Crowchanger (Changers of Chandris) (24 page)

Other masters arrived at the chamber, most bleary-eyed or arranging their tunics. Only the earliest risers looked as if the summons had not caught them unawares.

Master Donmar sat at the head of the table, eating chunks of fruit with a fork and taking sips of tea. The centre of the table held fruit and cold meat and bread fresh from the kitchens. Donmar was uncommonly good at remembering the comfort of those called to council, and Jesely’s stomach growled. It would have been a long meeting indeed with no breakfast. Jesely picked up a roll, breaking it open with his thumbs and pushing a slice of cold beef inside.

“No sense asking what this is about, Donmar?”

The council leader looked less composed than Jesely had first thought. He was unshaven—unusual in itself for a man so careful about his appearance—and his eyes were bleak.

“I’ll wait for the others,” he said. “That way I only have to tell you once. There will be questions, and I’m not sure I have the answers.”

Each councillor took his or her usual place at the table. No places were allocated, beyond that of the leader, yet changers were creatures of habit. Donmar waited until all were settled with food and drink before speaking. An expectant hush fell across the room.

“Just after daybreak, changers whom I have not seen for a long time arrived at the Aerie. Some of the names may be familiar to you: Artem, Nyniss, Pabori, Grygg, Sabelan, a few others. Eleven in all.”

Donmar paused, waiting to see who would work it out. Pabori had only left the Aerie two or three years before. For Artem, Nyniss, and Sabelan somewhere between three and ten years had passed since they were changers. Few around the table would remember Grygg. He had trained at about the same time as Jesely himself—going on twenty years before.

Jesely frowned. “All Chesammos?”

“Not only that, but all from the same village—Cellondora, one of the linandra-digging villages under Garvan of Lucranne.”

“How did they get here?” Fennoc the herbalist asked.

Donmar’s gaze swept the table. All the council members were present except Ayriene, who was in Banunis, and Narais, who at eighty-six years of age still clung to life, but only barely.

“They flew. They represent a large proportion of the changers Cellondora has produced for the last two generations. Most of them had not transformed since they went home, but they were desperate enough to try.”

“Desperate?” Yinaede prompted.

“Their village was destroyed in the night. Everyone was slaughtered; their homes burned out. They report seeing the liveries of Lucranne and Banunis among the soldiers.”

Jesely’s mouth was as dry as ash. “Do we know why?”

Donmar wet his lips. “Three days ago in Banunis, there was an attempt on the lives of King Deygan and his sons. His youngest boy died. Prince Jaevan was only saved by Ayriene’s skill. The perpetrators were from Cellondora. This seems to have been in retribution for the assassination attempt.”

“A whole village?” Yinaede pressed her hand to her mouth. All the colour had drained from her face and Jesely thought she might faint. He poured her a drink and passed it to her. She gulped a few mouthfuls but it hardly seemed to help. Jesely stared at his hands. They were shaking.

“Deygan cannot be allowed to get away with this,” said Cowin. “His hatred for the Chesammos is clouding his judgement. A whole village for an act of rebellion by a few men? That’s outrageous.”

“Were the assassins caught?” Jesely asked.

“Yes. They were caught and hanged. I heard…” Donmar glanced at Jesely, “I heard Sylas was involved.”

“Sylas? But he wasn’t from Cellondora.”

“He told me he was, a few months ago,” said Cowin. “At the time I thought he wasn’t telling the truth, but…”

“Was he—” Jesely’s words caught in his throat. “Did they hang Sylas?”

Donmar looked troubled, but shook his head. “I did not hear that he was among those executed. I have sent to Ayriene for clarification, but I do not believe Sylas to be dead.”

Jesely could not believe it. Would not. Sylas was a peaceful man. He wouldn’t get caught up in rebellion, whatever the provocation. “So Deygan cannot even claim that his son’s killers had fled back to their village. This is wanton destruction, not justice at all.”

“Indeed,” Donmar sounded tired, and Jesely understood the pained look in his eyes. “But these changers have put us in a difficult position. The soldiers saw them go. They shot at them as they took flight. Several were killed as they tried to escape, I’m told. In fact, Nyniss took an injury and it escapes me how he managed to fly all the way here. By now, Deygan knows that some eluded him and has probably guessed where they fled to. The question is, what do we do with them?”

“You can’t be thinking of handing them over?” Yinaede looked aghast. “Donmar, if he would kill a village to get revenge for his son, being changers won’t save them.”

“Quite the opposite,” Donmar agreed. “In fact, I had some news from Ayriene a day or two ago that makes me wonder if Deygan may not become even less fond of changing. She reports that Prince Jaevan himself is showing signs of the change. Not only that, she believes him to be a talent, although she has not yet established its nature.”

Stunned silence settled, then all the councillors seemed to speak at once—shock and excitement in their voices. Donmar held up his hand.

“First we must decide about the Cellondorans. They left years ago, not wanting to commit to the years of study it would take to become masters. Yet we clearly cannot send them away. They have no homes to return to, and even if another village would take them in, it would put that village at risk of similar treatment. I daresay Deygan would claim that they were sympathisers or collaborators or some such. But I will not allow them to stay without the agreement of the council. Do we keep them here and give them shelter from Deygan, or not?”

It was unanimous. They were changers; they could not be turned away in their need.

Before they left, Donmar told them that he had asked Ayriene to come to a special meeting of the council to discuss Jaevan. The crown prince would need training, for his own safety if nothing else, but Jesely had a feeling that dealings with Deygan over the matter would be anything but straightforward. Deygan and Donmar had worked together to thwart the Lorandans years before, around the time that Shamella died, but relations had been strained between them ever since. Something had happened over that time that had left the two forever estranged.

Jesely looked forward to seeing Ayriene. They had been friends a long while, and he was keen to see her and to quiz her about this wild rumour of Sylas’s involvement with the rebels. But he could not decide whether, with the Chesammos situation blowing out of control, Banunis was the safest place for the lad, or the worst. One thing he was certain of: the Aerie was no longer safe. Not while they harboured the Chesammos from Cellondora.

All the councillors were silent as they left the chamber, some deep foreboding haunting them all. Jesely at least had the feeling that this might give Deygan his excuse to move against them. Forces were shifting on Chandris, and he could not tell how they might play out.

Chapter 24

“N
ow I want to see you do it alone,” said Ayriene, leaning back in a horsehair-stuffed leather chair in her room. One end of the room looked like the Aerie workshop, equipped with pans and burners, mortar and pestle, jars and pots in all shapes and sizes, and a selection of roots, leaves, and berries that would not have looked out of place in the palace kitchens. “Make up another bottle of the infusion of leaves, so you will have plenty to mark with while I am away. Creator willing I will only be two days or maybe three, but this is the sort of discussion that could rumble on longer. And a batch of Jaevan’s potion, so I know I can leave that in your hands, too.”

“Will you take him on, Mistress?” Sylas bit back the begging ‘please’ that he longed to put on the end.

“I told you,” she said, “the life of a healer is not appropriate for the heir to the island. Would you have him walk with us the length and breadth of Chandris?” Her tone softened as she saw the disappointment he knew was etched into his features. “I know you would enjoy company, Sylas, and I’m sure Jaevan would love it, getting to travel about and meet all the common people he is so interested in. But think of the danger. He never leaves the castle without two bodyguards, sometimes more. We would turn into a wagon train if we took enough guards to satisfy Deygan. No, he must study at the Aerie, or here, and that rules me out, I’m afraid.”

At the Aerie. Safe behind the high brick walls. He might as well be a thousand miles away for all the times Sylas would get to see him. He and Ayriene had visited the Aerie once in eight months of travelling. He would have to learn control before he could fly to visit him, and Sylas still could not transform without the aid of a pipe or linandra. He had not admitted to Ayriene the role linandra had played in his changing, nor that he no longer owned the bead she had given him.

Casian had arrived the previous day and had lost no time in taking up his position as Sylas’s caretaker. While Sylas remained in Banunis, he had to be under the direct charge of either Mistress Ayriene or Casian, on pain of imprisonment. Already he chafed under the restrictions. Casian intended to make himself indispensible at court, one way or another, and seemed determined to resume his role as Jaevan’s mentor. Deygan would place no barriers between Casian and Jaevan, as he had between Jaevan and Sylas. It did not take much thought to work out what would happen. Casian would attach himself to Jaevan like a leech to a swimmer, and Sylas would lose them both. That it was entirely appropriate for Casian to be Jaevan’s mentor only made the potion more bitter for Sylas to swallow.

“So,” Ayriene said, gently breaking his train of thought. “Begin. Which of these do you need?”

That at least was easy. “These, Mistress.” Sylas selected a bulbous root, about the size of his clenched fist and the colour of a new bruise, and a bunch of leaves, long and slender, with fine downy hairs on the surface and red veins thick on the underside as if bulging with blood. He squeezed one of the leaves and the juice stained his fingers. “Blood elder leaves for the infusion for me and the root of the plant for Jaevan’s decoction.”

“Good. Now show me how you prepare each.”

Tearing the leaves roughly to release the juice—no knife to taint it with its metal—he placed the leaves in a bowl and poured boiling water over until all the leaves were covered. He stirred vigorously, the sap staining the water a dark pink. “That’s all I can do for now, Mistress. I’ll put it in a jar and shake it every day for a week. Then the liquid will be blood red when he held up to the light. It’s strained through fine linen, then heated again to boil off most of the water.” Now that he had shown himself responsive to the call, Ayriene did not dare leave him unprotected until he learned to resist.

“Side-effects of the blood elder leaf when used for marking.”

Ayriene had warned him before he started what he could expect. A lot of the side-effects began only after many years, and he would not be marking that long, maisaiea-yelai. When Ayriene came back she could work on his control. Then he could resist the call, change at will, and finally stop marking.

“After many years, pain like the eating away of your joints. Also itching and crawling of the skin so severe that a man may scrape his own skin off with his fingernails trying to escape it. In the shorter term—” He flushed furiously. “In the shorter term, it can cause impotence. Mistress, it does wear off, doesn’t it?” He would not mark long enough to experience the other side-effects, but it would be a cruel joke to be with Casian at last, but unmanned by the blood elder leaf.

“No one has used it so long that it has not,” was her carefully worded reply. One man might respond differently than another. A woman might use a salve that a hundred others had used without problem and come up in weals. A healer worked on likelihoods, not certainties. “Once we can work on your control, with luck you’ll only need to mark for a few weeks—three or four months at most. Now the decoction.”

This differed from the infusion only in a few details, but he was to administer this potion to Jaevan. The responsibility frightened him, however much Ayriene told him it was safe and however many times he had prepared such potions for the people they had treated across the island. A man might be adversely affected by a decoction that a hundred others had drunk without problem. She had just said as much.

“I peel the skin off, so, and chop it.” He cut the root into pieces the size of his first thumb joint. No avoiding the metal knife for this; the root was too woody and tough to be torn apart with fingers. He took a scant handful of the pieces and tossed them into an enamelled pan. When Ayriene had shown him she had taken a full handful, but her hands were smaller. Covering the pieces with water, he put the lid on the pan and set it to heat. “It will take two hours,” he said, “and then I leave the pan with the lid on until it is cold. It will have changed colour from red to bluish-purple.”

“So you
have
been listening,” she said approvingly. “And how much must Jaevan drink?”

“A goblet each evening before he retires. This will keep three days, no more, and then I must make a new batch. But you will be back by then, won’t you?”

“I hope so. You may add honey to it, or mix it with wine if he prefers. It has a bitter taste and he may wish to disguise it. Wine hides the colour too—some people find purple off-putting. Now you must show me that you can mark yourself and then I must go. The message said ‘with all haste,’ and although I had to make sure you could care for yourself and Jaevan I cannot delay further.”

The marking hurt, though not unbearably, and he pricked the skin neatly enough for even Ayriene’s approval. The marks on his chest now covered a patch a little smaller than his palm, and they would never leave him—a permanent reminder of how slow he was to learn. But he
was
learning. He would be a healer, and then the Aerie could never cast him out again.

“Lord Casian.”

A servant’s voice hailed him along the corridor. Casian gave a vexed acknowledgement. When would the staff here learn that he was a man of importance, not to be hailed like a fishwife across a market? “Lord Casian, you have a visitor. We weren’t sure where you were, my lord, but we showed him to your apartments.”

“My apartments?” An unknown visitor had been left unattended with his possessions? He mentally scanned his antechamber, wondering if he had left anything unattended he would prefer other eyes not to see.

“Yes, sir. He arrived by unconventional means, if you understand me, sir. I thought you would want him shown to your chambers.”

A changer? A visitor from the Aerie? Not Jesely, surely? They had parted on bad enough terms that he thought never to speak to his old master again.

“You did well. I’ll go there directly.”

“I had food and wine delivered, my lord. And clothing.”

Casian half smiled. Of course. His mysterious visitor would have arrived without a stitch. He wondered how scandalised the castle was at a naked man being shown to his rooms. Not the naked man he would want in his rooms, sadly. He was shut up elsewhere in the castle.

Having mentally reviewed a list of who might pay him a visit at Banunis, he was unsurprised to find Gwysias in his room, enjoying a hearty meal. He greeted Casian with a wave of his knife, cutting a chunk of a fine-smelling goat cheese and popping it into his mouth.

“Good day, Gwysias. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

“I have information for you. Although if I had known what fine fare I would be offered, I might have paid you a visit sooner.”

Casian took a chair opposite Gwysias and poured himself some wine. He sniffed speculatively at it. The wine was strong and dark, and he topped up the cup with water. It was early yet.

“Information?”

Gwysias swallowed, washed the food down with a goodly gulp of wine, and nodded. “Your father had something to do with destroying Cellondora, I assume?”

“My father and the king combined to eradicate a dangerous nest of rebels and revolutionaries,” Casian said, schooling his face to stillness.

“And did you hear that some escaped?
Flew
to safety?”

The emphasis on the word left Casian in no doubt what he meant. “There were changers among them?”

Gwysias raised an eyebrow. “Of course. It would be hard to go to any town or village and not find changers, I imagine. I also suspect more perished there, either caught by surprise by the raid or trying to protect friends and loved ones.” He pointed his knife at Casian. “But some flew. About a dozen, I believe. And would you like to guess where they flew to?”

“The Aerie,” Casian breathed. “Does the king know this?”

“The soldiers presumably saw them escape, and if they saw them, Deygan will know.” He gave Casian a shrewd look. “I wondered if maybe he would have told you—if my information would be of no value to you—but I see he has not. I wonder, though, if he knows where they are.”

Casian clenched one hand into a fist. Damn it all. He didn’t like Gwysias being better informed than he was.

“If I have brought you valuable news, my lord, may I make a request of you?”

Casian noted the form of address. In the Aerie, Gwysias had been Casian’s superior; outside, Casian outranked the Irmos changer by a large margin. “Ask.”

Gwysias twisted a ring on his finger. “With Chesammos claiming sanctuary the Aerie may no longer be safe. I request to serve you here, in Banunis.”

“What use have I for a scribe or a librarian, Gwysias? I have no staff—not even a manservant. I have no need of one with your skills.” The man’s face fell. He was genuinely worried. “What makes you think the Aerie is not safe?”

“The girl, Miralee, she had a seeing. I saw it entered in the records.”

“A seeing? What about?”

“An attack on the Aerie, by an army of the king. Death. Destruction.”

Casian all but held his breath. Deygan would lead an army against the Aerie? Gwysias watched him, hope in his eyes.

“And that was entered into the public record?”

Gwysias shook his head. “No. Miralee and Yinaede came to the library, and asked for entry to the secure area where only seeings likely to cause unrest are held. I read it after they left. They had made other entries lately, but in the open area. That’s why I looked specifically at what they wrote that last time—to see why they thought it worthy of concealment when their others were not.”

“What else did they enter?”

Gwysias gazed steadily at Casian. “My lord, I have helped you. I have always been your friend.”

“Very well,” Casian said, “I will give you sanctuary if you need it, for a time. Now tell me what else they entered, before I change my mind.”

“The girl had a seeing of an Irenthi king and a Chesammos who appeared to be some sort of advisor.”

“Yes, yes,” Casian waved his hand dismissively. “I know about that one. What else?”

“They studied the archives and linked that to other earlier seeings of the same king and Chesammos. There was a young girl there, too.”

This was more like it. “And?”

“The Chesammos said something along the lines of ‘I can keep you on your throne’ and ‘Without me you will fall.’ I don’t remember the exact words. My memory isn’t what it was. But that was the gist.”

Casian considered. How could Sylas be that key to his position? “You are sure they were linked?”

“The evidence strongly points to the seeings being linked, yes. I believe Miralee and these earlier seers saw the same event.”

So whatever else, Sylas must be there when Casian took the throne, and would play some part in him keeping it. And a girl—but she was of no consequence yet. That would be explained when it happened. Sylas had a sister, he vaguely recalled. Maybe his sister would be involved too.

“Very well, friend Gwysias, I will help you. If the king marches on the Aerie and I am there, fly to me in the king’s army.” He downed the rest of his wine. “I must tell the king what you have told me, and you must return to the Aerie before you are missed. Remember, if you are attacked, fly to me. I will keep you safe.”