The Soul Weaver

CHAPTER 17

By the time I crawled out of the royal bed on my first morning as the Bounded King, Vroon had taken most efficient charge of my household. A young male servant with only one ear and a wooden stick for a leg was waiting for me with a tub of steaming water and fresh clothes suitable for royalty. I accepted the fine-woven red shirt and black breeches, black hose, and calf-high boots - all of them, amazingly enough, made exactly to my measure - but diplomatically postponed wearing the gold-encrusted doublet and elaborately jeweled belt. Feeling properly human after the bath, I sent the servant to inform Princess Roxanne that I would wait upon her in an hour, then grabbed two hunks of hot bread, dripping with butter and honey, from a tray beside my bed, and set off to see Paulo. With my breakfast had come word from Nithea that he was awake.

When I arrived, Nithea had him propped up on pillows and was feeding him tiny spoonfuls of a thick whitish substance that smelled like rotten fish.

“Demons, have you come to rescue me?” he said weakly.

“Only to see that you’re not making Nithea too miserable with your complaining.”

“She’s got me so flat, I couldn’t lift a horse’s tail, then shoves more of this mess down me so I’ll puke out what insides I’ve got left. I thought it was a new torture from the Guardian.”

“You look better,” I said. And so he did. Some of the swelling had gone down in his face, his color was healthier wherever he wasn’t purple, green, or black, and his eyes had a spark of life in them.

Paulo screwed up his forehead and looked me up and down. “You look cleaner than last time I saw you, and your outfit’s pretty fine, but I think this lady should work on your busted face for a while and leave me be. You look like a mountain fell on you. What do you think, Nithea?”

“The king said you were to be made well before anything else. I do his will.”

Paulo squinted up at me. “The king… I was right, then.”

I shrugged.

Nithea took the pillows out from behind him and rolled him onto his side. I sat on a stool beside his bed and told him what I’d done.

“So why haven’t you gone to the Source yet?” he said, wincing as the woman spread a salve over the lash marks on his back.

“I just woke up. I had to come here first.”

He kept looking at me.

“All right, I don’t know. It’s what I wanted… what I came here for… the whole reason we got caught… ”

“You’re scared. That’s what.”

“I’m not scared. I’m just waiting for you to get on your feet again. You heard something ‘not right’ in that cave, and I didn’t. So, maybe you need to be with me when I go back.”

He pressed his face into his pillow, muffling a miserable groan. Around all the cuts and bruises he had gone a sickly yellow. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “This lady and her tree milk have done for me again.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

Nithea shook her head, holding up four fingers, then five, but her eyes smiled reassuringly above her veil. So it would take more than a day, but he would be all right.

“I’ll come back later when you’re feeling better.”

Nodding to Nithea, I left the room and headed down the stair in search of Roxanne.

Was Paulo right? Was fear what made me feel like a battle was going on in my chest every moment we stayed here? My connection to the Bounded was very deep. The land, the people, the problems… Every day, the place revealed itself a little more. I could look at the Singlars and know what names they would choose. I understood what had to be done to release them from their peculiar confinement to their towers, and I was already trying to figure out how they might share the wonders of the gardens. But I didn’t want to know these things or feel them. I didn’t belong here. I had to go back and clean up the mess I’d left behind in Leire, and then find some place to hide where no one could ever find me.

I wasn’t looking forward to my interview with Princess Roxanne, but unlike the Bounded, she was full of surprises. She wasn’t waiting for me in her apartments, but was bustling about the audience hall, peering into every nook and cranny, pulling back curtains, examining columns and doorways and every hand’s-breadth of the walls. Two Singlar women, dwarfish like Vroon, trotted after her on their stubby legs, while a male servant observed her from the wide doors to the rotunda.

The princess had gotten cleaned up as she wanted. Her hair hung heavy and damp halfway down her back. Evidently no one had found any gowns to fit her, so she wore a simple wool robe, much too large, that she had tied at her waist with a gold cord. Not very elegant, but the color, a rich blue, made her light hair look like gold thread.

When she saw me enter the room, she immediately altered course and hurried across the floor, planting herself in my way as if I had intended to walk past her. Her face, now that it was clean, looked like a fine sculpture, perfectly smooth, and rounded just enough to look soft. But you could have struck sparks from her eyes. They were gray, like steel. “So I’m a prisoner again. A fine rescuer you are.”

Why had I decided to visit her? Yes, I’d been harsh with her. And this was a strange, ugly place, bound to be frightening for someone with no experience of sorcery. But her father had burned sorcerers alive, slaughtered them and anyone who knew them: my father, Tennice’s brother, their friends, the infant they had thought was me. I had no reason to think the princess would do any different in his position. I ought to put her off the Edge.

“You are free to come and go as you like.”

“What a polite thing to say. But most houses provide doors and windows that make it a bit easier. Do you see any such things hereabouts?” She pulled back a green curtain, only to drop it again once she had shown me the blank wall behind it. With her lips pressed together, she strode from one drapery to another, nearly tearing them from the wall to illustrate her point. “And my chambers have none either. But then perhaps you still have plans to cut off my skin if I complain.”

She was certainly afraid - the Lords had taught me to smell and taste fear - but she did a good job of hiding it. I followed along behind her, hands clasped behind my back. It was true I had told Vroon to give her rooms without window slots. I had thought peeking through them might frighten her worse than she was already.

“Didn’t these women tell you how to leave the tower?” I nodded to the dwarfish women just out of politeness. They turned scarlet, placed their hands on their ruffled white collars, knelt, and bowed their heads to the floor. Roxanne glared at me. I nudged the women to get up, wishing myself ten leagues away. I’d give her a quarter of an hour and that was all.

“They only told me this ‘think of yourself out’ idiocy. Does it give you pleasure for your servants to be insolent or were you testing my obedience? I didn’t kill them for it, nor give them even a gentle slap for their rudeness.”

“But it’s the truth. They just don’t understand that you’re not used to such things. This is… ”

“… not Leire. Yes, I remember.” She spun on her heel, almost causing me to collide with her. “So tell me, O great king, where in the blighted universe are we?”

“Its inhabitants call this world the Bounded.”

“This world - ” She sat down abruptly on a plain wooden bench next to the wall. To her credit she lost none of her color. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I heard a story once of another world… ”

“… and a bridge of enchantment that joined it with our own.”

“I remember some of it. Such a wild tale… sorcery… other worlds… villainous creatures with no souls. I thought the woman must surely be mad.”

“That woman was my mother.” My mother had been astonished that King Evard had kept his daughter in the room as she told him about Gondai and the Bridge and the battle that had killed her brother.

“Your mother… truly? I couldn’t believe my father would even listen to her. I thought it was only because she was related to his sword champion, the Duke of… ” Her voice trailed away, and her gray eyes grew wide, staring at me again. “That’s who you are! Duke Tomas’s son!”

I bowed. “The stupidest boy in the world - at your service.”

Her brow wrinkled. “But the woman who told the story was not Duke Tomas’s wife.”

“There was a mix-up early on. He wasn’t really my father, but my uncle. His sister, Seriana, was - is - my mother.”

She shook her head. Her hair was curling as it dried and a few of the curls fell down on her face. She didn’t seem to notice. “Gerick. That was your name. And you were so unfriendly! You wouldn’t say anything and wouldn’t play anything I wanted. I told you about the cherry tarts to impress you. And later you were stolen by bandits. Everyone believed you were dead.”

“It’s complicated. I didn’t die.”

“So this is the world your mother told of?” She looked around the audience hall with new interest.

“No… or rather, I’m not exactly sure. It’s a long story. Would you like me to show you how to leave the Blue Tower? That’s probably enough strangeness for one day.” Then I could leave her to her own devices.

“Yes. Certainly. It might prove to me that I’m not your prisoner.” She popped up from the bench. “This is so odd. We played together. It seems a thousand years ago right now. This place… these people… You know… I don’t care if it’s complicated to explain where we are. I want to hear it. I’m not stupid. And I’m not some ninny who faints at the least fright. But, yes, show me how to get out of here first.”

Roxanne didn’t stop talking the whole way down the length of the audience hall. Without giving me much time to tell her anything, she peppered me with questions, not always the ones I expected.

“Who is your friend that you care so much for him?”

“His name is Paulo. He was born in the village of Dunfarrie. My mother befriended him there, and four years ago he helped her rescue me from the people who abducted - ”

“A common boy, then.”

“Those words have no meaning with respect to Paulo.”

“All right, all right. I can see not. Are you really as fierce as you say?”

I kept my eyes on the doorway at the end of the hall, wishing we were in the rotunda already so I could push her through the wall and be done with her. “My childhood was very unusual. I’ve done everything I say.”

She thought about that for a moment, her sidelong gaze feeling like fire on my skin. “There are a number of people who would say you are young to be a king, but I think it would be more accurate to say you are very old to be a year, ten months, and five days younger than me.”

The main entrance to the Blue Tower, where Paulo and I had first come through to visit the Guardian, was centered on a sheer curved wall, identifiable as a tower entrance only by the narrow silver band at its edges. I traced my finger over the outline to show her. “A dwelling in this world is called a fastness. They look like towers to us. But dimensions - height and width and depth - are measured differently here, so the interior spaces don’t reflect the exterior shape. And though the interior doorways between rooms look familiar to us, those which pass through the walls do not. The women were exactly right. You have to think of yourself out…”

I explained the passage to her as Vroon had explained it to me, and I described the thoughts I had used successfully. That was not easy, as I didn’t even have to consider them any more. Then I gave her a demonstration. When I popped back in, she was already yelling at me.

“Sorcery! I should have known it! How is it you are capable of such wickedness?” The princess was flushed, whether with anger or fright I couldn’t tell. “And how could you think that I - ”

“It’s not sorcery, though I’m sure to you it appears the same. But you and every person in this land can do it. And no one burns you for it.”

This time, she did turn pale. I thought she was going to run. But she just stared at me until my skin grew hot. “Well then,” she said at last. “Explain it to me.”

It took me a few moments to decide how much to say. I’d done a lot of thinking about the Bounded. Anyone in the Four Realms would call Nithea’s healing practices sorcery, and the same for Zanore’s route-finding, Ob’s weighty words, and the whole business of towers that grew. Yet I’d felt no telltale prickles of enchantment when the healing woman had massaged my shoulder - twisted when the dead maintainer had fallen on me - and I could suddenly raise my hand above my head without passing out from the pain. And I summoned no power to think myself out of the Blue Tower. The “prickles” were a sign of the resistance of the natural world to the use of a sorcerer’s power. So I had concluded that the Guardian had pronounced no magical winding to open the stone circle passage to the garden because no magic was needed. The fundamental nature of the Bounded was magic.

The princess’s fingers tapped impatiently on her folded arms.

“Well, first you have to understand the distinction between natural law and sorcery. Natural law is the set of rules a world works by - which can be different depending on the world. Sorcery is the use of a particular kind of power to stretch or extend or nullify those rules. Going in and out of these towers has no more to do with magical power than does riding in a wheeled cart or sailing on a lake in Leire…”

I tried to explain how things that would be inexplicable in our world and require a sorcerer’s power to accomplish could be a natural part of another one. I felt as if I was making a muddle of it. Roxanne stared at the floor, listening, her frown deepening by the moment.

When I finally gave up and stopped talking, she glanced up. “All right, then. I suppose that makes some kind of perverse sense. Go on.”

I was astonished. I wondered briefly what she might say if I told her I’d melted rocks with lightning from the tip of my finger or had swum in the deeps of the ocean in the form of a fish. I stayed with nature. “So, the way to pass between these spaces we call in and the spaces we call out is to convince yourself which way you’re going. Your mind’s just not used to being in a world with a different set of rules, and it doesn’t believe it when you tell it what to do. If you don’t want to try it, I could - ”

“No. I’m feeling a bit overstuffed with all this strangeness, and I’m tired of this dismal place and these lamps that are forever being turned up and down by creeping servants I never see. I need to walk in the sunlight. Maybe go riding.”

“Uh… perhaps there are a few more things you should know before we go out…”

Roxanne was very determined, and mastered entrances and exits in short order. She seemed to accept my word that it wasn’t evil. I supposed she had no one else to trust. However odd, I was at least someone she knew.

Once we were outside, she marveled at the green stars and massive lightnings of the Bounded, and called the towers “extraordinary” and “exotic.” This is not to say she was pleasant company. Mostly she complained about her awful robe, and the wind, and the too-large sandals they had given her for shoes, and the black dirt, and all the inadequacies of service in the Blue Tower. But even though I sensed how she was repulsed by many of the deformities in evidence, she never once showed it to those who crowded around us as we walked.

After a short walk, we headed back toward the Blue Tower. As we crossed the commard, a bent old woman with a jaw that bulged out like a bullfrog’s throat dropped to her knees in front of me and kissed the toe of my boots. She wasn’t the first Singlar to have done so that day.

Roxanne glared as I sent the old woman on her way. “They worship you! You must tell me how you’ve come here. I don’t care how long or complicated the story. How is it you’re their king? And why were you a prisoner?”

“I need to go - ”

“It’s your vile henchmen who brought me here, ‘King’ Gerick, putting a bag over my head and taking me before a horrible man who wore a crown and acted as though he were a king, though he had no kingly manner about him - ”

“And I would guess you told him who you were and what he could expect from your father if he so much as looked at you.”

Her eyes could have ripped the skin off a rabbit, but her tongue never slowed. “ - and in his most disgustingly impudent manner, this vile man threw me into that dungeon, where those other beastly creatures would come and taunt me and look at me, and I refused to believe in them. I spent a great deal of time screaming, until I decided that I must be in the hands of Kerotean priests, and that everything was an illusion induced by their wicked potions and elixirs. I believed they were taking vengeance against my father by driving me mad, and I decided I wouldn’t let them do it. So it’s only right that you tell me what’s going on in this place. Why are you a king?”

“It’s all bound up with a prophecy or an oracle or something like that… ”

I didn’t explain about the Breach or the Lords or why I had come here. I just told her about the Guardian and his corruption, and how I’d come to the Bounded for my own reasons, but gotten caught up in their expectations. As I talked, we started walking again, across the commard and back into the city. It rained a little as we walked, but the air stayed warm and still. Roxanne didn’t seem to mind. She kept her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the roadway as she listened. But she didn’t miss a word, and she kept interrupting me with more questions.

“Is everyone here a cripple or were they made so by this Guardian?”

“They are as they are,” I said. “You could say this is a world of outcasts, leftovers, ones people in our world would find unacceptable. They weren’t - ”

“And those three monsters came and stole people like these from Leire” - she waved her hand to the growing crowd following us through the dark streets - “frightening everyone to death. Brought them here to live like this, as if this were something better.”

“Vroon and two friends were sent to our world to look for this king. They just thought… Well, they were trying to help, I think. The Bounded is a very new world. They have little experience to - ”

“And then they make a boy their king!”

Having a conversation with Roxanne was like walking through a field of dartweed. You ended up getting pricked just about everywhere a needle could stick you.

“I’ve no intention of being their king forever. I just need some information from this Source. The Guardian was in the way.”

“So you’re not going to stay here and sort out the mess you’ve made.”

“As soon as Paulo is well, I’ll find out what I’ve come here to learn. Then I’ve got to go back, get some things straightened out. Make sure some people are… all right… ”

“… and take me back.”

“That, too. But meanwhile, yes, there are some things need doing here, and as I upset the order, I might as well do them. Then they can name someone else to be king if they even need one.”

“So why was I brought here? Do you know what they did to my father? They don’t have any prophecies about driving rightful kings mad or abducting princesses, do they? Whatever my failings, I don’t exactly match what your odd friends were looking for.”

We had come to the commard in front of the Blue Tower again, but here was another mystery laid out right in front of me. “I know what happened to King Evard, and I asked Vroon about it. He swore they had never touched the king. He admitted everything else - taking the other people and taking you.”

I waved toward a set of towers we hadn’t explored yet, and we set out that way. “What did you see on the night your father was attacked?”

Roxanne didn’t balk at extending our excursion. She seemed to be all right about anything as long as she was talking. “It was the night of my birthday feast. We were going to have such a magnificent party - they were bringing Kerotean fire-eaters - but Mama had it announced that Papa was occupied with a messenger, and she needed to attend him. Half the guests stood up to leave. No one wanted to waste their time if Papa and Mama weren’t there to see them ogling and coveting me. I was furious with Papa, so before the towels and water bowls were cleared away, I went looking for him. I couldn’t find him anywhere he might be ‘receiving messengers,’ so I went to his bedchamber. The guards didn’t want to let me in, but I… insisted.”

That scene wasn’t difficult to imagine.

“Papa was sitting on his bed, looking as if someone had hit him on the head, and a man was touching him… arranging him.” Roxanne shuddered. “The man was tall, dreadful - well I didn’t actually see his face… and perhaps he wasn’t all that tall. His size was unremarkable, in fact. He wore a servant’s cloak with a hood draped down low. But I’ll never forget his voice - soft, gentlemanly, whispering horrid things, calling Papa ‘the father of chaos.’”

“Was he the same man you’d seen before? Your mother said you’d seen a threatening man in your apartments.”

Roxanne turned approximately the color of fireblossom. “No. He - Well, I made those reports when I was much younger, and they perhaps weren’t… accurate. This was quite different. I screamed for Mama and the guards, but by the time they came, the man was gone. No one saw him leave the room.”

“When Vroon took you… was the man there, as well?”

“No. I locked myself in Papa’s room, telling everyone I was going to stay there until they believed me. Foolish, I know, but I couldn’t think what else to do. I was so angry and so afraid. Yes, afraid. I’m not a fool; Leiran nobles are not the most forebearing of subjects. If word got out about Papa’s condition, he would have been dead by midnight, and I’d have been married to whichever of the closest contenders lived until dawn. Poor Mama… ”

She inhaled deeply. “Anyway, I fell asleep on Papa’s bed and got waked up by a huge flash of green fire… The dwarf babbled nonsense, and when I told him who I was and threatened to have him flayed, the three horrid creatures dragged me off here like old baggage.” As we rounded a corner and entered the commard once again, she was glaring at me.

Taking a deep breath in hopes I could get out the explanation before the next barrage, I tried to explain what Vroon had told me. “The three Singlars followed me to Montevial, pursuing this stupid notion that I’m their king, just because I have these vivid dreams. When they discovered that a real king lived in Montevial, they came looking in the palace and found you. And when you… uh… went on… about being a king’s daughter and how you were destined to rule, Vroon says they got scared that you might actually be the one they were looking for. They didn’t dare let you go, so they brought you here straightaway.”

Vroon had actually said that by the time she finished yelling at them, they were all but certain she couldn’t be the Bounded King, but were afraid of what she might do to them if they let her go. That detail seemed best left for later.

“This isn’t exactly the kingdom I have in mind. So I suppose that when they talked about ‘the one’ - that was you?”

“I didn’t - They shouldn’t have taken you.” I wasn’t going to apologize for something I’d had nothing to do with. Certainly not to her.

“I’m the Crown Princess of Leire. I survived it.”

We had come to the steps of the Blue Tower again. After “thinking ourselves in” and summoning the waiting Singlar women to join us, I bowed. “I’ve told the servants to give you whatever you need.”

To my astonishment, she curtseyed in return. “Tell me, do you dine alone in your royal dining room, Your Majesty, or may a former playmate join you?”

I almost choked. I’d sooner dine in the middle of a nettle patch. “I eat with Paulo,” I said. “He’s not used to being laid up and needs me to talk to him. There’s not much room - ”

She raised her eyebrows, turned her back, and walked away, her soggy, overlarge robe sweeping behind her like coronation-day regalia. I felt like a glob of mud on the floor.

After three days, Nithea declared Paulo ready to eat real food. On the fifth day, I took him walking a few steps through the halls. A week and his ribs no longer pained him so badly, though Nithea kept them bound up tight. His hands remained heavily bandaged. Nithea had begun to “work the bones” now the festering was gone. Paulo didn’t want me with them when she did this, saying only that he’d be grateful if I could find some herb that deadened feeling… maybe from the neck down… while she worked her magic.

“What she does isn’t magic,” I told him. “It’s just the way of things here.” I explained it all again as I had to Roxanne.

“And the princess… ”

“She’s civil. Zanore takes her walking every morning, and Vroon says she’s trying to teach the servants how to sew and how to serve food properly and make her bed. She’s not hit anyone or taken an ax to them.”

“That’s a surprise. She seems such a… ”

“… wretched brat?”

“Yeah, that.”

“She is. Whenever I see her, she takes me to task about the food, the clothes, the temperature, no windows, her bodyguards, no sunlight… everything. I think it’s just she doesn’t know how not to complain. I stay as far away from her as I can.”

“She is fine-looking, though, even when I saw her. Strange to think you might have been married to her by now.” Paulo seemed to enjoy the thought.

I just found it alarming. “So, I guess some good came out of my being stolen away.”

He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “Someday you’ll get all this sorcery and doom and king business out of your head and figure out there’s other things for a man to think about.”

On the day Paulo felt strong enough to climb the stairs to the portal, we set out for my long-delayed visit to the Source. Only an hour or so remained until time for the lights to go down. I had sat all day in the audience hall, hearing the petitions of a far-flung group of Singlars who wanted to dig a trench to draw water to their tappa fields from another tower cluster’s supply.

“Are you sure you feel up to this?”

Paulo pushed my hand away. “If you don’t get to it, you’re going to forget what you come here for. I don’t want you getting to like this king business too much. I’d give a deal to see the sun sometime soon.”

We made the stomach-jolting passage to the garden that was still blooming as if this particular spot were forever spring. The yellow daylight was hot as we clambered down the steps. Paulo stopped just inside the cave mouth, close enough to listen.

“I’m depending on you,” I said. I hadn’t thought this venture would make me feel so unsettled, wound up tight with my stomach gnawing on itself.

“I’ll be here.”

Torches still burned in the sconces on the walls, making the cave sparkle, just as on our first visit. I walked the short distance to the spring. The basin itself was nothing remarkable, a slight depression in shallow shelf of rock that protruded from the mossy niche. The blue-green water seeped out of the surrounding rock to fill the basin and looked to be far deeper than the shallow bowl could possibly permit. I couldn’t resist the urge to dip my hand into it.

“So you’ve come at last.” No sooner had I touched the water than the clear voice surrounded me, reverberating in my very bones as if the icy water had penetrated my skin and carried the sound directly into me.

“You know who I am?” I said, peering under and around and behind the basin, examining the niche and the surrounding crystals as closely as possible. Finding nothing. I could see no hiding place in the alcove at the end of the cave, no sign of where the speaker might be found.

“You are the One Who Makes Us Bounded, our long-awaited king. You have lived in two worlds and found your place in neither, but in this world will you find the healing you seek.” I still couldn’t tell if the speaker was a man or a woman, but the smooth texture of the voice made me think of it as a “she.”

“I’m not looking for healing, only answers.”

“Only a small part of your questioning can I satisfy. All answers can be found within yourself.”

“Who and what are you?”

“I am the Source - the first root of this world, not yet buried deep by the weight of years.”

“Why are you so sure that I’m this king? How did you get into my dreams? How did you learn of me?”

She laughed softly. “So many questions… Here is one answer to satisfy all. As a stone falls to the land of which it is a part, as the rain finds its way to the sea which is its essence, so have you found your way to the Bounded. The stone dreams of the earth. The raindrop dreams of the ocean. And the earth needs no one to tell it of the stone’s existence.”

Vagaries and poetic speech - just as I had always read about oracles and prophecies. No absolutes. No matter what happened, a believer could always claim the sayings were truth, and a skeptic call them nonsense. I rested my back on the cave wall and thought about questions. Paulo’s presence hovered behind me, so the next would be for his satisfaction as well as my own need.

“Are you… is any of this the work of the Lords of Zhev’Na?”

“The Bounded is beyond the reach of the Lords as long as you are beyond the reach of the Lords.”

I couldn’t decide whether or not that was reassuring. “Then who was the Guardian? The only reason I’m going along with this king business is to undo the things he’s done.”

“The Guardian it was who first spoke to me. His intent seemed earnest, his hand firm and enduring to guide the Singlars as they emerged from chaos.” For the first time the voice reflected surprise… puzzlement. “Has he failed you, lord king?”

“He bound the Singlars to their towers with threats and punishments, beating and killing them, forbidding them company and pleasure, even denying them comfort and healing for their wounds and diseases. The Guardian said it was your commands he undertook. Why do you control the Singlars so cruelly, starving and punishing them?”

“No, no, my being is not cruelty. I entrusted the Guardian with the search for the king, but his reports never showed these things that trouble you. I shall have to consider the Guardian and hear your tales of the Singlars.” Legitimate concern. Legitimate sadness. “Sadly, intents are often flawed… misdirected. Sometimes we fail to pay attention to things we ought. You know this.”

I ignored the personal jab. The amethyst walls glittered in the torchlight, and I traced my fingers over the sharp facets of a crystal the size of my hand. “How long has the Bounded been in existence?”

“I have no concept of how long, but my nature is to be buried by the passage of time. A time will come when you and I no longer hear each other’s voice, but it is not yet.”

“What are the firestorms?”

“They are beyond my knowledge. They come from outside, and you must stop them or the Bounded will be returned to what it was.”

Returned to chaos. “How can I stop them if I don’t even know what they are?”

“You are with us and cannot be other than you are.”

“That’s no answer.”

“It is the most fundamental truth. It tells me that you can learn the nature of the storms. Though you belong here, you, like the storms, come from outside the Bounded. And the storms are aimed at you.”

I was getting nowhere. How had the Guardian ever managed to get information specific enough to act on? Perhaps I had to frame my questions differently. I still had the most important thing to ask, yet I didn’t expect an answer any clearer than those I’d already dismissed.

“Do you know who stabbed my mother?”

“Yes.”

“And you know who betrayed the Prince’s - my father’s - plans?” It didn’t seem necessary to explain what plans or who my mother and father were. This voice expressed the same understanding of me that I felt for this strange land.

“Yes.”

Cold, tight, I moved toward the basin again, as if proximity might make me hear the answer better. I would tolerate no mistake. “Who, then?”

“I will not answer that.”

My fingers gripped the rim of the water bowl as if I could rip it from the solid stone. “Tell me!”

“It is not time for you to know.”

“This is madness!” I threw up my hands, wishing for something to break or throw, yelling at the ceiling and the walls and the floor of the damnable place. “You… whoever you are… whatever trickery you work… you’ve used a thousand words, but you’ve told me nothing at all! It’s so easy to play the prophet, to tell me how wise and knowledgeable you are, but you speak in circles and refuse me the answers I need most.”

“To tell you these things would be a distraction from all you must accomplish here. Your people need your care, more even than I - ”

“These are not my people!”

“Be patient. Learn of your true self. Return in a hundredlight from this, and I will reveal what you ask of me. Until then, think carefully on all I have said.”

“A hundredlight! A hundred days? Impossible! I don’t even know… do you know if my mother is alive?”

“That I do not know. Ask me no more this day, 0 king. Secure your place in this, your new world. Help your - ”

“How can I waste a hundred days? I have to go.”

“And where would you go that is closer to the truth than in your heart - here, in the Bounded? Power awaits you here, and peace. Only death awaits you elsewhere.”

Disgusted with myself for trying to force some meaning into gibberish, I turned to leave.

“Before you go, young king, will you not taste of the water that gives life to your land? To all others it is alien - poison - but for you it holds comfort, strength, and nourishment. It is of you, and thus it will sustain you in whatever trials you face.”

I dabbled my fingers in the cold blue-green, scooping the water and letting it dribble through my fingers. “I don’t think so. I don’t trust your all-knowing benevolence.”

“As you wish. I will await your return. Come to the Source for counsel as you desire, but wait a hundredlight for your deeper questioning.”

“A waste of time,” I said to Paulo, as we emerged from the cave. “I should have known no ‘prophetic voice’ would tell me anything useful. And three months to try again.”

I strode down the path through the grove, only realizing, when Paulo grunted, how he was straining to keep up. Stopping at the pool, I gazed up at the falls for a bit, allowing him to catch his breath before we went on. The light had faded while we were in the cave. Sparrows and finches chattered as if the change were true sunset, and the call of a thrush pierced the cooling air with the clarity of a flute. In the shadier corners of the garden, lamps hung on iron posts gave off a warm glow that brightened even as the yellow-orange glare above us dimmed.

“So, what do you think?” I said, when Paulo’s expression looked a little less anxious. “Did you feel the same things as before?”

“You’re not going to like what I say.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think you need to get away from here. You oughtn’t stay - not even one more day.”

“This Source business is idiocy. I’ll agree. But” - how could I explain what I felt here in the Bounded, despite the day’s frustration? - “she was right about one thing. Where would I go?”

“It wasn’t so much the voice, but the place… the whole thing. There’s something wrong - something hidden. It’s what she’s not telling you that makes me skittish. I think we ought to leave. Go home. Hide out in Dunfarrie or Montevial if we can’t go home. Get to Avonar somehow, if that’s where you need to be to find out what’s going on with you.”

Even as the worn rim of the stone basin had yielded to the dribbling water, his arguments and my own resistance were eroded by simple logic. “I can’t face my mother, living or dead, until I know who hurt her. There are no answers in Leire or Valleor. All I can do there is hide. And if I go to Avonar without an explanation in hand, my father will kill me or the Lords will take me back, and I won’t even know who to blame.”

He couldn’t answer that. He’d been ready to kill me, too.

I draped Paulo’s arm across my shoulders, and we walked slowly around the path and up the stairs to the gallery. “I’ll be all right here for a while. But I’ll have Vroon take you back… and the princess… ”

“Now that wouldn’t be smart,” he said between steps. “If anyone was looking for you, and they found out the lady was come back from where you were… Well, she’s not likely to keep it quiet, now is she? She’d lead ‘em right to you.”

“I suppose so.”

“And I told you I’m stayin‘ close.”

“Even if I decide to stay here?”

“Nothin‘ better to be at.”

Without any further discussion, we stepped into the dark opening that would take us back to the Blue Tower. I wasn’t yet ready to ask if he still thought I’d stabbed my mother.