by Carol Berg
"You must have no regrets, mistress. The Way still winds through this gentle place. Even the Lady cannot help everyone who comes to her door. Come, permit me to stay with you as you stand vigil with the good G'Dano." He took her arm and led her through the cloisters into the house.
All right, so the man on the table had been gravely ill and died before the Lady could help him. That was reasonable enough. A great number of those who came here were on the brink of death. Why had I been so quick to assume foul play? Why had I allowed someone else . . . someone who wouldn't even show his face . . . to convince me to run away like I was some sort of criminal? I needed to tell the princess why her lover kept his gloves on all the time. A fortnight . . . perhaps I should ask Na'Cyd where the Lady had gone, so I could follow her.
Uneasy and exhausted from my adventures of the sleepless night, I dragged myself back to my father's apartments. It was almost midday. Papa was sitting in his garden absentmindedly dabbing at a bowl of soup with a soggy piece of bread. When I bade him good morning and kissed his thinning hair, he didn't even look up.
"Papa, I need your advice …" I told him what had happened. He nodded and made murmuring noises of interest.
"So, what if the man in the room was him ? What if he was stealing something or doing something awful and he's trying to make me look like the thief? If I find the Lady and warn her . . . what if he's there and accuses me?" I stopped pacing and knelt in front of my father. "Papa, what should I do?"
"I'm sorry, dear one, what did you say?" His face was loving and sympathetic, but absolutely uncomprehending. "Will you stay for supper, then? Is something wrong?"
I laid my head on his lap, and he patted my ugly hair. "Of course I'll stay, Papa. Nothing's wrong. I just need to sleep for a while. Then we'll have supper and play sonquey." Or perhaps we could pull out a pack of lignial cards and explore what vagaries of Dar'Nethi inheritance could explain why a Speaker's daughter could not unravel the simplest puzzle without coming to the conclusion that she was dreadfully worried about a monster she had vowed to expose.
I threw myself on Papa's couch and dropped off instantly, thrust without delay into an incredibly vivid dream. I was frantically trying to climb a mountain of red clay, and had a constant, unshakable sensation that someone was looking over my shoulder, but every time I'd turn to look, no one was there.
Just after sunset I awoke to find Papa dozing by the fire. I emptied the basket of bread from his untouched dinner tray, laid a brightly woven blanket over his knees, and then kissed him and left by way of his garden. Cramming the bread in my mouth, I slipped through the deserted courtyards to the Lady's house. If she was truly gone away, and no one could or would answer my questions, then I had no choice but to seek answers for myself.
Though the thin clouds to the west still showed golden edges, the house was dark. I reached for the teardrop-shaped crystal that dangled from a silken cord, waiting to chime a magical bell somewhere within the house. But after a moment's consideration, I drew my hand away without touching it. A fiery abrasion of my skin when I tried the door latch informed me that even my mechanical skills weren't going to get me into the house by way of the door. The upstairs window was still ajar, though tonight it was as dark as all the other windows.
Telling myself that my feats of the previous night had proven that I needn't be afraid, I started the climb. My knees wobbled like reeds in a storm. As I clung to the stone wall like a terrified leech, I couldn't even imagine how I'd been able to muster the strength or nerve to lever myself from the windowsill to the corner of the roof.
Toes on the ledge, fingers gripping the sill, I raised my chin above the sill. The long table in the center of the room was vacant. No one was inside that room. I hoisted myself up the rest of the way, threw a knee over the sill, and tumbled most ungracefully through the window. Various body parts hit the tiled floor with a thump. I hissed as I straightened one knee and discovered I'd overstretched it in the fall. With a muffled clank a metal candlestick toppled onto some cushions that I had knocked from the window seat. Otherwise the house was as silent as a crypt.
I sat still for a moment. Convinced I was alone in the house, I cast the weak light from my hand and looked around. The proportions of the room seemed designed to deceive the eye. The walls and ceiling were painted a deep forest green that drew the walls close. Yet the measure of the floor was generous, and huge mirror glasses hung on each side wall so that where I had seen fifty candles on the night before, there might actually have been only ten. The corner hearth was actually a small furnace.
I poked around the neat ranks of jars and bottles and boxes that sat on the dark wooden tables that lined the side walls under the mirrors. Scattered across the table were a number of tools—chisels and files, shaped metal pincers, and engraving tools—various items of gold and silver jewelry, and some odd narrow strips of bronze bent into shallow arcs half the length of my forearm. A lovely bronze figure of a horse in full gallop, about as tall as my hand, had fallen to the floor in between open sacks of sand and powdered plaster. Its flying tail was sadly bent.
On the wall opposite the window was a broad door I assumed would open on a passageway, and there was another, smaller door on the right wall. Each had an intricately engraved brass lock that refused to yield to touch or knifepoint. There was little else to be seen, no further answers to be found, and no way to leave except by the way I'd come in.
Foolish to come here. What had I thought to find? My skin burned just thinking about what I could possibly say if the princess came to the door: "Have you no abandoned dead man here, my lady? Have you no tortured ghosts who can reach out with immaterial hands to show me across your roof and into your dustbins?"
Hurriedly I put the toppled candlestick and disturbed cushions tonights, When I raised my handlight high to make sure I'd left nothing out of place, a glint of metal caught my eye from the farthest corner of the room. A thick, heavy chain dangled from an iron ring embedded in the high ceiling, the end of it well above my head. Still and somber, the dull, brutish chain looked out of place beside the fine and delicately worked ornaments lying about the room. As I drew closer, it seemed to point like a warning finger at what lay below.
I crouched down and held my light close to the blue-black tiles. Directly below the chain lay a clotted pool the color of ripe blackberries with a pale seepage around it. Smaller spatters had already dried to a deep rust color. A few steps away lay an oddly shaped wire device—a small frame with five protrusions, each having a small sharpened blade on the end. I picked it up to examine it. The blades—fingers on the palm-sized frame—were stained dark. I dropped it on the floor and clamped my hands tight under my arms, screams echoing in my soul, my head like to burst with darkness.
A crumpled paper lay in the corner. I retrieved it gingerly, only to discover it was no paper, but a wadded pair of gloves, a man's fine leather riding gloves, stiff with dried blood. That the gloves belonged to the one who had cried out in my mind, the same voice that had whispered to me from the shadows, insisting I leave the Lady's house, I had no doubt.
Before the lingering glow in the west had faded, I found myself astride my horse again, heading toward Gaelie—only I didn't stop there, but rode all the way to Avonar.
Chapter 20
A thin strip of moonlight was not sufficient to illuminate the dark room where the long-armed man shoved me to the floor. A wool rug burned my cheek as I skidded over it, and tickled my nose when I lay still, fighting to get air into my burning chest before the whole world went dark.
"Aimee, is that you?" a woman called from across the room. She sounded as breathless as I felt, as if she'd been running. "What's going on here?"
Small hard objects clattered onto a hard floor from another direction entirely. "My lady, what's wrong? And who else is here?" This was another woman. Younger. "Someone's come through the garden door, my lady, one or two people, but they've not spoken, so I don't know who they are."
Who else i
s here … a good question. Whose house was this? Whose knees were digging relentlessly into my back?
I had ridden down from Gaelie as hard as poor Pesca could run and flown to this place as mindlessly as a hummingbird streaks for a scarlet saber-flower. But in my fever to get inside—a fever as terrifying as it was inexplicable—I bumbled over a garden wall and tripped over a step. Long arms had wrapped themselves around me, and no matter how hard I fought and scratched and kicked, they would not let go until we were inside, and they had deposited me on this floor.
The person kneeling on my back snatched away the dry wad of leather I'd clutched for the past six hours and was futilely trying to hide under my breast. I felt a sharp jerking movement, and then a hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and bent my neck backward almost to breaking. "I'll kill you. By the Holy Twins, if you've harmed so much as a hair on him, I'll kill you."
"Paulo, who is this?" asked the first woman, the older of the two.
"It's a god-cursed thieving assassin is my guess." Mercifully, he let my head drop before my scalp tore, and then lifted his weight from my back. When he shoved a boot into my middle and rolled me onto my back, I didn't have enough breath to resist.
"Could we have a light, Aimee?" asked the woman.
"Of course! I'm so sorry."
Yellow light blossomed from someone's fingertips and sprang like a stray bit of lightening to one lamp on the wall and then another. The high ceiling was painted with a scene of a forest glade. I wished I were in that peaceful, uncomplicated place. Paulo , the woman had said. The skinny friend from the Gaelie guesthouse. I should have known. I shifted my gaze to the bony face hovering somewhere between my battered body and the painted forest. His expression was nothing I wanted to see on someone whose heavy boots were a handsbreadth from my face.
Where was I? And what in the name of sense was I doing here? A nasty creeping sensation fluttered deep in my head, like a moth that had been stuck there squirming itself free and flying away.
"I've found this lot—a damnable sneaking woman"— he was surprised at that—"creeping about the garden." Paulo gave my legs a shove with his boot. "She'll be dead if she can't explain herself."
Far across the room a tall, striking woman of middle years pulled off her cloak and threw it aside. The young Lord's mother, no mistaking it. The red glint in her brown hair, the gold cast to her flushed skin, and the dark brown eyes would have told me, even if I hadn't seen her on that long-ago day in Zhev'Na. "We don't have time to worry about thieves," she said. "Gerick is in terrible danger."
"I've figured that out already. See what I found on her." Paulo tossed the wadded gloves across the room to the older woman. Then he looked at me again. "What have you done with him? Where is he?"
"I don't know where he is." Able to take a full breath at last, I attempted to sit up. Paulo shoved me flat again with his boot on my shoulder.
"So it's only by chance you're carrying his gloves with his blood on them?"
"I don't know whose gloves those are, much less whose blood is on them, and"—I jammed my elbow into Paulo's knee so hard he bellowed and stumbled backward—"I'll tell you nothing else until you get your filthy boot off me."
"Heaven and earth!" The young Lord's mother stared at the bloody wad in her hands.
"I'll give you anything, she's the one attacked him in the stable," Paulo fumed. "He wouldn't never say who it was, but this one's been sneaking about the guesthouse for weeks—even asking me about him. Dolt that I am, I never made the connection until now." He looked so fierce for a moment I almost laughed. "If you've harmed him, I'll—"
"I've not touched him—not that he doesn't deserve worse than I could do. My father lives deformed and half blind because of him. My brothers died in the desert after he used them for his sword training. My mother lies murdered these twelve years at the hands of his friends, the Lords."
I clung madly to the things I believed lest the very earth shift out from under me. I was terrified to hear what these people would say of the young Lord. If he owned the gloves, then he was not only the voice who had warned me off, but the one who had been chained in that corner bleeding. I couldn't bear the thought of that.
"I've sworn to protect you, my lady," said Paulo. "Let me find out what she's done."
Lady Seriana—so I'd discovered was her name, not Eda as my father had known her—squeezed the blood-stiffened leather in her hand. She was having to work at staying calm. "You must have a story as to how you come to carry my son's gloves marked with such stains as these." I opened my mouth, but she didn't give me an opening. "Don't try to deny they're his. I gave them to him, and their maker lives a very long way from here."
Paulo, angry as he was, wasn't going to move without her approval. Taking advantage of his restraint, I jumped to my feet and tried to recapture some dignity. I straightened my muddy tunic and brushed away the damp leaves stuck to my cheek. Paulo came near attacking me again when I touched the leather belt that held my knife sheath, but I just looked him straight in the eye and pulled it around straight. But I kept my hands well away from the hilt that protruded from the sheath. I wanted to demonstrate that they didn't intimidate me, but I wasn't stupid.
"I've no cause to explain myself to you or to anyone," I said. "I've stolen nothing and harmed no one. Unlike others you know." Why were they all so tall? My head was on a level with Paulo's shoulder. Even the two women gave me a full handspan in height.
"Did you attack Gerick in Gaelie?" asked the lady.
"Yes. I saw a Lord of Zhev'Na walking free. Any faithful daughter of Gondai would have done the same."
"But you let him go," she added. "Your father, Gerick said, a resident of the Lady's hospice persuaded you to leave him be."
So he hadn't told his mother who Papa was. I wasn't sure what that meant. "My father is the kindest, most trusting of souls. Far too trusting. I honored his speaking because he is my father, but I don't… didn't… agree."
"So if you didn't harm my son this time, and you don't wish to tell us anything, then why did you come here? Presumably not to harm Mistress Aimee."
And, of course, that was the difficult question. Part of me wanted to spit at these people, willing dupes of a fiend. Part of me still wept at the cry I had heard, shaken to my very bones by despair that spoke the death of love and joy. Part of me trembled in fear, craving to deny my father's certainty that these events signaled something far larger than we knew. "I don't know why I'm here. And that's the truth. I found those gloves . . . somewhere … at the hospice. I should have thrown them away. I've no cause to do him a service. But I couldn't— I want to go." Part of me wanted desperately to run away.
"Perhaps we could sit down, have some refreshment, and come to better understanding. Let me make more light. I've such a bad habit of leaving my house dark when I'm here alone." I had almost forgotten the other woman—Aimee. She glided about the room, lighting the rest of the lamps from the magical glow of her hand, threading her way among numerous objects of dark green stone scattered about the floor—small statues of birds, it appeared—and a broken wooden box from which they had spilled. Her presence was like the first breeze of evening after a hot day. "I'll bring saffria and ale," she said.
When Aimee lit a lamp that hung in the air behind me, the Lady Seriana's stare settled on my neck. My skin burned under her gaze. And my blood grew hot as well. "He did it, you know. With his own hand, he sealed my collar. Did he tell his mother of his pleasures?"
She didn't get angry. Rather her brow wrinkled thoughtfully, and her gaze dug deeper, searching my face. "Stars of night! I know you. The child who served in his house …"
Yes, the slave child who scuttled about his house in bare feet and iron collar, terrified for every moment of every day for six endless years. Forbidden to speak, forced to scrub out night jars and empty vermin traps, to lay out his clothes and run his bath, my face scarred by one of his swordmasters, a Zhid who wore a jeweled ring and got impatient when I didn't summon the y
oung Lord to his lessons fast enough.
"No wonder he couldn't bring himself to say more of your encounter!" Abruptly she motioned me to a green-brocaded footstool. "Sit down."
Her command was inarguable. I sat.
"Listen to me," she said. "I don't know why you've come here, and for the moment we'll put it aside. But you are wrong if you think my son is still what he was in Zhev'Na. The danger you fear—the betrayal you feel—as you watch him go about freely when the world believes him safely dead . . . that danger does exist, but in someone else."
"You think the Lady D'Sanya is the danger." I sounded like a petulant schoolchild.
"Yes. Just this evening, I've come to the conclusion that she possesses one of the Lords' devices—a brass ring called an oculus . . . like the ones you saw in their house. I think she makes them."
"Demons of the deep, she's got an oculus?" Paulo sagged against the wall. "Master Gerick knew someone had power of that kind—I've just come from Prince Ven'Dar, delivering his letter about it—but he never guessed it was her. Never. Even to think it would kill him. Demons take the woman!"
An oculus ! I jumped up and retreated, my back against the garden doors, all my bravado made laughable. My knees felt like mush; my mind screamed. I had seen what the Lords did with their ghastly rings of light—what the young Lord did with them. Mind and body remembered pain and helpless fear coursing through my veins like liquid ice. I laid my hand on my dagger, not thinking what I could possibly do with it, only that I needed to be as far away from this house as I could get. "You can't hold me prisoner. I can't be here." Not if an oculus was involved.
"Sit down, young lady." His mother pointed sternly toward the stool I had deserted. "In the name of the Prince D'Natheil—my husband and Gerick's father— who set you free of your collar, in the name of every Dar'Nethi who has suffered enslavement to the Lords as did you and that same prince, or who died fighting the Lords as did Aimee's dear father, and in the name of every man and woman of my own world who lived in bondage there as did Paulo and I, I insist you sit here and listen to me."
