Daughter of Ancients

Chapter 1

In spring of the fifth year after the defeat of the Lords of Zhev'Na, our fifth year at Windham, Karon lost his appetite. He stopped sitting with me at breakfast, smiling away my inquiries and saying he'd get something later. Every evening he would push away from the dinner table, his plate scarcely touched. I paid little heed, merely reminding him not to burden Kat, our kitchen maid, with preparing meals that would not be eaten or by untimely intrusions into her domain. Our household was steadfastly informal.

Then came one midnight when I woke with the sheets beside me cold and empty. I found him walking in the moonlight. He claimed he was too restless to sleep and sent me back to bed with a kiss. Alert now, I watched through the next few nights and noticed that he walked more than he slept. In the ensuing days a certain melancholy settled about him, like a haze obscuring the sun.

Though I observed these things and noted them, I did not pry. For the first time in my life, I did not want to know my husband's business. The tug in my chest that felt like a lute string stretched too tight warned me what was happening. Though Karon was scarcely past fifty, a tall and vigorous man with but a few threads of gray in his light hair, I had long laid away any expectation of our growing old together. He had cheated death too many times, even traveled beyond the Verges and glimpsed L'Tiere—the realm of the dead that his people called "the following life." I feared the payment was coming due.

The morning of the Feast of Vines was sunny and crisp, a nice change from our inordinately cold and wet spring. Though the sunlight woke me earlier than usual, Karon was already up. From the bedroom window I spotted him in the garden, walking on the path that overlooked the willow pond. Pulling a gown over my shift and sticking my feet in shoes, I hurried outdoors to join him.

I sneaked up from behind and threw my arms around him in a fierce embrace. "Are you hiding feast gifts out here for me, good sir?"

He groaned sharply and bent forward, as if I'd stabbed him in the gut.

"Holy Annadis, Karon, you're hurt! What is it?"

Hunched over, he clutched his belly as if he were going to retch, his face gray, lips colorless. "Sorry . . ." He held his breath as long as he could in between short, labored gasps.

I took his arm and led him across the damp grass to a stone bench surrounded by a bed of blue and yellow iris left soggy and bent by a late spring snowstorm. "Earth and sky! Is this what's had you skipping meals and walking half the night?"

He sank slowly onto the bench. ". . . was going to tell you . . . soon . . . I'm not sure . . ."

"Shhh." My fingers smoothed away the tight, deep creases on his brow and stroked his broad shoulders, which were knotted and rigid. When his breathing eased a bit, I pressed one finger to his lips before he could speak. "Remember there is only truth between us."

He took my hand, kissed it, and pressed it to his brow before enfolding it in both of his. "I suspect it's a growth in my stomach." His bleak smile twisted the dagger in my heart. "I've tried to imagine it's something else, but all the willing in the world hasn't made it go away as yet. Not a pleasant prospect, I must say. When I've seen it in my patients, I've judged it best to leave nature have its will and use my power to . . . ease the way. Ah, gods, Seri, I'm so sorry."

Of course, Karon would not be able to ease his own way, for the enchantments of a Dar'Nethi sorcerer cannot be turned in upon the wielder for either good or ill. He'd given so much for all of us. It wasn't fair. . . .

The disease devoured him. A fortnight after the Feast of Vines, Karon canceled his long-planned sojourn at the University, where he was to give the first lectures on the history of the Dar'Nethi sorcerers in the Four Realms, an enterprise dear to his heart. And as our frigid spring slogged toward an equally unseasonable summer, he relinquished his healing practice, growing weaker and so consumed by pain that he could not bear the lightest touch.

All that our mundane world's physicians could offer were blisterings and bleedings that would sap his remaining strength and hasten the end. And so I cursed the demands of fate, generosity, and politics that made it necessary for him to live so far from his own people, some of them Healers like himself—sorcerers who might have helped him. But only the Prince of Avonar, our old friend Ven'Dar, had the power to cross D'Arnath's Bridge at will, and only once a year in autumn did he unbar the way between magical Gondai and our mundane world and come to exchange news and greetings. Autumn was months away. Karon would never last so long.

"Seri, come tell him you're going to bed. He won't take the ajuria until he's sure you're not coming back. He needs it badly."

The slim young woman with the dark braid wound about her head stood in the dimly lit doorway to the garden where I walked every evening. When she'd received my message about Karon's illness, Kellea had left her herb shop, her husband, and her two small children and come to stay with us, hoping to find some remedy in her knowledge or talent. But herbs and potions could not reverse the course of such a disease, and though she was Dar'Nethi too, Kellea's talent was for finding, not healing.

I dropped my soiled gloves and stubby garden knife on the bench beside the door, kicked off my muddy boots, and followed Kellea back to the sitting room, the largest room in the old redbrick gatehouse at Windham. We'd converted it to a bedchamber when Karon could no longer manage stairs. Weeks had passed since he'd been able to leave his bed.

Tonight he lay on his side, facing the door, thin, far too thin, like a creature of frost and dew that might evaporate in a warm west wind. Pain rippled beneath his taut, transparent skin in a punishing tide. Kellea had lit only a single candle and set it on the windowsill behind him so it threw his face into shadow. Even so, a flicker of light illuminated his eyes and the trace of a smile softened his face when I came in.

"Ah, love," he said. "I knew . . . the day was . . . not yet done. Not while you can appear before me . . . the image of life itself." Every few words he would have to clamp his lips tight to let a wave pass without crying out.

I pressed my finger to his lips. "I must disagree. This day is indeed done. I am ready for sleep after an exhausting slog about these bogs we call our gardens. Despite the late frost, everything is trying desperately to bloom and needs trimming or coddling. The gardeners do their best, but you know I can't bear to keep my hands out of it. And remember, I was up early this morning answering five thousand letters from friends and acquaintances, and five thousand more from people we've never heard of, asking as to the 'great physician's health,' or the 'most esteemed historian's recovery.' We've had fifty offers of grandmothers' poultices, thirty of herbal infusions, twenty of Isker goats known for the potency of their cheese and milk, and five of pretty young women to 'warm and liven' your bed. I refused them all in your name. It was very tiring."

"Even the young women? I'm always so cold . . . and very lonely here while you sleep in that dreadful chair."

I drew the thick wool blanket over his shoulders, shivering myself in the unseasonable chill. "Most assuredly the young women. If anyone is to warm your bed, it will be me. I will take up my sword and slay the woman who attempts to get there first."

Only you can appreciate the marvels of my mental condition enough to have me now . I felt more than saw his teasing smile. As happened more and more at the end of the day, his words echoed in my head, not my ears. Speaking directly in the mind was far easier for him. For once I have all of my memories, no lost identity, and no extra soul contained within my own, making me do things I'd rather not. And I'm neither dead nor disembodied — though these days I wish I could be rid of the wretched thing and live without it as I once did .

Kneeling beside his bed, I laid my head on his pillow where I could feel his breath on my hair.

Tassaye, beloved. Softly . He brushed my damp eyes with his cold fingers. Life is not done with me yet. I've been in and out of it so many times, you must trust my sense of it. If you can put up with me so long, I'm determined to be here when Gerick comes in the summer .

"And of course, Ven'Dar may come early and carry you off to Avonar to see a proper Healer, but unless he arrives tonight, you must rest and save your strength. As soon as I've washed my face and hands, I plan to do the same. Dream well, my love."

I kissed his fingers and his eyes and straightened his blankets before I left him. Then I watched from the shadows as Kellea forced him to sit up and drink her sleeping draught. He hated for me to see how hard it was for him to move. Only after he dropped into blessed insensibility did I bring my blankets and pillows and settle in the chair beside his bed.

"Hear me, Ven'Dar," I whispered a short time later, stroking Karon's graying temples to smooth away the lines illness had ground into his handsome features.

"Come early this year." As on every other night, I envisioned my plea taking flight like a red-winged night-hawk, streaking through the airs of the Four Realms and across the Bridge to Avonar, the royal city of the Dar'Nethi, and into the ear of Prince Ven'Dar, Karon's dearest friend. As on every other night, I received no answer.

Kellea nodded a good night and blew out the candle, retiring to her own bed in the room at the top of the stair where she was in range of my call. Not in a thousand years would I be able to repay her service. Karon moaned softly in his sleep. I prayed he did not dream of his terrible days.

Mother . . .

I sat up straight, knocking the pillows from the chair, sleep and shadows and starlight confusing my eyes.

Mother, I'm on my way . . . soon as I can . . .

"Gerick! Good . . . yes . . . soon." Though distant and faint, the voice in my head was unmistakable. I felt more than heard him acknowledge my answer.

I must have spoken aloud, for the light-sleeping Kellea appeared at the doorway with a candle. "What's happened? Is he—?"

"No, no. It's all right." I almost laughed. "Gerick is coming. He mustn't have used any power for three months for me to hear him at such a distance."

"You're sure?"

"I wasn't asleep, only quiet enough to hear him. Paulo must have found my letter at the Two Thieves. I was so afraid. . . ."

"It will be good for him to be here."

Exchanging letters with our son was complicated and unreliable, especially in the past year when a plague of vicious bandits had afflicted the northern roads. Every midwinter at the season of Seille, Karon and I traveled to a barren hillside in northern Valleor. There Gerick would meet us and take us through an enchanted portal into the primitive, shadowy realm he called the Bounded, a land born of his mind and his talent from the chaotic Breach between our human world and magical Gondai. And once a year at midsummer our son would come to us for a week to soak up the sun and revel in a few days' freedom from his responsibility for an entire world. Karon had not been ill when we'd made our farewells at the dawn of the new year, and it was still four weeks till midsummer.

Faint light filtered through the window as Kellea touched my shoulder the next morning, warning me that the ajuria was about to abandon Karon for another day. She dared not give him more of the potion than she did already. Though it might ease him longer, it would begin to eat away at his mind so that he could never totally emerge from its cloudy comfort. He didn't want that. .

"My ministering spirits," he whispered as I washed his face with a damp cloth. "It's a wonder every man in Leire is not taken to his bed so pitiably as I, just to have the two most beautiful women in the world coddle him so."

"You may flatter all you wish, sir," said Kellea, pulling up a short stool beside the bed, bowl and spoon in hand, the weapons of their daily war. "But I am still determined to get breakfast down you."

"Ah, no . . ."

"Hunger has nothing to do with it, nor do your incessant claims that everything tastes beastly, which I will not credit. Seri will tell you why it is more important than ever to take care of yourself."

As I knew it would, the news of Gerick carried Karon through the ensuing days. We talked a great deal of our son's kingdom, marveling again at his odd, deformed subjects who called themselves Singlars. They worshipped the young man whose talent had given shape to chaos, creating them a home, and who now struggled alongside them to make their world live. After five years of his leadership, they had created thriving markets and trades among themselves, had embraced the rudiments of schooling, managed their first ventures into the arts, and given birth to their first children. Gerick had not wanted to be their sovereign, but when fate had presented no alternative, he had thrown himself into it, learning what he needed as he went along. Karon and I had watched with pride and amazement as he'd grown into a wise, disciplined, generous, and self-assured monarch at the ripe old age of twenty-one.

It was a slender young man of middle height with red-brown hair trimmed to his collar who strode into the garden on a wet afternoon, only nine days after his message.

"You made decent time," I said, once I'd loosed my embrace enough to allow a look. Dark brown eyes sat deep in his narrow face. You could not gaze into them for long without understanding that this quiet, graceful young man had seen and known things of awesome and dreadful consequence.

"It would have been faster if Vroon could have transported us," he said. "We haven't yet figured out why his 'hops' about the countryside don't work any more. Nothing of the Bounded seems to work quite right lately. Fortunately Paulo can still convince a horse that a league is no more than fifty paces. I had no choice but to ride along."

At the mention of his name, a tall, gangly, freckled young man hurried around the corner of the house into the shade of the rose arbor. I extended my hand. "Paulo! He'll be so happy you've come."

"We worried we'd be too late," said Gerick, as I dragged Paulo into an embrace. "Your weather seems as foul as ours. The roads north are a mess."

"He was determined to wait for you," I said. "Come. He's in here."

With a smile and a handclasp, Kellea yielded Gerick her place at Karon's bedside. Karon's face brightened as our son drew the stool close to the bed and touched his hand. To see the two of them together, bearing such love, respect, and friendship for each other, was everything I had ever asked from life.

A glance over my shoulder took me back to the front hall. Paulo had accompanied us no farther than the sitting-room door and now stood outside on the stoop, facing away. "The horses did more than I asked," he said huskily when I laid a hand on his shoulder. "Like they knew."

"Bless you for getting Gerick here," I said. "And for coming yourself."

"Never thought it would be so bad. He needs someone to do for him what he done for me."

"I keep hoping for it, but unless Gerick can help him, we're out of choices. It's four months until Ven'Dar's autumn visit."

Paulo stepped off the stoop. "I'll be in the stable."

I caught hold of his leather vest. "Go to Karon first. You are his son every bit as much as Gerick. Our groom will care for your horses until you get there."

When I followed Paulo inside a short time later, he was sitting at Karon's bedside, speaking quietly to the man who'd rescued a lame, illiterate peasant boy from a desolate future and entrusted him with his life and the survival of three worlds. Paulo had justified Karon's trust many times over, but the young man had never lost his wonder at it.

Gerick was around the corner in the housekeeper's room, splashing his face with water at the washing table. As he grabbed a towel from the stack and blotted his face, he caught sight of me and motioned for me to stay where I was. He threw the towel in the basket beside the table. Returning to Karon's room, he touched Paulo on the shoulder and murmured a few words to the two of them, then joined me at the door.

"Tomorrow, after I've had a little sleep, I'll see what I can do for him," he said as we strolled down the gravel path between the muddy beds of struggling violets and summerlace. "Kellea says she's already tried all the simple painkilling things I know how to do. So that leaves the soul weaving business. I'll do it, but it's just … if I try it now, I might never get back to my own body. We scarcely slept all the way down here."

As the only Soul Weaver known outside of Dar'Nethi legend, Gerick could actually leave his own body and enter another, either taking control of that body or lending his knowledge, skills, and strength to the other person. When his purpose was accomplished, he could slip back into his own skin, leaving his host whole and undamaged.

"Will you be able to help him?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. He doesn't think so. But perhaps he'll be able to guide me into something useful once I'm joined with him. I just don't know."

At twelve, Gerick had been one of the most powerful sorcerers in any world, the prodigy of the murderous Lords of Zhev'Na. But since he had rejected the life they had planned for him, he rarely spoke of sorcery and, according to Paulo, used it even less.

We returned to the house, poked up the fire, and sat with Karon for an hour. Gerick and Paulo fought off sleep and told us of the heavy snows and freezing rain that clogged the roads from the north. Their failure to see a single thriving field along their route boded ill for the coming winter. Their own land's always-unstable weather had taken a turn for the worse in the past months as well. Paulo had been on his way to Yurevan to find someone who could teach them to engineer drainage canals to control the Bounded's unusually severe barrage of storm waters when he'd stopped at the inn called the Two Thieves and found my message.

Kellea soon shooed us all to bed. Everyone needed rest, and she didn't want three more patients to take her time. On that night it was Gerick who helped his father sit up and who whispered comfort as Kellea's herbs worked their mercy.

None of us watched as Gerick left his own body and entered his father's on the next morning. It seemed too intimate an act for public display. I sat in an upstairs window seat with an open book and tried not to hope. Just as well. After an hour Gerick burst out of the front door below me and vomited violently into the undergrowth. For a long while after, he stood beneath a tree, hands clasped behind his neck, his elbows squeezing his bowed head. He didn't need to tell me his attempt had been fruitless.

And so we settled in to wait. As so often happens, grief unleashed a reservoir of laughter. We played lively games of chess or draughts at Karon's bedside where he could listen to the progress of the game.

Kellea astonished us by singing in a rich contralto a variety of Vallorean folk songs, a repertoire she had apparently acquired as a child. She admitted sheepishly that no one had ever heard her sing until her husband surprised her at it when she thought no one could hear.

Gerick and Paulo recounted more tales of their struggle to make the Bounded live. The past months had seen their first large-scale harvest, but also some worrisome failures of the glowing sunrocks that enabled them to grow food enough for all in their sunless world.

I passed on greetings from dear Tennice, Gerick's tutor who had been forced to cancel a journey to visit Karon by a lingering lung fever, and I reported on their friend, our young Queen Roxanne, and her continuing struggle with the Leiran nobility. Four years after her father's death, my old enemy's daughter had at last succeeded in wresting professions of fealty from every member of the Council of Lords, who had once sworn that an ox would rule the Four Realms sooner than a woman. I hated to think of her hard-won concessions tested by a hungry winter.

But all that was before a rain-washed sunset four days after Gerick's arrival, when a sharp knock on the door announced two visitors from Gondai. For a short while, I thought my summoning prayers had been answered after all.

"As soon as he wakes in the morning, we'll take him home." The slender man in robes of dark blue silk gazed down at a sleeping Karon. Though his ageless complexion and fair hair and beard could leave one guessing, Prince Ven'Dar had seen his sixty-fourth birthday. The network of fine lines on his open face had been carved by laughter, but on this night his gray-blue eyes seemed uncharacteristically shadowed, as if he, too, had not been sleeping well.

Ven'Dar lifted his hand from Karon's brow. After dispatching his Dulce companion back across the Bridge to prepare for our arrival, the prince had cast a winding, an enchantment shaped from the nuances of words, to send Karon to sleep without the ajuria for the first time in a month. "Unfortunately, he cannot be in this state when I take him across the Bridge. As we've found out, strange things happen when minds lie fallow during a Bridge crossing. And I am not— Well, walking the Bridge is difficult of late."

"I'll give him ajuria then," said Kellea, who was settling the blankets around Karon's wasted body. "He'll need something if you're going to move him."

"No. Whether induced by enchantment or potions, he cannot be asleep."

"I can take care of it," said Gerick, quietly. "I can't cure this disease, but I can help him bear it for long enough to cross the Bridge and get him wherever he needs to go."

"So be it," said Ven'Dar. "We'll let him rest through the night—and you as well, lad—then at sunrise we'll go. Strange for all of us to be together again. Would it were a happier occasion."

As the stars pricked the deep blue sky outside our windows, Gerick and Paulo spread pillows and blankets by the hearth, Kellea retired to her room, and I escorted Ven'Dar to the bedchamber upstairs. It had occurred to me, even as the flurry of greetings flowed, that Ven'Dar's arrival four months earlier than usual was not truly a response to my nightly wishing. Even the Dar'Nethi ability to speak in the mind could not span worlds. And so, once the matters of towels and washing water and other rituals of hospitality were taken care of, I paused at the bedchamber door and broached the question. "So tell me, my lord prince, what's brought you here? If the power of my desires can reach all the way to Avonar, I'd like to know of it."

Ven'Dar stood at the window I had opened to air the room. "Only a curiosity. I was hoping Karon might have some advice for me. We've had a bit of interesting news in the realm." He turned his back on the window, his arms folded across his breast. "But for now all that must wait. Don't trouble yourself." No amount of wheedling gained me any more than that.

Karon wуke before dawn, before anyone else in our suddenly crowded house was stirring. "Who is this lovely wench who comes to warm my bed? I thought they all had been refused." His cold fingers traced the line of my cheek.

"I've set myself to guard against these intruding maidens," I said, trying to waken my tingling arms and ease out of the bed without jarring him. Unable to sleep, suddenly sensing the too-rapid approach of the inevitable, I had slipped in beside him. "Now what of you? How does Ven'Dar's remedy?"

"It lingers a bit. And while I still benefit from it, I'd like to see Martin's gardens once more before I go."

I fumbled in the dark to find his shoes, then helped Karon sit up and get them on. I threw a heavy cloak over his shoulders, and we picked our way around the sleeping Gerick and Paulo, emerging into the predawn stillness. The seasons had gone backward. Instead of the scents of grass and fading lilacs, a frosty mist floated over the garden.

Halfway across a grassy square between two bowers of blighted roses, Karon stopped and closed his eyes, a smile, not a grimace, crossing his features. "How I love this place," he said. "Cold or not . . . feel the life. Smell it. Taste it. You know, sometimes I feel the others here—Martin, Julia, Tanager. I wonder . . ." Holding his arms tight about his middle as if willing the pain to stay away a little longer, he lowered himself to a stone bench. "I've thought it could be that L'Tiere is not so far away. Perhaps the boundary between this life and the next is less formidable than the Breach, and we can find our way back to the places we love most. Who knows? I may come back here again."

I wrapped my arms about his wasted shoulders, unable to answer. Ven'Dar found us there as dawn touched the eastern sky.

"Time to go home, my friend," said Ven'Dar. "Are you ready?"

"I don't promise to be fast. No chance you've a winding to put all but my mind to sleep?"

"Sadly not. But you'll not be alone." He motioned toward Gerick, who had just stepped out of the garden door, conferring quietly with Paulo.

Paulo was drinking something that wreathed his face with steam, and Kellea soon came to us with a similar mug. She sat down beside Karon. "You're not leaving before breakfast," she said in mock severity, holding it to his lips. "Only a little to warm you on your way."

After two sips, Karon took her hand, kissed it, and pressed it to his forehead, a gesture of affection from the land of his youth. "I'll never forget, dear Kellea. Never. Go back to your children and your good sheriff and live in joy."

While Kellea embraced each of us in turn, Karon looked up bleakly at Gerick and Paulo. "If I'm to do this, I'm afraid I'll need an extra hand or two."

"We've come up with a better way. Maybe a little easier on you," said Gerick, hesitating. "If you'll permit me . . ."

Karon understood immediately. "Are you sure?"

Gerick nodded. And so, when Karon signaled he was ready, Gerick laid an arm about Paulo's shoulders. As the first pink and orange sunbeams bathed the garden, Gerick's body slumped, saved from falling by Paulo's firm grip around his waist.

Karon shuddered and sat up a little straighter. Then we stood, and his voice sounded stronger than I'd heard in weeks. "Lead us, lord prince. My wife and my son— my two sons—bear me upon their shoulders, and I would not burden them longer than need be."

Kellea stood watching in the garden, her hand raised in farewell. Her image faded as our strange procession passed into the sunrise. Ven'Dar walked in front, his fair hair shimmering in the light, and behind him a gaunt Karon wrapped tight in his black cloak, leaning on my arm, Gerick's strength enabling him to bear each step. Paulo came next. Over his shoulder he'd slung the slender body that belonged to his best friend and his king, whose soul was temporarily housed elsewhere. A strange procession setting out to journey along the strangest of roads.