Restoration

by Carol Berg

  “Go to bed,” I said. “You’ll have done good service this day.”

  “You’ll be gone when I wake tomorrow, won’t you?”

  I smiled and touched his broad shoulder. “Only for a while. Keep yourself safe, and I’ll be here when you need me again.”

  “I’ve no experience of sorcery, save this strange traveling with the good Blaise and his kind,” said Feyd. “Will you ever explain this to me?”

  I fixed my eyes on the small figures far below me, hurrying about their evening tasks in the dusky gold light. “No,” I said. “I probably won’t. But don’t think it any lack in you. I am very grateful for your companionship.”

  “To serve you is my honor, holy lord, and I could wish for no more.” His weary steps receded, back up the hill to where his horse was waiting.

  Holy lord ... I wished they wouldn’t call me that. Absentmindedly I rubbed at my leather vest, trying to ease the soreness in my shoulder and wishing I could reach the middle of my back where my shirt was sticking to the seeping spear gouge. One advantage of fighting naked—your clothes couldn’t irritate the injuries. I pulled off the vest, threw it on the ground, and tugged at my shirt until it came unstuck.

  About the time the sky had faded from bronze to deep gray-blue, I saw the shadowy horseman ride into the settlement, and the inevitable lamps and torches gather around him like fireflies about a rain puddle. I shifted to falcon’s form, flew down the hill, and circled the crowd. A glimpse of the tall, slender woman near the center set me at ease. Soon thereafter, I pulled aside a flap of canvas, ducked my head, and walked into Elinor’s tent.

  The space was not large, scarcely enough for two pallets, a pile of leather saddle packs, and a small wooden chest. A strip of leather brushed my face as I stepped in. High above the chest hung a flat tin plate with a candle set on it. The candlelight revealed a sword belt hung from the roof pole, sheath and weapon well out of reach of a small child. The child himself lay sleeping on the pallet, his dark lashes resting on rose-gold cheeks, one fist drawn up under his chin, the other clutching a threadbare blanket. Only when I passed my hand over his face to rest on his dark hair did I feel the soft stir of his breathing. He was warm with bed and blanket, but not fevered. I took a deep breath, as I had not since I’d heard the word fever.

  A breeze found its way through the tent flap, causing the candle to flicker. I should leave before Elinor returned, but I could not will myself to move. So I sat beside the rumpled bed and watched my son sleep, trying to keep my thoughts at bay lest they somehow sully his innocent dreams.

  “What’s going on? Who are—? Seyonne!”

  The exclamation jolted me out of that peaceful confusion that is just beyond thought, yet just short of sleep. I blinked in the sudden brightness. Feyd must have drawn out his storytelling, for on the tin plate hanging above the wooden chest, the gasping candle flame floated on a puddle of wax. The brighter light glared from a battered oil lamp in Elinor’s hand.

  My hand still rested on Evan’s head. Only as I felt Elinor’s eyes on me did I notice the dried blood under my nails and in the creases of my skin. I quickly withdrew my hand. Was I forever to be steeped in blood when I encountered Elinor?

  “What are you doing? Is he all right?”

  Shaking my head and holding out empty hands, I stood up to go. I doubted Elinor truly wanted words from me, and even if I were permitted to speak, she would likely not believe the things I wished to say. And so I turned for one more look, a glimpse of beauty to fill my memory and of innocence to fill my soul, and then came near jumping out of my skin when a hand touched my back.

  “You’re bleeding.” It was not quite an accusation.

  I shook my head again and waited for her to move out of the doorway.

  “Let me look at it. The others will be back soon, and from what Feyd says, the healers will be busy.” She took down the tin plate, blew out the failing candle flame, and hung the lantern from the hook on the roof pole. “I didn’t know gods could bleed.”

  What use was there to protest, even if I could do so without speaking? We had fought this battle already. And indeed my human flesh betrayed me. Even copper-colored Ezzarian skin would reveal such throbbing heat as I felt in my face.

  Evidently Elinor misinterpreted my heightened color. “All right, I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. I never know what to say to you, Seyonne. You frighten me ...” This modest overture left me completely off guard, and so I did not resist when she took firm hold of my arm, spun me around, and pulled up my shirt. “... and yet—Stars of night!”

  Not a pleasant sight, I knew. Not with a raw, seeping wound right in the middle of a slave’s legacy of scars. I quickly yanked the tail of my shirt down again, held up one hand to signify that she needn’t say or do anything else, and with the other I moved her aside so I could get out of the suddenly sweltering tent. I did not meet her gaze, nor did I look over my shoulder to see if my back was truly on fire where her hand had so gently brushed my horrid skin.

  Somewhere between Elinor’s tent and Feyd‘s, the world went dark and disappeared.

  When I dragged my heavy eyes from the game board, Nyel and Kasparian had already moved to the far side of the room and stood talking quietly together. I did not wait to hear what they might have to say. Outside the wide-open doors, the moon was high, the night cool; the garden smelled of late summer herbs and drying leaves. Though I was physically tired, I had no desire to sleep. Food had been laid out on a table in Nyel’s sitting room, but I wasn’t hungry, either. I needed air, solitude, and time to think.

  I wandered down the gravel paths in the silver light and forced myself to go through it all again—the reasons I had to undergo this change. I had eased Aleksander’s dream-spoken fear by telling him that I would help him. And his chances of success were so slender, so impossible, that he needed every advantage I could bring him. Yet who could explain the consequences of even so benign an interference? What if my comfort had made him less cautious? What betrayal would he have felt, what loss, if I had failed to keep a promise so rashly given in the intimacy of his dream? And then there was the bloodshed. I had killed without remorse to protect those I loved, and would do so until they were safe. Truly I had no need to explore my reasons for accepting Nyel’s gift of power; their safety was everything. But experience told me that the human world would never be perfectly safe. Would I ever be able to stop killing?

  Nyel was right to insist on my isolation. Already the power I held was immense and my hunger for it almost uncontrollable; even as I thought of it my breath came short and my body spasmed with the desire to shift, to shed my constricting clothes and feel the surge of melydda. Yet what dangers did I risk, tangling such power with love and anger and fear? And could I bear the cost?

  Yes, that was the difficulty. I had known every kind of pain of both body and mind, yet seldom had I felt such piercing hurt as I had just experienced. My back yet burned with the touch of Elinor’s hand, a human hand that spoke more eloquently of kindness and forgiveness than any words. Was I willing to relinquish such contact? Could I do such a thing and remain whole? Perhaps this was the hard lesson Nyel was trying to teach me whenever his eyes filled with tears: that the price of power and destiny was certain to be pain and loss on a scale with his own.

  As I walked the paths of Nyel’s garden, lost in such uncomfortable musings, I began to feel nauseated. At first I thought that fear and moral discomfort were upsetting my empty stomach and making my hands clammy. Or perhaps the illness was some delayed response to the night’s hard fighting. When I began to feel dizzy and feverish as well, I thought the symptoms must be a reaction to the wound in my back. Maybe the injury was worse than I thought or the weapon had been tainted with poison. I decided to return to the castle.

  For the first time in an hour, I glanced up to get my bearings and realized that I was on the verge of walking straight into the wall, right at the point where a jagged line marked the crack in the stone facing. Though its positio
n was correct and the shape of the inky crack familiar, the flaw appeared narrower than before, and the tracery of smaller lines extending from it no more than surface imperfections. Curious. But I could not pursue an investigation on this night. I felt near collapse.

  I reversed course and staggered toward the lights of the fortress, only to find the wave of sickness receding as quickly as it had come. By the time I reached the path that led to the steps, I felt hale again. Even the gouge in my back no longer nagged at me. I stopped for a moment and stared at my hands. Dry. Steady. In fact—I stepped into the light and turned them over to be sure—the scars on my hands had vanished, including the callused ridges about my wrists left by Derzhi slave rings. A quick examination told me that all my other scars remained where I expected them. But every mark on my hands was gone.

  I was still unsettled when Nyel walked out onto the broad porch. His straight, slender form was cast into silhouette by the brightly lit doorway behind him, leaving his features in darkness. Which face did he wear this night? His voice sounded youthful as he called, “Are you not tired, lad? Or hungry? Do you not need a bed after such a grueling adventure?”

  “I don’t want to sleep yet.”

  “Then let’s talk.” He walked down the steps past me and across a small lawn, settling onto a stone bench that overlooked a pond. On the still black water floated the yellowing leaves of pond lilies. Though his back was to me, I could hear the old sorcerer clearly. “Tell me about your son.”

  A chill that was no remnant of my brief illness danced across my back. Why was I so sure Nyel wished me well? “My son is none of your concern.”

  “Everything of your life is a concern to me. Did you think I didn’t know of the child? I first learned of him when you lay dying, and now I’ve seen him through your eyes. A beautiful boy. What hopes you must have for him. You need have no secrets from me.”

  Easy for him to say, who had a treasure house of secrets. “Perhaps I’ll tell you of my son when you tell me of yours.” His son ... his jailer.

  In the space of a heartbeat, winter settled on that autumn garden. In frigid silence Nyel rose and walked away, abandoning his questions and mine.

  CHAPTER 38

  Over the next weeks I had no time to consider either the unsettling exchange with Nyel or the inner questioning that had preceded it. Nyel did not mention my son again and showed no further signs of displeasure. I continued my work with dreams, though only for an hour or two a day. Nyel said he needed time to prepare for the enchantments that would effect my change. He gave no hints as to the timing, method, or duration of that event, only promised once again that I would be given a choice at every step. Mundane occupations like eating and sleeping seemed to demand less and less of my time, but the hours were filled to bursting, nonetheless. Though he did not respond to my particular questions, Nyel made sure I did not lack for answers.

  He set me to reading his library of scrolls—histories of the Madonai, their tales and poetry and learnings. Theirs had been a rich life, pondering the mysteries and beauties of the universe. A life of adventure, exploring their wide and varied world from mountaintop to ocean’s depth, vying with wild creatures of varieties not known in my own world. A life of study, examining the growth and change of animals and plants, the marvels of weather and storm, the nature of color and art, the nuances of music and its effect upon the soul. Days of reading and I had touched but a particle in the vastness of their knowledge.

  In other hours, my mentor provided certain enchantments for me to try—the simplest ones that did not require the full power of a Madonai. With Kasparian to initiate the working and Nyel to guide me, I spent one entire day exploring the world within a tree. Floating in the veins of life that threaded its body, I traveled from root to trunk to branch to stem to leaf. I walked the rings of growth that told its history, of years of drought and plentiful rain, of fire and storm and blight. Sitting within the green world of a single leaf, I experienced the pulsing, infinitesimal unfolding of its growing; I felt the sun’s hot caress upon my back and tasted the liquor of life. I emerged from the enchantment awed with its power, beauty, and mind-stretching understanding. The smell, the taste, the feel of that tree, the life that set it apart from every other, had become such an intimate part of me that I could truthfully say, I am oak—thisone of all oaks in all worlds. I could have spoken its name if tongue and lips could have articulated such a word.

  “Was it well-done?” said Nyel, his gray brows knitted together, his old young eyes probing as I sat on the grass under the canopy of that tree, lit by the double-sized moon. “I cannot follow you into these places as I can through the dreams. Such workings are forbidden me.” Forbidden—because his name had been taken away, the conduit of the soul that enabled the use of power. A dreadful thing, to strip a man of his name, so that even those who knew him would forget, all encounters and relationships fading like dew at noonday. When the person died, all trace of his existence would die with him, wiped from the scrolls of history as if he had never been.

  “Well-done. Very well,” I said. “No matter what else happens between us, Nyel, I thank you for this. I never imagined ...”

  “To experience the infinite varieties of life ... yes, I thought you’d like that. Every journey such a wonder. Beauty and complexity to grow the mind and enlarge the soul. And all of it waiting for you,” he said, smiling, the first genuine pleasure I had seen in him since my return to Kir‘Navarrin. “I can teach you a thousand more such workings. I’ve waited so long to share them with you.”

  As in our first encounter, his smile transformed him. But unlike the first time, I did not drop my eyes. Rather I tried to probe that figure of beauty and wisdom and power much as I had explored the oak, to travel the paths of his thoughts, to unravel the mysteries of his intentions. But I had not the power, and the vision soon faded. Nyel was but a lean, gray-haired man with marvelous eyes, eyes that were filled with kindness and love and long-held sorrow.

  I told myself that he was mad, and so these things I felt from him were surely some false creation. But I was a Warden, trained to see and feel the truth within the soul, and he was not false. Everything he expressed was reflected in me, as if I were a mirror of his heart. And so I was forced back to the question. “Nyel, please tell me why I’m here. Why me?”

  His smile vanished, and he would not answer.

  Every few days, between my studies and enchantments, I would traverse the ocean of dreams and return to Aleksander by way of my dreamer. The Bek rescue and Gan Hyffir raid had been successful, a needed victory, a tale that would take on its own life and spread throughout the Empire. The Prince had sent Bohdan to Edik just as I had delivered him, naked and bound. At risk of their own lives, four warriors of the Bek had pledged to throw the brute at the Emperor’s feet, leaving Edik with a cruel dilemma. Would he give Bohdan up to the Hamraschi, risking his alliance with the powerful Rhyzka, or would he refuse his Hamrasch allies their blood price, risking the same vengeance that had fallen on Aleksander? Along with Bohdan, the Bek warriors presented Edik with one more gift—a falcon’s feather. No one in Zhagad would fail to know its meaning. The Denischkar falcon was in flight. Aleksander was coming.

  Gan Hyffir was a foothold, but a precarious one, and its winning left Aleksander with his own dilemma. The battles at Syra, Taíne Horet, and Gan Hyffir had cost him no less than fifty of his best fighters, as well as more than a hundred and fifty others dead. Though the Bek were a valuable ally, they brought no more warriors to Aleksander’s side, for the small Derzhi house had agreed to take on the difficult task of retaking northern Manganar, with the understanding that they were to train Yulai and Terlach’s Manganar troops to fight beside them. They would need every man they could muster to withstand the Rhyzka, not to mention whatever retribution Edik sent from Zhagad. Unless he found more fighters quickly, Aleksander would run out of soldiers with his war scarcely begun.

  The answer was Blaise. Aleksander asked the shapeshifter to take o
n the task of recruiting fighters to the cause. The move was brilliant. Blaise’s strength had always been his passion and commitment rather than his sword arm or his strategies, and now he carried word to the Manganar and Suzai and Thrid that the Aveddi had raised the banner of their lost realms and fought shoulder to shoulder with their own lords. Over the next weeks, as I watched the ragtag bands of ironmongers and shepherds, drovers and farm girls arrive in Zif‘Aker, all of them both terrified and determined, I knew that Blaise had found his proper calling.

  As for more skilled recruits, the Prince devised a plan for that, too. Lord Sereg, the well-spoken and intelligent Bek fourth lord, had chosen to remain with Aleksander. Before many days had passed, Sereg and Roche were off to speak to the Mardek in Karn‘Hegeth, to the Fozhet in Vayapol, and to the other minor houses who had promised to support Aleksander if he could prove that anyone else was with him. Sereg himself would stand as the proof, while carrying the message that Aleksander was fighting not for the throne of the Derzhi Empire, but for a newly forming vision of the world.

  While Blaise and Sereg expanded his army, Aleksander took up raiding again, causing Derzhi nobles and their henchmen many a nervous night. Everything he knew of politics and grievance throughout the Empire he used to choose his objectives. We kidnapped tax collectors, not the cruelest of their ilk, but ones who could be convinced by fright, mystery, and a touch of royal persuasion to forego their exorbitant overcollection, thus easing the burdens that caused local merchants to starve out their poorest customers. Rather than attacking individual slave caravans, we hit the three trading centers in the desert that spawned them, thereby disrupting the vile traffic between the more recently conquered territories and the heart of the Empire. We raided a Veshtar camp where spies had reported the sons and daughters of the Naddasine were kept in cages. From my perch on a spit of rock overlooking the bloody remnants of that battle, I watched Aleksander oversee the release of two hundred slaves, offering his own hand to gaunt scarecrows who could scarcely move and his own waterskin to walking corpses half mad with thirst. Secret grain stores, disputed lands, an armory owned by a divided family, a horse merchant hoarding prize breeding stock ... all the tenderest spots in the Empire were ripe targets.