The Fall of Neskaya (15 page)

Long after the others had gone to their beds and the sky lightened in the east, Kieran sat with Coryn. Gareth had salved and bandaged Coryn’s hands, saying he thought the burns would heal without scarring. Fortunately, no one else was injured, although two of the workers needed additional rest.

Coryn picked at the wrappings on his hands. “I was criminally careless,” he said, miserable with guilt and fear. “I let my concentration lapse while I thought of nothing but my own glory. You entrusted me with a crucial task, and I failed you. I failed the entire circle. Someone else could have been badly hurt—”

Kieran silenced him with a gesture. “You are not the first to indulge in a little self-congratulation and then suffer the consequences. If we could all do everything perfectly the first time, there would be no need for training. But you will learn from this accident, far better than if I warned you with mere words.”

For a long while, Coryn dared not speak of his vision. Something terrible had happened at home, of that he was sure. When he had been open to the circle, his natural barriers had lowered. In that wash of exultation, his thoughts had gone to his family, to his childhood dreams. Kristlin, with her undisciplined
laran
, had swept through his mind like a firestorm. For a moment, he had
been
his dearest sister, delirious with fever, struggling for each breath.

“My sister—my father—Dark Avarra, have mercy on us all!”

At Kieran’s suggestion, Coryn now took out his starstone and focused on it, striving to mind-touch Kristlin once more, or his father, or even his other siblings. Sweat beaded his forehead and his fingers cramped, but he could not sense Kristlin’s life force. Petro, Margarida, even Tessa, he knew they still lived. Eddard, he was not sure, for the answering surge of sadness and terror when he thought of his eldest brother was too strong to penetrate. As for his father, he felt only an emptiness.

Kieran, too, was unable to contact anyone at Verdanta. No one there was trained in the use of their starstones. “Even I cannot reach so far with my mind,” he said, “for though I have ties of blood to your family, I do not know these people. You have a far deeper bond, especially with your sister.”

“Rumail is a powerful telepath,” Kieran answered aloud. “And he had trained many years together with the folk at Neskaya. This is no failure on your part.”

Though Kieran’s words brought little comfort, his presence did. Coryn had always envisioned Kieran’s energy signature as a rocky tor. Now as the hours passed until dawn, the old Keeper’s inner stillness seeped into Coryn, steadying him.

“We will send word through the relays,” Kieran said as he prepared to leave Coryn’s chamber for his own. “Perhaps someone at Neskaya has word of your family.”

“I must go home. I must be sure,” Coryn said, struggling to sit up. The room blurred sickeningly. As he coughed, racking pain lanced through his chest.

Kieran brushed his fingertips against Coryn’s face. To Coryn, the touch burned like frozen fire. He shivered.

Coryn heard a faroff wailing, like a banshee on the heights, like the wind through a deserted castle, a blizzard across the barren heights, and recognized it as his own grief.

The hawk fell from the sky,
he thought numbly.
Was it an omen?

A tenday later, Coryn woke from sleep, ravenously hungry. Gareth counted this a good sign, for his body needed food to repair and rebalance the disruption to his energy channels. The outward injuries, the burns on his hands, had healed to the slightest tinge of red, quickly fading.

He went down to the kitchen, where Gareth and Marisela, the housemistress, sat over bowls of stewed rabbit-horn. Steam, fragrant with the aroma of wild mushrooms and rosemary, arose from the huge pot, and five loaves of seed-encrusted bread sat cooling on racks. The last few slices from the sixth loaf, along with some soft
chervine
cheese, sat on a platter. Coryn helped himself and sat down with them, glad for their easy company. He remembered sitting around the chopping table back in Verdanta, munching on nut crullers or leftover meat pies with Petro and Margarida.

No, it was dangerous to think of home. Of home and what might—what
had
—happened there. The urge to go running home had returned along with his health, but Kieran had forbidden it outright.

So Coryn reined in his thoughts, calmed his breathing, and tried to concentrate on the present moment. He waited for the news which must come.

The kitchen at Tramontana was set out from the body of the Tower itself, to vent the huge ovens and let in natural light through the banks of windows along the far wall. One of the early Keepers, a gourmand, had bribed the best cook in the kingdom to join the Tower staff by building it just for her. Whatever the truth of the tale, the sunlit room stayed cheerful on all but the gloomiest winter days. It occupied one full corner of the ground floor, with its own doors leading outside to the courtyard and down into the cellars filled with casks of wine, huge waxed wheels of cheese, barrels of nuts, apples and cabbages, enormous bins of flour and smaller ones of seeds and dried salted fish.

Because of the location of the kitchen, Coryn heard hoofbeats approaching on the road.

Coryn stiffened, and the composure he had fought for vanished. His hands unconsciously gripped the edge of the table so hard one knuckle popped.

“A rider this late?” Marisela said. “He will want his dinner.”

“He’s ridden that poor horse pretty hard, by the sound of it,” Gareth said. He took his bowl to the huge scoured-stone sink where a panful of dishes already sat soaking, and ducked out the side door.

Coryn downed the last of his
jaco
as Marisela bustled about, preparing a hot meal for the poor traveler. It was all he could do to regain a tattered semblance of calm. Following the exercises he’d been drilled in since his first year at Tramontana, he breathed deeply, slowly, smoothing the tension in his muscles and focusing his thoughts.

Aran stood waiting in the kitchen doorway. With his empathic sensitivity, Aran knew something more had happened. His silent presence spoke more than any words. Coryn touched the back of Aran’s wrist with his fingertips.

Bredu,
I am glad you’re here. I—

One of the novices rushed up. The lad’s hair stood out about his flushed face.

“There’s news from Verdanta! A rider! Kieran wants you—”

Although Coryn had waited long days for those very words, icy fingers now froze his spine, reaching for his heart.
So, it has come.

You are not alone, my brother.
For an instant, Aran enveloped him in soothing warmth.

Moments later, Coryn, with Aran and the novice only a step behind, knocked at the door to Kieran’s private quarters. At a word from within, he lifted the latch and entered. The scene reminded him for an instant of that very first interview: the stark simplicity of the room, the chill which he now understood was not from any forced austerity but from indifference to temperature. Kieran sat in that very same chair, gesturing him forward. The Keeper seemed not to have aged at all since that day, except for a trace more thinness in the shoulders.

“I am sorry to see you, Coryn, under such circumstances,” Kieran said formally, “but pleased that you have a friend to stand beside you. Huy,” to the boy, “you may leave us now, but do not say a word of this. Remember what we agreed, that this is Coryn’s business and not yours.”

With a nod, the youngster clattered back down the stairs.

Coryn let the door close behind him to see One-eyed Rafe standing in the shadows behind the door. As the old mercenary stepped forward, the light fell across his face. He looked as if he’d aged a century, all his iron strength gone to rust. His clothes were dark with travel filth.

Kieran’s colorless eyes rested on Coryn’s, reflecting only kindness there. “News has finally come from Verdanta.”

Coryn searched Rafe’s face, the deep seams lining the mouth, the rheumy eye. With the discipline of his years of Tower training, he waited for the words he knew would come.

“An epidemic of lungrot swept all the area around Verdanta,” Kieran said. “Your father—and your sister—and many others—”

“Merciful Avarra!” Aran whispered.

“Even a man in his full strength can be felled by lungrot,” Kieran said, his voice shaded with bone-deep weariness. “Many died before the thing had run its course. No household was spared, from the poorest farmstead to the castle itself. Half the smallholder families are gone. And of those who survived, many have such scarring on their lungs as will shorten their lives.”

Coryn lowered himself to the nearest bench. Not only Kristlin and his father, but men and boys who had labored beside him on the fire-lines and feasted together at Midsummer, gone! He felt Aran’s light touch on his shoulder, the pressure of fingertip on muscle, a pulse of strength,
I am here
. . .

Lungrot . . . Unlike natural diseases, this horror was
laran-
made. Tramontana had never done so, and Coryn had heard Kieran speak out against weapons which respected no boundaries and killed so many innocents. Bronwyn, who had seen her home razed under firebombings from
laran-
powered aircars, had raged, “We should make warfare even more dreadful, then, so dreadful that no lord dares to strike at another for fear of what might be unleashed on his own lands!”

“I am so sorry,” Aran murmured. “Your father—”

In those few words, Coryn caught the echoes of pain long past, of losses set to rest but not forgotten. Never forgotten. Aran’s father and grandfather had died in a rockslide when he was seven or eight, old enough to remember them but young enough to need the guidance of a loving parent. His mother, bereft and embittered, had turned inward on her own grief, leaving Aran and his brothers to find their own way through the tempestuous, lonely years that followed. All this he had whispered to Coryn as they sat up, sleepless and a bit drunk, on Midsummer Festival Night of their second year.

“It was Kristlin who died, a day afterward,” Coryn said in a hollow voice.

Nodding, Rafe covered his face with one raw-scraped hand to hide his tears.

Coryn had not seen Kristlin for two years. It had been Midsummer Festival the last time he’d been home. He had thought there would always be another Midsummer, and then a wedding . . .

“And Petro? Tessa? Margarida? Ruella, my old nurse? The
coridom?
Old Timas?”

Rafe pressed his lips together, silently gathering his composure. “Petro and the other
damiselas
, they live, although how well they do, I canna say. Ruella—Timas—I don’t know these names, but few of the old people made it. The fevers hit them hardest, them and the wee ones. I—I was riding the border with High Kinnally and was late returning,” he added, as if in explanation or perhaps a plea for absolution.

Coryn found himself getting to his feet, Aran’s hand falling away. “I will prepare to return home for the funerals.”

Kieran said, “There can be no funerals for those who die of lungrot. The bodies must be burned and the ashes laced with salt to prevent further contagion.”

“I don’t care.” Coryn’s vision blurred. “This is my family—I must go home.”