Revelation (46 page)

But then I wrenched myself back from the brink of such appalling weakness.
Sentimental fool. Broken, mindless wreck. You are enchanted.
Surely that was it. This was all some game of witchery to make me surrender what I had suffered so dreadfully to protect. For if I fell . . . I pulled at my hair with my quivering fingers, as if I could wake the dead mind within my head. I had once wielded a great deal of power. What if this were just another combat? Merryt had warned me. I didn’t know Vallyne’s true face. She was not human.

An hour of this fruitless arguing, and the horse had carried me beyond the deserted city. When I realized that I could not see Denas’s castle, a knot of fear strangled my moonstruck babbling. My mind began conjuring Gastai lurking in the darkness.
No matter
, I told myself.
All you have to do is ride the perimeter of the city, and you’ll come on the point where you can get a view of the castle. Then a straight ride across the plain will get you behind walls.
I took control again, spurred the horse to a slightly faster walk, and bore to the left around the city. Every few hundred paces, I stopped to scan the horizon.

At my third stop I saw the tower. Not Denas’s castle that had ten separate towers linked by roofs and battlements, but a lonely finger of stone atop a ridge of low hills. A ruin, the crumbling walls exposed to the weather, only bits of its smooth white facing-stone intact, only visible among the ice pinnacles because of a momentary lull in the storm. Hardly worth noting . . . except that it had no place in Kir’Vagonoth. It belonged in Ezzaria . . . on a bald, windswept knob of rock . . . my refuge . . . one of the images I had protected for so long.

Heedless of time and terror, I took out through the swirling snow, urging the unliving beast beneath me ever faster. In a frenzy to discover its meaning, I dared not even blink lest the ruin vanish in the blue-gray clouds. My mount was knee-deep in powdery snow as we pushed up the rise. My cheeks and nose were numb, my eyebrows stiff with frost when I dropped to my feet from the horse’s back in front of the tower. For a moment I held still, closing my eyes, centering my thoughts, summoning the calm focus I used to detect sorcery. It was almost unneeded. No trace of demon working marred the immense enchantment.

Two steps took me through the jagged opening, where a thick wooden door had long rotted away, and into a circular room strewn with rubble. A blackened fire pit in the center of the broken floor. A dented copper pot and a pile of kindling beside it. A bed of dried pine branches—from trees that had never grown in Kir’Vagonoth. I passed my hand before my face, shifting my senses to intensify my perception of the world, and in the time it took for the air to shift about my hand, I knew where I was.

“Aife,” I whispered on the frail breath of hope, opening my deepest heart and exposing it to the bitter winter. “Are you here?” Such silence wrapped the crumbling stone that my words jangled in disharmony. A gust of wind flapped my cloak like a giant trying to get my attention, but my attention was fixed on my hearing, on the hope for a voice from beyond the storm.

I leaned my head back and laughed as I had not laughed in ages of the world. “A dream, yes, for certain. No waking of my knowledge could match it, and if I should see a portal, I would think it the fairest dream ever graced a night’s sleeping.”

I heard her laughing, too. Tired, life-giving, exultant laughter. Laughter of pride and purpose. In the shadows of that tower, the air glistening with frost shards, took shape a gray doorway taller than a man. And beyond the doorway, wavering like heat shimmer in the desert, was a gold-green brilliance so glorious my eyes could scarcely bear to look upon it. Unthinking excitement and hunger propelled me forward, and I was just on the verge of stepping through the portal, when I heard a faint call—worried, searching—from the wilderness outside the tower. “Exile!”

I thought my being might rip in two. To walk away from Vallyne, to break the tethers that bound me to that strange and terrible place . . . The consideration left me desolate. Yet that was not the whole of it. For even as I stood in the Aife’s shelter, enveloped in her enchantment, the walls of memory crumbled and my life came flooding back, giving name to my hoarded treasures—Aleksander, Blaise, Evan-diargh, blessed, faithful Fiona—and purpose to my empty words. What was the missing piece of the mosaic? What had caused my ancestors to destroy themselves and condemn these bright spirits to this hellish wasteland? Was there remedy for the flawed wholeness of my child and Blaise? The fog suffocating my senses dispersed, and the edges of the world became clean and hard. The bits and pieces I had learned despite my crippled mind now took on new shape and urgency. And with memory came pain, of course. Without answers, what awaited me in my own land? Nothing. No one. The cold wind twined about my ankles.

“Ah, my good Aife . . . I cannot . . .” Never had there been words so difficult to say. Never had I been forced to turn my back on a vision so enticing. . . . not yet. I’ll come back when I’m able and tell you more.”

“No longer, Aife. You’ve healed me. But my work here is not done. Tell the old man that Kir’Vagonoth is beyond his imagining. Ice and snow and cold and darkness, yes, but they have made beauty here in this horror. And the circles are just as he named them: the Gastai brutes, the Rudai, shapers of such skill they could remake his temple in an instant, and the Nevai . . . I cannot describe their glory or the strength of their passion. Tell him . . .” Another bit fell into place—the truth that had presented itself so clearly through the fog of my days in Kir’Vagonoth if I had not been too preoccupied to pursue it. “. . . tell him that they are not complete in themselves, any more than we are.”

“I will survive, Aife. There is another human here. A Warden lost in a battle hundreds of years ago. Is it not a wonder? He—”

“Exile! Where are you?” Closer. I had to get away from the tower.

“I must go.”
Are you sure, Warden?

“I’m sure of nothing. But there are answers here, if I can just discover them. And more in another place called Kir’Navarrin. Can you hold the way a while longer?”

The most stubborn and faithful of Aifes. “I will come bringing answers.”

She left the portal hanging there for a few moments more, perhaps in case I changed my mind. But the choice was made. I closed my eyes to the green-gold world and walked back into the howling wind.

Vallyne did not see me come from the tower. I made sure of it by riding down the back side of the hill and threading my way through the snowy hillocks until I was as far from it as I dared go. It was risky to stray from the path I knew, but the tower was my refuge, my escape route. No one could know of it. The concentration required to keep my course straight and the direction of the city firm in my mind precluded any consideration of my newly reclaimed purposes or what light my experiences in Kir’Vagonoth could shed upon them. With profound relief I turned toward the city walls, and when I saw Vallyne racing toward me through the driving sleet, her silver shimmer like a beacon in the night, I came near forgetting everything I had just remembered.

“Where have you been, Exile?” Concern was written on her pale brow, and she reached out and took my hands. Like a slave’s tether chokes off his breath, so her touch began to strangle my newfound reason. “I thought you were lost or run away. You are my gyos, and a guest should not stray so far from his patroness’s protection.”

But I held tight to my freedom, determined it would not be lost again to beauty and desire and whatever enchantment she had woven with them. I had a wife, a son, and responsibilities that could allow no more distraction. “I was only riding,” I said. “Thinking. It’s been so hard to have a clear thought since I was with the Gastai.”

“The Gastai are everywhere out . . .” She paused and glanced down at my hands that lay in hers, then back to my face. A whisper of puzzled curiosity creased her brow, but she went on without mentioning its cause. “They hate your kind and will try everything they know to steal you back to their pits. They don’t forget.”

“No, I’m the one who forgot everything.”

“But that’s not such a bad thing, is it? You said you came to us for refuge. Your life must have been terrible to make you seek sanctuary with those you’ve sought to destroy. Why would you want to remember?” Vallyne released her grip, motioned toward the distant castle, and we nudged our horses to a walk. “There are many things I would give much to forget. But it is not a skill we possess.”

“You’ve never asked me about what happened to me or why I believe I can find truth here. Nor has Denas.”

“Why would I want to know? You’ve left that other place behind. This is your life now, and I take pleasure in your company. As for Denas, he is a fool and a brute, and has no right to question you. You needn’t worry about him.” Her acting had not improved. But I couldn’t tell whether her performance was for me or for herself, or which part of her reassurance was the lie.

Time to be about my business. “Will you tell me of Kir’-Navarrin, Vallyne?”

She glanced at me sharply. “No,” she said, kicking her horse to a faster pace. “Not yet.” She said nothing more upon that cold journey, and we rode across the arched bridge in silence. It wasn’t until I undressed, ready to fall into my bed, that I knew what had puzzled Vallyne when she held my hands. They were no longer shaking.

So where to begin? The more I considered my life in Kir’Vagonoth, the more convinced I became that I had been wearing blinders not of my own making. Yes, the Gastai’s torment had wounded me, but not so much that I would forget my wife and my son and all the others I had left behind. Not so much that I would forget Aleksander and the changes we had wrought in each other. Not so much that I would forget my conviction that my people shared a common history with the demons. Why would the demons care what I remembered? And why would they not question my need for sanctuary or my claims of warning and goodwill? The foolishness with the dogs . . . Vallyne had been watching me. Testing me. And then she had bewitched me.

Sitting on my bed after several hours of restless sleep, I pulled out my journal. The childish scribbling was scarcely readable, and most of the entries made no sense at all. Sweet Verdonne . . . in one day’s entry I had written the first four letters of my name! Without thinking, I called up fire to destroy the treacherous paper, and before I could curse myself for forgetting my helplessness, I had to drop the blazing sheet. I jumped up and doused the flames with water from the enamel bowl before they could set the cluttered room alight. Then I licked my singed fingers and came near crowing with delight at the quiet thrum of melydda in my veins. So my power had also been hidden beneath the suffocating bonds of demon enchantment. Merryt had warned me. I was allowing the lady to steal away my soul without a fight.

I made sure the mess was cleaned up, then poked and fidgeted about my room, waiting for Raddoman to come in for his daily visit, scarcely able to contain the fever of long-delayed curiosity. Perhaps I could learn something from the growling fellow. Of all the demons, he seemed to speak his mind forthrightly. I was anxious to meet each of my demon acquaintances with my newly opened eyes.

He appeared with his usual bluster, shifting from his demon form into his disheveled human-shaped bulk. “Here is water. Food. The mistress is occupied and will not see you until the reading time.” He dropped a flowered plate of bread and cheese on the table and slammed a brass pitcher down beside it.

“Thank you, Raddoman. Wait! Before you go . . .”

He poked his chin out belligerently. “What do you want now?”

It was time to test my theories. “Why do you claim we stole your homeland?”

In the space of a heartbeat he shifted three times between his human form, his demon form, and his pig form. Settling on his human form, he grumbled. “Treating me like I am the captive, are you? Questioning me?” The stink of him wafted through the cold room.