by Carol Berg
Though I knew Evard would have claimed the sizeable dowry my father had set aside for me, I didn’t argue. Karon and I had more than enough. Tomas had not been stingy, and Karon had a gentleman’s income, set up anonymously by his father when Karon had first gone to the University.
Our more public wedding was in Montevial, where my circle of acquaintances had come to know Karon as the new Leiran Commissioner of Antiquities. My former beau, Viscount Mantegna, had told me of the post, vacant for several months since its most recent occupant had died, and I had pestered Karon until he applied for it. My new husband had returned to Montevial with some vague notion of using his income to buy a house in some out-of-the-way place so we could be together, but to leave Montevial made no sense when I held title to my family’s townhouse, a much finer home than anything he could afford. Evard’s marriage and Tomas’s flourishing career had eased the fears that had forced both Karon and me into self-imposed exile, and even Martin agreed that a respectable position and Karon’s intention to forego any privilege of rank would preclude any closer inquiry as to Karon’s origins. Though we would always need to be careful, we believed we had weathered the storm. And truly, the court posting was perfect for him.
The antiquities collection was a conglomeration of cultural rarities and worthless junk dumped haphazardly into the vaults of the royal treasury after every Leiran military victory. No one knew quite what to do with it all. Only the suspicion that abandoning the hoard would somehow subject Leire to the scorn of foreigners, who seemed to value such things, convinced the administrators to replace the deceased commissioner. Karon did not care about the political purposes of the treasure, but considered the position an unparalleled opportunity for anyone with an interest in history and culture. To care for such treasures as they needed to be cared for, to have unlimited access to study and write about them, to have the charter to seek out whatever might be available to augment the collection—he admitted that no position was more suited to the nature of a J’Ettanni scholar. So much to discover.
We kept up a social life in keeping with my rank and Karon’s position, though with far fewer engagements than I had in my year alone. Marriage made me dull, I heard it said. Acquaintances whispered that I had married beneath me, but then it was a fact that I was getting on in age for a first marriage. Indeed, most men would shy away from anyone with my uncomfortable relationship with King Evard, so perhaps I couldn’t afford to be too selective. I cared not a whit for what anyone said.
I still had a thousand questions about sorcery and the J’Ettanne, but Karon was unused to speaking of his secrets, and I was reluctant to begin our life together by forcing him out of his habits. When he was ready, he would tell me everything I wanted to know. I had never felt so deliriously happy, so much at peace, as in those first weeks after our wedding.
Karon reveled in his work, and I delved into my studies with renewed fervor, determined to share in the intellectual pursuits he valued. But as the winter deepened, I noticed a disturbing change in him. It began with a growing restlessness that no amount of walking, riding, or other occupation seemed to satisfy. He would sit with me of an evening to write letters or read, but instead of luring me into two hours’ conversation with some anecdote from his reading, he would throw down his book or his pen after only a short time and stand staring into the fire. No teasing or question, no puzzle or activity or entertainment of any kind could hold his attention, and though his affection seemed undiminished—far from it, in fact—he expressed less and less of it with words. Even after the act of love itself, he could not speak or sleep, but would excuse himself and go walking alone.
I refused to pry. I had observed a similar behavior in his years at Windham; it had always passed without explanation, and I had promised myself to respect his privacy. But on the evening he broke off our planning for Tanager’s thirtieth-birthday celebration, circling the library like a trapped beast and muttering that he couldn’t concentrate, I decided I could no longer wait for explanations…
“Karon, what is it? You’ll wear holes in the floor with your pacing.”
He looked up, his expression that of a deer facing a hunter’s bow. Every terrible fantasy a new wife could invent raced through my mind: he didn’t love me… he felt he had made a mistake… I had displeased him in some way.
“Tell me,” I said. “Whatever it is.”
“Oh gods, Seri. I thought I could be rid of this. With all you give me, I must be a fool.” He paced across our library and picked up a book, riffling through its pages. Without looking at a line of it, he tossed it down again. He crouched and threw a log onto the fire, and then cursed himself when it rolled out, scattering ash and sparks across the rug. He reached for a hearth brush to scoop up the mess, but I snatched it from his hand and pushed him to the floor, seating myself on the rug just in front of him.
“I am your wife. Tell me.”
He breathed deeply, his face sculpted with such distress, I had to force myself still. “Not two months ago I pledged I would never leave you, and here we’ve scarcely begun… I swear to you, Seri, my feelings have not changed, nor has my intent, but I’m afraid my vow must bend.” He took my hands in his, as he unleashed the flood of words. “Do you remember, in those early years at Windham, how I would leave for a few weeks from time to time?”
“Your research trips. Interviews and observations.”
“Well, that wasn’t quite the truth. But of course you didn’t know about me. If I’d told you I had to go because my blood was on fire, you would have thought me mad.”
“Most likely.”
He tried to smile. I could not even attempt it. His hands were near scorching my own.
“To describe it so would have been… would be… no exaggeration. This gift I have is forbidden by every law and custom in the world, yet would be far easier to ignore my eyes or my heart or to forgo speech or breathing than to abandon it. The journeys I made from Windham were to every manner of place. In such times as ours, it’s not difficult to find those who need what I have to offer. Though there aren’t ten people on this earth who would knowingly accept healing from a sorcerer, many are desperate enough to ask no questions.”
He kneaded my fingers, then bundled them up and enfolded them in his own. “What I’m trying to say in this stupidly muddled way is that I cannot stop. I thought I could after I came back last autumn. After a year of wandering, of doing little else but healing, I was spent. I thought that perhaps I had done enough, and from then on, it could be only when I would choose. I swore I’d never do anything to endanger you, even if it meant I never used my talents again. But that’s impossible. Neither my body nor my mind will allow me to ignore what I am. If I’m not on this earth to heal, then I cannot understand the purpose of my life. And if I fail to heed this call, then I’m afraid you may wake one morning to find a lunatic in your bed. I have to go, Seri, until I can settle again.”
“Will you come back?”
He drew our clasped hands to his burning forehead and breathed the words. “I swear to you that I’ll come back as soon as I quiet this demon in me.”
I had planned that my life would be different from the lives of other Leiran women. How often my mother had heard my father say, “My duty is to my king. I cannot take my ease in bed with you when there are battles to be fought and won.” She, as all warriors’ wives, had spent her life waiting for her husband to come home from war. But as a girl, I had nurtured dreams of fighting my own battles, of leading merchant caravans, or exploring the wild lands beyond our borders—a life of more purpose than waiting.
And so, as Karon told me haltingly of the strange fever that grew in him the longer he denied himself use of his power, I began to envision possibilities: travel together, adventure, not bloody combat with swords and severed limbs and looted cities, but secret kindness and magical escapes. I could help him tend his patients, divert suspicions, watch his back while he was occupied with his magic. When he fell silent, looking a little pu
zzled, I burst out with my ideas. “Well, at least you needn’t go alone anymore…”
But Karon dismissed my fantasies as quickly as they’d grown. “The places I go are not for you: battlefields, border villages, the poorest quarters of any city, disease and danger in every corner. And the way I have to manage it, in secret, always hiding, in disguise, ready to run at any moment. It would be impossible for two. I’ve no love for putting myself in jeopardy, but I cannot—will not—endanger you. I’ll not take you.”
I argued with him all the rest of that evening and into the next day, as he gathered a few things to take with him on his journey: some plain and sturdy clothes, a worn brown cloak with deep pockets on the inside, a supply of food, and a flask of wine. But despite my best reasoning, my escalating accusations of his mistrust and his disdain of my abilities, and a serious threat to bar him from my bed when he returned, he would not even tell me where he was going.
“I tell you again,” he said, “you are the most capable, most intelligent, most determined person I know—man or woman. I trust you with my life every hour. But this is for your safety. If I were to— If anything were to happen— which I promise it will not—you must have no idea where I’ve gone. You can say that I was a typical blockheaded man and refused to allow a woman to know of my business. Be ignorant and blame me for it. Promise me…” Even with all his peaceful ways, Karon could be stubborn.
Only as he led his horse from our stable and kissed me did I relent. “Then I suppose this is the way it must be,” I said. But only for now, I thought. I was stubborn, too.
He did come back, after only five days away. Four weeks later, he had to leave again. Sometimes he was gone for a week, rarely more than two. He would return home tired, sometimes grieving, but always at peace. And after a few weeks, the restlessness would begin to grow in him again. I came to recognize its onset before Karon did.
At first, he did not speak of his journeys even after he came home. I quite pointedly refused to ask about them, acting as though he’d not even been away. But after one four-week absence that had left me so frantic with worry that I could not pretend indifference, he broke his silence. Late on the night of his return, after a singularly desperate lovemaking, he held me in the dark of our bedchamber and began to tell me of a poor, isolated village near the Kerotean border that was devastated by a wasting sickness that had left three quarters of its people and all of its children dead. I let him talk until he fell asleep. He never spoke of it again.
But as time went on he did open this most private part of his life to me. He told of towns rife with fever, of Kerotean settlements ravaged by bandits, of streets where children grew malformed because their food had been taken for soldiers or because their childhoods had been sold for labor in mines or quarries. He would work until someone asked questions or until he had done all he could do.
So many of us lived our lives without accomplishing anything of worth. I could only marvel at the stupidities of a world that would call such a gift, so freely given, evil.
Deep on one night in early spring, when Karon was away on one of his journeys, I was awakened by the soft pad of footsteps crossing the wood floor of our bedchamber. Beyond the bed-curtains a faint light moved from the direction of the doorway to the far wall where a washing cabinet stood between the windows. I huddled silently under the bedclothes, cursing my foolish presumption that just because I shared a bed with a sorcerer I could forego the Comigor custom of hanging knife and sword above the bed. A medley of strange sounds came from the room: a bundle laid down, a quickly silenced ring of metal, the clink of glass. Time passed. My terror turned to puzzlement. No one had murdered me. Thieves would have taken what valuables I owned and fled. Pouring liquid… ripping cloth… a man’s muffled curse… Karon…
I yanked open the bed-curtains and saw him standing shirtless by the washing cabinet, dabbing at his side. “Seri! Gods, I’m sorry…” He tried to hide it from me with a ripped and bloody towel. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“And did you think to sneak away again once you’d ruined all my towels?” I said, pulling his hands away to see a long, blood-crusted gash in his side. Ugly and painful, but not too deep at least.
“I just wanted to clean up a bit before you saw. You mustn’t worry.”
I motioned him to a chair, lit a lamp, and brought towels, a healing salve, and a linen bandage I kept in a drawer, and then set to cleaning the wound myself. “Not worry? Better ask me not to breathe. The law of Leire is— Stars of night, Karon, you were a prisoner!” I held his hand up to the light, my skin crawling at seeing the rope burns on his wrists.
“This was thieves, not the law. They saw my heavy cloak and my decent horse and thought I might fetch a good ransom. It was quite clear there was nothing extraordinary about my skill in avoiding them,” he said, grimacing as I tightened the bandage about his middle. “And since I can’t heal myself, they had no cause to suspect me of anything else.”
“And how did you get away?”
“Well, they had to sleep, and I was able to conjure myself out of their ropes, leaving them only the most convincing evidence that I’d got hold of a knife and cut myself free.” He stroked my hair. “It could happen to any traveler at any time, you know. I was just able to get out of it easier.”
I jerked my head away from his hand and dumped the bloody water into the waste jar. “You live in Leire, not Valleor. You must wear a sword from now on,” I said. “No Leiran noble would ever walk the street without a weapon, much less travel that way. You might as well ride naked.”
“I cannot.”
I gaped at him uncomprehending. “Cannot…” My father and mother, my brother, everyone I knew, both male and female, and I, too, lived by the sword. I’d known how to wield a blade since I was ten, prepared to use any weapon to defend myself and those I loved. The brocade knife sheath strapped to my thigh was never empty. “Well, then”—I scarcely knew what to say—“you don’t have to use it, only look as if you are capable.”
“Oh, I’m quite capable. I was trained just as any youth. But I gave up carrying a sword when I realized I could never use it. I’m a Healer, Seri. How could I?”
I could think of several points of debate, but I had already learned that Karon’s deepest-held beliefs were immune to reasoned argument. “There lives no more stubborn beast than a man of conviction,” Martin had once told me. Karon took me in his arms, and we said no more about it, but I never again rested easy when he was away.
As the months passed, Karon taught me more of sorcery and the life of the J’Ettanne in Avonar. There was no day he could remember, he told me, when he could not do things I would call magic: to light a candle with the brush of his mind, to make a rose bloom from a dormant shrub, to call a bird to sit on his hand. And on every one of those days he knew he could be burned for it. It was as if I had grown up knowing I could be executed because my heart was beating.
In Karon’s youth, several hundred of the J’Ettanne had lived in Avonar. They had learned through hard generations how to live a dual life, to suppress their talent until they were in safety or to use it so subtly that no one would ever know. They were merciless with their children, he said, for it was the only way to keep them safe. Whenever a sorcerer was taken, seven of the J’Ettanne, always two of them children, would stand in the command of Montevial or the Imperial Amphitheater in Vanesta and watch while their friend or kinsman burned—so they would never forget.
But the children were also taught the skills and the love of life that were bound up with their heritage. Never did they deny who they were or reject the difficult course laid out for them. Never was there any suggestion that they forsake their Two Tenets and revert to the practices of their foolish ancestors. Many J’Ettanne became quite facile at using their talents. The ordinary citizens of Avonar never suspected that the reputation of their city for having the most exceptionally beautiful gardens and fountains and the most skilled craftsmen in all of Valleor rested in large p
art on the community of sorcerers that lived among them.
“Of course, our life was happy,” Karon told me one evening as we worked in our own tiny garden, tucked away behind the townhouse. “Quite happy. There were always ‘aunts and uncles’ to care for you and to listen when you were troubled. And we weren’t isolated from the rest of the children in the city. We couldn’t be or it would be noticed. We just learned how to manage it.”
“Could everyone do the same things you do? Heal, I mean. Tame birds. Make light.”
“Basic things, yes, like the candles and the birds. But it wasn’t until age sixteen or so that your primary talent would manifest itself. A bit terrifying when it happened. You would go to sleep as a modestly capable boy or girl, plagued with the normal confusions of being neither child nor adult, and then awaken the next day as a Gardener or a Builder or a Metalwright or a Healer. There were those who could melt silver without fire and shape it into marvelous creations with only their minds. There were the Speakers—not many, as truth-telling was always a rare gift—and there were the Word Winders and the Singers. My mother was a Singer. When she sang, the image of her words was brought to life right in the room with you, not just in your mind, but a shimmering vision in the air before you, alive with color and motion. When she sang you to sleep, you would dream her songs.”
I shoved a stick-like tree into the hole Karon had dug and wished I had some magic to make it grow faster, so that it would shade this corner of my garden before I had white hair. Some days, my own life felt truly useless. “What of you then?” I asked, pounding the dirt about the tree to hold it straight. “When did you discover you were a Healer?”
“I was seventeen. All that summer I had lived with the growing fear that I had no talent beyond the ordinary, that the Way would never be laid down for me. On rare occasion that would happen. No one knew why. One day my brother Christophe and I were out tramping in the mountains. He was just thirteen and very much determined to show he was my equal in climbing. We were hoping to find a new route to the top of Mount Karylis that day, but had begun to think it impossible. Then Christophe found a narrow chimney that looked to reach a ledge we’d been trying for, and before I could discourage him, he was up it. He fell, and… well, the details aren’t important. He landed on a rock and caved in his chest. There was no one to help—no one within two hours’ walk.”
