Restoration (73 page)

On the road from Drafa to Zhagad on the morning of his coronation, Aleksander had asked me to remain with him as his First Counselor. “Athos knows, I need someone to help me figure out how all this is going to work. It's not exactly the living I offered you four years ago, but you'll never want. And as it's all your doing, it seems only fair that you should haul about with me to see it finished.”

I told him I would think about it. And so I had, and about Evan and Elinor and Ezzaria as well.

On a late afternoon, five days after Aleksander's coronation, I knocked on the door of a modest dwelling in the outer ring of Zhagad with a brace of chickens hanging over my shoulder. Blaise, Evan, Elinor, and several of Blaise's outlaws were temporarily housed with a dye maker, the father of one of the outlaws, who still wept with relief every time he saw his daughter walking openly about the city, wearing a badge of valor granted by the new Azhaki king.

“I've brought dinner,” I said when Elinor opened the door, “courtesy of Yulai and Magda.”

Elinor expressed surprise to see me. “Blaise staggered in an hour ago,” she said, pointing to the body sprawled across one corner of the hot little room, snoring profoundly, “but he fell asleep while taking his boots off. He said he's been talking for five days straight, and that the King looks to go five more without stopping. I assumed you were with him.” Gingerly she took my proffered fowl. “Shall I cook these or are you going to join the snoring?”

“Chickens are hard to come by right now,” I said. “It would be a shame to waste them. But first, I'd like to talk with you a bit about—”

Evan barged into the room just then, insisting on showing me a new sling that Roche had made him for his third birthday. “Mam said that you will show me how to use it properly. I am to use the very smallest stones, and call out before I let one go, and never, ever, ever use it inside a house.” His blue-black eyes were wide and solemn as he pronounced the rules. Elinor's wry expression, along with a pile of broken pottery sitting on the table, told me the source of his solemnity.

“Those sound like very good rules,” I said. “And it looks to be a fine sling. When the day cools a bit, we'll go out and try it.”

While Evan regaled me with unending chatter about Roche and the sling and his small disaster with Dyana's favorite pot, Elinor shrugged and took the chickens out into the courtyard behind the house to clean them. All through the cooking and eating, as I held Evan on my lap and showed him how to hold his sling, as I listened to the exuberant conversation of the dye maker and his family, and laughed as they made jokes about Blaise's trumpeting snores, I watched Elinor move through the noise and heat of the cramped house with quiet humor and grace. When the shadows were long across the city, the dye maker's family set off for the market to drink nazrheel and listen to the day's gossip. I took Evan into the courtyard and spent an hour laughing and dodging his small leather pouch as it whirled about his head and showered us with pebbles. When the boy and I had collapsed on the paving, spent with our efforts and good humor, I noticed Elinor standing in the doorway of the house watching us.

“You wanted to talk,” she said.

Evan's head was bent over his pebbles as he began arranging them carefully by color and size in the cracks of the paving. Though he took no notice and concentrated on his private game, I stroked his dark hair. “I heard this morning that Aleksander had asked you to travel with Blaise-a dennissar in your own right—but that you had refused him. I assume you understand what it meant for him to offer-the respect he has for you—”

“—and that I'm a woman. Yes, I understand. And I was honored. But I told him I wished to live quietly for a while. A child should not grow up knowing only war and politics.”

She said nothing more. Just stood there. Waiting. She didn't make things easy.

“Yes. Exactly so ...” What was it I had come to say? It seemed so feeble. So presumptuous. “... and so I thought ... you'll need some way to live wherever you plan to settle ... and I could find work as a scribe, perhaps, now my hand is working better ... so I could be close by ...”

“But the Aveddi relies on you. His First Counselor, I've heard. Will you not roam the deserts with him?”

Her manner was impassive, curious, while my face was surely as hot as the aforementioned deserts. “He can come wherever I happen to be or call on me as he wishes. I'll always answer his need. But I've no more yearning to roam the deserts than you do, and some things are more important even than Aleksander and his kingdom.” I pushed a pile of black pebbles toward Evan's hand and watched his small fingers place them in the cracks. “Unless you tell me not, I'll go wherever you go.”

“And what if I say I choose Parnifour or Hollen or some other place far from Azhakstan ... far from Ezzaria? Would you truly go there and do scribe's work to keep us?”

“I will do whatever is necessary. I told you that before. It has not changed.”

“Aye, so you said”—a change in her voice drew my eyes upward to meet her own—“and so you have done.”

So much spoken in those simple words. Faith. Trust. Understanding. A generous spirit ... waiting. Her utterance opened a door in my heart and gave me a glimpse of possibility. I searched her strong and lovely face and saw nothing to contradict my hearing.

Quickly I packed Evan's fist full of pebbles, hefted him onto my shoulders, and stood up, praying he would stay occupied and quiet for a little while. “Mistress Elinor, would you honor me by walking out this evening ... to the market ... for a cup of nazrheel?”

She tilted her head as if giving the matter due consideration. Then she nodded. “Perhaps we need to take up our conversation exercises again. This would be a fine evening for it.” Her mouth curled ever so slightly at the left corner.

Before I could so much as get across the courtyard and take Elinor's arm, a barefoot, yawning Blaise walked out of the dim house behind her and, without a single word, snatched a giggling Evan from my back and disappeared back into the house. One might have thought he was standing there waiting for the opportunity.

Our conversation exercise wandered slightly farther afield that night; Elinor wanted to know all about Ezzaria and what it might be like as a place to raise a shapeshifting child. We would need to discuss a great deal more as the days passed, but the evening's conversation was pleasant. Exceedingly pleasant.

 

Seven days after the Day of Judgment, and six days after Aleksander's coronation, I stood in the evening light at the top of a towering dune awaiting the King of Azhakstan. He had sent word that he was determined to ride out on this evening, to take one hour away from advisers, petitioners, stewards, and job seekers, and that he would appreciate the company of someone who didn't want him to do anything.

I was smiling when he rode up the dune, his red hair flying, for I had just spent an afternoon with Lydia and young Sovari Ly diazar Aleksandreschi zha Denischkar. Life would never be dull for the royal family of Azhakstan. The tiny boy's hair was fiery red, and after giving me a toothless grin charming enough to melt stone, he took up yelling louder than a chastouain prodding his balky beast through the desert.

Aleksander slipped gracefully from his white horse and whispered whatever command ensured the beast would stay patiently where it was left. Part of his own special magic. “Holy Athos, I had to threaten everyone with hanging to get them to stay behind. You haven't let anyone slip you a petition just in case you saw me, have you?”

“Not a one. Perhaps I could come up with something, though.”

He groaned and motioned me to walk with him across the crest of the sand until we were out of sight of the haffai-clad guards clustered at the base of the dune. The empty desert stretched out before us, splashed with purple and gold. As we slipped and slid our way to a second crest where we could see no one and hear nothing but the quiet stirring of the wind, his shoulders relaxed and he sighed in pleasure. “Here, let's sit for a while. I need this.”

He spread his cloak on the sand and settled there, leaning back on his elbows. He cocked his head as I sat beside him. “You're not going to stay with me, are you, Seyonne?”

I laughed and shook my head. “How can you tell so quickly? We haven't spoken in almost a week. And I only just decided.”

“This time I cheated. Fiona told me you were talking of going to Ezzaria. And something's been troubling you since you came back—no wonder that. So, will going home remedy it?”

Of course Aleksander would be the one to notice. I scooped up a handful of the warm sand and let it trickle through my fingers. “I hope.”

“Tell me, Seyonne. You owe me that. I came a gnat's eyebrow from killing you, and you insist that you intended it, though you knew it would be a deed that would haunt me the rest of my life. You took your son to that place not knowing how things would fall out. That tells me the magnitude of your fear, and that you have accomplished some dreadful task that we ordinary folk will likely never comprehend. Whatever happened between you and the old man before he died brought you back safely, and I thank the everlasting gods for it. But you are my friend and brother, and I would know what grieves you.”

He was right. I owed him everything, and so, against all intent, I told him everything. As the purple shadows lengthened across the dunes, I spoke of Kerouan and Valdis and Verdonne, of traveling in dreams and the bargain that allowed me to participate in his war, of the crumbling wall and my unquenchable craving for sorcery. I told him of my dilemma: how I could neither allow mad Kerouan to keep his power nor risk him recouping it from me in displeasure, how I could not slay the old sorcerer and keep the power myself without ensuring my own corruption, certain that if I violated my demon's warnings while I possessed the unfettered melydda of a Madonai, I would become the tyrant to end all tyrants. “... and so I had to take the power and die with it. Your promise was my only hope, and dragging Evan into danger and trusting Blaise and Elinor to witness to my change were the only ways I could think of to convince you. Thanks to Kasparian, we were given another choice. And in the end ... seeing you and Elinor there ... thinking of Evan ... I had enough memory of my true life and enough reason to know that I did not want to continue without feeling. I could see no point to such an existence, no matter how long. Unlike Kerouan's expectation, I would have felt no satisfaction in killing you or any human. So I told him I would give him back his name, if he would take back what he had given and die with it ...” My voice trailed away much as the sunlight was fading from the sky.

“And you were left—Oh, mighty gods, Seyonne. You have no melydda.”

I brushed the sand from my hands and from my boots. “Not a scrap.” I tried to smile it away. “It feels a bit more final than before, when I was a slave. But you never know.” The loss itself was bearable. I had lived powerless for many years. But it was very hard that I would never be able to show my son how to enchant a light with his fingers or to fly with him through the heavens and catch him if he fell. “I appreciate your concern, but you mustn't worry. My father lived a blessed life without melydda. I'll not spend the rest of mine mourning a gift that most people never dream of.”

“Like lost empires?”

I grinned. “But you'll not rot in some Thrid jungle, either.”

“Indeed.” He sighed and twisted his face into a rueful grimace, still laced with worry about me.

Only one sure path to get him off this morbid sympathy. I had told him so much; I might as well tell him the other thing. “As long as you are dredging up my deepest secrets, I've one more to confess.”

“Which is?”

“I walked out with a woman last night. Just walked, talked a bit, nothing else. But last summer you made me promise to tell you whenever the great day came.”

Aleksander stared at me in wonderment and then exploded into laughter, flopping onto his back and clapping his hands to his head.

“I didn't think it was all that unlikely,” I said, a bit miffed at the level of his hilarity.

“Athos be praised,” he said when he finally regained control of his humor. “She finally got you to look at her and not just the boy. Gods, you didn't take him along with you when you walked out?”

“Blaise watched him,” I said, wondering if I would ever be able to surprise Aleksander with anything short of the destruction of the world. “And what do you mean ‘got me to look at her'? She's despised me for a year.”

We talked into the midnight hours, Aleksander shooing his worried guards away with a message for his wife and another for his aides, saying that business could wait until sunrise. At last, as the moon settled onto the silvered desert, our conversation slowed, and, knowing our hour had long passed, we stood to go. I watched from the crest of the dune as he sprang onto his horse and started down toward his kingdom. He looked back once and raised his hand. “Be healed, my guardian, and happy.”

And I called after him. “Be wise, my king, and glorious.”

 

Before another week had passed, Elinor, Evan, and I set out for Ezzaria. Blaise left us at the border, the rocky cleft that would lead us over the mountains and down into the green and sheltering forests. He would have led us all the way to my destination, the nameless settlement where my mother, the Weaver, and my father, the farmer, had taught me how to live, but I wanted to savor every step and introduce Elinor and Evan to every rock and tree along the path. We took a week to travel the rest of the distance, and never had I known days of such peace and delight.