He brushed the richly colored wood and twirled the stick about his head. “Am I to use it to fend off your frustrated suitors, then?”
“Not my suitors”—I snatched the stick from the air, rotated the ebony ring set into the shaft, and held the implement where he could see the sharp steel blade that now protruded from its lower end—“only those who mean you harm.” I had failed miserably in trying to persuade him to carry a sword when he traveled and thought perhaps a weapon that did not invite confrontation might be more acceptable.
“Ah, Seri…” It took no mind-speaking to tell me right away that I had failed again. He was still smiling, but his delight had gone.
“I’ll have it taken out,” I said, retracting the blade, unable to look at him any longer. I could not bear the thought that I had disappointed him. “I should have known better.”
The distance across the room between us suddenly yawned very wide. “I can’t be what you want,” he said. “In every other matter, I will follow your lead, become whatever you wish, but this one—”
“You are everything I want,” I said as I fitted the stick back in its wooden case. “I just thought… I just want you to have something more reliable than sorcery to defend yourself. Stars of night, Karon, what if you’ve used up everything… all your power… and you’re taken?” I could scarcely say the words, and even as I said them, I shoved them out of mind. “No matter. You are as you are, and I adore you, and Martin and the others are waiting for us with your birthday feast.”
I started for the door, but he did not follow. His stillness forced me to turn around. He was standing where I’d left him beside the hearth. His eyes were locked on me, and he wore a look of such distress that I hurried back to him and tried to wipe it away with my hand. But he gathered my hands into his and gripped them hard. “Seri, I’ve wronged you sorely. All these years I’ve known I would have to explain this. The Way of the J’Ettanne—this path that I choose for my life—is very hard. Coward that I am, I’ve told myself that my choices will not harm you if I’m careful enough. If I’m strong enough. If I love you enough. I’ve ignored the truths of our future and soothed my guilt by saying that I cannot rob you of the power to choose your own way. If your choices endanger you, then that is the Way laid down for you.” He sat down on the couch and pulled me down beside him. “But I’ve been fooling myself and you. I’m so afraid…”
Afraid? The fingers that stroked my own so softly were cold. I felt as if someone had crammed the walking stick down my throat. “Tell me.”
He took a deep breath. “When the day comes that I am discovered, I’ll not fight.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean, I cannot use my power or any other weapon to take life or inflict an injury. Not to save myself. Not to save you. Not for anyone. The gift I have is for healing, for lifegiving, and I cannot use it otherwise. It’s ingrained in me so deeply, it wouldn’t be possible. You have to know that.”
I came near blurting out that this assertion was ludicrous, an impossibility for a man of honor. And Karon’s honor was unquestionable; he constantly risked his safety to care for people whose names he didn’t even know. I could understand his reluctance to inflict bodily injury, having lived so intimately with the pain and suffering such violence caused. Yet it was inconceivable that a man would not use whatever weapon he possessed to defend his family and friends, and in Karon’s case, defending us meant defending himself.
But Martin had taught me how difficult it was to argue with an idealist. “A small dose of hard reality will always make idealists into practical men,” he had once said. And so, rather than disputing Karon’s professed beliefs, I argued with his more speculative point. “Then we’ll just have to make sure you’re not discovered. Martin is wait—”
I tried to rise, but Karon would allow me neither to leave nor to divert him. “It’s more likely than not, and the result will be terrible. I’ve seen what they do to sorcerers, Seri, and what they do to those who consort with them. The image never leaves me. And I’m telling you that I can’t protect you from it.”
“I am perfectly aware of the risks. I just don’t want to think about them.”
“But you must. If you have me in your life, then I’m afraid you’ll have that in your life, too.”
“I won’t let it happen.”
“If anything gives me hope that it won’t, it’s your determination. But you’re the daughter of a Leiran warrior, and you’ve been taught that failure to fight is despicable cowardice. I’m a J’Ettanni Healer, who’s been taught that the crooked paths of life are the most marvelous. You were so young on that night when Martin and the others chose to have me stay… I’ll not sneak away and pretend I don’t love you, but I can’t ignore this anymore. I’m asking a great deal of you.”
And, of course, because I loved him and it was his birthday, I said I would accept whatever came and whatever he could or could not do about it. But somehow I would persuade him to carry a weapon.
In early summer Karon and I rode out to a jonglers’ fair that had grown up in the hills just outside the walls of Montevial. Jonglers were wandering entertainers who usually traveled in small family groups, but who would stop for a few weeks in summer here or there, gathering in ever-greater numbers to exchange stories, wives, and horses, and generally to enjoy each other. Though jonglers were widely regarded as thieves and liars, people would travel from nearby cities and villages to enjoy the risky marvels of their fairs. The colorfully dressed women told fortunes by casting painted sticks, and wiry, shirtless men in pantaloons swallowed fire. They told tales, sang songs, fought mock battles in wildly colored costumes, and painted portraits on bits of wood and glass. Their ragged, scrawny children were the envy of every child in Leire who dreamed of living in eternal entertainment without the restraints of propriety or lessons or labor.
“Are you sure you’re not ready to head home?” asked Karon, giving me his hand as I jumped over a running ditch, left full by an afternoon cloudburst. “This isn’t the safest place to be after nightfall.”
“We couldn’t go before she finished the sketch,” I said, the dim light forcing me to squint at the few coal-drawn lines on the split shingle that evoked an astonishing likeness of Karon’s face. “And there’s still the fire dancers. A jongler fair is so much more exciting after dark. Tomas and I were once confined to our rooms for a month after we sneaked out to a fair that had grown up near Comigor one summer, and we never regretted the punishment. They actually plunge the torches right down their gullets, while everyone around them is whirling and stomping.” Some delights one just never outgrew.
“Then we’d best circle around this muck, rather than crossing straight through it and having you in wet shoes the rest of the night.” Karon led me along the dark peripheries of a field trampled into ankle-deep mud by a jousting demonstration. The flaring torches of the main venues were far across the field from the shanty where an acquaintance had told me I could get a portrait of Karon so like I would swear there were two of him. Forced by the mud to take a circuitous route, we threaded our way through a ragtag village of tents and lean-tos, currently dark and deserted except for a few bony dogs. Periodically a great cheer went up from the distant fire-glow of the central fair, so I almost didn’t hear the child.
“Agren. Agren. Wake up, Agren. Come on.” The quiet pleas were interspersed with sniffs and sobs. “Don’t be dead. Please don’t.”
We slowed our steps and peered into a shed of canvas hung from wood beams that had been roped together in a box-like shape. A ragged little girl of some six or seven years knelt beside a dark form sprawled on the ground. She was shaking his shoulder, but he was not responding to her pleas, likely something to do with the knife hilt protruding from his back.