Revelation (10 page)

Thickening clouds swirled dizzily above me, and the rain came harder, breaking the drought that had settled over Ezzaria for the summer. The tiny spring that had filled my need of water had been little but a mud hole for uncountable days. Thick, cold rivulets ran down my face and into my mouth. Talar would disapprove; the water that washed away the sweat and dust would also ease my raging thirst. But I was not ready to go down from my tower. Not yet.

In the two months since my sentencing, I had found no peace. Once I had expended all my anger in bloody dreams and grew tired of staring at nothing, I had damned myself for not thinking sooner of using sorcery to ease my loss. I spent a few frenzied days and nights conjuring an image of my son, taking Ysanne’s fine bones and straight nose and my own wiry build, bronze skin, and deep-set eyes, merging them to discover how he would look . . . as a babe . . . as a child . . . as a strong, fair youth. For unending hours I cast my enchantments. But when I tried to embrace him and tell him how much I wished I could have saved him, the image faded, and I cursed the gods and my hands that could not create life. Only death. I was very good at death.

I had passed through that time, too. Afraid . . . wondering if my reason was intact. I began to sleep again—long hours in both day and night. At first I dreamed of flying, through sunlight and ravaged cloud, through red morning and silvered night, past the moon and the stars to realms unknown, all sorrow left behind, all love forgotten, all care and grief subsumed in wind and spreading wing. I began to think that perhaps I was done with my harshest grieving, and that I could begin to consider the future. But then my visions changed, and a new dream crept into my nights. It consumed me, so overpowering that I huddled in my tower steeped in dread, yet so insistent that I could not eat or walk or think, save of how soon I could sleep again and go back to it. The dream always began in a land of ice and snow . . .

 

 

Only after uncounted days and uncounted repetitions of this dream was I able to force myself back to some semblance of life. I had not eaten for much too long and scarcely had the strength to lift my hand. The consuming dread and the empty, lonely craving to find my way out of the darkness and into the frozen citadel lingered in a corner of my mind, as vivid as the echo of Talar’s judgment or the memory of my arms around Ysanne’s empty belly. Yet the urgency to probe the meaning of the dream in daylight was quickly set aside by the abject condition of my body.

When I had first come to Col’Dyath after the Council’s judgment, I’d found a cache of hard biscuits and dried meat, tucked in a leather bag and hung up high where animals could not get it, left, no doubt, by some Ezzarian straggler in the days of hiding. Though a meager larder, it had kept me living through the dismal summer. But it had run out before my dreaming, and now that I was awake again, I had to hunt or starve.

Today—my rabbit quarry disappeared—it would be starve. But I planned to drink my fill of the blessed rain as I lay unmoving on my back, as if a giant hand held me down to the rock. Or perhaps it was that I was too tired to move, for I lay there through a storm-wracked night and into the next day until I believed the unending rain might dissolve me into the very soil of Ezzaria. Perhaps that’s what I wanted.

 

“Master Seyonne, can you hear me? Did you fall? Are you injured?” Icy fingers poked at my arms and legs and other parts too confusing to remember. “Idiot. What am I doing here?” I wasn’t asking these things of myself, unless my voice had taken on a disturbing female pitch.

I had every intention of batting the cold fingers away to make them leave me alone, but was disconcerted when my hand did not obey. Then an earthquake made my head explode and left me upside down, rain running into my nose as I was dragged across a mountain range. “Please don’t,” I mumbled to whatever beast was hauling me away. I must have been dreaming.

 

“Why didn’t you come for me a month ago?”

“It was not my place.”

The argumentative voices were very soft, but I thought they might complete the fracture that seemed to go right between my eyebrows.

“Verdonne’s child! Is it your place to let a man die?”

“He wasn’t going to die. I was watching. This fever is a new thing.”

I couldn’t place the voices. Probably more dreams. I had dreamed enough for five lifetimes and wanted no more of it; I was afraid of my dreams. But at least it wasn’t raining anymore.

 

“Seyonne? Open your eyes. I saw them move. It’s high time you woke up.”

Dark eyes with fine-woven lines about them peering into my face. A long braid of thick black hair, three renegade strands of it tickling my nose. A very worried, oval face.

“Catrin.”

“I should have known you would come back to Col’Dyath. We searched for you for weeks, but never thought to come this far. We assumed you’d gone to Aleksander.”

I closed my eyes and wished she would immediately take back all the memories she had just laid at my feet. “Go away.” Only the scraping rawness of my throat that accompanied each syllable convinced me that the harsh croak was my own voice.

“When you’re well, I will. I can’t imagine you would welcome me. Or any of us.”

I rolled over and pulled the blanket over my head, though before burying myself, I managed to budge my eyelids open enough to note that I was inside the tower ruin, spread out on a blanket, my head pillowed on a rolled-up something. Then I asserted, very foolishly considering the anvil that was shifting around inside my head with every movement, “I’m perfectly well. I just stink a bit. Go away.”

She pulled away the blanket, laid her cool fingers on my head, and made the anvil be still. “Then, tell me how many days it’s been since I came. Or how many days since you were found half drowned on a sliver of a ledge where one move could have sent you falling to your death. Or how many days since you’ve had a decent meal.”

I lay immobile lest she be tempted to move her marvelous hand and let loose the anvil. But I wouldn’t give her any easy welcome. “You’re not my mentor anymore. I don’t have to answer your questions. Go away.”

“And you will lie here and die of this fever as you please, leaving me to live forever unforgiven?”

“I’m not a madman, Catrin.” I wanted the cool hand to stay. It was the pain I wanted to go away. “I’ve considered madness here. I’ve dabbled in it. But I’m not. It wasn’t grief over Ysanne and the child. Yes, I was tired, but it was not the two hundred and fifty battles, either. And I survived my years as a slave as well as anyone could. I’ve spent a great deal of time reviewing it in these weeks. I saw what I saw, and I was not wrong to let him go.”

“I believe you. I was wrong to do what I did to you. You were in a terrible state, and I thought I knew what was best. And in case you didn’t hear it, I’m asking your forgiveness.”

She started to move her hand, but I caught it and put it back on my head. “So how long have you been here?”

In her best schoolmistress fashion, she made me sit up, eat soup, and drink willow-bark tea before she would tell me anything. And when she began telling me, I didn’t like it.

“Fiona brought me here?” I tried to bury my head in the blanket again. The last thing in the world I wanted was to owe favors to Fiona.

“She’s been camped just beyond that square boulder all summer.”

“Watching me.”

“She believes her duty was not removed by our judgment. If she hadn’t been here, you would still be lying out on those rocks, your bones being picked at by vultures. She saved your life.”

“She destroyed my life. What was left of it after Ysanne took her portion.”

 

The worst part about sensible Catrin’s care and feeding was that I came all too well to my senses. I was a wretched mess. Dirty. Ragged. Little better than when I was a slave, save my chains were less visible. I had always despised people who got stretched a little thin and took their troubles so much to heart that they abandoned decency and eating and reasonable pursuits until they became filthy, pitiful scarecrows. It was an insufferable indulgence. Too many people had no choice about such things. So, as one has to do after so many lessons learned as we stumble through the world, I humbly cleaned myself up and tried to reclaim some dignity.

Catrin refused to talk business until I was up and about, which took several days. I had evidently lain out in the drought-breaking downpour sick and half-starved for three days before Fiona found me and dragged me back to the tower. She had little skill at healing and no medicines, so she went for Catrin. I did appreciate her choice of healer.

So my first excursion away from my sickbed was to Fiona’s campsite behind the square boulder, not a thousand paces from my tower. She was hunched over a tiny fire, stitching a patch on one of her boots. She’d built a shelter woven of sticks hauled up from the forest far below us, and alongside a well-used bow and newly fletched arrows, there was considerable bony evidence that she was far more successful at hunting than I had been. She jumped up when I came, standing awkwardly with her stockinged foot held off the damp ground, her chin stuck out belligerently.

“I’ve come to thank you for hauling me back to the tower. And for bringing Catrin.”

“Couldn’t let you die out there, could I?”

Though sorely tempted to speak the answer that came immediately to mind, I kept my sarcasm mild. Thunder grumbled on the horizon, and a damp wind swirled smoke and ash in our eyes. “It’s foolish for you to be out here in the rain now I know you’re here. So if you feel bound to stay, at least come inside the tower. There’s plenty of room, and Catrin’s there to protect you from my unsavory influences.”

I thought she was going to refuse. I hoped she would be insulted and take her all-seeing eyes back to her home. But her pitiful campsite was clue enough to her persistence, and my discomfort had never prevented her from staying around. She moved in.

 

By the next day, Catrin allowed me to converse at length, and I had enough voice to do so. “So Hoffyd has no quarrel with you spending a week on a mountaintop with me?” I said to my dark-haired physician as we drank chamomile tea and listened to the rain.

Catrin smiled and filled my mug again. “Hoffyd is the most patient and understanding of men.”

“So where was he hiding those three weeks? Howel said Ennit was driving you crazy trying to find him.”

Catrin pursed her lips in warning, and her eyes flicked to Fiona, who was doing her best to ignore us. “Howel was mistaken. Hoffyd was with his sister for over a month. Poor Ennit’s never quite gotten over her flux. But I do need to get back to the dear fellow now you’re better.”

“How do your students progress?” It was hard to ask. Harder to hear. But if I was to continue breathing, I could not ignore it.

“Drych passed his testing just before I came. I’ll take Tegyr through next week. I’ll let them begin true combat soon after. I’ve sent word to the Searchers to bring in a few easier cases to start.”

“Take care of them, Catrin. There is so much . . .” I felt like I needed to warn Catrin, but I couldn’t come up with words to describe a danger I believed was looming somewhere just beyond the distance I could see. My worries were vague, ill formed, like an interrupted dream. “Tell me, in all your study, in all your grandfather’s talk, did you ever come across any mention of one called ‘the Precursor’?”

“Precursor of what?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t know.” We went over the demon’s words yet again.

“I don’t remember anything about such a name. Are you sure the word was
naghidda
?”

“Absolutely sure. The only thing I can connect with it is something the Lord of Demons said just before I killed him.” The memory had come to me in my summer’s dreaming. “He said, ‘Do not think this battle is over. There is another yet to come. . . .’ I thought he meant another battle, and I dismissed it because I got rid of the villain. But now I wonder.” Only as I spoke them did the words give shape to my disquiet. “I’ve done a lot of thinking up here these months. All of this”—I waved my hand to encompass everything of the life we knew—“there’s something fundamentally wrong. If I’d not been away for so long, I might never have recognized it. I couldn’t see it when I was a slave, because being back in Ezzaria, doing what I was meant to do, was everything I wanted. I could not question, because I had to survive. But since I came back . . . My problem has not been just my discomfort with discipline or my impatience with self-righteous fools. It’s not just newly clever demons and harder fighting.”