"I've nothing to send." Though the day was warm, my father hunched his shoulders and drew his cloak tight as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. "Must you leave again so soon? You've things to do here. You've not tested me since you've come back."
"You've seemed so much better today." At least until that moment. "I hate to keep intruding on you."
"It's why I'm here, Gerick. We have to know. You were away for a long time . . . days . . . weeks . . . And the past few days have been wretched." He shook his head and rubbed his brow tiredly.
"Of course, I'll do whatever you want." I took his arm and turned back toward his apartments, dreading what I might find inside him.
This fretfulness tainted his thoughts—a restlessness, a chafing at confinement. The deadness of his senses was, if anything, more profound. Colors flowed together, one almost indistinguishable from another. I felt no variation in temperature, unable to tell whether we sat by his fire or in his garden. Sounds seemed flat, harmonies impossible to hear, and if his memory spoke true, he could no longer tell the difference between wine and water in his mouth, or bread and paper.
But as I withdrew, I couldn't decide if these were truly changes in him, or if they were the result of my own perverse vision. Only my image of D'Sanya remained fixed, while the rest of the world seemed more distorted by the hour. I said nothing of what I found. "Not much change," I said. Of course it was so. I willed that it be so.
These joinings were never easy. It took most of an hour to let the insistent hammering of my blood fall silent. Paulo always said it was only right, as "bodies and souls weren't meant to get taken apart and jumbled back together." I couldn't help but agree, especially when I was trying to ease back into my own body and felt the raw abrasion of flesh and bone as my mind reconnected with my own senses.
On this particular day, as I sprawled on his couch trying to remember how to pump air into my lungs and blood into my heart without thinking about it constantly, ray father riffled listlessly through a pile of papers on his desk. "Do you think . . . would you stay a while longer and help me organize the papers Bareil sent from Windham? I need another pair of hands and eyes."
"Of course. Whatever you want." I massaged my temples with fingers that obeyed my wishes only reluctantly.
"Bareil is a dear friend, but rather than getting only the papers I put on the list, the silly fool sent me every scrap of writing in my study. I keep putting off sorting them. It seems such an overwhelming task. But if I could get it done, then perhaps I could move on to something useful. Do some writing. Something."
To hear my father falter in his struggle to keep living distressed and unnerved me. He had always been so sure of himself, so easy and generous with his immense talents, so at peace and good-humored with his limitations. In that moment I began to believe that we were going to lose him, no matter the outcome of this venture. A detestable thought.
I jumped up. "I'll be happy to help. Show me what you want me to do. Anything."
For the next few hours we sorted out the five hundred or so pages of my father's manuscript. Words and phrases kept leaping out of his bold handwriting, snatches of the story he'd set down, the history of his— our—people and their life in the world where we were born. He had taken his own experiences and the stories he'd been told as a child and woven them together with the tales he'd learned from Dar'Nethi Archivists here in Gondai and the written histories of the Four Realms. The narrative was unexpectedly fascinating, and I was soon reading more than sorting.
"So what do you think?" asked my father, noting my distraction. "I wasn't sure you would find the story all that interesting."
"I'd never really understood about the Rebellion, that our problems in the mundane world were our own fault."
Hundreds of years before, the Dar'Nethi Exiles had actually ruled in the Four Realms for a few years, claiming they would bring justice and enlightenment to the kingdoms. But instead they had turned into worse despots than those they had supplanted, using terror and sorcery to bend the people to their will.
"Well, not entirely our fault, of course," said my father, "and it wasn't all of us . . ."
"You give such a different view of the Dar'Nethi," I said after he'd talked for a while. "It's hard to imagine that the Exiles, who came to live the Way so generously and so well in our world, came from this same Gondai."
"You've had no experience of ordinary life among us. How could you appreciate our better parts? And here . . . the long war affected souls as well as talent and power. They'll recover, though. Now the Lords are gone, of course they will. Power and passion . . . the balance of the worlds. Dassine once told me . . ."
Somehow touching on these subjects so close to his heart seemed to stimulate his faculties, so that we conversed as if his torpor had been only my imagination. The afternoon passed quickly into evening and dinner, and by the time I looked up, the sunlight told me it was too late to return to Gaelic So we kept talking about what I'd read, and whether or not the manuscript could ever be safely published in the Four Realms, and about the excerpts he'd prepared as university lectures before he'd fallen ill.
"From a time when I was younger than you, I dreamed of telling the story of my people at the University," he told me, staring at the red wine swirling in his crystal goblet. "I believed that those lecture halls housed the summit of all learning, lacking only the single discipline that was the most important to me—this history that even I knew so little of. Who'd have thought I'd come so close to accomplishing it?"
I knew better than to answer such melancholy with false hope. I wished I could say, "Perhaps you still shall. Perhaps another miracle will occur." It wouldn't. Not this time. I knew that now.
"If only someone could take these notes and do it for you."
A whimsical smile drifted across his tired face, and he settled back in his chair. "I've been wanting to talk to you about that. I stepped over the wall again while you were gone."
"Father!"
"No, you mustn't worry. I've not given up on our investigation … or our agreement. It's just . . . something caught my eye, and I wanted to use a bit of sorcery. To see if I still could. I stayed only long enough to accumulate the power and spend it. A good thing I didn't need much. So I was able to step back before I became a gibbering idiot. Look in the top of that chest. You'll find a bundle wrapped in silk . . . yes, that's it. I've an idea about what to do with it, and I'd like your help . . ."
He had wrought a gift for my mother, and wished to surprise her with it at exactly the right moment. His plan was marvelous, its inherent charm and Tightness dimmed only by the fact that it must come to fruition after he was dead. We spent the next hour deciding how to go about it.
As I was pouring the last of the wine from the flask we'd shared at dinner so we could toast our plotting, we heard a quiet tapping on the door to his private garden. I had closed it earlier when the wind disturbed his papers. But his attendant always came from the public courtyard, never the private garden. Curious and careful, I pulled open the door.
"So you were holed up here. I hoped that might be," said the voice from the moon shadows. "The innkeeper said you'd not slept in the room for two nights running."
"What are you doing here?" I asked, hauling Paulo into the room and quickly closing the door behind him. "My not sleeping at the guesthouse for two nights does not constitute an emergency."