The Fall of Neskaya (5 page)

“What do you care, so long as they weren’t yours?” she said, darting away when he reached out to tickle her.

One of the house servants came in and said that if Master Coryn had finished eating, could he please attend
Dom
Rumail? With a tingle of excitement dancing in his stomach, Coryn made his way to the linen rooms. The air smelled faintly of cedar and goldengrass, used to sweeten the sheets and keep away moths. A handful of candles filled the little chamber with gentle light. Rumail sat on a stool, hands loosely folded in his lap. Folded blankets cushioned a low table and formed a pillow.

“Am I to lie down?” Coryn asked.

“Not just yet, young master. I have a few questions for you. I have already studied your lineage, so we need not go into that. How long have you been having attacks of dizziness and disorientation? Has the nausea made it difficult for you to eat? Have you had visual disturbances, where things were not the right shape or color or would not hold still?”

“I didn’t—” Coryn bit his lip. He’d thought he’d done a good job masking his weakness. Eddard hadn’t noticed anything on the fire line, or hadn’t seen fit to mention it. “It’s excitement, that’s all. It has nothing to do with, well, anything.” But even to his own ears, he sounded unconvincing.

“It has very much to do with the awakening of
laran
.” Now a steely certainty rang in
Dom
Rumail’s voice. Coryn felt something darkly powerful emanate from the
laranzu
. “And it is not a thing to be either ashamed of or taken lightly. These are the symptoms of threshold sickness, which often comes when
laran
powers awaken at puberty. Often, the stronger the sickness, the more powerful the
laran
.”

“Th-this means I really do have it?” Coryn blurted out. Eagerness quivered along his nerves.
“Laran?”

“That may well be,
chiyu
. It is what we are here to discover. Tell me, what happens when you look into your starstone? Take it out and show me.”

Coryn unwrapped the stone, his eyes resting on the flickering blue light in its heart. He had the curious sensation of falling into it, going deeper and deeper. After only a few moments, the sense of giddy whirling which was now sickeningly familiar came over him. His stomach clenched and he broke out in a cold sweat.

“Enough! Look away now!”

Coryn’s fingers shook as he tucked the starstone back into its silken pouch. Haltingly, he answered Rumail’s questions about the symptoms which, he admitted, had been growing steadily worse over the last season.

“Is it very bad, this threshold sickness?”

“It could become so if it is not treated,”
Dom
Rumail said. “Yet I have seen young people enter the Tower with far worse cases than yours and grow to the fullness of their talents.”

“What—what must I do?”

“For the moment, simply lie down and relax as best you can. Leave the rest to me.”

When Coryn lowered himself to the padded bench, the dizziness intensified. Closing his eyes as he was bid, he felt the touch of a fingertip between his brows. The world steadied. Shortly after, he felt warmth in the pit of his stomach, creeping up his spine. His arms and legs felt heavy and then light. He seemed to be floating on a gauzy, sunlit cloud. His muscles melted as if he had been soaking in a hot spring, like the one Eddard had found on Cloudcap Mountain. Thoughts drifted pleasantly through his mind, as insubstantial as ghosts. No wonder Margarida had enjoyed it, for she was given to daydreaming fancies.

Once or twice, Coryn became aware of the sound of Rumail’s voice, although he could not make out any words. From time to time, also, it seemed as if the inside of his skull had turned into his bedchamber and there was someone else moving about in it. Man or woman, he could not tell beneath the cloak of misty gray. He felt only a dreamy indifference and no sense of intrusion.

The visitor drifted across the room, picked up the comb of carved shell from its place on the shelf, pulled a strand of coppery hair from its teeth and placed the hair in an unseen pocket. Then it stooped to open the chest at the foot of Coryn’s bed.

Coryn watched, now from the vantage of his head upon his own pillow, as the visitor took out every piece of clothing, one by one—his holiday tunic of Dry Towns linex, his best winter cloak of tightly-woven blue wool trimmed with cloud-leopard fur, vest and pants in supple crimson-dyed leather which had once belonged to Eddard and no longer fit him, a dagger with the tip broken off, a box of soapwood scratched with his initials and filled with childish trinkets—poor quality river-opals in a bag stitched by Tessa for his sixth birthday, a stick horse and rider, a handkerchief embroidered with cherries which had once been his dead mother’s.

The visitor carefully folded and replaced all the items except for the dagger and the handkerchief.

What did this person want with him, with the things that it had taken, the hair and the dagger and the handkerchief? Coryn could only watch in horrified fascination as the visitor spread the handkerchief on his chest, over his heart, and placed the coiled hair in the center.

The figure reached up to its hooded head and, with a sharp jerk, drew out one of its own hairs. This it twisted together with Coryn’s hair and wrapped in the handkerchief.

This wasn’t right,
couldn’t
be right! Coryn struggled to move, to turn his head, to shout aloud. Dom
Rumail, help me!
But his voice and body remained locked, as if encased in a block of ice.

The faceless visitor picked up the dagger and held it over Coryn’s belly. Light glinted on the tip, now whole and needle-sharp, the broken bit filled in with blue glass which glowed eerily from within.

Coryn glanced around wildly, hoping for something he could use to defend himself. In an instant, he was no longer in his bedchamber. A vast gray emptiness, more barren than anything he could imagine, stretched out endlessly in all directions. He felt neither warmth nor chill, nor any substance beneath him. Overhead stretched an equally formless sky, lighter gray and unchanging as far as he could see. The place was empty except for himself and the gray-robed visitor.

The tip of the dagger slid into his body with only a pin-prick of pain. He felt it pierce his skin, his muscles, right down to his spinal column and deeper still. In that instant he knew it would not kill him, yet every nerve, every fiber of his body rebelled. With that new ability, he
sensed
a wrongness beyond words. His vision went white.

With a twist and a slash, the dagger sliced open his belly. He could not see, but he felt something being placed in his very depths.

Bits of thought and memory swirled around him, as if he had been caught in a shower of embers from an exploding resin-tree. Something deep within him tore loose from its roots.

Coryn screamed soundlessly and tried to arch away. Anything, anything to get away, to not feel that terrible wrenching
wrongness
. He hurled himself this way and that, blind in his desperation.

A corridor appeared suddenly before him. He bolted down it. The walls folded themselves around him, surrounded him on all sides. A soft gray blanket settled over him, as he became one with the substance of the walls. At last, he was safe. If he could not get out, then no one and nothing could enter. Nothing could reach inside him.

The next moment, the dagger was gone. Hands pushed the edges of his wound together. Unearthly warmth surged along the cut, fusing the edges. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. There was no pain. For one long moment after another, there was nothing except his own breathing. Silence and numbness bathed him.

Dimly, distantly, he felt the hands withdraw. In a body which was no longer his, the fiery streams faded into coolness.

The hooded figure bent near, until a breath whispered on his cheek.

Then true darkness took him.

B
right sun woke Coryn the next day. He opened leaden eyelids and studied the slant of the light. It must be well into midmorning. Why had he slept so late?

He heaved himself up on one elbow and wondered for a wild moment if he had been abed with lung fever, which he’d had when he was six. Sour cobwebs lined his mouth. He was where he should be, in his own bedroom with the same gray-and-pink smooth-cut stone walls hung with the same ancient tapestries of the legend of Hastur and Cassilda. Ruella, his old nurse, said they were woven by Great-aunt Ysabet, who never married and lived to be ninety-two, enough years to supply a castle twice this size with tapestries.

He lay in his own familiar bed, with the running stag which was the Leynier emblem carved into the headboard, wearing his own nightshirt. Yet . . . he had no memory of having gotten here.

Someone had brought in a folding table bearing a platter of fruit and drybread, a bowl with two brown eggs, and a tankard of lukewarm water laced with tonic herbs. He suspected Tessa’s hand in the bitter-tasting water. She’d think it just the kind of wholesome thing to give someone who’d been sick last night—

Coryn’s hands flew to his abdomen. When he pulled the shirt up, he saw no trace of a scar. He touched only whole, healthy skin. Had it all been a dream? The formless gray plain, the intruder,
the dagger
—

He bolted across the room for the dark wooden chest. Throwing himself on his knees, he jerked the lid open. He pulled out one familiar item after another. Yes, there was the cloak, the festival shirt. His fingers touched hard metal—the dagger. The tip was as blunt as ever, a blade deemed safe enough to give to a boy for practice.

Coryn pawed through the chest until he found the soapwood box. The bag of river-opals was there, as well as the stick toys, but no handkerchief.

Coryn’s stomach plummeted like a stone. He started shaking, bone-deep shivers like those of a man caught in a killing cold.

His hands moved of their own accord, pushing aside the remainder of the chest’s contents. He took out the cheek strap from the bridle of his first pony, wrapped in a scrap of the animal’s blanket, the vest of age-softened crimson leather which Eddard had passed down to him. And there, shoved into the far corner, a scrap of white. . . .

He drew out the handkerchief with its tiny embroidered cherries, smoothed its wrinkles. The fabric, delicate to begin with, had worn almost through in places, giving it the weight and feel of gauze. What had possessed him to rumple it so carelessly?

No matter, it was here. Everything was here. Last night’s nightmare had been just that, a fevered vision born of too much wine after the stress of so many days on the fire-lines. He’d also been suffering from threshold sickness, that’s what
Dom
Rumail had called it. No wonder he’d had bad dreams. Now, with the handkerchief safe in his hands, everything made sense.

A tap sounded at his door, more mouse scratching than a real knock. He tucked the handkerchief inside the soapwood box and scrambled to his feet, heart beating unaccountably fast, just as the door swung open. Kristlin stuck her head in.

“Wait till I say to come!” Coryn flushed, acutely aware that he was standing there in his nightshirt with his legs bare to the knees. Then he saw her face and broke off.

Kristlin’s cheeks were pale as milk, except for two spots of vivid color and crimson ringing her puffy eyes. Today, as she had since the fire, she wore boys’ breeches, this pair fairly clean, patched over the knees and seat, and a shirt two sizes too big for her. She sobbed and threw herself into Coryn’s arms.

He sat her down on the bed. “What’s the matter,
chiya
? What’s happened?”

“No! No! I don’t want to go!” Her words dissolved into sobs. She buried her face against his chest.

“Nobody will make you do anything . . .” His words sounded hollow to his own ears.

“Papa says I have to—have to—go away. To Ambervale,” She pulled away from him, her eyes snapping with her old spirit. “To marry that stinky old Belisar! I told Papa I never, ever want to get married! Not to anyone!”

Coryn sat back, bewildered. Just when things started to make sense, the world turned itself upside down. Kristlin, his baby sister, to be wife to the heir of King Damian Deslucido? She must have misunderstood. Surely it must be Tessa, who was grown up enough to be married and certainly looked like a Queen, or even Margarida, who had complained so much about the rash from her starstone—surely that meant she had
laran.
But
Kristlin?

“There has to be some mistake. Just let me get dressed and I’ll talk to Father. We’ll sort it out, you’ll see—” He disentangled himself from her arms. When he rose, his knees threatened to buckle under him. He caught himself on one hand on the bedpost, blinking back sudden grayness.

“I think you better have some breakfast first,” Kristlin said with one of her quixotic shifts in mood. She’d obviously decided that the matter was settled now that her favorite brother was taking her part. “You slept in all day yesterday, lazyhead.”

“I did what?”

“Well,” she counted on her fingers, “it was two days ago
Dom
Rumail tested you, and he said to put you to bed afterward, because you’d had a bad spell of threshold illness, and the next day you didn’t get up, so he gave you some
kiri—, kirian
, well, anyway, stuff to help you, and wouldn’t let any of
us
try it, not even Margarida and was
she
mad ’cause she says she gets revulsions of the stomach just as bad as you, and then Tessa got bossy and said you’d need something to eat when you
did
wake up, so here you are.” She folded her hands in her lap. “If you aren’t hungry, can I have your eggs?”

Coryn thought that if he had to put up with any more of her chatter, he’d pack her off to Belisar himself, but she left him cheerfully enough. He devoured the entire breakfast. It all tasted wonderful, even the ripened
chervine
cheese.