I ignored the personal jab. The amethyst walls glittered in the torchlight, and I traced my fingers over the sharp facets of a crystal the size of my hand. “How long has the Bounded been in existence?”
“I have no concept of how long, but my nature is to be buried by the passage of time. A time will come when you and I no longer hear each other’s voice, but it is not yet.”
“What are the firestorms?”
“They are beyond my knowledge. They come from outside, and you must stop them or the Bounded will be returned to what it was.”
Returned to chaos. “How can I stop them if I don’t even know what they are?”
“You are with us and cannot be other than you are.”
“That’s no answer.”
“It is the most fundamental truth. It tells me that you can learn the nature of the storms. Though you belong here, you, like the storms, come from outside the Bounded. And the storms are aimed at you.”
I was getting nowhere. How had the Guardian ever managed to get information specific enough to act on? Perhaps I had to frame my questions differently. I still had the most important thing to ask, yet I didn’t expect an answer any clearer than those I’d already dismissed.
“Do you know who stabbed my mother?”
“Yes.”
“And you know who betrayed the Prince’s - my father’s - plans?” It didn’t seem necessary to explain what plans or who my mother and father were. This voice expressed the same understanding of me that I felt for this strange land.
“Yes.”
Cold, tight, I moved toward the basin again, as if proximity might make me hear the answer better. I would tolerate no mistake. “Who, then?”
“I will not answer that.”
My fingers gripped the rim of the water bowl as if I could rip it from the solid stone. “Tell me!”
“It is not time for you to know.”
“This is madness!” I threw up my hands, wishing for something to break or throw, yelling at the ceiling and the walls and the floor of the damnable place. “You… whoever you are… whatever trickery you work… you’ve used a thousand words, but you’ve told me nothing at all! It’s so easy to play the prophet, to tell me how wise and knowledgeable you are, but you speak in circles and refuse me the answers I need most.”
“To tell you these things would be a distraction from all you must accomplish here. Your people need your care, more even than I - ”
“These are not my people!”
“Be patient. Learn of your true self. Return in a hundredlight from this, and I will reveal what you ask of me. Until then, think carefully on all I have said.”
“A hundredlight! A hundred days? Impossible! I don’t even know… do you know if my mother is alive?”
“That I do not know. Ask me no more this day, 0 king. Secure your place in this, your new world. Help your - ”
“How can I waste a hundred days? I have to go.”
“And where would you go that is closer to the truth than in your heart - here, in the Bounded? Power awaits you here, and peace. Only death awaits you elsewhere.”
Disgusted with myself for trying to force some meaning into gibberish, I turned to leave.
“Before you go, young king, will you not taste of the water that gives life to your land? To all others it is alien - poison - but for you it holds comfort, strength, and nourishment. It is of you, and thus it will sustain you in whatever trials you face.”
I dabbled my fingers in the cold blue-green, scooping the water and letting it dribble through my fingers. “I don’t think so. I don’t trust your all-knowing benevolence.”
“As you wish. I will await your return. Come to the Source for counsel as you desire, but wait a hundredlight for your deeper questioning.”
“A waste of time,” I said to Paulo, as we emerged from the cave. “I should have known no ‘prophetic voice’ would tell me anything useful. And three months to try again.”
I strode down the path through the grove, only realizing, when Paulo grunted, how he was straining to keep up. Stopping at the pool, I gazed up at the falls for a bit, allowing him to catch his breath before we went on. The light had faded while we were in the cave. Sparrows and finches chattered as if the change were true sunset, and the call of a thrush pierced the cooling air with the clarity of a flute. In the shadier corners of the garden, lamps hung on iron posts gave off a warm glow that brightened even as the yellow-orange glare above us dimmed.
“So, what do you think?” I said, when Paulo’s expression looked a little less anxious. “Did you feel the same things as before?”
“You’re not going to like what I say.”
“Go ahead.”
“I think you need to get away from here. You oughtn’t stay - not even one more day.”
“This Source business is idiocy. I’ll agree. But” - how could I explain what I felt here in the Bounded, despite the day’s frustration? - “she was right about one thing. Where would I go?”
“It wasn’t so much the voice, but the place… the whole thing. There’s something wrong - something hidden. It’s what she’s not telling you that makes me skittish. I think we ought to leave. Go home. Hide out in Dunfarrie or Montevial if we can’t go home. Get to Avonar somehow, if that’s where you need to be to find out what’s going on with you.”
Even as the worn rim of the stone basin had yielded to the dribbling water, his arguments and my own resistance were eroded by simple logic. “I can’t face my mother, living or dead, until I know who hurt her. There are no answers in Leire or Valleor. All I can do there is hide. And if I go to Avonar without an explanation in hand, my father will kill me or the Lords will take me back, and I won’t even know who to blame.”
He couldn’t answer that. He’d been ready to kill me, too.
I draped Paulo’s arm across my shoulders, and we walked slowly around the path and up the stairs to the gallery. “I’ll be all right here for a while. But I’ll have Vroon take you back… and the princess… ”
“Now that wouldn’t be smart,” he said between steps. “If anyone was looking for you, and they found out the lady was come back from where you were… Well, she’s not likely to keep it quiet, now is she? She’d lead ‘em right to you.”
“I suppose so.”
“And I told you I’m stayin‘ close.”
“Even if I decide to stay here?”
“Nothin‘ better to be at.”
Without any further discussion, we stepped into the dark opening that would take us back to the Blue Tower. I wasn’t yet ready to ask if he still thought I’d stabbed my mother.
CHAPTER 18
We stayed. The princess was livid when she heard it was to be another three months until she could go home, and she told me I was still the stupidest boy in the world who would take the word of a bowl of water for anything. She didn’t speak to me for three days, and then decided maybe it was more of a punishment to make sure I heard her complaining all the time.
I couldn’t argue with Roxanne’s premise. I certainly needed to learn more about the Source. But a number of things had to come first.
Paulo’s condition improved every day, and soon we were able to send Nithea home. I made sure she had a supply of all the medicinal plants I found in the garden and that she knew as much as I about what to do with them. Her eager questions made me wish I had listened closer to Kellea.
As the Singlars seemed inclined to listen to me, I spent the days trying to untangle the mess the Guardian had created, dealing with their disputes and petitions. I remembered how my mother had treated the tenants at Comigor with honesty and respect, and how she had spent most of her time listening rather than talking. Those principles seemed to carry me pretty well.