A Flame in Hali (43 page)

What had Varzil said, when he told her that he believed Eduin had a part in Felicia’s death? That Felicia had died because she was a Hastur, and Carolin had almost died for that very same reason.

Death to Hastur! We will be avenged!
Those were the dying thoughts of the assassin who had waylaid Carolin and Varzil on their way to Blue Lake so many years ago.

So someone held a death grudge against the Hasturs, one that spanned a generation. Carolin was an obvious target, the heir to the throne. But why Felicia? No one beyond a few intimates knew of her lineage, and why would that matter? She had no pretensions to power, but had sought only to use her Gifts in the service of the Towers.

Felicia was also the first woman to openly train as a Keeper.

Did that have anything to do with her death? Was someone so incensed that a woman would defy all tradition to wear the crimson? Was Ellimara Aillard in danger also? Was she, herself?

Sighing, Dyannis rose from the desk and began to pace. Her movement stirred fine eddies of dust. These scrolls were very old, reaching back into the Age of Chaos, and she doubted they’d been dusted in the last century. What marvels of matrix technology might be found there, she wondered, and what horrors?

She ran her fingertips along the stitched bindings of several scrolls, studying the labels. The parchments felt brittle to the touch, as if they might disintegrate at the first attempt to open them.

I will find no answers here,
she thought.
I do not believe Eduin did either.

She conjured a memory of Eduin startling as she came toward him. Yes . . . details fell into place. A scroll had been spread across this very table. It could not have been very old, then. She had no memory of curling, age-darkened edges or the crackle of parchment as he thrust it aside. The scroll had been supple, although a shade darker than the creamy white of one newly made.

Newer records, then . . .

She widened the scope of her pacing, as if in that way, she might pick up some faint trace of his presence, his intentions. Her movements took her down the ranges of shelves, back toward the central corridor. The records here were more recent. When she searched with her
laran,
she caught the traces of the craftsmen who had prepared the parchment and casings, the scribes who had dipped quill into ink, the archivist who had arranged them in such meticulous order. Whoever had been in charge when this time period was recorded had unusually tidy standards. Every scroll was placed in exact alignment with its neighbors.

No, one was slightly askew, as if it had been taken out and then hastily shoved back.

Dyannis brushed her fingertips across the scroll. Mentally she probed it, sinking down through the protective sleeve. The coiled parchment still bore faint traces of the living animal whose skin it had been. Interwoven with it, she sensed a great seriousness, a shadow, a weight, and knew it for the mind of the scribe. He was Gifted, of that she was sure, and he had left behind, like the film of fingerprints, some measure of his emotions as he wrote out.

On impulse, Dyannis slid the scroll from its place and took it back to the desk. She imagined Eduin doing the very same thing on that day, perhaps this very same scroll. He would have carried it thus, placed it thus upon the surface.

Dyannis sensed an answering resonance as she removed the sleeve. It was so faint that had she not been thinking specifically of him, she would have missed it. He
had
handled the scroll.

She settled herself in the hard-backed chair and carefully opened the scroll. It was a historical chronicle, but as she read line after line of painfully precise calligraphy, she could not escape the feeling that much more had happened than was recorded. There were too many vague phrases, too many gaps. Something had been deliberately left unsaid. Suppressed? she wondered. Hidden?

On its surface, the scroll documented the events of a generation ago, sometimes called the Hastur Rebellion or the Hastur Wars, because then-King Rafael II had defied the will of the
Comyn
Council, taken the part of his niece, Taniquel Hastur-Acosta and single-handedly opposed Damian Deslucido of Ambervale. Dyannis struggled through the convoluted political rationale for the conflict. Deslucido had apparently laid claim to certain Hastur lands on the basis of a marriage between his son and Queen Taniquel. Rafael, speaking on her behalf, denied the validity of the marriage, saying that Taniquel, newly widowed by Deslucido’s bloody conquest of Acosta, had refused consent.

She wouldn’t be the first woman of rank to be forced into such a marriage,
Dyannis thought furiously.
And unless she accepted her fate and pleased her new lord, as soon as the first son he’d sired on her was born and his claim to the throne secure, she would quietly disappear.

The Council still held considerable sway, and even King Carolin had to obtain their approval before marrying Lady Maura Elhalyn, but Dyannis had never heard of them forcing an abhorrent match.

The two kings had clashed at Drycreek, which even now was unsafe for man or beast to approach, thanks to the bonewater dust Deslucido’s sorcerer brother, Rumail, had unleashed. In the end, however, King Rafael had been victorious.

What an odd way to describe a military victory, Dyannis thought. She’d assumed Deslucido and his son had either been killed in battle, or else gone into exile. The brother, an outlaw
laranzu,
was presumed dead by his own villainy, for no trace of him was ever found. Vanquished Kings, like widowed Queens, tended to disappear with no one the sadder.

Dyannis brought her thoughts back to the present, rerolled the scroll, placed it in its sleeve and returned it to the storage rack. Whatever it was the historian had been at such pains to conceal must remain buried. She’d learn no more from these records.

The scroll clearly had nothing to do with
ancient Hastur lineages.
The only explanation for Eduin’s interest was that he had been tracing the lives of King Rafael or Queen Taniquel.

Which meant Varzil might have been right, Eduin had some reason to hate Carolin Hastur, even when they were teenagers together at Arilinn. Had Eduin really attempted to kill Carolin? Dyannis did not entirely believe this, for she had sensed Eduin’s love for Carolin, but decided to accept the premise to see where it led.

If Carolin, then why Felicia? To all appearances, she and Eduin had worked together in perfect amity at Hestral Tower.

Or had he?

The room went suddenly cold. Dyannis swayed upon her feet, and had to catch hold of a post of one of the storage racks to keep from falling. Like some monstrous volcanic eruption, the truth came boiling, hot and caustic, out of her memory.

Dyannis lowered herself to the floor, heedless of the dust. Her heart beat like a wild thing against the prison of her ribcage. Acid rose in her throat and she swallowed hard to keep from retching.

“An insignificant Tower for a nobody pretender,” that’s what Eduin had said when she told him that Hestral Tower was going to train Felicia as under-Keeper. And then . . .

Varzil would never have betrayed Felicia’s secret. Varzil would have let the insult slide, but she in her pride had blurted it out.

It didn’t matter that she had no reason to distrust Eduin. It didn’t matter that he had secrets of his own, those parts of his mind that deflected any overture like polished steel.

In one moment of willful carelessness, she had destroyed the life of one of the most brilliant and courageous
leroni
of her generation, and her brother’s beloved.

On some level, somewhere in the depths of her heart of hearts, she had always known what she had done. It was not her rash actions at the lake riot that spurred her to such tenacious guilt, but this far deeper transgression.

Slowly, Dyannis returned to herself. How long she had lain there, curled in a tortured ball on the floor of the archives, she could only guess. The slanting bar of light was gone, and outside the window lay a darkening sky. She trembled as she got to her feet, although the room was not cold. The chill came from deep within her. Her muscles shook as if she had worked without a break for a tenday, and her belly cramped.

Varzil would have railed at her for such emotional hysterics, such overdramatized, extravagant self-indulgence. He was right. Whether or not she was to blame for Felicia’s death, she had no right to wallow in self-hatred. Or, she added ruefully, to leave her corpse for some poor novice to find.

With difficulty she moved toward the door. Her body needed water and food and rest. Her mind needed calmness in which to reason out her next step. Her spirit . . .

The disease that afflicted her spirit lay beyond the healing of any monitor or physician. She was not especially religious. The shrines of Cassilda or Dark Avarra offered her no solace. There was only one place where she might find a measure of respite, of quiet in which to decide what she must do next. She had scarcely thought of it for many long years.

I cannot leave without telling them.
Raimon, as her Keeper, and Rorie, at least, deserved some word of where she was going, if not why.

As she made her way, slowly and painfully, back toward the living areas of Hali Tower, Dyannis gathered herself together. She did not want to encounter any of her colleagues, who would surely sense, even before they saw her face, that she had been through a terrible ordeal.

She stopped instead at the kitchen, where the cooks assumed she had just come from some especially draining
laran
work and showered her with dishes known to be restorative. At least they did not ask questions, though they hovered and clucked over her as she struggled with one mouthful after another of the rich food. At last, she felt her energy rise enough to make her way back to her own chambers, where she fell across her bed in a dreamless sleep.

Waking again was easier. Her body, with the resilience of youth, had mended itself. If she had no remedy for the anguish that gripped her soul, at least she had a plan. She washed in the basin of petal-scented water that had been laid out for her, pulled on a loose gown of green and gold, the Ridenow colors, and went to seek a last audience with her Keeper.

Raimon had clearly sensed her inner turmoil. He looked thoughtful, but made no attempt to reach her mind with his own. She had deliberately chosen to formally voice her request aloud as an expression of her separation from the Tower.

Dyannis refused his offer of a chair, preferring to stand. “I wish permission to return to my home,” she said after the usual greetings had been exchanged.

“Are you also asking to be released from service here?” he asked.

She hesitated. One part of her mind said,
Yes,
and another said,
No, I would not close that door until I am sure,
and yet a third argued that although technically Raimon as her Keeper could free her from her oath, in practicality he would not do so without conferring with King Carolin, and she did not want to face her brother’s dearest friend.

“That can be decided later,” Raimon said smoothly. “Let us consider this a visit only. All of us need to return to our homes and families. You have not done so before, and perhaps it is time.”

She lowered her head, grateful for his undemanding acceptance. There was far more to being a Keeper than simply organizing a group of Gifted minds into a circle.

“I will send to the city for a suitable escort as soon as it can be arranged,” he went on. “Until then, you are excused from work in the circle, and if you wish, you may take your meals in your room. I will speak with the others on your behalf, so you need not be troubled.”

It was too easy. For all her feeling of relief, she found an odd disappointment in the absence of a heated confrontation.

“I am not so disinterested as it seems,” Raimon said as he rose in signal that their audience was over. “I only wish to speed your return. Clearly, there are matters which you must decide for yourself. No one can choose for you.”

He thinks that after a time, I will hunger for my life here and my work as
leronis
. But I can never return to what I was.

D
yannis and her escort crested the last ridge and halted, letting their horses breathe. Below lay Sweetwater Valley, a cup of emerald velvet. It was just past noon in early spring, for they had stopped at an inn the afternoon before. Dyannis herself had insisted upon the rest, arguing that it was better to delay a day than to arrive late and exhausted.