Transformation (33 page)
Authors: Carol Berg
“I bear no guilt.”
“Then, you are indeed cursed, and perhaps the light I have seen in you is false. Good morning, gentlemen. I’ll be back with news as soon as I can.” She nodded politely to both of us, threw on her cloak and scarf, and hurried out of the house.
“Insufferable, pious wench. She’s as bad as you!” Aleksander slammed the door after her.
I pulled off my hood only after burying my grin. “Has a woman ever spoken to you so boldly, my lord?”
“Only the cursed witch of Avenkhar.”
“The Lady Lydia?”
“Yes. The dragon duchess herself. They are two of a kind. My sympathy to Ezzarian men if all your women are like those two.” Aleksander rummaged around the pots and bundles on the shelves, finally throwing a small tin pot at me. “Get me some water. I’m in need of something to clear my head after all this skull work.”
I filled the pot from the small drinking cask outside the front door, carefully replacing the lid so nothing would fall in to foul it. Then I hung the pot over the hearth flame and searched for real tea in the guest house stores to boil for myself. “The Lady Lydia saved your life, you know,” I said after a while. “If not for her, you would be on your way to Khelidar with a demon passenger.”
“She what?” It was truly a pleasure to astonish Aleksander so completely.
I didn’t tell him of the lady’s admission of love, only how she had given me the opportunity to help him. It was long after we had boiled and soaked and warmed and stirred his nazrheel that he could bring himself to speak again. “So what is this feadnach? Is it another curse that makes me beholden to slaves and shrews?”
“No, my lord. It is your heart. Difficult as it may be to comprehend, there is a possibility you may have one.”
Chapter 21
We staved off the pangs of long-delayed hunger with herb-crusted bread and new butter from the cottage shelf. For me it was a feast, for Aleksander, famine worthy of an hour’s grumbling. Shortly after we finished and I had cleaned up our crumbs, the investigator returned. She tapped on the door and stepped in at Aleksander’s word.
“I am to take you to the Queen immediately. She has only a brief time to spare you just now, but she agrees that the matter is of sufficient importance to hear your story herself.”
Aleksander threw on his cloak, but I remained seated by the fire. “Come, Pytor,” he said, glaring at me. “You must stay with me.”
“Your servant has judged rightly, sir,” said the woman. “The Queen has no need to see him. She will see you, and you alone.”
“But I insist!”
“Then, you shall not go to her. This is her domain, sir, not yours. We are beyond the boundaries of your Empire”—she quieted his protest with her hand—“because you’ve sworn not to use your knowledge of this place to harm us. Is that not true?”
“Word twisting.”
The lady motioned him through the door.
“Speak truth, Aleksander,” I said after he was gone. “If things have fallen out as I suspect, this Queen will read you like a child’s first book.” I curled up and hid from my thoughts in sleep.
It was two hours until the woman brought Aleksander back to the guest house. “I’ll fetch you at first light tomorrow. Until then—”
“What are we to do until then?” said Aleksander. “I won’t stay cooped up in this hovel like a prisoner. I should at least see to my horse.”
“I understand this is difficult,” she said. “Perhaps ...” She hesitated just for a moment. “Perhaps you would consider coming to my home this evening for supper. It’s certainly not the accommodation to which you’re accustomed, but perhaps it would be more comfortable than our poor guest house. We have very few guests here, and our customs are quite strict, but we have no wish to make a prison.”
“You would have me as a table guest—your enemy of whom you disapprove so heartily?”
She colored a bit. “I spoke out of turn this morning. My feelings intruded upon my work, which is unconscionable. Therefore I must make amends. Those who come seeking our help are equal in our sight. We must not and should not judge.”
“Fair enough,” said the Prince. “Then I presume my servant is also welcome.”
She glanced at me uncomfortably. I had pulled up my hood again when she returned. “I had no reason to believe he would wish to come. But if it is his desire, then he is also welcome. Will you come, Pytor?”
I shook my head. “I cannot—”
“Of course he’ll come,” burst in Aleksander. “He’s better company than his shy aspect and his boorish tongue would tell. If we are equals here, then servant and master will both sit as your guests.”
“I’ll come for you after sunset,” she said. “And, by the way, your horse is well cared for. You needn’t worry save that some of our lads won’t want to let him go.”
As soon as she was gone, I protested. “My lord, I cannot.”
“I’ll not argue it. If I go alone, I’ll want to bed the wench; she’s fair and pleasing when she controls her tongue. It’s likely not a clever notion, and if you’re there, you’ll shrivel my eyeballs for it, so I’ll lose the desire right off.”
“Bed her?” I was smitten with horror. “I beg you forget any such idea, my lord. It is not our way to be so free about such matters, and she must live here long after you are gone. It’s very unusual for her to ask you to her home unchaperoned. It’s a great kindness, so you must be—”
“All right. All right. Ease your mind. I had no serious thought of it. I would at least not take her unwilling.” He sprawled on the bed and closed his eyes, smiling to himself in smug satisfaction, as if I couldn’t see it. I wanted to throw something at him. He knew I could never let him go alone now. “Let me sleep for a while. Your women are exhausting.”
“What of the Queen?” I took my petty vengeance by preventing his sleeping until he satisfied the curiosity gnawing at my gut.
“I’ve never been probed and examined and poked at so thoroughly. I didn’t know there were so many questions in the universe.”
“But what did she say?”
“That I had a curse on me, and she’d have to think about it. A lot of bloody nothing for all the questioning. Comes of having a woman do it. Her consort was with her. He was listening right enough. Asked a few questions of his own, but left most of it to her.”
“We decided hundreds of years ago that women were better at such things than men. In our particular work, it made the difference between success and failure, and failure with regard to demons is more devastating than most failures.”
“So Ezzarians chase demons. However did you get yourselves into that?”
I laughed at his question. Only to be expected that Aleksander would hit upon the single puzzle Ezzarians themselves would like explained. “Actually, we aren’t sure. We’ve lost a great deal of information from the past. But we have the power, the melydda, to do it, and we’ve developed the skills over the years, and if we didn’t ...” I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t really possible to explain the devastation of the world that would occur if we failed in our task. The cruelty, the violence, the horror ... there was so much of it already that sometimes it was hard to feel that we made a difference. You had to view each victory in itself: the wife no longer beaten to the point of death, the child no longer starved, the slave left unmutilated, the man no longer weeping with the horror that his hands created, the woman no longer clawing her eyes to rid herself of unceasing visions. “... there is no one else. There are horrors worse than those we live every day.”
“And women are in charge of it. That seems a demon-wrought thing itself.”
“All have their role,” I said. “Equally important. Women have certain talents—sorcery you would call them—that enable them to do certain things. Other tasks require physical skills and sorcerous ones that women are less likely—”
“Fighting. You actually fight them, don’t you?”
“It’s how we get them out—not battling the possessed person, but the demon itself.” In a landscape woven of sorcery and the human soul. There was no simple explanation for the Aife’s magic—the portal and the land beyond it. “If the ones who did those things also carried the tasks of governing or examining, it would bind up too much knowledge in the person most at risk.”
“Like sending your master strategist into the vanguard?”
I wished he would stop his questions. I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to think of it. “Exactly that.”
“Warriors. Warriors who battle demons. And you were one of them, weren’t you? Before. What I saw was no dream.”
“Please, my lord ...”
He was quiet for a moment, though I could feel him looking at me.
“... tell me ...” Did I want to know or not? “Please, my lord, tell me of the Queen.”
“Exceptionally lovely.” He rolled over on the bed and kicked off his boots. “Cold as a stone goddess, but fire in her eye—and in her soul, too. When I got there she was playing some kind of lap harp. Thought my boots might start to smoke. Do they ever marry anyone but Ezzarians?”
“Never. Put it out of your mind.” I wished I could put her out of mine. It had been a mistake to ask. Music. That wasn’t right. She had never played. If it wasn’t her ... Darkness crept into my being. Dread.
Aleksander was still babbling. “It could be a good thing for Ezzarians to have me in the family, you know. Her consort has eyes like a frog. ...” He caught my attention again. “Not a bad-looking fellow, but his eyes don’t sit nicely down in a hollow, more flat on his face. Built like a Manganar, though. If he can fight, he’d be a day’s work to get rid of.”
“Oh, he can fight all right.” He could twist two Thrid into a knot and still crush a Derzhi neck with the other hand.
“You know him, then?”
“And the Queen, she’s tall, lighter-haired than most Ezzarians ...” Streaks of red-gold sunlight in her dark chestnut curls—so different from the straight black hair the rest of us had. “... with a cleft in her chin?”
“I could spend a day exploring that cleft. And another exploring under her skirt, and another—”
“That’s enough!” I jumped up from the floor. “Gods, will you leave it?”
Of course, Ysanne was queen. Why had I doubted it for a moment? She had been groomed for it from childhood. Her power, her perception, her skills honed every day. Fate, even in the form of a Derzhi conquest, could not have prevented her.
Aleksander came to me and pulled down my hood, cocking his head to one side. “She’s not just an acquaintance, is she? Not just your sovereign? A kinswoman, perhaps? I was told you were a royal bastard. Couldn’t be your mother unless Ezzarian magic is more powerful than I can imagine. Or was she your lover? That would be a tale worth hearing. How—”
“She was my wife.”
“Athos’ balls.” Odd how heartfelt sympathy could be expressed so crudely.
We’d not yet been formally wed, but the distinction was too subtle for a Derzhi. Ysanne and I had been paired when we were fifteen and had fought our first battle together at seventeen after I passed my testing and became a Warden. We were the youngest pairing ever to dispossess a demon. We had come to think as one, to mesh our talents so that I could move with ease through her portals from the world where we existed into the reality, the battleground, she created for me. There I would seek out the demon to banish or destroy it. Ysanne had been able to sense my doubts and fears before I knew them myself, and send me her strength and power and care to vanquish them. There had never been a Warden and an Aife so attuned to each other as we had been. We were destined for each other, we said, pledged through a hundred battles and three years of such intimacy as husbands and wives never know. I had known she would marry if she lived. I was dead. She was to be queen.
“And the fish-eyed consort?”
That was the true surprise. “A friend.” My dearest friend from the day we could walk. “On the day of Ezzaria’s fall ... when things got desperate, I sent him for reinforcements, spellmakers who could cause a distraction, allow us to regroup, anything to get five minutes to think, to get people out. He said that the only way he would fail was if he was dead. He never came, so I assumed ... all these years, I thought he was dead.”
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