Son of Avonar tbod-1

by Carol Berg

  “I’ll stand, if you please. And I’ll take nothing from you.”

  “Fine.” He fingered a pen that had been carelessly dropped onto the desk, disturbing its sterile order. “When I heard you were on the grounds, I decided it was time I spoke with you about this. It’s been on my mind for a long time, but there’s been no opportunity.”

  “You know where I live, Tomas, and you well know where I can be found on the first day of autumn in each and every year.”

  My brother clenched his jaw and snapped the pen, throwing it on the floor. I told myself to resist further goading for I was, indeed, immensely curious, and the J’Ettanni journal weighed heavy in my pocket. My brother stepped close, so stiff I wondered he could walk. I folded my arms. Feeble enough protection. But nothing would have prepared me for his words.

  “Seri, I want you to come home.” He rushed ahead, giving me no time to recover from my astonishment. “I’ve gotten you a full pardon from Evard. Your parole will be satisfied. You’ll never have to do that… thing… again, if you’ll come back to Comigor.”

  “You’re mad.” It was the only explanation.

  “It’s not right, your living the way you do.”

  “How dare you pass judgment on me! You know nothing of my life. You’ve never understood the least thing about me. Do you see my circumstances as yet another untidy blot upon your honor?”

  “No! It’s not that. Look at yourself, Seri. How long has it been since last you looked?” Before I could protest, he grabbed my shoulders and propelled me to an ornately framed glass that hung among his displays.

  It had been a very long time. I had to blink and sort out the image at first, for I had never realized how much Tomas and I resembled each other. But there was a world of difference, too. I could still see traces of the girl I had been, but my red-brown hair was dull, my complexion roughened by years in sun and wind, and my eyes had lines at the corners and knowledge in their depths that had never been reflected in my mirror at Comigor. And I was very shabby. My white shift was frayed at the neck and wrists, my tunic threadbare, my brown skirt faded, wrinkled, and not terribly clean. I looked altogether straggly and tired, like a garden gone wild.

  “Does it offend you more that I’m poor, Tomas, or that I’m thirty-five?”

  He didn’t answer, and I looked again at my brother’s reflection, seeing in his brown eyes something I’d not seen in them for years. Sarcasm and anger lost their purpose, leaving only the dregs of years and bitterness and too much sorrow. “Why ever would you believe that I would care what you think of me, or how I live, or what I do? Is it shameful that I eat only what I can grow or barter for or that I wear the same skirt every day of the year? And do you think those things should bother me enough that I would share a roof with my son’s murderer?”

  He turned and walked away from me, rubbing the back of his neck with his long, powerful hand. “No. Those things have nothing to do with anything. So stupid to think I could do this without going back…” In a voice so soft I had to work to hear it, he said, “I dream, Seri. Bloody nightmares that have not left me since that day. Desolation and ruin. Fire. And sorcery. I see you with that knife in your back… and the child… oh, holy Annadis, the child… The dreams eat away at me until I feel I’m living in that horror, and my waking life is the dream.” He spun about and held up his hand, his eyes closed. “Don’t say anything yet.”

  He took a breath and continued. “You may never believe me, Seri, but I was convinced—absolutely—that what I did was right. That all of it was for the best… for the family… for you. I’ve thought that the dreams haunted me because I was weak, not because I did anything wrong. But in the last few days, my dreams have gone away, vanished as if they’d never been. A mercy it seemed. But instead… It’s as if I’ve had no clear thought in fifteen years, and only now can I even begin to see what happened to us. To you. And now, if the dreams should return, I don’t know what I’ll do, for only the conviction that I was right kept them at bay. Then, on top of it all, I hear you’re at the gates today, and it’s like a madness in me that I can’t let you leave.”

  I started to speak, but he interrupted again. “No. Not yet. Hear me out, for I don’t know what’s opened my eyes or loosened my tongue. I leave the city in three days. There’s been a challenge, a serious one, from some rebel chieftain in the west. I’m to take care of it, of course. It’s a strange and nasty situation, but I thought nothing of it until this other business came up. But now…”

  His tongue would not form the words, but he was my brother… as close as a twin. I could read in him the thing he could not say. “You’re afraid, Tomas. Why?”

  “I have a son, ten years old. I’m often away from Comigor for months at a time, and I’ve never thought twice about it. It is my duty. But this time…” He paced the length of the room before he could go on. “Maybe this is what happens when a soldier’s luck runs out—some say they know beforetime. The only thing that comes into my mind is to get you to Comigor to be with him, and then I could be easy.” He ended his pacing by the balcony doors and slammed his fist into the lintel so hard that it rattled the glass. “Damnation! I’m a lunatic.”

  Magpies screeched in the invisible garden. A fountain splattered and gurgled. Fingering the telltale bulge in my pocket, I considered my brother’s incredible confession. I did not believe that he was mad.

  “Tomas, where is Darzid?”

  My brother turned, gaping at me as if I had asked him the price of fish in the market. “Why?”

  “Just answer me.”

  “He’s gone off to Valleor on urgent business—family business—with some old friend, or cousin, or something.”

  “And did the change in your dreams happen before he left?”

  “No. What are you getting at?”

  “After he left, then.”

  “No—well, not exactly. It was only when I came back here from Comigor. Darzid had been down near Fensbridge shopping for a new horse when he got called away. He has nothing to do with any of this. He’d tell me I was a fool to speak with you.”

  Shopping for a new horse. Not hunting a missing groom. One by one I placed Tomas’s words into the puzzle written in my head, but I could not yet read the answer. “Did he know you were coming to Montevial?”

  “No. My business here came up suddenly. Seri—”

  “Don’t interrupt. Has he ever left you for so long before?”

  “Perhaps once or twice. He is the most faithful and loyal of lieutenants.”

  “But would it be correct to say that, since Darzid was appointed as your aide, you have never, until this week, been in a place he didn’t know you to be?”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Am I right?”

  “Most likely that’s true, but—”

  “Now answer me this. Who made the ‘discovery” that Martin had sheltered a sorcerer? Who unearthed those incredibly ridiculous witnesses? It was Darzid, was it not?“

  Tomas looked as if someone was twisting a knife in his belly. “It’s the kind of thing I pay him to do. To gather information.”

  “And who first told you about Karon?”

  “Darzid, of course, but he—”

  “Who convinced you that only you, of all the bastards in Evard’s multitudes, had to murder my son?”

  “Seri—”

  “Answer me!”

  “Darzid said that—”

  “Of course,” I murmured. Darzid who had come to me with an improbable tale of old hatreds, who believed he was not living his own life, who felt that something had changed in the world when Karon died and had demanded… no, begged me to tell him of sorcery… “Turn over any slime-covered stone in this kingdom, and it is Darzid that slithers away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something a very wise man told me years ago. Perhaps it was truer than even he knew.” Somehow I knew that Darzid was not just hunting sorcerers. “Tell me, Tomas, did you meet Darzid’s friend, the one
who accompanied him to Valleor?”

  Tomas threw up his hands. “Clearly there’s nothing more to discuss. You wanted to leave. I’ll call Garlos, and you can take yourself to perdition as you will.” He had closed himself off again.

  “You may have your scribes record this momentous event, brother. For once in our lives we are in agreement. We have nothing more to discuss. And I’ll not go to Comigor except as your prisoner.”

  “So be it.” Tomas pulled the bell and turned his back.

  I was not about to tell my brother of my own business, but as I watched his stiff back, I recalled what I had seen in the mirror. We were flesh and blood. I moved close behind him and said, quietly, “I understand what it took for you to speak to me in the way you have, Tomas. Unfortunately you’ve credited me with a more generous nature than I possess. But in return, I’ll tell you this. I fear Darzid. I fear him more than I fear you and more than I fear Evard. If I were you, I would look into the eyes of Darzid’s friend, and if they’re as empty as I believe you’ll find them, I would hide my wife and my son and tell no one in the world where they can be found.”

  He didn’t answer. I didn’t know if he had even heard.

  Garlos led me back through the palace, looking pleased with himself. “You see? It was just as I predicted,” he said. “You are free to be on your way.”

  “As you predicted,” I said. “Tell me about yourself, Garlos. Is our friend Captain Darzid so tired of playing nursemaid to a spoiled brat that he leaves you in charge of my brother now?”

  The man’s face lost its smiling aspect. “I am not privileged to be one of Captain Darzid’s staff. His Grace decided to come to Montevial very suddenly. I’m a member of the administrative staff of the Guard, and was asked by His Grace to perform the duties of his aide while he is in residence here.”

  “I’m sure you understand that discretion is, above all, a virtue that my brother prizes.”

  The man was very eager. “I believe I have few rivals in that department.”

  “For example, this whole business with me… family business…”

  “I’ve not been given leave to discuss it with anyone.”

  “And that would be anyone, no matter how close to the duke.”

  “Of course.”

  “Excellent. You’ll go far.”

  As I disappeared into the crowds outside the service gates, I imagined Garlos staring after me, wondering at himself listening to political advice from one who looked as if she should be scrubbing the palace floors.

  CHAPTER 26

  Hot, sticky, my head jangling with the unaccustomed noise of the city, I shoved my way through the crowded Street of the Cloth Merchants. The sultry air was thick with the acrid stink of simmering dyepots, and everyone had moved out of the stifling shops in search of a breeze. Multicolored awnings stretched across the street like a paint-streaked sky. While sweating tradesmen tossed and stacked bags of fleece and bolts of cloth of every conceivable color and weave, hawkers screamed out the virtues of their threads and yarns, buttons and ribbons.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of Tomas’s story. Guilt was known to haunt and terrify, and Tomas had earned his own particular nightmares. Now I was back in the daylight world, my creeping fancy that Darzid was somehow connected to the world called Gondai seemed ludicrous. He had been Tomas’s aide for sixteen years and served Evard and King Gevron before that. I had no evidence that Darzid or his villainous henchman Maceron were guilty of anything but doing their sworn duty to exterminate sorcerers. Perhaps the Zhid were simply attracted to the most despicable residents of any world. But my brother’s testimony had only strengthened my irrational conviction. Why would Tomas’s dreams stop so abruptly with his separation from Darzid?

  “Seri, girl!”

  I whirled about to see a fluttering red kerchief waved by a white-haired man elbowing his way through the mob toward me. “Jaco, what are you doing here?”

  He mopped his forehead with the kerchief. His grin seemed to wilt in the heat. “Barrels. You’ve heard me tell of my old friend Roger the Ox, the fish-seller? He sent word last week that he was short of barrels. I had the lot from the wreck of the Mind, so…” He shrugged his wide shoulders. “But yourself, girl. What’ve you been about? Have you learned more about our young fool and his business? Has he found his tongue yet? Did you know that Graeme’s in the city?”

  “Rowan’s here?” Though we had seen no evidence of pursuit on our journey from Valleor, D’Natheil had sensed that we were being followed. He wasn’t sure whether it was the sheriff or the Zhid priests… or both together.

  “Aye, he’s about, and you’d best stay clear of him. He was like to split his gut when he came back from Grenatte and found you gone. Said you’d best be back before Sufferance Day, and how he’d a few things to ask you himself this year. He was after me to tell what you’d been up to.”

  “You mustn’t tell him anything. That’s why I can’t let you—”

  Jaco’s face bloomed as red as his kerchief. “Don’t say it! Dunfarrie has been wicked dull since you ran off. Made me see what an old fossil I’ve become. Dry-docked, I’ve been, but no more. I’ll feed the horses or polish the boy’s boots or whatever you like, but I’ll not be left out of your adventure.”

  “This is far too dangerous, Jaco.”

  “I’m not doddering yet.”

  Would all of my words come back to haunt me? Tennice would have a good laugh. Mustn’t Jacopo have the right to choose his danger, he’d ask, just like everyone else? “Of course you’re not doddering. I never meant to imply it.”

  Jaco patted my arm and maneuvered me out of the way of a mule team pulling a wool cart much too fast through the crowded street. “Then tell me, where are you bound? What did you learn in Yurevan? Sailors have friends all over—people who could likely help you, if you’ll just tell me what you need.”

  “Not now. I’ve an errand that can’t wait, and we mustn’t be seen together.” With Rowan close, I dared not take Jaco near D’Natheil. But perhaps shutting him out was wrong. If the Dulcé and the Prince failed to translate the map, an experienced navigator or his friends who knew of maps might be valuable. “Tomorrow, Jaco. Get your business done. At midday tomorrow, I’ll tell you everything…”

  We made plans to meet at an ale shop he knew of just inside the west gates. He seemed satisfied, and I waved as he hurried away. I began to make my way through the street again, wandering in and out of the shops and market stalls, watching for any sign of observers as I progressed toward the far end where Bagios and D’Natheil would be waiting.

  I had just stepped into the shade of a bright blue awning when a bull of a man carrying two giant bags of fleece hurried past, forcing everyone to move aside. No sooner had I stepped closer to the shop front than I was knocked off balance by three small boys careening through the crowd, trailing a rainbow of shining ribbons pilfered from an outraged ribbon-seller. When a firm hand gripped my arm, I thought some kindly passerby was helping steady me. But instead of finding myself upright and on my way, I was dragged into a dark alleyway between two buildings.

  And before I could utter a word of protest, a hand clamped over my mouth from behind.

  “At last!” said a man’s voice, not unfamiliar. “I thought I’d have to chase you across all of the Four Realms just to have a simple word with you.”

  So much for caution. I struggled and kicked, but Graeme Rowan was a good deal stronger than I and determined to hold on. He propelled me deep into the alley, deftly dodging the cats who snarled and raised their hackles at this invasion of their private feasting ground. I bit his fingers hard enough to draw blood. With a curse he yanked his hand away, and I spat out the blood, yelling as loud as I could, “Help me!”

  Rowan immediately slapped his bleeding hand across my mouth and tightened his grip. “Curse it all, are you mad?” He shoved me into a corner of the gloomy alleyway and spun me around to face him. His grim face was flushed, his green eyes glittering. “Promise
me you’ll be quiet and listen, and I’ll let go. Do you promise?”

  I nodded, almost twisting my eyes in their sockets in an attempt to glimpse the brass buttons on his coat, wild to see if one was missing. But he stood too close. Tentatively he removed his hand, ready to clamp down again if I made a move to scream. When I stayed quiet, he relaxed his grip on my arm a bit, but not yet enough for me to break away. “I’m sorry if I frightened you,” he said, “but after the miracle of finding you in this hellish city, I’ll not let you get away again.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I have a friend with an extraordinary gift for following people.”

  Ah, yes. His friends. I could not allow myself to be deceived by his aggrieved sincerity. I was in no position to run, but I did wrench my arm from his grasp. “Are you going to arrest me? Where are your ”friends“?”

  “I’ve no intention of arresting you. Now I’ve come out ahead on our little game of chase-the-cat, the only spoil of victory I ask is two moments without argument. Would that be at all possible?”

  “I don’t see that I have much choice in the matter.” But I was certainly puzzled. He was a sheriff. No one would take him to task for questioning me. Why lurk in an alleyway?

  He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and twisted it about his bleeding fingers. “You’re acting the fool,” he said in quiet vehemence. “You think you’re so clever sneaking and hiding with your strange friends who do such extraordinary things. But you’re not deceiving anyone. I’m not the only one after you.”

  My flip retort died unspoken as I watched the subtle changes in his features. The sheriff’s unremarkable face with its weather lines and scar had never revealed much of his inner life. But on the few occasions I’d seen him express strong feeling—whether anger, disgust, anxiety, or anything else—his every action had proclaimed his face a true mirror of his sentiments. And on this hot afternoon, his face told me that he was worried and afraid.