The Sacred Hunt Duology (65 page)

Why had they returned?

The words came again; hers, but distorted and sharpened. He did not answer her because he was afraid that if she heard him, she would know where he was.

• • •

She had not foreseen this. She had forced her shadows back, but he could not sense his freedom, and it would not last for long.
Come, Stephen
, she said, more urgently.
There is little time left. Come!
She couldn't force him to leave, because in order to do that she would have to . . . touch him.

Hunger.

Stephen!

• • •

“He won't—he won't come,” Evayne said, her voice a dry croak. “I'm calling him—but he won't come.”

Gilliam felt just a twinge of smugness.

“If he doesn't come back to us soon, he—won't be able to.” She stared into the crystal ball that her hands were clawing against. “I've given him the passage he needs. But he doesn't—I don't think he trusts me.” Her voice was bitter and icy. “And if he doesn't, we've lost him.”

As starkly as he knew how, Gilliam demanded his brother's attention.

Doubt came back along the bond—but it was Stephen's doubt. Fear.

I'm here
, Gilliam thought, as he redoubled his effort.
I'm here.
He reached out, with both hands and the strength of his conviction.
Come, Stephen. Come back. There's hardly any time left.

Self-loathing. Doubt. Shame.

Comfort. Belief. Trust.

Stephen answered, but as usual, there were no words to accompany the emotions.

The room, empty but for the bed and Gilliam and Evayne, became shrouded in a magical pall. The robes of the seeress elongated, rising like restless ghosts almost to the ceiling on either side of her.

“Look away, Gilliam of Elseth,
look away
!”

He did, obeying not her command but an instinct as old as the Hunter. He covered his ears as screams of rage and pain and terror buffeted him. Evayne had opened the gates. One voice in the storm of voices grew higher and thinner, but whether it screamed in rage or terror, in pain or even self-loathing, Gilliam could not say.

Stephen of Elseth, pale and thin and unblinking, stumbled out. The noise was cut off in an instant; the silence that descended was deafening in its suddenness.

Gilliam turned at once to see his brother prone upon the ground. Evayne was gone as suddenly as she had come.

“Stephen!”

Stephen did not move. Gilliam picked him up and carried him to the bed. He laid him down beneath the length of the window. The cold, for it was cold outside, did not chill the glass. But it chilled Stephen's skin.

Beneath the bed frame were blankets, heavy woolens, and lighter cottons. Gilliam pulled them all out and bundled them around and over Stephen's body. Then he rose to find food and water for Stephen's waking.

• • •

The dogs were at the door, and none too pleased to be there. Ashfel was in a foul mood, and was not above taking it out on the rest of his pack. Only Marrat, the oldest and wisest of the alaunts, had the intelligence to wait out of Ashfel's snapping range.

Gilliam nearly stopped walking when he heard their sullen voices pressing him. They wanted to know where he had been and why he had kept them waiting and if he had dared—dared!—to hunt without them.

He made haste to reach their sides, and after they had greeted him in their most enthusiastic way, he noted that among the paw marks his dogs had left along their path to the way stop there were footprints, faint and light, across the snowtop, accompanied by a sweep of cloth where robes might fall. He did not ask the dogs about it; Connel's acute sense of smell told him what he needed to know.

He did not understand Evayne.

He did not particularly like her.

But he owed her a debt, and he vowed quietly, as the night's grip began to crumble across a blueing sky, that he would not be in that debt forever.

• • •

The room was not empty when Gilliam returned with a tray of broth, bread, and warmed milk. Stephen was still in bed, but his wan face was propped up by several pillows, and his eyes were open.

At his side, sitting in robes of midnight blue, was a very young woman. Evayne the younger, as Gilliam thought of her. Her hood was arranged in a spill around her shoulders; her hair, dark as a raven's wings, was free. She started almost guiltily as he stepped across the threshold.

He wanted to ask her what in the Hells she thought she was doing here, but remembering his vow, said instead, “I brought some food.” His tone was curt and grudging, but nonetheless, Stephen's approbation for his self-control was clearly felt.

And that made him smile.

“The sun is rising,” Stephen said, ostensibly to Gilliam.

“Yes,” Gil replied. “And I saw yesterday's sunrise as well. I'm hunt tired.”

Evayne held out her hands for the tray, and after another minute, he let her have it. “I'll make sure he eats,” she said, almost demurely. “I've—I've gotten sleep in the last several hours. I can take care of him for now.”

“Stephen?” Gilliam asked brusquely.

Stephen's nod was not really an answer; his eyes were fixed to the window. The sun's disk was above the trees, but only by a hair's width. The sky was pink and orange and yellow; the darkness was gone, and the only shadows were those cast by the light.

Gilliam understood what Stephen did not say. He needed to see the breaking of day before he slept, or ate, or rested. Gilliam didn't. He could feel Stephen again, and Stephen was himself. That was enough.

“Wake me if you need me,” he said, although he was certain that this young woman—so different in every way but uniform from her powerful, older counterpart—would die before she did so.

“I will,” she said quietly.

• • •

When Stephen woke it was morning, but it was not the same morning that he'd witnessed the start of. The room was the same; a fire burned—he was grateful for its size and the warmth that the flames generated—in the wall opposite his bed. But there were deep green curtains, embroidered with browns and golds to look like a cloth forest, and beside the bed itself was a simple, cedar table that could, in a pinch, seat two. There was a chair as well as a bedstand.

It was the knocking that had pulled him from slumber, although he only realized this when it came again, faint but unmistakable, at the door.

He knew who it was, and who it wasn't.

“Come,” he said. He spoke softly because he could not put force behind his words. The cold was in his spine, his bones; his chest ached from the bitter winter. Once or twice as a young boy in the King's City he had been racked with just such pain—but at that time it was accompanied by coughing and hacking.

The door swung open, and the young Evayne stood in its frame, holding a tray. When she saw him, she smiled almost brightly. “I wasn't certain if it would be you,” she said. Then she glanced down at the soft foods she carried. “But I guessed it might be.”

“Have you tended many other sickly people?”

“No,” she replied firmly. “But I will.” There was no doubt at all in the assertion.

“Oh?” He sat up, changing the configuration of pillows so they formed a brace at his back. Then he looked down and realized that he wasn't wearing his Hunter's garb. He blushed.

She blushed as well. “I—I didn't do that. Lord Elseth did. He—he said you needed cleaning.”

Thank you, Gil.
“Do you know who else you'll tend?”

“No.”

“Then why are you so certain?”

“Are you hungry?” She put the tray down on the table and then pulled the chair up to the bedside. Her robes fell away from her arms, avoiding, as if by magic, the food beneath them. She saw him stare, and smiled with that odd mixture of bitterness, pride, and shyness that she only showed when she was young. “It was a gift,” she said. “From my father. It's—it's magic. Made by an Artisan and, maybe—maybe a God.”

“It's lovely,” he said, meaning it.

Her smile was genuine and unalloyed. “Do you think so? Miramon said it was too dark.”

It was too dark, he thought, for a girl her age; too austere, too severe. But he knew enough to know that a girl her age was not likely to want to hear that. If this Evayne truly knew how to be a girl like any other. “Very few could wear it so well.”

“I don't get to wear much else.”

“No?”

“No. Not even to sleep in.”

He accepted the flat, shallow bowl she offered him, looking at its contour and shape as if it were an inverted shield and not a dish. There was a clear broth in it that smelled very strongly like chicken; it was thick and very hot; he could feel it warm his palms.

“It's an Essalieyan drinking bowl,” she told him gravely, “In most of the inns in the flatlands, you'll find that food is served in bowls, with bread as a scoop.”

“Ah. Ours are not so shallow.” He drank, and she watched him.

“In Averalaan, they use all sorts of things to eat with. You'll see them when you get there.” She fell silent for a moment; he glanced up to see her staring out the window. “Lord Elseth said I saved your life last night.”

He stopped drinking his soup and shuddered; the cold gripped him tightly, and for just a moment he could not shake it. Then the waking nightmare passed. “Yes,” he said.

“What am I like?”

“That,” he replied dryly, “I would love to know. Who are
you
?”

“You'd know that better than I would,” she said, the bitterness once again lacing her words.

“No,” he said, setting his soup and his hunger aside as he met the violet eyes of a hurt young woman. “I wouldn't. The Evayne that I met last night is not you, no matter what you would like to think. You're different; you're your own person.”

“Am I?” she sneered. “Am I really? Everyone knows that I'm going to be
her.
All of them.”

“Everyone?”

“I can't tell you anything!” Her half-shout was startling because it was unexpected. Stephen watched her face in silence, and when he showed no reaction—no surprise or disappointment, she began again slowly and more calmly. “I'm not
allowed
to tell you anything. Everyone wants to know why I'm old and young and old and young. They want to know where I get my power, or how I use it. I'd tell them, if I could. But I can't. I gave my word, and more.”

“I won't ask you those things.”

“What else is there to talk about?”

“I don't know. I imagine that we'll find something. Or isn't that why you're here?”

She flushed and rose. Before he could speak again, she was at the door, and the door was open.

Stephen looked down at the cooling soup and smiled selfconsciously. It was not the effect that he was used to having, but then again, Evayne was in no way like the young women he was accustomed to meeting.

• • •

Four hours later—or at least he thought it four hours by the sun's position—she returned. Her cheeks were red with cold and wind and her feet showed the rare evidence of touching ground; snow was melting into the carpet at the door.

He rose—he was, by this time, dressed—and stopped as she stiffened. It was clear that she was still angry. “Evayne,” he said, bowing slightly, “I didn't mean to offend you.”

She shrugged. “You didn't.”

“Will you join me for lunch?”

“If you want.”

“I'd be honored.” He offered her his arm, and she took it. It was embarrassing, really; he was still too weak to walk well, and the arm that was to be the gentleman's gesture ended up clinging to hers for support; she was deceptively strong. Yet that seemed to suit her, and when they reached the open dining room—with its long tables and tall chairs—she was once again calm.

“You aren't like your Hunter Lord,” she said, as she found the table on which two dinners had been laid out.

“No.” Speaking of which . . . Stephen glanced around the hall, but he saw no other places set. “Are these places for us?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been here before?”

Her lips compressed into a thinner line, and he realized that he was asking the unanswerable. “Where were you born?”

She stared at him for a minute before she answered him, and the answer was heavy with the unspoken. “The free towns.”

Every question he could think of asking seemed polite and trivial, and it was clear that if Evayne—this Evayne—had ever mastered either art, it was forgotten. Once again silence engulfed them, and Stephen felt it acutely. Parents? Friends? Home? He was certain that they were behind her, and that she could not return to them; perhaps that accounted for her bitterness, perhaps not—but was it wise to stir up things that were barely settled?

“You see?” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, smiling wryly.

Silence again. And food. In her own way, she was like Espere; shy as wild creatures are, easily startled. He thought she might also be ferocious when cornered. But unlike Espere, he thought that Evayne was intelligent enough to be—to feel—lonely.

She said I was kind to her
, he thought, feeling the weight of those words as a responsibility.
She was as old as Lady Elseth, and she still remembered it.
Somehow, because of this, he knew that he could help her, even if he didn't understand her. But the silence stretched out between them, lengthening and hardening.

He looked up to meet her violet eyes; saw the expectation that she would never voice, and the disappointment that was growing in its place. He could not think of a meaningful thing to say about her life.

Which left only his own, and there was risk in that. He could never say why, afterward, he decided to take that risk.

“I was a thief in the King's City when I was half your age.”