“I never thought of it that way.” Garland swallowed, feeling the room, the world, shift around him like a house rebuilding itself into a completely different shape. “What can she do?”
“It’s hard to know, until she actually does it. I’ve seen her do some amazing things. She puts things together, basically—but she could just as easily be taking them apart. And she knows it.”
“But she doesn’t?”
“Fortunately,” J’han said, kissing his sleepy daughter’s head, “Karis is disinclined to destruction.”
It’s a strange and unpleasant sensation to know my life is almost over. For forty of my sixty years, I have been thinking as a farmer does, not just of the next crop, but five, ten growing seasons into the future, always asking myself, If I do this now, what will be the result then? But now, when I think that way, my thinking collapses. I will not be there to repair any errors I might make now. And it makes me afraid to think at all, afraid to take any action at all. Can I tell you this, a secret I try to keep even from Dinal (though, really, it is hopeless)? Can I write to you as though you were my friend? Or are you so angry with me that to tell you my secrets will only seem an insult, a presumption, like a drunk in a tavern who whispers to you exactly how he pleasures his lover?
Despite herself, Karis uttered a laugh.
Well, really, what choice have you? You can close this book and walk away, but you will eventually read it. No . . . I am guessing. I have no way to know you. I assume you will be like all earth bloods, but how can I be certain? Perhaps your disastrous childhood in Lalali (you see, I do know something about you) will leave you bent, lightning-struck, irreparable. Perhaps it is a bitter, foolish, short-sighted woman who reads these words. Perhaps I have vested the power of Shaftal in a broken container.
Here Karis did shut the book sharply, and stared into the cold fireplace, breathing hard. Faint voices murmured in the kitchen. Rain sighed, and then pounded on tightly latched shutters. The repaired roof held. Karis opened the book again.
But I do not think so. You see, I am afraid, and yet I am not. It is too late for me to save you. You will have to save yourself. But I know, or I believe, that it’s better that way. By the day you read this book, you will be healed. You will no longer rage at me for doing to you what I am going to do. And you will have found a companion, a fire blood, who in turn will find this book for you, wherever Dinal hides it, just as she would find it for me, had it been hidden for me by a G’deon of the past. Some things, I believe, will not change. And so I believe in you, as Rakel G’deon believed in me, when he threw that great weight of power into me. Like stones, it was. And then I awoke from my faint to find him dead. Though everything and everyone may seem to fail you, Shaftal will not, and you will be made strong.
So. I will write to you, to a G’deon whose name I cannot know, whose present pain and power suddenly evidenced itself to me mere days ago. I write to you on the day that the healers informed me that the strange weakness I feel from time to time is a herald of my death. I will live a half year, they say, maybe a bit longer, since we G’deons can be so tenacious. (Really, we are famous for it. But perhaps, in your time, such things will have been forgotten.) I write to you, for you and I will never speak, because, in order to protect you, I must leave you in that midden heap where you were born. I write to you, and I am not certain why. Because I pity you? Because my many, many guilts have grown impossible to live with any longer? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s that I love you, though you don’t even exist yet, though you are just an idea. I love you, and from your distant, difficult future, I can almost feel you looking backwards to comfort me. “Harald,” you say to me, “I am Shaftal! All will be well!” And that’s the truth that rises up in me, that I want to say back to you. All will be well. I am an old man facing his death, writing a letter to a stranger. I have no reason to lie to you. I tell you what I know even as I doubt it: All will be well.
Karis raised her eyes from the book and wiped her face carefully. When the tears did not stop, she lay back her head and sat quietly, simply waiting. Tears fell as though from someone else’s eyes. She kept wiping them, as though she feared that they would fall onto the book, and blur the ink. In time, they stopped.
Dinal has just come in. She was away, tending to Paladin business, and I had not sent for her, because I have never had to send for her before. She said, “What are you thinking, to write in the dark? Your eyes will fall out of your head.” I had not even noticed that the sun had set. She lit a lamp for me, and I saw by its light that she knew. No doubt she has already talked to the healers. I never have to tell her anything important. Always, she already knows. I say things to her anyway, because it lifts the weight. “I am dying,” I said to her. “I’m writing a letter.”
She said, “Well, it must be an important letter.”
And then we held onto each other for a while. The wood feeds the fire. The fire transforms the wood. That is our love. But you know this, don’t you?
Karis said out loud, “I can’t endure this!” She closed the book, stood up, and paced the empty room, which Garland had scrubbed clean. The candle, which she had stuck onto a projecting stone of the wall, fluttered with her passing. Her heavy, hobnailed boots scraped the floor. The book lay on the chair seat. She looked at it from across the room. Her eyes were red, her face stark. She said to it, as though replying to its long dead author, “Did you ever knowingly send Dinal to her death? Do you know what that’s like?” And then she stopped, as though she had heard the answer to her question, and it was not the answer she expected. Her angry shoulders slumped. She returned reluctantly to her chair.
Now Dinal has gone, to tell our children. Half our life together, she has spent on horseback, running my errands, while I usually remain in or near the House of Lilterwess. Half the year I am in the gardens, weeding the carrots and cutting great armloads of flowers to decorate the dining room tables. Young people coming to the House of Lilterwess for the first time, to be novices in one or another order, bump into me in the hallway and don’t even excuse themselves. They are too preoccupied with hoping for a glimpse of the G’deon. There I am, in my work clothes, with my hair untrimmed and dirt under my fingernails, carrying a big basket of cabbages to the kitchen. This is why we don’t trust children’s judgment! When adults look down their noses at me, those are the people that don’t rise in their Orders. Not because I am affronted, but because they still have the judgment of children, and need to grow up before they are given more power. Alas, there are too many such people here lately, besotted with their own self-importance, strutting about in their fur cloaks and whispering with Mabin about war. Where have they all come from?
Shaftal answers: they are the spawn of the Sainnites: not the children of their bodies, of course, but the people that are created each time the Sainnites commit one of their atrocities. Anger, pain, lust for revenge, shock and horror, that is what shapes these people. That is what shaped the Sainnites as well, in that land they escaped from. In turn they shape others to be like them, and soon our land will be a land, not of Shaftali, but of Shaftali whose desire to defeat the Sainnites has turned them into Sainnites.
You know this, my dear. Or, if you do not know it, if you yourself proved incapable of reversing the bitter shape into which the Sainnites forced you, you do not know, and all is lost. Shaftal does not speak to you. Or, if it does, you do not hear. You are reading this little book, thinking to yourself what an ass I am, what a fool, for going about that fine house covered with dirt, when I could be washed in milk and dressed in, oh, I don’t know, a silk-embroidered topcoat. Perhaps you are wearing one yourself as you read this! Certainly, with the abilities you have, you could live a rich and comfortable life. Sainnites may well be bowing down before you as the Sainnites now want us to bow to them. Oh, what are these dark thoughts!
They are the thoughts of a man who knows he must let go and trust another to do the work that he has done so joyfully (so stubbornly, Mabin would s
ay. So obstinately. So blindly.) I admit, I am proud of my steadfastness. But you are the child of a bitter land, a land in a future I fear, and perhaps steadfastness will be an unknown thing to you. Indeed, why should you be so strong when no one has stood by you? I shudder to think what has already happened to you. I quail at the thought of what has yet to happen, what I know must happen, what I dare not prevent, though certainly I can. Oh, my dear! I am so sorry!
And so I have circled back again to the thoughts that I began with: I am afraid. I must trust, and hope, in the land. The future no longer belongs to me, but to you. And you curse me, do you not?
Karis put her head in her hands. “No,” she murmured, after a long while. “No, not any more.”
Mabin has just been visiting. Of course, Dinal told her the news, on her way out to saddle her horse. (My wife is an old woman! She will ride all night, like a nineteen-year-old. Her vigor is the benefit of loving an earth witch, she says. But I wonder what will happen to her after I die. Will she age all at once? Will she lay down her weapons and start doting on her grandchildren, maybe learn to sew? I cannot imagine it.) Mabin had made herself look very grave, so I said to her with a heartiness as false as her sorrow, “Death is a fulfillment! A closing of the circle!” And she gave me the look I deserved, which forced me to laugh at her. “Come now,” I said, having put her all out of countenance. “We have always been honest about our mutual dislike. Why are you pretending that the news of my death makes you sad?”
She replied in that arid way of hers, “I suppose I thought I might convince you to think of Shaftal’s future.”
It is so typical of her, to assume that only she is capable of genuine concern about our land’s condition! To think that only she is disinterested, only she can see the dangers that beset us. I wanted to say to her that the one good thing about dying was that I need not endure her disapproval any more, but I am not entirely without diplomacy, and I held my tongue.
“Where is the heir to Shaftal?” she asked.
How could I tell her that it’s better for my heir to remain a whore in Lalali than it is for her to be twisted by the angers and power struggles of this House? (I imagine, now that the House no longer stands—yes, this far into the future I think I can see—that it will be remembered fondly. But in these last few years it has been a terrible, whispering place, full of plots and angry sideways looks. And I am not particularly sorry to know it will be destroyed.) Mabin disapproves of me. How badly will she treat you? How long would it take her to turn all her forces against you? I told her a blatant lie, glad there were no Truthkens in the room. “There is no heir.”
She looked at me, aghast. “Are you not relieved?” I asked her. “Doesn’t it give you joy to know that at last you will have no impediments to your military aspirations?”
It took some time for her to recover. (It is cruel and small-minded of me to torture her like this, but she has earned her suffering.) At least she replied more honestly, then. “An army with the power of a G’deon behind it could not be defeated. But, without a G’deon . . . How many Paladins are there? Seven hundred? Against how many thousand Sainnites?”
“Ten,” I said, to see her jump with shock. “Or so,” I added. “No, it will not be a pretty battle. Good luck to you. Fight well!”
“You’re doing this to spite me!” she said. “You will send all of Shaftal into ruin just to ruin one woman that you hate! What kind of man are you?”
I said then, to admonish her, “I am the G’deon of Shaftal.” But she will not, shall not, cannot understand what that means. She walked out in anger. So, she is to become blatantly impolite, now that my days are numbered! She is a grasping, power-hungry woman, but that I might forgive if she had a little imagination. Unfortunately, all that air in her blood has left no room for the fire. I am sorry to be bequeathing you such a enemy. For a long time, I fear, her power will exceed yours, and I have a horror of what she might do to you. Oh, my dear.
Now the healer is coming down the hall to admonish me for taking no supper, and as soon as he sees me, sitting here with the pen in my hand, he will bid me rest, as well. Yes, here he is, saying exactly as I predicted. I will lay down my pen for now. These healers, they are gentle enough, but in their hearts they are all despots.
Karis had been laughing, and seemed to realize it only then, as she looked up from the book as though to give Harald privacy to sleep. From the kitchen, she heard Leeba’s peevish voice, and the metallic clang of a ladle, banging on a tin plate. Hesitantly, she smiled at these sounds.
Morning now. Visitors were crowding the hallway when I awoke, so the healer has set watchdogs at either end of the hall, to turn visitors away. I will gladly ignore their appeals and their anxieties. If they are so weak as to be swayed by Mabin’s panic, then they deserve to suffer the results. How irritable I have gotten! Well, it is but my sense that my energies are failing, and that these people would deplete them even more, snapping up my reassurances like a pack of hounds their meat, and then baying desperately for more. Is this how I will be remembered, as a man who shut his doors against a frightened people? Well, what does it matter how I am remembered?
Before I began writing again, I read what I wrote last night, and I feel it has no value. I realize now that I have written to you, not to give you something, but to reassure myself, to make myself believe in you. I realize that I have nothing to give you—or rather, that by the time you read this, you will long ago have been given the most precious thing I have. But you will receive it like an assault; you will feel as though I have destroyed you; you may never forgive me for something that to you will seem a random, desperate, and ill-considered act. So perhaps I do have something else to give you, after all: the knowledge, simply, that I am thinking of you with kindness. When your great talent awakened in you, that was when hope awakened in me. When I realized what you are, I wept, yes. Your body will always remember the abuses it has endured. Sainnites and Shaftali alike may make you a pariah because of your “tainted” blood. But to one old man, who halfway knows you, who can only guess your future, you are a hope, a love, a calling to be steadfast to the end. Because of you, I can let the dogs howl. My certainty in you gives my life, and especially my death, coherence.
So I am writing, after all, to thank you.
The writer had filled up the book. There was no more to be read. Karis closed it and sat with it held between her hands. The house grew silent, except for the rain. The candle burned low and dripped a long strand of yellow wax down the wall. Karis stood up finally, and went to lift a window sash, and open the shutters. Four wretched, sodden black birds flew in, quarreling with each other, and found perches on her chair. “That’s a new chair. Try to aim your crap on the floor,” she told them. “Poor Garland! Maybe I should scrub the floor before he sees it. But he’ll be up before me, humming to his bread dough.”
One of the ravens said, “He’ll forgive us.”
“Give us something to eat,” said another. “The starvation season has begun.”
She went into the dark kitchen and came back with the scrap bucket. “Garland has started saving food for you.”
The ravens set to emptying the bucket. They made quite a mess. Karis watched them, with the book out of danger in her hands. When they were finished, and settled again on the chair to preen their feathers, one of them looked at her and said, “Well? What?”
“Tell your brothers in the Midlands to fly to Medric’s window. He’s awake, probably packing his books. I imagine he already knows what the raven will say to him, but say it anyway. Tell him to pack up the house and come to me, with Emil and Norina. Tell him we have work to do.”
Chapter 17
In a ditch where water and mud were chilled by their anticipation of winter, the battered woman lay bleeding. The darkness had come all at once, and she had shut her eyes against it. The last light of the stumbling sun flickered out. Her outstretched hand lay limp, with the churned-up ruts of the road beyond reach.
Now
the wagon came, hauled through the mud by weary horses, driven by a man who had repeatedly been forced to get out and put a shoulder to the wagon to get its wheels unstuck. That they traveled on this wet day was his passenger’s fault: that detour east to Hannisport, those three days in the dockside fabric shops. Yet she berated him for the slow progress, the constant risk the rain posed her load of silks. Watfield was still hours away, and soon the driver would have to light the lamps. He could hear water running, but the ditches were already black, their contents obscure.
The horses shied sharply. The passenger cried, “Stop!”
A pregnant woman who had to relieve herself at every turn of the road ought not to travel at all, thought the driver. Now the wheels would sink in and it would take more horses than he had to get them loose again.
The woman had seen something, though: an open hand, the gray smear of a face. She picked her way fastidiously through the mud, and stood looking down at the woman who lay in mud and running water like another shadow. She looked again, to make certain that what she saw was there.
“What?” said the driver wearily.
“I’ve never seen the like,” said the pregnant woman. “A border woman, I think. She may be dead. But we can’t just leave her here.”
“I’ll light the lantern,” the driver said. “A border woman? There’s no tribes around here.”
With impatient displeasure, the woman observed the mud staining her shoe. The driver came over with a lantern. “Look how her eye is swelling up! Someone was angry with her, that’s certain.” He looked around himself, worried that the border woman’s attacker might still be lurking in the dark. There was nothing in the woods but trees, though.
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