Son of Avonar tbod-1

by Carol Berg

  They said guilty, of course, but I had not prepared myself for the deadly precision of the words.

  The sorcerer is to be taken to the command of Montevial at dawn on the first day of the week, there to be exhibited on public display. On that same day at one hour past midday he is to be set afire until the stain of his existence is removed from the paths of human history. His name is never again to be spoken in any of the Four Realms and is to be erased from any document or record in which it is written. He is to be forgotten as if he had never been.

  Every possession of the sorcerer is to be destroyed by fire, including his place of residence, the furnishings and accouterments thereof, whether such possession is the rightful property of the sorcerer or the marriage portion or personal belonging of his wife, and any other object determined by the prosecutor or the priests to be polluted by his touch, especially any article of jewelry or stonework, or any artifact of writing, as sorcerers are known to store up wickedness in such things.

  Because of the generous recommendation of His Most Gracious Majesty at the petition of her family, the sorcerer’s wife is judged to be a wayward and deluded woman, rather than a conspirator. She will remain in the custody of the Crown until such time as she has done public penance according to the law. At that time she will be remanded to the physical and moral discipline of Tomas, Duke of Comigor, who will maintain sole sovereignty over her life, residence, property, and issue. She will remain on the life parole of His Majesty, King Evard, all rights of birth, rank, and grant to be removed from her until His Majesty may see fit to restore them.

  Any person who has been judged by the Lord High Prosecutor to have condoned, had knowledge of, consented to, or failed to report any act of sorcery by this condemned prisoner is likewise judged guilty at this hour, and is to receive the maximum penalty of the law without further trial. Any other person who has, in any wise, been associated with the sorcerer, whether as servant, employee, or acquaintance, is required to report to a priest for purification within seven days’ time. Failure to comply with this order will result in a charge of conspiracy to acts of sorcery, and punishment will be meted out accordingly without need for further trial. Thus speaks the law of Leire. All everlasting glory to Evard King!

  “Without trial?” I leaped to my feet, the bleak brutality of the judgment destroying my composure. Karon’s case was unsalvageable, but Martin, Julia, Tanager, and Tennice would not even be heard. “You can’t do that! Lord Hessia… Lord Dumont…” I was shouting to be heard above the pandemonium. “To execute any Leiran without trial is a violation…” But no one of them would look at me, and a guard blocked my way lest I try to get any closer. “Karon, save them,” I cried. How could he let them die?

  But he could not have heard me. A troop of guards had dragged him from the dock by the chain around his neck. The shouting ruffians gathered outside the door battered him with fists and cudgels, pelted him with stones and refuse. The guards neither protected him from the blows nor shielded him from the spitting vehemence of the good people of Leire who laughed and jeered at his painful stumbling.

  It was midweek. Four days. At least it would not be a long wait.

  Martin and the others were executed that night. Karon was riven with grief. I had to listen to them die, Seri, one after the other. I’ve tried… since they were taken, I’ve tried to help… to comfort them… but at the end…

  “Don’t speak of it, if you don’t want to. Just tell me how I can help you.” I sat on my bed unmoving, staring dry-eyed at the coarse sheets as the weak daylight faded. I could not grieve. I had nothing left.

  The only help is knowing that your brother will protect you and Connor. My blood and flesh grew hot with his outrage. What kind of man is your brother? How can he let them do these things to you like public penance? Oh, Seri, it is so hard… Never had I known Karon so angry.

  “The penance is nothing,” I said, numbly, trying to ignore the fear that suddenly came tumbling over me like an icy waterfall. “As for the rest—whatever comes—I will survive it all. I swear to you I will.” The Council’s proclamation echoed in my ears. My brother was to have sole right of sovereignty over her life, residence, property, and issue… Issue. My children.

  In the next days, Karon was abandoned in his darkness and pain. I believed they gave him only enough sustenance to keep him alive until the day of execution. I prayed he would die before it, and in the same thought I would will time itself to stand still.

  Lost in pain and sickness, his mind began to wander, but I could always bring him back by directing my thoughts to him. Often he would speak of the word and the images he believed were buried in him. The images come clearer, the less there is of me. There is a bridge suspended over the chasm, and I see figures passing over it, some anxious or frightened, some joyful and full of wonder, some lost, looking for their way. The bridge is so fragile… made of ice, I think, for it’s so cold… but glorious light… I think it sings.

  My blood burns, Seri. I feel such urgency. With everything that’s happened, our closeness in these days —such a joy that has been —and all the rest of it, good and bad together, I’ve stored up so much power that I feel as if I might burst with it. Do you understand, love? Tell me that you understand why I can’t…

  “Of course I understand. You told me long ago how it would be.”

  But as Karon wandered in his dream world, I retreated more and more behind my private wall. I dared not tell him what I feared about our child’s future. He had already demonstrated that his convictions were unshakable—and so I betrayed my son and betrayed my own soul and kept silent. It could be five or six years before a child showed signs of sorcery. Everything could change in that time. Tomas would never harm an infant.

  Karon hurried time along. I’m glad it isn’t long. I think I can manage —how many days is it?

  “Two more,” I told him.

  Two more. That I can do, I think. Do they treat you decently? It must be so hard for you to be shut in for so long. You hate it so. I’ve been afraid to ask, and you’ve said so little of your situation… so little of anything these days. I’ve monopolized our time with madness. No one comes here any more, even to tell me lies about you.

  “I’m as well as I can be. There’s a mute woman named Maddy who brings my meals and such. It doesn’t break my heart that they ignore me.” I prodded him to talk again. I was afraid of what I might say.

  In the dark hours before dawn on the first day of the week, they took Karon to the broad commard in the heart of Montevial and chained him to the stake they had erected there. The weather was freezing, and they mounted a double row of guards around the pyre so that no misguided zealot could rob the people of their pleasure at his burning.

  Stars of night, it’s cold, he said to me, once they had him bound there. But I don’t think I’ll make any wish to be warm. Not today. That was the only reference he made to what was to come. He spoke of private things that morning while the guards came for me: of our meeting, of his family, of our talks about death and life and our speculations about gods who might exist somewhere behind the myths of the uncaring Twins. Two serving sisters removed my dress, and clothed me in a penitent’s gown, a long robe of rough, undyed wool. Then they cut off my hair that had scarcely been touched since I was a little girl.

  So passed our last time together. I let him talk, hoping it might shield him from the horror that seethed around him. He did not know I watched from the palace balcony there in the bright winter sun and freezing wind. The whole morning I stood with him, until an hour past midday when the bells tolled and drums rattled and the first wisps of smoke floated up from the pyre.

  Only then did my fear and grief erupt into frenzied babbling—demanding that he save our child, begging him to free himself or to grab hold of me and take me with him, if he could do naught else. I called him cowardly and cruel and a hundred vile names. But my thoughts and words were in such chaos that he claimed he could not distinguish them. Hush, Seri love
. Please. There is too much. I can’t understand you. And when I forced myself silent, he tried to comfort me, who had to keep breathing while he suffered. Live, my dearest love. You are the essence of life and beauty, and you will shine as a beacon to me long after I cross the Verges. Because of you, there are no demons in this darkness. No moment I’ve spent with you do I regret, not even this. And you must have no regrets either. This word I’ve found is a word of healing, Seri. I feel it. I know it. It’s what I’m here for, and I think that if I wait until my power is at its greatest… from all that happens… then perhaps I’ll do what I’m here on earth to do. It’s a good thing to believe.

  But I could not answer. I did not believe. I closed off my mind and averted my eyes, and when the flames took him, I could not listen to his cry. Only much later, in my dreams, did I hear the word he shaped from his will, and the fire, and his destroyed flesh. “D’Arnath!”

  CHAPTER 21

  “D’Arnath!” I cried out, startling myself awake, the horror of the familiar dream swept away in the moment of revelation.

  Baglos looked up from the tiny, smokeless fire that crackled in the hut’s firepit. “What is it, woman?”

  A few last golden arrows of the summer sunshine shot through the thick canopy of the trees and the unshuttered window of the charcoal burner’s hut. I had fallen asleep in a dim corner after my return from Yurevan, only to dream of the fire yet again. But instead of desolation, bitterness, and self-hatred, the dream left me with a confusion of feeling so intense that the sunlight felt drab and lifeless.

  “Ten years ago, my husband spoke that name… How could he possibly have known it? He hadn’t heard your stories. Your history. Buried… hidden… inside him. Your dead king’s name. A word he could imbue with all his power as he died… hoping… believing… that something of meaning would come from it.” I was on my feet, pacing the room, flexing my fingers, pulling at my hair, stretching my arms to feel the sunlight as if all my appendages had been detached and were only now reconnected to my body, blood rushing into the dry, empty veins. “But I didn’t believe. I couldn’t hope, because I didn’t have the words.” D’Arnath. The king who had built the Bridge between a land of magic and a land of exile…

  And as if I had pulled it from the weft of life’s weaving, a thread lay in my hand, drawn from the tangle of the past. The thread that connected past and present. A thread of enchantment and fate and purpose. I halted in mid-stride and stared at the Dulcé and the Prince with new eyes. “Stars of heaven… I know what he did!”

  D’Natheil was carving on his birchwood and glanced up curiously. He motioned Baglos to his side and never took his eyes from my face as the Dulcé translated everything I’d said. Tennice, who had been standing watch, walked into the hut just in time to hear my last outburst. “Who did what, Seri?”

  “My dream. All these years I’ve dreamed about the day Karon died. No matter what I did, no matter how much I willed the past to be gone, I couldn’t rid myself of that one horror. But I think it was because I never listened to what it told me, the comfort it offered if I but knew how to hear it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor did I until now. In all that pain and torment, Karon insisted on finding order and beauty. I never believed it. Or rather, I believed in what he found, but I never thought he accomplished anything. I heard no word of magic when he died. Our child was murdered. All of you were dead. I believed he failed, and I was so angry with him—oh, gods, for all these years I’ve been so angry with him—because he let it all happen for nothing. But I didn’t know what to listen for. Today, when I dreamed it again, I heard him say the word.”

  “D’Arnath,” said Baglos, reverently.

  The memories of those last dreadful days came tumbling out of me. “He found images with the word: a great chasm and a bridge. He was almost mad with pain, and I couldn’t tell what was real and what was delirium. I put it all out of my mind, because I was convinced it had no meaning and I couldn’t bear the thought. But now I know. Baglos, Karon opened your Gates, didn’t he?”

  “It could very well be, woman. I wish I could tell you it was so.”

  “Tell me about the day the Gates were opened.” For, of course, I had to know more. What result could possibly have been worth the price?

  D’Natheil nodded to Baglos, and the Dulcé sat up straight, as he always did when telling stories of his land. “When the Gates are open, their fire burns white, and any may walk through without harm. But as they fail, the flame darkens, a fire that ravages first the spirit and then the flesh of any who attempt to pass. When the fire burns black— a fearsome sight—the Gate is impassable, and the dismal reflection of that dark fire permeates our hearts and every part of our land. And so it had been for hundreds of years.

  “On that day the Zhid were attacking in a great fury, as if they thought that victory was only the next arrow away. In the fortress kitchens we were making hot soup to send out to those on the walls, for the cold winds were blowing off the Wastes. The runners thought their legs might fail from making so many trips, but they didn’t complain. Too often they would go back for the empty pots and find the one to whom they had delivered it dead or his mind stripped away in the way of the Zhid that is worse than death.”

  The Dulcé transitioned smoothly from Leiran to his own language and back again. “But then came a peal of thunder, and we felt a surge of power, a storm of light and glory as if the Veils—the colored lights that grace the northern skies in summer—had descended on our hearts and infused us all with joy and hope. Though no one of us in Avonar had lived when last the Gates were open, we knew what the change signified, for there came a brilliance about every object from the most graceful tower of the palace to the least pebble underfoot, transforming the city with indescribable beauty. You could hear the warriors on the walls singing the Chant of Thanksgiving, so that your blood throbbed with it, and when night fell, no one could sleep for the singing and the talk of what the opening might mean. Would we wake to find the fire dark again? Would our young prince come to the Gate to walk the Bridge? With the strength and the light of the Gate infusing us, the Bridge strong, would we be able to push the Zhid back from the walls of the city? Would rain fall in the Wastes?” Baglos’s voice cracked and stumbled with emotion.

  “In his visions Karon saw brilliant light, and he thought the bridge was singing. How did you know it was the Exiles that opened the Gates?” Prove it to me, my skeptic’s heart demanded. Convince me.

  “Why, because even the Preceptors, as powerful as they are, cannot do it. Only D’Arnath’s Heirs ever had power enough to reverse the darkening of the Gate fire, and since the Battle of Ghezir, where we lost half of the Vales of Eidolon and D’Arnath’s sword, even they had not been capable. Prince D’Natheil was young and untrained and had shown no evidence of any power. We had seen no sign of the Exiles since well before the Battle of Ghezir. They had failed in their duty to walk the Bridge. But this had to be the Exiles for no one else could have accomplished it.”

  For a moment, all I could envision was Karon’s Avonar and its forest of blackened pyres. Bitterness leaked into my heart. “All those years, Baglos, why didn’t your people come here and find out what happened to the Exiles? They were being slaughtered. Perhaps everything would have been different if someone had come here to see what was happening.”

  “Because the Bridge was never meant to be crossed! It is not a roadway, but a link between our lands. It binds— Dar’Nethi power—It must remain open. To make things right. Your passions—Life flows—” All of a sudden the Dulcé was fumbling with words. A dozen false starts and disconnected phrases. Screwing his face in knots and tugging at his black hair with his short fingers. “I’m sorry I cannot explain better today. If only D’Natheil could—”

  He bit his tongue and glanced uneasily at the Prince before grasping at some thought and plunging ahead more smoothly. “King D’Arnath could not allow the Zhid free passage to your lands. He sent J�
�Ettanne and his followers here to maintain the far Gate—the Exiles’ Gate—and their part of the Bridge. Then he enchanted the Bridge with his strongest wards so that no one could use it to cross the Breach. J’Ettanne and his people could never return to Avonar nor any come here to succor them. It took the Dar’Nethi hundreds of years to discover D’Arnath’s secret way to make the passage. By that time, of course, the Gates were long closed. All was done for your mundane land’s safety.”

  I puzzled at these spotty explanations, but no path of reason led me anywhere that made sense. We had to unlock D’Natheil’s mind. If the Bridge was only an enchantment, then what did Baglos mean when he talked of people crossing it? What chasm was so wide that people could find no other way around it?

  “It’s near sundown, Seri.” Tennice held out my cloak. “We have an appointment. Perhaps more of this mystery will come clear with it. The thought that some higher purpose was served by all that misery… I’d like to think it. But your evidence wouldn’t stand in any court of law.”

  “He did it,” I said. “Karon opened their Gates.” No matter what the sense or nonsense of Baglos’s explanations, my bones resonated with the truth of my dream. I had been adrift for so long. Now, perhaps, I had found an anchor.

  The streets of Yurevan were full of people, hurrying through patterns of lamplight and shadow. I was afraid to expect too much from the meeting with Celine, but after the revelation of the dream, it was hard to keep myself in balance. What other truths might I discover, now that this one basic understanding was so changed? By the time the four of us entered the quiet, narrow street near the herb shop, my heart was racing.

  The shop was closed and dark, shutters drawn, but Celine had instructed us to enter through her rear courtyard, where Kellea would meet us. Yellow lantern light and the heavy scents of herbs and flowers guided us through a dark alleyway, and we found Kellea waiting amid the crowded boxes and planters. But her greeting was not at all what we expected. In her hand was a battered, yet quite serious, sword. “Don’t think that because I’m a woman, I’m incapable of using this. I practice, and I’m very good.”