by Carol Berg
It was on that long afternoon, as we grew relaxed and warm in our solitary island in the midst of the storm, that I first realized I loved her. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for my arms to be around her to quiet her shivering, and for her damp, fragrant hair to tickle my nose because her head was resting on my chest. All doubts and confusions were banished with her first sigh of contentment as I held her close.
"Are you awake?" she asked drowsily, without moving her head from the place I wished it to stay as long as I could persuade her to leave it.
"Approximately."
"I leave tomorrow for Maroth Vale. Will you come?"
"If you wish it." She could have asked for me to give her my eyes, and my answer would have been the same.
"How could I not wish my best friend to be with me?" She nestled closer. "But before we go, friend, there is the matter of one of your secrets that I think we must clarify."
For a moment my instincts shouted a warning. But only for a moment . . . until she turned her head just enough that it was the most natural thing in the world to kiss her.
Chapter 11
Jen
From the earliest days of my memory, my mother called me her forget-me-not child. I had the annoying habit of remembering every word and image of every story and song I'd ever heard, and neither my parents nor their guests nor their hired Singers or Storytellers dared leave out a single one in hopes of an early release from my attention. This was but an early sign of a certain singleness of purpose which my brothers preferred to describe as "dogged stubbornness akin to that of a particularly unintelligent mule."
I had a number of annoying habits when I was a child. I constantly interrupted adult conversations with sober, if ill-informed, opinions. I drove my family frantic by disappearing for long periods of time into a tree or some other hideaway and losing myself in a favorite book, ignoring their calls until they'd rousted the town Watch to find me. And I never tired of filling my brothers' boots with mud or hiding their school papers or otherwise getting them in trouble, and then playing the innocent girl child while they reaped the consequences of my tricks. My brothers had fond names for me, too, though certainly less polite than forget-me-not child .
Fond names for annoying habits are a natural part of a happy childhood, and loving parents always assume that those less-than-desirable traits will fade away as childhood yields gracefully to the passage of time. Perhaps that's why I never lost my annoying habits. My childhood did not yield gracefully, but was aborted, truncated, sheared off in the span of a single moment as I hid in the boughs of my reading tree and watched the Zhid slit my mother's throat and drag my father into slavery. And childhood was buried forever one year later when they came back for me and my brothers, the day the cold-eyed boy with the jewels in his ear sealed the slave collar about our necks, while my weeping father was forced to watch in silence. I had thought my life ended on that day, my heart transformed into steel as cold and dead as the collar itself, and it took me many years to discover it was not. But I never forgot.
It was a true measure of my father's goodness that he was able to look upon the person who had destroyed his children and caused his own savage torture with anything but hatred in his heart. My brothers had been used to train the beast in swordsmanship and then discarded like so much rubbish when he grew more skilled than they. They were sent into the desert camps and died there, I believed, for they were never found after the war. I was nine years old when the collar of Zhev'Na was sealed around my neck and fifteen when it was removed by a Healer who wept when he saw how young I was.
To find my father among the pitiful remnants of the thousands who'd been held captive in the Wastes had taken me three months. He lay in a house of healing in the Vale of Nimrolan, scarcely able to walk for the pain of his deformity. But one might say his grievous injuries were fortunate, for the path of life that led to his torture was the same that brought him back to me.
My father was a Speaker, one who can, with study and observation, divine the essence of a problem and judge its truth so that the parties to it may find a wise or just solution. It is an uncommon gift, and the single Dar'Nethi talent that leaves its wielder immune from transformation into Zhid. The power of a Speaker is immense; thus it was imminently desirable to the Lords, but it is born solely of truth, which left it out of their reach. Even the Three of Zhev'Na could not bend truth to their will. And so they took particular delight in enslaving a Speaker, abasing him cruelly, torturing him and flaunting him before the other Dar'Nethi as a reminder that no one could escape the Lords entirely, no matter what that person's gift. But they kept him alive.
Once free and reunited, my father and I had taken up life in the town of Tymnath. A Speaker's services were always in demand, so we lived comfortably enough. I kept our household, cared for my father, read and studied furiously to make up for missing years of education, and eventually pursued my own profession, facing the hard fact that whatever true talent had been born inside me had been destroyed by the slave collar of Zhev'Na. I had come of age without the Way, and like a seedling buried too long beneath a rock, my gift, whatever it might have been, had given up and died away before it ever saw the light. I could do the few small magics that any Dar'Nethi child could do, but nothing beyond. In five years I had grown accustomed to my lack, just as I had to the red scar about my neck, and I had made my own place in the world.
There was certainly work enough to do—rebuilding Tymnath for a start. I excelled at mathematics and had a good eye, so Builders and other craftsmen throughout the Vale of Hester found it useful that I could calculate their costs and sizes, loads and measures, and remember them exactly from one project to the next. True talent would have been nice, but paper, pen, and my mundane skills served me well enough.
It didn't take long to learn that people were shy of those who had been slaves, as if we had carried something more than our red scars from the desert, and it would behoove them not to get any closer than business required. Their discomfort didn't bother me. I had half a lifetime's worth of reading to catch up on and new skills to learn, and as often as we could get away I would hire a carriage and drive my father into the newly reclaimed countryside. It appealed to us far more than the untouched beauties of Avonar and the Vales. We would sit for hours reveling in the smell of moisture on the wind and the graceful brushstrokes of green newly painted over the healthy land, rejoicing in our survival and our Prince D'Natheil's victory over the Lords. After a few years, Papa said he almost couldn't remember what Zhev'Na had been like. I remembered.
In the fourth year of our freedom, Papa's strength began to fail. He lived with pain every day, the Healers' remedies helpful only in passing. They told him that if he would let them try to relieve the twisting of his poor back, then perhaps he would do better. But the healing itself was so excruciating, he could not bear it, and so it was never completed.
When his condition grew so painful that he could no longer work, he began to look for some other answer. More for me than for himself. He feared he was making my life intolerable. I spent hours alternately packing him in ice, then wrapping him in warm blankets with hot stones near the most painful places, and stretching and bending his limbs when he could not bear to do it, so as to keep his muscles working. Eventually I, too, was faced with giving up my work. The Lady D'Sanya's hospice seemed the perfect remedy. Since Papa could not work as he was, he insisted he would lose nothing by giving up his talent, and he wished to set me free to pursue my life without the burden of his suffering.
Our house was lonely without him, so I would spend one week of every three in Gaelie, where I could see him every day. It was on my third visit that I encountered the living beast in the hospice, and then saw him riding like a king on the very road I traveled and skulking in the guesthouse at Gaelie like a pickpocket hiding in the marketplace crowd. When I recognized him, I vowed that he would die.
My father was wrong about my reasons. It was not a matter of revenge. Noth
ing could restore my family or my childhood or give me talent, and though I was incomplete as a Dar'Nethi, I had not forsaken the Way. I rejoiced in my life and in the life of everything and everyone around me. But the Zhid were rising in the north, and here was their commander going about his sneaking business right before my eyes. I was a daughter of the Dar'Nethi, and I did not forget. No Dar'Nethi would be enslaved again if I could strike a blow to prevent it.
So why did I not kill him once I had him captive? I fully intended it at first. But my father's questions echoed those nibbling at my own mind. Why was I able to capture him so easily? Why did he not tweak his scarred hand and drive me mad or set me afire? If he'd made the slightest move, I would have driven my knife home, but he did not. . . and so I could not. In the final event, what stayed my hand was not my gentle father's belief that the villain had truly changed, but the sober consideration that someone needed to find out what he was up to. His death might not halt the evil growing in the north. All right. Let him think he had fooled the kind old man and his foolish daughter. Then watch him. That was my plan.
I gave up my profession as a Builder's assessor and became expert at lurking and skulking, at listening at doors and peering into windows, and at diving into bushes. Holding my tongue when he stumbled on me was much more difficult. Once free of my collar and its consequences, I had reverted to the indiscipline of my childhood.
The tall, skinny fellow at the guesthouse caused my first confusion. In the beginning I guessed that the young man must be the young Lord's manservant, but they seemed so easy together, I decided they must be accomplices. But then one day I found my borrowed horse panicked and wild from an inflammation of his hoof. The skinny young man encountered me in the guesthouse stable and was generous with his help and genuine in his concern and care for the animal. Unless he was the finest actor I'd ever encountered, he didn't even have an idea about who I was or what I'd done to his friend. He must be another innocent dupe. So I decided to warn him. But the moment I broached the subject of his companion, he turned bright red, slammed his mouth shut, and said he didn't talk about his "master" to anyone.
As for my quarry, I came to understand what an Imager must feel when he had inscribed a new object on his mind. Given material of flesh and bone I could have reproduced the slender form with the prideful bearing, the musculature so unexceptional until one witnessed the strength and power in the long legs and arms, the straight brown hair with a touch of red in it, the scarred hands he kept hidden from the day I noticed them. I could have sculpted his every facial feature: the wide-set, shadowed eyes, the narrow face and high cheekbones, the straight nose and slightly jutting chin. I could have stated his weights and measures as if he had been one of my clients' building projects.
It infuriated me that in all my secret watching I could not catch him out of his quiet, serious demeanor—a mask, as surely as the gold and diamonds he had worn in Zhev'Na. Only with his skinny friend and with the Lady did he ever soften his expression, and even then he held his smiles and laughter close-reined as if he were embarrassed to show them. He spent almost every waking hour with the Lady D'Sanya, and I was sure he meant her harm, but the longer I watched the two together, and listened to scraps of their nonsensical conversations, the more confused I became.
"What game does he play?" I threw my ripped and muddy cloak onto the floor of my father's room one afternoon after spending three hours getting wet, scratched, and muddy while watching the two of them gather raspberries in the rain. "He trails after her like a hungry calf; he does her bidding in everything: what he eats and drinks, where he walks, what he reads, what he wears. He cringes in distaste when she drags him to meet her friends, flinches as if he'd been struck when anyone walks up to them at Tymnath market, yet you'd swear he doesn't even know he's doing it. He puts on this never-ending show of mooning adoration, but I can't see who it's for, except the Lady herself, and she . . . Well, I just can't decipher it. He as much as admitted to us that he was planning to deceive her."
My father fluttered the pages of his book with his thumb, then closed it and set it aside. "Did you ever consider, dearest of daughters, that it might be nothing more than what you see? Is it impossible that the young man has fallen in love with the Lady?"
"He is incapable of love. He has no soul. I saw its last remnants burned away. Remember?"
"And what of the Lady? How does she react to this villainous mooncalf?" His eye smiled in the firelight, but I would have none of it. "Is she capable of love?"
"It makes no difference in the world what I think of her, Papa. She must be told who he is."
It's true I didn't care for the Lady. She was beautiful and kind, and the comfort her enchantments had given my father was undeniable, but I thought she talked too much and listened too little, and it seemed to me that every kindness she did was done mostly for herself. She hungered after doing good in the way some crave influence over others or power to feed their talents. And I saw in her the same thing I'd seen in so many when they glimpsed the scars of our slave collars. She wouldn't look us in the eye, and shied away as if we were dirty or diseased.
But I didn't have to like her. She was the rightful Princess of Avonar, and she had been a prisoner, too. I wouldn't wish anyone to fall under the hand of the Lords of Zhev'Na even once, much less a second time.
Papa drew me down onto the couch beside him and pulled my head onto his lap, ruffling my short, ugly hair. "Why this masquerade, Jen? You cannot be your brothers, nor would I ever wish it. You are my beloved daughter, a woman of intelligence and generous heart, and I glorify good Vasrin's creation every day that your path travels alongside my own. But you hide here with rae and chase these ghosts of the past instead of finding friends and living your own joys. Why do you treat yourself so slightingly?"
"I wear men's clothes because they are more comfortable and more practical when I work or travel. I keep my hair short because I don't have time to waste. I don't wear rings and baubles like Lady D'Sanya does at every hour of every day because I don't want to feel like a jeweler's cart at Tymnath market. I am what I am, Papa. Letting my hair grow long or wearing silk gowns or smiling at smarmy men who squirm when they see my neck will not change it. Now stop hiding from my question. Why won't you let me warn the Lady?"
"Because he asked us not."
"How can you—?"
"Because I have faith in the Way. Vasrin's creation is not disordered; we just cannot always discern the Shaper's pattern. There is a reason I was sent to serve in his house. A reason his mother was sent to me there. A reason we found refuge here and crossed his path."
It was strange to hear him speak with such firmness and conviction. Since he'd come to the hospice it had been as if the heart had gone out of him, so that even decisions so small as to what to wear each day had become difficult. But I still didn't share his belief.
"Perhaps the reason is that we can warn our princess of her danger."
He pulled my face around to look at him, and his eyes no longer sparkled, but shone with wonder that stilled my protests. He dropped his voice to a whisper as if someone might overhear. "Jen, I have seen the one he comes here to visit—not the Lady, but the one he names father. The man stays apart as you've noted for yourself. But one night when I could not sleep, I went walking in the gardens. He was doing the same, and we came face to face in the moonlight. Though he turned away quickly, I knew him, daughter. Back when you were a child, I had a close friend, a Healer named Dassine, one of the Preceptors and a man of great power and daring—"
"The man who fostered Prince D'Natheil."
"Yes. Back in those days Dassine asked me to Speak for him, for he was sorely troubled at something he had done. He confided only part of a very great mystery and made me vow on my life never to reveal what he had told me or anything of a man—two men, in fact—that he allowed me to speak with on that day, though I only saw one of them in the flesh. But I tell you, girl, the man I saw in the hospice garden was indeed the man who re
igned for four years in Avonar as the Prince D'Natheil. The great Healer. The man who destroyed the Lords."
"The one who condemned his son to death saying he was too evil, too corrupt to live?"
"The same."
"It's impossible, Papa. Prince D'Natheil is buried in the Tomb of the Heirs. And clearly he did not do everything we thought. One of the Lords still lives."
But I was very confused.
Chapter 12
Gerick
"A fortnight more or less, then I'll be back," I told my father. Outside, the dawn gleamed through a watery mist, the lingering remnants of a rainy night. "Are you sure you'll be all right? Perhaps I shouldn't have—"
"If we're ever to be done with this business, you must be satisfied that the Lady serves no purpose of the Lords. Can you say so yet?" My father sat listless and unshaven in his chair by the open doors. Unable to lie abed on the morning of my departure for Maroth Vale, I'd rousted him too early.
"She loathes the Lords. The least mention of Zhev'Na sets her talking of some new scheme to erase all memory of them. She is . . . exceptional … in so many ways, and I can find no fault in how she uses her talents."
On our last visit to Tymnath, D'Sanya had healed, embraced, and listened to people's troubles until well past midnight. Every day she spent at least an hour writing letters to those who worked to restore and rebuild Gondai, encouraging them to persevere. She sent them gifts of tools and materials, even hiring craftsmen to aid those in remote villages.
"But you're not ready to tell Ven'Dar to yield his throne and sleep soundly after." He tried to smile. An effort . . . but a poor one.
