CHAPTER 21
Ven’Dar
Prince D’Natheil’s first meeting with the Leiran youth filled me with tremendous hopes. The Prince had such great love for the boy, and as he sat at the bedside through the long afternoon, I could sense his desire to unleash it. But the boy held back. Whether he had truly turned traitor, or whether he had seen the changes in the Prince and decided he couldn’t trust him, I didn’t know, but I grieved for them both. If the youth maintained his silence, the consequences could be severe, not so much for him as for D’Natheil.
On the next morning, Bareil told me how the Prince had let the youth escape, and I understood his plan. I contrived to be at his headquarters when the Heir returned from Nentao, hoping to hear that the boy had indeed been moved by the distressing sight of the Lady, but I received only a brief account of the Prince’s failure. With a troubled heart I saw him plunge into his war once again, and return late that night covered in blood, his warriors praising the glories of his killing. If this continued, a time would come very soon when I wouldn’t be able to reach him any more.
And so on that evening, unknown to the Prince or even my madrissé, I slipped through a portal to Avonar. Soon after midnight I let myself into the peaceful darkness of Nentao by a side door. I had no fear of reprisal. After all, it was my own house.
I hadn’t known the Lady Seriana before the distraught Prince summoned me in his darkest hour, begging me to save her life. The Healers called to repair her injury had felt her slipping away. She would not grasp the tethers they proffered, as if life was become too painful to embrace any longer.
“Ah, gods, Ven’Dar,” he had said, weeping at her bedside. “I’ve killed her and myself together. And she’ll be gone before I can repair what I’ve done.” Guilt can twist truth so terribly.
I had drawn together what I knew of her from four years of the Prince’s friendship, and what I knew of this man she had loved beyond death, and I had worked a winding for her.
One never knows what will be the exact result of a winding. You create with a sense of your desired outcome, in the Lady’s case the necessity for holding on to a life so beloved and so valued, and you weave it into the words and the knowledge and the power that has been given you, until you are so filled with the enchantment you think it must leak out of your skin. Only then can you spin it out, as the fisherman casts out his line, and hope that the sum of your efforts lands somewhere close to your intended mark.
She lived, and for a brief hour we thought she might awaken to herself. But as the days passed our hopes faded, and when her eyes opened at last, no life dwelt in them. It was as if her injury had healed, but her soul would not. It was then the Prince asked if he could bring her to Nentao. “She wasn’t ready to come to the palace,” he said, bitterly. “She always said it was D’Natheil’s place, not mine. Clearly, she was more right than she knew. I can’t leave her there. And I’ll have to be away so much… ”
The Leiran youth was locked in my root cellar, snoring heartily, his hands and feet secured to a drainage pipe that was embedded in the ceiling. The small window and the door were warded and his limbs restricted by various simple, easily detectable enchantments.
I sat down on a crate of turnips and stared at him until he woke. Almost an hour passed. But I’d always found touching a sleeping stranger a dreadfully rude way to wake him up. And sometimes dangerous.
“Trussed you up like a goose, have they?” I said, when the boy’s eyes popped open, and he bolted to a sitting position amidst an avalanche of vegetables, letting out an exclamation of a common barnyard variety when he got tangled in the ropes and whacked his head on the pipe.
“Aye.” He slumped against the carrot bin.
“My name is Ven’Dar. I am one of the Preceptors of Gondai. I understand you are familiar with us - both our better parts, and those we’d prefer not to let everyone make jest of?”
“Mmm.” He acknowledged the truth with a sour twist to his lips.
“I thought so. Now if I were to untie your hands and feet, and make any number of promises of my honor and goodwill, and any number of threats regarding any attempt on your part to get away, would you consider talking with me for a while?”
He shrugged, his expression uncommunicative. Clearly he had reservations.
I did the untying, but skipped the promises and threats.
“To start, I’ll tell you that I’m an advisor of Prince D’Natheil, and also his close friend. I can’t set you free. I wouldn’t want you to be mistaken about that.”
“I figured. Did he send you to steal what’s in my mind?”
“Do you think he plans to do that?”
“Before today I wouldn’t have thought it. You’ll have to ask him.”
“You’ve been missing for four months. Believed dead. Mourned. And now you reappear in the vicinity of Zhev’Na, and you don’t deny your loyalty to one we believe to be our deadliest enemy. You weren’t expecting to be questioned about it?”
“I wasn’t expecting the Lady to be like she is. I wasn’t expecting the Prince to… to be like he is.”
“You find the Prince changed?”
“Demonfire… changed! I don’t - Well, just say that if you’d have told me he’d gone and got himself switched around again, I’d be more believing it, than that he’s the Prince I knew. But then, every once in a while, there’s a word or a look in his eye… and I know it’s really him. That’s worse.”
A perceptive young man. And a heart that was exactly as I’d been told.
“You swore to the Prince that his son was not allied with the Lords of Zhev’Na. Have you any proof of that?”
“No. None but my word and his - the young master’s, I mean.”
“Is that why you were so anxious to speak to the Lady Seriana?”
The boy narrowed his eyes. “So you are here to read my head?”
“No. Not only did the Prince not send me here, I have a feeling that he’ll be very angry with me when he learns of it. That’s why it is so important that we come to some understanding. I know that you’ve loved and honored the Prince, as do I, and I need to know if such is still the case or if the young Lord has turned you against him.”
“I told the Prince yesterday as I’d give him my life or my legs or whatever he asked. I wasn’t lying. I shouldn’t have to say it again.”
If this boy was lying, then he was by far the most convincing prevaricator I’d ever encountered. Perhaps lying was a particular skill of those who lived in the mundane world, one that we Dar’Nethi never had perfected.
“That’s what I thought. So answer my question. Why is it so important that you speak to the Lady?”
“Because she’s the only one as I can give the message. The young master believes the Prince won’t listen - as has been shown true - so he needs the Lady to convince the Prince to do what needs done. If she was dead, I’d be able to tell the Prince direct, but since she’s alive I can’t, and I’ll be shiv’d if I know what in blazes I’m to do now!”
I sat for a moment trying to sort out what I’d just heard and had no luck at all. So I pulled a cloth pouch from the pocket of my robes. “Would you like something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
Another clue that all was not as usual with the boy. The Prince had told me a great deal about Paulo. I took a handful of dried duskberries from the pouch and munched on them while I watched the boy watching me. I felt a question forcing its way out of him.
“So” - he scraped at a wayward carrot with his fingernail, concentrating on its pale skin - “does Radele know you’re here talking to me?”
“No, he does not. You can trust me, Paulo. I promise.” Of course, I had to hope he wasn’t fool enough to believe just any Dar’Nethi’s promise. Only mine. “I need you to trust me.”
“I don’t know you.”