Carol Berg - THE SOUL WEAVER

Astonishing that Evard would pick his murdered rival’s house for us to meet. Did he think I would feel safe in a place so familiar? More likely it was a pointed reminder of his power. Whatever his motive, the ruined house only served to remind me of everything I despised about Evard, a shallow, arrogant, ambitious man who had destroyed Martin and his friends because he was not fit to be one of them.

As the last glow of red dulled to gray in the west, I circled the skeletal house and strolled into the back gardens. The plantings had gone wild, of course, only the hardiest left to compete with thistles, brambles, and encroaching forest. I could find no remnant of the rose garden, and all the ponds and streams were dry. Surprisingly, the arched bridge remained intact, overlooking a choked oval of knee-high weeds where a reflecting pond should have been. Only a few birds and a lonely frog mourning the loss of his lily pads disturbed the quiet dusk.

A warm breeze riffled my hair as I waited. Not a long wait. My every sense was on the alert, so I heard the muffled hoofbeats long before the solitary rider reached the edge of the gardens. A horse nickered softly. Light steps crunched on the gravel, only to hesitate next to a wild mass of honeysuckle that had overgrown the path. Through the tangled shrubbery glimmered the faint beams of a lantern.

“Straight through. Angle right. The gardeners have been sorely lax. You’ll have to mention it to the lord.” My voice sounded harsh against the subtleties of the evening. Despite my resolution to be open-minded, I couldn’t hide my bitterness at the desolation this man had wrought.

The newcomer pushed through the branches until I could make out a shadowy figure at the far end of the arched bridge. Odd… Evard was never as tall as my brother, only average in height, much to his youthful disgust, but this person was not even as tall as me.

“Who’s there?” I said, retreating a few steps. “Speak or I’ll be away from here before you can blink.”

I listened until I thought my ears must crack and whipped my eyes from side to side, searching the gloomy plantings for any sign of stalkers, but I sensed no one else about. The figure moved closer, and I backed away.

“Wait. Don’t go!”

A woman! Her voice was low and mellow, yet bore such authority that my feet stopped moving of their own accord. My eyes stopped their suspicious search and riveted themselves to the slight form that followed the lantern beams up the arching span.

“The conditions of this meeting are not changed,” she said. “You’ve agreed to it, and I’ve endangered myself and others to come here. You cannot leave.”

She wore a lightweight cloak of the deepest sapphire, its full hood draped gracefully about her face, keeping it in deep shadow.

I walked to the foot of the bridge. “But the person I agreed to meet - ”

“Is unavailable tonight. I speak for him.”

“I cannot believe he would permit anyone to speak for him, especially… ”

“Especially a woman?” She set her lantern on the stone parapet. “Perhaps you don’t know him as well as you think you do, even after such long acquaintance. And, of course, you don’t know me at all.” With slender, pale hands, adorned with a single, slim band of sapphires that gleamed in the lamplight, she lowered her hood. On her brow she wore a gold circlet, graven with a dragon and a lily - the crest of the Queen of Leire.

Mariel Annalis Karestan Lavial, Princess of Valleor, had been a child of eight when her father’s kingdom fell. She had witnessed the beheading of her father and brothers, and the rape and execution of her mother, who had vowed to lie with the first Vallorean man she could find and so produce a new heir to rival the Leiran conqueror. Princess Mariel alone was allowed to survive untouched, secured in the virginal captivity of a remote temple school in case the Leirans ever found a use for her. She was the living symbol of Valleor’s subjugation. I, as so many other Leirans, had never thought of her as having any other identity, even when she was brought from her childhood seclusion to wed the Leiran king.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long while” - the queen raked cool green eyes over me as I sank into a genuflection I would not have offered her husband - “the Lady Seriana who threw away a kingdom for a sorcerer. The woman to whom I was forever being compared and beside whom I was always found wanting… by my husband, as well as everyone else at court.”

“Your Majesty, I - ”

“I decided early on not to hate you. After all, you’d given me a life. If you’d married him, I would have been dead by seventeen. And even if you’d never existed, he would not have cared for me in the beginning. A Vallorean princess was no more to him than a looted castle or captured horse. But he doesn’t speak of you in that way any more.”

The queen’s light hair was piled on her head in smooth coils, and her features were ivory in the lamplight, an impassive courtier’s mask that revealed little of the person beneath. Though her face was too long and angular to be called beautiful, and her stature unimposing, she carried herself with assurance. Her age would be somewhere near five and thirty.

“Why am I here, Your Majesty? How did the king know I was alive?”

She moved a few steps closer. “As you surely know, our people have suffered some… disturbances… of late that have left them in great fear. No science or philosophy offers any explanation. And so my husband’s thoughts turn to other unbelievable tales he has heard. To sorcery. To you. Who else in this land knows anything of magical beings or would be bold enough to speak of such to her king?” Her manner was businesslike, her voice clear and intelligent. “And, despite his many faults, Evard is not a fool. He said he would not believe you were dead unless he saw your corpse.”

But I refused to allow her easy manner to dilute my caution. “To speak of sorcery is forbidden, my lady. By His Majesty’s decree, I have been pardoned of my earlier offenses, but I would not bring the hand of the law around my neck again.”

“I’m not here to entrap you, Seriana. I know everything you told my husband: about this other world and the magical passage between us, about the sorcerer prince and his enemies and their war that somehow affects our own lands. If I wished to arrest you for speaking of such things, I’d not need to come to this wilderness and set about playacting. When I tell you the whole of these matters, you’ll understand why the king seeks your advice.”

“Well, then… ” She hadn’t left me much to say. “You, of course, may speak of whatever you please.”

She sat gracefully on the parapet next to her lantern, the light-beams dancing on the crystal beadwork of the riding gown visible beneath her blue cloak. “We heard the first reports more than two years ago,” she said, “whisperings among those bold enough to touch on forbidden subjects in the presence of the king: a commander with reports of a maimed soldier who disappeared in the middle of one night… a duke’s vanished mistress whose legs were crippled by a disease in her bones… a military governor investigating accusations of witchcraft. My husband thought little of these incidents until a man named Maceron demanded an audience, claiming he had evidence of an invasion from the world of the sorcerers.”

“Maceron!” I almost left the garden right then. The murderer Maceron, the despicable hunter of sorcerers who had exposed Karon’s secret to my brother and the king, who had served the purposes of the Zhid when they tried to use the Prince of Avonar to destroy the Bridge, the mundane henchman of the Lord Ziddari. “Madam, Maceron is a vicious, lying scoundrel.”