"Good Ka'Ston," she said, returning his greeting. Then she moved to the two bound Zhid.
"We thought to send them to Feur Desolй," said one of the men who had bound the two prisoners. "At the prison, perhaps, a Healer . . ."
"Let me see what I can do." As she knelt on the hard dirt between the Zhid, D'Sanya's eyes met mine. Her expression was solemn, but I could not understand what she was trying to tell me. Then she bent over Kovrack and touched his red hair.
His head popped up. "What is this?" he said harshly, jerking his head away from her hand. "What are you doing?"
"Anything broken must be put right," said D'Sanya, laying a hand on his breast, her gold rings catching the sunlight.
"Don't touch me, witch. I am not broken. I am as the Lords of Zhev'Na made me." He spat and writhed and twisted, his boots scuffing up a cloud of dust as he tried to get away from her, even bound as he was. His attempts at sorcery—virulent, tangled bursts of pain and confusion—fell dead quickly, aborted by the power of his bindings. That he could create anything tangible, even such ephemeral wisps, while under the restraints of dolemar and a Word Winder's binding spoke a great deal about his age and power.
Several Dar'Nethi held him still as D'Sanya placed her hands on his breast and his head and closed her eyes. As her enchantment took shape, the snarling, furious Kovrack riveted his gaze on me . . . expectant. I glared at him, hoping he would remember his oath and my fist on his heart. I dared not plant a thought in his head to reinforce my command, not with D'Sanya so close. And I dared not touch power again.
"Lord, do not allow—" With a gasp and a shudder, Kovrack's eyelids dropped shut, and his body relaxed. No one seemed to notice what he'd said.
Could she do it? Restore the soul of a Zhkl as old and decadent as Kovrack, a general of the Lords' armies, steeped in their corruption for hundreds of years? And what would come next? If D'Sanya could reawaken his soul, his bond of obedience to the Lords—to me—would be broken, and he could betray me. Ironic that he was more danger to me if he was whole. What would happen if he told these people who I was? The Dar'Nethi believed I should be dead, and to use power to save myself might possibly make me into the very thing they feared.
D'Sanya's power swelled, silencing the murmuring onlookers, choking me with her overwhelming enchantment. Unable to analyze the complex threads of her working, I watched her face instead. Intense, devout, passionate. The fiery liquor in my blood began to cool, hatred and self-loathing yielding to feelings that were cleaner, better. Moments flitted past. Almost too soon, D'Sanya straightened her back. If she had failed . . .
"What place is this?" Kovrack had opened his eyes as well, fixing them first on D'Sanya, who knelt beside him, and then sweeping his gaze about the hovering crowd. Lost, confused, searching, his gaze met mine . . . and passed on to the man next to me without recognition. "Why am I bound? Good mistress, I feel so strangely ill."
"Not ill, sir. Not any more." She beckoned the Dar'Nethi. "Come, cut him loose. Care for him."
"Tell us your name!" I called out. "Who is your master?" Better to know right away. Better to be sure. Zhid were allowed only one answer to that question.
The red-haired man blinked and looked puzzled. "P'Var, Numerologist of Gladsea, I am. And though I offer service to many who need my skills, I serve no master save the lord Prince of Avonar." He looked at me and then to the others as if for confirmation.
A Dar'Nethi woman cut his bonds and helped him to sit up. She didn't remove the last windings of silver about Kovrack's wrists and ankles, however, but jumped back to the verge of the watchers. When Kovrack noted the silver cord around his wrists, he jerked his head up and surveyed the crowd again. His sallow face told me in what moment he began to suspect what he had been. Even then he did not look to me. My fists unclenched.
D'Sanya, smiling, pressed something into his palm and folded his fingers over it. "Take this token, son of D'Arnath, and let it remind you of your goodness and strength."
As he opened his palm and stared at a slip of gleaming brass threaded on a silken string, D'Sanya, her skirt red with the dust of the yard, turned to the second Zhid.
When we left them a short time later, Kovrack sat alone in the middle of the hostler's yard, his head in his hands. He had refused all help or comfort save the brass lion pendant. P'Var the Numerologist's home village was long destroyed, and his family seven hundred years dead. For all he or any of us knew, he had killed them himself. The other man was sobbing, leaning on the thick arm of the smith who had reluctantly offered him a straw pallet in his forge for the night. The relieved townspeople had withdrawn in a hurry.
D'Sanya and I rode out of Tymnath without speaking. The afternoon light sculpted the green hills around us and stretched our shadows long across the path. When we came to a split in the road, D'Sanya surprised me by choosing the longer way, the way that led to the valley called Caernaille and its ponds with their blue herons. Only after we had sat for a while, watching the herons snare the rising fish, did she speak.
"I'm so sorry it had to be that one," she said, laying her hand on my knee. "Someone who had hurt you so terribly . . . your family . . . your father. Will you tell me of it?"
I shook my head, unspeaking. Unwilling to tell her more lies.
"It's all right to be angry," she said, her fingers squeezing my flesh. "You were a child. It was all brutal and unfair. You didn't kill him today. It's all right."
No, I hadn't killed him, only done a bit of torture and brutalized his mind. She had given him back his soul. Which of us was corrupt?
* * *
One bright morning in midsummer, D'Sanya and I climbed Castanelle, the highest peak in the range that formed Grithna Vale. As the sun reached its zenith, we sat, tired and hot, on a wind-blasted slope of short grass and rock. A rock-pig whistled from a nearby boulder as D'Sanya chattered, reliving every slope and switchback of the climb. We gazed out across the sunlit world and laughed as a wedge of geese flew past below us, and we sat motionless as a flock of goats with curled horns grazed within ten paces of us.
Despite the perfection of the morning, the blustering wind turned sour and sent us down early. The rain caught us halfway down the mountain.
"Look, over there," I said, holding my sodden cloak stretched over D'Sanya's head. "It's some kind of shelter."
Rain splattered and dripped from the trees. The path was swirling mud, and we were soaked to the skin. Our teeth were chattering. Even the half-collapsed shepherd's hut looked inviting.
"At least it has part of a roof," she said.
Only the end next to the stone hearth had enough of a slumping sod roof left intact that we could stuff our drenched and shivering selves into it. I gathered a pile of wet wood; D'Sanya set it to blazing with sorcery; and we huddled together to get warm, laughing at the fickle ways of nature, which had tempted us so high only to abandon us so abjectly. While the rain poured and her flames crackled, she talked and I listened.
It was on that long afternoon, as we grew relaxed and warm in our solitary island in the midst of the storm, that I first realized I loved her. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for my arms to be around her to quiet her shivering, and for her damp, fragrant hair to tickle my nose because her head was resting on my chest. All doubts and confusions were banished with her first sigh of contentment as I held her close.
"Are you awake?" she asked drowsily, without moving her head from the place I wished it to stay as long as I could persuade her to leave it.
"Approximately."