A Flame in Hali (48 page)

Midsummer came and still Lerrys hovered on the edge of maturity. The Festival itself was subdued that year. Each family member seemed to Dyannis to be harboring some grievance. Lerrys, like many of the adolescents she’d known at Hali, alternated between sulky withdrawal and fits of temper, sometimes outright defiance of his parents. Rohanne had never given up trying to induce Dyannis to join her in embroidery and gossip, two things Dyannis loathed. When Dyannis politely but firmly declined, this seemed to irritate her sister-in-law.

Harald’s temper fared no better. The day before Midsummer’s Eve, word had come from Serrais, the Ridenow capital.
Dom
Eiric Ridenow, having determined that an offensive strike against Asturias was necessary, had ordered Harald to send another twenty men and horses. Harald could scarcely afford to spare them, and Dyannis saw how it pained him to be sending men he had known all their lives into battle. So, although the central hall was bedecked with flower garlands and the tables were laden with platters of roast lamb and barnfowl and summer gourds, pots of honeyed fruit and baskets overflowing with the braided egg buns, a shadow hung in the air.

During the festive dinner, Harald and Lerrys almost came to blows when the boy declared his intention of joining the war party. Harald, red-faced in his holiday finery, retorted that it was out of the question.

Lerrys glared back at his father. “Siann’s going, and he’s only a year older than me! Besides, he’s riding Socks!” The old chestnut, marked by three white socks and a blaze on its forehead, had been his favorite horse as a child.

Rohanne cried, “You must not say such things, Lerrys! Harald, tell him no! He’s just a child!”

“He is almost a man,” Harald replied, “but he is heir to Sweetwater, and I will not have him risk himself needlessly.”

“Aunt Dyannis!” Lerrys turned to Dyannis, his eyes bright and pleading. “Tell him I can do it—I’ve been practicing—I’m ready!”

Dyannis shook her head with a little shiver of sadness. “Lord Harald is right to forbid you,
chiyu.
Would that none of us—not you, not your friend Siann, not myself—face such horrors. Ordinary battle is terrible enough, but once
clingfire
and other
laran
weapons are brought in, there is no honor or glory, only death.” Her throat closed up and she could not go on. She wondered if the lucky ones were those slain in the first fighting. She thought of Francisco and the other Cedestri folk, of the refugee farmers and soldiers she’d tended at Hali. No one, she thought, should live with such memories as she’d seen in the minds of the survivors.

“You’re all against me!” Lerrys cried, and bolted from the table. Rohanne started to rise, but Harald stopped her with a gesture, saying, “Let him be. He will get over it, once his friend and the others are well away.”

Rohanne glared at Dyannis as if the boy’s rebellion were all her doing.

Harald sighed. “In the end, we may have little choice, once the war is upon us.
Dom
Eiric has taken his own sons into battle, and we must all be prepared to defend our homes.”

After that, the heart went out of the festivities. No one wanted to dance. Harald and Rohanne retired early so that those servants who cared to might continue their own celebrations unconstrained.

Dyannis, deciding that a suitable cooling-off time had passed, sought out Lerrys. His room was down the hall from her own. When she knocked, she heard the sounds of scuffling, the clink of metal and the lid of a chest slammed shut. Pausing with her fist poised to knock again, she smiled and shook her head. The boy had a good dose of youthful Varzil in him.

Lerrys opened the door a crack. A single candle set on a ledge on the far wall lit the room.

“It won’t work, you know,” she said.

Lerrys drew his brows together, very much as his father did when confronted. Although she hadn’t used her
laran
to sense the borrowed sword, the rain cloak, and other gear at the bottom of the chest, she caught his unguarded thought,
She’s read my mind!

“Are you going to give me away?” he said.

“No, I don’t see the point in it. But I’d like to talk.”

“You mean
you
talk and
I
listen.” With an aggrieved sigh, he stepped back for her to enter.

She sat on the bed, pushing herself back so her feet swung free. “And
I
try to convince
you
to mind your father, like a good aunt should, is that what you mean? It doesn’t sound like very much fun, but if you insist, I’ll try.” She chuckled until she noticed his outraged expression.

“What’s so funny?”

Ah, youth.
Had she been so deathly serious at his age? “I wasn’t laughing at
you,
but at all of us Ridenow. We never seem to do things the easy way, do we? I’m too young to remember whatever Harald did, but Varzil—oh, my! When he wanted to go to Arilinn Tower and Father refused, what a fuss!”

The boy’s mood lightened minutely. He took a step closer, although his posture remained one of mistrust.

“Varzil ran away just after he’d been presented to the
Comyn
Council,” Dyannis continued, “and Father went berserk, not knowing where he was. I suppose Harald told you all this?”

Lerrys sat down beside her, listening now. “Father told me once, but Mother said he wasn’t to mention it again. She thought it would give me ideas.”

“Oh, yes! Varzil’s been giving people
ideas
all his life!” Dyannis laughed again, and this time, Lerrys laughed with her. “It was bad enough that Varzil tried to get admitted to Arilinn Tower on his own, but we weren’t yet on good terms with the Hasturs, and the Keepers there wouldn’t take Varzil without his father’s permission. Too politically dangerous, you know. So what did you think he did?”

Dark eyes flashed. “He found a way to get in anyway.”
Obviously.

“No, he didn’t.” She shook her head. “What you must understand about Varzil is that all his life, he had been different. It would have killed him to stay here, herding cattle and horses, running Sweetwater along with Harald. His
laran
set him apart. He was born to be a Keeper, and he felt it in his bones. He wanted to train at a Tower more than anything else. Anything else, except honor.”

“Is there a point to all this?”

She watched him, the soft candlelight making him seem even younger. He was no child, nor was he completely a man. Yet he now faced a man’s difficult choices.

“You see,” she went on, “if he went against Father’s wishes and snuck off to some place like Cedestri, where they’d take him no matter what, he’d be turning his whole life into a lie, instead of keeping faith with who he was.”

Lerrys looked uncertain. He was old enough to understand the importance of integrity, but clearly had not thought that staying home and obeying his father’s wishes might be an honorable course. Gently, she said, “It was the hardest thing for Varzil to do—to give in, to leave Arilinn with Father, but he did it. I think that decision helped make him who he is today, a man who shapes our times. He didn’t just do whatever he wanted, he did the right thing.”

Lerrys wasn’t ready to give up. “But he
did
go back to Arilinn. He found a way.”

“Only after Father agreed. Actually, it was Harald who changed Father’s mind, after the incident with the catmen. Harald isn’t as hide-bound and unreasonable as you think. It’s the natural course for all sons to challenge their fathers. But he loves you. He wants you to grow strong and wise, to rule Sweetwater after him. How can you do that if you cannot even rule yourself?”

Lerrys glanced away. His chest rose and fell; she could almost hear the pounding of his heart. His desires—for adventure and glory, for his father’s approval, for honor—roiled in his breast.

“It isn’t easy, is it?” she said in a low voice.

He shook his head. “What should I do? I can’t just give in.”

She touched the back of his hand, brushing his mind with her
laran
. “Just go about your chosen course. I doubt Harald will say anything. Your mother will fuss, but then, she would do that no matter what you decided.”

He grinned, and she knew he’d truly understood. Two days later, the men left to join
Dom
Eiric’s attack on Asturias.

A
tenday later, returning from her early morning ride, Dyannis knew something was wrong as she rounded the last curve of hill back to Sweetwater. Harald still wasn’t happy about her going out on her own, but as long as she returned by midmorning, he kept his objections to himself. It was one of many things they tacitly agreed not to discuss.

As usual, she rode the roan gelding. Given an easy rein, he set a brisk pace back to his familiar corral and breakfast. He showed no particular sign of alarm, yet even before the house and stables came into view, something shrieked like a burst of acid fire along her nerves. She caught a visual image of colors smeared together like a child’s painting, overlaid with the hot silvery shiver of terror.

She dug her heels into her horse’s sides. The beast snorted in surprise, then moved into a bone-jarring trot. They pounded down the steepest part of the trail. The horse lost his footing on a patch of loose rock, forefeet skidding. The next instant, he turned sideways and arched his back, and shifted his weight to his hindquarters. Snorting and blowing, the roan gelding came to a halt. Dyannis nudged him to continue downhill, but he flattened his ears and hunched his back menacingly.

Without warning, the sense of urgency returned. Colored lights twisted and melded behind her eyes. Her stomach rebelled; bile rose to her throat. She retched, swaying in the saddle. Around her, the horizon smeared into a sickening jumble of earth and sky. She took hold of the reins, dug her knees into the horse’s sides and yanked his head around, facing downhill. The horse took one step and then another, picking his way. His tail lashed in protest.

Without thinking, she blasted out a psychic command with all the power of her trained
laran
and her special Ridenow Gift:
GO!

The horse bounded down the last slope. Dyannis clung to his neck, using all her remembered skills to hang on. He clattered into the yard and she jumped off, even before he came to a halt. One of the stable hands ran toward her, hands raised to catch the dangling reins. The beast shied and the man ran after him.

“Lerrys! Where is he?” she gasped.

The stable hand was too busy cursing under his breath at idiots who ran a horse like that and then turned him loose without walking him cool—

“WHERE IS HE?”
The commanding Voice came roaring out from her throat, reverberating through the yard. Every animal turned in her direction, eyes and ears focused solely upon her.

The stable man whirled, his jaw dropping. “In—in the house.
Damisela—”

Dyannis sprinted from the yard. Her breath rasped like fire through her lungs. Her feet pounded up the wooden stairs. She shoved aside the great heavy door as if it were paper.

Lerrys!
A silent howl answered her.

Once inside the shadowed entrance, Dyannis knew exactly where he was. She burst into the central hall at a dead run, her riding skirt flapping about her legs. The servants in the hall jumped aside, except for one maid carrying a pitcher on a tray. Dyannis swerved, but not soon enough. She brushed the girl’s shoulder. Tray and pitcher crashed to the floor, splattering steaming
jaco
in all directions. Rohanne, pausing halfway down the staircase, shrieked.

Dyannis crossed the hall just as Rohanne drew breath for a second scream. She took the stairs one, two at a time, slipping and scrambling.

The boy’s mind went silent.

The hallway sped by in a blur. Behind her, Dyannis heard shouting. She yanked open the solarium door. Instantly, she spotted the overturned chair and the tightly-curled body on the carpet beside it. The chair still vibrated with the force of his first convulsion. The air reeked with surging, chaotic
laran.
Dyannis threw herself to her knees beside Lerrys. She knew even before she touched his shoulder that he had stopped breathing.

Lerrys!
She drew upon her years of training at Hali, shaping her thought to penetrate the psychic turmoil. Taking his hands in hers to amplify the contact, she dropped below the level of thought.

As a novice and later as a working
leronis,
Dyannis had monitored many others, both her colleagues and commoners. Never had she done it under such pressure for speed. Lerrys had stopped breathing a minute or two before she arrived. His heart had already begun to falter and his energy channels were so congested, they looked almost black.

With a practiced movement, she opened the locket containing her starstone. It flared into brilliance at her touch. As she had so many times, she used the gem to amplify and direct her natural
laran.

She sensed the clogged
laran-
carrying nodes just below his diaphragm, pressing on his solar plexus, pulsing with dark energy. It would take time to drain off the blockage, but Lerrys did not have time. Each passing moment further depleted his vitality. Working with critically-injured patients at Hali and then at Cedestri, Dyannis had learned to temporarily sustain life processes. At her command, muscles tightened and ribs lifted. Air rushed along breathing passages. Darkness eased. She felt the life spark brighten.

Dyannis poured strength into the boy’s heart, stimulating the contracting fibers. The heart responded, beating once, twice, each time more strongly.

“What are you doing?” shrieked a woman’s voice, barely recognizable as Rohanne’s. “Get away from him!”

Dyannis turned her head to glimpse her sister-in-law’s livid face. Beyond her, servants hovered, and the same maid Dyannis had knocked over stood wringing her hands.