Authors: Carol Berg
Transformation (14 page)
I longed to ask where he had come from. The few Ezzarian slaves I had encountered in my early years of captivity had been taken as I was, on the day of Ezzaria’s fall. The assault had come so quickly on that last day. We who had fighting skills had tried very hard to give the last survivors time to escape, but at the moment I had drawn my last free breath, every man, woman, and child within my view was dead. Where were the living? Who were they? Names danced on my tongue, demanding to be spoken. He could be the child of my friends. Memories flooded into my mind, crying to be shared with one who might understand. Questions about what exactly had happened after the first Derzhi lash had fallen on my shoulders ... an unfocused hunger for understanding, dressed in a strange, quivering anxiety that set my teeth on edge ... crept to the edge of my tongue. But I could not indulge my desires. I had to teach the boy truths for his new existence.
“Be easy about one thing. The Derzhi won’t ask you about the others, because they don’t really care all that much. We’re not worth the trouble to hunt down. It was an accident you were taken. You did something stupid and got yourself noticed by a Derzhi magician. Am I right?”
The boy nodded hesitantly.
“The magicians are the only ones who care about us anymore.”
“Why?”
“Afraid we’ll put them out of a job. They can do very little but make illusions. They happen upon things by chance, but they’ve lost any memory of melydda. They know we have power to do real sorcery, but they don’t understand it and can’t figure out how to get it themselves. They can’t seem to grasp that we don’t care about entertaining Derzhi nobles with it.”
“I was just trying to find my way back to ... Just trying to get home.” He almost bit a hole in his lip.
“You’re right not to trust me. Don’t trust anyone. There is even a rai-kirah housed among the people here—in a Khelid emissary—”
“Rai-kirah?” His eyes grew huge. Panicked. Trapped. He hadn’t even thought of such a possibility. But then, neither had I.
“It can’t know you. Just be exceptionally cautious. You no longer have any defenses. All in all, it’s safer to keep to yourself, but if I can help you, I will. Ask me whatever you wish.”
He didn’t want to talk to me. He kept looking away as if he could not bear the sight of one he would have shunned as unspeakably corrupt only a few days before. Yet then his eyes would flick back to me, to the mark on my face, to the scars on my shoulders and arms, to my fading bruises. “How long have you been ... like this?” He could not bring himself even to say the word.
“I’ve been a slave for sixteen years. Since the fall of Ezzaria when I was eighteen.” His whole lifetime. It must have sounded like eternity.
“What were you before? Did you have melydda?”
I could hear what he was really asking. If he had been blessed with true power, but I had not, then he might do better. He might escape my fate.
“This is the only thing I will answer about the past,” I said, “because I’ve left it behind ... as you must also do.” I looked him directly in the eye so he would know I was telling the truth. “I was a Warden.”
I hadn’t thought he could get any paler. I put the bread in his hand and encouraged him to eat. He did so, then did as he needed to do ... spoke of the present.
“They try to make me speak my name, to wear their immodest clothes, and kneel to worship them as if they were gods. They say I’m to serve at table. I would have to touch their foul meat and rotted foods, and use their unclean water to bathe their hands.”
Of course they would want him to serve at table. He was a handsome youth ... unscarred ... naive ... innocent. My heart boiled with hatred, and I hoped the rai-kirah was not hunting at that moment or it would find a proper vessel in me. “There are a few more things I should tell you about Derzhi table service. ...”
It was half an hour more—a bleak half hour—until Durgan opened the trap and bade me come out. I took the boy’s trembling hand and said, “You will survive it. Your purity is inside your soul. Untouchable. The gods will see the light in you.” I wished I could believe it.
As I let go and started up the ladder, the boy closed his eyes, clenched his fist to his breast, and said,
“Lys na Llyr.”
“Lys na Llyr.”
“Tienoch havedd, Llyr. Nepharo wydd,”
I said. Sleep in peace.
I said. Sleep in peace.
I struggled with what to do about Llyr. Instinct demanded I stay away. Loneliness was safety, just as I had told him. And the boy had to learn his own lessons—the quicker, the better. Yet the prospect of gaining his trust and having my questions answered was so tempting as to be physically painful. Fate, in the form of Aleksander, removed my choice.
On the very next day I was moved into the palace so it would be easier for the Prince and his staff to make use of me. Preparations were under way for Aleksander’s dakrah, so there were a thousand writing tasks to be performed: invitations to the local nobility, proclamations of all sorts, unending correspondence with merchants and suppliers, friends and guests.
It was a week until I saw Llyr again. The Prince summoned me, one evening at dinner; to read some poem that had been written about the coming festival and left at his place by an infatuated woman. Aleksander did not dismiss me when I finished reciting the maudlin verse, so I sat in the shadows behind him, and I watched the Ezzarian boy begin to wash the hands of the guests. His eyes were dark hollows; his skin almost transparent, stretched over his bones. My heart sank. He was not eating. He was still fighting the battle of how to avoid those things we had been taught were impure, while not killing himself—the ultimate corruption, according to Ezzarian law. It was so hard to reverse the teachings of a lifetime. And there was no answer to the dilemma unless he learned new truths to live by. Llyr could scarcely bring himself to touch the hands of the brawny Derzhi warrior. And when the man reached out and fondled his short hair, leering in unseemly anticipation, I felt Llyr’s despair as if it were my own. Which, of course, it had been ... and was.
Two nights later, as I was sitting in Fendular’s cold anteroom, writing a list of extra linens needed for the two thousand guests who were expected some six short weeks ahead, a young female slave appeared at the door. “Master Durgan commands you come to the slave house.”
It was an absolute breach of protocol for me to leave my assigned task to obey a lesser-ranking official, but I did not hesitate. I knew what I would find.
The fool of a boy had not known how to do it quickly or painlessly. He had put the dull shaving knife in his belly. Durgan had laid him in the darkest corner of the slave house, and thrown a blanket over him to quiet his shivering.
“Ah, child, what have you done?” I said.
He did not answer, but turned his head away from me. It was not my corruption that he could not face. Quite the opposite.
“Gaenad zi,”
he said. “Go away.” He was ashamed.
“Gaenad zi,”
he said. “Go away.” He was ashamed.
I gathered him in my arms and held him to me, feeling his warm blood soak my tunic. “I am not afraid of corruption, Llyr,” I said. “I’m just sorry. I wish ...” Well, what did it matter? Softly I sang the chant for the dying, hoping it would give him some comfort.
“Were you truly a Warden?” he whispered once I was done with the ancient prayer.
“Yes.”
“Will you look ... inside ... and tell me what you see?”
“There’s no need—”
“Tell me please. I’m so afraid.”
“If you wish.” I gazed deep into his dark, pain-filled eyes, but I used no Warden’s skill to read his soul and make my answer. “There is no evil in you, Llyr. No corruption. You are Verdonne’s child and Valdis’ brother, and you will live forever in the forests of light.”
He relaxed and closed his eyes, and I thought he was gone. But he smiled sleepily and said, “Galadon told me he once knew someone who was a Warden at seventeen. He said I would never have such melydda as that one in a thousand years of trying.”
“Galadon ...” I came near forgetting everything in the magic of the name.
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
“He never spoke such flattery in my hearing. He always said I was ‘incompetent, ignorant ...’”
“‘... imperceptive, and ill-suited for your gifts.’”
I smiled at the echo of lost joy. “Galadon lives ...”
“There’s ...” He choked on blood that came bubbling from his mouth, and his thin body wrenched in spasm. I held him close.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Be easy.”
“... five hundred ...”
“Hush, boy.”
“... hiding, hiding, hiding. Cold and clean ... ah ... shhhh. Don’t tell where. Gyrbeast leads the way ...” He was drifting away and his words fell into a faint singsong like a childhood rhyme. “... find the way ... find the way home ... follow the gyrbeast ... lead you home. ...”
He sighed, and said nothing more.
“Nepharo wydd, Llyr,”
I said. Sleep in peace.
I said. Sleep in peace.
If Llyr was in peace, I was not. Durgan tried to speak to me as I rinsed the blood from my tunic and put the wet garment back on, but I would not stay to hear him. “I must return to my work,” I said. “Do not call on me for such a matter again, slave master. I’d not wish the Prince or the Chamberlain to find me absent from my duties to wait upon a barbarian slave.”
It was a bitter time. I would have preferred to sleep freezing in the slave house and be set to shoveling out the middens with my bare hands, than to be drawn deeper into Derzhi life. But as the weeks passed I became too busy to dwell on it much. I was ruthless with myself, forbidding any thought, no matter how fleeting, that could have an association with the past. I dreamed no dreams, permitted no visions, spoke to no one outside my assigned work. And I completely banished from my mind the astounding news that five hundred Ezzarians were hidden somewhere in the world and that among them was one who had been my mentor from my fifth birthday, the day I was found to have melydda. My encounter with Llyr had done nothing but confirm that I had been right to stay apart, right to forget, right to pretend that there was no other life beyond the moment in which I existed.
Chapter 10
It was only three weeks until the start of the twelve days’ celebration that would mark Aleksander’s majority. He would be twenty-three, the age at which Derzhi men became the equal of their fathers. They received their portion of the father’s estates and lands according to mother, birth order, and number of siblings, and they could marry without their father’s permission. They could argue against their fathers in legal disputes and fight against them in battles without danger of being hanged for disrespect. They could speak with the same authority as their father, though as to being respected for their opinions, they had to earn that in the way of all Derzhi men—in battle.
Being the Emperor’s son, Aleksander’s case was slightly different. He would hold title to his own property—in his case, enough land, horses, and treasure to establish several thriving kingdoms—but he could not choose whom to marry. That was too important a decision to be left to a young man’s whim. And Aleksander would certainly not be the Emperor’s equal, though his voice would speak with imperial authority. If he spoke against his father’s wishes, only his father would chastise him. No one else would be permitted to do so. And no man or woman could refuse Aleksander’s command, thinking to go behind his back and make peace with Ivan as they might have done in the past. Ivan would have their heads for it. The Prince’s word would be the law of the Empire.
Every noble, every servant, and every slave in the Prince’s household—and most of them in Capharna—were immersed in the endless preparations for the dakrah. A great deal of work had been done the previous fall, when delicacies and precious materials were brought in from the farthest reaches of the Empire before winter snows closed the high mountain passes. Wagon loads of silks and damasks, cases of gold-rimmed porcelain, and casks of rare wines were stockpiled lest a lingering winter prevent their arrival. Jewels from Zhagad’s finest gem cutters were shipped in, and perfumed candles by the thousands, and such quantities of gold that the wagons left deep ruts in the roads.
Stewards agonized over planning twelve days of feasting for two thousand guests, and appropriate largess for the population of Capharna and surrounding villages, lest they starve when everything was appropriated for palace use. Herds of goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle, and flocks of every kind of fowl had been imported, along with enough fodder to fatten them over the winter months.
Tailors and seamstresses had been working on robes and gowns for a year or more. Aleksander was fitted for a robe studded with pearls enough to ransom all of Ezzaria, and I saw the designs for a diamond neck piece that would crush a smaller man with its weight.
Yet even with all the year’s preparation, the palace was in frenzy. The Emperor’s rooms must be painted and refitted, the guest quarters freshened, and accommodations found for those guests who could not fit even in so expansive a hostel as the Derzhi Summer Palace.
Gifts arrived from everywhere: jewels, statuary, boxes of ivory and jade, finely wrought knives, swords, and bows, jeweled headpieces and mail shirts, horses, fighting cocks, perfumes, exotic birds. Though still protesting that he had no belief in sorcery, the Prince had me examine every one of them for enchantments. Since my “cure” of his bedroom malady, he seemed to have confidence in my advising. I found nothing, but as no further disturbances occurred, he seemed to think I was doing a good job.
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