Chapter Three
I dreamed of the fire again that night. After ten years, one would think such pain might fade into life’s dismal landscape. Yet once more I saw Evard’s banners whipped by the cold wind, bright red against the steel blue sky. I heard again the jeering of the wild-eyed crowds that surged against the line of guards surrounding the pyre, and the stake, and the one bound there, maintaining as he could the last shreds of dignity and reason.
Where was justice? Time blurs so much of worth, so much of learning unused, so many of the daily pleasures that shape a life, too small to make grand memories. Why would it not erase the image of Karon’s mutilated face: the ragged sockets where they had burned out his eyes, the battered mouth where they had cut out the tongue that had whispered words of love and healing? Should not mercy dim his last avowal of joy and life, given just before he withdrew from what relief and comfort I could give him? After ten years I should not hear, again and again, his agonized cry as the flames consumed his sweet body. Dead was dead.
As much as I tried, I could not silence that cry. In the day, yes, as I worked at the business of survival, but I had never learned to command my dreams. I had vowed on the shields of my ancestors never to weep again. Yet, was it any wonder that weakness forever betrayed my resolve upon waking from that dream?
I had permitted no tears on that day or for many days after. The dreams forced me to relive that, toothe two months they kept me confined in the palace with no companion save the mute serving sister, Maddy, and the doomed babe that grew within me. Even Tomas did not come to me in that time. My brother did not want my bulging belly to stand witness against him for what he had done or what he planned to do. They could not kill Karon’s child before it was born. The spirit might seek a new host, they said. They wanted to be sure.
Only Darzid had ever shown his face at my door, but it was not for me he came. Always he sat by the brazier, clad simply and impeccably in black and red, propping one boot on the iron hod.
“Tell me of sorcerers, Seri. Who was your husband? What did he tell you of his people?”
Always probing, always questioning, his unrelenting curiosity picked at my pain as the horror of what had happened settled into grim history, and the horror of what was to come took appalling shape in my ever-naïve head. Throughout everything I had never believed they would murder my child.
I had begged Darzid’s help, promised him gold and power, love and loyalty if he would but smuggle me out of my palace prison before my son was born. But he brushed away my pleading just as he flicked off ash that settled on his shining boot, and always he returned to his questions.
“Tell me of the sorcerer, Seri. Something happened when he died. Something changed in the world, and I must understand it.”
Eventually I had stopped begging. Stopped talking. Stopped listening. Eventually Darzid had stopped coming, and eventually arrived the day that I willed my labor to stop, the day I struggled to hold the babe within me yet a few more moments, for I knew I would never hold him in my arms.
But nature had its way, and I was left empty; the law had its way, and my son’s life was cut short by my brother’s knife. The physician, his head and throat wrapped in a black turban so that his cold face hovered above me like some cruel moon, had commanded the serving woman to take the child to Tomas. I wasn’t even allowed to see my son until Darzid, sober and impersonally curious like an alchemist observing the turmoil he had wrought in his glass, brought him back to me—the tiny boy, pale, motionless, washed clean and laid in a basket, perfect but for the angry red slit that crossed his fragile neck. Then they took him away and burned him, too, and proclaimed the last sorcerer exterminated.
Why had they bothered to wash him? I had never understood that.
Once all was done as the law prescribed, they left me alone in that cold room. Ten years it had been since that last day, and still the dream made it real.
Year 4 in the reign of King Evard
The door was no longer locked. Karon’s babe had been the prisoner, not Karon’s wife. They planned to send me to Tomas’s keep, the home of my childhood, to live in penitence and subservience to my brother and his pouting, seventeen-year-old wife. But even with nothing left for which to fight, I was not ready to submit to that particular death.
I found a discarded towel and cleaned myself as best I could, tying rags between my legs to catch the birthing blood. Then I pulled Maddy’s spare tunic from the chest beneath the window and wrapped it over my stained shift.
Nothing was left to take with me. Every shred of clothing, every trinket, every paper and book and picture that had belonged to Karon or to me had been burned. The bastards had taken everything— No, don’t think. Just walk. The time for pain and hatred and grief would come after I was away. And so, I walked out of the room and out of the palace and out of my life.
For so many days I had existed in the unyielding, unvarying embrace of death, yet in the palace gardens, bitter winter had been replaced by damp spring. Life had continued for the hundred gardeners trimming the hundreds of trees beside the carriage road on which I walked. Crocuses were already drooping, and the showier blooms of daffodils and anemones fluttered brightly in the damp breeze.
Two horsemen raced by, then pulled up short and turned back toward me as I approached the first ring wall. Tomas and Darzid.
“Seri, you damned fool, where do you think you’re going?”
Tomas, speaking in his best lord-of-the-manor style. My brother was not even a whole year older than me—as near twins as could be, so our nursemaids had always said—but the warm droplets trickling down my leg reminded me of the ageless gulf between us. My hands ached for a throwing dagger or my bow and a poisoned arrow.
“I spoke to you, Seri. It can’t be healthy for you to be out so soon. I won’t see my sister die among the rabble like some whore who whelped in an alley.”
Words broke through my vowed silence, as molten lava bursts the volcano’s rocky cap. “Then you’ll have to carry me, brother, and bloody your fine breeches. The blood will match what’s on your hands and will never wash away.”
Vengeance is the right of blood kin. Blood for blood. Vengeance was my duty. My knees were trembling. I hoped to get past the outer gates before I collapsed.
“Seri, come back!”
Tomas ordered Darzid to follow me, while he himself fetched servants and a litter. So the captain trailed behind as I walked through the outer gates into the teeming mid-afternoon business of Montevial. How could the matter of one dark winter make such commonplace scene so utterly alien?
A constable poked at me with his stick. “Move along, wench. Are you struck dumb?”
Darzid observed from his black horse, unruffled. Tomas would not have permitted the insult. My brother had preserved my life. I had once considered Darzid my friend, but I had come to believe that he would have watched me burn alongside Karon with this same unemotional curiosity.
I wobbled against a barrow piled with apples in the mobbed market of the capital city, vaguely aware of apples bouncing all over the street, a startled horse, and a careening hay wagon. Someone in the street behind me cursed and cracked a whip. The angry rider’s name escaped me. Concentrating was so difficult.
Halfway down a lane of food vendors, a hunchbacked old man doled out soup to anyone with a copper coin and a mug. I felt hollow. Empty. But when the old man offered me a cup, I shook my head. “I’ve no money, goodman. Nothing to offer you. Nothing.”
And then the world spun and fell out from under me.
Scents of damp canvas and mildew permeated chaotic dreams. As I dragged my eyelids open to murky light, my neck was bent awkwardly, and a warm metal cup, quivering slightly, was pressed to my lips. Tart drops of warmed wine made their way to my tongue. A few more dribbled down my chin.
“Poor girlie,” said a cracked, leathery voice from a cracked leathery face.
“Who could she be, dearie? She don’t have the look of a street wench, for all she’s dressed so plain.”
“Nawp. No street wench. Look at the hands.” Two warm, rough hands chafed my fingers. I was so cold. “It’s a lady’s hands. What’re we to do with her, Jonah?”
“Can’t just leave her, can we? She’s just—” The old man’s words quavered and broke off.
“Just the age would be our Jenny. Let’s keep her for the night. Don’t look as if she’ll care this is no fine house, nor even that she might not wake up where she went to sleep.”
While I drifted between sleep and waking, the bed on which I lay began to move, rocking and jogging over cobbled streets. The old woman stroked my hair and my hands, and crooned to me gently, while rain plopped softly on the canvas roof.
“How did you discover it, my dear?”
“She was shivering so, and terrible pale. I thought she was fevered. But when she held her tits just so and wept in her sleep for the pain of them, I knew. It’s been scarce more than a day or two, and she’s lost a river of blood, and I don’t know if it’s been too much or no. If we’d left her in the market, she’d be dead, sure. ’Twas a good deed you did, old man.”
“Ah, but fine ladies don’t dress in working garb and take a stroll through the market after they’ve dropped a babe, live or dead. There’s trouble here summat. We’d best get her afoot and put some leagues in between us.”
A hand gouged my aching abdomen, forcing me to cry out as I stumbled out of sleep.
“There, there, child. We must knead your belly a bit to stop the bleeding. You’ll do better in a day or three.” The hand pressed and squeezed again, then took my own hand and forced me to do it, too.
A worried face hovered above me in the dust-flecked light. Unlike that of the turbaned physician, this face was connected to a body—a small and wiry woman with broken teeth. Her gray curls were tied up in a red scarf.
“Here, my man Jonah’s bringing summat to perk you up.” A flap at the end of the wagon flopped open to let in soggy sunlight and the hunchbacked soup-maker from the market. The old man had wispy white hair and soft brown eyes that embraced the old woman whenever he glanced her way.
“Thank”
The old couple shushed me with a spoonful of soup. While they fed me, they gabbled about everything: business in the market, prospects for the coming season, too much rain for the early crops.
“We’re headed south for Dunfarrie. It’s planting time. If you’ve a place we can leave you on the way? Friends who’ll care for you?”
I shook my head. Like the books and the pictures, the few who shared Karon’s secret had to be destroyed. He had been forced to hear our friends die, one by one: Martin, Julia, Tanager, Tennice, everyone he cared about. It had almost undone him. His tormentors told him he wasn’t to know my fate, and they would taunt him with a different cruel story every day. But they never knew he could read my thoughts, or speak to me without words, or bury himself in my love so deeply that what they did to his body didn’t matter. Until the end—in the fire.
“Didn’t mean to cause you more grief,” said the old woman in distress. “We’ll take you with us until you can see your way, little girl. Old Jonah and Anne will have you up.”
“Vengeance is my right,” I whispered. “My duty.” But not on that night.
The old woman gathered me in her arms and rocked me softly, for at last weakness overwhelmed me, and I wept until there could have been no tears left in the world.
But I would never weep again. I was a Leiran warrior’s daughter, and by the shields of my ancestors, I would not weep.