with his mother on his left and his brother on his right. At the foot, Rhoslyn’s every gesture, every click of her fork, every clink of her glass carried one curse or another. Feeling the storm clouds swirling, Grieva urged little Kethlyn to eat and stop squirming and be quiet. He was about to turn two, so food and quiet didn’t interest him. He was an exceptionally beautiful child. The golden hair and blue eyes were a striking and rare combination for a human. One day, he would draw girls like nectar drew butterflies, and if he turned out to be anything like his parents, they would have their share of scandal on their hands. Though nothing short of fire and flood could have kept Thorn from snatching up his niece, he felt an unbidden aversion toward his nephew. Watching Kethlyn over the rim of his goblet, Thorn told himself, It isn’t the boy’s fault, but it didn’t help.
On Thorn’s right, Etivva paid the uneasiness no mind. The shaddra’s shaven head reflected the colors of the stained-glass lamps. Her undyed linen robes crinkled crisply as she reached for the decanter of Doreli red and refilled Thorn’s goblet.
“You’re trying to get me drunk, so I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he said, noting that halfway through the meal his brother’s goblet still stood on its rim. So, Kelyn still abstained, did he?
Etivva’s brown cheeks filled with a grin; the crescent-shaped scar puckered up. “Well, it does not hurt to try. You are very vague, my lord.” How he had missed the sharp notes of her Harenian accent. “I ask, where are you living. You say, in the trees. Are you a monkey now?”
“I’m not at liberty.”
“Is it in Avidan Wood?” Etivva pressed. “Your mother thinks so.”
“Do not venture into that place,” he warned them. “It’s more dangerous than you know.”
“That is not an answer. You think you are so clever. But you forget. I know you.”
Across the table, Grieva put a chunk of buttered bread into Kethlyn’s chubby fist, but he threw his head back and tossed the bread straight into Etivva’s lap.
Rhoslyn’s thin composure snapped like a cord. “Take him upstairs! Eliad, deliver his plate to the nursery.” The squire jumped from his post at the sideboard, swept away Kethlyn’s and Grieva’s settings and fled into the corridor with them.
Settling back again, Rhoslyn’s scathing glare slid over Thorn.
Enough of this. Out with it. “It’s hardly my doing, Your Grace.”
Alovi’s eyes widened and her mind shouted, Don’t go there.
“Did I blame you?” Rhoslyn bit.
Heeding his mother’s warning, Thorn tore into the roast duck on his plate. “I’m told it’s rare for two avedrin to be born so closely in the same line. But I’m also told that the nexus hadn’t appeared in our family since Anyr. He was the first. A thousand years ago. We’re just long past due, I guess.”
Rhoslyn sucked her teeth, hardly mollified.
“It won’t do you—or Carah—any good to deny what she is,” Thorn added. “Or to try and suppress her gifts, however they might manifest.”
“When will they…?” Kelyn asked. “Mother?”
Alovi folded her hands primly and looked down at her plate. “Soon.”
Thorn pitied her for the guilt she must be feeling. She had known he was avedra from the beginning and did everything in her power to keep him from finding out. “As soon as Carah can move about and communicate with you, you’ll notice.”
“Birdsong?” Kelyn said.
“Maybe.”
“Fairies?”
“Certainly. Saffron claims she can look out for both Carah and me. Indeed, that it is her ‘sacred duty,’ whatever that means. Blasted creature wouldn’t explain.”
“What about lightning?” Kelyn’s glance settled on Thorn’s hands.
Once he would have tried to hide them. Not now. Nor did he bother hiding the green stripes that peeked from under the embroidered hem of his sleeve, but he did hope to lighten his brother’s concern. “Well, don’t expect her to start blasting people when she reaches those terrible twos, but be careful during those tempestuous adolescent years.”
“That’s not funny!” Rhoslyn snapped.
“Isn’t it? I thought it rather witty myself.” Thorn’s toes felt the stomp of Alovi’s foot; he stopped baiting the duchess. “There’s no need to worry. I’ll come every year to check her progress, and I’ll train her myself.”
“You’re assuming she will embrace this life, as you have,” Rhoslyn said. “What if she doesn’t want to be avedra?”
“That is Carah’s choice to make,” he admitted. “But given who her parents are, I think she’ll grab it with both hands.” He received not one shred of argument on that score. “Etivva? Will you mind tutoring another avedra?”
“Not if she is as studious as you,” said the shaddra. “You see? I told you, you are meant for more than hiding away in a library.”
“Well,” he confessed, “I do spend most of my time in a library.”
“In the trees? A library for monkeys?”
Thorn laughed. “Have it your way.”
When the last of the dishes were cleared away and the family drifted into the parlor for brandy and chess, Etivva stopped Thorn with a light touch to his arm. The lightheartedness she’d exhibited was gone. Instead, her face was taut with a question far more difficult to ask. “Do not lie to me now. Please. Your brother told me … he almost died, but you saved him … and it was then that you … saw her. The Mother-Father. Is it true?” When she took her vows to join the Order of the Shaddra’hin, she dedicated her life to the study of Ana-Forah’s ways and the preservation of her sanctity.
“Yes, it’s true,” he whispered. To speak of it aloud seemed sacrilegious.
Etivva’s breath quickened and a smile threatened to break free. “Her face. You saw her face?”
“No.” He closed his ey
es, remembering. “Only light. Light everywhere. It was everything, everything real and desirable. The world, our world, it was nothing but dust and ghosts. But I heard her voice, Etivva.”
“She spoke to you?” Her almond-shaped eyes grew large, as if the news were too much to believe. “What did it sound like? What did she say?”
“It was neither male nor female. Almost impossible to describe, Etivva, but if love had a voice, it is the voice of the Mother-Father. It moved through me until I was no longer separate from it. I didn’t want to be separate from it, and when I had to return … it felt like having my heart broken all over again.”
“She told you to come back to us?”
He nodded. “My family needed me, she said.” And something else. When this Age of Kings is over … What did that mean? How long must he wait until she came for him?
Etivva listened eagerly for more, but Thorn kept those words to himself.
~~~~
4
“The Houses of Athmarr and Nathrachan are implored upon to restrain their tenants and militias from the raiding and seizure of Aralorr’s livestock and property upon pain of immediate and complete retribution…
—Precepts for Peace,
by King Rhorek, 982 A.E.
That spring at Assembly, Laral was knighted, and after eight years of serving at Ilswythe, he returned home to Tírandon, cringing under his father’s boisterous approbation. Lander clapped his son on the back so often on his first day home that Laral felt bruises rising. “Your brother would’ve been proud of you. And your mother. Now to teach you how to be a lord of Tírandon.” How to tell Da that he had other obligations first? Better just to go.
Laral saddled the dapple-gray warhorse Kelyn had given him and stuffed a pair of saddlebags full of food and supplies for a long journey south. Nothing would keep him from this journey, not even his father’s temper.
“Son, this girl hasn’t replied to your letters in over a year. You said so yourself!” Lander’s red-faced bellowing filled the stable yard. The grooms made themselves scarce. Waiting at the gate to the courtyard, Drys and Kalla kept their eyes down and their mouths shut. Laral was grateful his friends had agreed to accompany him; otherwise, his resolve might crumble under his father’s onslaught. “She came to her senses. Why can’t you? Or maybe she married somebody else by now, eh? Consider that? She thought so little of you, an Aralorri, damn it, that she didn’t even bother telling you. Son, I know how these things are. Boys go off to war, they see a pretty face, they think they fall in love and will die without their enemy’s daughter. Mother’s bosom, Laral, do you see how ridiculous this is? She’s a Fieran! Think, damn you.”
