Son of Avonar (27 page)

We slowed our steps and peered into a shed of canvas hung from wood beams that had been roped together in a box-like shape. A ragged little girl of some six or seven years knelt beside a dark form sprawled on the ground. She was shaking his shoulder, but he was not responding to her pleas, likely something to do with the knife hilt protruding from his back.

Karon tried to drag me away, but I wouldn't budge. “Wait,” I said. “Aren't you needed here?”

“Not while you're with me,” he said, glancing grim-faced at the child as he urged me toward the distant light. His hand was hot on my bare arm. The fever pained him when it grew too fierce, and the child's quiet desperation would make it worse.

“Karon . . . do what you must. I'll keep watch.”

Another cheer went up from the distant revelers. He shook his head. “We're too close to the city. Too many people about.”

“Who's there?” The girl's voice quavered as she twisted around to look out of the flapping doorway. “Is it you Deft? Don't frig me, Deft. Agren don't like it.”

“What happened here?” I said, loosening Karon's fingers, ducking my head under the low beam, and stepping into the shelter. “Are you all right?”

The man lay on his belly. His beard was matted and dark, his long dagger still sheathed. Though I felt no breath when I placed my cheek by his mouth, his skin was still warm. “Who are you?” asked the child, glaring at me ferociously as she huddled beside the body.

“Fairgoers. My husband is a . . . physician. Perhaps he can help.”

“Somebody shivved him.” Her chin quivered. “I think he's dead.”

“Perhaps he's not dead. I thought I felt a breath.” I gathered the child to me and drew her away, nodding to Karon, who stood outlined against the doorway. “Come, let's give my husband some room to work.”

The girl—Nettie was her name—sat on a barrel outside the shed and told me of Agren—maybe her father, maybe not, she wasn't sure—and how he'd gone off to meet a man about a gambling debt. When he didn't return to the fair, she'd come hunting him. Through the dangling canvas, I glimpsed Karon kneel beside the man and, after a brief examination, yank the dagger from his back. Though he was but a shadow against the gray night, I recognized the next movements: unbuttoning his sleeve, scoring the dead man's arm, the moment's stillness as he cut himself and then wrapped the man's own long scarf about their joined arms.

I stroked the child's braids, sticky with the oil her people used to make their hair shine in the torchlight, and let her chatter on about the jonglers she liked and those she feared. Karon's back was still. A warm breeze flapped the canvas walls.

“Nettie!” A rasping whisper came from the darkness. “Here, girl . . .”

“Agren?” Eyes the size of saucers, the child jumped down from the barrel. I grabbed for her arm to prevent her seeing what Karon was about or touching him or her friend, but she squirmed free, scuttered into the tent, and dropped to her knees on the dirt across the body from Karon. Right on her heels, I bent down to lift her, only to have my hand fall slack in horrified astonishment.

“Vengeance, Nettie. It's Deft done this. We'll poison the sodding bastard. . . .” The hoarse voice, the vicious and brutal words came from Karon's mouth. Anger and hatred twisted his face until it was almost unrecognizable. “We'll take him ere morning. I'll cut out his heart. . . .” As vile, murderous epithets poured from him, Karon's expression convulsed and his shaking hand gripped the knife he had pulled from the jongler's back.

“Karon!” I dared not touch him. He'd told me of the explosive enchantment, the dangerous unbalancing that could damage both Healer and patient when the link was disturbed. So I squeezed the squirming child to my breast, hiding her eyes while I did nothing but speak his name.

The quivering knife moved laboriously upward, drawing my eyes and breath with it. I was ready to shove the child aside and leap, but the blade fell so quickly, I could do nothing but cry out. “Holy gods!” Three . . . four . . . five more times the knife slammed into the corpse.

When all was quiet again, Karon was bent almost double, his right hand still holding the knife embedded in the jongler's back.
“Maratathe . . . maratachi . . . maratakai,”
he whispered in his own voice, repeating the words over and over. When he had gained control of his trembling, he said, “Unbind us.”

One arm still wrapped about the squirming child, I drew my knife and sliced through the dirty scarf holding Karon's left arm to that of the jongler. After a moment, Karon got to his feet, took my arm, and pulled me up to his side. Nettie remained on the ground beside the dead man.

“I'm sorry,” Karon said softly to the gaping child, as he drew me away from them. “I couldn't help him.”

We walked straight to the carriage row and drove home, Karon neither speaking nor looking at me the entire time. Though my curiosity was near bursting, I waited for him to begin. Only after he had bathed and dressed the unclosed laceration on his left arm did he come sit beside me on the couch in our candlelit bedchamber, leaning his head back on the cushions and closing his eyes. “Agren did not like being dead. Coarse, corrupt, filled with so much greed and jealousy and hatred . . . In a hundred years, you could not imagine it. Instead of entering his own body again, he took mine. Celine told me of such souls, ones that longed so for life that they refused to cross the Verges and would turn on the Healer. I've never experienced it before, and never will again, I hope. Stars of night . . .”

“The knife . . . what did you do?”

Karon opened his eyes and rolled his head toward me, revealing a rueful smile. “I convinced him that he could only come back as himself. Which meant, of course, that he was truly dead, for his body had failed beyond revival. He wasn't happy about that. You saw the result. I'm glad he took it out on his own body and not on you or the child or me.”

“I wonder what will become of the child.”

He shuddered. “She'll be better off, no matter what.”

We sat up together the rest of that night, falling asleep on the couch only when dawn was peeking in the window.

 

A few weeks later Karon took a small party to Valleor to investigate an ancient tomb exposed by an earthquake. The royal governor of Valleor's southern district had notified the Antiquities Commission of the find that lay near the city of Xerema, reporting that the site appeared to have relics of great value.

Karon took two of his assistants on the trip to learn what might be necessary to mount a full-scale excavation. He was only to be gone a few days, and so I chose to wait and accompany him on the larger expedition he planned for autumn. I was working at my language studies again, helping Tennice translate an Isker manuscript for Martin, and I hated to abandon him in the middle of it.

Three weeks passed with no word from Karon. It wasn't like him. This was a public journey, not one of his private ones. A few more days and I had difficulty concentrating on Tennice's project and couldn't settle at anything else. When the fourth week passed, I went to the palace to see if Racine or Sir Geoffrey, the administrator of the royal archives, had news. But there was nothing. Never had I been so worried; every morning when I woke alone in bed, I felt nauseated.

Martin came to our house only rarely, so when Joubert interrupted my pacing one afternoon to announce the Earl of Gault, the sea of dread burst through the feeble dike I'd built to contain it. “News out of Valleor,” he said, taking my hands, his calm voice belied by his somber face. “Nothing specific to Karon, but we've had word that there's been another earthquake. They say Xerema has been leveled.”

“He wasn't to be in the city. . . .” One has to say the words.

“ . . . and I'm sure travel and communication are difficult,” said Martin. “Tanager is already on his way. He'll send word as soon as he knows anything.”

I hated Martin for sending Tanager without me. I had to sit and eat and walk and wait, counting leagues, counting days and hours, imagining horrors . . . After ten excruciating days, a cryptic message arrived with a Windham footman. “News. Come.” I was in the carriage before the footman's voice fell quiet.

Martin was waiting when I hurried up the steps. Without wasting time on a greeting, he led me to a sitting room where Tanager sprawled on a couch, shirtless and producing snores of prodigious volume. One arm was bound to his chest, and his head was bandaged. Julia was cleaning dried blood and filth from an ugly gash on his leg.

“Tanager insisted that he must explain with his own mouth what he found,” said Martin, shaking Tanager's shoulder, “but we thought he should stay put for a while. Here, lad, Seri's come.”

“I didn't see him,” Tanager mumbled, as I knelt on the floor beside the couch. “But I'm convinced he's alive.” His broad face sharpened as he forced himself awake. “Sun and thunder, I've never seen such destruction. If a thousand armies had taken a thousand battering rams to those walls for a thousand years, they couldn't have caused so much. Not more than a tenth of the place is habitable, even if you could bear the stench of the dead.” With his unbound arm, Tanager shoved himself to sitting, not seeming to notice Julia still working on his wounded leg. “Thousands were buried alive in the rubble. Those lucky enough to get out dug without stopping, trying to get to the rest before the governor's men set fire to the ruins. I rode out to the place of the tombs, and there was nothing left. Half the mountainside had come down on it.”

I thought I might suffocate.

“Listen to me, though.” Tanager's broad hand gripped my arm. “No one could tell me anything of the Leiran party that had come to excavate the tombs. But then they'd start speaking of their own troubles, and I kept hearing of a stranger who had appeared in the midst of the destruction. Time after time he managed to find men and women and children buried in impossible places, yet they lived. Unhurt. Everyone wanted to find this stranger to come pull out their relatives and friends, for luck walked with him, and he might find them alive when there was no other hope. They called him the
Dispóre,
the saving hand. They couldn't describe him. Some said he was milk-skinned like a Kerotean; some said he was dark and had the tilted eyes of an Isker. But all marveled at his strength, his luck, and his skill.”

“So you see why we have hopes?” said Martin. “It sounds as if our Healer just can't pull himself away.”

Tanager nodded. “By the time I left, they had burned the rubble. But the tales of the
Dispóre
hadn't died out. They say he's in company with those working with the sick and injured. I tried to find him, but the place is chaos, and he was always a step ahead of me. I only hope he doesn't stay too long. I got tangled with a mob who decided to share out my horse for supper. In thanks for saving his neck, the beast brought me home without much guidance.”

I wanted to believe that the stranger in the tales was Karon. He would indeed find it difficult to leave a place where he was so much needed. There was nothing to do but wait.

 

On a moonlit night a week after Tanager's return, I had fallen asleep in a chair, having stayed up reading far too late as had become my habit when Karon was away. The call startled me awake, but a glance about the dark library quickly confirmed that I was alone. The glass doors to the garden stood open, the scent of balsam hanging on the summer night. Moonbeams laid a silver path across the rug. The lamps were long cold, and a breeze ruffled the pages of a book I'd left open on the table.

Dreams, I thought, or perhaps some midnight noise from the lane beyond the garden wall, but as I gathered my shawl and my dropped book, ready to head up the stairs to bed, the call came again, faint, but clear.
Seri. Hear me!

“Karon? Where are you?” I was wide awake now, and sure the voice was his, but I couldn't fathom where he could be for it to sound so faint.

“Where . . . ?” And then I realized why I couldn't find him. His voice was only in my mind. Not since that first night of revelation in Martin's study had Karon spoken in my thoughts. I was unsure how to answer, but he seemed to know I heard him.

“I'll be there,” I said. It seemed so foolish to speak aloud. “Can you hear me? Are you well?” But I heard nothing more.

The full moon allowed me to leave well before dawn. I carried only a bit of food and wine in my saddle pack. With Karylis's halter attached to my saddle—Karon never rode him on his travels for fear of losing him—I rode northwest as fast as I dared, avoiding the main road and all other travelers. I had never ridden so far unaccompanied, but I had surely read more maps than books in my life. Only in isolated spots did I stop, and then only long enough to rest the horses. And in those short intervals, my hand never left the slit right pocket of my riding skirt, where I could reach my dagger, secure in its brocade sheath. I would not fail.

Threadinghall lay about ten leagues northwest of Montevial, set in a heavily forested part of the kingdom, about forty leagues from the Vallorean border. The baron who held the region was a nasty man with a nastier wife and a son who was known to hunt starving Valloreans for sport. By midafternoon I was riding into the little town, a mournful sort of place with a clock tower in the center of it. The streets were narrow, the tall houses pressed close together, and the people as pale and shaggy as the moss-covered trees that surrounded them so thickly. I inquired of a stringy-haired sausage vendor as to where I might find the Inn of the Bronze Shield.