The Outworlder (20 page)

Jared gaped at him. He could not help
himself. The question was so utterly unexpected.

“Do you love her?” Childir repeated. There
was no irritation in his voice, only a gentle insistence.

“I…I don’t know.”

Do I?
he asked himself.

The old man sighed and rubbed his hands
together slowly. “Perhaps what you’re thinking is mind-speech is
only that heightened awareness of the other that love brings.
Lovers can feel one another without touching, for example, or sense
each other’s emotions.” His piercing eyes were back on Jared’s
face. “Do you know what I mean, my son?”

Jared was silent, feeling again like a
schoolboy caught doing something forbidden.

He didn’t know how much he wanted to say to
Childir. It was true that he could sense Sahara’s feelings. His
memory of her and the
edulia
tree made him painfully aware
that he was also able to read her emotions, no matter how mixed up
they were, and that he’d been able to do so for a long time.

And then there was the strange but undeniable
fact that he had known somehow that she was lost in the desert and
that she needed him. He’d never told her who had sent him to look
for her. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had admitted that he
was the only one who had known she was there. Putting the search in
terms of a collective had been much safer for him, but he needn’t
have worried. She didn’t believe herself worthy of anyone’s care or
notice, whether his alone or the entire planet’s.

And then there were the nights. He couldn’t
forget the nights, filled with the gentle hushings of the
sandstorms outside the city walls, when he almost thought he could
hear her breathing as she slept, even though her quarters lay on
the other side of the garden courtyard from his.

“You do know what I mean.” The old man
interrupted his thoughts, and Jared came back to himself with a
start.

“Yes, I guess I do.”

“So you do love her.”

“But that doesn’t necessarily follow, does
it, my lord?” Jared realized how desperate his voice sounded, and
that made him angry with himself.

Childir chuckled and bit off a piece of his
cheese. “My son, you must figure that puzzle out for yourself. No
one, not even I, can tell you the answer to that! As I said, it
seems likely to me that what you think is mind-speech is nothing
more than hyperawareness. But perhaps not.”

Jared sighed, not sure if he felt relieved to
be out of the range of suspicion or not. “Can you tell me what
mind-speech is, just in case?”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened to
you?”

“I saw her as clearly as if I were standing
in front of her, even though I wasn’t there. She was following me
up a path, and the Dragon-Lords were lying in wait for her. They
had captured me already and put me on a ship bound for the prison
moon. And I watched as they killed her companions, one by one. She
never noticed them fall behind. She was in danger. I called to her,
but not with my voice. It was all in my mind, somehow. And somehow
she heard me, my lord! I saw her fall to her knees…I know she heard
me! But I couldn’t do anything more than that. No more words would
come, and they seized her.”

His voice trailed off and he glanced up at
Childir, who was still watching him steadily.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

Childir grunted and pressed his fingertips
together, sinking into silent thought. Jared stared down at the
floor and waited for him to say something else. He closed his eyes,
just for a moment….

“It seems you have a very strong connection
to her, whether you love her or not.”

Childir was speaking again, and Jared woke
with a start, ashamed that he had fallen asleep. The sage glanced
around, his nose wrinkling ever so slightly, as if he smelled
something very faint. “Even now, I feel something in the air. It’s
almost a presence, but very thin.” Childir looked sharply at Jared.
“Do you hear anything? With your mind, I mean?”

Jared shook his head. But hadn’t he just been
dreaming something? He frowned and puzzled his brow. Clarity rushed
through him, and his head snapped up.

“My lord, I dreamed of her. Just now.” He
didn’t think anything of admitting he had been asleep—he wanted too
badly to understand what he had seen.

“Tell me.”

Jared closed his eyes and studied his memory.
“I saw her huddled in her cell on the prison moon. But she was
smiling…almost at me, it seemed. But no, she was smiling at
something in her hands. What was it? A jagged knife, and a ring of
keys. And she said something to herself.”

Childir was leaning forward, his hands
gripping the chair so that his knuckles showed white. “What did she
say, my son? Can you hear her?”

“I think…” Jared’s eyes flew open. “She said,
‘I’m going home.’”

“Is that all?”

Jared closed his eyes again, and a line of
concentration appeared across his forehead. He looked almost
pained. “No, no, that’s not all.” He opened his eyes again, and a
smile flooded across his face in spite of himself. “She said my
name.”

Childir leaned back in his chair. “Ah,” he
said, and then, “Does she love you, my son?”

Jared shook his dark head. “I can’t say, my
lord. Sometimes she seems…but then she can be harsh too.”

“She has not known much of love in her life.”
Childir thoughtfully stroked his beard. “And she has killed
someone. That does something to the soul—wounds it, you know.
Without the proper healing….”

Jared thought again of the
edulia
tree, and he felt suddenly that he understood what had happened—why
she had wanted the fruit so badly, but refused it.

“You must teach her,” the old man
continued.

“Why? Why me? Why not Arnauld? Or….” He
choked on Brytnoth’s name before he could speak it. The thought of
that was profoundly unsettling, for a reason too vague to put into
words. He frowned and muttered instead, “Why me?”

Childir chuckled and shook his head. “My son,
I sense that there is love on one side of this equation—maybe on
both—but neither of you wants to admit that you are enslaved to
it.”

“Enslaved?”

“You will have to figure out whether or not
you love her, Jared,” Childir said, his voice suddenly sharp and
brilliant, like a diamond. “Because she is coming back, and she
will need you.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can put two and two together, Jared. What
you have just told me of your dream explains something of what has
been happening here. She is coming back, but not as a free
woman.”

“What does that mean? If they haven’t
released her, how could she come back?”

“There is an ancient privilege, my son, that
the Dragon-Lords have ever held sacrosanct, but it has not been
invoked in some time. This is the privilege of exacting blood for
blood.”

Jared felt as if someone were strangling him.
“What?”

“She has been made a blood-offering to the
Dragon-Lords.”

“She’s a
what
?”

“A blood-offering. Her blood will be spilled
in the stead of the rest of Silesia, and, most of all, in atonement
for the death of the one she killed a year ago.”

When Jared rolled over and opened his eyes
the next morning, the sun was already bright against the softly
billowing curtains. His gaze drifted around, slowly, remembering
his own chambers, his own bed. He sat up, his stomach protesting
the fact that he hadn’t eaten the night before.

The smooth floor felt pleasantly cool against
his bare feet as he crossed the room and pushed open the curtains.
As the sun flooded into the room, all the questions that exhaustion
had driven out of his mind last night refilled his
consciousness.

“First food, then questions,” he muttered to
himself.

He dressed quickly and left his room,
following the stairs down to the courtyard. Hardly noticing his
surroundings, he crossed the green space, past the cheerfully
sparkling fountain, and pushed through the heavy doors into the
dining hall. It was utterly deserted.

“Where is everyone?” he grumbled, crossing
the room and shouldering open the door to the kitchen. The stoves
were cold, and the cooks were nowhere to be seen. He ran a hand
through his dark hair in frustration and cursed under his breath.
“I guess it’s fruit for me this morning, then.”

His stomach turned over strangely at the
thought of eating an
edulia
fruit, half out of fear and half
out of excitement that it would raise more nerve-shattering
memories of the sort that nearly overwhelmed him yesterday. With a
sigh he left the kitchen by the back door and strolled out into the
oasis garden. The
edulia
orchard lay down a gentle hill,
next to the gurgling river. The water glittered, refracting the
strong mid-morning light so that its surface was almost too bright
to behold, and the shade beneath the
edulia
trees on its
bank was dense and cool. Jared picked a few low-hanging fruits and
sat with his back against the tree, contemplating the play of the
light on the water and the seductive scent of the fruit in his
hand.

He geared himself up to take a bite.
Suddenly, someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He jumped in spite
of himself and darted a glance to the side.

“Brytnoth!” he gasped.

“I’m sorry, Jared…I didn’t mean to startle
you.”

Brytnoth looked half-amused, and Jared swore
under his breath and settled back against the tree. Brytnoth sat
down beside him.

“What do you want?” Jared demanded. His
irritation at his uninvited guest made him forget his reservations
about the fruit, and he bit into it with a vengeance.

“I want to know more about Sahara.”

Jared swallowed and stared intently at the
innards of the fruit in his hand. “Why?”

Brytnoth sighed. “I don’t know. She seems
so…. I just wanted to hear more about her, that’s all.”

Jared studied him. Brytnoth was flushed
again, just as he had been the night before during Jared’s story. A
wave of loathing suddenly swelled up inside him and he felt a
distinct and almost overpowering urge to punch Brytnoth right in
one of his starry eyes.

“Why don’t you tell me who you are first,” he
said, suppressing his desire for violence, “and then I might tell
you what you want to know.” He shifted his gaze back to the river
and took another bite of the fruit.

Brytnoth hesitated for a long time, and Jared
began to wonder if he would ever speak at all. Finally, he said,
“Well, I’m an outworlder, just like her.”

“I knew that already.”

“You did?”

Jared laughed and tossed the core of the
edulia
fruit into the grass. “Do I look as witless as all
that? I mean, I know I was in prison for a couple of weeks, but I
think I know an outworlder when I see one. Tell me something about
you that I don’t already know.”

“Well…” Brytnoth frowned, puzzled, and then
looked Jared in the eyes with complete and open honesty. “I don’t
really know what else to say. My memory is…clouded…at the moment. I
remember waking up surrounded by sand...I remember walking for what
seemed like ages until I found myself here in your city.”

“Are you telling me that you don’t remember
your life? Who you are or where you are from?”

“I know my name. As to where I’m from…. I
lived on that ship almost all my life...my memory of my life before
that is hazy. We were refugees from….” His voice trailed off, and
he shook his head. “My memory is blurred,” he said. “I can’t
remember…”

“What happened to your homeworld? Do you know
that much, at least?”

Brytnoth’s face became strained, as if he
were grappling with something. “I don’t…I don’t remember.”

“You
don’t
remember, or you
won’t
remember?” asked Jared sharply. “What are you doing
here? Why have you come to Silesia?”

“By all that’s holy, I don’t know! I don’t
know why I’m here, or what to do now that I am here!” He ran a hand
through his hair in frustration. “My mind is foggy, somehow. Maybe
it was the crash. It’s all so foggy.”

“What does Sahara have to do with your
problems?” Jared demanded, still unwilling to be sympathetic.

Brytnoth looked at him helplessly. “She’s a
survivor. She came here and she survived.”

Jared’s voice cut sharply across Brytnoth’s
own. “She came here for a reason. She was bound for the labor
camps. It’s by chance alone that she’s not rotting there now!”

“You talk as though you had no part in that,
Jared,” Brytnoth observed. When Jared said nothing, Brytnoth smiled
carefully. “Tell me something about her that I don’t already
know.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Jared
retorted. “She can’t help you, Brytnoth. Survival is a road you
have to learn to navigate by yourself.”

“I’ve never been by myself.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,”
said Jared, starting on the second half of his breakfast.

“You grew up here.” Brytnoth gestured around
at the open spaces. “I grew up on a ship packed with hundreds of
lost souls like myself. Privacy was a luxury none of us had the
coin for.”

Jared shrugged. “So? Silesia is an empty
world. Albadir and the miserable little hamlets that hug its walls
are the only habitations left on the planet as far as we know…save,
of course, the fortress of the Dragon-Lords and their wretched
labor camps. We have dwindled from what we once were. The
Dragon-Lords have done their work, and we have done ours—rebelling
against them and shedding much of our own blood.”

Brytnoth started as if he had been struck a
blow in the stomach.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jared demanded,
gnawing at the flesh of the fruit that still clung to its seed.
“Did a bee sting you or something?”