Carol Berg - Daughter of Ancients

I didn't like what she'd said. Paulo stayed in the Bounded by his own choice. I'd never asked him . . . never told him he couldn't leave if he wanted. We were friends. He knew how important he was to me.

But Roxanne made me think back to the first time I had joined with Paulo, when I had possessed his body to keep him from being killed by the corrupt Guardian of the Bounded. Amid all his other thoughts and confusions, I had experienced his feelings for a Dar'Nethi girl he admired, and I'd realized that someday he'd have to do something about those feelings. Now five more years had passed, Paulo was almost twenty-four, and I'd not given it the slightest consideration. We'd had so much to do.

While I made laws for the Bounded, heard disputes, set up the Watch, and trained it to protect the people from the wild creatures at the Edge, Paulo taught the Singlars how to make a harness and use it to control a mule, and how to use the mule to help them haul stone and water and to break ground to grow something other than tappa roots. While I worked to convince them of the value of reading and writing and sharing their knowledge with each other, Paulo taught them how to barter for the things one person could do better than another. And it was well known throughout the Bounded that if the king was too busy to hear your petition, or if he'd made up his mind too quickly, then the surest way to see justice done or needs addressed was to find the king's friend where he worked in the fields or the town. If there was merit in your words, the king's friend would recognize it, and the king would hear of it. I didn't see how I could possibly manage without him, but it had been too long since I'd asked him if that life was what he wanted.

It would do no good to ask him outright. He'd say,

"Nothing better to be at," and stay with me forever. And I couldn't just send him away as if I were angry with him or tired of his company. He knew me so well, he'd never believe it. And that was what got me thinking about taking a wife. Paulo and I ate together, worked together, rode together, and when we had any occasion to talk at all, we needed only half the words anyone else might. But if I were to marry, all of that would have to change. It would give him a reason to look at his own situation, and not to have to worry so much about me.

So that became my plan. The only problem was, I had no idea as to how to go about it. I didn't know many women. The Singlars were only just getting used to pairing up with others who cared for them in that way, and I'd never met a one of them who wasn't so in awe of me that she could look me straight in the eye. And beyond that . . . well, the Queen of Leire was taken, even if we'd been willing to try cramming her ambitions and my strange history into one marriage. I didn't know anyone else.

All this was on my mind when I sent Paulo through the portal to the Four Realms to find someone to teach us how to channel storm waters, and he came back the same day with the letter from my mother telling me that my father was mortally ill. And, of course, before you could brush a gnat from your face, we were in Avonar, Paulo stammering his heart out in front of the Dar'Nethi girl he'd worshipped since he was thirteen, and I faced with watching my father die.

I had never planned to go back to Gondai. I had no sympathetic feelings for the Dar'Nethi or their world; the place would just bring back bad memories.

Only my father came close to understanding the things I had been taught in my years with the Lords, the deeds I had done, what I had become when I joined with them, He had kept his promise never to reveal to anyone the horror of what I had been, even to my mother, from whom he kept no other secret. So he knew what it was he asked when he said I needed to use what I knew of Zhev'Na to test this Dar'Nethi woman. But he was willing to postpone his own dying, a release he craved as much as I craved forgetting the past, to make sure that the work we had done together was finished. I could not refuse him. We made a private bargain that day. If either one of us found that his part could not be borne another day, my father would let me go back to the Bounded so I could forget, and I would see him released from his suspended life and let him die.

And so, on our first night in Avonar, I worked with my mother and the Dar'Nethi Healer T'Laven to help my father endure one more night of illness. In order to persuade this Lady D'Sanya that he was willing to relinquish his freedom and his talent in exchange for relief of pain and postponement of death, my father believed it necessary to create in himself true desperation. I'll not be able to hide that I don't relish her gift , he said. But this way, if she reads me, she'll see clearly that I have reason enough to accept it. In truth, feeling anything is preferable to the way I am now — neither dead nor alive .

When the sky turned gray, my father was dozing. T'Laven had left with the first birdsong to summon the Lady D'Sanya, while Aimee brought us cups of something hot that smelled of fruit and spices. My mother took a cup, sighed, and held it in her lap. Since my father had made his decision, she had said very little. Though she agreed that our plan was the only one that made sense, she was afraid of the cost.

I was sitting on the floor cushions, leaning against the bed. Aimee leaned over so I could reach the steaming cup perched on her tray. "Saffria," she said quietly, when I looked up with that very question on my tongue. Her smile was much too cheerful for so early a morning, like a stray sunbeam that strikes your eyelids before you're ready to wake up. "Spiced fruit cider. I seem to have made it especially pungent this morning. I've not been sleeping well of late, and it leaves me more careless than usual."

I took the cup, not so much because I wanted it, but because her tray was tilted at an alarming angle and I didn't want the scalding stuff in my lap. I was feeling groggy, numb, and half nauseated, as one does after so little sleep. "Thank you," I mumbled, holding the cup with no intention of putting it near my mouth.

"You might try it," she said. "My father always said saffria cleared his head when he had difficult thinking to do." Then she crouched down beside me, whispering, "You must persuade your mother to drink some, too. She didn't eat anything last night. And your friend . . . he sat outside that door all night, just fallen asleep in the past hour. My lord, will he be offended that I've laid a blanket over him? The morning air is so chill coming in through the courtyard, even in summer."

"No. Not offended at all." More likely he would go speechless for a fortnight at the thought of her touching him. Why was life so complicated?

Aimee hovered over me for a moment before tiptoeing out of the bedchamber. I didn't really believe she would know one way or the other, but I took a drink of the saffria to please her . . . and almost coughed it up again. Far too sweet for my taste, but indeed pungent. It raced straight upward, eating away all the cobwebs, dust, and other detritus that clogged my head. "Thank you," I croaked, even though she was no longer there to hear me.

I downed the rest of the saffria. Fully awake now, I was ready to do almost anything to get the matter of the mysterious D'Sanya over quickly. The sight of my mother resting her head on my father's pillow made me hate Healers who had no remedies for disease, hate the Dar'Nethi who complicated everything with their self-righteous bickering over their Bridge and their throne, and hate myself for being unable to help my father in any meaningful way and for grudging him this single task that he had set me. Last night had been wretched for several reasons.

Sounds of doors and voices pulled me to my feet. My mother kissed my father's brow, waking him gently with whispered words I tried not to overhear. We all recognized the fact that he was unlikely to survive this venture. Soon, much too soon for my mother, Aimee poked her head through the door to the side-chamber. "My lady, this way, quickly."