A Journey of the Heart (21 page)

"I don't know," she said. "I know nothing about their relationship since Tamnet left. Merin has never spoken to me about it. After the war our positions were reversed. I had my beloved with me, and she had lost hers. I knew what that felt like. And I bore such a responsibility for what had happened that to speak to her about it could only have caused more pain."

"Did my mother go home alone?"

Namet nodded. "As far as I know, she did."

"Where was my father?"

"He was here. A few months after she went home, he followed her."

"Did she love him?"

"I don't know," she said. "He certainly loved her. In time she could have come to care for him too."

Not as she had cared for Merin, I thought. While I had no way of knowing, I was sure that it was true.

All day Merin's fever burned. She was too weak now to try to get out of bed, too weak to do anything but sleep, and when she woke, she was not herself. Sometimes she babbled nonsense. Sometimes she gazed past me at something in the distance. Sometimes she wept quietly into her pillow.

"I don't know where her fever has taken her," the healer said, "but I think it's a place she never visits unless she can't help herself."

I wondered if the healer knew as much as I did about the Lady's sorrows.

"Have you seen her like this before?" I asked her.

"Only once," she said. "Not long after I joined this household. It must be almost ten years now. She called for your mother then too." The healer gave me a sidelong glance. "Why do you think she did that?"

I didn't distrust the healer, but the Lady's secrets weren't mine to tell.

"My mother is her closest friend," I said. "Who else would she call for when she has no family of her own?"

The healer made a sound like "humph" that told me she knew that I knew more than I was telling.

"When she's better perhaps she will confide in you," I said.

"Confide in me? I don't think so." The healer shook her head. "But I wouldn't be surprised if she were to confide in you, and if she does, you must listen to her carefully. This illness of the body both masks and reveals a disorder of the spirit. When her fever cools, another healing must begin, if she'll allow it."

The healer regarded me appraisingly. "Have you any experience with that kind of healing?"

I shook my head.

"I think that in any case there is no one else," the healer said.

"There is Namet."

"Not for Merin. There's no love lost between those two."

"Perhaps Namet can advise me then."

"Perhaps." The healer gazed at me for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable. Then she said, "Do you understand how serious this is?"

I nodded. I thought she meant to impress upon me how ill Merin was, both in body and in spirit. That wasn't what she meant at all. She was thinking of what would become of us, of what would become of all of Merin's people, if Merin could no longer care for us.

The healer lifted my chin and gazed into my eyes.

"Old eyes," she said. Her thumb lightly stroked my cheek. "Such old eyes in such a young face." She let go of me. "Are you willing?"

"Yes."

"Then go get some rest while you can. I expect she'll have a bad night."

It was the third night of the Lady's fever, and the third night of a fever is usually the worst. If I could get her safely through this night, there was a good chance she would recover.

The Lady slept fitfully for several hours. Then around midnight she woke and asked for water. Her lips were chapped and painful, so I dampened a cloth and squeezed the water into her mouth. She mumbled a few words I didn't understand.

"Sleep now," I said.

"Soon you'll be gone," she whispered.

"I'll be here when you wake."

"You might wait for midsummer's day."

"Hush."

"One more night," she said.

She closed her eyes and was quiet for a while, but her breathing told me she wasn't sleeping. Suddenly her eyes flew open. They glittered in the lamplight, dark and angry.

"I should have hated you," she said.

Although the Lady was so weak that she could barely raise her head, the force of her anger struck me like a blow. Her eyes demanded an answer. I couldn't give her one. I didn't know if she was talking to my mother or to me.

"You were a two-edged sword," she said, and at last she closed her eyes.

Sparrow had once said almost the same thing to me, that love is a sword with two edges.

The Lady struggled to draw breath. It didn't seem as if her illness was the cause. She sounded more like a child trying not to cry. I laid my hand over her heart, and then I felt what she was feeling, as I had felt her grief when I stood beside her at her window searching the night for ghosts. The ache of her longing seized my heart and brought tears into my eyes.

She fought to pull air into her body, but there was no room in her breast for anything but grief. She must have seen her own pain mirrored in my eyes. She freed one hand from the blankets and caressed my cheek.

"Lie with me," she whispered. "For the last time."

She slipped her hand around my neck and drew me down beside her. I didn't resist her. It seemed to me that in her arms I too would find relief from pain. I laid my forehead against her cheek, while her fingers stroked my neck and found the place that I thought only Sparrow knew. My body responded, and I blushed to know my mother's secret.

I understood what Merin was asking of me. When I became for Maara the child she sought along the misty riverbank, I wasn't aware until afterwards that I had gone with her on her journey back through time, and that I had not only stood in the place of the child that she had been, but that I had become that child, so that in me she could find a lost part of herself.

Now Merin was asking much the same thing of me. I didn't know if I could go with her as I had gone with Maara, not only because I didn't love her as I loved Maara, but because I would be standing in my mother's place, and this was a journey the two of them should make together.

Even so, I felt nothing strange as I lay in Merin's arms, nothing alien in her touch, nothing disturbing in her caress. Maara's arms had made me the child she needed me to be, and when that happened, I lost myself for a little while. In Merin's arms I remained myself, but though I couldn't become my mother for her sake, I thought I might serve as a mirror, reflecting back to her the woman she had loved before I existed. My heart was certain then that I had found the answer. Wearing Tamnet's face, I would have gone with Merin wherever she needed me to go, even into the most intimate embrace of love, but although she asked it of me, she didn't take me there. Perhaps she found my willingness enough. Or perhaps her journey swept her past the act of love into the abyss.

For a long time I lay in Merin's arms while her spirit traveled the paths of memory. She had wandered into some dark corner of her heart where she had hidden her agony even from herself. Sometimes she wept silently. From time to time she spoke to me. I never answered her. She seemed not to need an answer. All the while she held me to her heart. I listened to her heartbeat, and to words only my mother should have heard. I heard the story of her rage and her regret. I heard her curse love for changing her, so that she couldn't leave the ones who needed her, not even to follow love. I heard her beg my mother not to leave her. I heard words of love and longing that broke my heart.

At last sleep took us both. Dreams touched me in passing, leaving me weightless with joy, then heavy with grief. These dreams brought no images, only the rainbow of the heart that people said love was. The colors of love wound themselves around me, bright and dark.

I woke to the familiar sounds of activity in the kitchen below. The servants were up, lighting the fires, drawing water, kneading the day's bread. I shivered. The fire had gone out.

I got up and bundled Merin's blankets around her. She didn't wake. Her sleep was deep and peaceful, and when I touched her cheek, I felt only the slightest trace of fever. The worst was over.

I made a new fire. Then I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat down on the bed beside her. My breath made little white clouds in the chilly air. For a long time I watched her sleep. She was beautiful.

Suddenly she opened her eyes. She looked up at me and smiled. Her eyes drew mine and held them. I wanted to blink or look away, but her eyes wouldn't let me go. A look came into them as if a light had kindled within her. I had never seen a look like that. Love had never looked at me like that. Not even my mother's love had looked at me like that, because a mother's love would someday have to let me go, but the love in Merin's eyes would have held me until time ended, if I had been the object of it. When she closed her eyes again, it took me some time to grow accustomed to the dark.

I got up from the bed and slipped out the door. Soon she would wake. I hoped she would be hungry, and I wanted to have something ready for her to eat. In the kitchen I found a basket of fresh eggs. I put two in a bowl and filled the bowl with boiling water. To measure the time, I sang a song quietly to myself. When the eggs were cooked, but still soft, I broke the shells and mixed the soft egg with a handful of breadcrumbs. I was about to go back upstairs when the healer came into the kitchen.

"She must be better," said the healer, when she saw the contents of the bowl.

"She's much better," I said.

"Is she awake?"

"She soon will be."

"I can feed her if you'd like to get some rest."

"No," I said. "I'll feed her."

When I returned to Merin's room, I found her awake and struggling to sit up. She looked at me, surprised. I realized that I had neglected to knock.

"You've been very ill," I told her.

"Nonsense," she said. "Yesterday I had a touch of headache, that's all."

"That was three days ago," I said.

"Three days?"

I nodded.

She tried again to sit up, but her arms were too weak to hold her. I helped her prop herself up on a pillow. Then I fed her her breakfast. She didn't speak to me. She was confused and trying to gather her thoughts together. She had just finished her breakfast when the healer came in, bringing a steaming bowl of tea.

"Ah," said the healer. "I see she's quite herself again."

"I've always been myself," the Lady muttered.

The healer smiled with relief and pleasure.

"Yes, yes," she said. "Quite herself. Very much herself."

Although I had slept, I was exhausted. The healer took over the Lady's care so that I could rest. Before I went to the companions' loft, I stopped by Namet's room to tell her Merin would recover. Namet took one look at me and made me sit down on her bed. She peered anxiously into my eyes. Then she held her hand over my heart and cocked her head to listen.

"How do you feel?" she asked me.

"I'm all right."

"There's something odd about you. I can't put my finger on it."

"I've been up with Merin all night. I'm just tired."

Of course she knew I wasn't telling her the whole truth. She waited to hear the rest.

"Merin's fever took her into the past," I said, "and I went with her."

"Ah," she said. "You joined Merin on a journey of the heart, just as you did for Maara."

"This time was different."

"Every time is different," she said, and sent me off to bed.

I woke early in the afternoon feeling much better. When I looked in on the Lady, she was sleeping, so I sat down on the chair by the hearth to wait for her to wake.

As much as Namet had told me about Merin's love for my mother, nothing could have prepared me for my encounter with it. I thought about the one whose love she'd lost. Then I wondered if she had lost it. Did my mother's heart too have this grief locked away in it? If she had loved no less than she was loved, grief must lie buried in her heart still.

The Lady murmured in her sleep. She looked so young. Was it her fever or her journey that had changed her? Or was I the one who changed? I had seen Merin through the eyes of love. She would never look the same to me again.

I knew your answer when you didn't come to me right away," the Lady said. "If you intended to accept my offer, you would have come to speak with me about it."

"I should have spoken to you either way," I said, "if only to thank you for the honor. I'm sorry now I didn't."

She made a gesture as if to brush my apology aside. "I don't blame you. I'd be a dreadful mother. My own mother used to accuse me of selfishness, because I didn't care to bring children of my own into the world. I told her that I was only sparing them my many faults."

She was making light of my refusal, but I was ashamed now to remember my own words, that I wouldn't change a good mother for a bad one. I could, however, tell the Lady the truth about one thing.

"I wasn't thinking of what kind of mother you would make," I said. "I didn't want to lose the one I had."

"Ah," she said. "I can understand that."

We were silent for a while. Then she asked me, "What time of day is it?"

"It must be almost evening."

"Will you take the shutter down?"

"It's very cold."

She pulled a blanket around her shoulders. "Just for a minute. Please."

I took the shutter down. The sun hovered just above the western hills. Faint stars glowed against the darkening sky. The night would be clear and cold.

When the sun touched the horizon, a wordless cry rang out. It didn't come from within the house. It sounded like a cry of lamentation.
All is lost, all is lost,
it seemed to say. Although it had no words, the song was eloquent. It spoke of endless darkness, the loss of hope, the death of the heart.

"Who is that?" I whispered.

"The elders," she replied. "They're in the place of ritual, mourning the death of the sun."

I had forgotten. It must be midwinter's night.

When the last remnant of the sun vanished, the lamentation ended and another song began. This time it was a song I knew, and this time the voices came from within the house, from the great hall, where everyone had gathered to watch through the longest night. The voices of women and men blended together in a song of hope.