Daughter of Ancients

Chapter 20

A thin strip of moonlight was not sufficient to illuminate the dark room where the long-armed man shoved me to the floor. A wool rug burned my cheek as I skidded over it, and tickled my nose when I lay still, fighting to get air into my burning chest before the whole world went dark.

"Aimee, is that you?" a woman called from across the room. She sounded as breathless as I felt, as if she'd been running. "What's going on here?"

Small hard objects clattered onto a hard floor from another direction entirely. "My lady, what's wrong? And who else is here?" This was another woman. Younger. "Someone's come through the garden door, my lady, one or two people, but they've not spoken, so I don't know who they are."

Who else is here … a good question. Whose house was this? Whose knees were digging relentlessly into my back?

I had ridden down from Gaelie as hard as poor Pesca could run and flown to this place as mindlessly as a hummingbird streaks for a scarlet saber-flower. But in my fever to get inside—a fever as terrifying as it was inexplicable—I bumbled over a garden wall and tripped over a step. Long arms had wrapped themselves around me, and no matter how hard I fought and scratched and kicked, they would not let go until we were inside, and they had deposited me on this floor.

The person kneeling on my back snatched away the dry wad of leather I'd clutched for the past six hours and was futilely trying to hide under my breast. I felt a sharp jerking movement, and then a hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and bent my neck backward almost to breaking. "I'll kill you. By the Holy Twins, if you've harmed so much as a hair on him, I'll kill you."

"Paulo, who is this?" asked the first woman, the older of the two.

"It's a god-cursed thieving assassin is my guess." Mercifully, he let my head drop before my scalp tore, and then lifted his weight from my back. When he shoved a boot into my middle and rolled me onto my back, I didn't have enough breath to resist.

"Could we have a light, Aimee?" asked the woman.

"Of course! I'm so sorry."

Yellow light blossomed from someone's fingertips and sprang like a stray bit of lightening to one lamp on the wall and then another. The high ceiling was painted with a scene of a forest glade. I wished I were in that peaceful, uncomplicated place. Paulo , the woman had said. The skinny friend from the Gaelie guesthouse. I should have known. I shifted my gaze to the bony face hovering somewhere between my battered body and the painted forest. His expression was nothing I wanted to see on someone whose heavy boots were a handsbreadth from my face.

Where was I? And what in the name of sense was I doing here? A nasty creeping sensation fluttered deep in my head, like a moth that had been stuck there squirming itself free and flying away.

"I've found this lot—a damnable sneaking woman"— he was surprised at that—"creeping about the garden." Paulo gave my legs a shove with his boot. "She'll be dead if she can't explain herself."

Far across the room a tall, striking woman of middle years pulled off her cloak and threw it aside. The young Lord's mother, no mistaking it. The red glint in her brown hair, the gold cast to her flushed skin, and the dark brown eyes would have told me, even if I hadn't seen her on that long-ago day in Zhev'Na. "We don't have time to worry about thieves," she said. "Gerick is in terrible danger."

"I've figured that out already. See what I found on her." Paulo tossed the wadded gloves across the room to the older woman. Then he looked at me again. "What have you done with him? Where is he?"

"I don't know where he is." Able to take a full breath at last, I attempted to sit up. Paulo shoved me flat again with his boot on my shoulder.

"So it's only by chance you're carrying his gloves with his blood on them?"

"I don't know whose gloves those are, much less whose blood is on them, and"—I jammed my elbow into Paulo's knee so hard he bellowed and stumbled backward—"I'll tell you nothing else until you get your filthy boot off me."

"Heaven and earth!" The young Lord's mother stared at the bloody wad in her hands.

"I'll give you anything, she's the one attacked him in the stable," Paulo fumed. "He wouldn't never say who it was, but this one's been sneaking about the guesthouse for weeks—even asking me about him. Dolt that I am, I never made the connection until now." He looked so fierce for a moment I almost laughed. "If you've harmed him, I'll—"

"I've not touched him—not that he doesn't deserve worse than I could do. My father lives deformed and half blind because of him. My brothers died in the desert after he used them for his sword training. My mother lies murdered these twelve years at the hands of his friends, the Lords."

I clung madly to the things I believed lest the very earth shift out from under me. I was terrified to hear what these people would say of the young Lord. If he owned the gloves, then he was not only the voice who had warned me off, but the one who had been chained in that corner bleeding. I couldn't bear the thought of that.

"I've sworn to protect you, my lady," said Paulo. "Let me find out what she's done."

Lady Seriana—so I'd discovered was her name, not Eda as my father had known her—squeezed the blood-stiffened leather in her hand. She was having to work at staying calm. "You must have a story as to how you come to carry my son's gloves marked with such stains as these." I opened my mouth, but she didn't give me an opening. "Don't try to deny they're his. I gave them to him, and their maker lives a very long way from here."

Paulo, angry as he was, wasn't going to move without her approval. Taking advantage of his restraint, I jumped to my feet and tried to recapture some dignity. I straightened my muddy tunic and brushed away the damp leaves stuck to my cheek. Paulo came near attacking me again when I touched the leather belt that held my knife sheath, but I just looked him straight in the eye and pulled it around straight. But I kept my hands well away from the hilt that protruded from the sheath. I wanted to demonstrate that they didn't intimidate me, but I wasn't stupid.

"I've no cause to explain myself to you or to anyone," I said. "I've stolen nothing and harmed no one. Unlike others you know." Why were they all so tall? My head was on a level with Paulo's shoulder. Even the two women gave me a full handspan in height.

"Did you attack Gerick in Gaelie?" asked the lady.

"Yes. I saw a Lord of Zhev'Na walking free. Any faithful daughter of Gondai would have done the same."

"But you let him go," she added. "Your father, Gerick said, a resident of the Lady's hospice persuaded you to leave him be."

So he hadn't told his mother who Papa was. I wasn't sure what that meant. "My father is the kindest, most trusting of souls. Far too trusting. I honored his speaking because he is my father, but I don't… didn't… agree."

"So if you didn't harm my son this time, and you don't wish to tell us anything, then why did you come here? Presumably not to harm Mistress Aimee."

And, of course, that was the difficult question. Part of me wanted to spit at these people, willing dupes of a fiend. Part of me still wept at the cry I had heard, shaken to my very bones by despair that spoke the death of love and joy. Part of me trembled in fear, craving to deny my father's certainty that these events signaled something far larger than we knew. "I don't know why I'm here. And that's the truth. I found those gloves . . . somewhere … at the hospice. I should have thrown them away. I've no cause to do him a service. But I couldn't— I want to go." Part of me wanted desperately to run away.

"Perhaps we could sit down, have some refreshment, and come to better understanding. Let me make more light. I've such a bad habit of leaving my house dark when I'm here alone." I had almost forgotten the other woman—Aimee. She glided about the room, lighting the rest of the lamps from the magical glow of her hand, threading her way among numerous objects of dark green stone scattered about the floor—small statues of birds, it appeared—and a broken wooden box from which they had spilled. Her presence was like the first breeze of evening after a hot day. "I'll bring saffria and ale," she said.

When Aimee lit a lamp that hung in the air behind me, the Lady Seriana's stare settled on my neck. My skin burned under her gaze. And my blood grew hot as well. "He did it, you know. With his own hand, he sealed my collar. Did he tell his mother of his pleasures?"

She didn't get angry. Rather her brow wrinkled thoughtfully, and her gaze dug deeper, searching my face. "Stars of night! I know you. The child who served in his house …"

Yes, the slave child who scuttled about his house in bare feet and iron collar, terrified for every moment of every day for six endless years. Forbidden to speak, forced to scrub out night jars and empty vermin traps, to lay out his clothes and run his bath, my face scarred by one of his swordmasters, a Zhid who wore a jeweled ring and got impatient when I didn't summon the young Lord to his lessons fast enough.

"No wonder he couldn't bring himself to say more of your encounter!" Abruptly she motioned me to a green-brocaded footstool. "Sit down."

Her command was inarguable. I sat.

"Listen to me," she said. "I don't know why you've come here, and for the moment we'll put it aside. But you are wrong if you think my son is still what he was in Zhev'Na. The danger you fear—the betrayal you feel—as you watch him go about freely when the world believes him safely dead . . . that danger does exist, but in someone else."

"You think the Lady D'Sanya is the danger." I sounded like a petulant schoolchild.

"Yes. Just this evening, I've come to the conclusion that she possesses one of the Lords' devices—a brass ring called an oculus . . . like the ones you saw in their house. I think she makes them."

"Demons of the deep, she's got an oculus?" Paulo sagged against the wall. "Master Gerick knew someone had power of that kind—I've just come from Prince Ven'Dar, delivering his letter about it—but he never guessed it was her. Never. Even to think it would kill him. Demons take the woman!"

An oculus ! I jumped up and retreated, my back against the garden doors, all my bravado made laughable. My knees felt like mush; my mind screamed. I had seen what the Lords did with their ghastly rings of light—what the young Lord did with them. Mind and body remembered pain and helpless fear coursing through my veins like liquid ice. I laid my hand on my dagger, not thinking what I could possibly do with it, only that I needed to be as far away from this house as I could get. "You can't hold me prisoner. I can't be here." Not if an oculus was involved.

"Sit down, young lady." His mother pointed sternly toward the stool I had deserted. "In the name of the Prince D'Natheil—my husband and Gerick's father— who set you free of your collar, in the name of every Dar'Nethi who has suffered enslavement to the Lords as did you and that same prince, or who died fighting the Lords as did Aimee's dear father, and in the name of every man and woman of my own world who lived in bondage there as did Paulo and I, I insist you sit here and listen to me."

Grim, determined, she took my shaking hands and drew me back to the stool, pressed on my shoulders until I sat down again, and crouched down in front of me, her stern face softening only slightly. Her eyes were just like his, dark and deep, filled with so much terrible knowledge. "We must know what's happened to Gerick and whatever you can tell us about the Lady. If telling you something of our history is the only way to gain your trust, then that's what we're going to do."

She stayed right there in front of me, sitting on the rug of bright blue wool, and she told me the tale of a mundane girl who had come to love a sorcerer in a land where sorcery was forbidden, and how she had borne him a son two months to the day after he was burned alive, only to believe the infant, too, had been executed. She told me how her son had been hidden away from her and how he had come to believe he was evil, the tragedies of his childhood giving the Lords a sure weapon to twist and corrupt him. As the story of her husband's rebirth in the body of Prince D'Natheil filled me with wonder and astonishment, my shaking eased and my fear receded.

When Lady Seriana stopped to drink a mug of saffria Aimee brought her, the story continued uninterrupted in the soft voice of the young man on the other side of the fire. Unschooled in his speech, yet pouring out a measure of devotion as any man or woman would give a fortune to command, Paulo told how in the stables of Zhev'Na he had discovered Gerick's fight to retain the last shreds of honor, even when he believed his soul hopelessly lost. He told me of his friend's long struggle to be free of the Lords, and his final, dreadful conclusion that the only way to save anyone was to persuade his own father to kill him. Gerick's resolution had rid the world of the Lords.

I was mesmerized by the tale of his battle with the Lords . . . the tale of his talent . . . Was that what had happened to me? Had he taken me away from danger when I could not do it myself? And if so, then he had been closer to me than anyone had ever been in my life . . . and there was nothing of evil in the memory. Could he have masked it from me so completely?

Yet, in the end, it was not for the young Lord that I yielded my past and present anger, but for the woman and the friend and the dying man in the hospice. If these three had been so masterfully deceived, then what hope had any of us to resist the demon son? And if not—if he was truly what these good people claimed—then the land and people I loved stood in mortal danger once again, and I had no choice but to fight.

A log snapped in the fire, showering sparks into the air like a cascade of stars, and as if it were a signal, I inhaled deeply. "Yesterday morning at dawn I woke to the sound of a man screaming . . ."

It was as well I chose to fight, for just as I finished my own story we heard shouts from the street and a hammering on the door. Aimee hurried out to investigate and returned moments later with the news that war had returned to Gondai.