Brynna, who had turned twelve only the week before, was sitting at Morgan’s feet in her teacher’s chambers, attempting one of the more difficult exercises Morgan had set for her. In her mind’s eye she sat in, was surrounded by, what was almost a nest of the soft moss she remembered from beneath the willows. With a tendril of her mind she perceived the deep green of its presence all around her, feeling its texture with the tips of her fingers. With preternaturally sharpened senses she was following a thread of thought, of Power, retrieving a target set by Morgan. When the alien contact came it was sudden, jolting, and very fast; she was shocked from her cocoon, the moss turning hard and gritty beneath her hand, as though it had transmuted itself into coarse sand. She blinked, shivered, and sat rigid with shock, rubbing the last of the trance’s cobwebs from her eyes.
Morgan had felt nothing. “What is it?” she asked, herself startled by the sudden change in her young pupil.
“It felt…as though they were looking for me,” said Brynna slowly, groping for meaning in what she had just experienced.
A swift vision of a white tower in flames was visited on Morgan’s mind, quickly suppressed; she rose, her face grave. Once Brynna had spoken, she had no doubt as to exactly what had happened.
“And they may well have found you,” she said. “We still have time for a plan. I think,” and she allowed a wintry smile to touch the corners of her lips, “it’s time for some of our Sisters to go into retreat.”
They gauged it to a nicety. Morgan arranged things in such a way that the patrol came to Bresse in time to see the tail end of a small cavalcade of Sisters and a couple of pack animals vanishing along the narrow track which led up into the mountains. Morgan herself was in the courtyard to greet Sif’s soldiers. They were ten, and with them a pair of frightened women, one young, one old enough to wish never to have to sit a horse again, looking anxious and uncomfortable on her placid gelding.
“We have reason to believe you are harboring one whom our lord the king wants taken,” grated the leader of the patrol, after observing a sketchy obeisance due to one of Morgan’s rank. Behind him, thinking themselves unobserved, four of his men were making the sign against the evil eye.
“Bresse harbors no fugitives,” said Morgan levelly.
“We have orders to search,” said the patrol leader.
Morgan stepped aside, making a welcoming gesture with her hand. “Search. But disturb nothing.”
More men were making the sign; so many Sighted women together in one place was a rare circumstance. Every child in Roisinan grew up with the idea of Sight, sometimes within reach of a Sighted mother or grandmother, and this kind of domestic power was known and accepted. But gathered all together, the little puddles and trickles of familiar Sight pooled into a vast, unknown and dangerous sea. Bresse was not often frequented by common folk. Morgan’s injunction was almost unnecessary; not one soldier would willingly touch anything in this place.
But physical searching was not what the patrol leader had in mind. He turned, caught some in the act of making the sign and swore, then beckoned the two women forward. “Well?” he barked.
The older one was sweating, half in fear of her horse, half in terror of the captain of the guard. She offered nothing. But the younger woman was mettlesome enough; she met Morgan’s eyes squarely, then allowed her gaze to play on the cottages in the courtyard, the byres, coming to rest finally on the white tower. They lingered there for a long moment, and then she turned her head toward the scowling man who waited for her answer.
“No,” she said. “Not here.”
The scowl deepened. “By the Gods,” he snarled, “if you’ve led us here on a wild goose chase…”
“We heard what we heard,” she said, unmoved.
One of the men had been more observant or perhaps less overawed than the rest. “The group that just went into the mountains,” he said to his captain, “who were they?”
“Yes, who were they?” the captain asked, leaning forward on his pommel to stare at Morgan. “Where were they going?”
“Four of our Sisters,” said Morgan calmly. “They are going on retreat into the mountains.”
“On retreat? What does that mean? Where have they gone?”
“Even if I could tell you,” Morgan returned, “I would not. Retreat is a calling to solitude, not to be savaged by a mob of angry men. But the truth is I do not know where they have gone. Bresse maintains several small bothies in the mountains; those who go on retreat are not called upon to provide advance notice of which one they will make for.”
“This is true,” said the younger of the captain’s women.
His head swivelled in her direction. “What do you mean?”
“I was trained here,” the girl said, keeping her voice carefully neutral and her eyes on the space between her mount’s pricked ears. Morgan felt a sudden warmth spreading through her. This was one of their own; Morgan didn’t recognize her, but there had been so many novices through the years. This girl was Bresse-trained; she would not…
But the captain was speaking again. “Would you know where these mountain huts are, then?”
The girl glanced up at Morgan quickly, almost too fast for anyone to see, and dropped her eyes again. She shook her head. “I never went on retreat.”
Foiled, the captain rounded on Morgan again. “How long are these…retreats?” he demanded.
“As long,” said Morgan beatifically, tucking her hands into her sleeves, “as the Sisters think it is necessary. Sometimes it’s only a few days. Often it’s weeks, sometimes months. Once, a Sister stayed away for almost a year.”
The captain considered this. Perhaps he would have taken a chance and chased after the fugitive Sisters himself, but he knew he would find it utterly impossible to make any of his men do so, even at the point of a sword. Sif could have made them do it, but Sif was far away. “We’ll stay until they come back,” he decided abruptly, his fingers going to his temples as though he was nursing a particularly violent headache.
“I am afraid,” said Morgan, every word oozing with polite regret, “that Bresse cannot offer hospitality for longer than a night.”
“What do you mean? We are here on the king’s business, and…”
“You are men,” his captive Bresse graduate informed him.
They stayed in Bresse that night, and it was doubtful if any of them save the women enjoyed a wink of sleep. The captain knew when he was defeated and took up lodgings in Radas Han for almost another month, riding up to Bresse every day to look for the return of the Sisters who had gone on the fictional retreat. He became increasingly bad-tempered. Eventually, losing patience, he returned to Miranei with the two Sighted women and his troop of guards. Even the thought of Sif’s wrath at his failure was infinitely more palatable than guarding a castle full of women who set his men’s teeth on edge and who, in the captain’s own private and considered opinion, had been driven more than a little crazy by their isolation.
The captain would have been in a white-hot, blazing rage if he had realized the Sisters “on retreat” had only gone as far as the first bend in the mountain trail and waited there for his troop to leave. They had returned to Bresse, with him none the wiser, the very next day—via the small postern door, even as the captain was in the process of demanding lodgings from the innkeeper at Radas Han. The object of his search had watched him ride up from Radas Han and back again every day for a month. As it was, he rode away merely furious at the wasted time; he took it out on the two women, whom he made ride at a pace which soon reduced the elder to a quivering jelly of jolted and shaken bones and raw muscles. The younger woman took the punishment, and merely smiled.
Bresse had ways of guarding against accidents. But that gathering of women who ought to have been able to hear a feather fall from an eagle’s wing in the mountains on the other side of the world was oddly blind when it came to some things. When the true betrayal came, Castle Bresse lay wide open, unable to turn the blow that came unlooked for, ou
t of the darkness.
10
Ansen recovered slowly from his brush with power. At first he did not question the fact that his only visitors were his parents, the healer, occasionally Feor, and a pair of silent women whose function seemed to be that of sickroom attendants and who came and went in shifts, one of them always in the room with him. By the time he thought to query the continuing absence of Kieran and Brynna, as well as both his younger brothers, his two former schoolroom companions had been gone for almost two months. When he did ask, unfortunately, it was of one of the women, and she did not know any better than to be blunt.
“They were sent away, young lord,” she’d said. “Right after your accident.”
Ansen, who preferred not to think about his “accident” at all but whose sightless eye never ceased to remind him of that Cerdiad night, sat up in bed, propping himself up on both elbows. “Sent away? Where? By whom?”
“Lord Lyme and Lady Chella,” the woman said. “And Feor, your tutor.”
The three names rang in Ansen’s head, buzzing around his skull like furious bees. He smelled a conspiracy. The woman was obviously ignorant of the real facts, and Ansen pressed her no further, but he waited with angry impatience for one of the three who had been named to come to him, frustrated as he was by his continuing confinement to bed. It was Feor who was the first to arrive, gliding in one morning in his blue robe, trying to arrange his lugubrious features into one of his unaccustomed smiles.
“The healer tells me you’re getting restless,” said Feor. “That’s good. It means you’re healing.”
“When will I be allowed out of this bed?” demanded Ansen, distracted for a moment by the glittering prospect of a renewal of normal life.
“That isn’t up to me,” said Feor with his usual adroit verbal sleight of hand.
Ansen’s hand rose to touch the bandage which still wrapped his head. It was lighter now than the one Brynna had stared at, aghast, when she’d first come into this room after the accident. The patient was looking a little bit more like himself, his pale hair sticking out at odd angles from beneath the strap holding the bandage in place. “I can hardly wait for this to come off,” said Ansen with a sigh. “I feel like half a man with one eye closed like this.”
The expression that passed through Feor’s eyes was gone almost before Ansen could be sure it was there, but it was such a rare occurrence to catch Feor off guard he was instantly alert. His one good eye narrowed.
“Feor…”
Feor spared a moment to frame a choice curse in the privacy of his mind for the healer who had—perhaps out of misguided pity—neglected to acquaint his patient with the diagnosis everyone else in the keep already knew. When he met Ansen’s eye, sparking with something that was half anger and half abject terror, Feor had managed to restore a semblance of his usual tight control. When his eyes met Ansen’s they were blank, revealing nothing—no pity, no fear.
“There is a possibility,” Feor said in the flat, inflectionless tones of a messenger bringing news of defeat in battle to a new widow, “that you might never…”
Ansen’s cry was that of a wounded beast, inarticulate, inchoate, bleeding. He clawed at the bandage with the sudden and violent motion of a trapped animal gnawing at its own foot to reach freedom. It was as though having heard the bandage was not what was keeping the light from his injured eye, Ansen had decided to tear it away and take his chances without it.
He had decided nothing, of course, not consciously; blind anguish moved his hands, and his strength was such that Feor, who sprang to stop him from reopening his wound, could hardly hold him down. He shouted for someone to fetch the healer, anyone, an extra pair of hands. The healer arrived first, with a potion they tried to force down Ansen’s throat. It took three men to do it at last, and even then they were forced to tie his hands together until the potion took effect. He lay there moaning for a long time, and even when he slipped off into a drug-induced sleep he tossed uneasily on his pillow. There was a telltale streak of tears on his cheek, where his pale eyelashes touched flesh pallid from months of illness and incarceration.
Feor did not often give way to rage, but Ansen’s pain had distressed him greatly and the sight of futile and childish tears on the face of one so nearly a man drove him over the edge. When he turned on the panting healer, whose forehead shone with the sweat of his exertions, the man shrank from the white fury in Feor’s face. The priest’s voice, however, was silky, quiet and dangerous when at length he spoke.
“Did you not think he deserved to know the truth?” he enquired, almost conversationally.
The healer, whose eyes had dropped from the other’s set face, glanced up hopefully, thinking the storm had passed him by. What he saw made him quickly look down again.
“I did not think,” he began portentously, taking refuge in pomposity, “he was well enough to cope with the news. I was waiting until he…”
“Until he heard it spilled out without warning?” enquired Feor, still ominously quiet. “Do you consider him well enough now?”
The healer, a rotund, red-faced man with a premature paunch, was far from incompetent or cruel; he had genuinely meant well. He bleated some excuse and stood trembling before Feor, in the silence of a child caught out in some sin by his elders. If Feor had been in a softer mood, he might have pitied him, standing there in abject abasement. But there was no pity. There was only the glint of the hearth-fire on Ansen’s tear-stained cheek.
Feor’s voice broke at last, in thunder.
“Out!” he bellowed, flinging his arm out to point at the door. “You have done here! If I ever find you in this room again without the express permission of Lord Lyme or Lady Chella, I shall throw you out of yonder window myself!”
There was something faintly ridiculous in the idea of tall, thin, angular Feor lifting the stocky physician and throwing him anywhere, but as Ansen’s window was located on the second floor of the Cascin manor the healer saw nothing humorous in the situation. He scurried out of Ansen’s door, wincing and ducking a blow which never came, and vanished down the corridor.
Only now did Feor’s face soften and his hands drop to his sides. He sat lightly on the side of Ansen’s bed and smoothed the pale hair from his face in an unconsciously tender gesture. Ansen turned away, murmuring something incoherent. Feor summoned his attendant, leaving strict instructions that he or one of Ansen’s parents was to be called immediately the boy woke, and went in search of Lyme and Chella to tell them of the ugly turn of events.
They were all ready to pamper Ansen when he woke, with Feor aloof as usual but with an odd stoop to his shoulders, which made him look like a wizened old eagle hovering protectively over an injured chick. But Ansen, when he woke, was brittle and hard as obsidian. He wanted no pampering—he wanted the truth. He went back to the accident he had tried so hard to forget, and demanded that somebody help him remember it. All of it.
It was Feor, the only eyewitness still in Cascin, who gave him back the events of that night. The priest tried to blur the outline, pulling ragged edges of concealment where none remained, but Ansen cut through the pretense with a shrewdness that was almost Sight.
“Yes, but who threw the decanter?” he asked again, returning to the one point Feor had skated over. “Keda was right next to me, Kieran had his hands full of me, you were at the door and Brynna was halfway there, close neither to the table nor to me. I would have noticed if she had gone for the bottle, surely, even under the…circumstances. I admit I was drunk, perhaps perverse…” That was the one concession he made to his role in the whole affair, still arrogant, still haughty. “But…”
“Ansen, do you remember taking out a knife?”
Ansen shot him a smoldering look. “Does it really matter? Now?”
“It matters. If you did, you were the reason why two of your foster siblings were made to leave this house.”
“Is that all?” Ansen enquired, with sudden nastiness in his voice. His hand rose to touch his bandage. “
And what of me?” The hand dropped. There was a goblet of mulled wine on a tray beside the bed; Ansen reached for it, frowned when he misjudged the distance and nearly overbalanced the vessel. “Gods,” he muttered, “am I to be condemned to this for the rest of my life?” He looked up again, and there was a flash of rage in his good eye. “They crippled me, damn it, Feor!”
Ansen had experienced episodes of self-pity before, but they were different by far from the fit he was now in the grip of—more innocent, more innocuous, the last vestiges of childish whining from someone who was no longer a child. Now self-pity had congealed into something more brittle, more bitter. It was hard to feel compassion for Ansen when he resorted to mockery and sarcasm; he nursed his misery fiercely, and it colored the way he saw the events of that night. To his mind, he had still done nothing wrong by trying to seduce Keda using the traditional appurtenances of Cerdiad. The knife…the knife he could only vaguely remember, a blur in his mind. And there was something else, something he could not put into context, something terribly, terribly important…
“Where did they go?” he asked, taking a weary sip of his wine.
“Kieran was placed as a squire,” Feor said, abrupt and businesslike. He did not wish to discuss Kieran with Ansen, not while he was in this mood. Kieran was a living reminder of what Ansen might never be now, a youth on the path to knighthood, to glory. A youth with two good eyes.
“And Brynna?” Ansen frowned into his goblet. It was to do with Brynna, the thought he couldn’t pin down. She must have thrown the decanter at him—she must have—there had been nobody else in the room. But that was not it. Although there was something strange…
“She has gone to family,” said Feor smoothly. Which was true, up to a point; she had gone to a Sisterhood. But Ansen was devilishly sharp that day. Feor made the mistake, imperceptible under normal circumstances, of allowing himself to glance at the door at this point, as though hoping for rescue, or escape. Ansen saw his glance. It was around his odd little foster sister that the whole mystery was woven; and, with terrier-like persistence, he would not let go.
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