The dean paused and let his quill drop.
“You’re quoting him from memory?” marveled Toria.
The dean grinned with a certain amount of complacency.
“I saw him,” said Toria quietly.
The dean understood that she was definitely not talking about the archmage, Balthazar Est.
One of the candles started to splutter; Toria drew herself up, took a small pair of scissors from the table, and precisely trimmed the wick. She asked in a soft voice, “By the way, who is this powerful and terrible mage who, according to Master Est, liked old castoffs?”
The dean grinned again. “That was Est’s teacher. He died about a hundred years ago.”
He fell silent and eyed his daughter questioningly. Toria seemed distracted, but the dean saw that all her thoughts were spinning, like a dog on a lead, around one vitally important subject. And in the end her thoughts about this subject found form in words that seemed to escape from her lips, “Egert Soll.”
Toria faltered. Her father benevolently waited for the continuation. She removed a heavy folio from the trolley and put it on a cleared corner of the desk then perched next to it, her feet off the ground.
“The impression I get about the scar and all the rest of it is … You can’t even imagine how much he has changed. You didn’t see him before…” She fell silent, swaying her foot in its little slipper. “Soll was a magnificent, puffed-up blowhard. Now there’s nothing left of that, just an empty shell, a vile skin. Really, Father, why would y—?” cutting off the word half-spoken, she eloquently, with exaggerated bewilderment, shrugged her shoulders.
“I understand.” The dean smiled again, but this time sadly. “You’ll never be able to forgive him, of course.”
Toria tossed her head. “That’s beside the point. It’s not a matter of forgiving or not forgiving. What if a tree had fallen on Dinar or a rock from a cliff? Could I really hate a stone?”
The dean whistled under his breath. “So in your opinion, Egert Soll is not responsible for his conduct, like an animal? Or like a tree or a stone, as you said?”
Toria stood up, apparently dissatisfied with her inability to express herself. She crossly ripped off a thread that was dangling from her sleeve. “That’s not what I meant to say. He’s not worthy of my hatred. I neither wish to forgive him nor not to forgive him. He is a void, you understand? He is of absolutely no interest. I have observed him, and not just once or twice.”
Toria bit her lip; she truly had often found it necessary to climb up to the top of the heavy stepladder so that she could peer through the small round window between the library and the Grand Auditorium. Egert always sat in exactly the same place, in a dark corner far from the rostrum. His vain attempts to extract some meaning out of the lectures, his subsequent desperation, and the apathetic indifference that always succeeded it had been quite evident to the observer. Pursing her lips, Toria had tried to suppress the hatred within herself and to observe Egert Soll with the dispassionate gaze of a researcher; sometimes she had even experienced a sort of queasy pity for him. But there were also times when her anger broke through, and then, who knows why, Soll would suddenly raise his head and look at the window, not seeing Toria behind it, even though he seemed to be staring straight into her eyes.
“If you had seen him there, by the well,” said the dean softly. “If you had seen how the curse worked its will upon him. Believe me, this man suffers deeply.”
Toria clutched the lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead and jerked it painfully. Memories flickered before her eyes, eclipsing one another: memories of things it would be best to forget.
Egert had laughed that day: all too well did Toria remember that laughter and the regard of his narrowed, condescending eyes; all too well did she remember that painfully long, fatal game he had played with Dinar; all too well did she remember the black tip of the blade that stuck out of the back of her beloved, and the pool of blood on the wet sand.
The dean waited patiently while his daughter gathered her thoughts.
“I understand,” said Toria finally, “that he intrigues you as an exhibit or an artifact, as a man who has been marked by the Wanderer and as the bearer of his curse. But for me, he is nothing more than an executioner whose hand has been cut off. And so, the fact that he now lives there, in the annex, and walks along the same corridors as Dinar once did, that, on top of everything else—” She winced, screwing up her face as if she tasted something rotten. She fell silent. She twirled a lock of hair in her fingers then absently pushed it back into the rest of her hair. The lock immediately broke free again.
“It is unpleasant for you, I know,” said her father softly. “It is offensive and painful. But please believe me, it has to be so. Believe me, trust me, and endure it, please.”
Toria tugged pensively at the disobedient curl; then, stretching out her hand, she took a knife from the table and, just as pensively, cut off the annoying lock of hair.
She was used to trusting her father completely and in everything. People and animals trusted her father; even snakes trusted her father: she had first witnessed this trust as a young girl, when her father had induced an adder to come out of a haystack where the village boys had been playing. The adder itself was quite terrified; Luayan, who at that time was not yet a dean, sharply scolded the peasant who, horror-stricken, wished to kill the adder; then he tucked the snake into one of his large pockets and thus carried it away into the forest. Toria walked alongside him and was not the slightest bit afraid: to her it was clearer than clear that everything her father did was correct and that he could never house danger within himself. Setting the snake down in a swath of grass, her father took a long time roughly explaining something to it: young Toria thought he was probably teaching it that it should not bite people. The snake did not dare to slither away without having received the express permission of her father. When Toria excitedly told her mother about all of this, her mother simply frowned and pursed her lips: her mother, unlike everyone else, did not trust her father completely.
Toria had trouble remembering the vague arguments that occasionally bedeviled the small family. It is possible that her father, looking ahead, tried to ensure that his daughter remembered only what was good about her mother; nevertheless, Toria recalled every detail of the disastrous winter evening that had taken her mother away from her.
It was only much later that she began to understand what was meant by that single word—he—that was uttered by her father first derisively, then furiously, and finally desolately; in the mouth of her mother, that word always sounded the same, like a challenge. That evening, having argued with her husband, Toria’s mother was planning to go to him, but then, for the first time after a long period of dismissive sufferance of his wife’s indiscretion, Luayan rebelled.
That is to say that it appeared that he rebelled: in truth, he felt or simply knew what would happen next. He implored, then threatened, and then locked his wife in a room, but she raged at him and threw such words into his face that Toria, trembling with dread in her bed behind the curtains, was steeped in tears of terror and distress. At some point Luayan’s forbearance broke down, and he allowed his wife to leave; he simply allowed her to leave. The slamming door almost came off its hinges, so powerful was that parting blow.
“I couldn’t bear listening to her,” the dean bitterly said to his grown daughter many years later. “I couldn’t bear…”
Toria, aware of the pain and guilt her father felt, firmly pressed her face to his chest.