Carol Berg - Son of Avonar

“Anything is possible, Captain.”

But in truth, I never invited him back. I cared nothing for Darzid and his humors and his mysteries. Rather, my thoughts remained at Windham, and I would smile to myself and wonder what dusty tomes Tennice had discovered lately, and who would ally with Julia to argue with Martin that women should own property, and was Karon even there or was he traveling again, searching for knowledge and beauty to feed his strange power. Someday I would know more of sorcery. I’d had too small a taste of that exotic fruit.

When I was a child of five, King Gevron had decided that subjugation of the other three of the Four Realms was the only answer to the centuries of bloody disputes with our neighbors, Valleor, Kerotea, and Iskeran. He began with Valleor, the fertile kingdom to the northwest, also the weakest of the three and the one with the longest shared border. Eleven years passed until the day the last Vallorean fortress fell; only the kingdom’s vast size—and frequent interruptions from the more warlike Keroteans and Isker— had made the conquest take so long. Gevron spent three years ravaging conquered Valleor, and thus had turned his full attention to Kerotea only in the last years of his reign. That war had gone nowhere.

Evard marched out of Montevial one week after his coronation, bragging that he would finish off the Keroteans in far less time than Gevron had taken to crush Valleor. By midwinter of the first year of his reign, he claimed decisive victories on the Kerotean frontier. But dismal weather cut the campaign short, and gossip was that everything gained would be lost again by spring.

On the eve of Long Night, I decided to stay home. There had been an unending siege of entertainments celebrating Seille—the midwinter season that culminated in Long Night and the ten days until year’s end—and I had refused no invitation lest any slight be noted. I flirted with any man who would look at me and made sure there was enough gossip at court that Tomas and Evard would hear of it. The king would be able to blame no man for standing higher than himself in my favor. Eventually, perhaps, he would lose interest and stop listening. But enough was enough. I pleaded the grippe and spent the evening with a wool comforter and a book of Vallorean folk tales, the winter shadows held back only by the flicker of my library fire.

The front bell rang. I assumed it was one of my latest suitors, most likely Viscount Mantegna, pleading with the butler that he would be eternally devastated if he could not drive me out in his new sleigh. Mantegna was a slobbering pup, but amusing enough. Luckily I had Joubert, the butler, well trained. “No” meant no.

There came a tap on the library door, and Joubert entered with a long, thin parcel in his hand. “Your pardon, my lady. A gift has arrived.”

The arm-length bundle of green silk was tied with a gold ribbon and had no card. Unrolling the layers of silk revealed a rose… in the middle of winter, a single, perfect red rose. The tips of the scarlet petals curled out, on the very instant of bursting open. Poised on one of them was a single dewdrop, no stray snowflake or ice pellet melted in the warmth of the room, for as I gazed upon the flower, wreathed in its sweetness, I smelled the dew-laden gardens of Windham. Enchantment…

I ran to the foyer to see if he was there, but the front of the house was dark and deserted. I was overwhelmed with disappointment, but only until I touched the rose again. Then I smiled, put it in a crystal vase, and set it on a low table where I could see it from every angle. The rose was message enough.

Spring brought the Month of Winds, when we celebrated Arot’s wedding to Mana, the wind maiden who had given birth to the Twins. On each day of the Month of Winds, parents gave children presents and sweets in remembrance of the gifts Mana had given to the creatures of forest and sky at her wedding, hiding them around the house and gardens as Mana had hidden nuts for the squirrels. Midway through the month came the Feast of Vines, supposedly the most propitious day of the year for engagements and betrothals. Certainly it was a propitious day for wine-merchants.

On a rainy afternoon five days after the feast day, I attended the funeral rites for the Duke of Gamercy, a jolly, hard-drinking, foulmouthed old man who had been one of my father’s closest friends. Gossip said the old man had enjoyed the Feast of Vines a bit too much for one in his sixty-seventh year. Tomas did not attend the funeral, being at Evard’s side on the new campaign in Kerotea. Martin was present, though, sitting across the cold stone expanse of Annadis’s temple with Tennice at his side. It was the first time I’d seen them in the seven months since Evard’s coronation. Neither of them looked my way.

After the incense-filled hours of songs and stories commending the old warrior’s name to the Twins as worthy to be entered on their lists of earthly heroes, the guests retired to the duke’s townhouse for refreshment and reminiscence. Though I wanted nothing more than to fling myself into Martin’s arms and beg for news, I followed his lead. My cousin engaged himself with a serious group of men I didn’t know, making no move to approach me. Tennice left early after speaking with the widow and no one else.

As I took my own leave of the duchess, a footman presented me with the customary engraved commemorative card, folded so that the duke’s arms and martial history were scribed on the outside, and the tale of his lineage on the inside. It wasn’t until I got home, lonely and disappointed, that I discovered that my card had a scrap of paper inserted. The note was not signed, but two years of handwritten tutorials on the law enabled me to recognize Tennice’s hand quite easily. The text read like someone’s random, philosophical musings, but to me the choice of words was not at all random.

The wisdom of the fair sex is proved.

Safety for the traveler lies in prolonged absence.

Four is not enough for true diversity of opinion.

The first line confirmed my belief that Martin’s failure to discourage my withdrawal from Windham was a recognition of its necessity. I wondered if he had more concrete evidence of my wisdom than did I myself. I had only instinct. The second told me that Karon was gone. I couldn’t decide whether it was more difficult to think of him traveling in some distant, unknown land than it had been to think of him at Windham, so close, yet a place I could not be. I could not consider the prospect that he might never come back. Not after the rose.

The third told me that I was missed, and that made it all very hard.

Summer brought the fascinating news that Evard was betrothed to the daughter of Dagobert, the last Vallorean king. It was a brilliant move on Evard’s part—the legitimization of Leiran dominance over Valleor. Princess Mariel was sixteen and had been “sheltered” in a remote temple school since the day her entire family had been beheaded in front of her.

Though Leirans did not usually execute women, out of respect for Arot’s holy wife Mana, spared by the monsters of earth and sky in Arot’s battles in the Beginnings, they had made an exception for the Queen of Valleor. As her husband’s and sons’ severed heads yet stared up at their executioners, Queen Margereth vowed to lie with the first healthy Vallorean man she could find, whether noble or peasant, and thus produce an heir to Valleor more legitimate than any Leiran king. She was beheaded straightaway. But King Gevron had allowed the girl child to live, as long as she was locked up tight in a temple school and never allowed to look at a man. Perhaps even marriage to Evard would be better than that sterile prison and never tasting life at all.