She recoiled, saw in his face that he had picked up the recoil. He backed off quickly. “Well, well, child, I have known it a long time, the Towers do not easily let go their hold on those they have taken. I remember well how Damon went for more than a year like a lost soul blundering in the outer hells.” Clumsily he patted her arm. “I won’t ask questions, chiya. But if that husband of yours is no good to you…”
Quickly she put out her hand to him. “No, no. It has nothing to do with Andrew, Father.”
He said, his frown skeptical, “When a bride of a few moons looks as you do, her husband is seldom blameless.”
Under his concentrated study she flushed, but her voice was firm. “On my word, Father, there has been no quarrel, and Andrew is no way to blame.” It was the truth, but not the whole truth. There was no way to tell the whole truth to anyone outside their closed circle, and she was not sure she knew it herself. He sensed that she was evading him, but he accepted the barrier between them. “Well, well, the world will go as it will, daughter, not as you or I would have it Have you breakfasted?”
“No, I waited to keep you company.”
She let him call servants and order them to bring her food, more than she wanted, but she knew he had been shocked by her thinness and pallor. Like an obedient child, she forced herself to eat a little more than she really wanted. His eyes dwelt on her face as she ate, and he said at last, more gently than was his custom, “There are times, child, when I feel that you daughters of Comyn who go into the Towers take risks no less than those of our sons who go into the Guard, and fight along our borders… and it’s just as inevitable, I suppose, that some of you should be wounded.”
How much did he know? How much did he understand? She knew he had said just about as much as he could say without breaking one of the strongest taboos in a telepathic family. She felt obscurely comforted, even through her embarrassment. It could not have been easy for him to go this far.
He passed her a jar of honey for her bread. She refused it, laughing. “Would you have me fat as a fowl for roasting?”
“As fat, maybe, as an embroidery needle,” he scoffed. Her eyes on his face, she saw that he too was thinner, drawn and worn, and his eyes seemed set deeper behind cheekbones and brow.
“Is there none here to keep you company, Father?”
“Oh, Ellemir is in and out, about the kitchens. Damon has gone to the village, to see to the families of the men who were frostbitten during the great storm, and Andrew is in the greenhouse, seeing what the frost has done there. Why not join him there, child? I am sure there is work enough for two.”
“And it is certain I am no help to Ellemir about the kitchens,” she said, laughing. “Later, perhaps. If the sun is out they will be doing a great wash, and I must see to the linen rooms.”
He laughed. “To be sure. Ellemir has always said that she would rather muck out barns than use a needle! But later maybe we can have some music again. I have been remembering how, when I was younger, I used to play a lute. Perhaps my fingers could get back their skill. I have so little to do, sitting here all the day…”
The women of the household, and some of the men, had dragged out the great tubs and were washing clothes in the back kitchens. Callista found her presence superfluous and slipped away to the small still-room where she had made her own work. Nothing was as she had left it. She remembered that Damon had been working here during her illness, and, surveying the disorder he had left, she set to work to put everything to rights. She realized too that she must replenish stocks of some common medicines and remedies, but while her hands were busy with some of the simplest herbal mixtures, separating them into doses to be brewed for tea, she realized that there was a more demanding task before her: she must make some kirian.
She had thought when she left the Tower that she would never do this again; Valdir was too young to need it and Domenic too old. Yet she realized soberly that whatever happened, no household of telepaths should be without this particular drug. It was by far the most difficult of all the drugs she knew how to make, having to be distilled in three separate operations, each to dispose of a different chemical fraction of the resin. She had set everything to rights in the still-room and was taking out her distilling equipment when Ferrika came in and started, seeing her there.
“Forgive me for disturbing you, vai domna.”
“No, come in, Ferrika. What can I do for you?”
“One of the maids has scalded her hand at the wash. I came to find some burn salve for her.”
“Here it is,” Callista said, reaching a jar from a shelf. “Can I do anything?”
“No, my lady, it is nothing serious,” the woman said, and went away. After a little while she returned, bringing back the jar.
“Is it a bad burn?”
Ferrika shook her head. “No, no, she carelessly put her hand into the wrong tub, that is all, but I think we should keep something for burns in the kitchen and washing rooms. If someone had been severely hurt it would have been bad to have to come up here for it.”
Callista nodded. “I think you are right. Put some into smaller jars, then, and keep it there,” she said. While Ferrika at the smaller table, began to do this, she frowned, opening drawer after drawer until Ferrika finally turned and asked, “My lady, can I help you to find something? If the Lord Damon, or I myself, have misplaced something for you…”
Callista frowned. She said, “Yes, there were kireseth flowers here…”
“Lord Damon used some of those, my lady, while you were ill.”
Callista nodded, remembering the crude tincture he had made. “I have allowed for that, but unless he wasted or spoiled a great deal, there was far more than he could have used, stored in a bag at the back of this cabinet.” She went on searching cabinets and drawers. “Have you used any of it, Ferrika?”
The woman shook her head. “I have not touched it.” She was smoothing salve into a jar with a small bone paddle. Watching her, Callista asked, “Do you know how to make kirian?”
“I know how it is done, my lady. When I trained in the Guild-house in Arilinn, each of us spent some time apprenticed to an apothecary to learn to make medicines and drugs. But I myself have never made it,” the woman said. “We had no use for it in the Guild-house, though we had to learn how to recognize it. You know that the… that some people sell the by-products of kirian distillation, illegally?”
“I had heard this, even in the Tower,” Callista said dryly. Kireseth was a plant whose leaves, flowers and stems contained various resins. In the Kilghard Hills, at some seasons, the pollen created a problem, having dangerous psychoactive qualities. Kirian, the telepathic drug which lowered the barriers of the mind, used the only safe fraction, and even that was used with great caution. The use of raw kireseth, or of the other resins, was forbidden by law in Thendara and Arilinn, and was regarded as criminal everywhere in the Domains. Even kirian was treated with great caution, and looked on with a kind of superstitious dread by outsiders.
As she counted and sorted filtering cloths, Callista thought, with a peculiar homesickness, of the faraway plains of Arilinn. It had been her home for so long. She supposed she would never see it again.
It could be her home again, Leonie had said… To dispel that thought, she asked, “How long did you live in Arilinn, Ferrika?”
“Three years, domna.”
“But you are one of our people from the estate, are you not? I remember that you and I and Dorian and Ellemir all played together when we were little girls, and had dancing lessons together.”
“Yes, my lady, but when Dorian went to be married, and you to the Tower, I decided I did not want to stay at home all my life, like a plant grown fast to the wall. My mother had been midwife here, you remember, and I had, I thought, talent for the work. There was a midwife on the estate at Syrtis who had been trained in the Arilinn Guild-house, where they train healers and midwives. And I saw that under her care, many lived whom my mother would have consigned to the mercy of Avarra — lived, and their babies thrived. Mother said these newfangled ways were folly, and probably impious as well, but I went to the Guild-house at Neskaya and took oath there. They sent me to Arilinn to be trained. And I asked leave of my oath-mother to come here and take employment, and she agreed.”