Son of Avonar

CHAPTER 30

We found him in the ruined castle, half a league south of Yennet. Kellea had led us down a narrow track that wandered across the green hills toward the mountains. The bronze sun was low over the western peaks when the crumbled ruin came into view at the crest of a rise. Kellea pulled up and waited for us, pointing at the hilltop. “I’ll go on alone,” I said.

“I will go,” said Baglos. “I am his Guide.”

“He commanded you to follow my lead,” I said. “You’ll wait.” The Dulcé, more like himself again, went into a pout, but I trusted it would last only until his worry got the best of him. He didn’t hold tempers long.

Rowan didn’t like the idea of my going alone, either, but I refused his company as well. “If I’m not back in an hour, you may ride to my rescue,” I said. “But carefully, please.” We had seen no signs of a fight. No guards. No hoofprints or corpses or blood to hint at hunters or sorcerer-priests. Whatever had brought D’Natheil to this place, I didn’t think swords were going to repair it.

A warren of collapsed stone crowned the green hilltop. The exaggeration of evening shadows evoked a ghostly remembrance of the round towers and thick walls that had once dominated the countryside. Only one end of the ancient keep remained intact, three walls and a few sagging roof beams that created a shadowy shelter. The wind, heavy with the scents of damp earth and verdure, had picked up with the cooling hour and rustled the tall grass from behind me, and as I tethered Firethorn to a shrub that had sprung out of the rubble, an uneasy flock of sparrows swarmed upward in a fluttering mass. I picked my way carefully through the silent ruin. It didn’t seem proper to call out in such a place.

A quick survey from atop a ruined wall told me that D’Natheil must be inside the keep if he was here. Neither he nor his horse was anywhere to be seen. I climbed over a fallen beam and up a crude staircase of stone blocks to a raised remnant of stone flooring. This would have been the great hall of the long-dead lord. Here had stood the huge hearth, back in the days when the fire would blaze through the night while the lord’s soldiers and courtiers, children, cousins, and dogs ate, drank, and bedded down on the rush-strewn floor. Had I believed in ghosts I could have found them in the sun-drenched stones or, at the least, conjured the remnants of old songs and drunken jests and good fellowship.

The end of the keep where the roof still held seemed as deserted as the rest of the ruin. Disappointed, I was on the verge of turning back, when I caught a slight movement in the deepest shadows of the farthest corner. He was huddled against the wall like a child in disgrace, his head buried in his arms.

“D’Natheil,” I called softly. “My lord prince.”

He didn’t move. I approached quietly and knelt beside him, relieved to feel the warmth of life still pulsing from him.

“D’Natheil, tell me that you live. We’re afraid for you.”

“Go away from here,” he whispered. “Far away.”

I released my breath. “Why should I?”

“Please.” He spoke with his jaw clenched, as if to keep himself from screaming.

“I’ve never heard you say please in all these weeks, and if my going would encourage it, I might consider the matter. But I also do nothing without a reason. Why should I leave you?”

“I can’t hold them back any longer.” He drew in a shuddering breath.

“The Zhid, you mean? The Seeking? Are they after you again?”

“Unceasing.” A wrenching groan slipped through his control, and he shrank further into his corner, as if driven by the lash of an invisible taskmaster.

Unceasing . “And you’ve been shielding us from it.”

“They’re coming for me.” He raised his head. His eyes were pits of blackness, his skin stretched across the bones of his face. Exhausted. “You must be far away.”

“We won’t let them take you. Baglos would give his life for you. And we’re two more now. Graeme Rowan and Kellea have offered their help. If we’re together, we can protect each other, find a house, a forest—”

“Numbers, houses, forests. Those things don’t matter if I invite them. They force me to look into my mind before the running, and I can’t do it without madness. They’ve promised to give me back my life.” He shook his head. “You mustn’t be here when they come.”

“They do not give life. You’ve known that since the beginning,” I said. “You demonstrated it for me with two blades of grass. You’re a warrior. So fight.”

“There is nothing in me.” The haunted ruins around us were not half so bleak as his words. No lingering ghosts of joy or pleasure walked D’Natheil’s mind. No grace of evening sunlight bathed the stones of his being. His pain was palpable in the dimness.

Walk away, I told myself, rebellion prompting me to my feet. Leading him on a journey is one thing. Using your intelligence and experience to set him on the road to his destiny is only right. But this … To draw a soul from despair is such an intimate thing. I would need to know more of him than Baglos’s meager tales. Something of his dreams or desires. Something of the person hidden behind the changing seasons. How could one forge such a link with something that didn’t exist? Impossible. Walk away.

But irksome tethers of responsibility and caring bound my feet. Perhaps all I needed to do was wake him up. Make him think. I stood straight and raised my voice. “How dare you dismiss these weeks since you came to me? I’ve worked hard to teach you a thing or two. Perhaps it’s not been a life a prince might expect. But you came to me a despicable bully, and now you give of yourself: to Tennice, to Paulo, to me, even to Baglos. That would not be possible if there were nothing in you. These voices of shadow fear you, D’Natheil, and despair is their ally. What kind of warrior would allow them to succeed with such a paltry weapon?”

He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I tried. I’m still trying, but I am not enough.”

“Didn’t you hear Dassine? You told me he spoke only truth, and, if so, then you cannot discount the things he said of you nor the voice with which he said them. He loves you as a son and says you are worthy of our trust. Whatever he’s done to you, I cannot believe he would send you forth with no resources to fight this battle.”

“He sent me to you…” His eyes were as stark as northern winter.

“So he did.”

“… but I cannot… will not… bring you harm. Go away.” He was half pleading, half commanding.

The sunlight beckoned beyond the broken walls. I didn’t want to be here. I had not asked for this. Why had Dassine sent D’Natheil to me? Was it only that I knew the words to understand his needs? Was it only that I had knowledge to help unravel the puzzle of his destination, to find what was left of the Exiles to unlock his message, to keep him safe in my world? D’Natheil had isolated himself to protect us, and his mind had become a prison in which his tormentors could do whatever they willed with him. Indeed I should leave him. I had no weapon to repel this kind of assault.

A prison … As I watched the Prince huddle alone in his anguish, harsh truth ripped my soul like the first blast of winter. I had been here before… and I had walked away. Had Karon felt me abandon him as he shivered alone in the cold wind, awaiting the first touch of flame? Had he heard my pleading and accusations and condemnation there at the end, only pretending confused hearing? He had believed his soul was the price of our safety, and I had cursed him for not paying it. And because I could not forgive him, I had turned my back on him, refusing the only thing he had ever asked of me. Live, my dearest love. You are the essence of life. … I had walled myself up in my own prison and allowed my life to wither away.

Forgiveness cannot change what has gone before. Were Karon standing in front of me in this ruin, he would hold to his conviction that he could not use his power in corrupt ways just to save us. And I would argue until my last breath that a man of honor, a man who loved, could not allow his child and his friends to be murdered. But forgiveness is not a matter of repayment or surrender or forgetting, of winning or losing. It is a transformation of the heart. Yes, I knew of prisons and torment. That was why my feet wanted so badly to walk away… and why, in the end, I could not. Not this time.

I sat down on the rough ground in front of D’Natheil, pushing aside the broken paving stones that poked through my skirt. “Listen to me”—he had buried his head again with another shuddering breath—“and look at me. I want to tell you a story. Baglos told us of your childhood, a childhood blighted by war in a city that should have known only peace, but I’m going to tell you of a childhood of peace, among people who fought a battle that was much the same as yours. It should have been your childhood, too, if your people had not forgotten how to make it so…”

I told him Karon’s stories of growing up in Avonar with the descendants of J’Ettanne, where the children always had an uncle or an aunt to listen to their troubles, where they waited anxiously for their talents to emerge, even though use of them brought only danger and risk, where they listened wide-eyed to the magical stories of Av’Kenat and dreamed of one day sharing in such a celebration. I told him of Celine, and all I could remember of the exploits of Eduardo the Horse Tamer, and Gaillard the Builder, who stayed late every night after his workmen went home and sang to his bricks until they nestled smooth in their mortar. When his workmen would return the next morning, Gaillard would laugh merrily as the men stood and marveled at their own prowess, boasting that nowhere in the Four Realms were there such skilled bridge builders as in Avonar.

For hour after hour I forced D’Natheil to listen and to look me in the eye as I spoke. I did not stop when I heard Rowan walk across the stone paving, stand behind me for a few moments, and then leave again when it became clear there was no rescuing to be done. And I did not stop when D’Natheil cried out in anguish as the light beyond the sagging roof failed, and it looked as if everything we had gained was lost again. Instead, I touched his cold hand and felt the quivering tension as he fought to hold back the darkness… and as I held fast, the darkness enveloped me as well…

Come, Lord Prince, freedom and power await… The whispers crawled up my back and between my shoulders, twining about my neck and ears, sending threads through my hair and wrapping cold fingers about my belly… pricking my flesh and bone… pricks that became barbs that became spikes… We can give you back what you have lost… come do us homage… Streaks of red, and green, and purple… mammoth dark-clad figures, seated on huge thrones of black stone… their massive heads turning to examine my soul… I was lost if they saw me. They had no faces… only streaks of light… ruby, emerald, amethyst… glittering facets… lurid light reflecting in a sea of black glass… nauseating light in a roiling, smoke-filled blackness… a storm of choking ash… else you are left as nothing, condemned to look back at all you are… And the void gaped before me like the maw of a monster, like the sky when the last star winks out…

My head was cracking, my skin charring with a blazing heat, my stomach rebelling at the formless emptiness. “No!” I growled. Forcing my tongue to answer my command, forcing my eyes to stay open, I wrenched mind and tongue back to the stories… to life… to beauty… The darkness receded, and it was only night, reality comprised of our linked hands and my voice, telling of laughter and sadness and courage and hope, like the tale of Errail the Gardener, who made his flowers bloom only one day longer each year, until after thirty years the other gardeners of Valleor feared their plants were failing, because they bloomed a full month less than those of Avonar. And so on through the night…

About the time I thought my voice and my supply of tales must fail, D’Natheil’s hand grew warm, the suppressed trembling faded away, and his breath began to flow soft and even. Careful not to break his hold lest it wake him, I stretched my cramped legs and eased around to rest my aching back against the stone wall.

How many hours had I racked my brain for every scrap I could remember, so there would be no crack in the armor I built for him? The words could have been about things other than Avonar and the J’Ettanne, but I thought Karon’s stories might have the most meaning.

The wind whispered about the hilltop. In the distance a night bird screeched. Impossible to sleep. I remembered my father returning to Comigor after a long campaign, day after day of riding, fighting, poor food, no sleep, so tired he couldn’t even lift up my tiny mother and twirl her about as was his custom. My mother would urge him to go straight to bed and could never understand why he would sit up late in his study, drinking brandy and smoking his pipe and talking to any who would listen, saying he was too tired to sleep. Karon had been the same. Whenever he returned from one of his secret journeys, he would sit up late in the library or the garden, staring into the fire or the sky, saying he could not sleep until he had rested a while. Now I understood. I was beginning to understand so many things.

The sounds of horses and muted voices told me that Rowan had brought the others up the hill to be close. And before very long came footsteps and a quiet question. “Do you need anything?” It was Rowan.

“I would kiss the ground for a drink of anything,” I whispered, “and my cloak or blanket would not be unacceptable. One for him, too.”

“I’ve had to sit on the little fellow to keep him away. Should he come?”

“No. If you’ll—”

“I’ll take care of it.” The sheriff soon returned with two blankets and a wineskin. I had rarely tasted anything quite so delicious as Rowan’s sour wine.

“Thank you, Sheriff. Tell Baglos that the Prince sleeps and that I believe all will be well with him.”

“Done.”

When the morning sun penetrated the ruined keep, I woke hearing lingering echoes of Karon’s voice from my dreams. Seri love, he had called, let me in. My arm had burned, and I had felt his life flow through my veins as it had on the terrible day of his arrest, filling me, enriching me, forgiving me as I had at last forgiven him. My response to the dream had been quite vivid. When I realized I still clung to the Prince’s hand, my cheeks grew hot, as if, even in sleep, he might somehow have shared this most intimate of stories.

D’Natheil slept peacefully, sprawled under the blanket Graeme Rowan had thrown over him. I hated to wake him, but events could not wait. We could not know how long the road to the Bridge might remain open. And, of course, I had to see if what I’d done had been enough. I carefully extracted my hand and climbed to my feet. “Well, my lord prince, are you going to sleep all day? You’ve led us a merry chase.”

He stirred slowly, and after a few moments, mumbled, “What? I didn’t—” He sat up, rubbed his head, and peered about his desolate refuge. When his gaze came to me, it was filled with questions. “I don’t remember coming here.”

“What do you remember?”

“The rain. Fire. I don’t know. A jumble of things. Nothing clear.” His face was troubled.

“Come, let’s find the others.”

While we walked the length of the ancient hall, I told him briefly what had happened. “… and so you left us during the storm in an attempt to draw the danger of the Zhid away from us. You thought you couldn’t hold out against them, but you did.”

“Because of you, I think.”

“I’ve told you several times that such things are easier together. If your mentors taught you that in ail of history there has been any battle won by one man alone, then they know no more of history than does Paulo. I suppose they taught you, too, that women are weak and must be constantly coddled and protected. Perhaps you should have taken lessons from your friends, the soldiers on the walls of Avonar. My father always said that a soldier’s wife could make soup from sticks and swords from stones and could hold a citadel long after the warriors had given it up. Women make the…” But I never told him, because my voice trailed off into a prolonged coughing fit from the irritation of my throat.

“Perhaps you should give your voice a rest,” said the Prince, as he gave me a hand over the fallen roof beam. “Or you’ll find yourself being dragged about by argumentative, flame-haired women, unable to say a word to deter them from having their way with you.”

I stopped and stared at him as he continued across the littered ruin toward the sounds of our friends. After a few steps he looked back and smiled at me as he had not smiled for many days. The beauty of his face brought joy to my heart, though in the morning light I could not fail to notice that he’d aged a good five years in the past two days. Strands of gray threaded his fair hair. The stubble on his face could not hide the deepening lines. Baglos would not be able to deny the change this time. What did it mean? Shoving aside a sudden disquiet, I hurried after him.

The others were camped just beyond the fallen guard tower. Baglos caught sight of us first, raced to D’Natheil, and bent his knee. “Oh, my lord, forgive me for my absence from your side. My duty called me, but these… our friends… called upon the command that you laid upon me to be led by”—he took a deep and wounded breath— “this mundane woman. And I did follow it. But I respectfully ask if that was your intent?”

“I redouble my command, Dulcé, and I’ve placed it on myself as well. You are my madrisse, who can lead me on the proper road and answer whatever I ask of you. But the Lady Seriana is my counselor, who must tell me what road to take and what questions I must ask.”

By the time I dealt with two more bouts of coughing, D’Natheil was eating his second bowl of Baglos’s porridge. I wanted a drink of something hot to soothe my throat and was forced to resort to gestures to let the Dulcé know.

Graeme Rowan sat a short distance away on a remnant of a fallen wall, munching a hard biscuit. Kellea was sitting halfway down the hill with her back to the company. Gratefully, I took a cup of hot wine from Baglos and perched next to the sheriff.

“Good morning,” I said, croaking a bit.

“Good morning, madam.”

“Just Seri will do.”

“As you wish.” He cocked his head toward the Prince. “So, do I kneel to him?”

“He does not expect it.”

“It was awkward enough with you for so long. To know who you were and what you were accused of. And then Kellea, a sorcerer in the flesh. But she tells me that this one is a prince, and that he and his odd friend come from a land—a world—that is not this one we walk. Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Hand of Annadis…” The hand that held his biscuit fell into his lap. For Rowan, I had learned, such a reaction was the equivalent of an earthquake.

“That realization was not much easier for me. Paulo is the only one who takes all of it in stride.”

The sheriff grimaced. “Paulo’s life is naught but irrational events. And he talks with horses. Why would anything amaze him? He tells me you chose to keep him, rather than shove him off to a magistrate. I thank you for that.”

“You know I could never—”

“I thank you anyway. Folk busy saving the world oft-times fail to note illiterate boys.” He lifted the biscuit to his mouth again, pausing only long enough to add, “May I ask what was last night?”

My throat soothed with Baglos’s wine, I told Rowan about the Seeking of the Zhid, and how D’Natheil thought he had to fight it alone so as not to endanger the rest of us. “What I did, just talking to him long enough, enabled him to grab an anchor in a world in which he was at sea. He used his own strength to deflect the attack. I thank you for your discretion.”

“I vow never to interfere where this sorcery business is involved.”

“You may find it less terrifying than you think.”

“Hmmph.” A skeptical grunt. “So, what now?”

“We must get him to the place they call the Gate, as Kellea told you, so he can do whatever he was sent here to do, avoiding the traps the Zhid and the traitors among his own people have set for him.”

“And do you know the way?”

“We have clues.” I told him of the journal, and the Writer, and the riddles.

“You’re wagering the future of two worlds on four-hundred-fifty-year-old riddles written by a ten-year-old girl?” Rowan’s sandy eyebrows looked to fly off his face.

“She only gave her father the idea. He wrote his clues interspersed with her riddles, then left the key to them in the form of a children’s game.”

“Still sounds like hunting a bear with a stick.”

Rowan finished his biscuit and I my wine, watching Baglos bustling happily about with food and fire and pots. After a while Rowan said. “So the little one is his servant. He seems very devoted. Obedient… trustworthy.”

“Their relationship is much deeper than master and servant—a magical link of the mind. Baglos would have difficulty disobeying his commands, even if he wanted to. What about it?”

“Mmm… no matter. I just wasn’t sure. Back in Yurevan—” He waved his last bite of biscuit in dismissal. “Naught, then.”

My cup empty, I was anxious to get on with the day. “Then let me introduce you, and we’ll be off.”

The Prince was still eating voraciously. Paulo was attempting to match him bite for bite, but was falling behind.

“D’Natheil, I must introduce you to one whose honesty I’ve much maligned. He was pursuing us with only good intent. This is Graeme Rowan, whom I induced you to bash on the head out of my mistaken interpretation of events.”

The Prince looked up.

“Sheriff, this is D’Natheil—no, more properly His Grace D’Natheil, Prince of Avonar, Sovereign of Gondai, Heir of D’Arnath.” D’Natheil was still dressed in the clothing of a dead farmer, the same shabby shirt and breeches I had rifled from Jacopo’s bins, but when he nodded his head, Rowan bowed to him, though I believed he had come to the meeting with no such intent.

“You’re not a wicked villain, then?” asked the Prince solemnly, as he motioned Baglos to empty the last dregs of breakfast into his bowl, even while scooping the last bite into his mouth. “Not a heinous, hide-bound slave of corruption that parades under the name of the law?”

“A servant of justice and order, but no slave, and neither heinous nor hide-bound, I trust,” said Rowan, just as solemnly.

“But at least a surly, knavish rascal who cannot abide the possibility of rational discourse from a female, and who could likely not even recognize such a thing were it to pop up from a tankard of ale?”

Rowan shook his head emphatically. “I’ve learned my lesson on that score from several sources.”

I looked from one to the other and felt my cheeks grow hot. “What is this conspiracy, gentlemen? I lead this expedition, and I’ll have no pompous men having secret understandings and uncivil attitudes. You’ve just met. How can you be conspiring already?” I threw up my hands and busied myself with smothering the fire, pointedly ignoring the two who burst out laughing at my discomfiture. But I felt a smile bubble up from deep inside me… from a place I had believed barren.

Baglos packed the last of his pots and bags and went with Paulo to collect the horses. Moments later, Baglos came running to D’Natheil in great agitation. “My lord, we cannot find your horse! We’ve had no luck at all in summoning him. Unless you can do something…”

“He’ll come.” D’Natheil closed his eyes, flicked his fingers in a small gesture, and whispered a word I couldn’t hear. But I felt it. Most definitely. The sheriff felt it, too, and watched the Prince intently. When I heard the distant pounding of hooves and saw the chestnut appear on the next hilltop, I was not surprised. D’Natheil looked satisfied as the graceful animal galloped into our camp and stopped within reach of his master’s hand.

Paulo grinned. “You must’ve learned his name.”

D’Natheil stroked the horse’s head. “Indeed I did.”

“And what is it, then?” I asked.

“He is called Sunlight.”

A relieved Baglos finished the loading, while I pulled out the journal and showed Rowan and D’Natheil its secrets.

“The first riddle is obvious,” I said, tapping lightly on the page. “A river is a road that never sleeps, and its travelers have no feet—boats and fish and such, of course. And we know we’re going to the mountains, so we must head upriver. But how far? When do we look for the next clue? The chest is the next, and it must indicate this one, ”It is the lesser brother’s portion that brings the greatest wealth and the lesser passage that finds its destination.“ ”

“It would imply a decision point,” said D’Natheil. “A fork in the road or some such, and we would take the inferior way.”

“We’ll have to trust that we’ll recognize it.”

In a short time all was ready. The sheriff knelt at the top of the hill, raising a dirty thumb to his brow, as stubborn in his piety as in all else. And so we set off in the sparkling morning, leaving the mournful ruin to the wind and the sparrows. With six of us together, and D’Natheil yanked back from the brink of despair, I felt more confident than I had in many days. But after only an hour’s riding on the little used path that paralleled the restless Glenaven, D’Natheil pulled up and looked back the way we had come. “We’d best ride hard,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Someone’s close behind.”