Restoration (64 page)

“So what are we to do?” I said. The day's false warmth had fled, and I hunched my cloak about my shoulders, turning away from the rising north wind so I would not have to look upon the fortress and the wall and a future that terrified me.

“Give him back his hope.”

Such a simple, pleasant phrase to describe a nightmare. I turned on the Lady, such fear and anger rising up in me that my body quivered. “Let him make me a monster to follow him? I cannot do it.” For I could see his strategy now. Yes, he wanted his son strong and powerful, a true Madonai ... a god. But he also wanted me ruthless, free of the weakness that had caused him to fail. No wonder he hated Aleksander. No wonder ... holy stars of night, no wonder he wanted to know more of my own son. “You're telling me to give up my human soul. Don't you understand? I've seen what I'll become. I can't do it.”

The Lady's calm reason was terrifying. “You tried to contain his power with your enchantments, and for a very long time you succeeded. But the Twelve are tired, fading, and no Madonai are left to give themselves to the wall. Our friends paid a terrible price to allow him to live, hoping that someday his madness would heal and that he would again bless both worlds with his love.” Verdonne laid her hand on my arm, trying to soothe my agitation, strolling through the yellow trees as if we were discussing the weather or the price of flour in the market.

She told me how I—Valdis—had no more been able to slay my father for his crime than he had been able to hurt me, and so I had designed a way to contain his power. Twelve Madonai—out of so many who loved him, I'd had to choose—had allowed me to weave their essence into a wall, for pure Madonai power was all that could hold him. A thirteenth had become the tower guardian to provide the way in and out of the fortress. Verdonne had paid the price, as well, bound to this forest forever, giving it her strength and living with its pain. And then I had woven enchantment that stripped my father of his name. I had led him into the fortress and soothed his raving terrors, for it was to be a very long while until his mind regained any semblance of balance.

“Before many years had passed, the rekkonarre began to forget the prisoner, just as you intended when you took his name,” she said. “The Madonai were long dead, save for Vyxagallanxchi. Verdonne and Valdis and the Nameless God became the stuff of myth. But every day you saw the fortress was a knife in your heart, and as your father regained this show of reason, you were afraid the love you bore him would weaken your resolve. That's when you and Vyx decided to destroy your own memories of him. You came here and told me what you planned, knowing that you would forget me, too.”

Time slowed to a crawl as my fingers wrapped around the black stone in my pocket. “But I recorded his name, didn't I? So that if he were ever to recover—”

“Vyx wrote it. He put it under an enchantment so that no one but you could read it.”

Vyx had not been one of the rekkonarre, but my tutor, my protector, my mentor, a young Madonai devoted to me—his half-human
attellé.
Vyx had remained with me through the long years of forgetting, through the frightening time of the prophecy when I had been persuaded that if we didn't take drastic precautions, a winged shapeshifter was going to set the Nameless God free to destroy the world—not remembering that the one we feared was my own father. After we who remained—the rekkonarre, the builders—had worked the enchantment that split our souls, Vyx lived with me through exile in Kir' Vagonoth, remembering only that someday he would have to return to a black wall in Kir‘-Navarrin to complete his life.

Truth and awe had sapped my fury. “If we cannot rebuild the wall, then what—?”

“The time has come for him to die, beloved. Let his devotion to you be our last remembrance of him. You could try to slay him now as you are, challenge him in some ‘honorable' combat or destroy him in his sleep. But we have no way to gauge his true strength save by the wall, which says he is stronger than we would wish. With Kasparian to aid him in taking power from these poor shadows that inhabit Kir'Navarrin, the risk of his victory is too great. But the only way he can make you fully Madonai is to gift you with his own power, weaving it with that which was born in you. He cannot create Madonai sorcery anew, only transfer it, and at the moment of his yielding, he will be at his most vulnerable.”

Nyel was not my true father. I did not owe him a son's loyalty. But Denas ... Valdis ... was a part of me, and if I was to live with myself, I needed to tread carefully in these matters. “What if I don't kill him, Lady? What then?”

Our path had led us back to the tower. Verdonne pulled aside a vine and laid her hands on the stone, smiling sadly and murmuring something that was beyond my hearing—a greeting to the tower guardian, I thought. Then she lifted her gaze to mine. “Perhaps nothing. He may yield you his power and fade away in his fortress, content that he has done everything possible to redeem his sins. Perhaps with the strength you bring to this completion, you will then be able to leave the fortress and do as you will. But he has had a very long time to consider his plan, and my husband was the most intelligent, most powerful of his kind, which is saying a great deal. It is possible that he could revoke his gift if you failed to live up to his expectations and complete his dreadful work.” She took my hands in hers. “Fix this duty in your mind so that you will not forget your purpose amid the magnitude of your change. You must finish what you've begun. Accept his gift and take his life while he feels the joy of the giving.”

Truth weighs heavier than other words, my soul's father had once told me. It bears a substance of its own, like an ingot that comes from the forge glowing, yet unmalleable. It rings clear like crystal when tapped, shines like silver beside lead. “And if I do this,” I said, scarcely able to form words for the constriction in my chest, “who will contain me?”

“You will find your way. You are a man with two noble spirits, one that I know as I know my own heart and one that I have only glimpsed. What my son could not do alone, you, the stranger, will enable him to accomplish. The true powers of earth and sky have brought you to this place, forged you, shaped you, honed you. I trust them. And I trust you, my son and my friend.”

There was no more to be said. In only a matter of moments I had passed through the tower wall and climbed the stairs to the quiet room. I carefully placed the black stone back in its wooden box. Kerouan. The Nameless God. I looked out through the window at the bright woodland, and then stepped across the fathomless gulf.

 

“You confound me!” Nyel's hand was poised above his game board, halted in midmotion at my declaration. “After your unhappiness of these past days, I assumed—”

“I would be grateful if you would stop ‘assuming.' I am not a child. You can allow me to make my own decisions, and you needn't hide the difficult bits. I understand the consequences of my choices, have accepted them freely, and will do so until the end. I was unhappy because I killed innocent men, forced into it because my friend Aleksander refused to trust me fully. And then I discovered that I cannot walk through these walls, because you have already begun my change. Clearly you don't trust me, either. What man, Madonai or human, would not be ‘unhappy' to discover that the two souls he trusted above any in the world could not reciprocate?”

“I have been, perhaps, overeager in my gifting.”

An understatement of the case, to be sure, but as near to an apology as I was likely to hear. “So will you do as I ask?” I said.

Nyel carefully replaced the game piece—the white warrior king—onto the black-and-gray board. He rose and walked briskly to the windows, clasping his slender hands behind his back. “As you wish. I will send you to a new dreamer with the same conditions as before. But now to satisfy your need for truth: this venture, whatever your purpose, will be the last step of my working, save for the full gifting of power. When you return you will be Madonai, body and mind. Your human frailties will be eliminated, but not without cost. Certain portions of your past ... memories, feelings ... will have faded.”

“As my scars have done? Kasparian says that even these two that remain may vanish in time.” I helped myself to a glass of wine, marveling that my hand was steady. “Perhaps you've allowed them to stay to remind me of human perfidy.” Let him make what he would of my bitterness. I was interested only in his answer.

“Ah, you are indeed perceptive. These two blemishes ... rascally difficult to erase. Their roots delve so deep. We've scarcely begun your education—so many, many lessons to be learned—but we've no need to rush, and reminders will be valuable.” He whirled about, his face alight as if the moon had risen in the southern sky beyond his garden windows. “Everything of your human past will be altered in the moment of your change. Not lost, but made remote, as if it belonged to someone else, like a story told you in your youth. Without some mitigation, such a drastic shift of mind would be frightening, I think, and I would not have you feel that I've stolen your life. So I've allowed these last physical anchors to remain until you can release them yourself, along with the painful memories they represent.”

Gods have mercy, he was proud of his plan. He was doing me a “kindness.” I breathed a little easier and, behind my folded arms, kneaded the ache buried deep in my side beneath the “blemish.” A flimsy plan had come to me in the hours since I had returned from the gamarands. A dreadful gamble with incalculable stakes. And I would not be able to depend upon myself to make the proper moves; the very thought made me queasy.

“Good enough,” I said. “I just want to be done with the business. Leave me the reminders. I'd rather not be drawn into stupid plans like this last one ... gods, their ignorant, foolish schemes. All it would have taken to prevent this disaster was for Aleksander to entrust his plan to the intermediary I had chosen. What arrogant stupidity. I thought he had learned better.”

“You are a tool they use for their own purposes,” said Nyel. “What friend forces his comrade into violating his conscience?”

Night settled on the mountain, the day's clouds scattered with the north wind. The clearing weather left the air cold, and the stars that popped out of the blackening sky were hard-edged like glass. As Nyel summoned Kasparian to send us into the world of dreams, I paced and fidgeted, grateful at the Madonai's occupation that allowed my thoughts to focus on my dreamer and what I was going to say.

Before I had composed half the words I needed, Nyel returned with Kasparian in tow. The bullish Madonai's dislike burned steady as he arranged the chairs about the game table. Verdonne's revelations had explained Kasparian's hatred and jealousy. How bitter to see your master bestow his gifts upon your jailer ... upon one who was not born Madonai ... upon the son who had not loved his father as well as the
attellé
who had given up everything to share his master's exile. How unjust must fate appear to such a one.

Kasparian lit a candle as we settled around the table. A spider crawled up the pillar of wax. Nyel, his lean face eager, had the enchantment poised on his tongue, and before the first drip of wax had slumped down the candle, engulfing the struggling spider, I was floating above the sea of dreams.

 

She was only dozing. The trail of her dream was so faint and so quickly passed that I came near missing it. But explosive enchantment had possessed me from the moment of Nyel's touch, and I would not have failed to take the path of my desire had her dream been the length of a snowflake's life in desert noonday.

“Seyonne!” Elinor pressed her back against the lemon tree, sleep startled from her dark eyes. “What are you doing here?” Her aspect was wary, but not cowering, which spoke everything necessary about her courage. To wake from an afternoon drowse and see a man standing over you clothed in naught but a sword belt and garish light could be nothing but disconcerting, especially when the last you'd heard of him was that he had brought down a building to crush your foster brother's head. Unfortunately I was not going to ease her mind on that afternoon.

“I've come for my son. It's time for him to live with me.”

I might well have struck her. She leaped to her feet, face flushed, all uncertainty dismissed. “You gave me your word!”

“Things change,” I said.

“You said you would suffer anything to keep Evan safe and loved and happy,” she said. “I believed you.”

“And so I will do. Where is he?”

“Look at yourself, Seyonne! You'll frighten him. You frighten all of us now.”

“Do you doubt me, too, Mistress? What more must I do to prove myself?” We stood face-to-face on the steep, dry slope overlooking the crude tent settlement where I had last visited my child. The sun angle was low, the world streaked and splashed with red-gold light that no one would mistake for darkness. “I will not discuss this. It's time Evan learned of me and of his rightful place in the world.”

Her graceful jaw grew hard. “And what would he learn? We don't even know what you are anymore. Even the Prince fears you've changed into something other. How can I hand over my child to one who—?”

“Evan is
my
child. He should be with me, not running about the desert with a band of miserable outlaws in the middle of a human war. With your stupidities and your ignorance, you'll all be dead within the year.” I gathered a wind to fill my wings and took a step toward the tall woman. “Do not doubt my intent, and do not test me. Remember Parassa.”

Her bold flush had faded, but she neither backed away nor withered under my glare. “None of us will forget Parassa. Was it not Parassa where your blind blood thirst killed my brother Farrol—a man who called you friend and crippled Gorrid—a man of honor and faith who has sacrificed his personal vengeance to serve your Prince? Where seven of Lord Kiril's men fell at your hand because you would not lower yourself to speak to the Aveddi? What makes you think you are fit to care for a child?”