A strange look passed over Elise's pretty features.
"She is doing well, far better than she did either in her brother's care or in her sister's."
"A compliment to you," Derian offered gallantly when Elise seemed reluctant to continue.
"I wish I were so certain," Elise replied. "Certainly she weeps less and has nearly given up her hysterical fitsùincluding those where she draws so deeply into herself that it is as if she sees or hears nothing. Only occasionally does she make one of those odd comments."
"Odd comments?"
Elise laughed a trifle uneasily.
"I forgot, you haven't seen her. Citrine has been given to making comments that on face value seem to mean nothing. Later, however, they almost always prove to mean something."
She told him about the hole in the road.
"There were other such comments as well," she continued. "At Eagle's Nest Castle, Citrine kept some of her regular attendants quite on edge. Ninette learned from a rather indiscreet bit of gossip that it was being put about that Citrine had inherited some sorcerous talent from her mother."
Despite himself, Derian felt uneasy.
"But you say Citrine is all right now?" he asked, and hated himself for sounding so in need of reassurance.
Elise didn't appear to notice.
"Maybe not 'all right,'" she replied, "but at least much better. Citrine says she likes the idea of disguising herself as a New Kelvinese child. She even said she hopes to help us, that 'No one notices a child or watches what they say around one.'"
"It sounds as if you have done well by her," Derian said, feeling Elise needed reassurance.
"Not me so much as Doc," Elise replied with a smile that was momentarily so unguarded and so warm that Derian was assured that, whatever else had passed between these two the winter before, Elise's feelings had not much changed.
"At first Citrine was furious at Doc," Elise continued. "Then she underwent a gradual change of humor, as if seeking to prove Doc wrong. Today she is hard at work with Wendee and Grateful Peace, designing her costume."
"Have they found a way to deal with that gemstone?" Derian asked, thinking that it would little matter how they disguised Citrine if her identity was proclaimed by the presence of the gleaming gem, especially since the New Kelvinese practice of shaving the front several inches of hair meant that the forehead was more than usually visible.
"Wendee did," Elise replied, admiration in her voice. "She discovered that the band that holds the gem has some play in itùas it must for matters of hygiene. She experimented while tending to Citrine and discovered that Citrine is not at all upset if the stone is worn front to back or side to side, just as long as it is there.
"Headbands are not uncommon in New Kelvin, especially for those whose hair is not long enough to braid behind. One idea is to turn the stone to the side where it can be concealed in a variety of fashions. Or they may make a sheath for the entire bandùthough the difficulty there is making one that does not show so clearly that it covers a thicker, heavier portion. What is important is that Citrine will be disguised and in a fashion that will arouse no comment."
Derian was satisfiedùand relieved.
"I'll just go look up Wendee, then," he said, "and offer to take over the packing and quartermastering so she will be free to work with Citrine."
"Do," Elise agreed. "You will be staying with the other young men in the gatehouse. It must be getting quite crowded by now."
"Not really," said Derian, who had already been by. "Lord Edlin is staying there only part-time. I hear that he is splitting the rest between the other house and his kennels."
Elise shook her head but didn't voice the disapproval so evident on her features.
"I appreciate your willingness to take over as quartermaster," she said, "but you also need to talk with Grateful Peace about improving your New Kelvinese. I see it as essential to the success of our story that everyoneùother than Firekeeper, who hardly speaks Pellishùshows some comfort with the language. After all, this is a trip we are supposed to have been contemplating since last autumn."
"Yes, my lady," Derian said, startled slightly by the commanding tone in her voice. They had been talking so easily that he'd almost forgotten that Elise was the daughter of a baron. "I'll look Peace up right away."
"You may find both him and Wendee in the same place," Elise said, softening slightly, "since they are preparing Citrine for her new role. If you see Ninette, tell her I will be in my rooms reviewing the trade reports and she need not stop her work with Citrine to come to me."
Elise sighed slightly. Derian, remembering her outburst on how little privacy she possessed, thought he understood. Daughter of a baron or not, he pitied her.
BOOK TWO
Chapter XIV
IF THERE WAS ONE THING that amazed Melina about the New Kelvinese it was that a land so obsessed with the past could be so immune to curiosity.
Even during her first visit to the country, back when she was fifteen, Melina's awe and wonder had rapidly been followed by a flood of questions.
What did the symbols that adorned everything from skin to fabric to the walls of buildings mean? (For she rapidly deduced that they were more than merely alphabetic signs.) Why was the ruler of the land called the Healed One? Why was his elected administrator called the Dragon Speaker? What purpose did the sodalities serve? Was there any truth to the hundreds of legends that were repeated in so many different contexts?
Melina wasn't interested in the more practical elements of international trade or city management or local economics. However, the heritage that underlay these things and shaped them either explicitly or covertly rapidly became an obsession.
Was it really necessary that a special dance be performed every time a new glass furnace was opened? What purpose was served by the elegant rituals that began and ended each session of the Primes? What would happen if these things were not done?
This last she even asked, shocking her New Kelvinese hosts. Her mother, who she had accompanied on this journey, had been mortified and forbade Melina to ask anything else.
From this incident Melina came to believe that the New Kelvinese did possess magic. Why else be reluctant to answer questions about the fashion in which things were done? Why else be so steadfast in refusing to change even the smallest detail?
Melina had seen paintings of the first Primesùold paintings, contemporary to that revered bodyùand the clothing the members wore, the manner in which they styled their hair, even the way they folded their hands or positioned their feet in their awkward, curly-toed slippers, remained essentially unaltered all these years later.
The attempts to awaken the magic within the three artifacts that Melina had contrived to have enter New Kelvin's hands had proven a great shock to Melina. Watching the thaumaturges she had heretofore revered as wise mystics and faultless keepers of knowledge bumble and argue their way toward a solution had nearly shattered her reverence for the New Kelvinese.
Nearly. The experience did teach Melina to view the thaumaturges' claims to magical knowledge with less confidence, but it confirmed her certainty of their devotion to the magical arts. Therefore, even after the catastrophic end of that venture, Melina had resolved to remain in New Kelvin.
Political connections were not enough to assure Melina the place she desired among the thaumaturges. She must have a more solid link.
After some observation, Melina decided that there was nothing more solid in all New Kelvin than the respect in which the Healed One was held. At first she thought about simply making Toriovico her advocate, but when she got to know the young man better and learned enough of New Kelvinese manners to recognize the lithe strong body beneath the heavy robes, she could not resist making him her husband.
Melina's desire was not solely based on sexual attraction. The Healed One was unmarried, but would not remain so for long. There was a resistance bordering on insanity to having the Healed One succeeded in his office by anyone but a male o
f his own begetting.
Childless and with no brother or even uncle to follow him, Toriovico must marry. A wifeùno matter how docile a broodmare Melina might use her connections to arrangeùwould insert herself between Melina and her chosen anchor in her new homeland. Therefore, there was no choice but for Melina herself to become Toriovico's new wife.
Not that she found this prospect at all repulsive. The Healed One was younger than herself, his dancer's body strong and virile. Rolfston Redbriar, Melina's late husband, had long ceased to pleasure her when she permitted him into her bed. However, Melina had been too interested in perpetuating her family's connections to risk the stain of infidelity. Celibacy had been a deliberate choice, reluctantly accepted.
It was to the comet that glowed through the night skies late that winter that Melina owed the successful approval of her marriage to the Healed One. In Hawk Haven an astronomical phenomenon of that order awakened responses ranging from the passive interest with which sunsets and newborn babies are viewed through superstitious fear.
In New Kelvin the comet was an event to celebrate, proof that magic had not gone entirely out of reach. The Sodality of Stargazers was particularly voluble, explaining that the comet was a star come free from its place in the heavens. This was an event regularly witnessed in the fall of shooting stars and always indicated change.
Dropping a few hints into sympathetic ears, Melina suggested that the comet was absolute proof that Toriovico was meant to marry herùthat she was the shooting star and that her marriage to the Healed One was indicative of great events to come.
Melina knew that this was true, but doubted that those who so blithely spread the word of this good omen realized just how much change she meant to engender.
After Melina had placed her mark on him, the Healed One became the perfect lover, interested only in his wife's pleasure. Moreover, outside the bedchamber, Melina discovered a void of intense loneliness within her young husband, a void that cried out with flattering intensity for her to fill it. There were times when Toriovico turned those blue-green eyes of his on her, their expression intense with many levels of longing, that Melina could have begun to love him.
Love, however, was a weakness in which Melina did not plan to indulge. Her woman's cycles still followed their lunar order, but they did have their irregularities, and Citrine's birth had been nine years before. Time would show whether or not Melina was still capable of bearing a child.
In order to secure her hold on the Healed One and, through him, upon her newly acquired homeland, Melina must not only bear a child, but a healthy male childùand preferably more than one such son. Having already borne five living children, Melina found that prospect exhausting even to contemplate.
Thus, although she consulted a discreet (and controllable) member of the Sodality of Herbalists, and faithfully swallowed powders and potions meant to enhance her fertility and ability to bear a healthy child, Melina delved into more definite ways of securing her rule in New Kelvin.
SOMEHOW TORIOVICO HAD THOUGHT that being married would mean the end of being alone, but he was married now, had been for several moons past, and now he knew. Marriage wasn't an end to loneliness. Right now it seemed to be a door wide open into more loneliness.
He should have known that no other person could end the loneliness. That was his to bear, one and the same with the title he bore.
Healed One.
Toriovico thought it rather amusing that the title he had borne these five years assured all his subjects that he was healed, whole, one, while he himself knew just how empty and fragmented he was.
Toriovico knew that anyone who saw him saw him first as the Healed One, only after as an individual. His natural hair color was an unremarkable brown, but tradition required that the Healed One tint it to represent each season. Currently, it was a dark green. His eyes were a blue-green blend that his cosmetic artists loved to enhance appropriately. Today, of course, they shone like emeralds. His strong, lithe body, flexible as a reed from years of study as a dancer, was routinely swathed in heavy robes that made him look remarkably solid, less a man than a monolith.
Toriovico had lived for twenty-seven years, but he had lived within the isolation of the Healed One for only the past five.
Before that he had been part of something larger, like a kitten tumbling about with the rest of its litter. In Toriovico's case that litter had consisted mostly of sisters. He'd had six older sisters, still did, but now that he was the Healed One he didn't see them very often.
He'd had a brother, too, an older brother. Not the oldest of them all. That place belonged to one of the many sisters. Vanviko was the third born, but from the start he had been special. He was the one who had been destined to be the Healed One after their father died.
Toriovico sometimes wondered if Vanviko had ever felt this same piercing loneliness. He doubted it. Unlike Toriovico, Vanviko had been isolated from birth, proud of his privilege, of the special lessons he attended, of his place in his father's shadowùliterally, for custom dictated that this was where the Healed One's heir stood during ceremonies.
Although he had been the Healed One for five years, as of yet Toriovico had no one to stand in his shadow. He had been unmarried when his elevation had come. Indeed, he had even been encouraged not to marry, since his father lived, his brother lived, and his brother's wife was expecting. Why rush to create children?
Toriovico wondered if his new wife, Melina, was capable of bearing children. He was certain that she could. Hadn't she already borne five healthy children? Wasn't she a wonderful woman?
He felt reassured, but still some part of him wondered. It was very important that there be an heir to the Healed One. Sometimes it was easier not to wonder. Sometimes it was easier to remember.
Even when that remembering was painful.
Toriovico recalled the day his brother had died as clearly as if it had just happened, rather than being an event years gone. A minstrel had come to Thendulla Lypella, filling every ear that would listen with tales of the wonderful mountain sheep he had seen on his journey to Dragon's Breath. The minstrel sang eloquently of how its horns shone like gold and hooves sparkled as if cut from solid diamonds.
Winter had been slow to depart, storm-filled, and damply cold. Vanviko had been glad to have an excuse to leave the confines of Thendulla Lypella and the endless cycle of ceremony. The occurrence of such a miraculous beast needed to be investigated.
Even then Toriovico had his own interests and had not cared for the idea of a midwinter hunt. Thus he had avoided the avalanche that had wiped all but three members of the hunting party from the mountainside.
Vanviko was not one of those who staggered back into Dragon's Breath. For days there had been hope that he and some of his companions still lived, perhaps trapped in a cave or hollow in the snow. After a week's digging, searchers brought the bodies home. All of them, even Vanviko's.
The mountain sheep the hunting party had been pursuing had escaped. Some of the rescuers said it had stood on a nearby mountain crest as they went about their ugly work, bleating with laughter. Most dismissed this as the hallucinations of their tortured minds.
Vanviko's death had been a great tragedy for all the kingdom of New Kelvin, but for no one more than Toriovico. From his quiet artistic seclusion, he found himself promoted to the place in his father's shadow. He barely knew the most common rituals. Now he had to learn them all and as quickly as possible.
The Healed One had not been young when his eldest son had died. However, he took to the task of educating his new heir with the energy of a much younger man. His burden burned him out like a candle with too long a wick. He died when Toriovico was twenty-two and Toriovico stepped from the shadow into the light, in the difference between one breath and one never taken becoming the ruler of a kingdom.
But before that final breath had been taken, Toriovico's father had sent all his advisors, doctors, nurses, even his grieving wife, from the room. In rasping whispers he made T
oriovico swear never to speak a word of what he would now hear except to his own son, and never then but on his own deathbed. Then the Healed One told his heir the truth, the truth that transformed everything Toriovico knew into a lie.
STILLED IN SUMMER, with trade thriving and vigorous, differed from the town that it had been in early winter. By contrast, the town in winter had been a dead place. Then the majority of the goods that had come across the river had been consigned to warehouses, awaiting the snow-packed roads of later winter to be hauled away.
Stilled in summer was a busy place, full of noisy bustle and shoving people. In it Elise Archer saw a shadow of what her father envisioned for the Archer Grant should he establish a trading station along the Barren River.
Brightly curtained stalls lined the crowded streets, the merchants within selling goods from both Hawk Haven and New Kelvin. Their customers wore the costumes of both nations, the bright robes of the New Kelvinese contrasting with the open-necked shirts and practical smocks worn by the residents of Hawk Haven.
Minstrels set up impromptu pitches wherever they could, often in association with a food vendor who profited from those who dallied to watch the performance. A juggler clad in long robes and face paintùthough Elise would have sworn he was of Hawk Haven rather than New Kelvinùwas pulling quite a fine crowd.
Viewing this colorful chaos, Elise felt a twinge of nostalgia for her family's land as she had left it, completely foolish since the change of which Baron Archer dreamed had not yet come, nor might it ever.
They were leading their horses now, all but Derian, who was driving their baggage wagon while Doc had charge of Derian's mare, Roanne.
The wagon had been the only way they could think to get Grateful Peace and Citrine into New Kelvin unseen. It would not have done for their party to set out with two comrades who vanished and were replaced by two similar yet different ones on the other side of the river, so the man and the girl traveled rather uncomfortably secreted in an ingenious smuggling hold within the wagon's cargo. Duchess Kestrel's prestige promised to get them through customs with the most cursory of inspections.
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