Son of Avonar

CHAPTER 35

Dawn crept over the lake outside the cavern. Muddled with unchecked speculations, incoherent plotting, and unsettling half-dreams of disembodied faces, I scrabbled my way out of the long night. I had not wanted to sleep. I had wanted to do nothing but ponder on how it was possible that Karon could live. Only a madwoman could even consider it.

Baglos still lay under the colonnade like a discarded boot. As I shifted my cramped shoulders and stiff neck, I wondered if the Duke had known anything of what had been done to D’Natheil. D’Natheil… If this inconceivable fantasy were true, then what had become of the true prince? The man who had come to me in the woods on Poacher’s Ridge did not know himself. His body and spirit were alien to each other. I had seen that from the first, but hadn’t understood it. How did a soul exist in a body that was not its own? A constant struggle of emotion and instinct, untempered by experience or memory. Even his appearance had been in flux. Was that, too, the result of this inner combat? Dassine said that D’Natheil’s clouded mind was the inevitable result of what he had done to the Prince. What had he done? What I wouldn’t give for a few moments’ conversation with Dassine!

With the daylight came doubts about all that had been so convincing in the darkness. And even if my mad beliefs were true, his circumstances were so desperate that I might not see him again. Yet somehow my spirits were no longer bound by rational thinking or the limits of possibility.

As the pearly preamble to the day gave way to bold pinks and reds, Maceron’s men stirred and began the usual rituals of morning: rummaging in packs for food, relieving themselves under the colonnade, saddling horses, grumbling, bawling orders, curses, and insults. An hour passed and Giano did not come. Had he already found the Prince by the Gate? I craned my neck in a futile attempt to see. Where were they?

Maceron strolled across the mud-tracked paving. He gnawed on a leathery piece of jack, wiping the grease from his unshaven face with the back of one hand. “So you’re still here,” he said, grinning.

“And where else would I be?” I snapped, finding it easy to reclaim a combative spirit on this singular morning. “Why would I wish to be anywhere but here with my arms bent so charmingly about this stone tree? Have the villains finished their murderous doings?” I didn’t have to force the tremor into my speech.

He tweaked the rope binding my hands. “It seems our prisoner has escaped his guards.”

“Escaped?”

“You needn’t get your hopes up. He’ll not evade the priest. Can’t say I’d be sorry to see this Giano humbled. Though if I thought the devil sorcerer had the least chance to escape, I’d hunt him down myself and to perdition with all business arrangements. But the priest hates him more than I do.” He drew his knife and twirled it through his fingers as soldiers will do to amaze small boys.

I shrank back against the pillar, away from the flashing edge. “You claim to hate sorcerers, and then you help them with their murders. It makes no sense.”

Maceron shrugged. “The priests say our world will be free of sorcerers when they’re done. My master believes them, and who am I to question?” He sliced through my bonds, yanked me to my feet, and propelled me through the cavern, relinquishing custody to the gray-hooded Zhid waiting at the foot of the stairway. “Don’t think I’ll lose track of you, madam,” he called, as the hooded Zhid herded me up the steps. “You will reap your proper reward!”

On another day, I would have devised a proper retort for the vile sheriff, but my mind was far ahead of my feet, reaching into the chamber of blue fire. Is it you? Tell me. Give me a sign.

Giano awaited us at the first landing. His usually colorless face was flushed and his empty eyes gleamed hungrily in the torchlight. “I almost came to visit you last night,” he said, smiling. “But I wonder if I would have found you where I left you?”

“I am very proficient at releasing myself from captivity and reattaching myself to stone pillars,” I said. “It’s always such a lark.”

“Mmm… I wonder.” The Zhid wagged a dark-stained fragment of silver cord. “This doesn’t look like sorcery to me, and I don’t think the Dulcé has waked from his slumbers to perform yet another service for his prince.”

“Don’t blame me for your incompetence,” I said. “I might have thought of something better to do with a knife than freeing this infantile prince. The whole lot of you— Dar’Nethi, J’Ettanne, Dulcé, whatever you are—should leap off of this ledge and good riddance to you.”

Giano laid cold fingertips on my cheek, and I was almost sick with the dead feel of them. “Words are worth nothing. You are a mistress of words, but look at where they’ve gotten you: your friends dead, yourself on the way to your long-delayed execution, your grand mission in shambles. No matter what your activities of the night, my lady, I cannot find myself unhappy with you.” Indeed the Zhid seemed almost serene, not at all like a man whose prized prisoner has gotten the upper hand. “I especially want you to witness the precision of well-laid plans coming to fruition.” The Zhid waved me up the stairs. “Come, now, my lady. Great events to witness this day. A thousand years of history will come to an end. In truth, all of history will be made obsolete. Your little world will at last have its umbilical severed.”

“And, of course, as the good Maceron believes, none of your kind will remain in the Four Realms,” I said. “But you’ve no need to stay, have you? The Lords of Zhev’Na feed on our sorrows all the way from their wasteland—”

“Do not speak of those you cannot comprehend,” snapped Giano. “If you mundanes rip each other’s flesh, that is your own doing, not ours.”

Just outside the doors into the passageway, Giano and his companions discarded their priest’s robes. All three were attired in long, belted shirts of purple or gray, tight black hose, and supple black boots that reached above their knees. Each wore a single gold earring and carried a quite serious-looking sword. One of Giano’s henchmen was a burly man with reddish hair, thick forearms, and a gray cast to his skin. To my astonishment the other was a woman, tall, angular, and severe, arms like a plowman and iron-gray hair twisted into a knot atop her head. Her eyes held no more human feeling than did those of her companions.

“And now, madam…” said Giano, motioning me to precede him.

The blue-gray frostlight of the Gate flooded the passage. As I walked into the chamber, flanked by the two Zhid, my breath was visible in the frigid air. It took me a heart-searing moment to find the one that waited. He sat by the fiery wall, his arms wrapped about his knees, his head bowed as if he were asleep. I tried to shout a warning, but my tongue would not obey, no matter how I tried. Even so, the Prince’s head came up quickly, his face awash with unhappy surprise.

It’s all right, I thought. I chose to be here. To stay with you. Gods, how I wished he could hear me. Indeed, no answering words sounded in my mind, but on his face blossomed a smile of such brilliance, one might think all the beauty and joy of the universe had been gathered into his soul. Karon’s smile. I was right. Oh, holy gods, how was it possible?

A quick movement to my left was Giano, his gaze snapping from the Prince to me and back again. The Zhid’s eyes narrowed briefly, picking at my soul before he moved on to his business. “We stand at this artifice of enslavement called D’Arnath’s Bridge,” he said, focusing sober attention on the man seated in front of him. “Who speaks for the dead despot?”

And so the challenge was opened.

“I speak for D’Arnath, the father of my fathers,” answered the Prince, remaining seated, though shifting his full attention to the Zhid. “Who intrudes on this holy place?”

“Those who deny D’Arnath and his whelps any place in the worlds that have repudiated them. We refute your claim to these objects you so pompously declare to be holy. This bridge and its devices unlawfully bind the power of your own people. And the residents of this sad world”—he swept his hand wide—“have long declared they want no part of Dar’Nethi magics.”

“I’ll take on any challenge. I’ll not lie down and die for you, Zhid.”

Giano smiled. “I never intended you should.”

The Prince sat relaxed. Waiting. “Who has appointed you champion for this world, Giano?”

“Much as I desire to be the sole bearer of this challenge, D’Natheil, and to lick the last drops of D’Arnath’s blood from my sword, this battle is properly fought by all concerned.” He snapped his fingers, and the Zhid woman left the room. “It is time for your family’s unique brand of slavery to end. Unlike your self-important ancestors, we do not assume the right to speak for these mundanes or declare what’s best for their future. We’ve only shown them how D’Arnath and J’Ettanne have contrived to keep their world in bondage to Avonar, that dying crone who sucks the lifeblood of a child to extend her life one moment longer. No. This world has provided its own proper opponent, one who carries the honor of these lands and their sovereign on his sword.”

I caught my breath. The connection I hadn’t seen. Giano did not need to name his champion, the lord who had arrived in the middle of the night, the same lord who had been sent to answer the challenge of a “rebel chieftain” in the west. The burly Zhid had pulled me to the fog-shrouded periphery of the chamber, so Tomas did not see me as he strode through the doorway behind the Zhid woman. How magnificent he looked, dressed in red silk, fine leather, and the ruby-studded tabard that was only worn by the king’s defender, carrying the ancient sword of the Champion of Leire. Perfectly balanced, exactingly forged and tempered, there was no finer blade in the Four Realms. Now, where was his companion, Maceron’s master, the sardonic snake who slithered out from under every vile stone in the Four Realms? For the moment, at least, Tomas stood alone.

My brother seemed scarcely to note his strange surroundings, but saved his attention for the Prince. He snorted when D’Natheil rose to face him. “This is my opponent, my liege’s challenger?”

Though the two were equal in stature, the Prince looked shabby in comparison: barefoot, his face bruised, wrists and ankles raw and ringed with dried blood, Rowan’s tired black cloak held about him with the sword belt. D’Natheil looked puzzled as he examined Tomas, and only after a long scrutiny of my brother’s face and red-brown hair did understanding dawn. “Is this some jest, Zhid? I’ve no dispute with this man.”

Tomas interrupted the smirking Giano before the Zhid could answer. “I am no one’s jest. I stand champion for Evard, King of Leire and Valleor, Protector of Kerotea and Iskeran. No one challenges the sovereignty of my liege without answer from me.”

“I make no challenge to your king,” said the Prince. “My argument is with this Giano and his masters who have laid waste to my own land, who have devastated my people beyond your understanding, who have murdered my father and my brothers, and whose intent is to slay me before I can remedy the wickedness they’ve done.”

“I care nothing for your personal disputes,” spat Tomas. “But sorcerers of your race have lived in Leire uninvited, defying our laws and customs. You proclaim yourself sovereign of a neighboring realm, yet you do not treat with our king as would a legitimate brother. Instead you sneak about the Four Realms, committing murder and spying out our defenses. And this strange portal—do you not claim it as your rightful property, and is it not possible for your warriors to invade our lands through some secret avenue that lurks behind it?”

Someone had tutored him very well.

“You don’t understand what you’ve been brought into,” said D’Natheil. “I’ll not fight you. I honor your house, and I acknowledge your king.”

Tomas drew his longsword—the light, flexible, perfectly edged blade of the Champion of Leire, rubies glittering in its hilt. “I understand enough. Fail to fight, and you’ll die at my hand. By our law, you should rightly burn. But because you’ve come from another land, I offer you a warrior’s death.” He stepped closer to the Prince. D’Natheil stood motionless, hands loose and relaxed at his sides, sword sheathed. I tried again to call out, to stop the wickedness that was about to happen. But Giano smiled at my struggle. His binding on my tongue was as firm as the Zhid warrior’s hold on my arm. I could not make a sound, and my brother could not see me.

With the wickedly tapered tip of his sword, Tomas ripped a long slit in D’Natheil’s collar.

The Prince did not move. “I have no dispute with you, sir.”

Another tweak at his breast left a ragged tear in the black cloak. Tomas was proud and preferred a fight, but he took his duty to Evard very seriously. If he was convinced of the danger D’Natheil posed, he would take off the Prince’s head without compunction. A third move left a bloody scratch on D’Natheil’s cheek, and with a movement so swift as to be unseen, Rowan’s sword, heavy and old-fashioned, scratched and nicked in a hundred places, appeared in the Prince’s hand. Giano licked his lips. Was he still expecting the Prince to run?

With no further hesitation, Tomas attacked. I had not seen my brother fight since he’d come into his prime. He was a master of fluid power, the flash and speed of his youth replaced by intelligence and perception. It was as if he knew to an exactitude where D’Natheil’s blade would be at any moment, and he scarcely had to shift his position to counter any move the Prince made. His king did not deserve such perfection.

D’Natheil began slowly, as if he were reluctant, or the weapon were too heavy, or he couldn’t remember the moves. But as Tomas lunged and struck, the ringing swords sending blue-white sparks flying through the icy fog, the Prince shed his hesitation. Thrust, parry, counter, attack… spinning, circling… faster, smoother, more powerful by the moment, a new level of skill demonstrated with every closure.

Tomas’s jaw was sculpted in iron, his lips a thin line. As far as I knew he had not lost a match since he was seventeen. A barrage of slashing blows from the Prince had Tomas almost in my lap, but my brother ducked and spun and twisted away, and then his weapon was slicing downward toward D’Natheil’s shoulder. But the Prince spun, too, and his blade halted Tomas’s stroke with a bone-shattering block.

After a while I wondered if D’Natheil even knew whom he fought or why. His face had settled into an expressionless mask. Every step, every stroke, every attack, slash, spin, and parry seemed to take him farther away from himself, as if there were no real dispute with rights or wrongs or consequences, no war, no meaning outside his actions, only the unthinking, unending, glorious abstraction of combat. He was lost in passionless exaltation, his grace making Tomas look heavy-footed, his speed and strength making Tomas look old. Whatever the truth of his soul, the body that battled my brother that day was D’Natheil, the Heir of D’Arnath.

A ringing blow and the Champion’s sword clattered across the colorless paving stones. Tomas was on one knee, flushed, panting, and bleeding from a deep gash in his thigh.

D’Natheil held Rowan’s blade high over his shoulder, its edge on a line for Tomas’s neck. The Prince’s face was cold and deadly, and I felt that the very universe must be weeping silent tears.

No. No. No. I ached to cry out, to alter D’Natheil’s expression of uncaring inevitability. Tomas was my brother. Flesh of my flesh. I could not forget his eyes reflected in the glass back in his palace chambers—bewildered, guilt-wracked—craving forgiveness that he could not ask, knowing that I could not give.

Moments passed. The Prince did not strike. Slowly, he lowered his weapon and said, huskily, “Go. This is not your fight.”

“Do not dismiss me!” Tomas’s face was scarlet. “Finish me with honor or give me back my sword.”

The Prince shook his head. “I’ll not fight you. Those who chose you chose well, but I will not slay the Duke of Comigor, son of the Lord Gervaise.” He stuck his sword tip under Tomas’s blade and with a twist of his wrist flipped the gleaming weapon into the air, so that it came down hilt-first into its owner’s hand.

Tomas’s anger was supplanted by surprise and curiosity. “How do you know me?” D’Natheil glanced over my brother’s shoulder and tipped his head. Tomas’s eyes followed his. “Seri!”

The world paused in its turning.

“Yes, your traitorous sister is here, Lord Tomas,” said Giano, breaking his long silence and drawing Tomas’s gaze away from me. “She has betrayed you once again, Your Grace, betrayed your king, violated the sacred honor of your house by consorting with this sorcerer prince. She exemplifies the corruption he brings, mocking you, and prostituting your son’s heritage. I’m prepared to turn her over to you as soon as you discharge your duty to your king.”

Tomas stood up slowly and waved his sword point from Giano to me. “Let her go.”

“The sorcerer disdains you,” said Giano. “Can you not see the scorn in which he holds your king, your people? He thinks to make you impotent by flaunting his rape of your sister’s mind, this ultimate violation begun by that other of his kind. You remember… the one you so prudently removed from this world, the one who sought to pollute your very bloodlines with his foul seed.”

“You were right, Seri,” said my brother, staring at Giano. “Until this moment, I’d forgotten your warning about the one with the empty eyes.” He sheathed his sword and folded his arms across his breast. “I’ll fight no more until I understand what’s happening here.” Without taking his eyes from the Zhid, he said, “This is his friend. Darzid’s friend.”

But in the moment he uttered Darzid’s name, Tomas was lost. A leaden shutter dropped across his face, and like a wooden doll jerked onto the stage by its puppetmaster, he snarled and whirled to face D’Natheil. And before I could connect his altered behavior with Giano’s upraised fist, my brother drew his sword, roared a curse, and attacked. The startled Prince could do nothing but counter, and Tomas, in his madness, could not adjust to his opponent’s lightning response. D’Natheil’s sword was driven deep by the force of Tomas’s charge.

Tomas sagged, and when the Prince withdrew his blade, my brother slumped to the floor. Then the Zhid warrior released me and, together with the Zhid woman, drew his weapon and fell upon the Prince before D’Natheil could even see what he’d done.

I ran to Tomas and dragged him away from the combat. Blood poured from the gaping wound in his side. With his knife, I hacked a strip from my skirt and bound the folded rag in place around him with my cloth belt. Not fair. Not fair. Did the saving of the world require this blood, too? I clutched my brother in my arms and wished that I could pray.

A sword skittered across the paving, coming to rest beside the curtain of fire. The burly Zhid was down, leaving a smeared trail of blood as he crawled toward his dropped weapon. The woman was fading fast under D’Natheil’s relentless assault. I assumed Giano would be the next to attack, but the smiling Zhid commander leaned his shoulder against the wall and watched.

The fallen Zhid reached for his sword, but the battle raged close, and D’Natheil kicked the weapon past the Gate fire. The Zhid warrior lurched after it, reaching through the curtain of dark flame, then screamed murderously as he pulled back, half his body blackened and smoldering.

When would Giano move? The Prince’s victory seemed close. Tremors shook the foundation of the chamber, and the cold gnawed at my bones. The Gate fire burned blue-black. I should be rejoicing in D’Natheil’s skill, yet I was foundering in a sea of dread. The Prince was furious and determined, his face void of everything but battle. The Zhid woman was staggering, bleeding from uncountable wounds. Then she was down, D’Natheil kneeling beside her with a knife in his hand, his own silver dagger with the emblem of D’Arnath engraved upon it.

What was the horror that filled me as I watched him, so grim and implacable, raising his dagger to finish his enemy? Giano smiled and did nothing. The Gate fire was the same bruised color as the storm that had driven us to Pell’s Mound.

This was wrong. All wrong.

Dassine’s message of love and trust resounded in my memory. He believed Karon should be here, not D’Natheil. Why? There had to be a reason. There is that in D’Natheil that will tell him what must be done. But Dassine had meant in the D’Natheil he had sent, not in the prince who had grown up in Avonar, the one who knew only of fighting and death. Why Karon?

As the Prince’s dagger fell through the pregnant air, I lunged for his arm, deflecting his blow. D’Natheil shoved me away in cold fury. “Why? Why must I stop? What do you mean, this is not the way?”

Though I had uttered no sound, clearly he had heard the plea I was screaming in my thoughts. As a snarling Giano grabbed my shoulder and wrenched me backward, I tried desperately to focus my words. Look at the Gate fire, how dark. Dassine took your memories because you had been trained in the wrong way. All these years, the Dar’Nethi have fought and lost. You must find a different way to accomplish your task.

Giano shoved me against the wall. “Interfering whore. Do you think I can’t hear your maudlin pleas? I should have disposed of you long ago.” His hatred bored into my head like a hot poker, but I would not allow him in. I had not forgotten how to create a barrier in my mind.

The Prince’s silver dagger was again raised to finish the Zhid. I closed my eyes and fought to keep my head clear of everything but what was most important. When I looked again the dagger had not fallen, and D’Natheil’s gaze shifted frantically from one to the other of his victims.

“Giano has planned all this,” I told him, surprised to find the torrent of words bursting free of Giano’s silencing. “It’s why we were able to free you so easily last night. He let us do it. Just as he let us go at Ferrante’s, and in Yurevan, and again in Montevial. They never wanted to capture you. I was so stupid to think we had outsmarted them again and again. It was always too easy. Did you hear him? When you said you wouldn’t lie down and die for him, he said he never intended that you should. He brought Tomas, knowing well he could never defeat you. Giano wants you to kill them all.”

“Then tell me what I must do!” said the Prince, throwing his knife to the floor, his mouth tight with anger.

I had to follow Dassine’s lead. Instruction could not give the Prince the power he needed. “You must find the answer inside yourself. Dassine believed you could. I believe it. I know you, D’Natheil. You are worthy… so very worthy… of our trust.”

“So the Prince of Fools has become a slave to a woman,” said Giano, stepping forward. Perhaps I only imagined the note of anxiety in his sneering. “Ironic, is it not, that by sending you to this woman, Dassine has robbed you of your only virtue? The Dulcé was right. She is a curse.”

But the Prince was not listening to Giano. He took up his knife again, brushing his fingers along the blade and staring at the burned Zhid who lay moaning in wordless agony. D’Natheil’s stony visage softened to puzzled curiosity as he touched the dying warrior’s mutilated arm.

Giano stiffened and hissed, and without warning he wrapped his arms about me and yanked me to his breast. The dagger that had taken Baglos’s life and that of the highwaymen in During Forest was poised at my heart, and one by one my senses burst into flame, until I believed that the Gate fire must be burning beneath my very skin. But the Prince did not look up, and I refused to cry out. He needed time to see his way.

My captor dragged me toward the wall of fire, the blue-black curtain soaring in vicious exhilaration into the murky heights, and the Zhid began to laugh with such triumphant wickedness that D’Natheil was drawn to look. When the Prince saw what was happening, all softness fled from his face. He leaped up, grabbing his sword, and my heart shriveled. Giano’s fire had grown so fierce that I could not bear it, and I began to sob.

“Let go of the woman,” said the Prince, cold and angry. “I am the one you want.”

“So you are, but I will have you on my terms. We must rid ourselves of this meddlesome female before she saps all your resolve.” And with wicked laughter that rang through the stone chamber, Giano shoved me through the wall of black fire.