Valdemar Anthology - [Tales of Valdemar 02] - Sun in Glory and Other Tales of Valdemar (11 page)

“It's not just those things.”

“What isn't?”

“That you feel. That I feel. There's more. There's joy. There's silliness.”

“Magda did teach you, even if she didn't tell you what it was she was teaching.”

“Rodri did teach Gregori to listen to those things, and Gregori—flourished. We were grateful. The King was grateful.”

She knew that the story was going someplace bad, and she almost raised a hand to stem the flow of this autocratic woman's words. But she knew that would be a mistake.

“Rodri died, didn't he?”

Gisel raised a brow. Lifted her glass. “Yes. He died.”

“And Gregori?”

Gisel closed her eyes. Set the glass down and filled it again. “There are Empaths among the Heralds,” she said, when she chose to speak again. “I am not one of them.

“If I were, I would not be here to speak to you now.”

And Kayla knew, as the words left the lips of the King's Own, that she was angry; that had it been up to this woman, Gregori would be dead.

She took a step back, a step away, and lifted her hand.

Gisel's dark eyes became narrowed edges into a harsh expression. “Yes, Kayla, you're right. If it had been up to me, I would have killed the boy. If it were up to me, he would be dead now.”

“But the King—”

“Yes. The King feels guilt. Even though he sees the cost of Gregori's continued . . . existence, he feels that if he had somehow been present, he could have prevented what did happen. What is happening even as we speak. And he has summoned every Healer in the kingdom to the side of his son's bed in an attempt to revive him, to bring him back.

“They have failed, all of them.”

“And the Empaths?”

“Two of them were my closest friends,” Gisel said. She walked back to the tall window and stood in its frame, looking out. “The bells have tolled for the youngest.”

“But—”

“But?”

“I don't understand.”

“That much is clear. Ask, and ask quickly.”

“If the Empaths couldn't help him, why have you been waiting for me?”

“I don't know.”

“P–pardon?”

Gisel turned; the light was harsh; it made her face look like broken stone. “I don't know. I don't know what it was that Magda—that Margaret—Merton might have done to save him. I was there when Sasha fell. I was there when Michael joined her. I've been all over the city looking at the sleepers who are just waiting to join the dead. And I can
hear
what they think, when their terror has any words at all. It's my belief that if Gregori died, they would wake.”

Kayla listened as Gisel spoke.

“You're wrong,” she heard herself say.

Gisel raised a brow.

“If you killed him, he'd take them all with him when he went. All of them.”

Gisel closed her eyes. Her turn. But she snapped them open quickly enough. “And you know this how?”

Helpless, Kayla shrugged. “I don't know. But . . . I'd bet my life on it.”

“Well that's good, because you will be. Go and get a bath, get food, settle into your room. We'll come for you.”

Kayla nodded. “Can I have—”

“What?”

“Darius. Can I have Darius with me?”

Gisel hesitated. It was a cold hesitation. “It would be . . . better . . . if you did not.”

 

In her room—and it really was a single room—she found Daniel perched on the edge of her bed. He started when he saw her, and leaped up from the bed's edge, shortening the distance with his flight of steps. She caught him in her arms and held him tightly, seeing another child in his stead.

“You need a bath,” she told him gently.

He said very little, but she managed to ask for water, hot and cold, and she tended him first. She had spent most of her life taking care of the children of Riverend, and this one was no different.

Or so she told herself.

:Darius,:
she said, as she worked, soap adding to tangles of hair and the murk of what had been clear water,
:What was Gregori doing when Rodri died?:

:He was at the Border,:
Darius replied.

It was strange, that she could speak to him from such a distance, and that it could feel so natural.
:During the skirmishing?:

She pulled her son—no, this child, this stranger's son—from the bath water and set him in the towel in her lap.

Darius did not answer.

Answer enough.

 

She did not sleep that night. She knew that sleep, in this place, was death. Close her eyes, and she could see the black spread of dragon wings, the lift and curl of air beneath their span. Close her eyes, and she could hear those borne aloft by that terrible flight; the screaming and the terror of those who had not yet realized they were dead.

Kayla,
her mother said, from the distance of years, from the safety of death,
people make weapons out of anything. It's important that you understand this.

Her mother's voice, sad but firm, was all that remained her. She could not see her face in the darkness.
In the hands of the wrong men, guilt is a weapon. Love is a weapon. Hope is a weapon.

She hadn't understood what her mother meant, then. She had been younger.

I'm not beautiful enough.

But—

Kayla was silent. In the present, with a child cradled against her, she lay open-eyed in the dark, hearing his heartbeat as if it were her own. Her mother's words continued, the past seeping into the present in a way that Kayla would never have foreseen.

Because of Father.

I don't know.

She felt the harsh shock she had felt upon first hearing the words; felt the panic as she had attempted to deny the truth of them by finding the lie in her mother's mood. It wasn't there.

B–but why? How?

But—but what does that have to do with Riverend?

But is that so different? If you make them feel what they don't feel—

She had been silent, then.

 

In the end, she slept.

And the great beast was waiting for her, eyes red with fire, wings a maelstrom of emotion. He was despair, anger, loathing, but worse: He made mockery of the transience of the things Kayla valued: Love. Loyalty. Hope.

And who better to know of transience than she? She had buried a husband, a mother, a father. But worse, so much worse.

The dreams had always been her terror and her salvation.

When she lost her oldest child, Darius, unnamed and unnamable, had come to her in the untouched winter of a Riverend that was barren of life, and she clung to his back and wept, and wept, and wept.

Her youngest was old enough to walk, not old enough to speak, and he was also feverish, and she prayed to every god that might have conceivably lived, and in the end, weak and almost weightless, her second child's fever had broken.

But he never recovered, and although he seemed to take delight in the coming of spring, in the warmth and color of summer, the weight he had lost did not return. And she had wept then, at the start of winter, because she knew what it would mean. But at least, with her second, she had time. She told him stories. She sang him songs. She held him in the cradle of aching arms, and she comforted him, and herself, until she was at last alone.

But she was considered young enough in the village, if her heart was scarred; she was twenty-two. Her oldest son had survived six years, which was better than many, and the oldwives gathered to discuss her fate, and to ask her to marry again.

She had almost forgotten her mother's words, that day, and the promise she had made to her mother—for her mother was dead, and that death was so less painful than this terrible intrusion of the living.

She had had nothing, nothing at all. She had carried the blackness and the emptiness within her until it had almost hollowed her out completely. She felt it now; it was a visceral, terrible longing.

A desire for an end. An ending.

And she knew it for her own.

The dragon nodded, wordless; swept back huge wings, opened its terrible jaws. They were kin, she thought. He offered nothing but truth.

Two things saved her.

The first was the flash of white in the darkness: Darius, the Companion of winter in Riverend. And the second, more real, more painful, the small fingers that bruised her arms, the whimpering that reached her ears, that pierced the fabric of a dream she could not escape, tearing a hole in the wall between sleep and the waking world.

The child was weeping. She held him, and the ache in her arms subsided.
This
was what she was.
This
was what her mother had taught her to be: comfort. Hope.

But when he called for his mother in the darkened room, she answered; she could not deprive herself of that one lie.

 

In the morning, grim, she rose. The child was sleeping, and his peace was fitful, but it was there. She dressed in the odd, gray uniform she'd been given, admiring the quality of its workmanship, if not the choice of its colors. Then she lifted him, waking him. He was disoriented, but only for a moment; she let him throw his arms around her neck until she could almost not breathe for the tightness of the grip. She loved that breathlessness.

“Daniel,” she told him gently, “I need you to talk with Darius. I need you to stay with him.”

The boy's smile was shy, but it was genuine.

“I—I have work to do today. Darius is not really allowed inside.”

“But he's not a
horse!
”

“No . . . he's not a horse. He's better than that, and I'm sure he'll let you ride him if you want. Come. Let's find him.”

 

The halls were bustling; there were more people in the Collegium than she had ever seen in the Hold, and she found their presence almost overwhelming. But she discovered two important things from the young—the very young—man who stopped to talk to her. The first, where breakfast was served—and when, that being important—and the second, where the Companions were stabled.