Son of Avonar (42 page)

In the next days, Karon was abandoned in his darkness and pain. I believed they gave him only enough sustenance to keep him alive until the day of execution. I prayed he would die before it, and in the same thought I would will time itself to stand still.

Lost in pain and sickness, his mind began to wander, but I could always bring him back by directing my thoughts to him. Often he would speak of the word and the images he believed were buried in him.
The images come clearer, the less there is of me. There is a bridge suspended over the chasm, and I see figures passing over it, some anxious or frightened, some joyful and full of wonder, some lost, looking for their way. The bridge is so fragile . . . made of ice, I think, for it's so cold . . . but glorious light . . . I think it sings.

“Of course I understand. You told me long ago how it would be.”

But as Karon wandered in his dream world, I retreated more and more behind my private wall. I dared not tell him what I feared about our child's future. He had already demonstrated that his convictions were unshakable—and so I betrayed my son and betrayed my own soul and kept silent. It could be five or six years before a child showed signs of sorcery. Everything could change in that time. Tomas would never harm an infant.

Karon hurried time along.
I'm glad it isn't long. I think I can manage—how many days is it?

“Two more,” I told him.

“I'm as well as I can be. There's a mute woman named Maddy who brings my meals and such. It doesn't break my heart that they ignore me.” I prodded him to talk again. I was afraid of what I might say.

 

In the dark hours before dawn on the first day of the week, they took Karon to the broad commard in the heart of Montevial and chained him to the stake they had erected there. The weather was freezing, and they mounted a double row of guards around the pyre so that no misguided zealot could rob the people of their pleasure at his burning.

Stars of night, it's cold,
he said to me, once they had him bound there.
But I don't think I'll make any wish to be warm. Not today.
That was the only reference he made to what was to come. He spoke of private things that morning while the guards came for me: of our meeting, of his family, of our talks about death and life and our speculations about gods who might exist somewhere behind the myths of the uncaring Twins. Two serving sisters removed my dress, and clothed me in a penitent's gown, a long robe of rough, undyed wool. Then they cut off my hair that had scarcely been touched since I was a little girl.

So passed our last time together. I let him talk, hoping it might shield him from the horror that seethed around him. He did not know I watched from the palace balcony there in the bright winter sun and freezing wind. The whole morning I stood with him, until an hour past midday when the bells tolled and drums rattled and the first wisps of smoke floated up from the pyre.

Only then did my fear and grief erupt into frenzied babbling—demanding that he save our child, begging him to free himself or to grab hold of me and take me with him, if he could do naught else. I called him cowardly and cruel and a hundred vile names. But my thoughts and words were in such chaos that he claimed he could not distinguish them.
Hush, Seri love. Please. There is too much. I can't understand you.
And when I forced myself silent, he tried to comfort me, who had to keep breathing while he suffered.
Live, my dearest love. You are the essence of life and beauty, and you will shine as a beacon to me long after I cross the Verges. Because of you, there are no demons in this darkness. No moment I've spent with you do I regret, not even this. And you must have no regrets either. This word I've found is a word of healing, Seri. I feel it. I know it. It's what I'm here for, and I think that if I wait until my power is at its greatest . . . from all that happens . . . then perhaps I'll do what I'm here on earth to do. It's a good thing to believe.

But I could not answer. I did not believe. I closed off my mind and averted my eyes, and when the flames took him, I could not listen to his cry. Only much later, in my dreams, did I hear the word he shaped from his will, and the fire, and his destroyed flesh. “D'Arnath!”

“D'Arnath!” I cried out, startling myself awake, the horror of the familiar dream swept away in the moment of revelation.

Baglos looked up from the tiny, smokeless fire that crackled in the hut's firepit. “What is it, woman?”

A few last golden arrows of the summer sunshine shot through the thick canopy of the trees and the unshuttered window of the charcoal burner's hut. I had fallen asleep in a dim corner after my return from Yurevan, only to dream of the fire yet again. But instead of desolation, bitterness, and self-hatred, the dream left me with a confusion of feeling so intense that the sunlight felt drab and lifeless.

“Ten years ago, my husband spoke that name. . . . How could he possibly have known it? He hadn't heard your stories. Your history. Buried . . . hidden . . . inside him. Your dead king's name. A word he could imbue with all his power as he died . . . hoping . . . believing . . . that something of meaning would come from it.” I was on my feet, pacing the room, flexing my fingers, pulling at my hair, stretching my arms to feel the sunlight as if all my appendages had been detached and were only now reconnected to my body, blood rushing into the dry, empty veins. “But I didn't believe. I couldn't hope, because I didn't have the words.” D'Arnath. The king who had built the Bridge between a land of magic and a land of exile. . . .

And as if I had pulled it from the weft of life's weaving, a thread lay in my hand, drawn from the tangle of the past. The thread that connected past and present. A thread of enchantment and fate and purpose. I halted in mid-stride and stared at the Dulcé and the Prince with new eyes. “Stars of heaven . . . I know what he did!”

D'Natheil was carving on his birchwood and glanced up curiously. He motioned Baglos to his side and never took his eyes from my face as the Dulcé translated everything I'd said. Tennice, who had been standing watch, walked into the hut just in time to hear my last outburst. “Who did what, Seri?”

“My dream. All these years I've dreamed about the day Karon died. No matter what I did, no matter how much I willed the past to be gone, I couldn't rid myself of that one horror. But I think it was because I never listened to what it told me, the comfort it offered if I but knew how to hear it.”

“I don't understand.”

“Nor did I until now. In all that pain and torment, Karon insisted on finding order and beauty. I never believed it. Or rather, I believed in what he found, but I never thought he accomplished anything. I heard no word of magic when he died. Our child was murdered. All of you were dead. I believed he failed, and I was so angry with him—oh, gods, for all these years I've been so angry with him—because he let it all happen for nothing. But I didn't know what to listen for. Today, when I dreamed it again, I heard him say the word.”

“D'Arnath,” said Baglos, reverently.

The memories of those last dreadful days came tumbling out of me. “He found images with the word: a great chasm and a bridge. He was almost mad with pain, and I couldn't tell what was real and what was delirium. I put it all out of my mind, because I was convinced it had no meaning and I couldn't bear the thought. But now I know. Baglos, Karon opened your Gates, didn't he?”

“It could very well be, woman. I wish I could tell you it was so.”

“Tell me about the day the Gates were opened.” For, of course, I had to know more. What result could possibly have been worth the price?

D'Natheil nodded to Baglos, and the Dulcé sat up straight, as he always did when telling stories of his land. “When the Gates are open, their fire burns white, and any may walk through without harm. But as they fail, the flame darkens, a fire that ravages first the spirit and then the flesh of any who attempt to pass. When the fire burns black—a fearsome sight—the Gate is impassable, and the dismal reflection of that dark fire permeates our hearts and every part of our land. And so it had been for hundreds of years.

“On that day the Zhid were attacking in a great fury, as if they thought that victory was only the next arrow away. In the fortress kitchens we were making hot soup to send out to those on the walls, for the cold winds were blowing off the Wastes. The runners thought their legs might fail from making so many trips, but they didn't complain. Too often they would go back for the empty pots and find the one to whom they had delivered it dead or his mind stripped away in the way of the Zhid that is worse than death.”

The Dulcé transitioned smoothly from Leiran to his own language and back again. “But then came a peal of thunder, and we felt a surge of power, a storm of light and glory as if the Veils—the colored lights that grace the northern skies in summer—had descended on our hearts and infused us all with joy and hope. Though no one of us in Avonar had lived when last the Gates were open, we knew what the change signified, for there came a brilliance about every object from the most graceful tower of the palace to the least pebble underfoot, transforming the city with indescribable beauty. You could hear the warriors on the walls singing the Chant of Thanksgiving, so that your blood throbbed with it, and when night fell, no one could sleep for the singing and the talk of what the opening might mean. Would we wake to find the fire dark again? Would our young prince come to the Gate to walk the Bridge? With the strength and the light of the Gate infusing us, the Bridge strong, would we be able to push the Zhid back from the walls of the city? Would rain fall in the Wastes?” Baglos's voice cracked and stumbled with emotion.

“In his visions Karon saw brilliant light, and he thought the bridge was singing. How did you know it was the Exiles that opened the Gates?”
Prove it to me,
my skeptic's heart demanded.
Convince me.

“Why, because even the Preceptors, as powerful as they are, cannot do it. Only D'Arnath's Heirs ever had power enough to reverse the darkening of the Gate fire, and since the Battle of Ghezir, where we lost half of the Vales of Eidolon and D'Arnath's sword, even they had not been capable. Prince D'Natheil was young and untrained and had shown no evidence of any power. We had seen no sign of the Exiles since well before the Battle of Ghezir. They had failed in their duty to walk the Bridge. But this
had
to be the Exiles for no one else could have accomplished it.”

For a moment, all I could envision was Karon's Avonar and its forest of blackened pyres. Bitterness leaked into my heart. “All those years, Baglos, why didn't your people come here and find out what happened to the Exiles? They were being slaughtered. Perhaps everything would have been different if someone had come here to see what was happening.”

“Because the Bridge was never meant to be crossed! It is not a roadway, but a link between our lands. It binds—Dar'Nethi power—It must remain open. To make things right. Your passions—Life flows—” All of a sudden the Dulcé was fumbling with words. A dozen false starts and disconnected phrases. Screwing his face in knots and tugging at his black hair with his short fingers. “I'm sorry I cannot explain better today. If only D'Natheil could—”

He bit his tongue and glanced uneasily at the Prince before grasping at some thought and plunging ahead more smoothly. “King D'Arnath could not allow the Zhid free passage to your lands. He sent J'Ettanne and his followers here to maintain the far Gate—the Exiles' Gate—and their part of the Bridge. Then he enchanted the Bridge with his strongest wards so that no one could use it to cross the Breach. J'Ettanne and his people could never return to Avonar nor any come here to succor them. It took the Dar'Nethi hundreds of years to discover D'Arnath's secret way to make the passage. By that time, of course, the Gates were long closed. All was done for your mundane land's safety.”

I puzzled at these spotty explanations, but no path of reason led me anywhere that made sense. We
had
to unlock D'Natheil's mind. If the Bridge was only an enchantment, then what did Baglos mean when he talked of people crossing it? What chasm was so wide that people could find no other way around it?