Son of Avonar

CHAPTER 37

“Indeed, I am he that you name,” said the man who walked out of the wall of fire. He bowed to Kellea and me, but his eyes were only for D’Natheil. “If you will excuse me…” He limped across the chamber and tenderly lifted the Prince’s haggard face, examining it intensely. D’Natheil’s eyes were open, but whatever he saw was far distant from that room. He demonstrated no awareness of Dassine, or me, or anything around us. “Oh, my dear son,” murmured the sorcerer. “All I believed of you… How right I was.” He pulled off his brown robe and laid it around the Prince’s shoulders. “Rest now, and we’ll care for you as you deserve.”

He stood up slowly and leaned on his staff. “It will be some time before he can do anything but maintain his own existence, but I believe he will be fine.”

“And he will know who he is?” I said.

“Not today”—Dassine heaved a great sigh—“nor tomorrow. Not for a goodly time. But he’ll know. One day he will laugh, and ride his great horse, and grow enchanted roses for you in the middle of winter. As I told you.”

“Then I’m right. He is…” I could not pronounce the name aloud, lest by the single word my hope would shatter itself on the bulwark of impossibility.

“Oh, yes. In this body lives the soul you know as Karon Lifegiver. It is neither dream nor self-delusion.”

I could not speak.

“Some remnant of D’Natheil will always remain with him, but eventually it will seem neither strange nor uncomfortable. He will never look like himself, of course. His body is D’Natheil’s and that will not change though it appears he has taken on something closer to his own span of years.” Dassine laid a hand on the fair hair threaded with gray.

“How is this possible?”

“Mostly because of Karon himself—his strength and will and unparalleled love for life. His is a prodigious gift. Luck, too, has played its part, as have I—and you.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I can’t stay for stories,” said Kellea, who stood stiffly next the doorway. “Graeme—”

“Heaven and earth, the sheriff!” I said, guilty that my own desire had displaced thoughts of the injured Graeme Rowan. “Master Dassine, our good friend lies injured downstairs…”

“And what has that to do with me?”

“You’re a Healer, are you not?”

“I’m the most gifted Healer that lives, but I do not spend my talent lightly.”

His arrogance pricked like a thorn in the shoe. “I’m well aware of the cost of healing,” I said. “And I don’t ask lightly. A friend is dying from fighting your war.”

“Hmmph.” The sorcerer wrinkled his brow. “I suppose I must look at him.”

“He’ll want no help given unwilling,” said Kellea, snarling. “I’ll care for him myself.”

“No, no, you misunderstand.” Dassine waved one hand dismissively. “I don’t begrudge the man. But it’s been my practice never to spend my power on minor matters, and I’ve no strength to spare today. But if your friend is so desperate a case, I’m quite willing to see to him. I’ll warn you, though, young woman, that this cursed leg makes me damnably bad at dodging pursuers.”

“I think I can get you there safely,” said Kellea, choking on her fury. “There are only three frightened Leiran soldiers wandering about the cavern.”

“I’ll go then. You’ll watch over him?” said Dassine to me.

“I will.”

With every moment I spent near the Gate fire, I felt stronger, as if my blood drew sustenance from its glory. It was good that Karon was here.

At least an hour had passed by the time Dassine limped back into the room. “The good sheriff is resting. He will be healthier than he ever was and will very likely never appreciate it properly. The girl has stayed with him, and the ragamuffin boy.” With tenderness that belied his grumbling pomposity, he felt the Prince’s wrist, laid a hand on his temple, and peered into his vacant eyes. “It will still be a while until he can move. You want to know how it was done, I suppose.”

“I want to know everything.”

Dassine traced a circle in the air with his walking stick, and then, astonishingly, unfolded the ordinary looking limb of wood into a stool with a woven seat. He plopped himself onto it with a sigh. He didn’t explain his bit of magic nor offer me any comparable accommodation.

“I was in the Chamber of the Gate on the day your husband died,” he began. “The glory of that day was unimaginable, beyond hope, and the monstrous stupidity that followed was nearly our undoing. I think Exeget sent young D’Natheil to the Bridge early to destroy the evidence of his own monumental failure.

“The boy had been wild and incorrigible from the day of his birth, but intelligent, certainly, and strong-willed and courageous beyond his years. When his father and brothers died, he suddenly had demands on him: to act like a prince, to understand the war, to do those things you call magic. In their blind stupidity, the Preceptors could not see the worth of him and use his strength to encourage his best nature. As a result, D’Natheil excelled at swordplay and hand combat, but no heart developed alongside them. No wisdom or grace. Humility is a virtue we prize in our princes; Exeget, the pompous traitor, tried to beat it into him as if it was his fault he had received no teaching. When I first saw D’Natheil after my return from the Wastes, he had been forced to live out of doors for three days, unclothed in the most terrible winter weather, for refusing to bow to Exeget.” Dassine’s discourse was very like the spring storms that roll one after the other across the northern marches, each phrase a roiling intensity of disgust or bitterness or sorrow.

He glanced at me sharply. “You know of Exeget?”

I nodded.

“The boy preferred to shiver in his nakedness than to grovel before a fool. He hungered for war. By the time he was ten, some on the Council believed he was already a tool of the Zhid. Whatever the truth of that, the Bridge destroyed D’Natheil. When I carried him away from it, there was no soul left in him. An hour’s examination told me that the last Heir of D’Arnath was never going to save his people.”

“But if this was after Karon died, then how—?”

“Patience, madam!” said Dassine, rapping his staff on the floor in front of me. “The people were not told what their foolish Preceptors had done. While Avonar yet sang the triumph of the Exiles and the opening of the Gates, I sat by D’Natheil’s bedside and mourned the noble line of D’Arnath, and with him, our future and yours. You see, as a result of the long years of war, we Dar’Nethi had lost ourselves. Our princes had been trained more and more strenuously in the art of war, yet the Gates had remained closed and the Bridge had grown weaker. If only the Heir was like the one who had opened the Gate, I thought. All of us had felt the power of his enchantment—the will, the glory of his life’s essence. As I gazed on the deadness in D’Natheil’s eyes, I wondered how those eyes would appear if the light of such a life was reflected there.”

“Karon had not yet crossed the Verges,” I said, dragging at the traces of the old man’s story.

Dassine smiled crookedly. “It had only been three hours, three hours from exultation to despair. I was beside myself with anger, and so, there in my study, with D’Natheil half dead and the brave songs still echoing through the falling darkness, I sought through the ether for the one who had given everything to save us. Such souls do not cross the Verges quickly.”

“And you found him.” The wonder of it was almost unbearable.

“It wasn’t difficult to identify his among the souls that traveled that night. I summoned him and told him what I wanted—to return him to life in our prince. He refused. As long as there was life in the boy, he could not supplant it, he said. And L’Tiere beckoned, as it will for any who have left their physical being behind. But I bound him to an artifact of power and told him that I would do my best to heal D’Natheil. If I was successful, then I would release Karon to go beyond the Verges. But if the Heir had been irreparably damaged as I feared, then he, Karon, must live again as the Heir of D’Arnath.”

Dassine’s eyes glistened with tears, and he drew a clenched fist to his breast, lost in his storytelling. “At first he would beg me to let him go. The agony of his death was real to him at every moment of every day. I chided myself that in prolonging his torment, I had come to be no better than our enemies. But I could not release him; we had no one else. And so we waited. Ten years—”

I was overwhelmed with horror. “Ten years? You made him wait for ten years between life and death?” Ten years with no body—no light, no scent, no sound, no touch of wind or rain or human hand. Only the fire. How could any man do such a thing to another?

Dassine reached out his hand for me. I recoiled, but his piercing blue eyes held me, insisting I accept his truth. “You must believe that he came to accept this half-life I gave him. As we grew to know each other, he became involved in my work and the pain of his existence receded. Karon became an extension of my mind, and, had I not come to love him as my own son, I could have been tempted to enslave him in such a way forever. We could have rivaled the Lords of Zhev’Na in our combined power. But, instead, I learned of this world and of you, and in the plan that evolved in my head, I knew you had to play a part.

“I was ready to bring him into D’Natheil after only a year. The boy could eat, and speak, and fight as he always had, but there was no thought in his speech, no moral grounding to his combat. Even so, Karon would not consider it while D’Natheil yet lived, though it would have meant release from his own captivity.”

Dassine was no longer telling the story, but reliving it: the challenge, the awe at his own audacity and skill. “To pour the life essence of one man into the body of another is a deed of tremendous complexity, with immense risks and unfathomable implications. As the years passed, I devised the plan to take away all memory, so that the minimal functioning mind and the physical body could learn to work together. Over a period of months, I would carefully awaken each memory and do whatever was necessary to guide him through the difficulties of the joining. Karon consented, though I think the prospect of giving up his memories frightened him more than anything. It was you, you see. With all his being he desired to carry his memory of you beyond the Verges, and if I failed, he would be left with nothing. I promised that if we ever made the attempt, the first memory I returned would be something of you.”

Dassine dropped his voice, and I had to lean closer to hear him over the flames. “Six weeks ago events caught us up. Avonar was nearing its end. D’Natheil raged at the wards that bound him to my house. Given his freedom, he would not fail to be in the thick of battle. So I released the boy to his war. I stayed close, watched, and knew I was right. He stood tall and beautiful and soulless, and he slew fifty Zhid without thought, risking death without care. He turned the tide of that night’s battle, but not until he met a crafty Zhid who used a mind-destroying poison on his knife and left D’Natheil among the dying. I knew that poison… as I knew the Zhid who wielded it.”

“You murdered him!”

Dassine did not flinch at the word. “Some would say it. But I would not change the choice I made. Karon could refuse me no longer. Had he known what I’d done… well, I didn’t tell him. At the moment D’Natheil breathed his last, I brought Karon back in his place, erasing every memory of both minds at the same moment. Then did I receive due retribution for my sin. On that same morning of new hope, a Dulcé named Bendal came to me with the story of the traitors’ bargain with the Lords of Zhev’Na— to trade the Heir for D’Arnath’s lost weapons. They had decided that your world was not worth saving, and that ours could survive even without the Bridge, if we but had a royal talisman to protect Avonar. Traitorous fools.”

“So you sent him onto the Bridge before he was ready, before he even knew who he was.”

“I had to send him. Not to do so was to concede defeat. The Zhid were on the verge of closing the Gates, and I had no assurance we would ever be able to open them again. I could not accompany him, for if he failed, the last battle would be fought in Avonar, and my duty lay there. But I did not believe he would fail. You still lived. Karon taught me that the gift of the Dar’Nethi… the power for sorcery that lives in us… is life itself. He said that you were… are… and ever will be… the very essence of his magic.”

“That’s why you said the answer was in him.”

“That had to be it. How else could he have opened the Gates as he did? We needed a Healer to restore the Bridge, one who would give everything. Look at what he’s done…” He waved at the three Zhid sleeping quietly on the floor beside the curtain of white fire. “These three have souls again.”

“Why didn’t you tell us what you’d done and why? If I’d known it was Karon—”

“What would you have done differently? I know you better than anyone in the two worlds, better even than Karon who is blinded by his affection for you. Though I trusted you to do all you could do, you had parted from him in bitterness—yes, I recognized it in his story. And Karon’s tasks were difficult enough without knowing he had two missing lives instead of only one and an angry wife he couldn’t remember.”

“Will he ever remember all of it?”

Dassine stood, picked up his stool, and, with a twist of his wrist, transformed it into his walking stick again. “It’s why he must come back with me now. I will take him back to the beginning again and help him open the doors to his missing lives. He must understand that D’Natheil will always be a part of him and what that might mean. He must know that he was dead and that the longing he feels for L’Tiere is natural and not some morbid perversion. And, too, he is truly the Heir of D’Arnath, as well as the man you know. He must learn his place in both worlds. Zhid have crossed D’Arnath’s Bridge for the first time in a thousand years. Our battles are not over, and whatever life he chooses, he must be a part of our struggle. We have no one else to walk the Bridge.”

Dassine brushed the fair hair from Karon’s forehead and unbuckled the sword belt from his waist.

“How long?”

“A few months, a year… I cannot say. But he will come back to you, my lady, and he will know everything of the life you shared. I promised him.”

“I don’t know whether to bless you or curse you, Dassine.”

“He lives. You will bless me.” He handed me Rowan’s sword belt.

“Can I come with you?”

Dassine shook his head. “Impossible. Even in the presence of the Heir, the passage of the Bridge is fraught with peril. To protect Karon as he is now will take everything I can muster, and once we are in Avonar, I’ll not dare leave him.” The old man paused for a moment, looking at Karon with sympathy. “And too… these coming days will be difficult. I must lay him open like a gutted fish as I give him back himself. He will have no defenses, and I’ll not expose him so completely to anyone, not even you. But from time to time when I think he’s able, I’ll bring him to you. If you follow my instructions, I think you could be of some assistance in his recovery.”

“I suppose I must entrust him to you, then.”

“As I entrusted him—and everything—to you.” Dassine took my hand in his, and when he let it go again, I held a polished bit of rose quartz about the size and shape of a robin’s egg. The stone was unnaturally cold. “Keep this with you. When it grows warm and glows of its own light, we will come with the next day’s sunrise to whatever place you are. You will make sure the place is secure. If it’s not, throw the stone into a fire, and I’ll be warned.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“I have no doubt of it.” He gestured toward my lap and held out his hand, and I relinquished the Heir’s dagger that still lay in the folds of my skirt. Sticking the weapon in his own belt, he turned back to Karon who still knelt on the cold stone paving, unmoving and unseeing. “Come, my friend. It’s time we took you home.” Dassine placed his hand under Karon’s arm, lifting him easily. Karon towered over the sorcerer, but any observer could see which one supported the other. “Farewell, Lady Seriana. You’ve done well.”

“Take care of him.”

Dassine nodded and led Karon through the veil of fire.

“J’den encour, my love,” I whispered as the dark outlines faded into the white flame. I fingered the cold, pale stone. I would wait and be ready.