The Thirteenth Scroll (3 page)

She was always glad when they left her; she was happier
with the birds and beasts. They were friends Lysandra never tried to tame. She fed those who came to her hungry, healed those
who were sick or injured, and let them go again in their own time.

There was one exception—a wolf she had found, injured, as a small pup. From the first moment she started to care for him,
the pup had touched her heart as nothing had in many years. His trusting nature, the eager way he responded to her nearness,
the unquestioning love he gave her was a balm more potent than any medicine in her cupboard.

She named the pup Cloud-Dancer, partly for the softness of his thick silver-and-white fur, whose beauty she had seen only
upon occasion, and partly for his habit as a pup of dancing on his hind legs, front paws lifted as if trying to reach the
clouds. Now, at two, Cloud-Dancer rarely left Lysandra’s side, except once a day when he needed to hunt. He always returned
to her swiftly—and never did he make a move toward any animal in her care.

She had come to rely upon his presence and his instincts, especially in those times when her
Sight
left her. Over the last two years this bond of trust between them had become so strong, that when her need for true vision
was great Lysandra could put her hand on Cloud-Dancer and see through his eyes. Like her inner
Sight
, this, too, was an odd sort of vision, a world of strange perspective seen in tones of sepia, gray, and muted pastels. But,
also like the
Sight
, her understanding of it had strengthened with use and familiarity.

But Cloud-Dancer was more than just a companion and another pair of seeing eyes. Although Lysandra cared about all the creatures
of the forest, it was to Cloud-Dancer alone that she gave the only love she had to give.

But the reawakening of her heart came at a price. Life
in her cottage moved in a rhythm of simple actions and simpler pleasures, an easy cadence built slowly through the years.
On days like today, kneeling in her garden in the warmth of the sun, feeling Cloud-Dancer’s nearness soft but ever-present
in her mind, the life and dreams of her youth seemed like parts of a fairy story she had once heard before falling asleep—lovely
but unreal.

Yet now that her heart had its own beat again, however soft, into moments of deepest silence a half-and-best-forgotten voice
sometimes whispered. It brought back moments and memories out of her long-dead past—thoughts of home and family, abandoned
yearnings for love, marriage, children.

She had a home, she told herself each time; she neither wanted nor needed another. Her children were her plants, the animals
she cared for; her family was Cloud-Dancer. These were enough.

But, despite her brave resolve, the whispered memories still returned.

Lysandra stood and stretched the ache of the garden hours out of her back. The days were lengthening as summer slowly approached,
and sundown was still two hours away, but it was time to go inside and close down the day.

As Lysandra headed for the door, Cloud-Dancer came to walk beside her, brushing her thigh as he always did. The walkway to
her house was so familiar she needed neither his guidance nor his eyes to find her way, but she reached down and gently ran
her fingers through his fur to signal the gratitude she always felt for his company.

At the door, she stopped. Over the years, Lysandra had developed one final ritual, performed each evening before going in
for the night. She turned back toward the forest and closed her eyes. She waited until her mind and body
stilled, until all she could hear was her breath and the sound of her own heartbeat. When at last that moment of perfect stillness
enveloped her, Lysandra opened her mind and embraced it with all the eagerness of a lover.

The quickly cooling freshness of the spring air blew across her cheeks, and Lysandra sent the full awareness these years had
developed in her outward to soar upon it. Her questing thought touched the wings of the nearby birds in flight, rustled new
sprung leaves, brushed across the creatures of the forest. Her mind reached out, ever farther… listening for the cry of anyone,
animal or human, who might need her help.

All remained silent… and in that silence was her rest, her peace, her home. All was well. With a soft smile, she once more
touched Cloud-Dancer, then put her hand to the door latch and went inside.

Two hours later, she sat in her chair before the fire. Contentment had settled over her like a soft, warm blanket. Outside,
the occasional cry of a night bird heralded the deepening darkness. Lysandra sighed and, closing her eyes, rested her head
against the warm fleece that covered her chair. Soon she would go to bed.

Oh, but that means I have to move
, she thought sleepily.
It would be so easy just to drift off here, by the fire… it’s so warm here….

Suddenly, her tranquility shattered and flew into a thousand fragments.

All day long she had felt the presence of… something… flitting around the edges of recognition, elusive yet insistent. Now
it cut through Lysandra’s sleepy peace like a sword slicing a remnant of tattered lace. Heart pounding, she sprang to her
feet.

What are you?
her mind cried.
What do you want? Tell
me or leave me alone
. But still it refused to be pinned down or give itself a name.

Cloud-Dancer whined, responding to her turmoil. She put her hands out for him and he was immediately there, warm and soft,
a touchable comfort.

Lysandra rubbed him gently behind one ear. “I’m all right,” she said to him. “We’re both all right, aren’t we, boy?”

Her voice was low and soft, and she felt his ears perk forward in response to it. As always, his eagerness touched Lysandra’s
heart. She knelt beside him, putting her arms around his neck and resting her cheek atop his head.

“Yes, we are,” she whispered her own answer. “We’re all right just the way we are.”

In spite of the brave assurances she gave herself, she knew that some small corner of her heart now held a new and unexplained
foreboding. She feared that somehow the world outside her forest, the world she did not wish to enter again, was about to
find her.

It was deep in the night when the dream came, full of vivid color that even in dreams now took Lysandra by surprise.

She saw only a pair of eyes, the deep brown of newly tilled earth, sparked with flecks of green and gold, and soft as the
eyes of a fawn. They were looking for something… for her? She felt that she was being sought, being called, but not in a voice
heard with her ears. This call was one she felt in her bones.

Lysandra shook herself awake, away from the disturbing feelings of need that filled the dream. Was it her need… or someone
else’s? She did not know—nor want to.

She felt Cloud-Dancer’s reassuring weight upon the
foot of her bed. Through the bond they shared, Lysandra knew he was awake and watching her, made wary by her second burst
of agitation. Like her, he, too, was used to the undisturbed routine of their lives.

“It was just a dream,” she said to him—to herself. “Dreams mean nothing.”

But as she lay back down she wondered how much truth those words held.

It was easy to dismiss the dream the first time it happened, but not the tenth or the fifteenth. Night after night those eyes
invaded Lysandra’s sleep—always looking, always searching.

Night after night she felt as if her name were being called, though in truth she heard no word. It became impossible to shake
off the feeling. It lingered as she rose each morning and set about her tasks in house or garden. She felt as if those eyes
watched her from every bush and shadow, as if every breath of wind among the trees whispered her name.

Then it began to interfere with her work as healer. A shepherd brought a sick ewe to her. Lysandra could tell he was young
by the sound of his voice, though, oddly, she could feel none of the tumbling mix of thought and emotions that were always
part of human presence. But Lysandra, concentrating upon the ewe, spared this absence barely a thought—for she suddenly faced
a new and far more frightening lack.

For the first time since the beginning of her
Sight
, Lysandra received no impression when she touched the animal.

Her
Sight
was never a constant thing, present or absent for reasons she understood no better now than she had at its inception. But
it was always there for the animals.
Always
. And so she waited, ignoring the shepherd as she bent all of her will upon the ewe.

No
Sight
came to show her what was wrong.

At this continued darkness, the foreboding that had become her ever-present companion sent a sudden burst of panic through
her. Her fingers trembled slightly as she took the ewe’s head gently between her palms and held it, once more ordering her
mind to stillness.

She slowly exhaled, determined to help the ewe. Whatever her own sudden affliction, she would not let this animal continue
to suffer. She was a healer, she told herself; she could rely on her other senses and on her past experience.

As other healers do
, she reminded herself firmly.

Still, the panic turned to bile in her throat as she began to run her hands across the body of the ewe, trying to be sensitive
to any signal of movement or breathing. She was so intent upon her patient that she had almost forgotten the young shepherd’s
existence until she realized he was asking her a question.

“So, who do you think’ll get the throne this time?” he asked.

Lysandra looked up, slightly confused. “Get the throne? We’ve King Anri, don’t we?”

“Gor… you do live cut off ’ere. Anri’s been dead these seven months, since Michaelmas. I say good riddance—and I’m not the
only one neither. Most of Aghamore’s glad to see the last of ’im. There’s some what say ’e was poisoned, to get ’im off the
throne, you see.”

“Why would Aghamore be glad to have no King?” Lysandra asked, still bewildered. She knew—too well—what it meant for a kingdom
to have no ruler. It meant lawlessness and the suffering of innocents while those who were supposed to look after the common
good turned
their attentions to gaining power any way they could—and the common good be damned.

“Right ruinous, Anri was,” the shepherd was saying. “I mean, ’s’truth a King’s got to have ‘is pleasures—everyone knows that.
But weren’t the old taxes enough to pay for ’em? They was for ol’ Osaze, and ’e weren’t no hermit from what I ’ear. But Anri—’e
raised taxes again and again ‘til I knows some folks what couldn’t pay and they lost everything to the tax collectors, dirty
vultures that they are. Even so, I ’ear the treasury’s all but empty. Anri spent it on his ‘favorites,’ didn’t he? And not
women what could become ‘is wife, neither, if you take my meaning. I’ll wager the Church’ll be more particular who they support
this time, seein’s how they’s the ones what put Anri on the throne.”

“You’re rather young to have such strong opinions, aren’t you?” Lysandra asked, a bit amused by his vehemence. “You can’t
have been more than—what, four or five?—when King Osaze died.”

“Six I was,” the shepherd replied, just a little indignant. “But I got ears, ‘aven’t I? And eyes? I ’ear people talk. I see
what’s what around me. You’d ‘ave to be a blind fool—“

The shepherd stopped, embarrassed. “I… um… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—“ he quickly stammered an apology.

“It’s all right,” Lysandra gently assured him. “My blindness is a fact I long ago accepted. And it’s true… I am isolated here.
I have little interest in who is on the throne or what is happening away from this forest.”

That said, Lysandra turned her full attention back to the ewe. Still no
Sight
had come, nor had her tactile examination revealed anything to cause the ewe’s symptoms. Yet the animal’s distress was quite
real. Confused, frustrated,
and more than a little frightened that her
Sight
should so completely abandon her, Lysandra made a bold decision. There was one final thing she could try; it was difficult
and something she attempted only in rare cases, but the truth was she did not know what else to do.

Lysandra closed her eyes and drew one more deep breath. Then, as she slowly exhaled, she forced every fear and feeling of
failure aside, opening herself to the ewe and its pain, willing herself to be one with the animal and to take its distress
into herself.

But, though Lysandra was willing, though the gates of her mind were open and her instinct for self-protection suppressed by
her commitment to healing, she could not create the necessary bridge. Her inability to help the ewe made her want to weep.

She knew she needed to be alone. The sudden possibility that she might now face a future in true and complete blindness was
too frightening to imagine and too real to be ignored. She needed solitude to think.

And, perhaps, to find a new path through the threatening darkness.

With a deep sigh, she sat back and lifted her hands from the ewe’s body. “I can find nothing physically wrong,” she told the
shepherd. “I would guess that something is stalking your herd and has frightened her badly. Sheep will manifest their fright
in illness sometimes. They can even be frightened to death. I suggest you keep her close to you for these next few days. Touch
her, carry her, let her feel the constant safety of your nearness—and keep more vigilant watch than usual. It’s the time of
year when many predators are giving birth and have new, hungry mouths to feed. If she’s not better in a few days, bring her
back and I’ll look at her again.”

“Right,” the shepherd said, gathering the ewe up into
his arms. “I’ve brought you a pot of cheese and some bread. Is that enough?”

“More than enough,” Lysandra said. “I don’t deserve any of it. I didn’t
do
anything.”

“You deserve your pay, same as the rest of us,” he replied firmly. “But you’d best pray a new King gets settled quick-like,
and that ’e’s better than the last, before the tax collectors find you, too. Though ‘ow they’d tax bread and cheese, I don’t
know. But sure as sunrise, they’d find a way.”