Restoration

by Carol Berg

  He was right. I owed him everything, and so, against all intent, I told him everything. As the purple shadows lengthened across the dunes, I spoke of Kerouan and Valdis and Verdonne, of traveling in dreams and the bargain that allowed me to participate in his war, of the crumbling wall and my unquenchable craving for sorcery. I told him of my dilemma: how I could neither allow mad Kerouan to keep his power nor risk him recouping it from me in displeasure, how I could not slay the old sorcerer and keep the power myself without ensuring my own corruption, certain that if I violated my demon’s warnings while I possessed the unfettered melydda of a Madonai, I would become the tyrant to end all tyrants. “... and so I had to take the power and die with it. Your promise was my only hope, and dragging Evan into danger and trusting Blaise and Elinor to witness to my change were the only ways I could think of to convince you. Thanks to Kasparian, we were given another choice. And in the end ... seeing you and Elinor there ... thinking of Evan ... I had enough memory of my true life and enough reason to know that I did not want to continue without feeling. I could see no point to such an existence, no matter how long. Unlike Kerouan’s expectation, I would have felt no satisfaction in killing you or any human. So I told him I would give him back his name, if he would take back what he had given and die with it ...” My voice trailed away much as the sunlight was fading from the sky.

  “And you were left—Oh, mighty gods, Seyonne. You have no melydda.”

  I brushed the sand from my hands and from my boots. “Not a scrap.” I tried to smile it away. “It feels a bit more final than before, when I was a slave. But you never know.” The loss itself was bearable. I had lived powerless for many years. But it was very hard that I would never be able to show my son how to enchant a light with his fingers or to fly with him through the heavens and catch him if he fell. “I appreciate your concern, but you mustn’t worry. My father lived a blessed life without melydda. I’ll not spend the rest of mine mourning a gift that most people never dream of.”

  “Like lost empires?”

  I grinned. “But you’ll not rot in some Thrid jungle, either.”

  “Indeed.” He sighed and twisted his face into a rueful grimace, still laced with worry about me.

  Only one sure path to get him off this morbid sympathy. I had told him so much; I might as well tell him the other thing. “As long as you are dredging up my deepest secrets, I’ve one more to confess.”

  “Which is?”

  “I walked out with a woman last night. Just walked, talked a bit, nothing else. But last summer you made me promise to tell you whenever the great day came.”

  Aleksander stared at me in wonderment and then exploded into laughter, flopping onto his back and clapping his hands to his head.

  “I didn’t think it was all that unlikely,” I said, a bit miffed at the level of his hilarity.

  “Athos be praised,” he said when he finally regained control of his humor. “She finally got you to look at her and not just the boy. Gods, you didn’t take him along with you when you walked out?”

  “Blaise watched him,” I said, wondering if I would ever be able to surprise Aleksander with anything short of the destruction of the world. “And what do you mean ‘got me to look at her’? She’s despised me for a year.”

  We talked into the midnight hours, Aleksander shooing his worried guards away with a message for his wife and another for his aides, saying that business could wait until sunrise. At last, as the moon settled onto the silvered desert, our conversation slowed, and, knowing our hour had long passed, we stood to go. I watched from the crest of the dune as he sprang onto his horse and started down toward his kingdom. He looked back once and raised his hand. “Be healed, my guardian, and happy.”

  And I called after him. “Be wise, my king, and glorious.”

  Before another week had passed, Elinor, Evan, and I set out for Ezzaria. Blaise left us at the border, the rocky cleft that would lead us over the mountains and down into the green and sheltering forests. He would have led us all the way to my destination, the nameless settlement where my mother, the Weaver, and my father, the farmer, had taught me how to live, but I wanted to savor every step and introduce Elinor and Evan to every rock and tree along the path. We took a week to travel the rest of the distance, and never had I known days of such peace and delight.

  Now midsummer has come and gone, and on this starlit night I sit alone beside a steaming pool, deep in the forests of Ezzaria. The pool is very like the one in Dael Ezzar, where my old mentor helped me rediscover the melydda I believed lost in my years as a slave. Today I tried to step into the scalding water, calling on my senses to protect me long enough to endure immersion, a good first lesson in preparation for true sorcery. For the fiftieth time, I failed, though I think perhaps this failure was slightly less abject than the previous forty-nine attempts. Faith links the senses to one’s power, so Galadon taught me. And so I must have faith that someday the rains will fill the dry watercourses of my soul, allowing that part of me to live again. Tomorrow I’ll come back and step into the pool once more. Or perhaps the day after.

  Meanwhile my days are filled with quiet joys. I’ve begun to teach my people of our beginnings and to write down the story, so we will always remember. Come autumn, I’ll return to Kir‘-Navarrin and have Kasparian tell me more.

  Blaise reports that some of the rai-kirah who remain in Kir‘-Navarrin are shaping bodies again, though a number have bade farewell to their comrades and walked into the gamarand wood. The rai-kirah say that these have unshaped even their light-drawn forms and returned their true being to the land. The tower has crumbled to dust, and no one has seen anything of the Lady. The woodland thrives.

  Catrin and Hoffyd’s black-haired daughter, Chloe, was born demon-joined. Two more Ezzarian children have been born since Chloe, and they, too, are whole. Elinor looks to become our newest mentor, telling these parents stories of Blaise’s and Farrol’s childhood, and preparing them—and me—to manage childish shapeshifting. Elinor and Evan remind me every day of the richness of life, and I regret no choice that I have made. But after my experiences of the past few years, a man cannot but consider ...

  Had I given up the chance to be a god, to learn answers that those of us born in the human world have yearned to know since the beginning of time? Was Kerouan himself a god in the days before his madness? And if not Verdonne and not Valdis and not Kerouan, then whose hand has shaped us? And if not in Tyrrad Nor, then where are the gods and how are we to learn of them? I contemplate these things as I walk these beloved hills and forests and struggle to learn again from the beginning. I have found no answers as yet.

  But, of course, in the end, the exact truth of it doesn’t matter. My child and his mother hold me fast in their love, and I am set free to think and remember. I think of Blaise, sharing his sublime and passionate wholeness with the hungry world. I remember Sovari and Malver, W‘Assani and Galadon, Farrol and young Kyor, and, yes, Ysanne, too, offering life itself to sustain us. I watch Fiona, determined and stubborn, guiding my beloved Ezzaria into a new service. And I imagine Aleksander, riding his desert kingdom, bearing the weight of our lives and safety upon his strong shoulders, sheltering us all under his mantle of light. It is, after all, tales of strength and honor and purpose that reflect the true glory of the gods, no matter who they are and where they may reside.

  Verdonne was a beauteous woodland maid, a mortal, who caught the eye and heart of the god who ruled the forest lands of earth. The lord of the forest took Verdonne to wife, and she bore him a child, a fair and healthy son named Valdis. And the mortals who lived in the lands of trees rejoiced at the alliance between their own kind and the gods.

  The forest god grew jealous of the love the woodland people bore for Valdis, angry at the thought that this boy-half mortal-might someday steal his throne, and the god plotted to kill the child and all the mortals who loved him so. The grieving Verdonne, unable to persuade her husband of Valdis’s guileless nature, sent the boy into the
sheltering trees to save him, and she herself took up a sword and set herself between the god and the world of mortal men.

  Verdonne battled with the god all the years as their son grew to manhood. The cruel god stripped his wife of her clothes to shame her, melted her sword to taunt her weakness, and burned the fields and forests around her so that she would have no sustenance. “Yield,” bellowed the forest god. “I will not sully my sword with mortal blood. ” But Verdonne would not yield.

  The elemental spirits, who ordinarily care nothing for the affairs of gods or mortals either one, watched as the mortal woman challenged the mighty god. They marveled at her courage and took pity on Verdonne. They gave her sunlight as her cloak when the god took her clothes, and thunder and lightning for her weapons when he melted her sword. They gave her rain to wash her wounds, wind to bear her up, and fire to sustain her.

  “Yield, ” bellowed the forest god. “You are mortal, and when you die I will have my way. You have no hope. ” But Verdonne would not yield.

  Then came the day when Valdis reached his manhood and laid his strong hand upon his mother’s shoulder. Verdonne smiled and stepped aside, and Valdis wrenched his father’s sword away and stripped his father of his power. But instead of keeping these things for his own, he laid them at his mother’s feet. “You have shown your people the selfless strength and faithfulness of a true sovereign ruler. These are rightly yours. ”

  Verdonne ruled the sweet forest lands until she grew tired, for her body was mortal. But Valdis honored her and made her immortal, and even unto this day she rules the forests of the earth and he remains her strong right arm.

  Valdis built a magic fortress, a prison furnished with beauty and comfort, and because Valdis would not be a father-slayer, he locked his immortal father away in that fortress. And the young god took his father’s name from him and destroyed it, so that no man or woman could invoke it ever again. But woe to the man who unlocks the prison of the Nameless God, for there will be such a wrath of fire and destruction laid upon the earth as no mortal being can imagine. And it will be called the Day of Ending, the last day of the world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Though Carol Berg calls Colorado her home, her roots are in Texas in a family of teachers, musicians, and railroad men. She has a degree in mathematics from Rice University and one in computer science from the University of Colorado, but managed to squeeze in minors in English and art history along the way. She has combined a career as a software engineer with her writing, while also raising three sons. She lives with her husband at the foot of the Colorado mountains.