Son of Avonar tbod-1

by Carol Berg

  “One moment,” said the old woman softly. “I must look deeper. I must know what he is.”

  From the shop came a thundering crash, then shouts and the clash of swords. A man’s cry of painful wounding. But around me enchantment surged, and in the midst of the clamor intruded a sound so at odds with all the rest, I almost could not name it: laughter.

  Celine sat pale and fragile by her fragrant window, chuckling merrily. “Cut it now,” she said, her voice soft and hoarse. “Oh, to meet this Dassine! What audacious conceit! And what power to do this thing…”

  I cut the bloodstained linen, and Celine’s arm dropped limply into her lap. “Seri, come here,” she whispered, falling breathless back into her cushions. “Come close.” Even in my terrible anxiety, I could not refuse her. “You have to know,” she whispered in my ear. “Look deep. It is a wonder, all—” The old woman took a breath and tried to speak again, but shook her head. Then her head fell back, and, still smiling, she closed her eyes.

  The noise from the other room grew louder. We dared not leave the old woman here alone. I shook her shoulder. “Madam Celine, we must get the Prince to safety. You need to come with us, too. D’Natheil, you’ll have to carry her.” I tried to tell him with my stupid gestures and the smattering of words I knew in his tongue.

  Though his face was beginning to reflect the desperate sounds from the other room, the Prince remained at Celine’s feet. He took her dry, wrinkled hand and kissed it, and then he looked up at me, tears welling in his blue eyes. “It’s no use to take her,” he said hoarsely. “She’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Ce’na davonet, sacer Vasrin,” cried Baglos. The Dulcé praised his god, allowing himself only this moment’s wonder at D’Natheil’s recovery. In a succeeding babble of exhortation, he pushed and tugged his master to his feet, urging him toward the doorway, the courtyard, and escape. D’Natheil refused to move, his hungry gaze lingering on Celine’s face.

  She looked so peaceful. Her dry, pink cheeks were relaxed. I bent my cheek to her mouth that still bore the trace of her smile and felt no breath. Dead. Beasts of earth and sky, what had we done?

  A monstrous crashing from the direction of the shop wrenched the Prince’s attention from the old woman. He looked up, bewildered at first, shocked as if someone had struck him.

  “Mie giro, bence …” Again, Baglos shoved him toward the kitchen and the outer door, but D’Natheil snarled, slammed him against the wall, and charged toward the front of the shop. “Ne, ne, mie giro!” I thought the Dulcé might tear out his beard. How could he imagine D’Natheil would avoid a fight? Baglos and I hurried after him.

  The shop was in chaos. Tennice was wedged against one wall, trying to persuade a snarling assailant to loosen the grip on his throat by bringing down a shelf of jars and bottles on the man’s head. Kellea was circling with two men at sword’s point. As she parried one attacker’s sword, she used her left hand to grasp for whatever missile she could find—a box, a tray, a bronze measuring weight—to hurl at the second man who was feinting at her with a dagger. The shop door hung in splinters, and a burning torch lay on the floor next to a sprawled stranger with a bleeding head.

  Wasting no time, D’Natheil lifted Tennice’s opponent and flung him against the far wall, causing another loaded shelf to crash down on him. Tennice slumped to the floor between two barrels, staring straight ahead, bleeding from a wound in his side. While I dropped to my knees and tried to revive him, wadding the tail of his shirt to press against the wound, D’Natheil turned to Kellea’s fight.

  “Get out of here,” Kellea yelled. “If you care for my grandmother as you say, take her out.”

  The man by the doorway struggled to his feet and lunged for Kellea’s back, while her other two foes moved in for the kill. D’Natheil, his handsome face transformed by rage, hoisted a table and slammed it into the wounded man, sending him back to his place on the floor. As Kellea battled the swordsman, the Prince pressed the dagger-wielding attacker away from her and into the wall. Grabbing the hand that held the weapon, he forced the dagger back on its owner, shoving it smoothly, inexorably into the wide-eyed man’s throat.

  Baglos shrieked and pointed toward the broken window; two more men were climbing into the shop. I grabbed a broken table leg, ready to defend Tennice with it if I could find no better weapon. But in the next instant the flames from the fallen torch ignited a barrel, nearly blinding me and pelting us with sparks and splinters. Fiery tendrils raced through the baskets, dried plants, and old wooden planks of the shop. Flame engulfed the front wall, quickly filling the room with acrid brown smoke. Kellea dropped her sword, grabbed a woven sack from a pile in the corner, and started beating at the flames. D’Natheil and Baglos did likewise. As far as I could tell through the murk, the attackers who yet lived had run away.

  Raising one arm to shield my face from the heat and sparks, I tugged at Tennice’s arm. “Come on,” I said. “We need to get you out of here.” He remained limp and unresponsive. It was all I could do to haul him upright to lean against my shoulder.

  Heat burst the glass jars, showering us with shards of hot glass, and flames consumed their contents in sweet-scented geysers of green, blue, and orange. Baglos tugged at D’Natheil, who was still flailing at the fire. “My lord, the day is lost! Save yourself. Please, my lord!”

  Kellea slapped at her smoldering tunic. “Damn you all,” she cried. “Damn you bringing your troubles here. Where is my grandmother?”

  Coughing, choking, breathless with the heat and the effort of dragging Tennice toward the back of the shop, I could only shake my head.

  The girl stared at me in horror, then dropped her bags and ran past me toward Celine’s room. No ear in Yurevan could have failed to hear her wail. “Murderers!”

  Tennice’s long, limp body kept sagging out of my arms. Flames licked at his boots, and I had to knock away a flaming bundle of dried burdock that fell from the ceiling, threatening to set our clothes and hair afire. Come on, come on, I begged silently. I won’t leave you. My sweat-slicked hands slipped on his bare arms as I stumbled forward, no longer sure I was going in the right direction. His body slipped again, and my arms were empty. I spun around, peering through the smoke, panicked when I couldn’t locate him. But a grunt just ahead of me came from D’Natheil who was dragging my old friend through the doorway ahead of me. A hand on my back was Baglos, pushing me after them.

  The air in the back passage was slightly cooler. I caught a breath and wiped my watering eyes. Beyond the sitting room door, Kellea knelt beside her grandmother, her head in the old woman’s lap, no tears softening her cold mask of grief. Smoke snaked through the doorway and the window.

  “Kellea, come away. The roof has caught.” I had to shout over the roar of the fire.

  The girl did not acknowledge my presence.

  “Listen to me. You’re right that we’ve caused her life to end, though we had no such intent. But I want you to know that she laughed before she died. She was filled with joy at what we brought her. Don’t ruin her life’s ending by wasting yours.”

  “Go away. You speak of choices. Let me make my own.” Her words were shaped of granite.

  I joined the others who waited in the firelit courtyard. Ash drifted down on us like unholy snow.

  “Where’s the girl?” asked Baglos.

  “She’ll come,” I said. “She’s too afraid of burning to stay, but too angry to come with us.”

  We hurried through the alley, stopping where it met the street. The fire had attracted a crowd. A bald giant of a man was trying to organize water buckets and blankets and pails of dirt, anything to keep the fire from spreading to the adjoining houses. “You can’t go in there,” he yelled at someone in the crowd.

  Outlined against the flaming shop front was a man trying to escape the hold of two onlookers. “Let me through, damn you! There’s a woman inside.” The furious voice slowed my steps; it was Graeme Rowan.

  “Might be several women in there if
Kellea and her granny didn’t get out,” bellowed the bald man. “Blink your eye and none of ‘em will be alive. You will be neither if you go in.”

  I scanned the crowd for the priests. The Zhid were nowhere to be seen, but I recognized another face—a face I didn’t expect to see and could never forget. My gorge rose. Maceron, the fish-eyed sheriff, was leaning against a fence-post, arms folded, unruffled, observing the frenzied mob as if the burning were a jongler’s play put on for his private amusement. Ducking my face, I backed away, only to bump into D’Natheil. “Quickly. Away,” I said.

  “A moment. I’ll have to carry him,” D’Natheil said in a hoarse whisper. He hoisted Tennice onto his shoulders, and we edged our way between the mass of onlookers and the dark shopfronts.

  Occupants of the nearby houses were dragging trunks, bedding, and children into the street. A wagon filled with water barrels rumbled through the narrow lane, forcing the crowd to squeeze into doorways and alleys and on top of each other to keep from getting trampled. Despite the creeping dread that had me checking behind us every few steps, no one paid us any attention as we made our way through the crowded streets toward the city gates. Traffic thinned as we hurried under the gate and turned into the jumbled, stinking district of stables and stock pens outside the walls. Baglos paid the hostler, while the Prince handed me the reins of Tennice’s horse and put Tennice up on his own mount. “Lead us,” he said, after he had gotten himself into the saddle behind Tennice.

  Where to go? Tennice needed warmth and care and time for us to care for his injury. I dared not return to the charcoal burner’s hut, lest we’d been followed from it, yet I couldn’t feel safe so long as we were in Yurevan. After the disaster I had brought down on Ferrante, Celine, and Kellea, I couldn’t seek out another friend, even if I had one. But that consideration gave me sudden inspiration. I would seek out the friend to whom I had already brought disaster. “Back to Ferrante’s house,” I said. “They’ll never look for us there.”

  Neither D’Natheil nor Baglos questioned my judgment, though I questioned myself often enough as we left Yurevan behind us and raced through the dark countryside. But luck rode with us, for we saw no sign of pursuit. The parkland and orchard were silent as we slipped into Ferrante’s stableyard, the cherry trees as still and somber as gravestones in the night. D’Natheil carried the insensible Tennice through the kitchen garden, back the way we had come only one long day before. The house was dark and deserted. Still no sign of Ferrante’s servants. I tried not to think about the professor, frozen in his death terror just up the stairs.

  D’Natheil laid Tennice on the tidy white bed in the steward’s bedchamber, neatly tucked away next to the kitchen, while I collected candles, water, brandy, and clean towels. Baglos set about lighting the stove, promising to put water on to heat as soon as he had the fire going.

  When I returned to the bedchamber, D’Natheil was sitting on the bed beside Tennice, studying him intently, brushing the graying hair from Tennice’s thin face. The wavering candlelight revealed the burdens of the day written on D’Natheil as clearly as the bloodstains drying on his shirt. “He’s fevered.” The young man’s voice was hoarse and soft.

  Fever… so soon. “Let’s get his shirt off.” Using Celine’s little knife, crammed in my pocket and still bearing the blood of prince and healer, I cut away Tennice’s shirt. The wound in his side was a ragged, ugly gash, the skin around it red and fiercely hot, very like the injury D’Natheil had had when he first came to me. As I sponged the wound with brandy and water to loosen the last stiff fragments of linen, Tennice moaned pitifully. Worrisome to remember how ill the young, strong D’Natheil had been. Tennice must be past fifty and had never been robust. I covered the gash with a clean towel and ripped another in half to tie the first in place.

  “I need to see if they have medicines here,” I said. “Stoneroot or woundwort, willowbark for his fever. Ferrante’s cook used herbs from Kellea’s shop. Maybe they have other things.”

  Baglos hovered like a worried moth at his master’s side. “I would seek out these things for you,” he said, tapping his fingertips together rapidly, “but I have no knowledge of them today.”

  D’Natheil touched the Dulcé‘s shoulder. “Detan detu, Dulcé. Find the medicines for the lady.”

  Such a transformation came over Baglos in that instant that I could have been no more surprised if he had grown two heads taller. No longer hesitant, no longer unsure, the almond-eyed man bent his knee to D’Natheil and said with calm confidence, “Detan eto, Gire D’Arnath.”

  “You’ve remembered,” I said, as Baglos left the room.

  “Not precisely,” said D’Natheil, as he watched me wipe Tennice’s brow with a damp cloth. “I know the words to command the Dulcé, which I did not know this morning or yesterday, but I cannot say I remember. Nothing tells me that I ever knew how.”

  “But Baglos will bring what I want?”

  “If any such thing is to be found here.”

  I spooned a few drops of brandy into Tennice’s mouth, then shot another glance at D’Natheil, who had stepped away from the bedside, his hands clasped behind his back, and was examining the furnishings of the room. “Do you know other things that you didn’t before?”

  “No. Except for your language, as you see. Before tonight it was like the speech of animals—nothing recognizable. Only the words you taught me had meaning. Dassine’s message was like a key inserted into a lock, all the tumblers falling into place about it. But that is not ‘remembering.” “

  “So you didn’t learn the rest of his message or what made Celine laugh before she died and say… the words she said?”

  “I know no more than you.”

  While I cleaned blood and soot from Tennice’s face and hands, D’Natheil leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching me. I urged him to have some of the brandy for himself, so he would not lose what little voice he had regained, but he shook his head, indulging in the surer remedy of silence.

  Soon Baglos returned and genuflected to his master. “It is done, my lord.” Then he presented me with two paper packets. One held small heart-shaped leaves and was marked “for lacerations, scrapes, burns, festerings, mortifications.” The other held strips of rough, gray bark.

  “They’re exactly what I wanted,” I said. “Thank you. Both of you.”

  D’Natheil nodded. Baglos beamed, his delight dimmed only when Tennice moaned in his sleep.

  “When your water is boiling, we need to soak the bark…” I instructed Baglos on how to prepare willowbark tea and what I would need to make a poultice of stone-root leaves for the wound. An hour later the bark was steeping, and I was tying a bandage over the dressed wound.

  “Is there anything else to do for him?” Baglos asked, fussing about the sheets and pillows as Tennice’s breath came harsh and uneven.

  “Someone needs to stay with him. Give him the willowbark tea, if he settles or wakes. Later, when he can take it, we’ll need broth or gruel to sustain him. It’s all I know to do.”

  We agreed that I would take the first watch. The Dulcé said he would find ingredients for broth and start it simmering, and then get some rest until I called him to take my place.

  I glanced around the bedchamber, orderly and spare as one would expect for the room of the steward of a well-run household. A clothes chest with a stack of clean, folded linen set on top of it, a wooden chair and footstool in the corner and a candle table beside—now littered with cups and spoons—a small desk holding a crisp ledger, pens, paper, and stoppered ink bottle, a washing stand set with comb, razor knife, and a stack of small leather boxes of the type to hold collars and belts, buckles and fasteners.

  Rummaging in the steward’s clothes chest, I found a clean nightshirt, soft and thin from years of wearing. I asked D’Natheil to help me lift Tennice and get the shirt on him. The young man did as I directed. As I peeled the remains of Tennice’s shirt from his back, D’Natheil’s eyes narrowed. “What is this on the back of him?
He is no warrior. Nor slave, nor servant either, by his manner.”

  On Tennice’s back were the knotted, ugly telltales of my friend’s captivity. Shy, scholarly, brilliant Tennice… My stomach clenched with anger and revulsion. “He was beaten,” I said. “Cruelly beaten, put to the sword, and left for dead. Those in power wanted him to betray his friends, to tell our king that my husband and our friend were planning to steal his throne. Tennice didn’t want to say anything that would make our fate worse. He tried very hard.”

  “But he did as this king wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Betrayed his comrades—your husband, your friends?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “He should have died in silence. With honor.” The Prince sounded as though he needed to scour his hands. “How is it you still care for him?” His scorn was hot on my own back.

  After we settled Tennice on the pillows, I tied the loose neck of the nightshirt and drew up the blanket. “It wasn’t Tennice’s fault. Karon forgave it, and I know the others did, too.”

  “To forgive such a betrayal—”

  “Forgiveness has nothing to do with the offense or its consequences, only with the heart. They needed no proof of Tennice’s love, and they’d have done anything to spare him this. They were going to die anyway. There was no honor in any of it.”

  “You must hate the ones responsible for such deeds.”

  “For many years I hated them, but now… I don’t know. Hatred won’t undo what’s been done.” D’Natheil gazed down at the sick man for a moment.

  Then he walked out of the room.

  I watched Tennice long into that night, holding him as he thrashed and moaned in delirium, sponging his face and hands when he sank into a feverish stupor. While he was quiet, I occupied my thoughts with the incredible events of the evening. It was impossible to grieve for Celine. She had been so full of joy in her going. I could not regret bringing her purpose and laughter at the end of her life. Kellea was a different matter. To leave her loose with the knowledge and anger she bore—and so close to the Zhid—was a risk. But the girl was surely capable of defending herself. We couldn’t take her prisoner.