Daughter of Ancients (2 page)

He squinted into the western brightness. The blotch was likely a wild goat or perhaps a lame gazelle—too slow and erratic for a healthy one. At worst it was a scavenger wolf. The creature disappeared behind a dune, reappeared, vanished again.

J'Savan yawned and stretched out on his back, propping his head on his rucksack. The grassy dune underneath him was warm and comfortable, the day pleasant, but he would have preferred to get back to his regular duties of digging, planting, and coaxing the earth to do his will. He enjoyed his work. Even better would be an early start to his coming leave days and his planned visit to the charming young Singer he'd met at his aunt's house before the autumn's turning. Her waist was plump, her laugh as musical as the patter of spring rain, her spirit tart and flavorful like new-cut limes. Yawning again, he lowered his chin to rest on his chest, closed his eyes, and envisioned her breasts . . . soft . . . curving above the neckline of her gown like a sweet sunrise . . . flushed . . . warm . . .

“Kibbazi teeth!” he yelled, as a fiery sting on his neck startled his drooping eyelids open. “Who are you? What do you think you're . . . wait . . .”

He scrabbled his feet for a moment, but fell still at once when a few warm droplets dribbled down his neck from the sharp edge pressed against his throat. A filthy, ragged woman of indeterminate age hunched over him, rifling his pockets with one hand while threatening his heart vein with the other. A scavenger . . . but no wolf.

She wrenched the small leather tool packet from his belt, sniffed it, and threw it aside, then yanked his rucksack out from under his head. She needed both hands to untie the leather thong that held the sack closed. J'Savan used the opportunity to scramble away, backing up the reclaimed dune like a nervous spider until he was out of her reach.

She didn't seem afraid of him, now she had his things. Greasy tendrils of hair hid her face as she ripped the sack open and pulled out the stone water flask. After yanking the stopper, she cradled the flask in trembling hands and took a sip, no more than a taste. She moaned faintly.

“You can have it all,” said J'Savan, peering at her anxiously, desperate to see her eyes. No matter how much he would rather run away, he had to discover if she was Zhid. He was responsible for his fellow Gardeners' safety, for the camp . . . Summoning power, he shaped a simple enchantment of confusion and delay, holding it at the front of his mind lest she attack again.

The woman set the stoppered flask aside and rummaged in the rucksack. She stuffed a crumbling biscuit into her mouth, and after it the bruised pear J'Savan had decided not to eat earlier as he didn't like them so ripe. Only after she'd consumed every morsel, thrown down the empty rucksack, and taken a second sip from the flask did she seem to remember the young Dar'-Nethi. She stood up slowly, clutching the water flask in one hand and her knife—a crudely worked strip of bronze—in the other.

She was tall for a woman, so thin that her sunburnt skin stretched over her bones like silk across the spars of a sailing ship. Sand caked her arms, her bare feet, and her legs that stuck out from her stained, shapeless gray tunic. A dirty cloth bag the size of a man's fist hung from a thong around her neck. She moved toward the Gardener.

J'Savan backed away slowly. “Who are you? Show me your face. I can get you more water and food, but I'll defend myself if need be. I don't mind what you took . . .” His tongue would not be still, as if chattering might set her at ease—or maybe it was for himself. She was so mysterious, so intense. “. . . or where you've come from. I can help. Find you clothes. Are you hurt? Are you . . . ?”

She stepped closer, using the hand with the knife to push the salt-stiffened locks of hair from her face, and J'Savan's voice dwindled away. Her eyes might have been windows on the sky. Huge, blue, limitless. So young, much younger than he'd thought, no older than himself. Her cracked lips moved slightly.

“What? Sorry, I couldn't—What did you say?”

“
Regiré. S'a nide regiré.
” Her soft voice was as dry as the rocky wastes.

She was clearly Dar'Nethi, not one of the warrior Zhid or their Drudge workers. Her eyes said it all. Yet she was not a Dar'Nethi slave, freed by the victory over the Lords, for she wore no collar nor the wide terrible scar from one. Perhaps a Dar'Nethi fighter, lost in the last battles? Surely not. Not after five long years. And her language was unfamiliar, some corrupt dialect, just on the verge of understandable.

“
Regiré. Desene, s'a nide regire
.” Even rough with thirst, her voice was commanding, urgent.

“I'm sorry. I don't understand you. Look, come with me to the camp. There's water—all you could want—and food. Not a quarter of an hour's walk from here. We'll help you. Find someone who can understand what you're saying.” Never quite turning his back on her, he beckoned, using gestures to guide her toward the Gardeners' camp. He breathed easier when she trudged after him, her steps weary and slow, as if she didn't believe he could help, but had nothing better to do.

It was difficult not to run ahead. No one would believe this, someone wandering out of the wasteland after so long. Rumor had it that Zhid still lurked in the jagged mountains of Namphis Rein, the Lion's Teeth, far to the north. But in these first years after the fall of the Lords, the Zhid had been aimless and leaderless. Everyone believed that those not captured were long dead. Was this woman even real?

Quickly J'Savan turned and swept his mind over the woman. Her lank hair had fallen down again, masking her marvelous eyes. But she was no illusion. He sensed no enchantment about her at all.

When the woman squatted down and began pawing at the sand in the middle of the rootling grove, J'Savan averted his gaze, embarrassed to keep staring at her when she clearly needed privacy. He walked through the slender trees more slowly for a few moments, until he heard her plodding along behind him again.

The other Gardeners spotted them while they were still five hundred paces from the camp. Three women and two men stood up from the mounds of dark earth they were working and shaded their eyes. A gust of wind snatched away their calls of greeting.

“Eu'Vian!” shouted J'Savan. “This woman's come out of the Wastes. She's starving and parched. Sun-touched, I think.” He ran toward his comrades in fits and starts, slowing whenever he glanced over his shoulder to make sure the woman hadn't vanished, then speeding up again.

A sturdy, capable-looking woman in a dusty yellow tunic and brown trousers stepped out from the other Gardeners and extended her palms to the stranger.

“Welcome, wanderer,” said the gray-haired Eu'Vian.

“How may we help you?”

“Be careful!” said J'Savan. “She's not Zhid, but she's fierce. Those stains on her tunic . . .” He hadn't noticed the rust-colored blotches earlier. His neck hadn't bled that much.

The woman pushed her straggling hair aside and looked from one kind, curious face to the next. “
S'a nide, regiré
.”

“That's all she's come out with,” J'Savan said. “I can't understand her speech.”

Eu'Vian crinkled her brow, but did not lower her voice. “It's just an ancient mode. She's asking to be taken to the
regiré
, the king.”

“But—”

“Hush, lad.” Eu'Vian's face fell into puzzled sympathy.

The warm wind fluttered the strange woman's rags and the wide hems of Eu'Vian's sandy trousers as the Head Gardener spoke haltingly with the woman. At the end of their brief exchange, the stranger dropped the water flask and bronze knife to the grass, closed her eyes, and clenched her fists to her breast. “
Regiré morda
...
D'Arnath morda. . . .
” She sank slowly to her knees and began a low, soft keening.

“I told her we have no king in Avonar, that we honor D'Arnath so deeply that no successor has taken any greater title than his Heir,” said Eu'Vian quietly. “Then she asked if King D'Arnath had truly died, and when I said, ‘Yes, of course,' the result is as you see. She mourns our king as though he's been dead three days instead of nine hundred years.”

As the evening light swept golden bars across the sweet-scented grassland, Eu'Vian crouched beside the stranger, laid her hand gently on the woman's shoulder, and spoke as one does to a child who wakes from a nightmare or an aged friend who has lost the proportions of time and events.

But the stranger shook off Eu'Vian's touch. With her hands clenched to her heart, she turned to each one of them, her very posture begging them to understand. “
S'a Regiré D'Arnath
...
m'padere
...
Padere
...”

Eu'Vian straightened up, shaking her head. “Poor girl. Who knows what she's been through to put her out of her head so wickedly.”

“What is it she says? What sorrow causes this?” said J'Savan, unable to keep his eyes from the grieving stranger. His chest felt tight and heavy, and tears that were nothing to do with wind or sand pricked his eyes. His companions, too, seemed near weeping.

“It is for a father she mourns,” said Eu'Vian. “She claims she is D'Arnath's daughter.”

In spring of the fifth year after the defeat of the Lords of Zhev'Na, our fifth year at Windham, Karon lost his appetite. He stopped sitting with me at breakfast, smiling away my inquiries and saying he'd get something later. Every evening he would push away from the dinner table, his plate scarcely touched. I paid little heed, merely reminding him not to burden Kat, our kitchen maid, with preparing meals that would not be eaten or by untimely intrusions into her domain. Our household was steadfastly informal.

Then came one midnight when I woke with the sheets beside me cold and empty. I found him walking in the moonlight. He claimed he was too restless to sleep and sent me back to bed with a kiss. Alert now, I watched through the next few nights and noticed that he walked more than he slept. In the ensuing days a certain melancholy settled about him, like a haze obscuring the sun.

Though I observed these things and noted them, I did not pry. For the first time in my life, I did not want to know my husband's business. The tug in my chest that felt like a lute string stretched too tight warned me what was happening. Though Karon was scarcely past fifty, a tall and vigorous man with but a few threads of gray in his light hair, I had long laid away any expectation of our growing old together. He had cheated death too many times, even traveled beyond the Verges and glimpsed L'Tiere—the realm of the dead that his people called “the following life.” I feared the payment was coming due.

The morning of the Feast of Vines was sunny and crisp, a nice change from our inordinately cold and wet spring. Though the sunlight woke me earlier than usual, Karon was already up. From the bedroom window I spotted him in the garden, walking on the path that overlooked the willow pond. Pulling a gown over my shift and sticking my feet in shoes, I hurried outdoors to join him.

I sneaked up from behind and threw my arms around him in a fierce embrace. “Are you hiding feast gifts out here for me, good sir?”

He groaned sharply and bent forward, as if I'd stabbed him in the gut.

“Holy Annadis, Karon, you're hurt! What is it?”

Hunched over, he clutched his belly as if he were going to retch, his face gray, lips colorless. “Sorry . . .” He held his breath as long as he could in between short, labored gasps.

I took his arm and led him across the damp grass to a stone bench surrounded by a bed of blue and yellow iris left soggy and bent by a late spring snowstorm. “Earth and sky! Is this what's had you skipping meals and walking half the night?”

He sank slowly onto the bench. “. . . was going to tell you . . . soon . . . I'm not sure . . .”

“Shhh.” My fingers smoothed away the tight, deep creases on his brow and stroked his broad shoulders, which were knotted and rigid. When his breathing eased a bit, I pressed one finger to his lips before he could speak. “Remember there is only truth between us.”

He took my hand, kissed it, and pressed it to his brow before enfolding it in both of his. “I suspect it's a growth in my stomach.” His bleak smile twisted the dagger in my heart. “I've tried to imagine it's something else, but all the willing in the world hasn't made it go away as yet. Not a pleasant prospect, I must say. When I've seen it in my patients, I've judged it best to leave nature have its will and use my power to . . . ease the way. Ah, gods, Seri, I'm so sorry.”

Of course, Karon would not be able to ease his own way, for the enchantments of a Dar'Nethi sorcerer cannot be turned in upon the wielder for either good or ill. He'd given so much for all of us. It wasn't fair. . . .

 

The disease devoured him. A fortnight after the Feast of Vines, Karon canceled his long-planned sojourn at the University, where he was to give the first lectures on the history of the Dar'Nethi sorcerers in the Four Realms, an enterprise dear to his heart. And as our frigid spring slogged toward an equally unseasonable summer, he relinquished his healing practice, growing weaker and so consumed by pain that he could not bear the lightest touch.

All that our mundane world's physicians could offer were blisterings and bleedings that would sap his remaining strength and hasten the end. And so I cursed the demands of fate, generosity, and politics that made it necessary for him to live so far from his own people, some of them Healers like himself—sorcerers who might have helped him. But only the Prince of Avonar, our old friend Ven'Dar, had the power to cross D'Arnath's Bridge at will, and only once a year in autumn did he unbar the way between magical Gondai and our mundane world and come to exchange news and greetings. Autumn was months away. Karon would never last so long.