Son of Avonar (34 page)

Tennice broke the tired silence. “And now can someone explain all this to me?”

“I can try,” I said. “If you've no wish to be . . . involved . . . I couldn't blame you.”

“I've just left my friend and employer wallowing in his own blood, and I've been pursued through the forest by those who make me feel like someone else is living in my skin. And in the midst of it all appears a woman I believed ten years dead, who happens to be in the company of two most unusual strangers. Not likely I can just leave it.”

“The ones who murdered Ferrante are called Zhid,” I said, as I tried to get my thin, damp blanket to make a double layer around my cold feet. “They, as well as my two friends here, come from . . . someplace else. I'm not sure where. Clearly you've guessed some of this as you watched D'Natheil—that surly one who prefers the rain to our company. I seem to have gotten myself mixed up with sorcerers again.”

“I knew it. . . .”

I told him how D'Natheil had come to me, and the evidence that led me to believe that it was not by chance. “. . . and so, even though for the past ten years I believed myself as dead as the rest of you, I have now been selected, coerced, or summoned to play nursemaid to a mute, half-wild princeling who can scarcely remember his own name. And this other one—the good Baglos—says he's been appointed as D'Natheil's ‘Guide,' but he knows nothing of where he is to guide him, and cannot tell me where their home lies, and in fact knows very little unless his master bids him. And somehow D'Natheil must remember how he is supposed to go about saving the world.”

“This makes no sense.”

“Absolutely correct. I'll confess that it's more than a little unnerving to listen to these two and attempt to find some logical conclusion to it.”

Even Tennice's puzzled expression could not persuade me to voice the absurd speculation that had been running around the back of my head for the past few days. Where had D'Natheil and Baglos come from? From a land called Gondai that appeared on no map I had ever seen in my father's vast collection of maps, nine tenths of it laid waste embroiled in a war that had lasted a thousand years. From an Avonar that was not Karon's Avonar, but far older, a city of sorcerers. Across an enchanted bridge that connected Gondai to a land with no sorcery, a land that the people of D'Natheil's Avonar considered exile. We in the Four Realms were indeed turned inward, giving scant attention to the vast reaches of the world beyond our borders. But how could such places exist and our people not know of them? Enchantment . . . sorcery . . . another place . . .

Tennice took a long pull at one of our wineskins. “Who are these Zhid? And what does Ferrante have to do with any of this?”

“From what I understand, the Zhid are the ancient enemies of D'Natheil's people . . . Karon's people. And Ferrante—” I puzzled over it again, the intricacy of the puzzle distracting me from my unnerving ideas. “Baglos claims he is unable to explain more than I've already told you, and that D'Natheil is the one who must explain their mission. And he says that D'Natheil's condition—his inability to speak and his loss of memory—is certainly new. And so I decided that the only hope to discover what's locked inside D'Natheil's head is to find someone to read what's there in the way Karon could.”

“But Ferrante was no sorcerer.”

“Another of the J'Ettanne could do it.”

With every justification, Tennice stared at me as if I'd gone berserk. “They're all dead, Seri.”

“Are they? When Karon first went to the University, his father told him that in time of trouble he should go to Ferrante, that Ferrante was the only person outside their community who could be trusted implicitly, that he was sworn by the most sacred of oaths never to reveal a J'Ettanne to anyone. Ever. In that last autumn before he was arrested, Karon began to wonder if perhaps the professor was
unable
to tell him the truth, that Ferrante took his oath so seriously that he wouldn't even reveal one J'Ettanne to another. He never had the opportunity to confront Ferrante with his theory.”

Tennice's eyes had grown wide as I said this, and when I paused, he spoke in quiet excitement. “The list of those who are left . . .”

“What?”

“I can't believe it. You're right. Karon was right. It's so obvious now.” His eyes glittered behind his spectacles. “Ferrante had records of all the students he ever taught over the years. Hundreds of them. Under each name he would list the topics they had covered, thesis titles, research projects, and the like. He was forever asking me to find out who had done the work on the Battle of Horn's Cavern or written a discourse on the Honneck Invasion. On one of my delving expeditions, I came across three instances of Karon's name. Two entries were quite typical, one from his student years when he first came to Yurevan, the other from his second sojourn, when he was studying archaeology and Martin met him there. But the third entry had nothing beside it but a mark. Several other names were on that list, most with the same mark beside. I asked Ferrante about those entries, and he said only that it was ‘the list of those who are left.' Stupid me, I never understood. I'll wager frogs to elephants, they were J'Ettanne. There's your answer. . . .”

“But we can't risk going back for it.” The disappointment was crushing. To be so close . . .

Tennice bumped my chin with his bony knuckle. “Have you forgotten so much? Though I never had Karon's intelligence, Martin's wisdom, or Julia's wit, I possessed one skill that was out of the ordinary. These cursed eyes don't see so well as they did, but the head to which they're attached is the same.”

“Your memory!”

“Four names were still unmarked: Lazari, Bruno, Kellea, Celine.”

“And was there any clue as to where these people might be found?”

“Not in the book. Bruno, I never ran across again, nor Celine. But until a year ago, someone named Lazari wrote often from Kallamat. And Kellea”—he looked as though he might burst. “Well, there's an herb shop near the University—I'm not sure exactly where. But once a year, Ferrante had a little box of a rare herb sent to Verdillon to ease his old cook's gout. He said he could get it nowhere else, but that Kellea had a gift for finding things.”

“She's here in Yurevan!” I jumped to my feet, unable to contain my excitement though cold reason told me we could not set out right away. Even if the shop was easily found, and the woman still there, we dared not leave the forest. Night was falling. The Zhid would be seeking. Even D'Natheil had come indoors at last, settling in a corner, where he was cleaning his knife and his sword with his sodden shirt. “I wonder if this house ever held people who cared for each other in a way that would hold back the Zhid?” I said.

“I don't know about all those who've lived here,” said Tennice. “But a family stayed here once. This is where Karon healed the family of plague, and where Martin watched from that window and saw what he did.”

“Here?” I pushed the shutter wide open and leaned on the damp sill of the crudely cut window. Gazing into the darkening forest, I heard Martin tell once more of the strange and poignant sight that met his eyes as he watched the young sorcerer work his magic on the dying family. Karon had been here in this room, worked his magic, given of himself. I looked afresh at the crude walls, the dirt floor, the cold firepit, the timber roof, as if somewhere in their grime and splinters might be scribed a reflection of the past, one glimpse . . . oh gods, one glimpse of his face. Such a dagger of grief pierced my breast at that moment that I almost cried out with it.

“He stayed with me, you know. In my head, through it all.” Tennice, sitting on the dirt floor and leaning tiredly against the wall, twirled his spectacles in his thin hands. D'Natheil watched us from his corner, where Baglos sat beside him, listening to our talk and murmuring into the Prince's ear. “I would have lost my mind otherwise. I held onto him like one drowning, though what they did to me was nothing to what they'd done to him. After everything else they decided to finish me off with a sword. I suppose I was boring next to Martin and Julia. I told them everything I knew in the first day, said everything they wanted me to say, and signed whatever they wanted me to sign soon after. At the last I lost consciousness, believing and hoping I'd never wake again.”

He drew up his knees and rested his long arms on them. “There was a guard—he never told me his name. You know how you could never go anywhere without meeting someone who'd been one of Tanager's ‘bully comrades.' That held true even in the foul pits of our foul king. Instead of hauling us out for the gravediggers, this man carried the two of us to an out-of-the-way cell. He cared for us as best he could and sent word to Father—”

“Tanager! Is he—?”

Tennice shook his head. “It must have taken a great deal to break him. I believe he was dead already. For certain he died long before Father's men could retrieve us. I, for whatever reason the mad gods dreamt up, did not.”

“That's why your father refused to claim your bodies.” For all these years I had cursed the old baron for abandoning his dead sons.

“The guard would have had to produce two corpses, and he had only one. It was weeks before I knew anything. Father told me of Karon's death, and he tried to find out what became of you. Oh, damnation, Seri, we thought you were dead. Father was told that both you and the child were ‘taken care of.' When I recovered, I came here and never looked back. Ferrante heard that my brother Evan was killed two years ago in the war, so Father is left alone now. I daren't write him, though. To protect him, I must be dead, too.”

“Is it your choice or his?”

“He believes it's his, and that's enough.”

“Be sure, Tennice.”

He glanced up, his face wrinkled into a rueful smile. “You sound like Karon.'Everyone must choose their own danger.' I hadn't thought of it so . . . the Way of the J'Ettanne.”

My skin grew cold. What was I thinking to speak such drivel? “This has nothing to do with the Way of the J'Ettanne.” The Way of the J'Ettanne brought only death. Wasted, useless death. There was no “following life,” no greater good, and, for those of us left behind, no reprieve from the cost of such wretched, foolish idealism.

As Baglos shared out bread and apples, I told Tennice of Anne and Jonah and my life in the past ten years. The story didn't take long. There wasn't much else to say. We were all exhausted.

Frightful dreams plagued me that night. Each time I woke, I saw D'Natheil standing in the doorway of the hut, his unshaven face hard and fierce, lit by the traveling moon. I woke again when the sky was just beginning to lighten, and he was no longer there. He must have given in to sleep at last. But as I turned over, hoping to find a more comfortable position and wrest another hour of sleep before the day to come, I glimpsed him sitting in the shadows, his eyes fixed on me.

Evard's war was going badly. Only a month into the fourth year of his reign, his armies had been repulsed at the very gates of Kallamat and driven into the mountains. Even the weather seemed to side with the pious Keroteans, for a ferocious winter storm had assaulted the already decimated Leiran troops. Five thousand soldiers died of starvation when supply wagons foundered in chest-high snow. Five thousand more froze to death, the injured men abandoned by their comrades in fear of the bloodthirsty pursuit. The remnants of the Leiran army straggled into Montevial on the heels of winter, Evard and his household among them.

Baron Hesperid, a young noble who had lost his right arm in the spring campaign, publicly accused Evard of mishandling the war, of proceeding too fast and too far. He hinted that the king had promised his friends new lease-holds of Kerotean lands before taxes were due in the spring. Only intervention by the Council of Lords prevented Hesperid's execution for treason. Instead, Evard stripped him of his lands and title and banished him from Leire for thirty years.

“Lucky, I think,” Martin said. “Luckier than the rest of us who were less pointed in our criticism of this course of stupidity. I wouldn't want to be in the way when Evard decides who'll be the scapegoat for this mess.” But, of course, he was. We all were. . . .

 

“Of course, it's the cursed sorcerers. Kerotea is ruled by barbarian priests. They claim to speak for this vile horse god or frog god, or whatever it is. . . . Come, Seri, you'd know. Your husband studies these barbarian things.”

“Ilehu is half-man, half-wolf.”
Stupid, ignorant woman.
I restrained my hand from knocking away the wineglass the countess was waving in my face.

“Just so,” she said to the three other women who stood gawking at her idiocies. “The savages claim this Ilehu commands them to destroy any of their children born defective or weak. I've heard they eat the hearts of the dead babes, just as sorcerers do! It's a mercy King Evard survived their magics.”

Yes, Karon had taught me about the Keroteans. They believed that their terrible custom was a mercy for those who had to survive in their harsh mountain kingdom. But Leirans had never understood such ways, and so every unusual behavior was wrapped in the mantle of the evil they'd been taught to abhor above all others—sorcery.

“I've heard—” The sparrow-like young baroness on my left was twitching, her thin fingers flitting over her mouth and chin. The black dots of her eyes darted about the crowded drawing room, and then she leaned forward, drawing the other women close. “I've heard they walk among us again,” she whispered. “Sorcerers—”