Guardians Of The Keep tbod-2

by Carol Berg

  He stood motionless, solitary, bathed in winter sunlight, facing a gnarled, bare-limbed tree that creaked in the cold. The white hood masked his profile, and his arms were folded into his white cloak, so that he might have been some strange snowdrift left in the garden by the passing storm, something only an enchanter could transform into human shape. I didn’t even know what name to call him. “Good morning, Your Grace,” I said, dipping my knee.

  He bowed to me in answer to my greeting, but said nothing and did not raise his hood to reveal his face. He remained facing the tree.

  “The tree is a lambina,” I said, “native to lands well east and south of here, lands less extreme in their climate. In spring it flowers, brilliant yellow blossoms as large as your hand, their scent very delicate, like lemon and ginger. When the flowers fade in early summer, they don’t fall, but float away on the first breeze like bits of yellow silk. Then the tree blooms again, almost immediately, small, white, feathery flowers with bright yellow centers, each in a cluster of waxy green leaves. It’s very beautiful.”

  “I’ve seen it,” he said, so softly that I almost didn’t hear him. “The leaves turn dark red in autumn.”

  “This one hasn’t bloomed in many years. I’m hoping it’s only dormant.”

  With movements spare and graceful, he stepped across the snowy lawn to the tree and laid a hand on its gnarled trunk. “There is life in it.”

  Beneath my warm cloak, the hairs on my arms prickled. “I’m glad to know that.”

  “You’re Lady Seriana, Dassine’s friend.” So strange to hear the disembodied voice coming from the shapeless robe and drooping hood. I strained to hear some trace of the person I knew in the quiet words.

  “He said you might like someone to talk to while he was about his business.”

  “Please don’t feel obliged. It’s cold out here, and you’d be more comfortable inside. I’ll await my keeper as he commanded. He knows he needn’t set a guard on me.”

  “I don’t consider it a burden to speak with you.”

  “A curiosity, perhaps.”

  “I’ll ask no questions.”

  “And answer none? Dassine’s not very good at it- answering questions, that is. I can’t imagine he would permit someone else to answer things that he would not.”

  I smiled at this wry disgruntlement, even as I blinked away an unwanted pricking in my eyes. “I’ll confess that he’s asked me to be circumspect.”

  “Then you do know more than I.” His curiosity tugged at the conversation like a pup.

  “About some things.”

  “It sets quite a burden on an acquaintance when one knows more than the other.” The note I detected in his voice was not anger. Nor did it seem to be resentment that kept his countenance hidden under his hood. I felt the blood rush to his skin as if it were my own. Earth and sky, he was embarrassed.

  I shook the crusted snow off a sprangling shrub, and the branches bounced up, showering me with ice crystals and almost hitting me in the face. “I think this could be considered an interesting variation of acquaintance,” I said, brushing the chilly dusting off my cloak. “And, as many things have happened since I met you last, we should start again anyway, don’t you think?”

  “I certainly have no choice in the matter.” His tone demonstrated a most familiar irony and good humor. My heart soared.

  “All right, then. We shall ignore all past acquaintance and begin right now. You may call me Seri. I am thirty-six years old, and I live in this hoary edifice you see before you. A temporary situation, though there was a time- Ah, I forget myself. No past. I am a poor relation to the lord who rules here, though circumstances have placed me in charge of the household-not an inconsiderable responsibility. I am well educated, though not as up-to-date in many areas as I’d like, and I have a secret ambition to teach history in our kingdom’s center of learning. Now tell me of yourself.”

  “I believe you already know who I am.”

  “No, sir. If I must begin again, then you must do the same.”

  “It is required?” His voice was low.

  I let go of my teasing for a moment. “Only if you wish it. I am not Dassine.”

  With another bow, he turned to me and lifted the hood from his face. His eyes were cast down, and his cheeks were flushed as I had known they would be. “It seems I have several names. You must choose the one that suits.”

  “Aeren,” I said without thinking. Tall. Fair hair grown long enough to tie back with a white ribbon. Wide, muscular shoulders. Square jaw and strong, narrow cheeks that might have been sculpted to match the fairest carvings of our warrior gods. Wide-set eyes of astonishing blue.

  At the time of his death, Karon had been thirty-two, slight of build, dark-haired and boyishly handsome, with high cheekbones and a narrow jaw. The rough-hewn stranger who had dropped into my life on Midsummer’s Day looked nothing like Karon. I had called him Aeren, for he had no memory of himself except that he shared a name with the bird-a gray falcon-that screeched over Poacher’s Ridge. I had learned that his own language named him D’Natheil, but this man was not D’Natheil either. I felt no scarcely restrained menace from him, The threadwork of lines about his eyes, the strands of silver in his fair hair, the air of quiet dignity stated that the one who stood in my mother’s garden was older, wiser, more thoughtful than the violent twenty-two-year-old Prince of Avonar. But he was not my husband… or so I told myself.

  “As you wish.” Even as he accepted my judgment, he glanced up at me.

  My breath caught. In that brief moment, as had happened four months ago in an enchanted cavern, I glimpsed the truth that lived behind his blue eyes. This was no one but Karon.

  I started to speak his true name, to see if those syllables on my lips might spark some deeper memory. But no light of recognition had crossed his face when his eyes met mine. Patience, Dassine had said. You were his friend before you were his wife. He looked very tired.

  “Would you like to walk?” I said. “There’s not much to see in this garden, but walking would be warmer as we wait.”

  “I’d like that very much. I can’t seem to get enough of walking outdoors.”

  Inside, I danced and leaped and crowed with delight; Karon had never gotten enough of walking out of doors. Outwardly, I smiled and gestured toward the path.

  My boots crunched quietly as we strolled through the frosty morning. Karon broke our companionable silence first. “Tell me more of yourself.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Anything. It’s refreshing to hear of someone who isn’t me.”

  I laughed and began to speak of things I enjoyed, of books and conversation, of puzzles and music, of meadows and gardens. He chuckled when I told him of my first awkward attempts at growing something other than flowers. “Jonah couldn’t understand why his plants produced no beans, until the day he found me diligently picking off the blooms. I told him that my gardener had once said that plants would grow larger if we didn’t let them flower. Poor Jonah laughed until tears came, telling me that until we could eat the leaves I had best leave the flowers be. I had ruined the entire planting, a good part of their winter sustenance. It was devastating for one so proud of her intellect as I, but it was only the first of many gaps in my experience I was to discover.”

  “This Jonah sounds like a kind gentleman. He was not your family, though, for if his crop was a good part of his winter sustenance, he was not the lord of this manor.”

  Careful, Seri. Careful. “Jonah and Anne were like parents to me. I was estranged from my own family at the time.”

  “But now you are reconciled?”

  “They’re all dead now, my mother and my father and my only brother. The lord of this house is my ten-year-old nephew, and the lady is his mother, a somewhat… self-absorbed… young widow.”

  “We have something in common, then. I’ve gained and lost two families in these past months, one I loved and one I hardly knew. And now I’m left with only Dassine.”

&
nbsp; “And does Dassine teach you to grow beans, or does he pout, whine, and tell you nasty gossip?”

  His laugh was deep and rich, an expression of his soul’s joy that had nothing to do with memory. “He has taught me a great deal, and done his share of pouting and cajoling, but no interesting gossip and certainly nothing of beans. Beans must be beyond my own experience also.” They were. I knew they were. I laughed with him.

  The path led us toward a sagging arbor, a musty passage so hopelessly entangled with dead, matted vines that the sun could not penetrate it. Without thinking I followed my longtime habit and looked for an alternate way. But to avoid traversing the arbor we would need to trample through a muddy snarl of shrubbery or retrace our steps.

  “Is there a problem with the path?” Karon asked, as I hesitated.

  “No,” I said, feeling foolish. “I just need to let my eyes adjust so I won’t trip over whatever may be inside. I must get a gardener out here to clear all this away.” I led him quickly into the leafy shadows. The air was close and smelled of rotting leaves, and our feet crunched on the matted vines.

  “Why are you afraid?” His voice penetrated the darkness like the beam of a lantern.

  “I’m not… not really. A silly thing from childhood.”

  “There’s nothing to fear.” His presence enfolded me.

  Less than fifty paces and we rounded the curve and emerged into the sunlight. “No,” I said, my voice trembling ever so slightly. “Nothing to fear. This was my mother’s garden.” I walked briskly, stopping only when I reached the lambina tree again. From the corner of my eye I could see Dassine hobbling slowly toward us. Not yet! Not even an hour had passed.

  Suddenly a quivering trace of enchantment pierced the morning, and the lambina burst into full bloom, each great yellow blossom unfolding like a miniature sunrise, its pungent fragrance wafting through the sharp air. In a few moments of wonder, the huge blossoms floated away like enormous, silken butterflies, only to be replaced by the soft white blooms of summer, heavy with sweet and languid scent, each cradled in its nest of bright green. And then the glorious dying, the white blossoms fading into burnished gold and the waxy green leaves into deep russet, falling at last to leave a royal carpet on the frozen ground.

  “Thank you,” I said, my breath taken away by the marvel. “That was lovely.”

  “It’s too cold to wake it completely, and I know I must be wary in this world, but I thought perhaps it might ease your sadness.”

  “And so it has.” I hadn’t meant for him to see my tears. Perhaps he would think they were for my mother. “You’ll come again to visit me?” Dassine was almost with us.

  “If my keeper allows it. I’d like it very-” Both voice and smile died away as he stared at my face. Knitting his brow, he touched my tears with his finger, and his expression changed as if I had grown wings or was a dead woman that walked before him. “Seri… you’re…” Pain glanced across his face, and the color drained out of him. Rigid, trembling, he whispered, “I know you.” He raised his hands to the sides of his head. “A beacon in darkness… Oh gods, so dark…” Eyes closed, head bent, he groaned and stepped backward. I reached out.

  “Do not!” commanded Dassine angrily, shoving me aside and grabbing Karon’s arm to steady him. “What have you done? What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Nothing that was forbidden. We walked and talked of the garden. Nothing of the past. He made the tree bloom for me.”

  Dassine laid his hands on Karon’s temples, murmuring words I couldn’t hear. Instantly, Karon’s face went slack. When his eyes flicked open again, they were fixed on the ground, and the light had gone out of them.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” I whispered.

  “As I said. It was not a good time to bring him. You are too strong an influence.” The old man took Karon’s arm. “Come, my son. Our time here is done. We’ve a hard journey home.” They started down the path toward the eastern wall.

  “Dassine!” I called after them. “Will he be all right?”

  “Yes, yes. He’ll be fine. It was my fault. It was too early, and I left him too long. A setback only.”

  Before I could bid him farewell or ask when they might come again, the two white figures disappeared into a flickering fog.

  CHAPTER 5

  Karon

  Surely I am the sorriest of madmen. These hands… they are not the hands that lifted the wine goblet to my father on the day he became the Lord of Avonar, my Avonar of the mundane world, the Avonar that is no more. The shape is wrong. They’re too large; the palms too wide. The hair on the backs of them too fair. This face… I peer into this placid pond that mimes so truly the tree and the stone beside me and. the clouds that travel these azure skies, and the face I see is not the face that looks back at me from the ponds that exist in my memory. And my left arm… only four scars. Into what reality did the hundreds of them vanish, each one a painful ecstasy so clearly remembered, each one a reminder of the gift I know is still a part of me? It is a loss beside which the loss of the limb itself would be no matter at all. Where has the first of them gone, the long, ragged one made when I embraced my dying brother and a future that terrified me-the day I first knew I was a Healer? With this gift I have brought people back from the dead.

  So. These are a stranger’s hands. Yet, I know their history, too. Know and feel and remember… They have been anointed with oil of silestia, that which consecrates the Heir of our ancient king, D’Arnath, to the service of his people. With them I raised the Preceptors of Gondai from their genuflections on the day I was made Prince of Avonar, this other Avonar that still lives. These hands wield a sword with the precision of a gem cutter and the speed of lightning. And they have taken life, a deed that fills my soul with revulsion.

  How is it possible that I’ve killed and thought it right? And I’m good at it and proud of my prowess…

  As I sat in Dassine’s garden, I pressed my hands-the stranger’s hands-to my face, digging the heels into my eye sockets so perhaps the world wouldn’t come apart on this bright, windy winter morning-or if it did, at least I wouldn’t see it. As always after a session with Dassine, my search for understanding had left me stranded on a mental precipice, facing… nothing. Absolutely nothing. If I stayed at the precipice too long, tried too hard to shape some coherent image in this gaping hole in my head, the universe would fall apart in front of me, not just in the mind’s realm, but the physical world, too. Jagged cracks of darkness would split whatever scene I looked on and break it into little fragments-a tree, a stone, a chair, my hand-and then, one by one, the fragments would fade and vanish into the abyss.

  The effort of holding the world together always felt as if it were tearing my eyes right out of my skull. Even worse than the physical discomfort was the paralyzing, suffocating horror that always accompanied it. And I knew in my very bones that if ever I let the whole world disappear, I would never find my way back. If I was capable of speech, I would beg Dassine to make it stop, to wipe clean all he had returned, to excise that mote of cold reason that told me I would never be whole until I knew everything.

  And what did my teacher, my companion, my keeper, answer when I begged his mercy? He would pat my throbbing head and remove my shaking hands from their desperate hold on his wrinkled robe, and say, “We’ve pushed a little too hard today. Take an extra hour’s rest before we begin again.” For, of course, my questioning, my feeble attempt to unravel the meaning of the person I was and the lives I had lived, was but the inevitable result of Dassine’s schooling.

  In my life as a Healer in the mundane world, I had once come upon a remote village where the inhabitants had discovered a tree whose fruit, dried and powdered and mixed with wine, gave them terrifying visions that they believed came from their gods. Drinking this potion also caused them to forget to eat and to care for themselves. When I found these people, the corpses of their starved, neglected children lay all about their village. The few adults who yet breathed were wasted with starva
tion and disease. Though they knew well that their insatiable foolishness had led them to this piteous state, they could not refuse the call of their gods. I understood them now. Even when so weary I could neither eat nor lift a cup, even when I wept from exhaustion and madness, neither could I refuse another taste of Dassine’s gift. Dassine-my master, my subject, my jailer, my healer, my tormentor.

  A cold gust caught the hood of my white robe, yanking it off my head and dumping the snow from a bare tree limb onto my neck. With leaden arms, I reached around and brushed off the snow, feeling a few icy droplets trickling down my back. Shivering, I drew my stranger’s hands into the folds of the wool robe. Who am I? What’s happened to me?

  “Come on. Time to sleep.” I hadn’t heard Dassine open the door.

  He had already disappeared back into the house, leaving the door open. He wouldn’t expect me to answer. Words were always an effort by this time. I rose and padded through the garden after him, shedding my flimsy sandals at the door. I needed the fresh air, even on such a cold day, to remind myself that a world existed beyond my broken mind. Our latest session had ended better than most. No panic. No raving. No begging.

  Once I’d stepped inside the house and closed off the world again, Dassine pointed to a cup of tea sitting on the table. “You shouldn’t go out on days like this. I don’t like you getting so cold.”

  I shook my head, refusing the tea and his worries in one efficient motion. In two heartbeats, I would be asleep and wouldn’t care.

  My bedchamber was a small, unadorned room that adjoined Dassine’s workroom. Its walls and floor were bare, constructed of thick stone that eliminated all vagary of noise or climate that might disturb its utter monotony. Despite its construction, the chamber was neither cave nor prison cell, for it was clean and dry, and had a large, unbarred window of thick but exceptionally clear glass, a bed and a washing table, and no door at all, only an empty opening to the cluttered workroom. The bed was comfortable, though I was never allowed a full night to enjoy it.