The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (10 page)

On her third resurfacing, Alyneri awoke in darkness. Her body felt comfortably cool. Remembering the last time she’d tried to move her head, she decided to start this time with a more benign appendage. She wiggled her toes, and was happy to find no pain in the doing. Legs and fingers followed to equally safe result. Finally, after lying still for several long breaths trying to work up the courage, she braved moving her head ever-so-slightly from side to side and was rewarded with only a dull ache. Relief flooded her. It was a good sign she was healing.

She felt one arm strapped to her chest, and she recognized a splint held it safe. She lifted her other hand to gingerly explore the bandage wrapped around her head and across her eyes. What had happened?

The last thing she remembered with any clarity was going into the Apothecary. She followed herself in memory as she walked through the store and found—

The image of Sandrine came as a sharp sting, and other memories followed in a flood. The drugged tea, the strange man in the coach—kidnapping her in the name of the Duke of Morwyk, though the details remained fuzzy—and then the violent storm. She felt sick at recalling the lurch that had pitched her from the coach. After that, she remembered only brief glimpses of waking.

So who had saved her?

She was debating whether she might try to sit up when a door opened and a woman came inside singing a tune Alyneri immediately recognized.

Come rain, come rain,

Come wash my hands of these dusty years.

My love has gone, my life is long,

Come wash away these burning tears

My love has gone, but I live on.

Come rain, come rain.

Come christen me for I am bare

A life anew is one denied

She lives and dies while I have cried

My love is gone, but I live on.

Come rain, come rain.

“My father used to sing that song to me,” Alyneri said when the woman paused at the end of the verse. Her own voice sounded so weak and hoarse it seemed barely a whisper, but the woman moved straight to her side.

“Ah
soraya
, you’re awake at last.”  Her voice, throaty and deep, reminded her with a pang of loss of
Farshideh
. The woman took Alyneri’s free hand in hers. It was a rough and calloused hand, and Alyneri could tell from her touch that it was also an old hand, one that had perhaps seen many babes born and lost.

“I love that song,” Alyneri whispered, blind to the world beyond her bandage but envisioning the kindly face of the woman at her side. “Naeb’s Lament, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is an old, old Kandori song,” the woman answered, and Alyneri heard the surprise as well as the pleasure in her tone. “You were brought up right if your father sang it to you.”

“I fell asleep to the sound of his voice singing every night,” she recalled wistfully, wishing as ever that her father,
Prince Jair
, was still alive. She’d had him for so few years. That her charming, beautiful father had been stolen from her while she was still so young was one of the cruelest hands Fate had ever dealt her.

The woman patted her hand. “How do you feel,
soraya
?”

“Strange,” she answered honestly. “Better than before. Thank you…for helping me.”

“All praise is due to Ama-Kai’alil. He’s the one dragged you from the river.”

Alyneri drew in a long breath and exhaled slowly, settling herself to receive the news of her condition. “I don’t remember the river,” she admitted. “Am…am I—”

“No lasting harm, I think,” the old woman assured her. “A broken rib, a fractured arm which we reset well for you. You took a bad hit to your head. As
Azerjaiman
blows west, that one worried us, but I see you’ve kept your wits about you. Daughters of the sand are strong.” 

Alyneri realized she’d been holding her breath and let it out in relief. “Thank you. I am…” she grunted, catching her lower lip between her teeth. “Well, I’m alive. That’s a start, isn’t it?”

“A good start, to be sure.”

“But…where am I?”

“Safe, child. In my home. I am Yara.”

“You’re Kandori,” Alyneri said with a smile—not a difficult assertion considering they were speaking the desert tongue. She was surprised though that the speaking of it brought her such joy.

“As are you, it would seem,” Yara answered, and Alyneri could hear the smile in her voice. “The gods work in mysterious ways.”

“But we’re not in Kandori—we couldn’t be?”

“Nay, child, a good deal west. Near the border of Veneisea and the town of L’Aubernay. Two days north of the Free City of Rethynnea.”

So close…
Alyneri bit her lip again. So close to Ean still. It was such a relief. She reached her free hand to touch the bandages across her eyes. “Can these come off?”

“A while yet,” Yara advised, tapping her hand gently to leave the bandage alone. “I stitched the one wound, but your eye was also in a bad way. There is bruising and swelling yet. It’s been but days since you came to us. A few more for the healing, I would think.”

Alyneri nodded her understanding. She could tell Yara wasn’t saying everything there was to know about her condition, and in a way she was grateful. There wasn’t anything she could do about her injuries as it were, and knowing the true extent of them might only have scared her.

Only time could help her now, she understood this, though the helplessness rankled. While she was used to the frustration of not being able to heal everyone who came to her for aid—used to it if not inured to it—it was frightening to feel so helpless against her own need. But the one pattern a Healer couldn’t see was her own. It was akin to not seeing the forest for the trees—how could one see the pattern of the entire forest when standing deep within it?

“A moment,
soraya
,” Yara said, releasing her hand. Alyneri heard her cross the room, and then a far door opened and closed. A moment later, the door sounded again and the woman returned. “There,” she said as she retook her chair, “I’ve called for Ama-Kai’alil. He’ll be here soon to see you—been quite concerned, we have. I feared
Inithiya
would come for you when your fever ran so high, but She moved on.
Angharad
looked favorably upon you, child.”

At least this once,
Alyneri thought with a heavy heart. “Is Ama-Kai’alil your husband, Yara?”

“Lands, no!” Yara laughed. “Ah, but you’ll love to look upon him, you will, once those bandages come off. My but he’s handsome,
soraya
, and whip-smart to boot, tall as his shoulders are broad. He has even an old woman like me thinking things I haven’t dreamed of in decades. If only I had a few less years on these old bones…”

Alyneri chuckled. “You make him sound Epiphany’s own brother.”

Yara laughed at herself and added with pat of Alyneri’s hand, “He’s the son I might’ve had if
Jai’Gar
had seen fit to give me sons instead of daughters.” 

Alyneri smiled too, imagining what Yara’s ideal man would look like. She envisioned someone like her father—tall and raven-haired, with almond skin and deep, dark eyes. “It’s a strange naming though.”

“That it is,” Yara agreed. “There’s a story there, to be sure. He’ll tell you if you ask him right.”  She paused for a moment and then added quietly, “I imagine you both have some stories to share.”

“Yara?” 

Alyneri heard the man’s voice just before she heard the outer door close, and her breath caught in her throat. She’d recognized something in it, and yet…

Footsteps crossed the distance, and then, as if he stood in the doorway: “Were you talking to me just then, Yara?”

“Ama-Kai’alil, friend of my heart,” Yara said, still using the desert tongue, “she’s awake.” Alyneri heard a great sense of relief in this pronouncement and realized how scared for her the old woman had really been.

“Yes, I’m—” he hesitated. “Well…uh, welcome back, I guess,” he said in the common tongue, and she heard the smile in his voice.

“Thank you,” she managed in the like, giving him a smile that she hoped he would see in return. It was disconcerting being blind to the world, trusting only lesser-used perceptions to provide the images her eyes were denied. “And thank you for saving me. Yara told me you risked your life to save mine.”

He grunted derisively but with humor. “It was the least I could do.”

Yara stood and walked across the room, announcing in the desert tongue, “I’m off to see to dinner. Soraya, you make him stay here now and tell you his tale.”

“Wait, you—” he said, surprised, “you speak the desert tongue?”

“My father was Kandori,” Alyneri explained. “I hope—I mean…that doesn’t bother you, does it?”

“Far from it!”  She could hear the happiness in his voice this time, and it thrilled her to know she had pleased him. His voice was at once resonant and soft, and the more Alyneri heard it the more she was reminded of the deep Gandrel and its glorious groves of emerald sunlight. It was familiar and yet not so much that she could put any face to it. Yet his voice warmed her, such that she wanted only to hear him speaking more. “You speak the Kandori dialect well,” he said then. “Which language do you prefer?”

“I…I am pleased to use the language of my father…if it pleases you,” she added, feeling herself blushing for no good reason at all. She heard him sit down beside her then and become still. His was a quiet yet forceful presence that made her feel strangely…safe. “Yara said,” Alyneri began, hesitant to disturb the sudden sense of peace that had descended upon her by just being near him, “…she said there was a story to your name?”

“Yes, she likes to imagine greater things of me than I ever have hope of becoming.”

“Greatness is as greatness does, Ama-Kai’alil,” Yara admonished from the other room.

He chuckled. “But I would know of
you
,
azizam
, and then I must share some news—though I hope…well, we shall cross that bridge soon enough.”

Alyneri felt at once thrilled and anxious; thrilled to have his attentions—
azizam
meant ‘darling one’—and anxious that such attentions came at a time when she could not have been more vulnerable. “All right,” she said after a moment, catching her lip between her teeth and wishing she had a clue what she looked like to him—then deciding it was best that she didn’t know. “What would you learn of me?”

“What if we started with your name?”

His tone was so kind, his voice so melodic and soft, it at once put her at ease. “I am Alyneri,” she managed. “
Alyneri d’Giverny
.”  She felt a silence descend, felt him grow tense at her side, and became immediately dismayed. What had she done? What
could
she have done? “Is…is something wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” he sounded almost breathless. “Sometimes…I will explain at some point, I promise you, it’s only that sometimes certain words bring on memories that were long buried. Sometimes the memories are very…powerful.”

Alyneri waited, unsure how to proceed.

“Your name,” he said after a moment. “I know it somehow. I don’t know how I know it.” In the silence that followed, she felt him growing distant again.

“I’m a Healer,” she offered to fill the space expanding between them. “I’m not famous, but I served my king, as my mother and grandmother did before me. I have traveled some, and the Giverny name is known. I’m…well, I’m a duchess, you see.”

“I see,” he replied, and then he added to himself, “that would explain some things.”

“What kind of things?”

“We’ll get to that,” he said gently. “Can you tell me what happened to you? How you came to need rescuing by a ne’er-do-well like me?”

At which Yara snorted loudly from the other room.

“I was…” but she wasn’t sure how much she should say—or how much she really even understood of what had happened. “There was a storm…and a mudslide, I think. Our coach was caught. I don’t remember it clearly.” 
Laudanum has that effect on a mind.

“The road washed out about six miles south of L’Aubernay,” he advised as she was mentally cringing from memories of Sandrine and the drugged tea. “Could be your coach was caught then.”

“That sounds plausible,” she agreed.

“Were you traveling with others? Is there anyone we can notify? Surely a duchess has a retinue?”

“I…” but as much as she wanted to tell him of Ean and the others, as much as she wanted to trust this man with the golden voice, she dared not. “No,” she whispered, turning her head away though her eyes were already hidden from him. “There is no one,” and the equal truth of this stung bitterly.

He took her hand with unexpected compassion. His was warm, calloused like a soldier’s, strong. “Alyneri d’Giverny,” he said again, as if testing the name on his tongue, trying to remember where he’d tasted of it before. “It’s a lovely name.”

“Ama-Kai’alil,” she said, turning to face him again though the bandages quite prevented their eyes from meeting. “It’s a…really strange name,” she said, and they both laughed at the truth of this.