:Gods - oh, gods, I didn't know, I didn't guess - I thought he was playing with the boy, I thought he was - oh, gods, what have I done?:
He shuddered away from the unwanted sympathy, from the mind-words that were like acid in his wounds, and blocked that line just as ruthlessly.
Then had come the potions - and the numbness. The blessed unfeeling. He drifted, nothing to hold him, not even his worry for Mardic. It was pitchy dark, they hadn't left a single flame in the room, which under the circumstances was probably wise. Scraps of what he now knew were thoughts drifted over to him; now Savil's mind-voice, now Jaysen's (dark with guilt, and Vanyel wondered why), now Mardic's.
If he had been on his feet, he would have staggered with relief at hearing that last. I didn't kill him - thank the gods, I didn't kill him.
He drifted farther, until he couldn't hear anything anymore. Until he lost even his own thoughts. Until there was nothing left but sleep, and the sorrow that never, ever left him.
Savil stood beside the garden door with one hand on the frame, and prayed. She didn't pray often; most Heralds didn't. Praying usually meant asking for something - and the kind of person that became a Herald tended to be the kind that didn't look outside of himself for help until the last hope had been exhausted.
For Savil, at least, it had gotten to that point.
Just beyond the window, bundled in quilts and blankets and half-lying against Yfandes' side, Vanyel dozed in the sun, still kept in a sleepy half-daze by Andrel's potions. Jaysen had carried him out there, with his own mind so tightly shielded against leaking his thoughts that Savil fair Saw him quivering under the strain. Jaysen would be back for the boy in another two candlemarks, which was all Andrel would allow in this cold. This was the third day of the routine; there had been no real repetition of the crisis that had precipitated it, but Savil more than half expected one every night.
Vanyel sighed in sleep, and one arm stole out of the blankets to circle around Yfandes' neck. The Companion nuzzled his ear, and instead of pulling away, he cuddled closer to her.
But before Savil had a chance to really take in this first, positive sign that the Herald-Companion bond was taking root in the boy, someone pounded on her outer door. She half-turned, and heard Donni pattering across the common room to answer it. There was a murmur too indistinct to make but.
The voice from outside the door strengthened. "Please, I'm Van's sister - let me at least talk to my aunt - "
Savil started, and strode quickly across Vanyel's room, pulling open the door. There could only be one of Vanyel's sisters likely to show up on her doorstep at this point, the one that had fostered out in hopes of a career in the Guard.
"Let her in, Donni," Savil said - and blinked in surprise. The girl in the doorway could have been herself at seventeen or eighteen.
God help her - no wonder she went for the Guard, Savil thought irrelevantly. She's got that damned Ashkevron nose.
Evidently the same thought was running through the girl's mind. "You must be my Aunt Savil," she said forthrightly, standing at what was almost "attention" in the doorway. "You have the nose. I'm Lissa. Can I help?"
Savil decided that she liked this blunt girl. "Perhaps, I don't know yet," she replied. "First, Lissa, come in and tell me what you've heard."
Lissa turned away from the garden door with a shudder. "He looks like he's been dragged through the nine hells facedown," she said.
"And at that he looks better than he did three days ago," Savil replied. She would have said more, but there was another pounding on the suite door and a voice she knew only too well rumbled angrily when Donni answered it.
"Like bloody hell she's too busy," Lord Withen Ashkevron snarled. "I didn't bloody ride my best horse to foundering to be put off with a'too damned busy!' Now where in hell is she?"
Savil, with Lissa at her side, strode across to the door, flung it open, and stood facing Withen with her back poker-straight, feet slightly apart, arms crossed over her chest.
"What do you want, Withen?" she asked flatly, narrowing her eyes in mingled annoyance and apprehension.
"What the hell do you think I want?" he growled, ignoring Lissa and Donni as if they weren't there, placing his fists on his hips, and taking an aggressive, wide-legged stance. "I want to know what the hell you've been doing with the boy I sent you! I sent him down here for you to make a man out of him, not turn him into a perverted little catamite!" His face darkened and his voice rose with every word. "I - "
"I think that's more than enough, Withen," she snapped, cutting him off before he could build up to whatever climax he had in mind. "I, I, I - dammit, you blustering peabrain, is that all you ever think of? Yourself? Vanyel almost died four days ago, he almost died again three days ago, and he could die or go mad in the next candlemark, and all you can think of is that he did something your back-country prejudices don't approve of! Gods above and below, you can'i even call him by his bloody name, just 'the boy'!"
She advanced on him with such anger in her face that he actually fell back a pace, alarm and surprise chasing themselves across his eyes. Lissa moved with her, and stood beside her with every muscle tensed, and her fists clenched into hard knots.
"You come storming in here when we've maybe - maybe - got him stable, without so much as a 'please' or a 'may I,' you don't even ask if he's in any shape to put two words together in a sensible fashion! Oh, no, all you can do is scream that I 've made him into a catamite when you sent him to be made into a man. A man!" She laughed, a harsh cawing sound that clawed its way up out of her throat. "My gods - what the hell did you think he was? Tell me, Withcn, what kind of a man would send his son into strange hands just because the poor thing didn't happen to fit his image of masculinity?"
Savil ran out of things to say - but Lissa hadn't.
"What kind of a man would let a brutal bully break his son's arm for no damned reason?" the girl snarled. "What kind of a man would drive his son into becoming an emotional eunuch because every damned time the boy looked for a little bit of paternal love he got slapped in the face? What kind of a man would take anyone's word over his son's with no cause to ever think the boy was a liar?'' Lissa faced down her father as if he had become her enemy. "You tell me, Father! What right do you have to demand anything of him? What did you ever give him but scorn? When did you ever give him a single thing he really needed or wanted? When did you ever tell him he'd done well? When did you ever say you loved him?"
Withen backed up another two paces, his back against the wall beside the door, his expression that of someone who has just been poleaxed.
Savil found her tongue again. "A man - may all the gods give you what you deserve, you fathead! What kind of a man would care more for his own reputation than his son's life?'' She was backing him into the corner now, unleashing on Withen all the pain and frustration and anger she'd been keeping bottled up inside her over the past week. He had gone pale - and started to try to say something, but she cut him off.
"Let me tell you this, Withen," she hissed. "Everything that Vanyel's become, you had a hand in making - and mostly because you didn't want a son, you just wanted a little toy copy of yourself to parade around so that people could congratulate you on your bedroom prowess. You helped make him what he is - gave him a set of values so distorted it's a wonder he even recognized love when he saw it, and taught him that he had to keep everything he felt secret because adults couldn't be trusted. And now I have one boy dead, and one a hair from dying, and all you care about is that somebody might think you weren't manly enough to father manly sons! Oh, get out of here, get out of my sight - "