Heart and stomach threatening to choke me, I dragged the horses toward the wagon and the newcomer, who had slipped behind the bole of the great oak.
“Please, madam”—I flinched and spun backward, but it was only the flustered proprietor who had popped up at my side—“forgive this misunderstanding. Allow me…” He gestured toward the horses and offered his hand.
Taking a quick breath, I stiffened my chin and raised my foot purposefully. The proprietor quickly linked his hands and gave me a leg up. “Since my honest guide has not arrived to escort me, I suppose I must ride alone,” I said.
“So sorry, madam, but for me to leave the inn—”
“I am the guide hired for you, madam.” The figure in the hooded cloak stepped out from behind the tree and bowed, interrupting the innkeeper before he could grovel further. “My apologies for my tardiness.”
“Hold up there,” yelled the grizzled driver of the wagon, as he stood shading his eyes and peering into the noisy fracas. He waved his arm toward the corner, but the sheriff was fully occupied, and Karon was already on Karylis’s back.
In moments, we were racing out of Threadinghall and down the forest road, back the way I had come earlier. The full moon lit our path with the brightness of day.
For an hour we rode without stopping and with no possibility of speech. When we emerged from the dense trees into the rolling moonlit meadows, Karon pointed to the right branch of an upcoming fork in the road. We thundered down the dusty track, winding through gentle hills until at last we came to a grove of willows bordering a wide stream. The water rippled merrily in the silver light.
We pulled up, and I slipped from the saddle straight into Karon’s arms. I whispered into his neck, “I was so frightened for you.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, stroking my hair and pressing me fiercely to his breast. “I had no idea. Never, never would I knowingly call you into such danger.” He was trembling.
I pulled away and laid a finger on his lips. “Judge on the merits of the deeds alone, not on what the circumstances of life have made of them. Have I got it right?”
“Yes. Of course you do.” He smiled weakly. “My chief counselor never forgets anything that can be used to refute a fool’s premise.”
“Should we not ride on now? I can go farther, you know.”
“We should, but I can’t. I have to rest for just a bit.” Karon’s trembling was not just the released anxiety of the evening’s events. His skin was hot and dry, a fever that had nothing to do with sorcery, and his rigid posture told me that sheer strength of will kept him upright.
“What have you done to yourself?” I asked, stroking his haggard face.
“Nothing that a year of sleep and a lifetime of you will not take care of. And to my great regret”—leaning on my arm, he sank to the spongy ground of the willow thicket— “a little of the sleep must come before anything else.” His eyes closed as he mumbled. “Just an hour, no more than two, then we must go…” And while holding my hand as if it were his last connection to life, he was asleep.
For a long while I sat and watched him sleep, knowing full well that the night’s events had changed my life forever. Karon had come a finger’s breadth from capture. I had killed a man to protect him. Full of uncomfortable musings about what else we might have to do to keep him safe, I pulled his cloak around us both and fell asleep.
The moon hung like a huge yellow lantern low above the mountains in the west when I woke. Karon slept unmoving, his scarred left arm thrown over me. “Wake up,” I said, shaking his shoulder. “You said two hours, no more.”
He buried his face in my tunic and emitted a muffled groan. “But this feels so marvelously fine.”
“Our own bed will be much nicer, and perhaps you’ll be clean. Happy as I am to see you, there is definitely an aura of the stable about.” At least his fever seemed to have cooled a bit.
He rolled over wearily. “I was the only passenger in Lynch’s cart, but chickens, and sheep, and pigs had most definitely preceded me. I was in no position to be choosy.”
I pulled out the provisions from my saddle pack. That roused him a bit. First he drained two waterskins. Then he downed half a loaf of bread, a knob of cheese, and three apples, and did not protest more than once when I gave him my portion, too.
“The man who laid the trap was a sheriff. He knew about you.”
He rubbed his neck and stretched his shoulders. “I was sure I’d shaken them… careless… unforgivable—”
“I told you, it’s all right. You’re safe. That’s all that matters.”
We didn’t return to the main road, but continued on a longer, less traveled route back to Montevial. As we rode, I told him Tanager’s story, and then he told me his own.
“I’d gone into Xerema to hire guards to protect the site. It was a fabulous find—at least seven hundred years old, built deep and hidden to protect it from graverobbers— but, of course, it’s all gone again now. I was on my way back to the site when the earthquake struck, out in the open. Though I used everything I knew to find Rinaldo and Damon, I had to give it up early on; I sensed no hint of life and had no hope of digging through that mess.
“But I couldn’t leave the area without trying to help. Unlike at the mountain, there were pockets in the city ruins where people could survive for a little while. Whatever I did, it wasn’t enough. Every few hours I’d have to forgo use of anything but my hands, and I could still hear people screaming and crying. But somehow I managed to do more than I could in ordinary times. As did everyone.”
The beautiful morning seemed at odds with his dreadful tale. Hawks soared through the haze of dayfires, hanging over the patchwork grain fields. Karon stared at the weedy path ahead of us, lost in the telling. “After a week or so, there was no one left living under the stones, and no one who hadn’t crossed the Verges, and I thought I’d come home. But I met up with a surgeon named Connor. We’d worked together at several sites, and he had guessed there was something out of the ordinary. He asked if I had medical training, and I told him I did, though perhaps different from his own. He said that if I’d continue working with him. he’d ask no questions.”
Karon looked up at me with a sadness that tore my heart. “He was extraordinary, Seri. Never have I met anyone who gave so much of himself. For days he would go without sleep, treating all who came to him: nobles, beggars, peasants, soldiers. Never did he lose patience or fail to treat even the least of them with kindness and respect, as if each were the most important person in the world. And he was skilled beyond any physician or surgeon I’ve known. I would assist him as best I could, and when he found something he couldn’t handle, he’d ask if I might have some insight into the case beyond his own. If I thought I could do it, he would find a private place and see that I was not disturbed…”
“You speak of him in the past.”
He nodded. “There was a little girl. Only five years old or so. A beautiful child. We got to her too late. With all of Connor’s skill and all of mine, we could not undo what had been done.” He spoke as if the terrible scene still lay before him. “The child’s father went mad. His wife and five other children had died in the earthquake, and the little girl was all he had left. When Connor told him she was dead, the man pulled a knife and stabbed him to the heart. It happened so quickly”—Karon’s face was a portrait of grief—“and just as with the Writer and his daughter, it came at a time when I had nothing left to give him. Before he died, he whispered that he had hoped he could at last witness what it was I did. Oh, Seri, would that I could have saved him. It was very hard to keep my own teaching in my mind.”
“Because he was an uncommon man and a friend in terrible times.”
“More than that. The murderer was a man I’d brought back from the dead.”
We rode in silence for a long while. What ordinary words of comfort could ease such extraordinary sorrow? But eventually Karon took up the tale once more, shaking his head as if to rid himself of his own thoughts. “That was about twelve days ago, I think. I knew I couldn’t keep up the work indefinitely. Someone would see or guess, and I was very tired, sick enough that I was endangering people I wanted to help, seeing two of everything or things that weren’t there. And without Connor my work was far more difficult. A day or two after I buried him, I began to suspect I was being followed. I’ve been running ever since. Every time I thought I was clear, that sheriff would turn up again. Finally I heard about this carter that plied the Leiran road, so I believed I could get to Threadinghall. I’d be safe there. But I knew I could go no farther without help—”