Guardians of the Keep

by Carol Berg

  He was quiet for a long time after I was done, then shook his head slowly. “Blazes . . . that is the damnedest story. I’ve got to think on it a while before I can even know what to think. Some of it’s clear enough, but some . . . Why did you think this wicked prince that was really your da killed your nurse? I didn’t see that.”

  “It was obvious. It’s why Seri brought him to Comigor, to take her revenge on Lucy and Papa. And it was his knife that did it. I saw it.”

  “But that was in your dream you saw his knife. I’ve seen horses fly in dreams.”

  I didn’t like him questioning me. “Your head’s in a muddle. I don’t expect you to understand. And I don’t know why I babbled all of this to someone who doesn’t know the word for boots.”

  “It’s true. I don’t got half your brains, and what brain I’ve got is full of horse muck.”

  “You must be about horses like I am about sword fighting. You’d like to be the best at it, wouldn’t you? At training them and knowing about them. I’ll bet you’d like to run a stable of the best horses there were anywhere.”

  He screwed his swollen face into a frown. “I never told nobody that. You didn’t go picking at my head, did you?”

  “No. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I appreciate that. Gives me the crawlies to think on it.” About that time a faint buzz in my head told me it was second watch, about two hours before dawn. “Do you want to sleep for a while? I should go soon, and once I do, it’ll be harder for you.”

  “No need. I can sleep anywhere. It’s an advantage when you’re born low. Go ahead and put me back.”

  I tied him back up to the wall, trying to duplicate the way the warrior had fixed him. “I can’t come in the morning, you know,” I said.

  “It’s all right. It was a better night than I expected.” He was asleep before I shut the gate.

  It had been foolish for me to do what I’d done, but I felt a little better than I had in a while. When I went to the stable the next afternoon for my riding lesson, I wandered past Firebreather’s stall. The boy wasn’t there anymore. Two days passed before I saw him again, mucking out a stall, still bruised and scratched, but otherwise looking no worse for the experience. I looked right through him, and he didn’t turn his head.

  CHAPTER 36

  Seri

  Dia and I had both been summoned to service in the Gray House. We still slept in the dormitory with the sewing women, but instead of the sewing room, we reported to the Gray House scullery each morning at sunrise. A sour-faced Drudge named Gar assigned us to our duties, Dia to light the fires, prepare food for the Drudges, and deliver graybread to the slaves twice a day. I spent my days with a pail and rags, scrubbing floors and railings, polishing brass, scraping candle wax, and wiping layer upon layer of red dust from everything. It was a change from sewing, at least, and allowed me to see a great deal of what went on in that house. I was assigned to the lower floors, while two other Drudges cleaned in Gerick’s apartments. Just as well for the present. There was always a risk he would recognize me.

  I saw him for the first time on my second day in the house. My task of the morning was to scrub a tiled passage that opened onto one of the inner courtyards. The dawn provided scarcely enough light for me to see what I was doing. In the way of Drudges and slaves, I shrank back into the shadows at the ring of approaching footsteps. Gerick strode past me and into the yard.

  Though his build was still slender, he had grown two hands taller and his shoulders and upper arms had filled out. A green singlet exposed his deeply tanned arms, and his brown breeches, leggings and boots were well fitted. Alone in the fencing yard, he removed his sword belt, hung it on a hook on the wall, and began to warm up. His movements were like a ritual dance, done to no music I could hear.

  He was beautiful. His shining hair fell softly about his sun-bronzed face as he stretched and spun, a few thin braids dangling in front of each ear, and even as his exercise grew faster and more violent, he showed no signs of the awkwardness one might expect from a boy so young. His features were composed, peaceful, his mind seemingly focused inward . . . until a Zhid warrior appeared across the courtyard.

  “What shall we work on today, young Lord?” asked the newcomer. “You fall short in so many areas, it’s hard to know where to begin. Every day, it seems, our greatest challenge is to decide what you’re worst at.”

  Gerick’s only response was to halt his exercise, buckle his sword belt about his waist, and stand waiting, his face now cold and expressionless.

  Throughout the morning the swordmaster continued in this manner, casting insults, taunts, and humiliation. Gerick did as he was told, repeating moves a hundred times with no complaint, no argument, and no change in his haughty demeanor.

  The stone walls of the passageway became a furnace as the sun grew high. The fencing yard would be worse, as it had no scrap of shade, but the rigor of the training exercises did not diminish. At mid-morning Gerick donned his leather practice armor, and a slave was brought to spar with him. The swordmaster faulted Gerick’s every move. Whenever he wished to pause the match, the Zhid would use a whip on the slave, a lithe, quick youth of eighteen or so.

  After the third time the slave was left gasping in the dust by the swordmaster’s lash, Gerick spoke tightly. “If you have some reason to kill this slave, then do so and bring in another.”

  “Shall I direct this practice like a nursery, then?” snarled the Zhid. “Childish sensibilities have no place in true warfare. Is this the weakness of your blood showing itself?”

  Gerick strolled over to a barrel and drank deeply from a copper dipper. Then he returned to the sneering Zhid, who stood leaning against the wall. Almost before one could see it, Gerick had a knife pressed up against the swordmaster’s ribs. “You will direct my practice the way you think best, but if you ever speak to me in that way again, I will carve out your liver and have you staked out right here until your skin cracks like an unoiled boot. I’ve done it before with those who crossed me. Consider it.”

  As quickly as he had unsheathed it, Gerick put away his knife, returned to the slave who waited in the center of the yard, and raised his sword in a ready stance. His face was expressionless again. There was no sign the incident had ever occurred.

  The Zhid did not lash the slave again. When he wished the match to stop, he brought up a wooden staff between the two boys. One might think him chastened by his pupil’s rage, unless you saw his smirk when Gerick’s back was turned.

  I had come near scrubbing grooves in the stones at the wide entry to the fencing yard. As I moved on down the passage, I could no longer see the yard, but the clash of weapons and the shouted instructions of the swordmaster continued throughout the morning. It was difficult to associate the cold-eyed youth in the fencing yard with the child I had met at Comigor. Even such a brief glimpse revealed a great deal that I didn’t want to know. No need to hear the deepening timbre of his voice to know there was nothing of the child about him any longer.

  Gerick trained in the fencing yard almost every morning. Even if I wasn’t cleaning an area that allowed me a view, I would walk by, if only to catch a glimpse of him. I had no idea how to approach him. All midnight imaginings of revealing myself to a terrified child, grateful to be rescued from a villainous captivity, had crumbled on that first morning. And the days that followed did nothing to reverse my failing hopes.

  Late one afternoon a ferocious wind storm hit the fortress, a howling, choking tempest of red sand that could flay human or beasts. Gerick was in the stableyard when a horse broke from its tether, driven wild by the whirling sand. A young slave yanked Gerick aside, dragging him to the ground as the horse reared and kicked and galloped out of the yard. The slave had saved Gerick from certain injury, yet, once back on his feet, Gerick knocked the youth to the ground with the back of his hand and kicked him viciously. “Touch me again, and I’ll cut off your hands,” he said to the cowering youth.

  On another day the entire household wa
s called out to the Lords court. We gathered in awkward assembly—Drudges, slaves, Zhid—to witness the lashing of a Zhid warrior, one of the house guards whom Gerick had found asleep at his post. The Zhid was bound to an iron frame. Gerick gave the warrior two lashes, and then turned the whip over to a burly Zhid. Cold and imperious, Gerick watched as ten more lashes were administered, and the torn and bleeding warrior was dragged away.

  My companions chided me for my tears. “The guard deserved his punishment,” said Dia. “What if someone had come to harm the young Lord? The Worships have their duties just like us.”

  I didn’t tell her that it was not for the Zhid I wept.

  I quickly lost my fear that Gerick might recognize me. He took absolutely no notice of any servant, whether Drudge or slave. Two slaves were always within range of his call, but never did I see him acknowledge their existence by word or glance. It might have been the wind that fastened his cloak about him before he went out in the evening, or the weight of the air that deposited a cup into his hand at the end of his sword practice. Several times he came close to stepping on my hand as he walked past me, and once I rounded a corner and came near running into him. I was shaken, as his face was now almost on a level with mine, but his eyes never wavered from his destination, and he made no response to my mumbled apologies. I feared I might be too late to save him.

  Then came a morning when I walked past the fencing yard, but did not see Gerick, only the swordmaster, fuming, his hands on his hips. “You, woman. Yes, you, dolt,” he shouted angrily to me. “Go to the young Lord’s chambers and find out why he leaves me here waiting. Be back apace or I’ll have you whipped.”

  When I reached the top of the stair, a slave informed me that the young Lord had injured his knee and would not be attending his lessons. I reported this to the swordmaster, who summoned the surgeon. From the shadowed corners of Gerick’s apartments, I watched the Zhid Healer work his vile perversion of Dar’Nethi healing. The air grew heavy and dim, laden with the foulness of that enchantment.

  Gerick threw Mellador out of his rooms, forcing the surgeon to carry the dead slave himself rather than wait for others to remove him. When Gerick was alone, he began speaking—to himself, I thought. But the oppressive air made me think of the Lords’ house, and the jewels in his ear gleamed bright and hot through the murk. He was speaking with the Lords.

  After a moment, he gave a quick shudder, and looked around the room as if he had just returned from some other place. I didn’t move, but he caught sight of me, registering no more surprise than if I’d been a convenient chair or table. “Tell my slaves they’re wanted in my bathing room.”

  I made my genuflection, but before starting down the steps, I looked back and saw my son standing alone in the center of his fine room. He had wrapped his arms tightly about himself and was shivering violently, as if he stood in the snows of Cer Dis rather than in the heart of the blazing desert. My heart clenched fiercely. He was not yet theirs.

  CHAPTER 37

  V’Saro

  My existence in Zhev’Na was little different from that in the desert camp. The pen itself was identical, though only five of the cells were occupied. The rules were the same. The food was the same. The stench . . . the vile washing sink . . . the storage building and surgeon’s room with iron rings in its stone walls . . . the blazing furnace of the sun that sapped the body and spirit . . . the bitter nights . . . the unending fighting, blood, and death . . . the collar . . . that, too, unchanged.

  The only difference was the quality and prestige of my opponents. They were the highest-ranking officers in Ce Uroth, and therefore the finest warriors, for the Zhid had no other criteria for advancement. I no longer had to run in place at the end of the day to make sure I was exhausted enough to sleep. Staying alive required everything I had.

  Staying sane was something else again. Only the nagging voices in my head kept me holding on, though I tried my best to silence them. Everything seemed to be slipping away from me—my identity, my memories, my life—while my strange and terrible dreams were taking on the harder edges of reality. Who could not view such happenings as madness?

  I squatted beside the stone sink, where I had just washed off the dried sweat and blood from the previous day to prepare for my morning’s opponent, a seasoned warrior named Gabdil. Gabdil’s slavehandler was late fetching me, so my tether chain had been fastened to a ring in the wall, and I was left shivering in the chill shadows of dawn, dully pondering how I was going to stay warmed up. I could afford no disadvantage with Gabdil.

  From outside the gate came a woman’s voice, asking the guards where she could find the slavekeeper. “I’ve a message from the chamberlain in the Gray House. A slave sparring with the young Lord has been wounded in the foot and needs to be brought back here. The house slavekeeper has no men to spare for the task.”

  I shot to my feet, my heart racing as it never did when I was fighting. It wasn’t that I’d not heard a woman’s voice in my time in Ce Uroth. A few female servants and slaves worked about the camps, and a surprising number of women could be found among the Zhid warriors. But this particular voice ripped through my head like a sharpened ax.

  “Keeper’s through the door there to the left, across from the cistern,” said the guard.

  I glimpsed only the back of her as she walked through the gate and into the room where the stores of graybread and tunics were kept. She wore the black skirt, brown tunic, and red kerchief of a Drudge. My cursed tether was too short, and I came near choking myself trying to get a better view. When the voice of Gabdil’s aide growled outside in the courtyard, panic bade me devise some ruse to prevent me being taken until the woman reappeared. But she finished her business quickly. When she walked out of the storehouse, the full light of dawn fell through the barred gate onto her face. Only five heartbeats . . . maybe ten . . . but I knew her, and knew she had no relationship to a swordmaster from Sen Ystar . . . and neither had I.

  The fantasy of V’Saro’s life crumbled in that instant, but before I could even begin to sort through the rubble, the Zhid slavehandler dragged me out to the sparring ground. Gabdil, a warrior with a reach a handspan longer than my own and upper arms as thick as my thighs, had already killed a slave that week, a man who had survived three months in Zhev’Na.

  Forget the woman, I told myself. If you don’t pay attention, you won’t live to learn anything.

  A hundred times that day the woman’s voice echoed in my mind, and her face floated before me in the glare. Brutally I forced myself to concentrate. In our initial sparring, I took a deep cut in my arm—happily not my sword arm—and Gabdil complained that I wasn’t as good as he’d been told. Fortunately, the rest of the day was restricted training, a set of patterned practice moves endlessly repeated, working on flow and control and fluid transitions between stances. There were ample opportunities to get hacked or skewered, but it was not as likely as in full combat when an instant’s lapse could mean your life.

  In mid-afternoon I was returned to the slave pen, trembling with fatigue, not from the work, which had been light as my days went, but from the sheer effort of concentration. The surgeon assigned to this slave pen set about stitching my arm, but I scarcely noticed, for as soon as I allowed my thoughts to wander, the world came into sharp and terrible focus, and I knew what a wicked predicament I was in. I remembered the woman’s name and my own, and was already beginning to retrace the events that had placed the anointed Heir of D’Arnath so abjectly at the mercy of his enemies.

  The slavemaster had died in his bath. Ludicrous. No wonder the news of it had thrown me—V’Saro—into such despair, for Gernald the Slavemaster, the Zhid whose soul Dassine had healed so long ago, had been the key to Exeget’s plan. Slowly, cruelly, carefully, over the years, Gernald had worked himself into a position of power in Ce Uroth, an impregnable position, so that he could safely open a portal to Avonar itself, knowing that such a breach in the armor of the Zhid might someday make all the difference in our long war.
And then, at the very culmination of his long endeavors, his heart had given out, and he had slipped under the soapy water, stranding all of us in bondage.

  The plan had been ingenious, though to believe Exeget and Gar’Dena could transfer me out of the council chamber before I was dead required a great deal of trust on my part. To let me die again would be an enormous risk, and neither of them was a true Healer. But their enchantments had worked flawlessly. In four days I was completely recovered and living happily in Sen Ystar, trying to rebuild a life that had never existed. Then came the attack, and the desert, and the collar.

  I was never supposed to be sealed into the collar, of course. Gernald was to be waiting for V’Saro, the swordmaster of Sen Ystar, who was to be given a seal that would leave his powers intact, and who was to have his temporary identity removed so that he would know what he was about. But the slavemaster had died in his bath, and I was left as V’Saro the slave, who had terrible dreams and believed he was going mad. And the fourteenth day had long passed.

  Seri was here. Gods have mercy. I had assumed that the two who were to receive my signal and provide the information I needed to rescue my son were others like Gernald. But Seri, too, had been caught in Gernald’s disaster, abandoned in this villainous place, and my son had been left to the Lords’ mentoring for almost a year.

  “Your scars tell me you’ve had much worse wounds than this, V’Saro, and much less skilled care. Why do you look like death itself tonight? Is my needle too dull?”

  I just shook my head.

  Exeget had found it necessary to explain fifty times over why we couldn’t seize my son from the council chamber. As the man and boy had come together as suppliant to the Preceptorate, Ce’Aret and Ustele would not consider separating them, insisting that such interference would be a violation of our law. And neither Exeget nor Gar’Dena understood Darzid—who he was or what was the extent of his power. But their greatest concern lay with the jewels, the link between the boy’s mind and the Lords. Take him by force in the council chamber, and the Three would destroy him, or, if they had already corrupted him sufficiently, he could possibly channel all the power of the Lords into the very heart of Avonar. Listen, watch, observe, they had told me. Anything more was too great a risk. Stealth and surprise would get him back. A quick strike into the heart of the Lords’ stronghold. Stupid, how things work out.