Daughter of Ancients (31 page)

“I don't remember.” He waved away the wine without touching it. “No taste. I told you I don't like it.”

On returning from our three weeks in Maroth, I had been eager to hear my father's observations about Na'Cyd, and Cedor's death, and his new attendant, a cheerfully attentive man named Vanor. But, though he insisted he felt no pain, no change, no anything, he could not seem to carry on a conversation for more than three sentences.

“Come on, let's go out. Fresh air will do you good.”

I offered him my hand, but he just huddled deeper in his chair. “Leave me alone.”

“Father . . .”

“Go on. I just need—” He couldn't finish it. “Come back later.”

I threw a blanket around his shoulders and told him I would be in the garden, but would return to eat dinner with him. “Send Vanor if you need me.”

Despite his dismissal, I felt guilty at leaving him alone. I didn't know what to do about his condition. I had pressed him to rest and to eat; I had shoved books into his hands and started a hundred games of chess. On the previous day, he complained that I was driving him to distraction and ordered me to leave and not come back until I could sit still.

It was true I had been extraordinarily restless in the two days since our return. D'Sanya was occupied with the hospice: visiting the residents, catching up on business with Na'Cyd and her stewards, and interviewing and welcoming a newcomer. I couldn't settle at anything. Words and images from the past weeks lived more vividly in my thoughts than the food I ate or the roads I traveled. My mind and body were consumed, filled, alight with D'Sanya.

Unable to do anything about either my father or the Lady, I was about to burst.

I pulled the door closed and hurried down the cloistered walk toward the gardens, only to discover Sefaro's daughter sitting on a shady bench where she could observe my father's front door. Another uncomfortable problem.

Since our unpleasant encounter in the hospice library, I had spoken not a word to the woman. Her constant surveillance had kept me on edge—not a bad thing—and I certainly had no right to complain about her violation of my privacy. Any attempt to offer amends for the past was ludicrous. Though I had wished to ease her mind about my intentions, the knowledge that even common courtesies from my lips would rightly disgust her left me tongue-tied. Yet, after the events in Avonar, justice demanded certain acknowledgments, no matter how uncomfortable their delivery made me.

I stopped in front of her bench and extended my palms. “Mistress, please excuse my intrusion. I wanted to thank you for your help in Avonar . . . on behalf of the Lady. Your bringing help probably saved her life.”

Her short hair askew as always, the woman just sat there with her mouth open, looking absolutely astonished. I'd never noticed the dusting of freckles on her nose.

“I didn't tell anyone it was you.” I rushed to get everything out before she caught her breath. “Not even Lady D'Sanya. As you didn't give Je'Reint your name, I thought perhaps you preferred to remain anonymous. And I want to thank you for not revealing my father's identity to anyone, despite your reservations about me. To be questioned . . . besieged . . . to have demands made of him would be very hard right now. He's not well. Not right. I hope . . . I sincerely hope your father fares better.”

Her eyes were the darkest of the Dar'Nethi blues, such a deep midnight shade that only in the brightest sunlight would you see their true color.

I prepared to bolt. She had closed her mouth and now glared at me in her accustomed manner. But at least her first words were quiet. “Some days he is better, some worse. . . .”

Trying to preserve this moment of civility, I bowed and backed away before turning to head down the garden path.

“. . . not that you have any right to ask,” she called after me, sounding more like herself. “I'm still watching. Don't think I've given it up because I wasn't in Maroth.”

Silly that I felt like grinning as I hurried away.

 

On the fourth day after our return, D'Sanya sent me a message that suggested I stay the night in my father's chambers on the promise of a dawn ride and breakfast with her. I needed no persuasion. But when I arrived at the stables the next morning, a messenger delivered a note asking to postpone our ride until dawn the next day, as she needed more time with the new resident.

...
and lest you think this delay is some willful neglect, know that I grieve for every moment we spend apart. The future is mysterious and uncertain, and yet one hope and resolution has fixed itself in my heart. One thing I choose from the realm of all possibility, my dearest friend, and if I must forego all other pleasure, duty, or destiny to do so, I will have this thing I choose, if you but grant it. Ponder this and bring your heart to our next meeting so you may give me answer.

Lost in a confusion of indefinable hopes, I thought to go riding to sort out what she might possibly mean by such words. Yet when I stopped in to tell my father of my aborted plans, he seemed so happy at the prospect of my company for the day, I could not bring myself to leave again.

His mood was much improved from the previous days, and he seemed more alert, more interested, more his usual self. I chose not to discuss my concerns about Na'Cyd, who had not approached me since our return, or tell of the Zhid attack in Avonar. The omissions made me feel guilty, but I didn't know how well my father's erratic temper might deal with new worries and new secrets. Instead I spent the morning repeating the stories of my visit to Maroth, of how I'd been able to get D'Sanya's Builders to agree on a single vision of the new hospice, and how, despite the Lady's incessant words, we'd never gotten around to anything more substantial in our conversations.

“And she truly had you dancing?” He showed no signs that he had heard any of my story before.

“Night after night. She receives more invitations than she can possibly accept. As she's sworn that I must learn to enjoy company as she does, she made sure that we had some dancing party to attend every night we were in Maroth.” Perhaps she had guessed she'd best keep me occupied. If we'd had time alone . . . if I'd had hands of flesh to touch her with . . .

“A most determined young woman.”

“She's nothing like I expected,” I said, sudden heat sending me to throw open the windows.

When my father's smirk broke into a chuckle, I suggested, somewhat resentfully, that we play a game of chess. I did not tell him the full contents of D'Sanya's message. But it was good to hear him laugh.

I won the chess game handily. In ordinary times he would have bested me in ten moves, considering the image that ruled my thoughts—D'Sanya's shoulder, left bare by the dark blue gown she had worn on our last evening in Maroth—but he could not seem to strategize more than one move at a time. “Perhaps a walk will clear my head,” he said, as if he'd never heard my repeated urging of the past days. “I don't get out enough.”

Activity suited me as well, and we left by his back gate, taking a path that led into the wood. Even within the enchanted bounds of the hospice, the grounds were extensive and varied. After a while, the path began to look familiar.

“It's good to see you smile, Gerick. I suppose I shouldn't ask the cause.”

I felt the blood rise in my face yet again. “It's nothing. It's just nice to be out.” The place should be just ahead.

But I decided I must have been mistaken about our location. The oak in the center of this sunny clearing lay rotting, its ancient trunk split, and its roots exposed nakedly to the sun. This was not the clearing where D'Sanya and I had played hide-and-seek.

Our walk was the kind I liked best, where you didn't need to say much of anything, not because you had nothing to say, but because the other's presence and companionship and shared appreciation of the moment were enough. By the time we wandered back into the hospice garden, I felt a little more rational than I had all week. “I've just time enough to ride down to Gaelie and fetch any letters Paulo's brought from Avonar,” I said, calculating that I could be back well before my dawn ride with D'Sanya. “I could take any you've written for Mother, as well. Would you like that?”

“I've nothing to send.” Though the day was warm, my father hunched his shoulders and drew his cloak tight as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. “Must you leave again so soon? You've things to do here. You've not tested me since you've come back.”

“You've seemed so much better today.” At least until that moment. “I hate to keep intruding on you.”

“It's why I'm here, Gerick. We have to know. You were away for a long time . . . days . . . weeks . . . And the past few days have been wretched.” He shook his head and rubbed his brow tiredly.

“Of course, I'll do whatever you want.” I took his arm and turned back toward his apartments, dreading what I might find inside him.

This fretfulness tainted his thoughts—a restlessness, a chafing at confinement. The deadness of his senses was, if anything, more profound. Colors flowed together, one almost indistinguishable from another. I felt no variation in temperature, unable to tell whether we sat by his fire or in his garden. Sounds seemed flat, harmonies impossible to hear, and if his memory spoke true, he could no longer tell the difference between wine and water in his mouth, or bread and paper.

But as I withdrew, I couldn't decide if these were truly changes in him, or if they were the result of my own perverse vision. Only my image of D'Sanya remained fixed, while the rest of the world seemed more distorted by the hour. I said nothing of what I found. “Not much change,” I said. Of course it was so. I willed that it be so.

These joinings were never easy. It took most of an hour to let the insistent hammering of my blood fall silent. Paulo always said it was only right, as “bodies and souls weren't meant to get taken apart and jumbled back together.” I couldn't help but agree, especially when I was trying to ease back into my own body and felt the raw abrasion of flesh and bone as my mind reconnected with my own senses.

On this particular day, as I sprawled on his couch trying to remember how to pump air into my lungs and blood into my heart without thinking about it constantly, my father riffled listlessly through a pile of papers on his desk. “Do you think . . . would you stay a while longer and help me organize the papers Bareil sent from Windham? I need another pair of hands and eyes.”

“Of course. Whatever you want.” I massaged my temples with fingers that obeyed my wishes only reluctantly.

“Bareil is a dear friend, but rather than getting only the papers I put on the list, the silly fool sent me every scrap of writing in my study. I keep putting off sorting them. It seems such an overwhelming task. But if I could get it done, then perhaps I could move on to something useful. Do some writing. Something.”

To hear my father falter in his struggle to keep living distressed and unnerved me. He had always been so sure of himself, so easy and generous with his immense talents, so at peace and good-humored with his limitations. In that moment I began to believe that we were going to lose him, no matter the outcome of this venture. A detestable thought.

I jumped up. “I'll be happy to help. Show me what you want me to do. Anything.”

For the next few hours we sorted out the five hundred or so pages of my father's manuscript. Words and phrases kept leaping out of his bold handwriting, snatches of the story he'd set down, the history of his—our—people and their life in the world where we were born. He had taken his own experiences and the stories he'd been told as a child and woven them together with the tales he'd learned from Dar'Nethi Archivists here in Gondai and the written histories of the Four Realms. The narrative was unexpectedly fascinating, and I was soon reading more than sorting.

“So what do you think?” asked my father, noting my distraction. “I wasn't sure you would find the story all that interesting.”

“I'd never really understood about the Rebellion, that our problems in the mundane world were our own fault.”

Hundreds of years before, the Dar'Nethi Exiles had actually ruled in the Four Realms for a few years, claiming they would bring justice and enlightenment to the kingdoms. But instead they had turned into worse despots than those they had supplanted, using terror and sorcery to bend the people to their will.

“Well, not entirely our fault, of course,” said my father, “and it wasn't all of us . . .”

“You give such a different view of the Dar'Nethi,” I said after he'd talked for a while. “It's hard to imagine that the Exiles, who came to live the Way so generously and so well in our world, came from this same Gondai.”

“You've had no experience of ordinary life among us. How could you appreciate our better parts? And here . . . the long war affected souls as well as talent and power. They'll recover, though. Now the Lords are gone, of course they will. Power and passion . . . the balance of the worlds. Dassine once told me . . .”

Somehow touching on these subjects so close to his heart seemed to stimulate his faculties, so that we conversed as if his torpor had been only my imagination. The afternoon passed quickly into evening and dinner, and by the time I looked up, the sunlight told me it was too late to return to Gaelie. So we kept talking about what I'd read, and whether or not the manuscript could ever be safely published in the Four Realms, and about the excerpts he'd prepared as university lectures before he'd fallen ill.

“From a time when I was younger than you, I dreamed of telling the story of my people at the University,” he told me, staring at the red wine swirling in his crystal goblet. “I believed that those lecture halls housed the summit of all learning, lacking only the single discipline that was the most important to me—this history that even I knew so little of. Who'd have thought I'd come so close to accomplishing it?”