Transformation (37 page)
Authors: Carol Berg
I pulled my torn cloak about me and doused my smoldering branch in the snow. While I watched the shengar sate his hunger, I leaned my head against the tree and tried to map out in my mind the route we had run. It was impossible. How were we ever going to find our way back to the settlement?
Shouts from the way we’d come woke me from a drowse. The shengar was still gnawing on a haunch bone, showing no sign of reverting back to the Prince’s true form. Soon, if all went as before. Its ears pricked at the closing sounds. I pulled up my hood and stood up, stretching out my cramps and moving around behind the tree.
“This way! See the tracks!”
The shengar dropped the bone and a low rumble of disturbance came from his chest. It wasn’t a good idea to interrupt a shengar at its feeding. I slipped a short way down the hill thinking to intercept the hunters, but I hadn’t counted on them being mounted. Three riders galloped past, and the shengar roared.
“There!” shouted one of the riders. A woman. “Take it.”
“Get behind, so it can’t run,” called a man.
“Wait!” I cried, chasing after them. Panic muted my senses so I didn’t notice the tremor the voices set up in my skin. “Don’t!” I crested the rise just in time to see one of the mounted hunters let fly a spear. It fell short, just in front of the furious, blood-streaked cat. “He’s human,” I cried hoarsely, terrified they couldn’t hear me over the pounding of blood in my ears. I grabbed the stirrup of the nearest rider. “You mustn’t hurt him. He’s enchanted.”
“Human?” It was the woman. “Oh, sweet Valdis, this is the supplicant!”
“I’ve got him!” cried the hunter from across the glade, as the cat screamed in pain. “Finish him with your sword, Daffyd.”
I ran to the shengar, who lay sprawled in a pool of blood with a spear protruding from its side. I couldn’t tell which blood was the cat’s and which was the buck’s.
“My lord, can you hear me?” I pressed fingers to the beast’s breast and it snarled feebly, trying to nip them off, telling me what I wanted to know. “We’ll take care of you,” I said. “No Derzhi warrior was ever taken with a single spear. Is that not true?”
The riders had dismounted and come up behind me.
“Does he live?” asked the woman.
“Yes,” I said, “but sorely wounded. Bleeding badly. Is there a healer who could help him?”
“None that know of shengars.”
“He will change ... soon.” A blast of hot air rippled through the glade, and the shengar growled ... then moaned ... and the image wavered. As the two images battled for supremacy, Aleksander cried out in anguish and the people behind me gasped in horrified astonishment. I had no attention to spare for them.
“Soon, soon, my lord,” I said, moving back slightly so I would not touch him during his change. “Hold on to my voice. We’ll help you as soon as the change is over.”
For a moment I thought him dead, he lay so limp and cold in the bloodstained snow. I ripped off my cloak and my shirt, then, hoping I wasn’t going to make things worse, I eased out the spear, pressing my wadded shirt to the gushing wound in Aleksander’s belly. I used his leather belt to hold the shirt in place, then wrapped him in my cloak, using the edge of it to wipe the blood from his face. “He needs a healer,” I said. “If you could take him on your horses ...”
But they did not answer, and, in an instant, I realized what I had done. I was wearing only a slave tunic with my breeches, and the crossed circle on my shoulder would be glaring at them. They would see that I was Ezzarian and know what I was, and perhaps, like Garen, they would know my name.
“I ask only that you care for him as Ezzarians have always cared for those who come as supplicants,” I said, hoping they would listen to what I said even if they would not acknowledge hearing it. Then I took the offensive in my own war and looked up ... into the faces of my wife, the Queen of Ezzaria, and her husband, who had once been my dearest friend.
Chapter 24
The moon was sinking toward the horizon, leaving the forest dark and haunted as I trudged down the hill. Ysanne and Rhys and their companion Daffyd, a man unknown to me, had made a litter for Aleksander and taken him away. I tried to help, to ease Aleksander, to speed their departure, but I might have been only a moon shadow for all the notice they took of me. Even in that first moment of revelation their eyes had betrayed nothing, as if the ground beneath my feet was all they could see. I knew how it was done. Gods have mercy, I had done it in the past, never understanding the horror it was for the one unseen, the utter desolation of the spirit to be told so explicitly that one did not exist, that flesh and blood were not enough, and that there was no remedy for it.
At least I had their tracks to follow. Only once did I depart from the horse-scented path, to light a branch in the smoldering coals of an abandoned moon fire. The small torch helped me see the tracks and droppings, and helped to keep a bit of warmth in my hands and face. The first real clothes I’d had in forever, and I’d already lost half of them. I laughed aloud as I walked. Aleksander would think it a good joke. The humor echoed hollow in the silent trees.
The years had touched Ysanne with magnificence. Even in the torchlight I could see with what artistry time had sculpted her girlish softness into true beauty. I longed to look in her eyes to see whether or not the garden of her spirit still flourished behind her wall of stillness. So few had ever been permitted to see it. Her Serene Majesty ... the brittle iron of her girlhood now tempered by time and adversity. She was born to be queen.
Her family had lived in a village some twenty leagues from my own. Ysanne had been taken into Queen Tarya’s house to train when she was five and found to have an astonishing level of melydda. Too young to be so far from home, to live in a huge house with fifty courtiers and a busy woman older than her grandmother. Queen Tarya was set in her ways and forced Ysanne to train exactly as she herself had done fifty years in the past, not allowing the girl’s brilliance to move her along faster or skip any step, but rather making her take every step twice over. Tarya never let her so much as demonstrate the marvelous variations of her talent she discovered as she grew. Because her awestruck parents would not dispute the Queen, Ysanne had no choice. For ten years she bottled up loneliness and fury, determined not to yield, sure the old woman was trying to make her quit or crush her spirit. But on Ysanne’s fifteenth birthday, Queen Tarya smiled and embraced her and told her that she was the most powerful Aife ever born in Ezzaria, and that the rai-kirah would not prevail as long as her talent was fed by the fire within her.
“Then, why did you never allow me to use it?” Ysanne had asked in mystification. “Why did you bury me in the old ways all these years?”
The Queen had laughed at her and said that her talent needed little schooling. But her patience ... that was a different matter. No Aife could afford to be impatient.
Only after I had known her a very long time did Ysanne tell me of that day. She wasn’t one to admit that anyone ever found her wanting.
To be an Aife, a portal-maker, was the most difficult of all Ezzarian callings. To weave one’s own being into the soul of another so completely as to shape a physical reality was hard enough when the person was healthy and whole of mind. But to do such a thing to a subject who hosted a demon—a person perhaps mad, perhaps vicious, perhaps violent—was intricate and dangerous work. Wardens were more celebrated, as warriors so often are, but no Warden could have taken one step into a battle, much less have had the confidence and freedom to do what was necessary, without absolute, unshakable trust in his Aife. If the portal closed behind him, he would be trapped forever in another person’s soul, and without the solidity of the Aife’s shaping, he would tumble into an abyss of madness where no rescuer could ever find him.
Mentors like Galadon had a network of colleagues throughout Ezzaria, all of them watching for the right pairing for their students. Warden and Aife, Searcher and Comforter, Scholar and Spellmaker, all of our skills were honed to work in pairings, except for the Weaver, of course, who always worked alone. The Searcher’s skill at discovering demons lurking in the heart of madness or cruelty was worth little without a Comforter to envelope the victim in enchantment. And the touch of the Comforter that spun the thread of power back to the Aife had no security without the physical skills of the Searcher to protect him. Though all were working toward the same purpose, our talents needed to balance like the roles in some complex dance figure, where your life and your sanity might depend on the footwork of your partner as it blended with your own. The announcement of a new pairing was in every way equal to a birth or a death or a marriage. This is not to say that every pair married. In fact, it was more common not to marry. But the intimacy of Warden and Aife was extraordinary. It was hard to imagine being married to one woman while walking souls with another.
I was fortunate that Galadon lived in my own village, and I didn’t have to leave home as so many Ezzarian students did. Though my preparation was rigorous and consuming, my parents and my sister had sheltered me with warm and loving normalcy. Having lived and trained in one small village, I was intimidated when Galadon told me that he’d found me a pairing with Queen Tarya’s protégée. A girl celebrated for her extraordinary skills. A girl rumored to be cold and difficult. A girl destined to be queen. A girl so lovely that my youthful urges, suppressed by unending schooling, burst forth full-blown and came near exploding me into bits the moment I laid eyes on her.
Galadon took care of that problem quickly, of course, by plunging me into a course of training that made everything thus far look like nursery coddling. Somedays I would see her only for a brief moment, when the candlelight of the temple reflected on her face as she concentrated on her portal-making. I would stand stupidly and wonder how the small cleft in the smooth line of her chin would feel were I to run my finger across its tantalizing irregularity or how it would be to brush away the little wrinkle of intensity between her brows, until Galadon would say, “Begin now, imbecile! Demons do not wait upon gaping jackdaws.” And I would close my eyes and sigh at the remembrance of her loveliness as if Galadon couldn’t see me do it, then I would say the words and shift the reality that would take me into her creation.
It was in the portal that I got to know her. There I could hear the voice of her mind without being distracted by the sight of her body. We argued everlastingly at first. She was very sure of herself, and though I was a shy and gawky fifteen-year-old in the matters of women and life, I had no such reservations about my aptitude in the realms of enchantment and combat. Ten years with Galadon had seen to that. Just as with Tarya, you came to believe in yourself or you gave it up. Galadon claimed that the two years we trained together aged him fifty, but we knew better. He gloried in our perfection and our strength and our triumph. When we returned victorious from our first battle—forcing the demon from a Suzaini woman who was on the verge of murdering her children—Galadon toasted us and said there was no pairing ever made that was our equal. We scarcely heard him, for when we opened our eyes and saw each other in the flesh while our blood still thundered with enchantment and danger and victory, there was room for nothing else in the universe.
By that time I had discovered the fiery core within the alabaster goddess, the tender passion that could breathe life into a dead man, the quiet wit that could sharpen a diamond’s edge, the devotion that had been waiting all her life for a loving hand to claim it. Her soul was a fifth season, of richer hue than autumn, bursting with more life than spring, hidden away, ready to transform the world with such glory as it had never seen. She had permitted me to glimpse it ... and she had promised that I could spend my life exploring it.
I shivered in the predawn blackness as I walked out of the forest and down the path to the village. It had all been so long ago.
There were lights in the windows of the guest cottage and a cluster of people outside the door. I debated whether to walk back into the forest until they were gone, but I decided that it didn’t really matter. No reason to stay out in the cold when the worst had already come to pass. I hadn’t died from it. I wasn’t bleeding. I would survive.
The fifteen or twenty people did not part when I approached, but somehow in their movements—one man leaned toward a friend to speak, one man drew a cloak about himself, a woman gathered two children close against the cold—a way was left for me to pass where I would not touch any of them. When I walked in the door, the healer didn’t even turn around to see who came.
Aleksander looked dreadful, his skin almost transparent, his lips colorless, and his cheeks and eyes sunken. The woman had cleaned him and bandaged him, and from the implements on the table—needles, silk thread, packets of herbs, a small brazier, an assortment of small stones and bits of metal—I gathered that she had stitched the wound and used an enchantment for healing such a thing. I ignored the healer, who was washing her hands and packing the implements and the blood-soaked rags into a basket so they could be cleaned and purified, and sat down by the bed.
“Sleep well, my lord. Have no ill dreams tonight.” He didn’t move, of course. Unlikely he could hear me. “I’ll wake up every few hours and give you water and check your bandages.” The healer poked up the fire, then took a few things from the bedside table, leaving a packet of herbs and a damp cloth behind. The door closed softly behind her.
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