Emboldened by his recent successes, Ean sought out Björn one night with a question—the first he’d managed to craft into an inquiry that didn’t also sound an accusation.
He found the First Lord in his library in counsel with Ramu, but the Sundragon waved off Ean’s apologies for interrupting with an explanation that his business was complete and bade them both good evening. Ean watched him leave feeling an immense affinity for the man. There was much to emulate in Ramu—Ean barely knew him, but that much was readily apparent.
Björn received Ean with equal grace as Ramu took his leave. He poured wine for them both and asked as he handed Ean a glass, “So…what have you come to ask me tonight? I would tell you anything you wish to know.”
Caught off balance by this candid inquiry, Ean stumbled to formulate the simple sequence of words he’d spent at least half an hour crafting in his rooms just moments before. “First Lord,” he began, using the term of respect for the first time, yet surprised that it felt so natural crossing his tongue, “what role am I supposed to play? You’ve known me from the beginning, while I—Raine’s truth, I recall hardly a fraction of who or what I’ve been. I believe I’m to become a player in your game, but I don’t truly know what game we’re playing, or…or even exactly what we’re trying to do.”
Björn considered him, and Ean tried to hold his gaze in return. Bearing in mind that he’d recently come within a hair’s breadth of letting Markal decapitate Isabel, holding Björn’s gaze should have been effortless by comparison. But it was one of the more difficult moments of his day. One could not stand before Björn van Gelderan and not feel the emanation of his presence. It radiated, as palpable as the feel of the sun upon your skin. The fact that he seemed so humbly unaware of his own power and yet so obviously confident in it was a compelling contradiction.
“Walk with me,” Björn said after a moment, finally releasing Ean from the force of his gaze. The prince visibly exhaled, relieved to find his breath returned to him, his body once again under his own volition and not held helplessly in the thrall of the Fifth Vestal’s potent consideration.
Ean moved at his side. The Vestal walked with a purposeful stride that was yet graceful and relaxed for all its surety. He cast the fifth before him to open two tall, mullioned doors and led Ean out onto a grand balcony.
Sunset bathed the world in crimson and gold. The sky seemed a sheet of flame, while the city and countryside undulated beneath variegated waves of gold-limned shadow. The high mountains across the valley loomed darkly, their peaks as a great swath of jagged basalt towers, while lush hanging valleys collected the night as water and their trees greedy with thirst. High, thin waterfalls split the darkness in silver-gold streaks, as if moonlight dripping down from the veil of clouds. And nearer, just below their high balcony, the alabaster city glowed rose-hued and brilliant, seeming reborn as the day died.
Overwhelmed by the astonishing beauty, Ean blurted, “This must be paradise.”
Björn glanced his way. The First Lord had his own sort of beauty, one that seemed somehow reflective of the same magical light that existed in the moonlight waterfalls and the gilded air, or the glimmering alabaster stones. “Paradise,” he mused, reflecting on the idea. “This concept conveys an ultimate, an unattainable absolute.” He arched a dark brow. “Perhaps such can exist in some dimension, on some plane of existence. Yet…there would be no game in paradise.” He cast Ean a wry look. “Do you see? Games require obstacles—challenges—while perfection necessarily excludes their very existence. The Laws of Patterning tell us there are no absolutes; rather, there is Balance in all things.”
He looked back to the view and gestured with his goblet. “T’khendar was not meant as a paradise. But there is a reason to introduce beauty into the world, Ean. Revolution may be fueled by the worst sort of vice, but beauty is the driving force of any evolution with the potential to bring about higher states of being.”
“And this is our objective?”
Björn smiled at him. “It would be a worthwhile aim, don’t you think?”
Ean really tried to understand this logic, but Björn’s philosophical explorations just confused him. There were too many connections that he couldn’t make, huge gaps in his understanding. What could fighting against Malorin’athgul possibly have to do with evolution to higher states of being? He shook his head, frustrated with himself. “What am I missing?”
Björn placed a hand on his shoulder and guided his gaze to the heavens, where the first stars were just then appearing. “Look…watch…wait.”
They stood in silence together then, with Ean surprisingly content to merely stand at Björn’s side. Despite his many biting questions, Ean felt calm in the First Lord’s company.
As they watched the sky, drinking their wine, the last glow of sunlight vanished beneath the rim of the world, and a wind blew in the stars, scattering them of a sudden like diamond dust across the heavens.
“The Avataren Fire Kings believe the stars are the souls of their loved-ones watching over them,” Björn observed with quiet contemplation. “The Kandori name each star—many for the immortal drachwyr, one of whom you have met,” he added with a wink. “Ramuhárikhamáth, Lord of the Heavens.” He took another contemplative sip of wine. “Agasi Scholars would tell us each star is the gateway to another world, one of each of the thousand realms represented in Illume Belliel.” Casting Ean a brief smile, he offered, “I like to think that T’khendar now appears to other distant worlds this way, a sudden flare that materialized three centuries ago and remains brilliant to this day.”
Ean kept listening, but his attention stuck somewhat on the seven stars that had just appeared, hovering at eye level above the dark swath of mountains. “Cephrael’s Hand,” he murmured, feeling a personal and highly unsettling connection to the ominous constellation.
Björn cast him a wry look. “Cephrael had but one task assigned him by his father,” the First Lord said. “Would you like to know what it was?”
Ean gave him a swift look. “Of course.”
“He is the caretaker of this realm—of all of the realms of Light, though the blessed son is known by different names in each. Balance is Cephrael’s governance. But look out there, Ean,” Björn said, returning them to the topic at hand. “Beyond the protection of this world, beyond Alorin’s enveloping shield, what lies there?”
Ean shook his head. He felt heady, but he didn’t think it was the wine; rather, the sure knowledge that everything being spoken of here was vitally important—no matter how disconnected it all seemed—and imbibing it all was more than he could contain. “I don’t really know.”
“No one does for certain,” Björn murmured. “But I will tell you this, beyond the veil of these known worlds, between their protective shields woven of light and elae, chaos lurks. Chaos—formless, frenzied, boundless.” He walked to rest hands and goblet both upon the railing and gazed out over the budding night, where the city lights, the stars of the earth, became a mirror of the heavens. “The Sobra I’ternin tells us our worlds were formed upon a spiral,” Björn said, glancing at Ean over his shoulder. “At the core of this spiral lies the raw power of creation, and at the far unraveling edges, just beyond this world—the last world within the spiral—destruction thrives. This is how it was meant to be, this balance of beginnings and endings. There is no natural cycle in which the pattern of creation isn’t found. That cycle is Balance in its purest form.”
“Yet Alorin is dying.”
Björn turned and leaned back against the railing. He regarded him gravely. “Indeed.”
“But that can’t be right—not if there is Balance in all things.”
“This, too, is true.”
Ean shook his head, missing the connection. “Then…what?”
Björn turned his gaze to the hovering stars, to Cephrael’s Hand—an omen of catastrophe in Alorin, but in truth, representative of so much more. “I suppose we could say Cephrael must correct this imbalance,” the Vestal mused
. Then he added wryly as he looked back to Ean, “But I never have been one to lay responsibility at the feet of another man.”
Ean gave him a long look.
The First Lord finished his wine in one swallow and moved to rejoin Ean. He clapped him on the shoulder. “Tomorrow my sister will show you what it is we are doing here.”
Ean set down his empty goblet on a near table, their talk concluded. “Thank you, my lord.”
But before he could depart, Björn touched his arm and captured the Prince’s gaze again. “We were friends once, Ean,” he said, and the prince was startled to note the wistful longing in his tone. “I hope we can be so again.”
Ean felt the power of those words resonate inside him. “That is my hope as well, my lord,” he surprised himself by saying.
Björn smiled. “Good. I will see you in a few days then. Safe journey.”
And with that, Ean said goodnight to the Fifth Vestal, his thoughts already turning to the morning, and Isabel.
He dreamed of her that night.
Yet in his dream, he knew her by another name, a name he somehow couldn’t recall. They stood upon a rocky beach where the waves crashed just steps from their feet, the rush and ebb of the powerful waters echoing the steady beat of Ean’s heart. He stood with Isabel enfolded in his arms, his lips pressed to her hair, their gazes aimed at the sea. Her hair was different than he remembered, highlighted by long days beneath the strong southern sun, though still long and very soft. The wind made vines of it around his arms, around his back, doubly binding them together in a moment that would define the rest of their days—these things Ean knew the way one knows things in a dream, though he didn’t understand them.
“Are you certain?” he asked her with desperation riding the crest of his uncertainty, an imminent sense of loss as an ache that threatened to tear him apart. “How can you be sure? You’ve told me always the future is framed by the choices we make.”
“But you have already made these choices, my lord,” she returned softly. “The path is set. You will not veer from it any more than I would leave your side because of it.”
“If I’d known it would mean I would lose you—”
“You will never lose me,” she promised, and Ean felt the truth of her words. He and Isabel were threads bound into a pattern that could never be unraveled. Where his threads ended, hers began, and vice versa, the bond of their troth an endless knot, forever entwined. “And it would not have changed anything,” she added quietly. “This you also know.”
“Yet I would wish it so,” he whispered, his voice the haunted ache of despair and duty, themselves entwined confusingly within him. He pressed his lips into her hair, smelling of its sweet depths, smelling of the sea, so long a part of both of them. “Do you think…is this punishment?”
Their position kept him from seeing her face, but he sensed her smile. “Punishment? From whom?”
“Fate? Your father?”
“My father!” she laughed.
“I’m serious.”
She pressed herself closer to him, and he tightened his arms around her. “We make our own fate by our choices in this life and those that came before…by the agreements we make with our own conscience, those we keep or break. Fate is the entwining of the myriad paths of our lives, the aggregate of misdeeds and conclusions, of promises made and broken, the choices that bring us to now.”
“The path of honor,” he heard himself say, though he didn’t understand why he said it.
“Sometimes,” she agreed with a sigh.
“I will never see you again,” he managed, and his voice broke in the saying. Ean wanted to scream from the pain of this truth, the unbearable knowledge—the very idea was so abhorrent. That he could willingly be without her for any reason…
Isabel turned in his arms and took his face in her hands. She kissed him, long and deeply, their bound souls caressing each other, a kiss to linger through the ages. Her eyes were closed as she pulled away and murmured, “Not in this life—”
And Ean woke.
He gasped as he shot up in bed, his heart racing in a panic, the wild fear of losing her so vivid that he found himself clenching the sheets into hard knots in both fists. Beyond his windows, a silver-grey dawn made the air luminous with promise, but still caught in the horror of the dream, he turned and—
For a moment, seeing her sitting on the edge of his bed made no sense. Then he realized she was really there, and he grabbed her into his arms, choking back his relief and the muffled exclamation that partly escaped before he could contain it. She hugged him as she had in his dream, unhurriedly, her cheek resting on his bare chest. After a while the world regained its balance, and Ean thanked Epiphany it had only been a dream.
He reluctantly released Isabel, and she straightened to hover slightly above him with the hint of a smile on her lovely lips. “Happy to see me, I take it.”
“My lady, you have no idea,” Ean readily admitted, yet he wondered if indeed she understood too well. One thing he could say about Epiphany’s Prophet, her timing was unmatched. He allowed himself to bask in the feel of her nearness, letting her warmth melt away the last vestiges of the disturbing dream. “And how may I serve thee today, my lady?”
She pushed up to sitting again. “Today we travel. Three days will be sufficient, if you would like to pack some things.”
Ean contemplated three days alone with Isabel and thought he’d found paradise despite the Fifth Vestal’s insistence that such places couldn’t exist. He made to throw back the covers but reconsidered—suddenly aware of his nakedness and determined to protect her honor. “Isabel…” he said, giving her a chastising look, “a lady should turn away.”
“I wear a blindfold, my lord,” she protested innocently.
Indeed she did, the black one that so immediately and intensely aroused him. “Isabel, if I thought your sight was even remotely hindered by that piece of cloth, I wouldn’t let you take a step without me at your side.”
“Perhaps my lord should then think of me thusly,” she reasoned.
“Isabel,” he sighed, longing and desire such a wonderful torment, “unless you’re ready to let me bed you right here and now, I am honor-bound to protect your reputation.”
With a tolerant sigh, Isabel dutifully pressed palms to her eyes.
“Not good enough.”
Laughing, she kept her eyes covered and turned her head away.
Ean rose from the bed and donned his britches. A kiss, gentle and soft, released her from her bondage. She dropped her hands and murmured in her silken voice, “Thank you, my lord, for your discretion. Now your arousal and my sight are equally veiled, a fitting resolution.”
Ean resisted the urge to take her into his arms and ravish her, but just barely.
Glorying in Isabel’s company, the prince stuffed what things he might need into a satchel. They took breakfast together on his balcony, and then she led him out into the palace.
He walked at her side, never prouder than to have her hand upon his arm. She wore a dress of bronze silk that day but in a heavy weave, nubby and raw and styled for travel. She carried her staff in her right hand and the tap of its base rapped a steady accompaniment to their strolls.
“Where did you get the staff, my lady?” he asked as they were walking down a long hallway interspersed with regular alcoves, the homes of towering marble statues of varied design.
“Phaedor made it for me,” she answered as if this was the most ordinary of events.
“Oh, of course.” Ean flashed a wide grin. “How can I get one of those?”
She arched a brow at him. “Did not the zanthyr remake your blade for you?”
Ean came to a standstill and stared at her—startled first at the idea that she knew of this occurrence, he was more taken by the recognition of the occurrence itself, which suddenly claimed a profound new meaning. He remembered too well the moment the Shade had driven his kingdom blade into his chest in an eruption of ash, and as well the sight of
the blade restored after his first wild ride with the zanthyr. “But…” he frowned, “it’s not Merdanti…” Yet even as he said it, he wondered.
Her answer hinted at his own suspicions. “What is Merdanti? Is it the stone, quarried and wrought by mortal men? Or is it the magic used to craft a weapon into a sentient thing?”
As he stared at her, Ean couldn’t help marveling at the zanthyr’s impossible foresight. But then he pushed aside memories of Phaedor, for they brought a maudlin cast to the day. Ean cleared his throat and started them walking again, affecting a light manner as he inquired, “I suppose he taught you how to use the staff?”
“Well, certainly. One does not carry a Merdanti weapon and have no idea how to use it. That would be inviting of trouble.”
Funnily enough, the comment reminded him of Alyneri and her chastising of Tanis for carrying the zanthyr’s dagger, conversations overheard from horseback as they rode through the meadows of Veneisea with the Assifiyahs scraping the eastern sky. It seemed so long ago now.
A pang of regret filled him as he thought of his dear friends. Memories of Tanis especially made him regretful. The lad had become so dear to him…for some reason, more than with anyone else, the idea that Tanis now likely thought Ean had betrayed him was enormously hard to bear.
Embroiled in these sudden memories, Ean barely noticed the man approaching down the long corridor until he was nearly upon them and Isabel was gently tugging his arm to stop. When he realized who approached, he felt transported back to his dreams.
Dagmar Ranneskjöld pressed hands together and fingertips to lips as he bowed in greeting. “Ah, Ean, at last in the flesh we meet! Be welcome! I am so glad you chose the path to us.”
Knowing what he now knew of himself, Ean wondered if he’d ever had any choice. He regarded Dagmar amid a confusing mix of emotions. Their last conversation had not gone well, though Ean had been furious for all the wrong reasons. “My lord,” he returned, hearing the contrition in his own tone, his embarrassment and regret. He hoped Dagmar heard it too, for he didn’t know how any apology would make up for the things he’d said.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 41
