Transformation (40 page)
Authors: Carol Berg
“Seems like you’d want to bring your partner in on something like that.”
“Of course I do. I want to be with her every minute of every day. I want to touch her ... body and mind. I want to be her eyes and her ears, because the whole world is more perfect when I share it with her. But when I step through the portal, I have to leave her behind. What if I take too much of her with me and reveal it to the demon? What if I get distracted thinking of her or worrying about her? I have to work alone, so sometimes I just have to be alone. I just don’t know how to tell her that without making her angry. I can’t seem to get out the right words.” It had taken so long to get her to open up her heart. I was terrified of losing her, or of losing my admission to her inner self, which was just the same.
Rhys sat up and shook my knee as if to wake me up. “What if I were to talk to her? I’ve got to go south for a few days to see Gram. I’ll get Ysanne to go with me while you’re off in your eyrie. I’ll tell her Casydda is showing talent for searching and needs Ysanne to test her.”
I wanted to say yes. Rhys was so much better with words than I. But that was the coward’s way out. “No. I need to tell her myself. And besides, she still doesn’t like you.”
Rhys popped to his feet, ignoring my weak protest. “Don’t worry. Go get your head mended. I’ll take care of her for you. I’ll tell her you’re an independent bastard who never lets anyone help him do anything, so she might as well get used to it. And I’ll be very gracious. She’ll learn to like me.”
When the path angled upward I did not slow, and I leaped smoothly across the streams and fallen trees that tried to block my passage. Clarity. Memory. The pain I had banished, so much deeper and more agonizing than chains or lashes. The entirety of my being was encompassed in my running, and my long maintained barriers crumbled in the tide of understanding.
My arms were on fire. Inside and out. Inside with the burning of muscles too long strained, too tired, functioning only from will and necessity. Outside from fifty lacerations of sword and knife and spear, some deep, leaving bloody rivulets dribbling to my wrists. An arrow point was buried in one thigh, threatening to collapse my right leg under me. Everywhere was the stink of death, where men had released their bowels in pain and fear, where warriors had vomited when seeing the mutilated remains of friends and lovers, brothers and fathers.
If Rhys didn’t come in seconds, I would be carrion along with the rest. How long had it been since he’d gone for help?
I whirled and kicked the knife from the hand of a startled flat-faced Derzhi, and he summoned two Thrid who had just hacked off the hands of two of my dead friends. I slashed with my sword at a snarling Manganar and feinted my knife at another, while aiming it for the heart of a second Derzhi who thought I didn’t see him. My pivot leg was the one with the arrow in it, and I made the mistake of brushing the broken shaft with my swing leg. I commanded the leg not to buckle, roaring as the steel tip ground against bone. No use to hold back the cry when it might surprise one of the growing crowd of hostile faces around me. Pride had no place when you were desperate for any advantage.
Watch their eyes.
The eyes of the flat-faced Derzhi shifted, telling me that another had come up behind me. I whipped about and swung again, this time making sure to leave room for the arrow shaft when I set my foot again.
The Manganar is worried. Nice, but why? Not because of an overtired Warden fighting with the dregs of his skill and stamina. I whirled again, sweeping the circle, keeping them back long enough to see. There ... at the top of the rise, silhouettes against the orange smear of the sunset. Even as my eyes flicked back to the curved saber threatening my rib cage, I continued to solidify the image in my mind. Broad square shoulders. And beside them, a cloud of dark hair, touched with gold. Rhys and Ysanne come to rescue me. Five or six others with them. Enough.
With a last surge of hope I took the Derzhi on my left and ducked a neck-severing swing from the saber.
One minute . . . a few seconds for them to set up a spell ... a quick distraction so I could sneak out between the six ... now seven warriors.
“On your knees, barbarian.” The stabbing fire in the vulnerable spot just under my left ribs stopped me instantly. Blood dripped slowly down my side from the shallow contact, and any movement would drive the blade deeper. And, of course, in the moment of my hesitation, there came a knife to my throat, a scalp-ripping grab of my hair, and a most persuasive spear point to my groin. “Drop your bloody little toys. It would be a shame to slay such a fighter. You’ll do very well to wipe our backsides with your clean Ezzarian fingers.”
Now! Do it now, Rhys! I cried silently, as the flat-faced Derzhi forced me down with pressure on the sword tip lodged in my side. I dropped my weapons and tried to summon an enchantment of my own. Anything. But twenty hours of battle, three days without sleep, and grief beyond bearing laid their leaden fingers on my mind and my body. I could not conjure a will-o’-the-wisp. My only hope stood at the top of the rise.
There’s only these few, I thought. The bulk of the enemy is five minutes away, finishing the slaughter of our left flank.
But as the circling vultures screamed triumph and descended on the dead, and manacles were locked about my wrists, the Derzhi leaned to the side to grab a friend’s whip. And then I saw. One moment the square shoulders and gold-streaked hair were visible at the top of the rise, and in the next, as the first lash ripped the flesh of my shoulders, they turned their backs and disappeared from my sight.
Up and up. The trail narrowed into a rocky, ice-slick goat track. By this time I was not thinking, only running. And when I reached the cliff edge at the top and could run no more, I knelt in the cold sunlight at the rim of the frozen world, and I wept.
Chapter 26
So I had come to it at last. A “revelation” that I had known full well for half my life. Aleksander would be satisfied that he had guessed the truth so easily, whereas I had tried to reinvent it, reinterpret it, reenvision the memory of my friend’s betrayal ... and Ysanne’s. She had been there with him. She had watched. She had done nothing.
I sat on the edge of the cliff, dangling my legs over the vast emptiness of sunlit valley.
So what was I to do now? I had brought Aleksander to the Ezzarians in hopes we could find the help he needed so sorely. Was I wrong to believe that such betrayal had led to true corruption—and that it had crippled the Ezzarians, as we had always feared?
“Are you ready for this particular test so soon?”
Fortunately I had a good hold on the rocky verge of the abyss, or the startling intrusion might have sent me off the edge.
“Catrin! How did you find me?”
“The Prince told—”
“The Prince?”
“Nevya had him awake and eating broth two hours ago. He’s very weak. He said you were out working off a disturbing encounter with an old friend.” She cocked her head to one side, and the wind caught her long hair, framing her small face with a dark corona. “You’ve always gone to high places when you were troubled.”
I shook my head and laughed as I looked back at the noonday brilliance. “Did you do nothing when you were a child but spy on me?”
Catrin peered into the immensity below us, then sat down beside me, keeping well back from the edge. “I’ve managed one or two other things along the way. And I don’t think you always considered it spying. You never refused the almond cakes I brought you nor the words of encouragement as I remember. You were always very solemn and proud in your humiliation, but you never refused to listen to my admiration. Nor ever contradicted me, as I think about it.”
“I kept hoping your grandfather had sent you to tell me he was mistaken, that I was not the most incompetent student he had ever had the misfortune to mentor. Failing that ... I hoped you had inherited his meticulous eye and had seen worth that he had not.” I smiled at her. “So have you? I have sore need of both wisdom and encouragement at the moment.”
“Have you given more thought to what he proposed?”
“Of course I’ve thought of it. I wish I could believe I still had melydda, or that five days of exertion could bring it back.”
“It would take you several weeks to prepare. You’d need to work at—”
No point in letting her rattle off Galadon’s arguments again. She couldn’t understand. “Do you know what they do to you in the Rites of Balthar, Catrin?”
“Seyonne—”
“They start by putting you into a stone box—a coffin with just enough air to keep you breathing—and they bury you underground. You lie there in your own filth, made worse by your terror, unable to move. You think they won’t leave you there long. They want a slave. They’re just trying to frighten you. But after a while ... hours ... a day ... thirst begins to gnaw at you, and you feel the walls pressing in. You use your power to hold off your fear: to make a light, to dull the cramps and the thirst, to prevent breaking your fingers trying to claw your way out. After a while you can’t hold it off anymore, and while you lie there in the dark feeling the madness come, they begin to twist your mind with illusions. ...”
She put a finger over my mouth, quieting the shaking rage and terror that consumed me with the remembrance. My betrothed wife and my best friend had put me in that coffin. I had known it and had used every scrap of melydda to make myself forget, leaving nothing to hold off the horror of being buried alive. For three days I had prayed to die, but my captors would not allow it. Only my heart and my power had died.
“We know what they do,” said Catrin. “They believe—and you believe—that they starve your melydda until it’s gone. They force you to use it up, and they use horror and pain to prevent you from touching it until it withers away. But Grandfather believes it is not your melydda they destroy, but the faith that binds your senses to your power. The power is still there. Your mind and body and will are still there. You have only to reconnect them. What better way to do it than to explore the very path you walked before, when you opened yourself in faith, risking everything to prove that you could stand against demons?”
I shook my head. She believed what she said very sincerely, but what could a sheltered young girl know of despair? I hated to disappoint her, in the same way I would have hated to refuse her gifts of sweets when she was seven, but there was no choice in the matter. “I have no faith. I don’t know where to find it anymore.”
“You can start with my grandfather. He has never failed you.”
“But he doesn’t tell all of the truth.” Galadon knew what Rhys and Ysanne had done. He knew Aleksander would be refused. That was why he was so determined I should try to reclaim my power. But he hadn’t told me any of it.
She paused a moment before answering. “Being worthy of your trust does not oblige him to reveal everything he knows. It never has. He acts as he thinks best.”
“It makes faith all the more difficult, especially when things get hard.”
“Strangely enough, we believe you have already found something of faith in this Derzhi. In time, you will find it where you most need to find it. But that will be another day.”
“You seem very sure I’m going to do this.”
“If you’re going to make a Derzhi into the Warrior of Two Souls, you’d best not dally.”
“Your grandfather believes me?”
“No. But he can’t ignore you, either—which annoys him greatly. And time is very short. The Queen will render her verdict as soon as the Prince is awake again. She’ll send him away.”
“How can I even begin such a thing when I can’t summon the melydda to light a candle?” I said, still consumed with the morbid shadows of the past. “It would waste your time and mine. Better I should go right to the end—step off this cliff and see how far my faith would take me.”
The color fled from her rigid face, and her dark eyes grew huge and horrified, shifting from me to the vast emptiness behind me. “Sweet Verdonne, no! You can’t—”
“No, no. I didn’t mean that. I’d never ... I’m sorry.” What was I thinking? She was an innocent, generous young woman ... not a cynical slave who could find humor only in the macabre. I held her cold hands. “I sit here floundering in self-pity while you offer a gift of everything I desire. I wish so very much that I could believe as you do. But you mustn’t think ... I’ve a number of things to do before I die. I’ve got to get someone to listen to me about the Khelid, and I’ve got to find a way to get this annoying Derzhi off my conscience.”
Catrin set her jaw and yanked her hands from mine, and for a moment I caught a disconcerting glimpse of her grandfather in her small face. “Don’t you dare treat me like a child. Even after so many years, you still think you know everything. You’re still the same cocky boy of seventeen who would pat me on the head and tell me that I couldn’t possibly understand his problems until I grew up. Well, I’ve grown up. Perhaps I can enlighten you to a few things. Tell me, cocky boy, do you remember how my grandfather questioned your memory on the night you were at our house? He had you reciting every spell you ever learned or made.”
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