Restoration (67 page)

The main room was large and would command a fine view of the gardens. Shelves lined one wall, filled with toy ships and balls, books and paper, and sticks of coal to draw with. Under the wide casements stood a clothes chest stocked with new shirts, breeches, undergarments, and boots of the proper size. A conjured servant was just laying out a supper of cold meat, apples, and toasted bread on a small, low table. While I stood in the doorway watching, Mistress Elinor sat on the rug beside the bedroom fire and helped the boy change into a well-worn nightshirt pulled from a traveling bundle. I considered leaving. I had no interest in bedroom rituals; servants could learn such things and carry them out when the nursemaid was dead or gone. Yet I stayed, listening and watching.

“... But this is your new house ...” said the woman, when the child popped up from her lap and tried with pokes and shoves to stand her up, demanding to go home. “... and it is a very nice house with many new things to see. Here, have some supper. You've not eaten in ever so long.” She pulled the boy onto her lap, coaxing him to try a bite of cold fowl. He shook his head, but accepted a square of toast, watching the servant make up the small bed that stood against one wall.

The bed prepared, the plain-faced serving woman picked up several cloth-wrapped bundles that lay by the outer door and pointed to a smaller doorway off to one side. “I'll put your things in your room,” she said to Elinor.

“Leave them, please. I'll be staying in here.”

“Your room is next to this. Not so large, but sufficient.” The servant was of Kasparian's creation and bidding, and so, of course, quite expressionless and unintelligent.

“As I said, I'll be sleeping in here with my son.”

“But you've no bed here for sleeping, and I'll not be moving any furniture without I'm told by Master Kasparian.”

The human woman shrugged and shifted her attention back to the child, picking up the dropped toast. Clearly the argument was concluded, though the simpleminded servant who disappeared through the door with the traveling bags did not understand who had won.

I admired strength in a woman, though I knew better than to trust the one who possessed it. As I crossed the room to join the woman and boy by the fire, my hand rubbed the nagging reminder on my side. This woman must be taught to bend; she claimed my child as her own.

“Hello, Evan. May I join your supper?” I said, bowing to him slightly.

The child buried his face in the woman's breast. Of course any child was fearful of new circumstances and unfamiliar faces. I seated myself in an armchair a few steps away from the two,

thinking that perhaps he would be less shy if I were not so tall. Taking an apple and a knife from the table, I cut off a thin wedge and offered it to the boy. “I'm pleased you've come to live with me, Evan. I've been waiting a very long time for us to be together.” A very long time. I looked into the past to review the course of our separation and was appalled at what I could remember of it—a legacy of rampant ignorance and fear, injustice and cruelty. I recalled an image of this woman staring down at a crippled man who had been dreadfully mutilated and other humans hacked into bloody refuse, and her face as she blamed me for the carnage—

The boy snatched the piece of apple from my hand.

“Say thank you to”—the woman looked over at me—“what should he call you? He still thinks of Gordain as his da.”

Gordain. A human man, not even rekkonarre. “You will speak no more of Gordain to my son. I would not have him mourn a human. In a Madonai house, the male parent is addressed as ‘Fyothe.' The closest human word would be ‘Papa.' ”

The woman nodded, burying any retort, as well as the questions that came so clearly to her tongue. She would not even know the term Madonai. “Evan, say, ‘Thank you, Papa.' ”

The boy squirmed and murmured something like, then buried his face again while beginning to nibble at the bit of apple. I cut off another wedge. “I will not tolerate your teaching him to fear me.” I made sure my tone was nothing that would frighten the boy.

“Seyonne”—the woman lowered her voice, glancing sidewise at the doorway to the adjoining room—“we need to talk privately.”

“With regard to ... ?”

She examined my face carefully, perplexed and hesitant, all her bravado fallen away. “Give me a sign, Seyonne,” she whispered, pleading in a most pitifully human way. “We thought—The Prince was sure—After what you said about promises and faith—”

The servant returned and began to bank the fire for the night. The woman glanced at the servant's back and spoke in a normal tone again, though her face had not lost the probing worry. “Your somber manner surprises me. Prince Aleksander says you are prone to telling bad jokes at awkward times such as these.”

I could not understand her strange manner. “I find little humor in anything human, Mistress Elinor. My experiences in your world belie any inclination toward it.” The servant left again. I jumped up from my chair, unable to sit still. The woman's comments unsettled me, as if a spark had shot from a too close fire and stung my forehead between my eyes. I hated the sensation. “And do not presume. As I've told you before, I am not the man this human prince knows; I have discarded that part of my existence. You are a servant, remaining here by my forbearance, and I would advise you to remember it. You should address me as Master Valdis.”

A certain brightness deserted the woman's face, as when the last vestige of the sun's disk slips below the horizon, leaving the actual daylight little changed, but its quality irrevocably altered. She began to rock the boy slowly, laying her cheek on his dark head as his heavy eyelids sagged. “Valdis,” she said. “The name of the Ezzarian god. I thought you disdained the role of god.”

“Ezzarians have no concept of what or whom they speak.”

“Then tell me, Master Valdis, why is it so important that Evan should be moved here now, and so quickly? We've tended him well, kept him from harm, loved him as is a child's right. The war has moved farther from our settlement, and so there is no immediate threat to his safety. You've had little time to spend with him in the past, and if you continue your participation in the Aveddi's war, that will likely not change. What do you think is going to happen in the human world that you no longer trust us to protect the boy?”

I tossed the knife and the remains of the apple onto the table. “I wish my son safe. I don't remember exactly why I felt it necessary to move so quickly.”

“You don't remember?” Her head popped upright. “Four days ago you threatened to kill two hundred people if I didn't get him here immediately!”

“But that was before.”

“Before what?”

The woman was a morass of impertinent questions, but I knew that daily life would be easier if we remained on reasonable, if proper, terms. So I answered her. “Before my change. Before I became wholly Madonai.” Explaining would have been easier, of course, if I had known the information she wanted. But, as with so many pieces of my discarded existence, the logic behind my actions was hazy. “I believed quite urgently that my son should be here with me, but I don't recall the entire chain of reasoning that led up to that belief. I was still human then. Human ‘reasoning' is inextricably entangled with human emotions, and such convoluted paths are difficult to recapture now that my body that generated and supported those emotions has changed so radically.”

“Your body has changed ... not human ...” Her bewildered expression was but another annoying question.

“I am now Madonai, as are my father and Kasparian, although they were born and I was gifted ... transformed. The rekkonarre—you and the rest of your race—are the product of human and Madonai mating twelve hundred years ago, a grievous mistake that has corrupted the world. In me, my father has remedied that mistake. Do you see now?”

“I'm beginning to understand. And now you are ... changed ... in this way, you remember only facts from the past—events, decisions, names—not how you felt about them or why.”

“Whatever else was involved in my decision, I will likely remember it later. Not that it matters. My son's proper place is with me, not in some human war camp at risk of slavery or mutilation, or cruel, wasteful, useless death—these damnable human plagues. He will be raised as Madonai, and when the time comes, I will give him the gift that my father has given me.”

The woman pressed her lips together, stroked the child's hair, and shifted him onto her shoulder. Her gaze did not leave my face.

Now that her questions were mercifully silenced, I took my leave. “The child sleeps. I'll see him in the morning.” I felt her eyes still fixed on me as I walked out of the door.

Disliking the murky confusions the woman raised, I returned to the ramparts, shaped my wings, and leaped into the air. Unfortunately, battling the storm wind and the annoying limits of the cursed wall did not silence the fool woman's question. Why had I brought the boy here so soon and so fast?

Indeed I had told her one part of the answer. My soul revolted at the thought that my son might someday wear scars like those on my face and my side. And the boy was rekkonarre, thus would need to spend time in both worlds. But not yet, so why was his presence so urgent?

A second part of the answer was surely that bringing Evan here would convince my father of my intent to complete my change. And so it had done. But a fortress prison housing a mad Madonai and his two companions was not a rational choice for raising a child. Until I could break the wall and decide what to do about my father, having the boy here held its own dangers.

Which meant there was a third part to the answer, and that one, to my head-bursting frustration, I could not remember. And so I twisted and dived in the wind over the mountain, letting the storm batter my body and monopolize my attention.

 

When morning came, cold and overcast, I bathed, dressed, and resisted the urge to make my way immediately to my son's chamber. He was still half human. He would be sleeping or breakfasting. I needed to go dream traveling, and so I met Kasparian in the library, the room I had chosen for my own study. But no sooner had the sullen Madonai sat down at the worktable and begun his enchantment, than I pushed his hand away and dismissed him. “We'll do this tomorrow,” I said. “I need to reconsider my objectives in this war.”

Before a quarter of an hour had passed, I was watching from a tower window as the woman and Evan walked out into the winter garden, bundled in cloaks and scarves. The child ran from pond to statue to frozen fountain, laughing and teasing, climbing and hiding and running. The woman was always there to pull him away from the frozen ponds, to brush the snow from his clothes before it could melt, to help him down when he had climbed too high, to laugh with him when he bumped a tree trunk and showered the two of them with snow. Soon they wandered deeper into the garden, where I could no longer see them. Before I could decide whether to go out and join them, I heard a terrified wailing.

I sped through the castle, shaping my wings and taking to the air the moment I was out of doors, following the sound to its source. The woman stood on a snow-covered knoll, clutching the sobbing Evan. Though I saw no blood, no hurt on the boy, no evidence of broken limbs, the woman's cheeks were also streaked with tears. Only when I touched earth beside them did I grasp what distressed them. Down a short incline the man Blaise lay on a flat section of the lawn, faceup, his limbs bound and stretched between four stakes. His garments were stiff with ice, his hair and brows frosted, and he was shivering violently. The rope of light still circled his neck, preventing him from speaking.

“He will not die,” I said. “His punishment lasts only until midnight. He will be very cold, but perhaps he will remember to obey my commands.” Snow drifted from the heavy clouds.

Pressing the sobbing child to her shoulder, the woman walked slowly down the slope until she stood only a few paces from the prisoner. “How can you do this? Blaise is your friend. He helped save you from despair. He has loved and cared for your child—”

“—and I have saved Blaise from madness and preserved his life countless times. But does that give him leave to violate my home? Does appreciation for past deeds oblige me to allow him opportunity to steal my child away?” Why was reason so alien to human thought?

“Seyonne is truly dead, then,” she said, shifting her gaze from the shivering man to me. “This change that has transformed your body has also destroyed your heart.”

“Indeed,” I said, looking down at the man and feeling nothing. “I believe that was the point.”

 

The weather worsened all through that day. I had Kasparian watch to ensure the man did not die or lose a limb to frostbite, and at midnight I went myself to set him free. What pain he suffered was likely the result of restored circulation and cramping muscles. But the discomfort was evidently considerable, as his eyes glistened with tears as he watched me unbind him. Unfortunate, but necessary. I gave him my hand, and he stumbled to standing.

“Tell your fellows,” I said.

He nodded, pressed his bony hands to the black wall, and vanished.

 

 

Evidently the incident served warning enough to still the woman's combative nature. Her font of questions dried up, and her attempts at familiarity ceased. Only her unrelenting observation was left to irritate me. Unfortunately, the child was bothered enough by the memory of Blaise's punishment that he would neither leave his room, nor engage with anyone but Elinor. In order to confront this distancing before it festered into fear and to ensure the woman did not encourage it, I spent most of Evan's waking hours with the two of them, delaying yet again my return to the human war.