I touched his arm, clasped the blue cloak at my neck, and pulled up my hood. “Let’s go then, and I’ll ask the Prince myself. No protocol will stand in my way.”
Leading the horses to a rock of convenient height, Bareil helped Roxanne mount a placid bay and, likewise, offered his hand to steady me onto a gray mare. We rode out at a moderate pace across the baked valley floor and upward, over the ridge to the road that would take us back to Avonar. The blustering wind that filled our eyes and mouths with dirt, and the burden of ominous events and forbidden topics, did not promote easy conversation. The sooner this journey was over the better. So I was somewhat surprised when we reached the top of the valley rim, our journey scarcely begun, and Bareil pulled up abruptly. Laying his small hand on his horse’s mane, he did not shift his gaze from the road that stretched in front of us.
“You said you would get your answers from the Prince when you arrived in Avonar.” He tossed out the remark carelessly, as if making casual conversation, as if we had stopped for some other reason. Perhaps pretending it was of little importance mitigated his breach of a Guide’s protocol by speaking of his madrisson. “My lady… I must say… I don’t know if you should depend on that.”
The heat of the day vanished as if the sun had been blotted out.
“I am privy to nothing, my lady, as I said, and if I were, I could not share it unless the Prince permitted me, as you have remembered so well. But as I prepared to ride out from Avonar this morning, I obtained my horse from a public stable so as not to be remarked in the royal yards. As one will at any public place, I heard rumors… a great number of them… Some that might be of interest to you.” He stroked his horse’s mane slowly. Deliberately.
I forced myself to maintain his pretense, lest urgency force him back beyond the barriers of discretion. “Rumors are always interesting, Bareil, but rarely accurate.”
“One says that the honorable Men’Thor is to be named to the Preceptorate this day.”
“Such a rumor has been spread for months,” I said, “probably by Men’Thor himself. The gossipmongers just don’t know all the Prince has learned in these past days.”
“So I believed also, my lady. But one of the men who spoke this rumor has a brother in service at the palace” - the words flowed faster now - “and he said that the Prince rode in before dawn this morning. My lord’s first act was to summon Men’Thor from the Wastes and his son from the watch on the Vales. They were in consultation for a goodly time. When Men’Thor emerged, he sent my informant’s brother to take a message to his own house - to set in motion a feast he had long planned and to make all in readiness for a momentous event. Another servant was sent to Radele’s tailor to prepare ceremonial garb - on a scale far beyond anything he has ever requested.”
“They’re fools. They’ve misinterpreted.” Why would Bareil be skirting his vows to repeat rumors? Why stop here in the wilderness to tell me this? “I don’t understand, Bareil.”
His gaze at last met my own. Unflinching, the Dulcé continued as if I had made no comment. “I have heard another rumor, my lady.”
“Which is?”
“The Prince is to name a new successor this night.”
“Earth and sky! Let’s ride!”
“I thought no city could rival Montevial,” said Roxanne, craning her neck as we rode through the colossal bronze gates of Avonar. “But our cities are as far from this as the Bounded is from Leire.”
I glanced at the stone pillars that supported the gates, columns higher than the towers of Comigor, sculpted into two long, slender bodies whose eyes gazed down benevolently on all who passed, creations of such delicate perfection that the robes of stone that draped the perfect naked forms were the image of windswept gauze. Vasrin Creator and Vasrin Shaper, the male and female expressions of a single god. The ancient gates themselves reached almost as high as the figures, and the bronze panels that sheathed the ancient wood depicted in intricate detail hundreds of scenes reflecting a Dar’Nethi life far removed from what we saw around us.
“Perhaps we would be equally capable of such beauty if we’d only allow ourselves to learn it,” I said. “But we’ve always chosen to fight wars instead. After so many years of their own war, Karon says the Dar’Nethi are losing their arts and becoming more like us all the time.”
We had ridden hard for several hours across the sweeping borderlands, stopping only when we needed to rest and water the horses at the watercourses that flowed out of the city and the Vales. The rough dry borderlands and thready streamlets had yielded to healthier grasslands as we approached Avonar. Though ripe and fertile land for planting, these fields had been long abandoned, for it was across these rolling meadows that the tides of war ebbed and flowed. Here the armies of the Zhid would advance on the royal city, besieging the enchanted walls for months at a time. And when the Dar’Nethi shoved the Lords’ forces back into the Wastes, grass and flowers would slowly recover the reeking ruin left behind, only to be crushed when the war tide flowed again.
Roxanne had spent our journey questioning me about Avonar and sorcery, about Karon and the succession, but mostly about the Lords and what they had done to Gerick, which neither he nor Paulo had fully explained. Only in the last few leagues had she fallen silent, either from exhaustion at keeping such a pace or the need to mull the complexities of all I had told her.
We left our horses at a stable near the gates and shaded our faces with the hooded robes and long scarves Bareil had supplied. The shadows were lengthening, but the normal activities one would expect in the wide streets of the royal city on a summer afternoon were nowhere in evidence. Instead of street vendors hawking sausages and magical trinkets, small groups of citizens stood on the street corners talking with great animation. Instead of children running and laughing at their games around the fountains of colored light beams or water sprays that shaped themselves into figures of horses and birds, twos and threes of women walked side by side in deep discussion, tugging bewildered little ones behind. Every shop door had a gathering in front of it, and every hostelry, bathhouse, and house of refreshment seemed overflowing with custom. Anticipation was as palpable as the late summer heat.
“We’ve made good time,” said the Dulcé. “I’d not expected to make it back here before sunset.”
All night and all day I had pondered what I might do to influence the next few hours - hours that meant life or death for those I loved most in the world. I had composed words of reason and logic to lay at Karon’s feet, to shout at the Preceptors, at the Dar’Nethi, at the Lords themselves. After Bareil told me his “rumors,” I had tried again and failed to come up with any plan worth the dust on my shoe. I didn’t know enough. My feet slowed. “Tell me, Bareil, where are you taking us?”
“I was told to bring you to the palace discreetly. I am to settle you and the young lady in a suite of rooms in a private wing and see to your comfort until such time as the Prince commands me otherwise.”
“And you have no further orders concerning me or the princess?”
“Only that I am to insist that you remain in hiding and hold communication with no one until you hear differently from the Prince. For your safety, he says.”
“I see. He said nothing about when I might expect to speak to him again or to see my son?”
“No, my lady. Nothing.”
I needed to understand what Karon was doing. If he wasn’t going to tell me, I needed to seek answers elsewhere. And we were at least two hours earlier than Bareil had expected to get us here. Though Bareil fidgeted at the delay, I left the street and led the others into a lush green parkland in the shade of spreading trees, laden with fragrant pink blossoms. “Bareil, do you know where I might find Ven’Dar?”