“Not while the storms keep up.”
“I’ll figure out something. It’s only another few weeks till we can leave this cursed place.”
“You won’t last that long. And if some of these oddments that still believe the Guardian was their friend find out you can’t think straight for half a day after a storm, they might come up with some way to do us in.”
We’d had some trouble with some of the old maintainers trying to force Singlars back into their fastnesses, beating them and telling them I was destroying the Source. Most Singlars were still easily intimidated.
“I can’t leave now.”
“Then go back to the Source. Try what it said would help you.”
“Drink from the spring? Not likely. I don’t want to take anything from the Source. You said yourself that you didn’t trust it.”
“I don’t. But I don’t want you dead neither. I want to go back where they make jack and real biscuits, and where I can plant my backside on a piece of horseflesh. If you’re going to be dead, then you might as well be dead from trying to stay alive.”
I didn’t answer him then. I just got to my feet and said, “I’ll be all right. Let’s get moving.”
Three days later another storm struck, worse than the last. Another sevenlight, three more storms, and I couldn’t go up the stairs in the Blue Tower without stopping every third step to rest. I’d lost so much weight, my breeches wouldn’t stay up. I felt as scrawny as Zanore, but Zanore could have tied me in a knot with one hand. My mouth tasted like ash, as if everything inside me had burned up. Paulo kept looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking.
I went to the Source while everyone was asleep. I didn’t take Paulo with me, didn’t tell him or anyone where I was going. I didn’t want anyone seeing how hard it was for me to get up the stairs.
The lamps were down in the tower, so it was night in the garden. But it wasn’t completely dark. Lamps just like the ones in the tower hung on iron posts, scattered throughout the plants and trees, casting a soft yellow glow on the path. The air felt chilly, but that was no surprise. I couldn’t seem to get warm any more.
“Greetings, my king.” The voice washed over and through me when I walked into the cave and dipped my hand in the water. “Too long it’s been since you’ve come here.”
I didn’t waste time. “What did you mean when you said the water from the spring could sustain me through my trials?”
“Just that, my king. The water is of you, and thus will strengthen and nourish you.”
I dabbled my hand in the icy blue-green water. It had no smell, no aura of enchantment. I touched my tongue to a drop and discovered no suspicious taste, no unexpected sensation except for overpowering thirst. No instinct warned me of poison. Having eaten or drunk nothing for many days without threat of imminent nausea, and having scarcely made it down the garden steps without falling on my face, I decided it was worth a try. I scooped up a handful.
“Drink deep, my king. Live.”
And so I did.
“Oh, stars of night… ” It was hard not to drain the basin dry. Pure, clean, clear, the water stung each of my senses awake. After I had drunk all I could hold, I sagged against the cave wall and slipped down to the floor, feeling the ash that clogged my veins and lungs washed away. I did not sleep, but by the time the lamps faded and the sunrocks began to glow, I could think clearly again. I must have been perilously close to the end. The Source did not speak again that night.
From then on I went to the Source after every storm. Each time I dipped my hand in the water, the voice would greet me. “Welcome, my king. I rejoice in your life. How may I serve you this day?”
“Will you answer my question?”
“Not yet. The time of your understanding is not come. But I would talk with you about many other things.”
“Then I’ll just drink the water and be on my way.”
“Ah, you are hard! I must find something to tease you into talking with me. I’ve waited so long for your company.”
“Tell me what I want to know.”
“You should expand the realm of those things you want to know. Your wisdom is lacking in many areas.”
It became a game of sorts between us.
“Tell me, O voice of the water bowl, have you a name?” I said one day, as I sat watching the torchlight sparkle on the surface of the spring while the water did its work in me.
“I am the first root of the Bounded. It is perhaps not an elegant name. Not easy on the tongue.”
“It seems strange to call you Source. It’s not a proper name. I could call you Root, I suppose.”
“As you wish - and I could call you boy, instead of king, for at the root of your being is a youth of sixteen, though you bear the burdens of a king.”
Gradually we did move on to matters of more substance in our conversations. I began to talk of problems brought to me by the Singlars, of difficulties caused by the changes I’d made, and of freedoms I’d given them. I asked about the roving bands of monstrous creatures that I knew were sentient beings who threatened outlying fastnesses, and what to do about the Singlars who were afraid to leave their towers to join in the awakening life of the city. I began to think of the Source as a friend who spoke to me as an elder sister might. She never told me what to do, but led me through my thinking, asking questions and encouraging me to draw on everything I’d learned: from books, from watching my father and mother - both my true parents and those who had raised me - even from my time with the Lords, though neither the Source nor I ever mentioned them by name. I refused to sully the beauty of that cave with the ugliness of my past.
“The answer is already there,” she said to me when I fumed in frustration at some problem. “You have only to uncover it.”
And most of the time it was.
I remembered what the Source had said that first time, about how a stone dreams of the earth of which it is a part and how the rain finds its way to the sea that is its essence, and I came to believe that I was indeed linked to the Bounded in some profound way. The firestorms that damaged us both, the water that healed me, the Source that knew my mind, my instincts and familiarity with the strange land and its people… even the geometries of the Blue Tower that satisfied desires I hadn’t even known I had… my nausea at the unsettled Edge… everything I had experienced here witnessed to such a mystery.
And so as the days of waiting passed, the Bounded grew, and I felt useful, and I began to think that once I’d settled my business in the mundane world - my mother and the rest of it - I just might come back and finish what I had begun here.
Roxanne became an invaluable assistant in matters of governing, coming up with good ideas about trade laws and judgments and projects. She must have studied every document about philosophy, law, or politics that had ever been written in the Four Realms, and she delighted in quoting them at me, especially when she could trounce one of my ideas. I had never imagined anyone could take pleasure in argument.
She didn’t travel the Bounded with Paulo and me. Though she never admitted it, I think it was fear of the firestorms that kept her close to the Blue Tower. The first one had kept her in her bed for almost a week.
When she wasn’t helping me in the audience hall or the council chamber, as I had named a large study down the passage from my bedchamber, she was rummaging about the Blue Tower, foraging for furnishings, fabrics she might use for clothing more suited to her tastes, anything to enliven a “house run by male children” as she put it. She had taken over the running of the household, training servants and ordering whatever foods and furnishings she liked from the luxuries found in the storerooms of the Blue Tower, but nowhere else in the city. I was happy to have her deal with those things, as I had more than enough to do, and cared not a whit what we ate or sat on.
That no one could say where the goods in the storerooms came from or how to obtain more when the supplies started getting thin piqued my curiosity, but infuriated Roxanne. She could not abide secrets or mysteries, and took any suggestion that an event was unexplainable in terms of science, economics, or politics as a personal affront. Living in the Bounded, which by its very existence was a mystery beyond her experience, came near driving her to distraction. Even after she’d long given up on science and nature, no day passed on which she failed to look for any small mystery that she could declare solved.