by Carol Berg
He stopped. Twiddled his cane. Glanced sidewise at me again. I sensed he was not finished.
“Such a compliment from Dante, even awkwardly given”—Portier shook his head like a sage of ninety summers—“you know how rare that is, yes?”
Why did my skin feel like summer noonday? “I’ve a glimmer.”
And still Portier fiddled. He heaved a deep breath. “He’s forbidden to return to Castelle Escalon. But the king has offered him a small house called Pradoverde. It sits on a few hectares of meadows and woods near the village of Laurentine in northern Louvel. Isolated, which he likes. A royal gift, which he doesn’t, but might be persuaded to accept. Secret, which is necessary, as we’ve heard a thousand calls for his execution. I’ve loaned him Heurot to do for him until he is more accustomed to his condition. Dante hates it, but Heurot is staunch, patient, and not easily discouraged. All necessary, as you might imagine. And I pay the lad well. The mage threatens to disembowel anyone who offers him help. It would take a ferocious will.”
“You want me—?” Unnecessary even to complete my question. As ever, the master logician had laid out his case precisely, and in so doing had resolved my own turmoil into a clear—and scarce conceivable—course of action.
Portier hauled himself to his feet, pulled a brass ring from his pocket, and pressed it into my hand. The hairs on my arms rose with the telltales of enchantment. “Give him this. Tell him his student says he must consider taking up teaching.”
“I’LL VISIT AS SOON AS I believe it safe,” I said, “and stay as long as you need me. But I don’t belong at Montclaire anymore. I’ve other responsibilities.”
I felt guilty telling Ambrose that I could not go home, especially when our parents faced months, perhaps years, of recovery, and I was leaving the burden solely on him. It had been even more difficult to tell him that I planned to live, unmarried, with a man who had contributed to his torment. But I was not yet ready to reveal the gift—or curse—I shared with Dante, or my conviction that any future away from him would condemn me to only half a life. How could I explain what set my own hands trembling? So I couched my decision solely in terms of magic.
“This Mondragon blood festers inside me,” I said to him as we took a last walk through Ilario’s gardens. “I feel like a volcano, ready to spew murder. I stabbed a man in cold blood and relished it. I mutilated a man’s face and another man’s hands and hungered to hurt them more. And I killed one of them. No matter justification, I hate it. As of now, I’ve no desire ever to use magic again. But before I can live among people, and especially people I love, I must learn how to control it. I’m not willing to go to the Camarilla, who looked aside while Lianelle and Ophelie died. They’re busy rousting out Kajetan’s followers anyway. Duplais is traveling. That leaves Dante. Trust me, brother. You’ll see.”
“I won’t come there, Ani,” said Ambrose, scarce suppressing his own anger. “I won’t come rescue you. I won’t speak to him or welcome him to Montclaire. I would kill him gladly and without guilt. I’ve done as you asked thus far and refrained, but I won’t pretend he’s somehow nobler than the others who ruined us, just because his personal interests at the end happened to coincide with ours.”
My brother walked away without word or touch. I couldn’t blame him, though it twisted my heart. But this was the best I could do.
Ilario was equally horrified, swearing me to summon him at the slightest difficulty.
Only Eugenie understood. “Like clear glass,” she said to me, smiling, “blown into the simplest, thinnest shape. May it ring with perfect clarity and catch only the truest colors of the light.”
It only remained to convince Dante.
AND SO IT WAS THAT I found myself at the lovely little country house called Pradoverde in the middle of Estar’s month, on a morning when frost limned every twig, leaf, needle, and blade. I strolled up the path, leaving Ilario and the horses heading for the shelter of a likely looking shed. The muted light on the frost crystals reminded me of the structures of magic. My heart slammed against my breastbone as if trying to escape its fate.
Heurot knew I was coming, though his new master did not. The young man opened the door to my knock, grinned, and ushered me into a study, frigid despite a blazing hearth fire. It appeared the drapes had been torn down from the wide windows. The sight wrenched my heart.
“A lady visitor, Master Dante. She is most insistent.”
“I told you to turn them all away.” Seated at a table jumbled with the paraphernalia from his palace laboratorium, he was ripping pages from a stack of journals—those I’d seen in the schoolmaster’s stool. “Tell her I’ll hex her unborn children—her grandchildren if she’s crone.”
“I’m not a crone,” I said. “My name is Anne Sophia Madeleine de Mondragon, aged two-and-twenty, and I’ve discovered an unexpected talent for magic. I need someone to teach me how not to kill people with it.”
He did not face me, but his knuckles turned as white as the staff propped idly in the corner. “Go away. I’ve no further business with you.”
I joined him at the hearthside, making sure my steps were noisy. “A former student gave me this and recommended you as a mentor.” I pressed Portier’s ring into his hand.
He threw it across the room. “Get out of here. Him, too, if he’s skulking about.”
“Portier left for Abidaijar this morning,” I said. “To study, he says. He’ll be back. He hasn’t fulfilled his purpose in the world as yet. Frightening to think that.”
Dante snorted. “He and the peacock have infected you with this cult nonsense. Now leave.”
Friend . . .
“Stop,” he snapped. “That is over and done.”
“Over and done? Are you mad?”
“Clearly so. I torture, murder, and cripple innocent minds when I believe it necessary. I also find it most annoying that people use my madness to excuse such crimes. Yet if they did not excuse me, they could rightly hang me for them. What could be more lunatic than that?”
“You spent four years without speaking truth with another human being.”
“You see my point? You are a sentimental aristo woman and make excuses I don’t want.” By this time he was on his feet. He reached for his staff but misjudged and came up with nothing. His cheeks flamed. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re trying to do?”
“You know a great many things, mage, but you’ve no idea what I’m trying to do.”
He fumbled for the stool and sat down again, taking up one of the torn pages and crumpling it into a knot. It might have been Jacard’s face. “I told you I cared nothing for aristos, nothing for their wives or whelps. I don’t want you here.”
“Is it the blindness in particular that shames you?” I said as if discussing his decorating preferences. “You’ve lived with crippling injury since your hand was burnt. I’ve heard you managed your life in your forest hermitage quite well. And I doubt if three people at Castelle Escalon guessed about your hand.”
“It is not the blindness,” he snapped, shoving the stack of journals to the floor. “I will deal with that in my own way if I can just be left to it. I am not shamed, and I do not want your pity . . . Portier’s pity . . . anyone’s pity. I will certainly not indulge my own. Do you comprehend? I just want to be left alone.”
But I had known better since the first time I’d heard his other voice. There has been no one . . . ever. No, this battle within him was more than blindness, just as my malaise was more than reaction to horror. I was determined to force him to confront it as I had. I had prepared my approach carefully. “Why did you ask Portier every day if he’d heard how I was getting on with my screaming fits?”
“Because—because I needed to know that my actions did not damage you.”
“Why?”
“A sorcerer is a moron if he does not understand the consequences of his work.”
“That morning in the maze, why did you tell me of your friendship with Portier, the first honest man you’d eve
r met?”
Surprise crossed his face but did not slow the answer. “I had to convince you to work with me.”
“In Eugenie’s bedchamber, why did you tell me the story of your teacher? At that point, you didn’t know I was the one you shared the tangle curse with. Why would the aristo enigma, Anne de Vernase, reeking of magic and secrets, care about the origins of your hate?”
“I needed . . . I’ve no idea. I was trying to warn Portier that the day of the rite was at hand. That he was in mortal danger, and that the conspiracy was all to do with this idiocy of reborn saints and Ixtador. He wasn’t there, so I had to tell you. And then you looked at me with such bald disgust, as if I were a monster, inhuman—which I had spent those years trying to be, so I couldn’t care. But I saw my reflection in you and couldn’t—” His complexion flamed. “This is ridiculous. I want you to go. The king granted me this house to be private.”
But I was not ready to give in. “At Voilline, why did you tell me how your hand was burnt, when you’ve kept that piece of information private from every other person living?”
“How is that relevant?”
“Why did you tell me?” One thing I’d learned: I could be as stubborn as he.
“To remind you that we could only speak truth in the aether. So you would do what was necessary.”
And why will you not speak to me in the aether now? I said. I’ll tell you. Because you know that when you insist you’ve no wish to be near me, I’ll hear your lie. You’ve no way to shape it into a truth, because there is another part of you that is just as real as this arrogant, unrepentant daemon before me. You knew those revelations would speak to me because we were already irrevocably linked. Don’t you see? Our outward seeming is nothing like what lurks inside our souls. We are the reflection of each other, not joined through a common looking glass, easily parted, but as if a nireal has bound us together into a whole—a fractious whole, for we have as many contradictions between us as we have within ourselves. I don’t despise you. I don’t pity you. I know you. I see you, and—saints have mercy on all lunatics—everything I see I value.
“Gods . . . Anne . . .” For that one moment, wonder and astonishment glinted like fireflies against a midnight of pain. It was enough to banish my lingering doubts, if not my fear.
I pulled out the nireal Lianelle had made for me, the one etched with an olive tree. I had bound it as her letter had instructed, considering everything in the world I treasured. Now I dropped it around his neck. My sister and I made this. When you are ready, the key is luminesque. I will not leave you, Dante, my friend of the aether. I cannot. Not now. Not ever.
His unscarred fingers grasped the silver pendant, and his head twisted slightly, as if he were listening.
But he did not speak the key, and his face hardened into its customary cool mask. “I’ve no patience for teaching. I tried once. Wasted my time.”
A smile he could not see teased at my lips. His eyes, so dull when I arrived, now sparked with curiosity. I retrieved Portier’s ring from the dusty corner and folded his fingers around it. “Your student says differently.” Even a brief touch of the brass circle prickled my skin.
Still and intent, Dante turned the ring over and over in his capable fingers. His mouth twitched. “Well, then. Perhaps my efforts weren’t wasted. But I’ve no—”
I interrupted his excuses. “As I’m sure you would disdain either Collegia Seravain or any other Camarilla tutor for a promising talent, I must study here. You’ve no need to fear I’ll intrude on your privacy. I understand you’ve a reasonable guesthouse. I’ll bring my chambermaid. She can take care of both houses and, together with Heurot, chaperone our arrangement. If you require it, my family will pay a yearly stipend, as they would at Seravain, though I’ll say my brother’s none too pleased with the idea.”
His color high, Dante stewed, fidgeting, crumpling more papers. I let him, happy he couldn’t see my own fingers twisting as I awaited the outcome of his battle.
When he heaved a deep, tight breath, I knew I’d won. “I won’t go easy because you’re a woman. No days off. No coddling. No argument about arrangements.”
“Understood.”
He reached for his staff again and this time found it. “I don’t want your father’s money. And I’ll take the guesthouse. You take whatever’s up the stairs here. Ground floor is for work. Books. Materials. You’ll have to get dirty.”
“I’ve worked a vineyard, patched roofs, and a thousand other things you wouldn’t guess. I can do what’s needed.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?” Had my heart not been soaring, his grim tone might have set me shivering.
Without another word he marched stiffly from the room, only occasionally hesitating to touch the surroundings with his staff. I watched him set out for the modest cottage set behind the main house. Halfway across the yard, he paused, fiddling with something pulled from his pocket.
Music floated on the air—the merriest, most annoying piping one might imagine. Dante snatched the ring from his finger and launched it into the brown grass that rustled with the frost of beauteous winter.
For that moment of grace, I laughed, blessing the saints . . . or at least the one I knew. Then, with a deep, shaking breath, I climbed the stairs to survey my new home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Berg is a former software engineer with degrees in mathematics from Rice University and computer science from the University of Colorado. Since her 2000 debut, her epic fantasy novels have won multiple Colorado Book Awards, the Geffen Award, the Prism Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Carol lives in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies with her Exceptional Spouse, and on the Web at www.carolberg.com.
ALSO BY CAROL BERG
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The Spirit Lens
THE LIGHTHOUSE SERIES
Flesh and Spirit
Breath and Bone
THE BRIDGE OF D’ARNATH SERIES
Son of Avonar
Guardians of the Keep
The Soul Weaver
Daughter of Ancients
THE RAI-KIRAH SERIES
Transformation
Revelation
Restoration
Song of the Beast
