“You are the Vestal?”
Raine turned to find a woman standing beside him. In the joyous noise of the night, he hadn’t heard her approach. “I am Raine D’Lacourte.”
“I am Daria.” She pulled her long grey braid across one shoulder and smiled. Deep wrinkles crinkled the corners of her blue eyes, while longer ones connected cheekbones to jaw, but her countenance held a purity as well. Raine imagined she might’ve been beautiful once—she still was, in truth, for beauty had many expressions of form. “The Islander said I should tell you what I saw of your companion,” Daria said. “Would you come?” and she motioned him toward a wagon.
Raine realized she had to be the Healer that Carian had been seeking on Gwynnleth’s behalf. “Of course—please.”
He followed her inside the wagon and by the light of a hanging lantern saw Gwynnleth’s sleeping form. She looked frail in her slumbering state, her harshly angular features seeming fragile, like a tiny bird lying helpless. So strangely out of character.
Raine suddenly welcomed the chance to be concerned about someone else, to ease off the clenching hold he had on his thoughts, dwelling on personal misfortune. It galled him to realize he’d been so self-absorbed. “What can you tell me of her condition?”
Daria knelt at Gwynnleth’s bedside. She brushed a strand of red-bronze hair from the avieth’s brow and looked gently upon her. “She rests in an in-between. I have heard of it happening but have never before seen it—few third-stranders come to T’khendar, and those that do have often been warned.”
“Warned? Of what?”
“That they cannot take the form here.”
“Ah…” Suddenly explanations began to take shape.
“The way it has been described to me,” Daria continued, “is that the third strand is tied to Alorin differently from the other strands. That is, Gwynnleth’s two forms are somehow supported by Alorin’s pattern alone. Though T’khendar shares many of Alorin’s patterns, the third strand is not shared. Thus, when your avieth friend attempted to take the form, her consciousness had to reach all the way back to Alorin to find it. The distance was too great—the forces between too powerful to overcome. That has created a limbo, where she remains.”
Raine had surmised much of this from Daria’s initial statement, but how to help Gwynnleth for all of that? He frowned at the avieth’s sleeping form, thinking of all that she had done at his behest, risking herself on his order alone. “What can be done for her?”
Daria shook her head. “It is beyond my skill. I have shored up her pattern as best I could, and the Islander, your friend, has been seeing that she takes water and broth, but any help for her—if she can be helped at all, my lord—will only be found in Niyadbakir.”
Niyadbakir.
The name remained always on the fringes of his thoughts. Niyadbakir, where Björn awaited. And likely Isabel. Where answers might be found if he was willing to pierce the veil of his own failures.
Well, he had certainly started that process, however unwillingly.
He yanked his thoughts back to the moment and gave the Healer a grateful look. “Thank you, Daria. I would offer you coin—“
“The Islander already compensated me, my lord,” she told him kindly, making Raine wonder what that compensation could have entailed. Standing, she nodded to him and said, “The Lady’s blessing upon her.”
“Yes, thank you,” he murmured as he watched her leave.
Then he went and sat down on the bunk across from Gwynnleth. He was still sitting there with elbows on knees when the pirate came in several hours later.
“Oh,” Carian said upon finding Raine. “Hello, I guess.”
Raine looked up. “You’ve been taking care of her,” he said, feeling wretched and deplorably irresponsible.
Carian cast him a sooty look. “Well, one of us bloody had to. I reckoned it wasn’t going to be you, seeing as how you vanished within minutes of landing here and were gone all night, while I meanwhile tried all manner of resuscitation—in her best interest, mind,” he added defensively.
“You’re right to be wroth with me, Carian,” Raine admitted with a heavy sigh. “I’ve been extraordinarily selfish since we arrived. I thank you deeply for caring for her when all I could think about was myself and my own troubles.”
Carian looked a little caught off by his humble apology. He shrugged his wild wavy hair out of his eyes and spied the Vestal suspiciously, as if waiting for the rest of the story. “You’re awfully morose these days,” he said by way of cautious agreement.
Raine gave him a rueful look. “When we arrived here,” he said, “I thought it might perhaps be the worst imaginable fate. I see now that assumption was a drastic understatement.”
Carian snorted. He threw himself down onto the bunk, dislodging Raine from his position at the other end, crossed his ankles, and slipped hands behind his head. “You know,” he said while gazing at the reflection of the lamplight on the wood-beamed ceiling, “I know how you feel about the Fifth Vestal, but aside from whatever happened with the wars and so forth—which may or may not be Raine’s truth, if you’ll pardon the expression—what’s your bloody oath-brother done since then that’s so terrible?”
Raine gave him a pained look.
“No, I’m serious,” Carian said, shifting to get a better view of the Vestal, who stood now in the shadows by Gwynnleth’s cot leaning against the wall. “He’s got a bonny gig here—maybe not as nice as a life on the account, but the people here are happy, boyo. The realm is at peace, and Adepts are training in Niyadbakir—did you know that?”
Raine shook his head, though he wasn’t at all surprised. Björn would want an Adept army to replace the one Malachai’s war decimated. “You’ve been listening to Balearic’s stories, I take it,” he observed quietly.
“Hey, there’s two sides to every coin,” the pirate returned unrepentantly, “and I ain’t so sure the side everybody sees in Alorin is the right one.”
Neither am I, Raine caught himself thinking—to his intense dismay.
He retrieved Björn’s coin from his pocket at stared at it lying quietly on his palm. Sometimes the coin seemed a foreign and intensely insulting object that had no right existing at all, but more often it was starting to encapsulate all that Björn was to him: an enigma with no solution, a closed door with no handle and no way to peer inside to glimpse what lay behind. An elliptical puzzle with neither entry nor exit to its logic, encouraging naught but one’s own theories, most of them impossibly wrong.
And despite the many conjectures surrounding it, the coin lay remote, resolute, and utterly indifferent. The coin cared not if others maligned it or smothered it with praise, it simply remained inviolate, a steadfast representation throughout the ages, never altering from its original purpose even to defend that purpose to others. Nothing affected it. Nothing changed it!
Impossible! No man can be so immutable!
But Björn was.
The very recognition of this stabbed Raine with agonizing force, for this simplicity lay at the heart of a truth Raine could no longer deny. They had presumed…guessed, formed their own theories and declared them as fact. But they had never known.
Oh, to be sure, the evidence had implied one thing, yet their hearts had told them another—especially in the beginning. Raine and Alshiba had spent eons fighting with themselves and each other over what they would—what they could—bring themselves to believe. Raine knew in his heart of hearts that Alshiba still denied many of the truths they’d supposedly agreed upon between them.
As the centuries drew endlessly on without answers, without solutions to the multitude of problems they now faced, they’d lost faith—Raine had never had much to begin with—and chosen to side with the facts, as impossible as they seemed. They couldn’t be blamed for that, could they?
But Raine was starting to believe that they could.
The pirate snoring loudly drew the Vestal’s gaze, offering a momentary respite from the agony of these thought
s. He pocketed Björn’s coin and turned down the lamp as he left, envying the pirate his rest, for he knew with certainty that he would find none of it that night.
Nineteen
“Never ask a god for patience. He will teach it to you.”
- The Agasi wielder Markal Morrelaine
Twelve days before the solstice, the festival of Adendigaeth began, launching at sundown with the First Lord’s Masquerade. Ean stood beneath the towering arches that marked the entrance to the grand ballroom, looking out across a vast sea of masked heads. It seemed the entire realm had convened to celebrate, though Julian had told him that each city in T’khendar would hold its own celebration.
Still, it took him the better part of an hour to find Julian in the crowd, and meanwhile everyone he met bowed to him just as the townspeople had, just as Julian had bowed to Ramu. It was unnerving.
“Ean!”
The prince turned at the sound of Julian’s voice. The lad came toward him looking resplendent in a deep crimson coat of lush velvet and matching pants. His fair hair had been tangled around sprigs of the darkest holly, and his mask was that of an older man with tiny horns extending from his forehead.
“Welcome, oh, Holly King,” Ean said, recognizing the familiar likeness at once. “And will you battle the Oak King tonight?”
“Not if I can help it,” Julian said from behind his mask. “His name is Ferdinand and he’s a good deal stronger at swords than I am. Here—have some wine.” He handed Ean a goblet. “Hey, have you seen the First Lord yet?”
Ean shook his head.
“Raine’s truth,” Julian remarked, looking a little wild around the eyes, “his costume is…creepy.” At Ean’s curious look, the lad nudged him and said, “Come, I’ll show you.”
The prince followed Julian through the crowd of masked faces, noting costumes that ranged from traditional—honoring the solstice theme—to extreme, representing impossible creatures or mythological gods. Here and there he took note of a particularly ornate headdress or costume, but mostly he just took in the scene overall in broad slashes of brilliant color.
Ean didn’t know whose idea his own costume had been—he certainly wouldn’t have picked it for himself. Baldur. He knew the legend, which was a favorite of the Danes. He wondered if Dagmar had somehow arranged…but he couldn’t see the Second Vestal choosing him to represent the handsome and much beloved son of two gods, who was murdered by his brother and then resurrected by his father.
Still, the costume itself was gorgeous. His black velvet doublet was worked all over with sparkling crystal spirals, and he wore a diamond-encrusted mask of similar black and silver swirls. In one hand, he carried a spear tipped in mistletoe, the weapon his godly brother Hodur had been tricked into using to slay him.
After trekking from one side of the vast ballroom to the other, Julian finally pushed a hand to Ean’s chest to stop his forward progress and whispered in awe, “Look—there he is!”
The First Lord wore a jeweled sapphire coat and a silver mask similar in nature to his Shades. He stood talking to a man Ean identified from his silvering hair as Markal Morrelaine, though the fearsome horned mask he wore would otherwise have made it impossible to tell his identity. It wasn’t until Björn turned to someone behind him that Ean realized the god he was portraying.
Ianus. The Two-Faced God.
Indeed, as Björn turned to speak to someone else, the silver face on the back of his head picked right up in conversation again with Markal.
Ean took half a step back in surprise.
“I know—it gets you right here, doesn’t it!” Julian said with a grin, pushing a hand to his stomach, just below his ribcage.
Julian was right. Seeing both faces talking at once was both disturbing and morbidly fascinating.
“Of course it’s the perfect costume!” Julian said, veritably oozing the odd combination of awe mixed with disgust. “Ianus is the ancient Cyrenaic god of beginnings and endings—you know, their version of Cephrael. He’s associated with doors and gates and the beginnings of a journey. In some legends, they speak of him as being able to see the past and the future, but most of us view those concepts as part of Epiphany’s domain. Still, a great costume, you must admit.”
“Unquestionably,” Ean agreed, perversely mesmerized by the two talking silver faces. How does he do that?
Then a flash of fire caught his eye, and Ean forgot all about the Two-Faced God.
He saw the Phoenix moving above the crowd, its fiery, feathered crest cascading back from a crimson head. As the Phoenix neared, Ean saw that the mask’s beak extended to a graceful point hovering over Isabel’s nose, and beneath she wore a crimson blindfold. Her silk gown was encrusted with rubies, citrines and garnets—fire captured and bound to her will—and an ornate jeweled collar hung around her neck, sparkling in time with dazzling earrings of citrines and yellow diamonds.
Ean felt his heart beating a rhythm unique to her alone. He stood riveted by Isabel’s presence—the moment she entered the room, he had eyes for no one and nothing else.
“By Cephrael’s Great Book,” Julian murmured appreciatively. “She’s something, isn’t she?”
Isabel stopped about ten paces away from the staring boys and greeted her brother. As she turned her back to Ean, he saw that her chestnut hair was braided with gilded feathers.
“Why isn’t she with anyone?” he asked Julian, even though the very idea of her being with another man filled him with a dread so palpable he felt it in his knees.
“They say she’s loved only one man in all her life.”
Ean’s breath stuck in his throat. He grabbed Julian’s arm. “Who?” he gulped. “Is he here?”
“That would be something if he was,” Julian remarked, taking perverse amusement at the stricken look on Ean’s face. “He died three hundred years ago. He’s famous though. His name was Arion Tavestra. He was one of the First Lord’s three generals.”
Ean started breathing again. If he’s dead, then at least I have a chance.
“Well, go on,” Julian encouraged, nudging Ean. “Get it over with. She’ll either love you or laugh at you. Might as well find out before you waste any more time pining over her.”
Ean gave him a flat look. “I’m not pining.”
“Drooling then,” Julian corrected with a grin.
Fixing him with a sooty stare, Ean straightened his already rod-straight shoulders and headed purposefully toward the group that was Isabel, Markal and Björn. The First Lord saw him almost at once and held open one hand to receive him.
“Ah, Ean,” he said in greeting. “Welcome. I applaud your choice in costumes. I trust our modest fete is to your liking.”
Ean looked at the thousands of people eating, drinking and making merry and wondered what a fete that wasn’t ‘modest’ would look like to the Vestal. “It is beyond words, First Lord.”
Björn turned to his sister. “Isabel, have you had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of our newest arrival?”
She looked at Ean and yet did not, for clearly her eyes were covered with the crimson blindfold, but just the recognition of her attention came as a heady draught to his head. “Ah yes,” she murmured with the quirk of a smile, “he spent some time staring at me from the ramparts, I believe.” Her voice was honey, liquid light, a loving caress—any word representing that ineffable quality of tone that held both music and emotion.
“Well, that’s nearly a meeting,” Björn noted amiably. “Ean val Lorian, may I present my sister, Isabel.”
Wearing the most devious shadow of a smile, Isabel extended her gloved fingers toward Ean.
He took them and pressed a chaste kiss upon the back of her hand. Though her eyes were tantalizingly veiled from him, he had the feeling she was watching him all the same.
“Excuse us but a moment,” Björn said, and he and Markal moved away into the crowd.
“What may I offer you, my lady?” Ean asked as he straightened with eyes only for her.
; One corner of her lips lifted in a delicious half-smile. “What have you to offer, my lord?”
My heart and soul in a vial to wear around your neck. “Would the lady like wine?” he asked. “Something to eat? Shall I escort you somewhere, or merely stand here within the shadow of your beauty and admire you?”
“Mmm,” she murmured, thinking over her options. “Any of those sound delightful, but I think I must choose the first.”
For half a second, Ean was sure she meant his unspoken thought. “Wine then,” he managed and began looking around for a steward. He was loath to leave her side even for a second, but fortunately stewards were plentiful, and he quickly waved one over. “White or red, my lady?”
“Red is the lady’s favorite,” she murmured, her voice throaty and so inviting of his desire.
Ean was quite inundated by it already. He chose a goblet for Isabel and placed it into her hand, acutely aware of the blindfold separating them. Gently he closed her fingers around the stem. “Thank you, my lord,” she purred.
Mindful of her comfort, Ean looked around and spied a bench. What made it most ideal was that it was outside on the patio and away from the larger crowd. “There is a bench in the garden that seems to be waiting for us,” he suggested. “Will you sit, my lady?”
“If you will but guide the way, my lord.” She lifted her hand as he’d seen her do with Markal, and it was with immense pleasure that Ean placed his arm beneath her outstretched hand.
As they walked toward the towering glass-paned doors, which stood open to admit the evening breeze, Ean was so heady he might’ve been treading on starlight. Her near presence, the blessing of her attention, exhilarated him beyond measure. He thought he might die tomorrow and be the happier for having had this one night to bask in the glory of her notice. But then that would mean he would be without her, and that thought was too horrible to contemplate.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 25
