Flesh and Spirit (31 page)

“As my sister is yearning to reveal, I am afflicted with a disorder of the mind, a blindness that leaves me incapable of deciphering written words. At a more appropriate time and place, I will beg forgiveness for this and all my deceptions, holy father and good brothers, hoping that you will understand my fear in the face of your great kindness when I came here wounded and desperate. My experience of family is difficult—the details best left unspoken—but I assure you that I professed my vows with sincerity, if not…without reservation. As to how my disorder affects my use of my grandfather's book—
my
book, as it happens, not my family's, as he gave it to me on my seventh birthday—it means I cannot read place-names or written spells, and so must rely on my instincts, inborn talents, my knowledge of maps, and my spellmaking skill to interpret the drawings.”

I resisted the urge to add more. No need to humiliate myself further. If I was to be shipped off to Palinur to the gentle discipline of my family and the Pureblood Registry, I would get my fill of humiliation.

Stearc mumbled oaths. Brother Gildas masked a grin with curled fingers. Gram looked thoughtful and, for once, did not drop his eyes when they met mine. Unfortunately he was too far away for me to read anything in them—not that I was likely to see anything at all rewarding. Elene remained in the doorway, but now her back was to me. Probably for the best.

“Do
not
allow him to get away with this,” said Thalassa, tight as a moneylender's fist. “Were Valen standing at Mother Samele's right hand and suggesting I ascend her holy mount, I would not move one step forward, lest I fall into Magrog's pit. He is a consummate liar—”

“Sinduria, if you please.” Gram's quiet insistence drew their attention away from me, for which I was grateful. “Lady, the last time we spoke of Janus de Cartamandua, you indicated that he was very ill. Does he yet live?”

Not shifting her glare one quat, Thalassa jerked her head in the affirmative.

“Impossible!” The old man had been half in his grave before I'd run away—past seventy years old and addled beyond use. And gods knew I'd wished him dead often enough before and since. How could he not be dead?

“Brother Valen, did your grandfather know of your difficulty with reading?” Gram pursued whatever mad line of reasoning he had begun without altering his tone.

“Everyone in the house knew of his willful ignorance,” Thalassa snapped before I recovered wit enough to answer. “Valen's only
disorder
is his despicable, intransigent soul. Surely you cannot swallow this playacting?”

“Please, Sinduria, hear me out.” Gram raised his hand but not his voice. “The causes of your brother's condition are not relevant here. Only whether Janus de Cartamandua knew of the problem, which you have confirmed that he did. So, Brother Valen, your grandfather gave you the book on your birthday. Do you believe that he intended you to use it? Or was his intent merely to give you something of value to cherish or to sell?”

“To
cherish
? Hardly. Every time Capatronn—my grandfather Janus—returned to that house, he tried to teach me of the book. I hated it. I hated him. I did everything I could think of to be free of his lessons. But he insisted, saying that I must use the book to follow in his footsteps, and that our family would come to be the most powerful in the world. He was crazed with the idea and made me swear over and over, on holy writs, on shrines, on my life, and always, always with my blood, that I would use the book when I was old enough. When I was ‘free to do as I pleased,' he put it. He stank—”

Gods, I could still smell his sour body, the stench of urine and ale and his rotting teeth when I saw him last. And I could see him on so many occasions before that, his black eyes bulging as he made me prick my finger yet again and slap the aingerou that supported the mantel over his hearth, leaving a bloody smear.

I reined in my disgust. “He was…is…mad. It was unpleasant.”

Gram nodded as if I had just given a recitation of the great vices and virtues or an accounting of the abbey grain stores. “So I would guess that reading is not essential to your use of the book. That would explain your success. And if you, as a…an ill-mannered, rebellious boy…refused your grandfather's tutelage, that would explain your uncertainty as to how that success was accomplished.”

A nice hypothesis, but I didn't see what difference it made. If I didn't know what I had done, then I could scarcely repeat my “success.” But the gaunt secretary had tangled the others in his thread of reasoning. When he leaned forward on his stool, scarcely visible around his lord's thick shoulder, they leaned forward to listen.

“Two matters require we consult the Danae. We must discover if they can shed light on this upheaval in the natural world, and we must present our request with regard to the Scholar. My Lord Stearc sees no hope in further approaches through the Danae sentinels. Danae have ever distrusted humans, and now, it seems, they despise us. Which means we must travel farther into Aeginea and directly approach those among the long-lived who might yet retain some fondness for Eodward. Stian and Kol are our only hope to be heard.”

Brother Victor had been rubbing his lip thoughtfully as Gram spoke. Now he dropped his hand to his lap and crinkled his brow even more. “Rightly spoken, Gram, yet the Dané's reference to thievery and violation is worrisome—clearly obstacles in our path, though we've no idea what they mean.”

Good to hear of crimes they could not lay at my feet; I had never stolen from the Danae. Though the consideration of how close I'd come to stealing the offering of nivat gave me a sudden shiver. The damnable, cursed doulon.

The chancellor turned to Thalassa. “Lady, have you had any success in learning more of the Danae's withdrawal from human intercourse?”

“No. The old man is confined to his room and speaks nothing of sense to anyone.”

“You have mentioned in the past that his ramblings include frequent references to…a person you cared not to name. Is it possible…?” Brother Victor was surely a master of diplomacy. His gaze flicked to me, and my sister did not whisk his head off with some priestess's spell.

“Yes,” she said, twisting her mouth in distaste. “Valen was ever his favorite. No one could understand it. When he gave that vile, undisciplined child the last extant copy of the most precious book in the world, our parents—”

Thank all gods, she stopped, perhaps realizing that the seamier aspects of the Cartamandua-Celestine household were perhaps not the proper topic for a serious group of monks and lords come to discuss the end of the world. I had arrived at the same conclusion in my own rant.

Gram was standing now, his sober tunic hanging loose on his thin body. “Abbot Luviar, it seems to me that the god has brought us at least a slim hope of answers,” he said. Bathed in the smoky light from the tall windows at his back, less stooped, he took on a certain dignity. “Brother Victor is correct. Before we can approach the Danae, we must understand these grievances that have caused them to retreat from human contact. And we must learn how to use the maps to travel in Aeginea beyond the sentinels, for that is where we'll find Stian and Kol if they yet live. Gildas has found no way to move past the Well, yet we know that Eodward visited the Well and walked as far as the ‘valley beyond it to the east,' implying that he traveled from the west as from the abbey. So we are clearly missing something. As Brother Valen is the only person who has taken us even so far as this, I believe he holds the key both to these answers and to our interaction with the Danae.”

“Pssh!” Stearc regarded me with a look appropriate to rotting meat. “How do you propose for him to discover these answers that even you have failed to unlock? The man cannot even read his own book of maps. I say the danger a
recondeur
poses far outweighs any service he can offer.”

I stopped listening. Were they ever going to ask my opinion? Such an odd group of people. The enigmatic abbot. Brother Victor, whose unflappable, relentless reason was more unnerving than Stearc's contempt. The Evanori warlord, himself a cipher—a scholar and warrior, a man who treated his secretary with a remarkably even hand while bullying his own daughter. Stearc seemed genuinely caught up in this mad venture. Worried. They were all worried, even Thalassa. It was easy to imagine my sister had come here solely to bait me, but she was a member of this group.
Intelligence, wisdom, and a vision that is broader than one abbey or one kingdom or one faith
, so Elene had said, referring, among others, to a member of my family. Truly a wonder of wonders.

“…see your reasoning. You think to have him question his grandfather.” Brother Victor's quiet conclusion stung me awake like a stealthy wasp, as if Brother Infirmarian's lancet pricked a mortified wound.

“No!” I yelled, on my feet before his last word had faded. Pain and hatred and crippling memory exploded from that incision like pus and septic blood. “You cannot force me to do that! I have naught to say to any of them. The old man is mad. You heard her say it. I won't.”

“Brother Valen…” Several of them said it. They were all standing now.

“I cannot,” I said, fighting to hold back the onslaught of the past. “You don't understand. Tell them, Thalassa. Tell them what happened every time Capatronn left to go adventuring.” The only person my father loathed more than me was Janus de Cartamandua, but pureblood discipline forbade him touching his own father.

I was already halfway to the door…shaking…furious…when I realized I had nowhere to go. Turning my back on them, I retreated toward the window, where I clutched the iron frame and stared into the yard. I tried to recapture my wonder at what I had seen at Caedmon's Bridge—a living magic in the universe. Such a sight should leave all other events trivial. But all I could see, all I could feel, all I could hear were my grandfather's conspiratorial whispers and his robust chortling as he rode away on his great horse, leaving me alone to face my father's strap. Even my hatred for the man who beat me until my bowels released and confined me hungry and bleeding in my spell-darkened room could not match my hatred for the man who kept promising to set me free of it and never did. I had sworn I would never look at my grandfather again. Never speak to him. Never listen to him. He should be dead.

“Destroy my mind with Sinduri magic if you wish,” I said through gritted teeth. “Send me back to pureblood slavery if you wish, or throw me in the river with a stone hung round my throat. But do not ask me to sit in a room and have a civilized conversation with my grandfather.”

I did not hear their hasty deliberations as I pressed my forehead against the cold glass, raging and swearing—at myself more than anyone else. What use to be so angry over past misery? I had set myself free of that house, and if I had found only fleeting enjoyments and unsavory habits to soothe my restless nature, well then that was unfortunate. But at least I had made my own choices, whether to tan hides or steal a dagger or soldier for a king, whether to bed a woman or winter in an abbey or expend my magic on the doulon. At least I had lived.

When Brother Gildas broke away from Abbot Luviar, took my arm, and led me from the guesthouse and into the garden, I did not speak to him. I would waste no words on them ever again. I would lift not one finger to conspire in their madness.

The evening was still, a pale silver sheen of flagging sunlight behind wads of gray wool clouds. For once, the only storm raged inside me. Back in the guesthouse Thalassa was surely recounting the wicked tales I had so cleverly diverted earlier. Even worse, she could be telling them the whole sordid story of my childhood. Gods, how I hated the thought of that. But I would not waste any more time trying to explain.

Gildas held silent as we strode between the hedges, past the scummy pond, past the statue of Karus and uncountable images of saints put there as reminders of how we ought to live. I soon realized the monk was not leading me anywhere in particular. Thalassa's two guards followed at a discreet distance, ready to pounce should I breathe wrong.

Rabbits sat paralyzed in the center of the path as we approached, darting out of our way just before we stepped on them. Two magpies screeched at us and then at each other and at the squirrels chasing through the hedges. Thunder rumbled from beyond the mountains.

I stared numbly at the path, my steps gradually losing their initial frantic pace. Eventually the bells for Vespers rang, and as the last tones drifted into silence and birdsong, my most acute fury seeped away. Still, Gildas waited.

“Don't you need to be back at the guesthouse deciding what to do with me?” I said at last. “I'm not going to run off—not with those two brawny goslings prancing after me as if I were their dame. They'd have no second thoughts about violating the cloisters to chase me down, if that's what concerns you.”

“I belong with the cabalists little more than you,” said Gildas. “I've been involved with them only three years. I help where I can, but my primary role is different from that of the others. They've not even told me how to open the lighthouse as yet. Only Victor, Luviar, and Stearc know that.”

“They're all mad. Gods…Books and plows and Danae. Monks and princes, warlords and my sister the high priestess. An abbot who plays them all like strings on a vielle.”