Son of Avonar (26 page)

I squeezed his shoulder and jiggled it. “Don't make me guess.”

“He's gone to the elders of the Closed Hand and asked for refuge in Vittoir Eirit, the J'Ettanni stronghold. And he's written down the route they told him.”

“He wrote it down? I thought it was the most closely guarded secret.” More and more I was losing any wonder at how powerful sorcerers had given up a kingdom so easily.

“It was. But the Writer never trusted himself to remember everything he needed to keep straight, so he encoded the instructions. It's the reason for the symbols. Seri, if I can unravel his code, I might be able to find the stronghold. Can you imagine it?”

“Surely there would be nothing left.”

“Hard to say. The stories we told in Avonar came from people sent away from Vittoir Eirit when the elders decided to abandon it. My ancestors never knew what became of the stronghold, and they were forbidden to seek out any other of the J'Ettanne, so they had no way to find out. They assumed it had been discovered and destroyed. But even if it's ruined, think how fine it would be to discover its location. To walk in Vittoir Eirit . . .”

Karon had taken on his dreaming look again, and I tugged at his hair. “Give it up. You'll not unravel a four-hundred-fifty-year-old puzzle without the key to his code.”

“True. But we've already learned that the Writer is not a complex man. The key will be here in his journal.”

“And birds will fly upside down and Evard will develop a heart.” I flopped back in my chair and picked up my book, but my eyes did not leave Karon's glowing face.

 

The search for the key to the Writer's code occupied the entire spring, but by the beginning of our second summer married, we were no closer to the answer. The diagram consisted of five symbols, connected by straight lines. We assumed the lines were roads or trails and the symbols landmarks of some kind. We pulled out maps of Valleor to see what roads might fit the pattern, but too many years had passed, and even in our present day, maps were notoriously inaccurate. And, too, we had no idea if the distances between the symbols on the page were at all in proportion to the actual distances involved. The five symbols were no more enlightening. One was almost certainly a foot, one looked something like a trunk or chest, another resembled a hunting horn. The other two looked like a man's face and a rabbit. We investigated the names of towns and villages, rivers and landforms, and tried a hundred other ideas, seeking some correspondence, but to no avail.

Karon proceeded with the translation, learning more of the Writer's travels and his life with his wife and six remaining children. The man wrote of his garden and his animals, of the difficulties of teaching his children to read and finding mentors for their emerging talents. He wrote loving and lengthy descriptions of their games and childish follies. We laughed when we read of his five-year-old daughter's attempts to install the family pig in the house in the dead of winter. She was afraid the beast would be cold and succeeded in inducing it to follow her about like a tame dog. It took all of the family together to overcome the little girl's enchantment and persuade the agitated pig to retreat to the cold barnyard.

As Karon read this passage, he sat beneath a tree in our garden, and I lay on the grass with my head in his lap. “When do you know . . . with a child?” I asked.

“If they have magical talent, you mean? When one of the parents is not J'Ettanne?” I felt him move under my cheek. I loved the way Karon's body came to life when he spoke.

I nodded.

“Five or six years.” Karon touched my cheek, and looked down with a smile that made my heart swell. “It won't matter you know, if and when such a marvel occurs. The child is the miracle. And the love that creates it. Nothing else.”

“Were there marriages like ours in Avonar?”

“Yes. We were so few. We could not marry just within our own kind.”

“And the children . . . it really didn't matter? Not even to them?”

His eyes drifted out of focus. “There was an old J'Ettanni Healer named Celine. She became my mentor after my day in the mountains with Christophe. She was married to a candlemaker who was not J'Ettanne, and one day I asked her if her children had talent or not. She said that one of her sons had looked to be a tamer of horses since he could walk, and he had grown into the most renowned horse-tamer in Avonar.

“ ‘Eduardo, the Horsemaster?' I asked her. Eduardo's power was renowned among us. ‘Aye,' she said. ‘But my other son showed no magical talents at all.'

“And in the fullness of my newfound J'Ettanni manhood, I asked her, quite solicitously, was it not terribly difficult to see one son so talented and one so . . . ordinary. Celine nodded gravely and said it was one of the trials of parents to see children unequally blessed. Her other son had worried about it a great deal when he was a youth and didn't want to listen to those who told him that his own talents were of no less value than J'Ettanni sorcery. But while Eduardo was in the fields with the horses, Morin read and studied, talked with the elders, and made what he could of himself.

“ ‘Morin?' I said. And she smiled slyly and said, yes, Morin was the name of her unmagical son. Well, Morin was possibly the wisest man I have ever known. He was my father's chief counselor and the most respected man in Avonar. Of all that was lost to the world in the destruction of Avonar, the loss of his mind was perhaps the most grievous. Even now, I always begin to sort out a problem by thinking how Morin would approach it. So, you see, I learned my lesson early what gifts were important. It really doesn't matter.”

 

For Karon's birthday I gave him a walking stick made of cherry wood. “It's quite the fashion at court, in case you haven't noticed,” I said that evening in our library. “And I had it made especially for you.” Despite his avowals of delight and appreciation, I did not imagine that he was anything but puzzled at my choice. We were not at all bound by court fashion. Karon would sprout wings before he gave up the high-necked shirts and muted colors of provincial Valleor.

He brushed the richly colored wood and twirled the stick about his head. “Am I to use it to fend off your frustrated suitors, then?”

“Not my suitors”—I snatched the stick from the air, rotated the ebony ring set into the shaft, and held the implement where he could see the sharp steel blade that now protruded from its lower end—“only those who mean you harm.” I had failed miserably in trying to persuade him to carry a sword when he traveled and thought perhaps a weapon that did not invite confrontation might be more acceptable.

“Ah, Seri . . .” It took no mind-speaking to tell me right away that I had failed again. He was still smiling, but his delight had gone.

“I'll have it taken out,” I said, retracting the blade, unable to look at him any longer. I could not bear the thought that I had disappointed him. “I should have known better.”

The distance across the room between us suddenly yawned very wide. “I can't be what you want,” he said. “In every other matter, I will follow your lead, become whatever you wish, but this one—”

“You are everything I want,” I said as I fitted the stick back in its wooden case. “I just thought . . . I just want you to have something more reliable than sorcery to defend yourself. Stars of night, Karon, what if you've used up everything . . . all your power . . . and you're taken?” I could scarcely say the words, and even as I said them, I shoved them out of mind. “No matter. You are as you are, and I adore you, and Martin and the others are waiting for us with your birthday feast.”

I started for the door, but he did not follow. His stillness forced me to turn around. He was standing where I'd left him beside the hearth. His eyes were locked on me, and he wore a look of such distress that I hurried back to him and tried to wipe it away with my hand. But he gathered my hands into his and gripped them hard. “Seri, I've wronged you sorely. All these years I've known I would have to explain this. The Way of the J'Ettanne—this path that I choose for my life—is very hard. Coward that I am, I've told myself that my choices will not harm you if I'm careful enough. If I'm strong enough. If I love you enough. I've ignored the truths of our future and soothed my guilt by saying that I cannot rob you of the power to choose your own way. If your choices endanger you, then that is the Way laid down for you.” He sat down on the couch and pulled me down beside him. “But I've been fooling myself and you. I'm so afraid. . . .”

Afraid? The fingers that stroked my own so softly were cold. I felt as if someone had crammed the walking stick down my throat. “Tell me.”

He took a deep breath. “When the day comes that I am discovered, I'll not fight.”

“I don't understand.”

“I mean, I cannot use my power or any other weapon to take life or inflict an injury. Not to save myself. Not to save you. Not for anyone. The gift I have is for healing, for lifegiving, and I cannot use it otherwise. It's ingrained in me so deeply, it wouldn't be possible. You have to know that.”

I came near blurting out that this assertion was ludicrous, an impossibility for a man of honor. And Karon's honor was unquestionable; he constantly risked his safety to care for people whose names he didn't even know. I could understand his reluctance to inflict bodily injury, having lived so intimately with the pain and suffering such violence caused. Yet it was inconceivable that a man would not use whatever weapon he possessed to defend his family and friends, and in Karon's case, defending us meant defending himself.

But Martin had taught me how difficult it was to argue with an idealist. “A small dose of hard reality will always make idealists into practical men,” he had once said. And so, rather than disputing Karon's professed beliefs, I argued with his more speculative point. “Then we'll just have to make sure you're not discovered. Martin is wait—”

I tried to rise, but Karon would allow me neither to leave nor to divert him. “It's more likely than not, and the result will be terrible. I've seen what they do to sorcerers, Seri, and what they do to those who consort with them. The image never leaves me. And I'm telling you that I can't protect you from it.”

“I am perfectly aware of the risks. I just don't want to think about them.”

“But you must. If you have me in your life, then I'm afraid you'll have that in your life, too.”

“I won't let it happen.”

“If anything gives me hope that it won't, it's your determination. But you're the daughter of a Leiran warrior, and you've been taught that failure to fight is despicable cowardice. I'm a J'Ettanni Healer, who's been taught that the crooked paths of life are the most marvelous. You were so young on that night when Martin and the others chose to have me stay. . . . I'll not sneak away and pretend I don't love you, but I can't ignore this anymore. I'm asking a great deal of you.”

And, of course, because I loved him and it was his birthday, I said I would accept whatever came and whatever he could or could not do about it. But somehow I would persuade him to carry a weapon.

 

In early summer Karon and I rode out to a jonglers' fair that had grown up in the hills just outside the walls of Montevial. Jonglers were wandering entertainers who usually traveled in small family groups, but who would stop for a few weeks in summer here or there, gathering in ever-greater numbers to exchange stories, wives, and horses, and generally to enjoy each other. Though jonglers were widely regarded as thieves and liars, people would travel from nearby cities and villages to enjoy the risky marvels of their fairs. The colorfully dressed women told fortunes by casting painted sticks, and wiry, shirtless men in pantaloons swallowed fire. They told tales, sang songs, fought mock battles in wildly colored costumes, and painted portraits on bits of wood and glass. Their ragged, scrawny children were the envy of every child in Leire who dreamed of living in eternal entertainment without the restraints of propriety or lessons or labor.

“Are you sure you're not ready to head home?” asked Karon, giving me his hand as I jumped over a running ditch, left full by an afternoon cloudburst. “This isn't the safest place to be after nightfall.”

“We couldn't go before she finished the sketch,” I said, the dim light forcing me to squint at the few coal-drawn lines on the split shingle that evoked an astonishing likeness of Karon's face. “And there's still the fire dancers. A jongler fair is so much more exciting after dark. Tomas and I were once confined to our rooms for a month after we sneaked out to a fair that had grown up near Comigor one summer, and we never regretted the punishment. They actually plunge the torches right down their gullets, while everyone around them is whirling and stomping.” Some delights one just never outgrew.

“Then we'd best circle around this muck, rather than crossing straight through it and having you in wet shoes the rest of the night.” Karon led me along the dark peripheries of a field trampled into ankle-deep mud by a jousting demonstration. The flaring torches of the main venues were far across the field from the shanty where an acquaintance had told me I could get a portrait of Karon so like I would swear there were two of him. Forced by the mud to take a circuitous route, we threaded our way through a ragtag village of tents and lean-tos, currently dark and deserted except for a few bony dogs. Periodically a great cheer went up from the distant fire-glow of the central fair, so I almost didn't hear the child.

“Agren. Agren. Wake up, Agren. Come on.” The quiet pleas were interspersed with sniffs and sobs. “Don't be dead. Please don't.”