Sharon Lee: Adventures in the Liaden Universe

Images.

Now he saw images and more than images. He saw intentions made visible.

Walls of stone, a window set flush and firm, tightly latched against the storm raging without. Hanging to the right of the window was a wreath woven of some blue-leaved plant, which gave off a sweet, springlike scent. Mil Ton breathed in. Breathed out.

He felt, without seeing, that the stone barrier was all around the woman, as if she walked in some great walled city, able to stay safe from some lurking, perhaps inimical presence...

A rustle of something and the stones and their meaning faded.

“Please,” a breathless voice said nearby. He opened his eyes to his own wood-floored kitchen, and looked down into the round face of Endele per’Timbral.

“Please,” she said again. “May I walk in your garden?”

“Certainly,” he said, suddenly remembering her profession. “I am afraid you will find it inadequate in the extreme, however.”

“I was charmed to see your house sitting so comfortably in the woods. I am certain I will be charmed by your garden,” she said in turn, and turned to place her cup on the counter.

He unlocked the door and she slipped through, walking down the path without a look behind her. Mil Ton watched her out of sight, then left the door on the latch and poured himself a second cup of tea.

By trade, he was a storyteller. A storyteller whose stories sometimes went ... odd. Odd enough to pique the interest of the Masters, who had insisted that he was Healer, and taught him what they could of the craft.

He was, at best, a mediocre Healer, for he never had gained the necessary control over his rather peculiar talent to make it more than an uncertain tool. Sometimes, without warning, he would tell what Tereza was pleased to call a True Story, and that story would have—an effect. Neither story nor effect were predictable, and so he was most likely to be called upon as a last resort, after every other Healing art had failed.

As now.

Mil Ton thought about the woman—the woman Fen Ris had taken as lifemate. He remembered the impassioned speech on the subject of this same woman, on the night Fen Ris had come to tell him how it was.

He sighed then, filled for a moment with all the grief of that night, and recalled Fen Ris demanding, demanding that Mil Ton take no Balance against this woman, for she had not stolen Fen Ris but discovered him. Among tears and joy, Fen Ris insisted that they both had been snatched, unanticipated and unplanned, out of their ordinary lives.

And now, of course, there was no ordinary life for any of them.

He wondered—he very much wondered—if Endele per’Timbral would choose Healing.

Her blue bag still lay by the hearth, but it had been many hours since she had gone out into the garden. More than enough time for a sturdy woman in good health to have hiked down to the airport, engaged a pilot and a plane and been on her way to—anywhere at all.

Mil Ton sighed and looked back to his screen. When he found that he could no longer practice his profession, he had taught himself a new skill. Written stories never turned odd, and before his betrayal, he had achieved a modest success in his work.

The work was more difficult now; the stories that came so grudgingly off the tips of his fingers bleak and gray and hopeless. He had hoped for something better from this one, before Fen Ris had intruded into his life again. Now, he was distracted, his emotions in turmoil. He wondered again if Endele per’Timbral had departed for a destination of her own choosing. Fen Ris would suffer, if she had done so. He told himself he didn’t care.

Unquiet, he put the keyboard aside and pulled a book from the table next to his chair. If he could not write, perhaps he could lose himself inside the story of another.

She returned to the house with sunset, her hair wind-combed, her shirt and leggings rumpled, dirt under her fingernails.

“Your garden is charming,” she told him. “I took the liberty of weeding a few beds so that the younger flowers will have room to grow.”

“Ah.” said Mil Ton, turning from the freezer with a readimeal in one hand. “My thanks.”

“No thanks needed,” she assured him, eyeing the box. “I would welcome a similar meal, if the house is able,” she said, voice almost shy.

“Certainly, the house is able,” he said, snappish from a day of grudging, grayish work.

She inclined her head seriously. “I am in the house’s debt.” She held up her hands. “Is there a place where I may wash off your garden’s good dirt?”

He told her where to find the ‘fresher and she left him.

Dinner was enlivened by a discussion of the garden. She was knowledgeable—more so than Mil Ton, who had planted piecemeal, with those things that appealed to him. He kept up his side only indifferently, his vision from time to time overlain with stone, and a storm raging, raging, raging, outside windows tight and sealed.

When the meal was done, she helped him clear the table, and, when the last dish was stacked in the cleaner, stood awkwardly, her strong, capable hands twisted into a knot before her.

Mil Ton considered her through a shimmer of stone walls.

“Have you decided,” he said, careful to keep his voice neutral—for this was her choice, and hers alone, so the Master Healers taught—”whether you are in need of Healing?”

She looked aside, and it seemed that, for a moment, the phantom stones took on weight and substance. Then, the vision faded and it was only clean air between him and a woman undecided.

“They say—they say he is my lifemate,” she said, low and stammering. “they say the life-price was negotiated with my clan, that he paid it out of his winnings on the field. They say, we were inseparable, greater together than apart. His kin—they say all this. And 1 say—if these things are so, why do I not remember him?”

Mil Ton drew a deep, careful breath. “Why should they tell you these things, if they were not so?”

She moved her shoulders, face averted. “Clearly, it is so,” she whispered. “They—he—the facts are as they state them. I saw the announcement in the back issue of the Gazette. I spoke to my sister. I remember the rooms which are mine in his clan house. I remember the gardens, and the shopkeeper at the end of the street. I remember his sister, his brothers—all his kin! Saving him. Only him. My ... lifemate.”

Her pain was evident. One needn’t be an empath to feel it. Mil Ton drew a calming breath... “I am not a monster,” she continued. “He—of course, he is bewildered. He seems—kind, and, and concerned for my happiness. He looks at me... I do not know him!” she burst out passionately “I owe him nothing!” She caught herself, teeth indenting lower lip. Mil Ton saw the slow slide of a tear down one round cheek.

She was sincere; he remembered Tereza’s report all too well:

This is not merely some childish game of ness, but a true forgetting. And, yet, how has she forgotten? Her intellect is intact; she has suffered no trauma, taken no drugs, appealed to no Healers to rid her of the burden of her memories...

“And do you,” Mil Ton asked once more, “wish to embrace Healing?”

She turned her head and looked at him, her cheeks wet and her eyes tragic.

“What will happen, if I am Healed?”

Ah, the question. The very question. And he owed her only truth.

“It is the wish of your lifemate that you would then recall him and the life you have embarked upon together. If you do not also wish for that outcome, deny me.”

Her lips tightened, and again she turned away, walked a few steps down the room and turned back to face him.

“You built this house, he said—you alone.” She looked around her, at the bare wooden floor, the cedar beam, the cabinets and counter in-between. “It must have taken a very long time.”