Beyond the Pale (59 page)

Grace closed her eyes again. “Yes, I can feel them. The evergreens there. And the tall tree on the edge of the grotto—its leaves are gone, but I can see the life still moving inside it. And there! There’s a mouse hiding in the stones, watching us. I’ve never … I’ve never felt anything like this before.”

“But I think you have, Lady Grace. Are you not a healer?”

She started to shake her head, but even as she did she knew there was truth in Kyrene’s words.

Kyrene reached into her fallen gown and pulled out a small
clay pot. It was oil, scented with herbs. She rubbed the oil over Grace’s body. At first Grace stiffened—it had been so long since she had let another touch her, she wasn’t certain she could bear it—but the countess’s fingers were deft and soothing. Grace relaxed, and warmth encapsulated her in a gold haze. She knew now how the two of them had been warm that day in this grotto, despite the cold and their naked skin.

“Yes, you have sensed it before, sister. That is what it means to be a witch—to have the Touch, to feel the Weirding, to reach out to it, and to shape it.” Kyrene’s voice became a low croon. “Hear me, sister. Once we were crones: hags and hedgewives and madwomen. We were ugly and despised. People threw stones at us and burned us on piles of sticks. But now … look at who we are now, sister.”

Kyrene gestured to a puddle on the ground, melted in the heat that flowed from them. Two women gazed up from the silvery water, naked and fey, eyes glowing emerald and jade. They were ethereal beings—beings of power.

“Yes, look at us, sister,” Kyrene whispered in an exultant voice. “We are hags no longer. Now we are women of rank and power—beautiful, radiant, and strong!”

Grace drew in a shuddering breath. The trees, the vines, the moss. How dull and dead the rest of her life must have been, for at the moment, for the first time in her life, Grace felt as if she were indeed alive.

“More,” she said. “I want to feel more.” She shut her eyes, started to reach out, farther, deeper.

Her eyes flew open as, like a black curtain, cold descended around her and shut off the golden warmth. In a heartbeat the fey being was gone, and she was merely Grace again, naked, bony, and shivering.

Kyrene’s gaze upon her was calculating. “I think that is enough for today, sister. It does not pay to drink too much too soon.”

Grace’s teeth nearly broke as they clattered against one another.
You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Kyrene? Giving me something, then taking it away
.

However, Grace said nothing. She shrugged her gown over her against the chill and left Kyrene and the garden behind, to step again inside the castle’s walls of lifeless stone.

It was a cold afternoon, two days after he had gone with Grace to look at the door, when Travis learned about kennings.

“There is always danger in speaking runes,” Jemis said.

A soft snow fell outside the tower’s narrow window. The doves huddled together for warmth in the rafters of the drafty tower. Travis and the two runespeakers did the same around the brazier.

Rin continued. “Even when you whisper a rune’s name, if you are not careful, you might invoke some fraction of its power. That is why we use kennings to speak about runes.”

Travis tightened his grip on his mistcloak. “Kennings?”

Rin pointed to a rune on Travis’s tablet.
Sindar
. Silver. “This is Ysani’s Tears.” He pointed to another rune. It was
Fal
. Mountain. “And this is Durnach’s Bones.”

Ysani. Durnach. Travis recognized those names from some of Jemis’s stories about the dawning of Eldh. They were Old Gods, like Olrig One-Hand. Understanding sparked in his mind. Why not use a code to speak about runes? That way there was no danger of invoking their power, no chance of hurting another.

“Tell me more,” he said.

Rin did so.
Sharn
, the rune of water, was Sia’s Blood, and
Kel
, which was gold, was called Fendir’s Bane. According to Jemis, Fendir was the first of the dark elfs—fairies whose lust for gold twisted them into small and ugly, but clever and nimble-fingered, creatures.

The following day, Jemis finally let Travis speak a rune.

“This is your first rune,” Jemis said. He drew a symbol on his own tablet and showed it to Travis.

I
already know that one
. Travis almost said the words aloud but bit his tongue. He carefully copied the three splayed lines onto his own tablet. It was
Krond
. Fire.

Travis sat at a table in the tower’s main chamber and stared at an unlit candle. He licked his lips, then spoke the word.

“
Krond.
”

His right hand tingled, there was a brilliant flash, and the tip of the candle burst into flame and flared upward. Travis jumped back from the table.

“
Sharn
!” Jemis shouted in a commanding voice, and at once the candle was extinguished.

Travis sucked in a breath. The candle had melted and slumped over, and a dark ring had been scorched into the surface of the table.

Jemis glared at him, his eyebrows drawn down over his small eyes. “You do not use a sword to cut a thread, apprentice.” He turned in disgust and disappeared, as he always did when angry, into one of the tower’s upper chambers.

Rin tried to stand the twisted candle back on end. “Why don’t we work on moderation?”

Travis only nodded, and tried not to think of the mad lord in Eredane.

The next morning, Travis opened his eyes and stared into the tempered dawn light that filled his bedchamber. He no longer needed Falken to wake him. The bard’s steady breathing drifted from the other side of the room: He was still asleep.

Travis had hardly spoken to Falken or Melia since he started his studies. When he returned to the chamber at night he usually flopped down on his bed in exhaustion. Besides, the bard and the lady were busy with the Council of Kings. Sometimes he woke late in the night and heard the two speaking in low voices by the fire, about the king or queen who had made a report to the council that day. He never caught more than fragments—

 … the dire wolves coming from the Barrens have …

 … 
is the fever, but that it harms only children and …

 … see shadows in the forests all around Embarr …

—and these wove themselves into his strange dreams.

Travis saw even less of Beltan than he did Melia and Falken, and every time he did, the big knight was walking away from him, head bowed and eyes on the ground. The blond knight’s bleak mood—which had lifted a bit that first day of the council—had returned, even stronger than before.

Travis rose from his bed and gasped. The floor was
cold
.
He scrambled into his clothes, threw his mistcloak over his shoulders, and slipped out the door without a sound.

He had grown to like this hour of the day, when it seemed the entire castle slept. The moon was just setting over the high wall of the lower bailey, and its light rimed the battlements like frost. He hurried to the tower of the Runespeakers. Deeming it too cold to knock and wait for Rin to come down for him, Travis entered the tower and started up the stairs to the main chamber above. He halted halfway up the stone flight. Voices drifted down from above.

“… that we should stop now.”

“We can’t, Jemis. We have made a vow to him by taking him on as an apprentice. We can’t break that.”

“Yes we can! He is too old, he has no control, he can barely read. He cannot be taught!”

“But we have to teach him. He’s strong, Jemis, you know that. Stronger than me. Stronger than you. By Olrig, I wonder if he isn’t stronger than All-master Oragien himself.”

The only reply to this was a low grunt.

Travis did not wait to hear more. He stumbled back down the steps, out into the bailey, and breathed in deep gulps of frigid air.

He’s strong, Jemis.…

No, he didn’t want that power. He didn’t want any power. “Why, Jack?” The words were moonlit ghosts on the frosty air. “Why did it have to be me?”

The moon slipped behind the castle wall. The misty words went dark and drifted away, unanswered. After a while he turned around, walked to the tower, and knocked on the door.

It was several more days before Grace found a chance to slip away again with Travis to search for other doors with runes on them. Every day that passed in Calavere the demands on her time seemed to grow. Not that Grace wasn’t used to being busy. In Denver she had spent nearly all her waking hours at the hospital. More than once, after she had worked
for thirty-six hours straight, Leon Arlington had had to pry a stethoscope or a syringe or a scalpel out of her numb fingers and lead her, stumbling, to the residents’ lounge.

“If you can’t let yourself go home, then at least let yourself lie down for a bit,” Leon would say, and he would waggle a dusky finger at her protests. “Now you listen to me, Grace. Sleep a little while now, or you’ll end up sleeping in one of my steel drawers downstairs for a long, long time. Got that?”

She would nod, and lie on the vinyl sofa, and let Leon throw a spare lab coat over her, and sometimes she would even close her eyes and drift off for a while. Yet after no more than an hour, two at the most, she would be back out there, walking the slick tile floor. Sleep offered no comfort, not like her work did, not like taking broken people and making them whole.

Doctor, heal thyself
. Leon had told her that once. Except that was impossible, and Leon Arlington was dead, sleeping that cold, steel-cased sleep he had always warned her about.

Challenging as they had been, Grace’s days in the ED could not have prepared her for her life in Calavere. Never before had she tried to do so many things, to be so many things, and to be them for so many people—so many living, whole people. For a while, after the start of the council, it had seemed King Boreas had forgotten her. She had spoken to him that day after the first reckoning and not since.

Appearances could be deceiving.

“What news have you for me, my lady?”

Grace was no screamer, but when the king of Calavan leaped out of an alcove into her path, even she couldn’t help letting out a small cry.

Boreas bared his pointed teeth in what wasn’t quite a grin.

She forced herself to stop shaking. “Good morrow, Your Majesty,” she said.

The king stalked around her, dressed in his customary black. Muscles rippled beneath the close-fitting cloth. Grace bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood. At that moment she hated how powerful he was, how strong and masculine and handsome. How could anyone ever deny this man anything?

Damn it, but it’s so unfair. Why should men have so much power
? Only that wasn’t true, was it? She remembered
the sharp green scent of the winter garden. There were other kinds of power besides brute strength.

She squared her shoulders, lifted her head, and gazed into Boreas’s keen blue eyes. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I already told you everything I learned.”

“It isn’t enough, my lady.” It did not seem a statement of anger or derision, merely of fact. “I can see for myself how the council decided. What I need to know now is how I can change that reckoning.”

Grace stared at him. Did he really think she had the ability to sway the minds of kings and queens?

“You are clever, my lady,” the king said before she could find her voice. “I am certain you will discover something that can help me—some desire or fear of each ruler I can use to my advantage. The council must decide on a muster. If it does not, then all is lost.”

Grace wanted to tell him it was impossible, and that if she had to bring herself to speak in veiled words and innuendo with one more noble, she would run screaming into the bailey as a madwoman. Instead she bowed her head and murmured, “Of course, Your Majesty. I’ll do my best.”

With only a nod for farewell he turned and vanished down the corridor. Dizzy, she moved to a narrow window. She threw the shutters open, drew in several breaths, and let the wintry air clear her head. Below, a dozen men-at-arms marched through the gate that led to the lower bailey. The last of the sunlight glinted on the tips of their raised halberds, crimson as blood.

Grace reached into her pocket and drew out the wooden bull she had found in the bailey—the symbol of the Cult of Vathris, the warrior mysteries Boreas followed. She ran a finger over the needle-sword stuck into the bull’s throat.

“Do you know the story of Vathris?” asked a deep voice behind her.

Grace turned in surprise, then despite her troubles she smiled. “Durge. It seems so long since I’ve seen you.”

The Embarran’s weathered face was somber as always. “I am ever here, my lady.”

Despite her troubles she smiled.

He gestured to the figurine in her hands. “It is an old story. Legend tells how Vathris was the king of a parched and dying
land in the far south, across the Summer Sea. To save his realm he went in search of a magical bull, and when he found the beast he slew it. The bull’s blood poured forth in a great river, flooding the land, and bringing life once more.”

These words plunged a blade of fear into Grace’s own throat. She looked up, into the knight’s brown eyes. Was that what Boreas wanted? To ride across the Dominions and let loose a new river of red, just like his god had thousands of years ago? Except Vathris’s deed, violent as it was, had saved the land. She slipped the bull back into her pocket.

“I don’t know what to do, Durge.”

The knight stroked his drooping mustaches. “What do you
wish
to do, my lady?”

“I want to know what’s really going on, Durge, to know what danger is truly facing the Dominions, and the best way to counter it. I want to know so I can decide what the right thing to do really is.” It was what a doctor would do: catalog the symptoms, diagnose the illness, then prescribe a cure.

The knight seemed to consider her words. The wind through the window blew his brown hair back from his brow. Then he nodded. “I think it’s time you tried a new tactic, my lady.”

Her heart quickened in her chest. She stepped closer to the knight. “Tell me.”