Daughter of Ancients (17 page)

“You were there when you came of age,” she said, stroking the now-healthy horse's nose, patting his neck, and fondling his ears, soothing his lingering agitation. “I've heard it said that those who came of age in Zhev'Na have difficulty developing power and never find their true talent, but I thought that was only those who were slaves. Crippled as they were . . .”

“I don't know about others. For me, it's impossible.”

“Heaven's lights, how do you bear it?”

I was thankful she didn't wait for an answer, or ask for more specific details, like the nature of my true talent or whether I even had one. Better for her to assume I could do nothing. To reveal my true talent was to reveal my identity, for the only Soul Weaver known to the Dar'Nethi was the corrupted son of Prince D'Natheil who was supposed to be safely dead.

She spoke no more of sorcery as we tethered the horses in a grassy glade and walked up the path. Perhaps she thought it would bother me to consider the immensity of her own gifts when I professed to have none. I could think of no subtle way to ask her if she had always possessed such power or if it was somehow grown larger since her awakening, so I just listened to her chatter, which took up again where it had left off.

 

All through our supper D'Sanya talked of one thing and another: of her two older brothers, the quiet, serious D'Leon who had succeeded D'Arnath and then fallen in battle with the Zhid after only five years, and the wild, mischievous D'Alleyn who had completed the Gates to his father's Bridge between the worlds. “You can't imagine how it is to read of my brothers in manuscripts so ancient they would crumble were it not for the Archivists' enchantments, when it seems only a few years since they filled my bedchamber with birds on my sixteenth birthday. To hear that D'Leon died so young and so valiantly and that D'Alleyn, the wicked tease, ruled with wisdom for fifty years. I do miss them so.”

Then she went on to talk of the hospice, and her plans to build a second one in the Vale of Maroth far to the south. “Na'Cyd has three Builders working already. I'll need to visit the site soon to see how they progress. They argue a great deal over the design, and I speak to one and think the matter settled, then another one sends me a letter telling me the faults of the first, and the third sends a message threatening to abandon the project if I can't persuade the other two that arches should be sealed by a Word Winder to ensure their strength. All I want is for the building to be completed so I can help more people. Enough have applied to me in the past few weeks that I could fill the place already.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “The one who conceives the shape of the building gets insulted when the one who must lay the bricks says you can't lay bricks in such a shape. The builder is incensed when the artist says a better builder could find a way. I've had to lock them in a room—” I stopped abruptly when I realized what I was doing . . . talking about the Bounded, which she must not know of.

When my father had taken me out of Zhev'Na through the Breach, I had submerged myself in the chaotic matter of the rift between the worlds to escape the pain of separating from the Lords. Somehow, my act had imposed shape and coherence where there had been none before. My strange little kingdom would not exist had I not been a Soul Weaver linked to the Lords of Zhev'Na, had I not been desperate enough to do anything to separate myself from them. And my subjects—the Singlars—had given me just such problems as D'Sanya's as we rebuilt their tower cities after the war with the Lords.

“Go on. Tell me more of your builders and bricklayers,” she said, leaning across the table, lips parted, eyes shining. “You've said so little of your life. Nothing of what you do in ordinary times.”

I shoved aside thoughts of the Bounded and the Singlars. “Nimrolan Vale is so remote that, in the years of the war, we had to make sure we could defend ourselves if the war came to us. For centuries we crowded together in horrid, cramped towns, everyone on top of one another. So we're trying to replace what we have with more scattered dwellings, less fortified, open to our woodlands, the way things once were. I've been helping. . . .”

Concentrating on the story that Ven'Dar and I had contrived should the question of my profession ever come up, I evidently said something that convinced D'Sanya I had led a building project such as hers, which of course I had.

I tried to change the subject—I hated lying to her—but she would not let it go. “You must come with me when next I go to Maroth,” she said, clapping her hands in delight so that her ten rings glittered. “Na'Cyd has no skill at negotiating. He only makes them argue the more. You can settle their disputes and get the new hospice built for me.”

I had no intention of staying in Avonar so long or becoming involved in her projects. Yet it was not a night for arguing. Again D'Sanya was dressed all in white, a loose filmy gown that fell to her ankles. Still barefoot, she wore a slender band of diamonds about one ankle. One side of her pale hair was held back with a diamond clip, while the other curled about her face and brushed at her long, slender neck. Her diamonds might have been stars for all I knew, just as her flesh might have been shaped of moonlight as she held out a glass of wine the color of rubies. At that moment I could have refused her nothing.

“Drink to our pact,” she said. “Together we shall recapture the years that were taken from us, and learn again the delights of living free.”

I touched my glass to hers.
“J'edai en j'sameil,”
I said in the ancient tongue of the Dar'Nethi, D'Sanya's tongue. It was a traditional Dar'Nethi feasting wish I had learned from my mother, but I was not thinking of my mother as I said it.

“To life and beauty!” Her delight, as she echoed my words, showered on me like sunbeams. “Oh, friend, is it not a magnificent night? The skies of Avonar are marvelously familiar, far more than the people or the cities or even the land itself, which are all as strangers to me. My brothers and I would often sneak out of the palace at night. We loved packing up food and wine and creeping through the city and out into the countryside to have a moonlight adventure. Or we would climb the terrifying stair to the top of Skygazer's Needle—ancient even in our day—and pretend we were looking through the moonstones that revealed the secret movements of all worlds. The city was much smaller then, of course, and unguarded, for the walls were not built until I was older, just after I turned fourteen.” Her voice faltered as her chatter led her to this less comfortable place.

“What happened?” I said, pouncing as if I'd seen the first breach in an enemy's wall. “Tell me, Lady. I want to know you.”

“Ah, no. You first,” she said softly, holding me with her eyes and a smile that had turned wistful. “A secret for a secret. It is part of our game. You agreed.”

I nodded, my mind racing ahead, shaping my story for simplicity . . . and safety . . . as near truth as I could make it. “It was an old acquaintance of my parents,” I began. “He was turned, and in his enmity chose to torment my parents by turning me. He carried me away to Zhev'Na, gave me a house and weapons and horses and slaves, and treated me as a man instead of a child. He twisted truth into such knots that he made me believe I belonged in Zhev'Na, that I was the cause of all the wickedness I had witnessed in my life, that I had no choices left to me. And then he began my training . . .”

I lay back on the white cushions and fixed my eyes, not on the moon, but on the cold darkness behind it, and I told her of my days in the desert where I learned how to flay a man, and what sound it made when taking a prisoner's eyes, where I listened to the music of Dar'-Nethi screams and the death rattle of empty-eyed warriors, where I studied the manifold aspects of death and suffering and excelled at my lessons. As trailing wisps of cloud drifted past the stars, I told her of my sword training, where young Dar'Nethi slaves and Zhid warriors were brought in for me to perfect the techniques of slaughter.

I kept thinking,
Fool, you've told enough. Now stop.
But I couldn't stop. She would understand my tale as no one I had ever met possibly could. I drank another glass of wine, and the story poured out of me, of how I learned to gather power from hatred and vileness as the Zhid would do, and that to interest myself in my servants or my soldiers or my tutors was to sign their death warrant, so that I came to be what the Zhid had planned for me to be—unfeeling and alone. I told her the part I had never been able to tell my parents or Paulo—of how it felt to watch my soul die, like a paper that when thrown in the fire chars and curls and withers into ash.

She said nothing as I spoke. Though the food grew heavy in my stomach, I forced myself to remember the horror I had left in my wake, renewing my loathing and revulsion for the life I had tried so hard to put behind me. And even then the things I told her were not all. Not the worst things. I didn't mention the spinning brass ring—the oculus, the instrument that enabled me to channel the horrors of two worlds into my empty soul to grow the power I craved—or the jewels in my ear that gave the Lords constant access to my mind, so that my training was at the hands of the masters themselves. And I did not reveal that I had at last become one of them, profoundly evil, and holding a universe of wickedness in my scarred hands.

But I told her a great deal, ending my story by telling her that my father had risked his life in Zhev'Na to steal me away again and how he had healed what he could of my injuries and convinced me that, no matter what I had done or believed as a child, I was not destined to be a monster. I could still choose my own path in the world.

When I was done, feeling exhausted, empty, and far calmer than I had expected, I sat up and poured more wine. D'Sanya sat with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped about them, staring down at the grass. I filled her glass and offered it to her, wondering if revulsion at my tale would bring the evening to an abrupt end. But all she said was, “Poor, poor child. What evil can compare to corrupting a child?” Then she fell quiet again.

“Now it's your turn,” I said. “You can't leave me out here alone . . . so exposed. That's not a fair game.”

She lifted her glass and gazed into it, then took a sip and set it down, never looking at me once.

“I was fourteen when the event you call the Catastrophe occurred. I've told Prince Ven'Dar, and the Preceptors, and the Archivists of what it was like to see two-thirds of the world go up in flames, the forests reduced to ash, the cities and villages ruined, rivers left dry in a matter of days, whole kingdoms vanished in a few weeks, thousands upon thousands of people dead or driven mad or transformed into these soulless Zhid. I was young and living in Avonar, so I survived it, and I had no doubt that my father the king would put it all back to rights. But I saw my father weep as he sifted the ashes of the twelve kingdoms of Gondai through his fingers. By the time of my sixteenth birthday, he and his dear cousin J'Ettanne were at work on their plan to restore the world before all Dar'Nethi power was lost forever.

“I rarely saw my father after he began work on the Bridge, or my brothers who toiled beside him. He sent me away from Avonar to our house in Kirith Vale. My mother had died of illness when I was five, and everyone I knew was either dead or at work on the defenses of Avonar, so I was left alone with the bodyguards my father had commanded to protect me. I chafed at being banished, and though I had not yet come into my talent, my father's power lived in me. I tried every way I knew how to convince my father to allow me to help with the Bridge. ‘Too dangerous,' he said. ‘Too risky. Too near the Breach.' He said he could not concentrate on his work if he thought I might fall prey to the madness that lurked in the Breach, and that at least one of his heirs must stay safe. As for my brothers . . . well, they were older, and it was necessary that the people see young men labor alongside their king.”

She laughed ruefully and lay down on her side, propping her head on her elbow. “Almost three years had passed since the Catastrophe. I told no one when I felt the stirrings of true talent at seventeen, and unbeknownst to anyone, I took a man named L'Clavor as mentor. I decided to develop my talents so quickly and to such a level that I would prove how wrong Papa was to leave me behind. I worked every hour of every day to master everything L'Clavor could teach me. One day in late spring he summoned me to his home for my lessons, saying that he could teach me advanced techniques only in his own workshop.

“My bodyguards would not allow me to go, so I sneaked out on my own and rode to L'Clavor's village. Naïve child that I was, I didn't notice how deserted were the lanes of the village. No one in the fields. No one in the shops. I was intent upon my own wishes. Foolish, proud, blind girl. Only when L'Clavor opened his door and I saw his eyes did I know how foolish I'd been. He was Zhid.

“I tried to run. I had protective wards with me . . . things L'Clavor and I had made. But they were not enough. Fifty Zhid were waiting to take me before the Lords . . . the Three. Perhaps you saw them while you were in Zhev'Na. Unnatural, monstrous beings they became, with faces half of flesh and half of beaten gold, and gemstones for eyes.”

She paused for a long time, and I didn't know whether it would be better to keep silent or to encourage her to say more. But without anything from me, she took a deep breath and gave me a quick smile. “Though they were not yet masked when I first met them, I could feel them probing my heart, laying bare my soul, searching for any weapon to destroy all that I loved. I could tell them nothing of the Bridge or its construction or even where it was that my father and brothers labored; it made matters no easier to know my father had been right to keep it from me.