Son of Avonar Page 20

For Karon’s birthday I gave him a walking stick made of cherry wood. “It’s quite the fashion at court, in case you haven’t noticed,” I said that evening in our library. “And I had it made especially for you.” Despite his avowals of delight and appreciation, I did not imagine that he was anything but puzzled at my choice. We were not at all bound by court fashion. Karon would sprout wings before he gave up the high-necked shirts and muted colors of provincial Valleor.

  He brushed the richly colored wood and twirled the stick about his head. “Am I to use it to fend off your frustrated suitors, then?”

  “Not my suitors”—I snatched the stick from the air, rotated the ebony ring set into the shaft, and held the implement where he could see the sharp steel blade that now protruded from its lower end—“only those who mean you harm.” I had failed miserably in trying to persuade him to carry a sword when he traveled and thought perhaps a weapon that did not invite confrontation might be more acceptable.

  “Ah, Seri . . .” It took no mind-speaking to tell me right away that I had failed again. He was still smiling, but his delight had gone.

  “I’ll have it taken out,” I said, retracting the blade, unable to look at him any longer. I could not bear the thought that I had disappointed him. “I should have known better.”

  The distance across the room between us suddenly yawned very wide. “I can’t be what you want,” he said. “In every other matter, I will follow your lead, become whatever you wish, but this one—”

  “You are everything I want,” I said as I fitted the stick back in its wooden case. “I just thought . . . I just want you to have something more reliable than sorcery to defend yourself. Stars of night, Karon, what if you’ve used up everything . . . all your power . . . and you’re taken?” I could scarcely say the words, and even as I said them, I shoved them out of mind. “No matter. You are as you are, and I adore you, and Martin and the others are waiting for us with your birthday feast.”

  I started for the door, but he did not follow. His stillness forced me to turn around. He was standing where I’d left him beside the hearth. His eyes were locked on me, and he wore a look of such distress that I hurried back to him and tried to wipe it away with my hand. But he gathered my hands into his and gripped them hard. “Seri, I’ve wronged you sorely. All these years I’ve known I would have to explain this. The Way of the J’Ettanne—this path that I choose for my life—is very hard. Coward that I am, I’ve told myself that my choices will not harm you if I’m careful enough. If I’m strong enough. If I love you enough. I’ve ignored the truths of our future and soothed my guilt by saying that I cannot rob you of the power to choose your own way. If your choices endanger you, then that is the Way laid down for you.” He sat down on the couch and pulled me down beside him. “But I’ve been fooling myself and you. I’m so afraid. . . .”

  Afraid? The fingers that stroked my own so softly were cold. I felt as if someone had crammed the walking stick down my throat. “Tell me.”

  He took a deep breath. “When the day comes that I am discovered, I’ll not fight.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean, I cannot use my power or any other weapon to take life or inflict an injury. Not to save myself. Not to save you. Not for anyone. The gift I have is for healing, for lifegiving, and I cannot use it otherwise. It’s ingrained in me so deeply, it wouldn’t be possible. You have to know that.”

  I came near blurting out that this assertion was ludicrous, an impossibility for a man of honor. And Karon’s honor was unquestionable; he constantly risked his safety to care for people whose names he didn’t even know. I could understand his reluctance to inflict bodily injury, having lived so intimately with the pain and suffering such violence caused. Yet it was inconceivable that a man would not use whatever weapon he possessed to defend his family and friends, and in Karon’s case, defending us meant defending himself.

  But Martin had taught me how difficult it was to argue with an idealist. “A small dose of hard reality will always make idealists into practical men,” he had once said. And so, rather than disputing Karon’s professed beliefs, I argued with his more speculative point. “Then we’ll just have to make sure you’re not discovered. Martin is wait—”

  I tried to rise, but Karon would allow me neither to leave nor to divert him. “It’s more likely than not, and the result will be terrible. I’ve seen what they do to sorcerers, Seri, and what they do to those who consort with them. The image never leaves me. And I’m telling you that I can’t protect you from it.”

  “I am perfectly aware of the risks. I just don’t want to think about them.”

  “But you must. If you have me in your life, then I’m afraid you’ll have that in your life, too.”

  “I won’t let it happen.”

  “If anything gives me hope that it won’t, it’s your determination. But you’re the daughter of a Leiran warrior, and you’ve been taught that failure to fight is despicable cowardice. I’m a J’Ettanni Healer, who’s been taught that the crooked paths of life are the most marvelous. You were so young on that night when Martin and the others chose to have me stay. . . . I’ll not sneak away and pretend I don’t love you, but I can’t ignore this anymore. I’m asking a great deal of you.”

  And, of course, because I loved him and it was his birthday, I said I would accept whatever came and whatever he could or could not do about it. But somehow I would persuade him to carry a weapon.

  In early summer Karon and I rode out to a jonglers’ fair that had grown up in the hills just outside the walls of Montevial. Jonglers were wandering entertainers who usually traveled in small family groups, but who would stop for a few weeks in summer here or there, gathering in ever-greater numbers to exchange stories, wives, and horses, and generally to enjoy each other. Though jonglers were widely regarded as thieves and liars, people would travel from nearby cities and villages to enjoy the risky marvels of their fairs. The colorfully dressed women told fortunes by casting painted sticks, and wiry, shirtless men in pantaloons swallowed fire. They told tales, sang songs, fought mock battles in wildly colored costumes, and painted portraits on bits of wood and glass. Their ragged, scrawny children were the envy of every child in Leire who dreamed of living in eternal entertainment without the restraints of propriety or lessons or labor.

  “Are you sure you’re not ready to head home?” asked Karon, giving me his hand as I jumped over a running ditch, left full by an afternoon cloudburst. “This isn’t the safest place to be after nightfall.”

  “We couldn’t go before she finished the sketch,” I said, the dim light forcing me to squint at the few coal-drawn lines on the split shingle that evoked an astonishing likeness of Karon’s face. “And there’s still the fire dancers. A jongler fair is so much more exciting after dark. Tomas and I were once confined to our rooms for a month after we sneaked out to a fair that had grown up near Comigor one summer, and we never regretted the punishment. They actually plunge the torches right down their gullets, while everyone around them is whirling and stomping.” Some delights one just never outgrew.

  “Then we’d best circle around this muck, rather than crossing straight through it and having you in wet shoes the rest of the night.” Karon led me along the dark peripheries of a field trampled into ankle-deep mud by a jousting demonstration. The flaring torches of the main venues were far across the field from the shanty where an acquaintance had told me I could get a portrait of Karon so like I would swear there were two of him. Forced by the mud to take a circuitous route, we threaded our way through a ragtag village of tents and lean-tos, currently dark and deserted except for a few bony dogs. Periodically a great cheer went up from the distant fire-glow of the central fair, so I almost didn’t hear the child.

  “Agren. Agren. Wake up, Agren. Come on.” The quiet pleas were interspersed with sniffs and sobs. “Don’t be dead. Please don’t.”

  We slowed our steps and peered into a shed of canvas hung from wood beams that had been roped togethe
r in a box-like shape. A ragged little girl of some six or seven years knelt beside a dark form sprawled on the ground. She was shaking his shoulder, but he was not responding to her pleas, likely something to do with the knife hilt protruding from his back.

  Karon tried to drag me away, but I wouldn’t budge. “Wait,” I said. “Aren’t you needed here?”

  “Not while you’re with me,” he said, glancing grim-faced at the child as he urged me toward the distant light. His hand was hot on my bare arm. The fever pained him when it grew too fierce, and the child’s quiet desperation would make it worse.

  “Karon . . . do what you must. I’ll keep watch.”

  Another cheer went up from the distant revelers. He shook his head. “We’re too close to the city. Too many people about.”

  “Who’s there?” The girl’s voice quavered as she twisted around to look out of the flapping doorway. “Is it you Deft? Don’t frig me, Deft. Agren don’t like it.”

  “What happened here?” I said, loosening Karon’s fingers, ducking my head under the low beam, and stepping into the shelter. “Are you all right?”

  The man lay on his belly. His beard was matted and dark, his long dagger still sheathed. Though I felt no breath when I placed my cheek by his mouth, his skin was still warm. “Who are you?” asked the child, glaring at me ferociously as she huddled beside the body.

  “Fairgoers. My husband is a . . . physician. Perhaps he can help.”

  “Somebody shivved him.” Her chin quivered. “I think he’s dead.”

  “Perhaps he’s not dead. I thought I felt a breath.” I gathered the child to me and drew her away, nodding to Karon, who stood outlined against the doorway. “Come, let’s give my husband some room to work.”

  The girl—Nettie was her name—sat on a barrel outside the shed and told me of Agren—maybe her father, maybe not, she wasn’t sure—and how he’d gone off to meet a man about a gambling debt. When he didn’t return to the fair, she’d come hunting him. Through the dangling canvas, I glimpsed Karon kneel beside the man and, after a brief examination, yank the dagger from his back. Though he was but a shadow against the gray night, I recognized the next movements: unbuttoning his sleeve, scoring the dead man’s arm, the moment’s stillness as he cut himself and then wrapped the man’s own long scarf about their joined arms.

  I stroked the child’s braids, sticky with the oil her people used to make their hair shine in the torchlight, and let her chatter on about the jonglers she liked and those she feared. Karon’s back was still. A warm breeze flapped the canvas walls.

  “Nettie!” A rasping whisper came from the darkness. “Here, girl . . .”

  “Agren?” Eyes the size of saucers, the child jumped down from the barrel. I grabbed for her arm to prevent her seeing what Karon was about or touching him or her friend, but she squirmed free, scuttered into the tent, and dropped to her knees on the dirt across the body from Karon. Right on her heels, I bent down to lift her, only to have my hand fall slack in horrified astonishment.

  “Vengeance, Nettie. It’s Deft done this. We’ll poison the sodding bastard. . . .” The hoarse voice, the vicious and brutal words came from Karon’s mouth. Anger and hatred twisted his face until it was almost unrecognizable. “We’ll take him ere morning. I’ll cut out his heart. . . .” As vile, murderous epithets poured from him, Karon’s expression convulsed and his shaking hand gripped the knife he had pulled from the jongler’s back.

  “Karon!” I dared not touch him. He’d told me of the explosive enchantment, the dangerous unbalancing that could damage both Healer and patient when the link was disturbed. So I squeezed the squirming child to my breast, hiding her eyes while I did nothing but speak his name.

  The quivering knife moved laboriously upward, drawing my eyes and breath with it. I was ready to shove the child aside and leap, but the blade fell so quickly, I could do nothing but cry out. “Holy gods!” Three . . . four . . . five more times the knife slammed into the corpse.

  When all was quiet again, Karon was bent almost double, his right hand still holding the knife embedded in the jongler’s back. “Maratathe . . . maratachi . . . maratakai,” he whispered in his own voice, repeating the words over and over. When he had gained control of his trembling, he said, “Unbind us.”

  One arm still wrapped about the squirming child, I drew my knife and sliced through the dirty scarf holding Karon’s left arm to that of the jongler. After a moment, Karon got to his feet, took my arm, and pulled me up to his side. Nettie remained on the ground beside the dead man.

  “I’m sorry,” Karon said softly to the gaping child, as he drew me away from them. “I couldn’t help him.”

  We walked straight to the carriage row and drove home, Karon neither speaking nor looking at me the entire time. Though my curiosity was near bursting, I waited for him to begin. Only after he had bathed and dressed the unclosed laceration on his left arm did he come sit beside me on the couch in our candlelit bedchamber, leaning his head back on the cushions and closing his eyes. “Agren did not like being dead. Coarse, corrupt, filled with so much greed and jealousy and hatred . . . In a hundred years, you could not imagine it. Instead of entering his own body again, he took mine. Celine told me of such souls, ones that longed so for life that they refused to cross the Verges and would turn on the Healer. I’ve never experienced it before, and never will again, I hope. Stars of night . . .”

  “The knife . . . what did you do?”

  Karon opened his eyes and rolled his head toward me, revealing a rueful smile. “I convinced him that he could only come back as himself. Which meant, of course, that he was truly dead, for his body had failed beyond revival. He wasn’t happy about that. You saw the result. I’m glad he took it out on his own body and not on you or the child or me.”

  “I wonder what will become of the child.”

  He shuddered. “She’ll be better off, no matter what.”

  We sat up together the rest of that night, falling asleep on the couch only when dawn was peeking in the window.

  A few weeks later Karon took a small party to Valleor to investigate an ancient tomb exposed by an earthquake. The royal governor of Valleor’s southern district had notified the Antiquities Commission of the find that lay near the city of Xerema, reporting that the site appeared to have relics of great value.

  Karon took two of his assistants on the trip to learn what might be necessary to mount a full-scale excavation. He was only to be gone a few days, and so I chose to wait and accompany him on the larger expedition he planned for autumn. I was working at my language studies again, helping Tennice translate an Isker manuscript for Martin, and I hated to abandon him in the middle of it.

  Three weeks passed with no word from Karon. It wasn’t like him. This was a public journey, not one of his private ones. A few more days and I had difficulty concentrating on Tennice’s project and couldn’t settle at anything else. When the fourth week passed, I went to the palace to see if Racine or Sir Geoffrey, the administrator of the royal archives, had news. But there was nothing. Never had I been so worried; every morning when I woke alone in bed, I felt nauseated.

  Martin came to our house only rarely, so when Joubert interrupted my pacing one afternoon to announce the Earl of Gault, the sea of dread burst through the feeble dike I’d built to contain it. “News out of Valleor,” he said, taking my hands, his calm voice belied by his somber face. “Nothing specific to Karon, but we’ve had word that there’s been another earthquake. They say Xerema has been leveled.”

  “He wasn’t to be in the city. . . .” One has to say the words.

  “ . . . and I’m sure travel and communication are difficult,” said Martin. “Tanager is already on his way. He’ll send word as soon as he knows anything.”

  I hated Martin for sending Tanager without me. I had to sit and eat and walk and wait, counting leagues, counting days and hours, imagining horrors . . . After ten excruciating days, a cryptic message arrived with a Windham footman. “News. Come.” I
was in the carriage before the footman’s voice fell quiet.

  Martin was waiting when I hurried up the steps. Without wasting time on a greeting, he led me to a sitting room where Tanager sprawled on a couch, shirtless and producing snores of prodigious volume. One arm was bound to his chest, and his head was bandaged. Julia was cleaning dried blood and filth from an ugly gash on his leg.

  “Tanager insisted that he must explain with his own mouth what he found,” said Martin, shaking Tanager’s shoulder, “but we thought he should stay put for a while. Here, lad, Seri’s come.”

  “I didn’t see him,” Tanager mumbled, as I knelt on the floor beside the couch. “But I’m convinced he’s alive.” His broad face sharpened as he forced himself awake. “Sun and thunder, I’ve never seen such destruction. If a thousand armies had taken a thousand battering rams to those walls for a thousand years, they couldn’t have caused so much. Not more than a tenth of the place is habitable, even if you could bear the stench of the dead.” With his unbound arm, Tanager shoved himself to sitting, not seeming to notice Julia still working on his wounded leg. “Thousands were buried alive in the rubble. Those lucky enough to get out dug without stopping, trying to get to the rest before the governor’s men set fire to the ruins. I rode out to the place of the tombs, and there was nothing left. Half the mountainside had come down on it.”

  I thought I might suffocate.

  “Listen to me, though.” Tanager’s broad hand gripped my arm. “No one could tell me anything of the Leiran party that had come to excavate the tombs. But then they’d start speaking of their own troubles, and I kept hearing of a stranger who had appeared in the midst of the destruction. Time after time he managed to find men and women and children buried in impossible places, yet they lived. Unhurt. Everyone wanted to find this stranger to come pull out their relatives and friends, for luck walked with him, and he might find them alive when there was no other hope. They called him the Dispóre, the saving hand. They couldn’t describe him. Some said he was milk-skinned like a Kerotean; some said he was dark and had the tilted eyes of an Isker. But all marveled at his strength, his luck, and his skill.”