The Spirit Gate (28 page)

Yawning again, she squeezed her eyelids tightly closed and
rolled her eyes behind them, hoping to scrub away the grit of hovering sleep.
Just a few more paragraphs, she told herself. She wanted to hear more about
Leliwa, wanted to know that he was like her Shurik, kind and gentle and loving.
Just a few more paragraphs before she slept . . .

Decembris 17:
Leliwa wants to marry me. He has already informed
his family and sought his father’s
permission. They are apparently more than pleased to have an Apprentice Mateu
as a bond-daughter and have sent me a chest full of rich wedding gifts. The
evening of Saturnek after e’en
prayers I will go to Leliwa’s
house to begin planning our wedding. I am glorious with happiness. I have told
my Master, and he says he will be pleased to perform the marriage rite on the
day of our Lord and Lady’s
wedding feast.

Itugen mine, Aprilus is so far away—must I really wait until then? But I am an
Apprentice Mateu, and it is only proper that I share my wedding day with Mat
and Itugen.

Kassia smiled, recalling how her family had felt when she
and Shurik informed them that they would not wait for the Wedding Festival to
be married. They had met at Solstice, when Shurik Cheslaf brought his wares to
Dalibor’s Summer
Festival for sale. Love had come immediately—insistently. There was no thought of waiting until
the next spring. They were married at the end of the Festival, and Shurik had
returned to Ohdan only long enough to bid his family good-bye and collect his
belongings for the move to Dalibor.

She remembered the day as if it were yesterday—the warm summer Sun,
the nodding tops of the cedars of Lorant, the incense of their risen sap. Her
little family and their few friends gathered about while a young priest led the
wedding celebration. Then she and Shurik had run into the woods laughing,
seeking a bower in which to consummate their bond. A bower where none could see
but the God and Goddess who would bless their union.

Kassia felt an unexpected flush of sensual pleasure at the
memory. She had never thought of Shurik like this in the years since his death.
It had been too painful. Now, it was merely insistent, filling her with a sense
of need that, after some moments faded to balmy contentment. She let the
sensations pull her into a place of slumber where she dreamed of being loved by
a man well-versed in love’s
rituals. She gave over to the dream, hungry to hold Shurik again, thirsty for
his kisses. But it was not Shurik she gave herself to, some detached part of
herself insisted. Shurik was dead. Shurik was a face she could not even be
certain she remembered. To prove the voice wrong, she sought the face of her lover.
He had none.

She woke, feeling strange, feeling as if she was not alone
here. Her spirit flame still burned, floating in the air next to the bed. She
scanned the room with bleary eyes. For the briefest moment, she imagined the
mirror across from the foot of her bed was aglow with a soft, spectral light.
She rubbed her eyes and looked again. The glow, if it had ever existed, was
gone.

Sighing for the loss of the dream, Kassia extinguished her
reading light, snuggled down beneath the blankets, and returned to sleep. She
recalled no other dreams, but felt as if she was floating in a river of magic
that eddied around her, lapping, swirling, tugging her this way and that. She
had no choice but to let the river take her where it would.

Morning found her refreshed, feeling radiant, gleaming. She
washed, dressed, and went out to the cesia for her morning devotions. Zelimir
was already there, kneeling in the grass. She hesitated, but he had sensed her
presence and turned to look at her. He smiled and beckoned.

“I
am not the sole owner of this cesia,” he told her when she had drawn near. “It is here for all the citizens of my court,
yourself included. Or perhaps, for you especially.” He gestured for her to kneel
beside him.

“You
flatter me, Majesty,” she murmured, coming to her knees in the dewy grass.

“Never.
I speak only what is in my heart.”

Kassia performed her genuflections then prayed silently for
a while, trying to ignore the man next to her. But she could feel his eyes on
the side of her face.

“Majesty,” she murmured at length, “you
are not doing your devotions. I have distracted you.”

“What
makes you think I’m
not doing my devotions, Apprentice Kassia?”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “Majesty . . .”

“Mishka.
My name is Mishka.”

“You
are my king.”

“You
are my shai protector, a daughter of Itugen. Certainly a higher station than my
own. Now, I am most certainly distracting you. Please, continue your devotions.”

He did not stare at her after that, and she was able to
complete her prayers without further interruption. But when she rose, he rose
with her, and walked beside her back toward the palace.

“Have
you broken fast yet?” he asked as they neared the gallery from which Kassia had entered the
garden.

“No,
sire, I have not.”

“Then
you shall breakfast with me this morning.” He raised a hand against her
protest. “As you
so pointedly reminded me earlier, I am your king. You should not disappoint me.”

She smiled and inclined her head in acquiescence. When she
raised it, she saw that the Bishop of Tabor had come out onto the stone gallery
to meet them. There was no mistaking the disapproval on his face.

“Your
Majesty, I must speak with you on a matter of some urgency.”

Michal Zelimir made a dismissive gesture. “Later, Your Grace.”

The Bishop fixed him with a most intent gaze, a gaze that
raised the hair on the back of Kassia’s
neck and made her face feel prickly as if from a fire’s heat. She felt as if unseen forces prowled around
and between them, tugging, prodding.

“It
is a political matter, Majesty,” the Bishop said I really think—”

“I
really think that Kassia and I must have some breakfast. I don’t function at all well
until I’ve been
fed. I will speak to you later.” He took Kassia’s
arm then, and swept her into the palace, past the furious gaze of Bishop Benedict.

Glancing back over her shoulder, she met the Frankish cleric’s eyes. They were
cold, baleful, but the strangeness she had felt from them before was gone. She
shrugged away the tingling sensation that pranced across her shoulders, and let
Michal Zelimir lead her to the morning meal.

oOo

Lukasha felt Benedict looking for him. It was an odd
feeling, a tingling at the back of the neck, a sudden desire to glance around
for prying eyes. He was not precisely spoiling for a fight with the Frankish
bishop, but neither was he shy of him. He left the solitude of Master Antal’s private library and
found his way down to the atrium that ran the length of the grand reception
hall’s western
side. Benedict was there, in conversation with Joti Subutai who, seeing the
Mateu out of the corner of his eye, immediately turned and motioned toward him.
Benedict followed the gesture with his eyes and fixed Lukasha with a cold gaze.
He dismissed the Apprentice with a curt nod and made his way to Lukasha’s end of the atrium,
his gait rigid.

“Master
Lukasha, I must speak with you. Privily.”

Lukasha motioned toward a hearth on the inner wall of the
atrium around which a group of chairs had been drawn. The hearth was cold at
this hour of the day, but the Sun, falling through the thick glass panels
overhead, warmed the long hall. He seated himself, casually pushing the sleeve
of his robe above the be-webbed silver bracelet on his left wrist. Not, he
thought wryly as Benedict sat opposite him, that he would need it. The other
man was radiant with antipathy.

“Please,” Lukasha said, “speak
freely.”

“This
woman you have brought to Tabor—who
is she? What is she?”

“She
is Kassia Telek—my
Apprentice.”

“She
is a sorceress.”

“She
is shai. There is a difference.”

“I
fail to see it.”

“The
shai are pledged to harm no one. They are souls with extraordinary gifts—”

“So
Pater Julian tells me. Your shai Apprentice visited our church yesterday and
cast some hellish spell upon our altar.”

Lukasha quirked a brow. “‘>Some hellish spell?’”

“She
placed a flame upon the altar that the Pater was only barely able to put out
with the aid of the Holy Spirit.”

“Hmm.
The same power Kassia invoked to set it.”

“You
blaspheme, but I will not convict you—my
Lord will convict you. As he will convict your sorceress. I can do nothing for
your souls, for they are lost. But I will do what I can for my King’s soul.”

“Your
king? Is not your king the Most High Bishop of Avignon?”

“In
a spiritual sense, yes. But I am a citizen of this land and I will not see it
brought to ruin. I see what you try to do, Mateu. I know why you have brought
this woman to Tabor and presented her to Zelimir. You think he might marry her,
as she is one of his own. You think you might control him through her.”

Lukasha’s
lips twitched. “I
think nothing of the sort. I brought her here that she might protect him.”

“You
will take her away.”

“Will
I?”

“You
will.”

“Perhaps
if I take her away, Zelimir will refuse all others. Perhaps he will seek her
out. What then?”

“He
cannot marry a village sorceress.”

“She
is far more than that, Bishop. She is my Apprentice. By the new year she will
be an Aspirant. Then a Mateu. Among our people—among Zelimir’s people—there
is no higher station. She is every bit as noble as your Orsini duchess and has
spiritual powers beyond your reckoning.”

“There
is nothing spiritual about her. She is a danger to Michal Zelimir’s immortal soul.
Take
her away
.”

“When
she has done what I brought her here to do.”

“I
warn you, Mateu—”

Lukasha rose. “Of
what, Your Grace? Of Divine retribution? Of the power of your prayers—or of your hatred? My
prayers also have power. God listens, yes, even to the prayers of the so-called
‘pagan’. He sent Kassia to me when I despaired of ever seeing the rift between
the Mateu and the shai repaired. He sent her to Zelimir when I despaired of him
finding any woman of more than passing interest.”

“If
he marries her, his soul will be lost and his realm unprotected.”

Lukasha chuckled. “Oh,
hardly that. The state of his soul will be, as always, between himself and his God.
Let us just say of his realm that its protection would come from a power more
potent than Frankish armies.”

Now Benedict came to his feet as well. “I will fight you.”

“I
don’t doubt it,” Lukasha said and bowed to the other man. “You will excuse me, Your Grace. I have promised my
Apprentice a tour of the city.”

At the far end of the solarium, where it met the corridor,
Lukasha chanced a glance back at the other man. Benedict was looking after him
with a gaze that threatened frostbite even at this distance. The cold was
palpable enough to make the Mateu raise a reflexive ward wall against it.

Smiling grimly, Lukasha took himself out of sight. His
adversary would summon the fires of his hell if he knew how successfully Kassia
had won the King’s
favor—if he had
been party to the conversation that had transpired between Lukasha and Zelimir
only moments before in Master Antal’s
library. There the young king had poured out his heart to his old friend, and
by Benedict’s
reckoning, his soul was already lost. He was falling heels over head in love
with the snowy-haired enchantress, could no more resist her mesmerizing pull
than he could the urge to sleep or wake or dream.

Lukasha had sympathized with him: How sad that she had
appeared in his life on the eve of his having to make a political marriage; how
regrettable that she was of no political importance, that she would make, in
the eyes of many, an unsuitable match. Although, Lukasha had mused aloud, the
shai would soon regain the stature they had achieved before the Tamalid horrors
began. What might seem unsuitable now would in future be a most desirable
union.

Hearing that, Michal had rallied to a declaration of
stubborn purpose, then sobered. There were ties to be strengthened, alliances
to be forged. He could not overlook his marriage as a tool of diplomacy. Would
she accept concubinage? He would dismiss all others—easily. Already, they were forgotten. Then, perhaps
in the future if, as Lukasha said, the shai retrieved their status, he might
marry her.

Lukasha cautioned him; Kassia was no mere village lass to be
used and discarded. She wielded power even she could not imagine. To marry
another while loving her would be sure to breed trouble, personally and
politically. What of her son, Beyla? What place would he hold in the Zelimirid
Court? What would his life be like when blood heirs were born to the man to
whom he would look to as a father?

Michal had left the Mateu more uneasy of mind than when he
had found him. “I
must speak to Kassia,” he said. “Soon.”

“Don’t be reckless, Mishka,” Lukasha told him. “Who
knows? Among your potential brides there may be one who will steal your heart
absolutely.”

But Michal Zelimir could not be convinced. There was only
Kassia. The more his thoughts dwelt with her, the truer that became. In the
end, Lukasha had agreed that he would speak to his Apprentice and try to
determine where her heart lay. He would do more than that. He would try to
convince Kassia to view a suit by the king with favor. There was a good
possibility he would fail in that . . . without arcane
assistance. He wondered if the magic that had worked so well on a mere man like
Michal Zelimir would have any effect on Kassia Telek.

oOo

Decembris 19:
I found the most peculiar reference today in the
writings of Pater Honorius to traveling between here and Tabor (Sandomir, he
called it). He wrote, “I
will be in Sandomir tomorrow.” But the entry is dated, and the location of its writing given as Jasna
Gora (his name for Lorant). I am left to wonder how Pater Honorius can travel
from Jasna Gora/Lorant to Sandomir/Tabor in a single day. Pater Honorius has
some peculiar ideas about things metaphysical, but I’d never suspect him of madness. If I wasn’t seeing Leliwa
tonight, I’d be
able to read further in the old monk’s
papers.