The Seven-Petaled Shield (55 page)

“Free—you’re free,” Zevaron said, half-stunned. His words were lost in the general rejoicing.

Jaxar met his eyes, and his expression turned somber. He motioned for quiet. “Zevaron—”

“Where is she?
Where is my mother?
”

Silence answered him. His body turned cold right down to his bones, except for an explosion of incandescent fury behind his heart. “Cinath still has her! You walked out of there and left her!”

“It’s not like that—” Danar began.

Jaxar cut him off with a gesture. “For the time being, that is true,” he said to Zevaron. “I have been exonerated of all charges. My brother now believes that Tsorreh placed me under an evil spell. She is currently being held in one of the cells beneath the Old Temple of Justice, while Cinath deliberates the manner of her execution.”

Zevaron felt as if he had been pierced with a blade of ice. His chest muscles locked. He could not breathe.

“Do not lose heart, for this is only the middle of the story,” Jaxar went on in a kindly, encouraging tone. “It is not yet the end. We will—we
must
—work on her behalf, and do everything we can.”

The sincerity in the older man’s voice only fueled Zevaron’s anger. These people were Gelon, the enemy. They took care of their own and only their own. Why had he expected otherwise? They cared nothing for anyone or anything else.

A sense of fairness, however, gave him pause. Tsorreh had been brought here as a prisoner, but that was not Jaxar’s fault, nor was the madness of the Ar-King.

“My husband, you must rest,” Lycian pleaded. “You have been through a terrible ordeal, but it is over now.”

Zevaron’s vision cleared, so that he looked on Jaxar with different eyes. The older man was clearly worse, his eyes ringed by cadaverous shadows, his puffy cheeks ashen, and his breathing labored. Yet Jaxar refused his wife’s supporting arm and kept his attention on Zevaron, waiting for a response.

“Go with her, Father, please,” Danar pleaded. “I’ll try to make him see reason.”

Zevaron dipped his head, ashamed. He had been ready to heap judgment upon a man who had tried to befriend his mother under very difficult circumstances. He searched for words, but none came.

“My boy,” Jaxar touched Zevaron’s arm, his fingers soft and cold. “I cannot promise—” He broke into a spasm of coughing.

Lycian gave orders to the servants to bring Jaxar to his bed chamber. This time he did not resist.

Danar remained, glaring at Zevaron. “Come up to the laboratory, where we can talk.”

When they were safely out of hearing, Danar turned on Zevaron. “How dare you make things any harder for my father, after everything he has done for Tsorreh? Don’t you think he is as worried about her as you are? Can’t you see what it cost him, those few days as a prisoner? He could have
died
, you insolent lout, and he still might!”

Zevaron fully expected Danar to strike him, so hot and passionate were Danar’s words. “I am sorry,” Zevaron said slowly. “I hope he will recover.”

“You’d better pray to whatever gods you believe in, because if he does not get better, Tsorreh has no hope.”

In the space between one beat of his heart and the next, Zevaron saw everything in a different light. “She has
you
.”

Danar took a step backward, his face going pale. Zevaron thought he would insist he had no power to help. Then Danar’s expression softened.

“You are right. I do not know what I can do, but I have
been finding out. I do not have my father’s influence, but I am not entirely helpless. Whether you believe it or not, I love Tsorreh. Perhaps not the way you do, as a mother. These four years—I think I would have gone mad, living in the same house as my stepmother. Tsorreh has been my elder sister, my teacher, my friend.”

“I did not know,” Zevaron said, mortified. Yet why should it come as a surprise that Tsorreh had made friends even in the stronghold of her enemies? He had seen her only as the mother he had sworn to protect.

“She said,” Danar’s voice choked and he looked away, drawing a breath before he could continue, “she said the first time we met that I reminded her of you.”

And you have been a faithful ally to her. She has not been alone because of you. And Jaxar.

“Let us work together for her sake,” Danar said softly. “We are not your enemies, my father and I.”

“Tell me, then, what I must do.”
Even if it means waiting in silence.

“Rest, be ready. Tomorrow, if he is able, my father will arrange for us to see her. Then you can give her your strength and courage. The rest—it will not be easy, but we will keep trying.”

After Danar departed, Zevaron sat alone in the laboratory, trying to reconcile his jumbled, discordant impressions. For so long, things had been simple. He had known who was on his side and who was not. The fact remained that his mother was in the hands of Meklavar’s most ruthless adversary, that once again her life was in jeopardy. There was nothing he could do, alone, to save her.

He went to Tsorreh’s sleeping pallet and picked up the folded cloth she had used as a pillow. He buried his face in it, inhaling the lingering scents. And tried not to weep.

D
URING the night, Zevaron wrestled with the almost overpowering desire to rescue Tsorreh himself. In the end, he accepted that while it might be possible for him to reach her by stealth, there was no chance for the two of them to escape that way. He’d have to rely on Jaxar for that.

The next morning, however, Jaxar was too ill to leave his chamber. His steward dosed him with various herbal infusions and insisted on a regimen of rest. Jaxar’s interpretation of rest must have been very liberal, for by the early afternoon, he had arranged for Danar to see Tsorreh, accompanied by Zevaron as his bodyguard. Lycian went about her own affairs, taking several of her own maidservants as her escort.

Danar emerged from his chamber dressed in a cloak over a tunic of linen so fine, it shimmered in the light. The cloak was trimmed in purple and blue, a reminder of his royal lineage.

“You’ll do very well as you are.” Danar indicated Zevaron’s Denariyan clothing.

“I won’t attract too much notice?” Zevaron asked.

“That’s just what you
will
do. You will be so garish and offensive to the eye that no one will see the Meklavaran beneath the Denariyan disguise.” When Zevaron gave his
best piratical scowl, Danar laughed. “Everyone knows Denariyans are too barbaric to understand Gelone.”

Danar was right. Zevaron was just another strange, colorful servant in a city filled with the exotic. A Meklavaran attempting to contact Tsorreh would only furnish further proof of a conspiracy. That would be all Cinath needed to execute her without further delay.

They walked, following the route Zevaron had taken with Lycian. Danar strode through the more crowded intersections with practiced ease, clearly accustomed to going everywhere in the city on his own feet. Zevaron tried to look fierce, scowling at everyone the way the bodyguard of a son of a noble family should. Whereas he had not particularly cared what happened to Lycian, now he was acutely aware of the dangers Danar invited by walking, unarmed and undisguised, through such crowds. Everyone clearly knew who he was, or whose son he was. Zevaron remembered what Danar had said about the value of making the arrests public.

People are watching. People are remembering.

“That’s the new Temple of Justice,” Danar said, pointing. “It was built in my grandfather’s time.” He indicated a broad white stone building decorated with friezes depicting historical events, or so Zevaron assumed. Even ignorant of the niceties of Gelonian art, he recognized the artist’s skill.

“Inside, it’s even more impressive,” Danar said. “The central atrium is three stories tall, most of it taken up by a gilded statue of Ir-Pilant, under whose auspices all legal proceedings take place. My old tutor used to take me through these buildings and lecture me on their architecture. I’ll show you another time, if we have a chance.”

“We’re not going there now?”

Danar shook his head. “There are no dungeons there, so they use the cells beneath the Old Temple. My grandfather believed that if Ir-Pilant—his own personal god, by the way—were pleased with the temple, there would be such perfect justice, there would be no need for prisons.”

The stone of the Old Temple might originally have been
a deep orange, but over time had weathered and darkened in streaks. The walls looked to Zevaron as if the skies themselves had bled over them. The entrance was lightly guarded, but as they passed into the dim, slightly dank interior, they were closely watched. Zevaron tried to look stern and stupid as Danar went through a series of brief meetings with one official or another. He could not follow the convoluted legal justification for the visit and was grateful it did not seem to daunt Danar.

In the wake of a senior official, they passed along a windowless corridor, gated at both ends. Zevaron’s task was to hold the torch that was their sole light. He grimaced as the barred iron door clanged shut behind them. As they descended the rough cut stone stairs, the temperature fell. The air turned clammy.

“My tutor said these passages were originally mining tunnels,” Danar said to the official. “They provided the stone for the foundation of Aidon.”

“Yes, indeed,” the official replied, “for I once saw an old map that showed the system extending to the edge of the city in the time of our fathers’ fathers. Only a small area, here beneath the temple, is presently used.”

They came to a landing and another barred gate. From there, the stairs descended into a well of blackness and stagnant air. Zevaron did not want to think what it was like to be locked away in the bowels of the earth, away from sun and air, with the dense oppressive silence and the soul-gnawing fear of being forgotten, penned in the dark for eternity. Danar had said these warrens were not meant for long-term incarceration, but who would know? How many enemies of the Ar-King had simply disappeared into these depths?

The official unlocked the door, and it swung open with a creak. Beyond lay a hallway, wide enough to accommodate a small table and two chairs. In the light of a torch set into a wall sconce, a single guard sat playing with a set of carved bones amid the remains of a meal, a heavy pottery mug and plate with several dry, curled bread crusts. The other wall
bore two doors, age darkened wood pierced by an open grate at eye level. Zevaron felt an unexpected ripple of relief, that Tsorreh had at least a little light and the sounds of another human being.

The guard scooped the bones into a pouch and bowed to the official. They exchanged a few words, then the guard unlocked one of the wooden doors and stepped aside for Danar to enter the cell. A faint whispering sound, cloth over stone or straw, came from within.

“Your servant must remain outside,” the official said, and by his tone he clearly felt that Zevaron should not have been admitted to the temple in the first place.

Danar paused on the threshold, turning back with a frankly imperious air. “You don’t seriously suggest, my dear sir, that I approach this accursed sorceress without protection? What if she should cast a spell, and he were not here to take it upon his own body? The information I must obtain from her is crucial to my father’s investigation, but not at the risk of such an attack. I shall depart immediately to inform him of your failure to provide suitable security for this interview.”

“No, no,” the official said. “Please, it is not a problem. Your bodyguard may enter. I understand completely.”

“Then you also understand that whatever is said here must remain confidential.”

“You have my oath upon it!”

“And
his
?” Danar said, staring pointedly at the guard.

The official sputtered protestations for a moment, then quickly decided that since Danar had such confidence in his own bodyguard, the most prudent course would be to leave Danar and Zevaron alone with the prisoner.

“That will be sufficient,” Danar said, but he watched until the outer door clicked shut behind the official.

“Danar?” Tsorreh stood in the doorway of her cell, a slender shape in the wavering light. The Arandel token glinted in her hair. “Danar—and oh, Zevaron!”

Zevaron caught her, lifting her off the ground for an instant. He felt sick that she had endured even an hour in
this hideous place. He heard the sob in her breath, but once she was back on her feet and able to talk, her voice was steady.

“Danar,” she began, “I have not words enough to thank you for bringing Zevaron to me. Your soul shines with your goodness.”

Danar looked embarrassed. “Father says he will not rest until he obtains your release.”

“He must not make himself ill again on my account. Who would nurse him back to health?” She touched Danar’s cheek with one hand. “Let us not deceive one another with hope. Cinath must have someone to blame for Thessar’s death. With Jaxar exonerated—and not beyond suspicion, do not believe that for a moment—the entire blame must therefore fall upon me.”

“Mother, no!” Zevaron broke in, appalled. “Do not say that, not when those who love you are ready to fight!”

“There is still much we can do,” Danar protested.

“Do not give in to despair,” Zevaron said. “I almost did, after Gatacinne. But you are still alive, and I have found you. We have survived too much to give up now.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Tsorreh said, with the hint of a smile. “Let us not waste this precious time in argument. Danar, I must speak privately with my son.”

Danar left them and closed the cell door almost to the point of latching. A moment later, Zevaron heard Danar speaking with the guard, and the muffled sounds of the outer door opening and closing. What Danar said to the guard, Zevaron could not guess, nor did he spare the time to wonder.

“Quickly now!” Tsorreh cried, her breath as fast as if she had just run across the city. She lowered herself to a patch of filthy straw and held out one hand to him. “We may have only a few moments.”

“Mother, are you ill?”

She took his face between her hands, peering into his eyes. “I feared I would never see you again.”