Restoration (63 page)

“Can I command you to be other than you are?” Her chin rested in her hand, and her voice was as much a part of that woodland as the rustling leaves. “Perhaps then this business would be easier, for I would not care what became of you.” Her sigh was the breeze that shifted the layers of ash. “For so long I've believed that if you could but find your way here again, we could devise a way to hold him. But never did I think your journey would be so filled with pain. How can I ask more?” She rose and came to me. Her hand touched my shoulder and drew me up, and another on my cheek lifted my head to look on her. Her bronze skin was shaped by fine bones, and her spare features, the burnished glow of her hair, and the faint lines about her eyes spoke more of mature wisdom than blooming girlhood. She reminded me of Elinor. Only the immensity of her presence named her far, far older than my son's foster mother. “Ah, beloved, what am I to say to you?”

“I'll stay here a prisoner if need be,” I said. “Or I'll walk back through the gateway and into the desert to live a powerless hermit. I'll take my place in the wall, if that is necessary. But I cannot take another step along his path, though I go mad with it.” And I would go mad. I knew I would. “Just help me understand, Lady. Command me.” For so long I had tried to control my own future. Whatever life and fate had put before me, no matter what pain my choices cost me, I had insisted on shaping the event to my own design. Now I was tired of choosing. No more of it.

She put her arm through mine, and we strolled along the edge of the burned forest. “We've so little time. It's enough to make one shake the World's Tree until its roots break loose!” Jerking me to a halt almost immediately, she bent over to brush the choking ash from a young gamarand. As she wiped her gray-smudged fingers on her green mantle and propelled me forward once more, she shouted in the direction of Tyrrad Nor. “May its fruits bruise your balls, Madonai, and its trunk bash your hard head!” She punctuated her outburst with a bone-bruising squeeze of my arm. I jumped a little and gaped at her. She crinkled her lovely face into a rueful smile. “What is it? Do our people no longer swear by the World's Tree?”

Swear
... In that crystalline moment, the name that I had bandied about for thirty-eight years assumed the shape of a human woman instead of a goddess—a human woman who, after more than a thousand years of guardianship, could still rail in good-humored ferocity at what fate had brought her. I could not help but grin. “My lady ... our people swear by your name!”

Amused resignation danced on her face. “I suppose that makes as much sense as a tree. The powers who truly shaped the world must be accustomed to odd guises.”

So small an exchange, so trivial to ease a man's awe and desperation. Yet it drew me back to our business, too, for Ezzarians also swore by the name of her son ... the jailer. But it was with rational need and no longer with panicked frenzy that I phrased my request. “Tell me the story, Lady.”

“First, look up there.” She pointed to the wall. “Look closely.” For the first time in a long while I called upon my Warden's senses, the human skills of far-seeing and sharpened hearing that were nothing of enchantment, only long training and practice. The entire outer surface of the wall was crumbling, as if someone had taken a battering ram to it.

“Three days ago the wall was almost whole,” she said. “It was an astonishing sight, for our enchantments have been on the verge of failure for many years. Even when Vyxagallanxchi took his place a year ago, his gift—the last of the Twelve—was quickly used up. But in the last few months the damage has been reversed, the cracks sealing themselves, the wall reabsorbing its broken pieces.” She paused and fixed me with her gaze. “Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because of you. Because of his love for you. And perhaps because of yours for him.”

The day shifted, as if the sun's great eye had blinked. “But now it's broken again,” I said, swallowing hard to keep my nervous stomach in place. “What's causing it to fall apart?”

“You know the exact events more than I,” she said, resuming her pace, drawing me along in her wake as a ship guides a floating leaf. “On the day of our wedding, my husband gifted me with the heartbond of the Madonai, and so I am one with his joys and sorrows, though I rarely know their cause. I know he travels in dreams, and I know what he's learned to do with them—my fault, I'm afraid, for it was my suggestion to leave the breach in his bonds that has caused the world such distress. I can see the visions he creates, and so I learned of you—the cause of his great joy. I tried to reach you, to warn you, but I've nothing like his power, of course, even contained as he is—”

“—and I would not listen either to you or to this rai-kirah that's joined with me; I shut him out, silenced him before he could remember.” I had destroyed him with weapons forged of my lifelong fears, of the need to control my own destiny, of my reluctance to allow anyone—my wife, my friends, and especially a powerful and angry rai-kirah—access to my soul.

Her red-gold cheeks deepened in color, and a wind of sadness wafted through the woodland, shifting the fallen leaves. “You must not blame yourself. Never, never do that. There is too much weight in these matters to think they hinge upon a single pivot. Every deed we do, every happenstance, even our own sense about what we've done and seen—all have their places in the great puzzle of the world. Just tell me what's happened in these few days, and then I'll explain more. To understand what must be done, you need to see the past more clearly. If it cannot be from your own remembrance, then it must come from me.”

And so we walked the forest paths, through the trees and out again into another desolation of ash and smoke, while I poured out the story of my bargain with Nyel and its terrible consequences. I told her of my inexplicable reliance on his good intentions and my foolish belief that if I could not save him, I would at least be able to kill him. “But I know now that such a deed is inconceivable,” I said. “He has me in such thrall that my hand could never raise a weapon against him, even if I knew what one to use. I fear for my soul, Lady. And if I lose it, the world will suffer.” Astonishing how the very act of speaking such perilous truth can soothe its mortal dread. Or perhaps it was only the Lady and my belief that she could forgive me anything, even to the destruction of the human race.

We had come to a slow flowing stream, a ribbon of floating gold, and we sat on the leaf-strewn earth beside it. She drew up her knees and hugged them. “He believes you will refuse him. That's what's happened to the wall. All his hopes, both for good and evil—for he is truly mad and cannot see the difference—are bound up in you. And without hope, he is lost again, and we are all in danger. The wall will fail.”

“I have been a naive fool,” I said. “To let him do this to me—” She laid her hand on my knee and leaned forward. “No, no! Do not doubt your own mind, dear one. Everything you've seen of him, everything you've felt of his goodness, is absolutely true. When I waked beside my father's fire to see the one from my dream sitting beside me, those glorious eyes gazing at me in wonder and curiosity and no small portion of lusty interest, I first learned the meaning of beauty and love and kindness. For twenty years I learned nothing other from him. Oh, we argued. Everyone would tell you of it. He was strong-willed and proud and used to having his way. And I was my father's only daughter and very like. But our disputes were always rooted in good humor, and our delight in each other, both body and mind, soon mended them. Everyone who knew him—Madonai, human, and rekkonarre—felt the same. No one in any world has been better loved than he who dwells in Tyrrad Nor or more deserving of it.”

She withdrew her hand and laid it in her lap, staring at it as if it were a part of someone else, not quite belonging to her own body. “Even when his people began to die, things did not change between us for a long while. He would come to me and lay his head in my lap as I sat beside our fire, telling me who had sickened that day and who had died, and of his endless investigations to discover the cause of their decline. I would wipe his tears and tell him news of the children. Seventeen of the rekkonarre dwelt within a day's walk of my hearth fire. Though he came always in the night, he would often linger into the day, so that he could spend time with our own son.”

Son. The word was like a spark of lightning over distant hills, a portent of the coming storm.

“The children were the joy to balance out his grieving,” she went on. “Imagine the horror of this early death for the Madonai. Think of how we feel when a youth or maiden dies—far worse than for an infant death, because a youth or maid of twelve or fifteen summers has begun the journey, brought joy to her family or strength to his village, but has yet to realize the full promise of life. So many things undone, untried, unknown. Such was this for his people, for a Madonai who has lived only a few hundred years is but a youth. Now think of a plague that takes our young people one by one, the most generous and most joyful first—for those are the Madonai who first mated with humans. When the younger ones were dead, the elder tried to make children, too, and then the elders, too, began to die. All in the matter of a heartbeat in the span of their long lives. Why did my love not die with them? He didn't know. Was it because he was the first? Because he was the strongest? Because he loved to travel through my dreams and had never stepped through the gateways in the flesh? More and more he remained in his world, pushing himself to find the reasons and the remedies, giving everything he had to make things right again. When he stopped coming to me, I tried to send messages, and I tried to go to him. But he would neither see me nor would he see our son, for he had found his answer and could not bear it.”

I dislodged a snag in the stream, where a charred limb had stuck in the earthen bank and caught the drifting leaves, holding them until the mass had turned black and clogged the flow. The rotting mess swirled and broke apart, moving away slowly until the golden stream ran free. “He told me he planned to destroy the gateways,” I said, “and because it would have prevented the rekkonarre from spending time in both worlds, thus dooming them to madness, he was called a child-slayer.”

“Kasparian told him that story when his mind was still quite fragile. To know the whole of it would have destroyed him again when he was only just recovering. I've no way to know how much he remembers now.” Verdonne clasped her hands in her lap. “My husband was going to destroy the gates. That's true. But the danger to his people still existed. He could not destroy the enchantment, the
vietto
that had brought the Madonai to our world in the first place, could he?” And so the storm broke.

“He came to me in the night,” said the Lady. “Lay with me as he had not done in a year, weeping every moment even as he pleasured me beyond mortal imagining. When we lay sated beside my hearth fire, he reached for his tunic and pulled out a jewel, a diamond that could have been a star brought down to earth in his hand. His body would take fire with golden light when his power was flowing. On that night, the jewel grew golden, too, so that his tears reflected its light, and I asked what was this working that grieved him so sorely. ‘It is the answer,' he said as wailing rose from the forest, first from one direction and then another. The sky darkened with the sound as if clouds had covered the stars. The night bled. And he lay in my arms with his jewel and his tears, as the wailing rose from ever more distant settlements.

“ ‘What terror is abroad this night?' I said. ‘Why do you lie here weeping and do nothing?' Never had he failed to answer our distress, giving everything of his heart, of his labor, and of his power to ease our human travails. But on that night he just gathered me in his arms and stroked my hair, and sobbed that no one suffered or was afraid. He'd seen to that, he said. I felt him quivering, cold sweat on his forehead and his breast. Soon he rolled to the side, groaning, still clutching the jewel, and I saw he was in terrible pain. ‘Love, what is it?' I said. ‘Make it stop.'

“ ‘I cannot,' he said. ‘I tried to find some other way. Truly, my darling one, I tried. But it is my people. Unless I do this, I'll have killed them all.' But, of course, that's exactly what he was doing to the humans and the rekkonarre ... killing them all and taking their pain and fear into himself to ease their way into the realm of death.”

“And who stopped him?” I said, knowing the answer even before she spoke it.

“You did, my darling—the son he cherished beyond all telling. When you woke from your sleep at my call and challenged him to end the slaughter, he could not bring himself to slay you. For love of you, he shattered his jewel before it was spent. And once he broke the spell to stop the killing, the guilt of his race's ruin and the pain and fear of ten thousand dead tore his mind apart.”

Nyel. The Nameless God. My father. Mine and not mine ... for even when my flesh and spirit knew and believed and witnessed to my mind that Verdonne did not lie, my soul clung to the gentle man of books and earth who had sired me in Ezzaria. Gareth of the line of Ezraelle was my soul's father, not a proud, tormented Madonai who had tried to exterminate the human race. No matter that he had sought to ease their way into death, the Madonai had chosen slaughter to remedy a grievous tragedy. And because he had been a good and honorable man, he had gone mad from it.

His son had become his jailer and lived on until the split that had sent the rai-kirah into exile and the human sorcerers back to Ezzaria. And though his physical body had died a thousand years in the past, that son still lived, an inseparable part of me.