Guardians of the Keep Read online

  During all these days, Dassine fumed. He snorted at any hint of weakness on my part, and his lectorium looked as if it had been ransacked by looters. We had never conversed much, but our silence had always been deep and comfortable. After the Preceptors’ visit, the very air was angry.

  To define my relationship with Dassine was impossible. He never asked what I had experienced in my journeys, though he always seemed to know whether they had been pleasant or especially difficult. I wondered whether he could “listen” as I relived my lives. Or perhaps he knew everything already. For my part, I could predict his actions with phenomenal accuracy, from the way he closed a book or the moment he picked to rub his game leg when the weather was damp, to the very words he would use to wake me. His moods colored my days. The vague impressions I had of him from my memories of D’Natheil’s childhood did not explain our familiarity.

  Exeget’s assertion that I had lived with Dassine for ten years before my second foray onto the Bridge intrigued me. Dassine had told me that my first failed attempt to walk the Bridge when I was twelve had left me incapable of analytical thought or human sympathy. If that were true, and it was only after that incident that I lived with Dassine, then why did I feel such close kinship with him? Had I known him in my other life as well?

  I had long sworn not to damn myself to incipient madness by asking such questions, and now I had to add the Preceptors’ accusations to my list of nagging mysteries. But the days passed, and Dassine continued to slam our plates of soup and bread on his table, kick the well-fed cats that wandered in and out of the study, and throw his candlesticks into a heap instead of packing them away carefully when we were done.

  “Get up. The world won’t wait on you forever.”

  I slid my toes out from under the blanket, trying to keep my eyes closed and my head on the pillow for as long as possible. But just as one foot touched the stone floor, a hand whisked the blankets off, exposing my bare flesh to the cool air, and yanked the pillow out from under my head, letting my head flop most uncomfortably. The stars outside my window told me it was sometime in the midnight hours. I had to find out what was bothering Dassine.

  I fumbled for my robe and slogged into the lectorium. After my journeys I was often incapable of speech, and he would brook no delays when he was ready to begin, so I had to act quickly. “Dassine—”

  “So, are you ready?” He mumbled and swore under his breath as he placed the candlesticks in the circle.

  “Dassine, I’m sorry if I disappointed you with the Preceptors. Was it my offer to let them examine me? I could see no other way to put them off.”

  “You had no need to put them off.” Had he been a bear from the frozen northlands of Leire, he could not have growled so expertly. From a lacquered box, he selected a new candle as thick as my wrist and ground it into one of the tall candlesticks.

  “But you know quite well that I had no idea of what they were talking about. How else could I answer their charges?”

  “I told you they had no right to question you. You should have listened to me . . . trusted me.” The last two words burst out of him as if unbidden, laden with bitterness.

  “Is that what all this is about? Gods, Dassine, I’ve trusted you with my life, my sanity, with the future of two worlds, if what you tell me is true. I do everything you wish, though it makes no sense, and I accept it when you tell me that it will all fit together someday. I’ve met no one in either of my lives that I would trust in such a fashion. No one. Not my parents or my brothers or any friend. I can’t even explain why, except that I seem to be incapable of doubting you. But despite my irrational behavior toward you, I cannot demand blind obedience from others. I will not, cannot, rule that way. You must know that as you know everything else about me. How can you ask it?”

  He scowled and stopped his fussing, sagging into a chair by his junk-laden worktable. He drummed his wide fingers on the table for a bit, then said vehemently, “Then you should have kept silent.”

  “Perhaps you should have told me more.”

  “I’ll not distort your past by interpreting it for you. You must become yourself again, not a version of yourself crafted by Dassine. Believe me when I say it is not easy to withhold the answers you seek. I have quite healthy opinions about many things, and it would gratify me if you were to come to share them. I believe you will . . . but I will not plant them in you now.” He hammered one finger on the table repeatedly to emphasize his point.

  “Then you can’t be angry when I do what I think is right, even if you don’t agree.”

  “Pssshh.” He averted his eyes.

  I pressed the slight advantage. “If I accept that I am truly D’Natheil, as you’ve sworn to me, then what harm is there in an examination? Even Exeget, as much as I detest him, would not go so far as to distort the findings of an examination by the Preceptorate. They’ll learn that I am who you say I am, and they’ll decide whether or not my mind is whole enough to lead them. It might do me good to have that reassurance.”

  Dassine pushed a pile of books from his table onto the floor and reached into a battered cabinet behind him, pulling out a green flask. He thumped it on the table and rummaged in a pile of water-stained manuscripts, dirty plates, ink pots, sonquey tiles, and candle stubs to come up with a pewter mug. When he uncorked the flask, the woody scent of old brandy made my mouth water. He poured a dollop into his mug, but didn’t offer me a drop.

  I must have looked disappointed, for he said, “You need all your faculties,” and slammed the cork back into the flask. “If you think you’ve deferred our work by this yammering, you’re wrong. When we’ve made a little more progress . . . closer to the end of all this”—he waved the mug at the circle of candles that had started to burn of their own accord—“I’ll explain the realities of life to you, a little more about your friends on the Preceptorate, and why it would behoove you to stay as far away from them as possible.”

  “One of them . . . Y’Dan tried to tell me about conspiracies . . . murder. I didn’t understand it.”

  “You have no concept of the twistings and turnings of deception. Just today I’ve discovered that I am not the master at such that I believed. But for now”—he slammed the empty mug on the table and shoved the flask back into the cabinet—“we have work to do.”

  I berated myself for wasting my limited strength in the belief that I might change Dassine’s mind about anything. But as he hobbled around behind me to finish his preparations, he used my shoulder for a handhold. Something in his firm grip told me it hadn’t been such a waste after all.

  In a few moments he was ready, and he took my robe and motioned me into the circle. I took up my position seated on the cool stone. As he began his chanting, I would have sworn he was grinning at me, though it was impossible to see through the ring of fire.

  That night I journeyed back to the university city of Yurevan to study archaeology, the passion I had discovered in my three years of wandering. I lived just outside the university town with Ferrante, a professor and friend who was the only living person who knew the secret of my power. Just at the end of my night’s vision, he introduced me to a friend of his, a fascinating man of far-reaching intellect, deep perceptions, and irresistible charm. His name was Martin, Earl of Gault, a Leiran noble, but far different from the common run of his warlike people.

  When I returned from that fragment of time I had lived again, I sat in Dassine’s garden, watching the dawn light paint the faded dyanthia blooms with a brief reminder of summer, and I found myself enveloped in overwhelming and inexplicable sorrow. Such things as Preceptorate politics seemed as remote as the fading stars. Dassine did not have to fetch me to send me to bed as was the usual case, for on that morning I wanted nothing more than to lose myself in unthinking oblivion.

  Not long after this—in terms of my remembered life, six or seven months, so perhaps a fortnight of current time—Dassine said he needed to do an errand in the mundane world, and that he would allow me to visit his friend
, Lady Seriana, while he was occupied. I was delighted at the prospect of any change, but made the mistake of asking Dassine if the lady was someone I knew. He tried to avoid the question and then to lie about it, but my mind was not so dulled as to mistake the answer.

  “Yes, yes. All right,” he grumbled. “She knows of you. Has met you. Yes.” In his infuriating way, he would say no more.

  The lady was not what I expected any woman friend of Dassine’s to be. Not just intelligent, but witty and overflowing with life. Beautiful—not solely in the way of those on whom my young man’s eyes had lingered, though she was indeed fair. Every word she spoke was reflected in some variance of her expression—a teasing tilt of her lips, a spark of mischief in her eye, the soft crease of grieving on her brow. I began to think of ways to draw more words from her, just to observe the animation of her face, the richness of a spirit that opened itself to the world in so genuine and generous a fashion.

  From the first moment of our conversation, I knew she had been no casual choice, no acquaintance who just happened to be available to converse with me while Dassine went about his business. I knew things about her with a surety I could not apply to myself, and felt as if I were just on the verge of knowing more. But when I reached for memory I found myself once again at the precipice. The universe split apart as had become its disconcerting habit—on one fragment stood the lady, on another the lambina tree, Dassine on another, and between each fragment the terrifying darkness. To my shame, pain and dread overwhelmed me, and I could not even bid the lady farewell.

  When next Dassine hauled me from my bed to begin my ordeal once more, I did not beg him to erase what he had returned to me, but instead I asked if he could return something of the woman, Seriana—Seri she called herself. She was so substantial, so real. If I knew something of her place in my history, then I might be able to veer away from the precipice when the terror came on me the next time. My jailer did not scoff or ridicule me as he often did when I pleaded for some variance in his discipline. He only shook his head and said, “Soon, my son. Soon you will know it all.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Seri

  I sat for a long time in my mother’s garden. To interpret what had passed was like trying to analyze a streak of lightning. Already the event itself was fading, leaving only the bright afterimage. I tried to hold onto the moment of his laughter, the sound of his voice, and the look in his eyes as he made the tree bloom for me, and to ignore the disturbing ending of his visit.

  Many wild dreams had grown unbidden in the past months. Though I had succeeded in dismissing most of them, one had lingered. Somewhere beyond my disbelief I’d held a secret hope that I might see Karon’s face again. Clearly, that was not to be. His face was Prince D’Natheil’s. Though aged by more than fifteen years in our few months together the previous summer, sculpted by his struggle to fuse body and soul, his appearance had changed no further since he had vanished through the Gate-fire with Dassine four months before.

  Yet how could I be disappointed? Dassine had said I was not yet a part of his memory, and such was clearly not the case. He understood my fear of the dark and knew what would ease my sadness. As we walked through the arbor, his manner had been so like Karon’s that I could never have guessed he was not the man I married. He would remember me.

  On the previous night I had told Nellia that I was not feeling well, and under no circumstances was I to be disturbed until noon at the earliest, but my subterfuge now seemed a bit foolish. As I locked the garden and walked through the herb and vegetable beds toward the kitchen door, it was not even mid-morning.

  I pushed open the door to the kitchen and stepped into bedlam. Nellia was directing two white-faced serving girls to carry jugs of hot water upstairs as soon as they were ready, and another girl to take a stack of clean towels to the mistress’ room. When the housekeeper caught sight of me, she hurried toward me. “Oh, my lady, I’ve just sent Nancy to wake you. Though you said not to disturb, I knew you’d want to be told. It’s the duchess. Lady Verally has sent word.”

  Philomena’s child. Weeks too early. “Has Ren Wesley been sent for?” I climbed the servants’ staircase alongside Nellia.

  “I dispatched Francis right away, but—”

  “. . . but it will be an entire day before he can be here. Has anyone on the staff had experience as a midwife?”

  “Only Mad Lucy, the young duke’s old nurse.”

  “She still lives here at the castle? Somehow I’d thought . . .”

  “Aye, Duke Tomas let her stay as she’d nowhere else to go. But her mind’s long gone. She’s done naught but sit and rock in her chair for nigh on five years now.”

  “Perhaps if we talked to her, even if she’s feeble in the mind, she might be able to help. Even when they can’t remember whether they’ve eaten dinner, old people can often remember what’s important to them—how to make bread or play a game or deliver a child.”

  “No use. She’s a mute, you know. Even if she’d a thought to share, she couldn’t do it.”

  “Then we must send to Graysteve for a midwife.”

  Nellia puffed with effort as we passed through a door to the first floor passage. “But the duchess will have naught to do with anyone from the village. She says they’re common and ignorant. That’s why she hired Ren Wesley to come and stay for her last weeks, though, alas, it don’t appear the time was set right for him to come.”

  “If the child is really on its way, I don’t think she’ll care. Send for the midwife.”

  “As you wish, my lady.”

  Nellia turned back, while I continued on to Philomena’s bedchamber, only to find the door barred by an iron-faced Lady Verally. “You’ll not come in. The duchess is in her last travail. We must have a physician or a priest, not a witch. You may have weaseled your way into this house through my niece’s kindness, but I’ve a clear eye yet, and I can see what you’re up to. I won’t have you anywhere near her.”

  “Ren Wesley has been sent for and also a midwife from the village, but it will take time.”

  “I’ve already done all that can be done. Her fate is in the hands of the Holy Twins.”

  Poor Philomena. I never imagined I could feel sorry for her. To face the loss of another child born early with only the grim Lady Verally to comfort her would be a dismal ordeal indeed. And neither the High God Arot, retired to his celestial palace in mythical Cadore, nor the Twins—male warriors as they were—were going to be much help with a woman’s labor.

  “Will you tell me her condition then, so I can inform the young duke? He’ll likely be quite distressed by rumors. Tomorrow is Covenant Day, and we must be prepared for all eventualities.”

  “I’ll tell you nothing, witch. I’ve advised the young duke to stay away from you until we have you removed from this house. Your deceptions will be uncovered, and you will burn as you should have long ago.” She slammed the door in my face.

  Beastly woman. I hurried downstairs and sent a message to Gerick, telling him that it was possible that his mother would deliver her child early and reminding him that, no matter what happened, he would be expected in the great hall at first light on the next day to receive his tenants. Difficult though it might be, nothing must interfere with it.

  For the rest of the day everyone in the house walked softly, as if an untoward disturbance of the air might precipitate disaster. The mourning banners that still drooped heavily on the castle doors took on an ominous new significance.

  I occupied myself with preparations for receiving the tenants, trying to concentrate on the lists of names and families that Giorge had prepared, but I chafed sorely at being barred from Philomena’s room. Though I had no idea what I might be able to do to help, I believed I should be there. Nellia brought me periodic reports, gleaned from the chambermaids. Philomena’s labor had stopped after only a short while, but could resume at any time.

  The midwife from Graysteve arrived, but Lady Verally insisted we dismiss her straightaway. I spoke to the wom
an, a neat, trim person of about my own age, and asked if she would be willing to stay through the afternoon and evening, in case the duchess were to overrule her aunt’s decision. The midwife said she would wait as long as necessary. Infants should not be held responsible for the concerns of their relations, she said, putting a polite face on our foolishness. I asked Nellia to see to the woman’s comfort.

  I received no response from Gerick. Giorge had told me that the boy had sat with Tomas every Covenant Day since he could walk and had behaved himself admirably. I had to trust that he would do so again.

  It was dark and cold when I rose on the next morning, and I dressed quickly. The custom was for the family to dress in their best, but I had nothing fine. As I pulled on the better of my two dresses, I told myself that my dignity would have to be my adornment for the day. Even as I said it, I had to laugh. I sounded just like my mother.

  I hurried down to the kitchen and pounced on Nellia as she came out of the larder. “Any word of the duchess?”

  “The girls say the night was quiet,” she said, as she set a wedge of cheese on a plate in the middle of a tray filled with plates, bowls, and pots. “Lissa! Take this on up.” When the girl in the white cap hoisted the heavy tray, I was sure one moment more would see us all splattered with fruit porridge, boiled fish, sausage, scalding cider, and seedcakes. But the maid steadied her load and scurried away. “Lady Verally slept in the mistress’ room,” Nellia continued. “She’s pushed a chair up to block the door and will only let her own girls in. I had the midwife stay the night with me. I thought to ask you should we just send her home. Don’t seem needful to keep her from her own children when she’s not wanted here.”