Bound by Blood and Sand (6 page)

In her dream, the garden was flush with life. Red stones still marked the path across it, ringed the fountain, divided the courtyard into careful sections. Grass grew up everywhere else, bright green and high enough to tickle her ankles.

The cactus bloomed with red flowers, and the stunted bushes had come back to life, with deeper green leaves hanging from each bough. The flowers around the base of the fountain were an amazing rainbow of rich reds and yellows and even purple. Their blossoms were full, delicate petals rimming their pollen insides, and they smelled sweeter than Lady Shirrad's perfumes. The fountain burbled behind them, the water fresh and cool, despite the sun—splashing, sometimes overflowing as the breeze picked up.

Jae stood in the middle of the garden, turning in a slow circle, staring at it all,
feeling
it all. Not just the damp breeze on her skin and the soft grass under her bare feet, but the life in all of it. More than anything else, she felt the fountain. It wasn't alive, but it hummed with some kind of energy she didn't recognize, brimming more with power than with water.

“Jae, Jae, please wake up,
please.
”

She could just make out Tal leaning over her, shaking her. She moaned, lances of pain shooting through her body, and managed to say, “I'm awake.”

He stopped, thankfully, and pressed a hand to her forehead, his palm cool against her skin. “You're sick. You must be sick; you're
burning.
But you were inside today.”

He stared at her imploringly, waiting for the answer to his unasked question. She tugged his arm away from her face and mumbled, “I don't know. I think I just…fell.”

“Let me help you,” he said, and stood, then leaned down to offer his hands. She clenched her jaw so no scream of pain escaped when he moved her, but she must have gasped anyway, because he murmured, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Jae. You'll be fine. I'll get you inside….”

The pain was too much. She felt like she'd been in the sun all day without a drink, as if she'd been straining, hauling enormous water jugs by herself for hours until her body had given out. Everything
hurt.
The Curse throbbed in her head, and she didn't even know what it was punishing her for.

When Tal finally managed to get a grip around her and pull her up into his arms, it was too much. The world went black again.

“These drawings are…They're not as clear as I was expecting,” Lady Shirrad said, leaning forward over the papers with a slight frown. Elan waited, schooling himself to be patient and relaxed. Now that he and Desinn had settled in at Aredann, it was hard to find time to talk to the Lady alone.

The whole day had been long, boring, and hot. He'd spent it sitting in this same chamber with Shirrad, Desinn, and all of her Avowed. They'd been discussing how much water they had left at Aredann. It was Shirrad's duty as the reservoir's guardian to see it was used wisely, and doled out to the Avowed who served her, but the Avowed had spent the day quibbling over how many jugs each of them had been allotted. As if that made any difference. Aredann was going to be abandoned soon. But that just seemed to make them greedier, as if whoever finally drank the reservoir dry before they left would win.

Desinn had watched them all with a superior smile. He and Elan both knew how little any of this would mean, once the Avowed were sent to the central cities. But Elan had been sent here to see just how desperate the drought could make people, to be reminded of why the Highest had to make careful, sometimes even cruel, decisions for everyone's safety.

It wasn't until after dinner that Elan had finally managed to walk with Shirrad out around the grounds and mention that he was interested in learning more about Aredann's history—and that he'd brought some old books and papers about it. The information in them was obscure, some of it seeming to be a completely different kind of writing, nothing he'd ever seen before. That was probably from before the War, maybe even before the Well had been crafted; he knew she wouldn't be able to read it any more than he could. But she might be able to do something with the rest of it. If she recognized something, it might lead him to the Well's location.

“Maybe that one isn't the best to begin with,” Elan said. “There are some other drawings, here.” He shuffled the pages around, looking for one of the more complete images. There had been shockingly little information about Aredann in any of his father's books, and Elan had barely had time to copy any of it properly before being sent away. What had been hard to decipher in the originals was all but impossible now, though he finally found one that was more clear: a quickly copied drawing of a garden.

Lady Shirrad studied it, then looked up, wide-eyed. “Highest, of course I know what this one is. Look.”

She pointed above his head. He turned to look over his shoulder—and there it was, the same image, the largest of the mosaics hanging on the wall. He bounded to his feet to examine it more closely.

The mosaic was enormous, some of the tiles as small as his fingertips and others as large as his fist. The wall was opposite the room's windows, so the tiles themselves had lost some of their vividness, but they still gleamed in the torchlight. It must have been quite a sight when it had first been created, huge and bright, showing a man kneeling in a garden as he planted a flower.

“My father told me that it's an image of Lord Aredann himself,” Shirrad explained.

Elan nodded a little, studying the picture. Aredann had been one of the greatest heroes of the War, a mage whose own brother, Taesann the traitor, had joined the Closest when they'd tried to seize the Well. Taesann had been the Closest's final mage, and Aredann had eventually been forced to kill him. The estate where Aredann had grown up had been renamed in his honor. The mosaic itself was as tall as Elan, though it was hung above the shelves, with its bottom as high as his ribs. It was set within a green-gray frame with a rough texture.

“How long has this been here? Has it ever been moved?” Elan asked.

“Not in my lifetime, Highest,” Shirrad said.

If it truly was an artifact from right after the War, the era when it had been decided to hide the Well, then it really
might
hold a clue. But if he had the mosaic removed from the wall so he could study it more closely, Desinn would definitely hear about it. Elan would have to explain himself, and at best, Desinn would scoff at his quest to find the Well. More likely, he'd spin it into a tale that would make Elan look worse to his father, attempting to solidify his
own
influence with the Highest. Elan couldn't afford to appear any worse in his father's eyes.

Finally he said, “Lady, we haven't discussed this much, but when Aredann is abandoned…” She winced but didn't say anything, so he pressed on. “When we leave, we won't want to leave anything
this
valuable behind. Can this be taken down from the wall? Cleaned and prepared to move?”

She didn't say anything for a long moment, her lip trembling; then she took a deep breath and said, “Of course, Highest.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Is there anything else you can tell me about it?”

“Only a little,” Shirrad said. “The garden—well, it's not as large as it looks up there. The courtyard just isn't that big.”

“The courtyard?” he asked. “This is
that
garden?”

“I know it's hard to believe,” Lady Shirrad said. “But before the drought, the garden was a wonder to behold—or at least, that's what my father told me.”

“You're
sure
it's the same garden?”

“Yes, Highest,” Lady Shirrad snapped. Elan glanced at her again, surprised by the bitterness in her voice, but she recovered herself quickly and gave him a cheerful, obviously false, smile. “That's the fountain. It's still there. It seems to have been built by mages, just like the house.”

“So it
can't
have been moved since the War,” Elan realized. “Then—then I need to go look at it.”

Lady Shirrad's pleasant, polite smile didn't waver this time. “Of course, Lord Elan. I don't think we'll be able to move
that
anywhere, though, when you leave Aredann.”

She led him to the courtyard, and he tried to memorize the way as they walked. The house at Aredann wasn't nearly as large as the ones the mages had built around the enormous reservoirs where he'd grown up, but he still needed to learn which corridors connected to which wings. The sitting room they'd left was central enough that he'd gotten turned around and didn't know which way led toward the garden.

When he stepped into the courtyard, he realized that it was a little silly to examine the fountain now after all. It was dark out, and though the moon was bright enough, everything was shadowed. It would be easy to miss details.

The fountain itself was impossible to miss, though. It towered over everything, silver-white in the moonlight, bright enough that it was almost a light in and of itself—bright enough that his eye caught on something at its base.

“Lady—Lady, look!” He crossed to it, crouched down, and caught his breath.

Lady Shirrad joined him, her eyes widening in surprise. A single flower, bright purple and delicate, was growing at the fountain's base. There was no grass around it, nothing but sand and stones. Elan put his fingers to the ground, and they came back dry and dirty, not damp. But this flower was just like the one in the mosaic—and it was alive, which was impossible. It needed water to grow, and he hadn't noticed it the previous night, when he'd first glanced around the miserable little courtyard.

“The Closest,” he said. “The one who tends the grounds—Jae. I need to speak to her immediately.”