Daughter of Ancients (15 page)

With an explosion of disgust, the girl sliced through the ropes, nearly taking a few of my fingers with them. She whispered in my ear with a spit of hatred. “I won't forget. Justice will be done.” Or perhaps it was only in my head that I heard it. Then she untethered her horses, and took her father's arm, and with no more word, they headed off toward the hospice lights and soon vanished into the night.

As for me, I huddled alone in the shelter of the tree through a very dark midnight, waiting for my vision to clear and the blood to return to my arms and legs. The cold rain fell for hours.

“You were fortunate to be given a chance to speak,” said my father when I explained my shopworn appearance on the next morning. “Seeing that bruise makes my own head hurt.”

“If the choice had been left to the woman, the earth would have split in half before I'd have said anything,” I said.

I'd only told him an abbreviated version of the night's encounter: how I'd been recognized and assaulted by a woman who had been captive in Zhev'Na, that I'd managed to convince her father to withhold judgment and keep our secret, at least for now. My father would guess there was more, but it wasn't his way to push. I just couldn't bring myself to talk about it.

“I'll watch my back a little closer from now on,” I said.

We strolled along a tree-shaded lane that led from the main house to a fenced paddock where the Lady D'Sanya's horses grazed. Though the hour was still early, the sun had already sapped the previous day's moisture and glittered hot through the leaves. When we came to the edge of the shade, our steps slowed.

A horse cantered through the paddock gate on its far side. No mistaking the well-formed gray or the rider's cloud of pale hair.

“I'm not very good at this investigating business,” I said, pausing to watch her. “I want to march up and ask her straight off what she's up to.”

“You don't think it remotely possible the Lady could be as she claims?”

“She lived in Zhev'Na for more than three years before she was enchanted to sleep. No, I don't believe she could be untouched by it. She was amazed that I'd told you what I'd experienced, and she seems to assume that . . . forgiveness . . . is necessary for anyone who was there. She was not a slave. So what did she do that needs forgiving? That's the key.”

As I resumed walking down the path that led past the paddock, my father didn't move from his position in the shade. “I think I'll go back,” he called after me. “I want to finish a letter to your mother, and I think the Lady might be inclined to be more sociable without me.”

I waved, walked on to the paddock, and soon found myself hanging over the white painted fence, admiring the way D'Sanya slipped from her mount so gracefully and catching her unguarded expression when she turned and saw me. Her face took on a certain brightness, an indescribable clarity. How could such a look, not even a smile, please me so well?

“Master Gerick! How is it I find you here alone? Is your father well?”

“He claims he's getting lazy and hasn't finished a letter he wants me to take to a friend, so he's sent me off on my own.”

Her horse snuffled and crunched an apple she pulled from her pocket. After patting his nose and stroking his neck, she turned him over to a groom who had hurried out from the stables. Then she walked over to the fence. She wore a tan riding skirt, tan boots, and a filmy, wide-sleeved shirt that was either blue or green, depending on the angle of the light. When she stretched out her arm in my direction, I believed she'd read my thoughts and was allowing me to see more of the long pale limb the slightest breeze left bare, but eventually her arched eyebrow and her boot on the fence rail penetrated my thick head.

She laughed as I gave her a hand to climb over. But when she stood before me in the lane, a quick sobriety clouded her face in the way thin sheets of vapor mute the sun. Her fingers twined in a knot at her breast, as if she couldn't quite decide what to say next and didn't like her choices. “I must apologize for my rudeness the other evening,” she said at last. “I hope your father was not offended.”

“Not in the least. Just a bit—”

“Curious, I suppose.”

“I won't deny it. You didn't know he'd been a slave. But you hadn't asked; we assumed there were others here.” I clasped my gloved hands behind my back.

“Of course there are. Several others.”

She started walking down the road toward the trees, her arms folded tightly now. I walked beside her, not offering my arm. She was no wilting flower, and I needed to keep my wits about me.

“Their slave-taking was so despicable, so wretched.” Her head and shoulders moved tautly with each word. “Amidst all their cruelties, it was so absolutely evil. When I see the scars, it makes me feel—I don't know how to describe it.”

“Guilty? For having escaped it?”

She glanced up at me sharply, her eyes almost on a level with mine. “Of course. That's it. Yes. I should have known I didn't have to explain it to you.”

“My father was in such pain before he came here that he couldn't move, couldn't think, could scarcely speak. You've helped him a great deal.”

“And I'm glad of it. But I wish so very much . . .”

“. . . that you could go back and change what happened in Zhev'Na. Because those horrors make illness such as his so unfair after what he's suffered already.”

“Exactly.” Her steps paused, and she crinkled her nose at me. “Do you read thoughts?”

“As little as possible.”

“Then it must be that you have the same ones as I.”

“I wouldn't wish them on you,” I said, resuming our stroll into the trees. “Or anyone.” This was not easy banter between us. Not with the ache in my head and shoulders to remind me, and the depths of sadness in her words. Talking seemed easier when we kept moving.

Unfolding her arms, she clasped her hands behind her as if to mimic me. “There's much to be said for sharing these experiences as we do. We can move on to other topics without having to dredge them up and explain.”

“What other topics?” Perhaps I was at last going to hear what I needed to hear.

The dappled sunlight teased at her face and shifted the color of her silken shirt to deep purple and blue. Suddenly she stopped walking again and tugged at my arm, forcing me around to face her. “Remembering how to enjoy ourselves,” she said. “I think that would be a marvelous beginning. I would state unhesitatingly that you've near forgotten it.”

Without meaning to do it, I burst out laughing at such foolish words so seriously spoken. She was so unexpected. “Conceded,” I said.

She threw up her hands, more animated by the moment. “I've been so involved in explaining myself, being tested, dragging Archivists about to dig up ruins of my lifetime, and trying to do some good with the gifts holy Vasrin has shaped in me, that I've not had time to remember what I was doing when I was fourteen . . . before the world changed. I know that life was wonderful, and I enjoyed it immensely. But I seem to have lost the skill. So I need to relearn it, and you must relearn it along with me.”

“I don't think I ever knew how. I was only ten. . . .” And had lived in terror since I was five years old, when my nurse discovered that I was a sorcerer in a world where sorcerers were burned alive, even if they were five.

“Exactly so! The Preceptors and a hundred town guilds clamor that I must assume my father's throne right away, that it is my duty, my ‘heritage,' even though the good Prince Ven'Dar is much loved and admired. But I've put them off. I've told them that I need to learn of the world as it is now and to grow accustomed to being free again. I intend to permit no distraction, not even the throne of Avonar, until I've recaptured the pleasures of being fourteen and grown up to my duties.” As if to prove her point, she climbed up on a stone half-pillar, one of a pair like those that marked the roadside all up and down the lane between the paddock and the gardens.

I didn't know what to say to such things. Fortunately, she didn't seem to expect me to say anything, but pointed to the ground in front of her perch, saying “here, here” until I moved to the spot she wanted. Once I was in place, she stood tall with her hands on her hips, looking me up and down. “No child—certainly no girl of fourteen—can exist without a best and dearest bosom friend. I think you'll do nicely . . .”

“Me?”

“. . . though before we begin, you must tell me what you've done to yourself. You look as if you've had a disagreement with a bull and a hay fork!” With one finger, she turned my head to the left where she could get a better view of my bruised forehead and the myriad abrasions that extended from eye to jawbone.

“A clumsy encounter with the floor of the Gaelie stables,” I said, stepping back as if she might learn the cause of my injuries by touching them. “Embarrassing mostly.”

“Hmm . . . so I must pry it out of you as part of our relearning how to be children. Ten-year-old boys are not so easily embarrassed. Tell me, what do ten-year-old boys enjoy? Ah, I've got it. . . .” And before I could answer, she hopped down from the stoop and darted into the woods. The shifting colors of her clothes made her disappear so effectively, I might have thought she was nothing but the laughing voice that echoed through the trees, calling out, “Hide-and-seek . . . and you're seeker!”

I stood stupidly in the lane, trying to decide if it would better suit my purpose to indulge her whimsy or wait for her to give it up. But I concluded that I wasn't going to get any information if I wasn't with her, so I took off through the noonday woodland, stopping every so often to listen and search for her path. She was very good at moving quietly, only occasional bursts of giggling giving her away, and she was very fast. But she knew nothing about covering her tracks, so it was only a matter of staying on her trail and waiting for her to pause too long.

Only at the end did she succeed in throwing me off, when I strode through knee-high stems of fading mayapples and wood-sorrel to the center of a sunlit glade, losing her trail beneath the canopy of a monstrous oak that stood there alone. I listened, but heard nothing. I crouched down to examine the faint trail of crushed grass that ended so abruptly. She must have used some sorcery to hide herself. Or else . . .

I looked upward and a small hard missile bounced off my head. I caught the second one. An acorn. Ten more followed the first in quick succession.

“I thought I won the game if I caught you,” I said, peering into the branches over my head, thinking I saw a shifting blue-green tunic somewhere in the leaves. “Not fair to attack.”

“But you've not caught me yet. There's a chance I can drive you away with my weapons. And you are down there, and I am up here.”

“Easily remedied, if that's what it takes,” I said and swung up to the low-hanging branch that had given her entry to the tree.

“There, you see? You know how it's done. You just have to work to remember the rules.”

She scrambled up higher in the tree. I followed until we were perched on the last two branches that could possibly hold our weight, a height that left us far above the roof of the woodland, able to see across the leafy green sea to the meadows and mountains, sharp-edged and clean in the morning light.

“Is this not a marvelous tree? I think we should stay up here until sunset,” she said. “How long has it been since you were in such a joyful place as this?” Sunbeams danced in her eyes, and her cheeks were colored a deep rose.

“Forever.” The answer had formed itself unbidden. I grasped feebly at my purpose. “So what is my prize for finding you?”

She pulled off two leaves, colored the bright green of new growth, and curled them in her fingers. “I'll have to think on that. Boys always have to win and get their prize, don't they? Whether at games or stories. With ten-year-old boys, winning at hide-and-seek is a matter of life's breath.”

“I suppose.”

“The palace in Avonar was the most delicious place to play hide-and-seek. My brothers and I knew every crack and crevice of it. Even better, D'Leon was a Word Winder, and even at thirteen, he could cast windings that made us invisible to each other, so we had to hunt through all five hundred rooms using only hearing and smell. Once D'Alleyn hid in my father's council chambers during a very serious meeting. D'Leon and I found him just at the same time, and chased him out from under the council table and around the columns and in and out of the room. Imagine ten pompous sorcerers remarking on the change of seasons causing such a disturbance in the air, assuring each other it wasn't evil spirits or evil omens for the times to come.

“But Papa knew exactly what it was, and he sent us to our country house for a month with our tutors commanded to teach us proper deportment, which we thought very cruel. My uncle J'Ettanne told me later, though, that Papa laughed himself to tears at the memory of his hoary-headed counselors looking for evil auras and portents when it was only three children playing hide-and-seek. It was one of our best family legends.”

She sprawled out on the length of her branch like a cat stretching, and propped her head on her hand as if prepared to stay there forever. “Now you must tell me of times when you would play hide-and-seek. I know it's still done; children's games do not change over the centuries.”

“I wasn't much for games,” I said. “I've no brothers or sisters, and we lived remotely, so other children weren't about very often. My father was away. The war and all. And my mother . . . I lost my mother when I was small. I spent most of the time alone or with my nurse.”