“—and you called me.”
“Inexcusable. I should have known they’d find me again. But I was at the end of my resources, and you were so much in my thoughts. I don’t think I could have spoken to anyone else at such a distance. I couldn’t conjure a broomstraw after it. Still can’t. The certainty that you would be waiting was the only thing that kept me moving yesterday. But invading your mind, stealing your thoughts—it violates everything I profess…”
“Would it make a difference to you if I said it was all right? If I gave you my consent to speak to me in that way any time?” The idea had been with me since I had first heard him in our library. “Last night, I needed to warn you. I wanted you to hear. I trust you, you know, and I welcome you into every part of my life. It doesn’t frighten me.”
“Gods, Seri…”
We reached home without incident and with no evidence that Karon’s pursuers had any clue as to his identity. He believed they had never seen his face. He worried that I’d be recognized, but I assured him the light had been poor and my face shaded by my hat. For good measure I burned the clothes we had worn.
I didn’t tell Karon that I had killed to protect him. Keeping the secret caused me far more guilt than the killing, but I told myself that I would reveal it as soon as time had blurred the event. Perhaps by then Karon, too, would realize that the Way of the J’Ettanne was not the way of the world.
Karon’s illness passed quickly with rest and decent food, but I had never seen him in such a desert of the spirit. In the weeks after his return, he ventured out of the house only once—to visit the families of his two assistants, offering them his sympathy and what help he could in dealing with their loss. Though he hadn’t asked me to do so, he seemed relieved that I discouraged visitors. The effort of communicating with anyone was so monumental that even a quarter of an hour’s company left him pale and sick. He had spent everything he had five hundred times over. Now smiles and laughter and even words came hard.
But on one morning in early autumn I awoke to find him gazing down at me, head propped on one elbow, a sober demeanor belied by a sparkle in his blue eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me, my lady.”
“What do you mean?”
“Are there more secrets than this one?”
“Who ever said you were to know everything that goes on?”
“But I believe I have an interest in this matter.”
“Have you been prying with this fiendish talent you have, sir?”
“I confess to it. You’ve seemed unwell these few weeks, and I was worried.”
“And so you’ve deprived me of my surprise?”
His face lost its shine for a moment. “Does it really bother you? I thought—”
I rolled over into his arms. “Not a whit! I was just waiting to be sure.” An astonishing thought came to mind. “What else can you tell about it?”
His laughter was bursting with joy and life. “Do you really want to know?”
“Everything you know. If I have no secrets, neither can you.”
“It is a son.”
The months that followed were the sweetest that life can provide. Whether caused by delight in our child’s new life, or the newfound intimacy of our mind-speaking, or the summer’s brush with mortality and dread, that golden autumn was wrapped in aching beauty. It was as if nature itself had decided to grant us a season of perfection long after a normal year would have lost itself in snow and ice. We walked and rode in the intoxicating air of the countryside. We read and we laughed. Karon delved into his work, and I with him, and we marveled at each new treasure we dragged out of the bottomless vaults of Leire.
Our son would be named Connor Martin Gervaise. So many names for a being so tiny, said Karon. Every night he would close his eyes and lay his hands on my belly, whispering the proper words, and, after a moment, he would smile and tell me all was well. Sometimes he would say it with words, and sometimes he would look into my eyes and speak with his other voice. Words were only a pale shadow of that other voice, no more representing the wholeness of speech than notes of one octave can represent the wholeness of music.
The J’Ettanne of Avonar had only rarely used their talent for mind-speaking. The gift carried an immense emotional burden, for it had been their downfall. Its use was rigidly constrained by the Two Tenets of the J’Ettanne. Thus it was only with the freedom granted by my offer that Karon was able to explore his strange talent for the first time. Eagerly he experimented with all its various aspects, working at openings and barriers, contacts and distractions, until I thought that he must turn his head inside out— or mine.
We practiced enough that it became easy, Karon speaking to me and then listening to my thoughts in reply. But once we mastered the skill, we used it only rarely. Karon said it would be too easy to misstep, demonstrating knowledge of something one had no business knowing while in the company of others. It was the same reason he used his other magical abilities so sparingly. Habits. Though I believed no one would ever learn of what we did, I did not complain as I might have a few months earlier. Karon’s safety was the one subject on which I no longer offered any dispute.
Karon made no healing journeys that fall. At my urging he would take Karylis out to run in the countryside long after I felt too uncomfortable to ride, but he would always be back before nightfall. Each time he would say that perhaps the groom should take the horse out for exercise from then on, so he would not be away too long. But I told him, laughing, that he should not deprive himself of his delight in riding, for I had bribed Karylis to make sure he always came home.
CHAPTER 15
As Baglos recited the tale of his mysterious land and people, the afternoon waned gracefully. The meadow came alive with birdsong and a soft breeze. While I sat picking at the dry, weedy grass, giving thought to our next move, D’Natheil used my ax to split the thick chunk of birchwood and shorten it. Baglos stood nearby, chewing his lip and watching D’Natheil uncertainly, as if he weren’t quite sure what to do next either.
Jacopo stood up, rubbed his backside, stretched his shoulders, and then promptly squatted down again beside me, rapping his thick knuckles on his boots. “I should go home,” he said, eyeing my two visitors uncomfortably. “I’m feeling down in the leg after all this hill climbing, and I left Lucy Mercer with the shop. The old biddy’s overgenerous with my money. Got no eye for a bargain.”
“You should go,” I said. “Paulo, too. Better if you’re both out of this.”
At some time during Baglos’s astonishing story, Paulo had finished with the horses and fallen asleep in the shade of my woodpile. He could not have heard much and was surely not in the habit of volunteering information to anyone. But Rowan seemed to have an eye on Paulo, and the prospects for a lame, illiterate boy from Dunfarrie were bleak enough without tainting him with talk of sorcery.
“I don’t feel right to leave you. Fearful business—all this talk of madness and murder and men with no souls. And I can’t say as I trust these two as you do. Come along home with me, Seri.”