But Auram did not come. No one came.
I do not know how long we waited in that house adrift on the edge of the boundless plain. I know that the angel came to me most nights, crying “Write” like the clanging of swords, and that I gritted my teeth in that punishment of light. My weakness was a mercy: I fainted soon. I know that I woke, sometimes in my bed, sometimes on the floor, thinking only of survival. I know that I made a number of crude messes of the foodstuffs I had found in the scullery, thinning them with water to make them last. I drew the water from a well in the garden, the frozen chain searing my hands. The pail was cracked, but I found a sound one in the scullery. It knocked against the side of the well with a fat and cheerful sound as, wasted by hunger and fear, I struggled to draw it up. A breath of wind went whispering among the trees, and they quivered, their shadows glancing over the layer of new snow on the ground. The tiny sound, the movement, emphasized the isolation of that place, so iridescent and remote. I grasped the pail at last and rested it on the lip of the well, holding my aching side, waiting for my breath. When I raised my head the trees all looked like shadows and their thorns like mist, and the sun spangled everything with leaves of ice.
I hauled the pail inside the house. Water splashed on the tiles of the main hall as I staggered through, creating bright spots on the floor, revealing the flowers of topaz under the dust, the stars of broken glass, the encrustations of jasper and chalcedony. I made my way into the nearest room with a fireplace, the formal sitting room, a chilly wasteland where peeling damask dangled from the walls, where hectic blossoms seethed in the obscurity of the carpets, and the glass in the windows shivered in the wind. The room had the desolate air of a place avoided by the living, the scene of an accident or an ancient crime, but it had become my haunt because it was close to the main door and contained a wealth of brittle furniture for my fires. Heraldic greyhounds paced through the stones of the fireplace; they seemed to snarl at me as I seized an elegant Valley chair and beat it against the floor, cracking its legs, separating them from the cushions of dark pink velvet, wreaking havoc on the embossed ptarmigans. Sweating with exertion I sat on an ancient bredis which had escaped my wrath because its sagging leather was difficult to burn. When I held the tinderbox to the broken chair, the stuffing went up the chimney with a blue flame and a whoosh like a cry of alarm.
I warmed my hands at the yellow blaze. There was no food in the house. The bredis, I thought reluctantly: I could boil the leather. The thought made my tortured guts writhe in my ribs. And Miros could not survive on boiled leather. He needed meat, milk, healing herbs—perhaps more. The hum of the walls in the force of the wind whose authority flattened the thorn trees kept me aware of the chilling distances outside, the endlessness of the great plateau, its vast impenitent savagery, its dreadful monotony under the wintry sky. For the first time I thought: if Auram never comes. If no one comes. I sprang up to chase the thought away and filled a blackened pot with well-water. I hung it over the fire and pulled at the damask on the walls, which came away in my hands like sheets of the finest cobweb. If no one comes. But he would come. I waited until the water boiled, soaked the damask in it, and hung it on the dead lamps to dry. The long strips fluttered in the warmth from the fire. When the water was cool I took the pail and the damask and carried them upstairs.
“Miros.”
Each time I entered the room in dread, expecting to find a corpse—but for today at least he was still alive. The door of his box bed stood open, and he turned his head toward me and smiled, and at the sight of that smile relief died in my breast. It was not Miros’s smile. It was infinitely more gentle, more withdrawn. “Good news,” I said with false cheerfulness. “No stew today.” My experimental dishes, which neither of us could swallow without gagging, had been a source of grim amusement during all our time in the house. But now he did not laugh, only smiled more tenderly than before, a smile as delicate and lifeless as the snow.
“I’m going to change your bandages,” I said in a trembling voice. “You’ll have to sit up for me. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” he said.
It tore my heart to force him to change position, to pull him out of the bed, to tug the bandages where they were stuck to his body. He was as skeletal as the denuded trees in the garden. His wound, sewn up with gut, was a sullen purple, the only color on him. I poured water over it and wrapped it in lengths of tattered damask. Then I put his filthy shirt on again, and his highlander’s sheepskin jacket. I pushed him back into bed, cursing myself because I was too weak to set him down gently, and covered him up as best I could.
He was still awake. Usually he lost consciousness during my coarse attempts at nursing. His eyes were large and dark, clearer than the sky.
“Jevick,” he said. “I think I’m going to die here.”
“Nonsense,” I said with all the heartiness I could muster. “You’ll be in Sinidre next hunting season.”
He sighed. “I’ll never hunt again.”
“Of course you will.”
“No.”
He looked at me proudly, and with that new distance and coldness in his face. And everything poured out of him. He spoke of his debts and his failures, and of the woman: Baroness Ailin of Ur-Melinei.
“I am a balarin,” he told me bitterly.
A balarin: a “sweet, free one”: the young lover of a wealthy married woman. In Sinidre he had twice fought with those who had dared to call him this name; he had blinded a man in one eye; he was fined and narrowly escaped prison. But now he admitted that it was the truth. And he was in love with her. He had realized it fully on this journey: if he could not write to her, at least know that she would remember him, he was mad; the simplest actions became unbearable.
“That’s why I fought with my uncle at the Night Market,” he said, shifting restlessly on the pillow while I knelt beside his bed. “There were letter carriers there. I wanted to send a letter west, and he wouldn’t let me. He has no pity; I don’t think there’s a nerve in his body.”
The recollection seemed to stir his blood: a touch of color came into his face. His fingers gripped the blankets with a rush of strength. And as if, having broken his reserve, he was freed from all constraint, he spoke to me of the lady of Ur-Melinei.
His position was hideous, shameful. It was the scandal of his family and the mortification of everyone who knew him. He had met her on a hunting party in the Kelevain; her husband’s property bordered on that forest. He had never seen her before. She disliked city society; her own people came from the western fringe of Olondria. She arranged an exclusive society in the country house: there were actors and musicians, hunting, dancing, and masquerades. She rode beautifully. It was whispered that she had Nissian blood. She was very fair, and black-haired like a barbarian. She was ten years older than he, she had three children who were away at school, and her husband was a diplomat of the Order of the Lamp.
It began as a mild flirtation. He was invited to Brovinhu, the baroness’s villa, and took part in her amateur theatricals. She cast him opposite herself in such tragedies as Fedmalie and The Necklace, and swooned in his arms before an intimate audience. “Alas,” she said, “thou lookest red, as if thou hast run a great distance.” And he answered: “Aye: a gulf separates this hour from the rest of my life.” Her husband sat in the front row, clapped his great, hard hands together, smoked cigars, and discussed the Balinfeil with distinguished visitors. Miros had planned to stay for a week; he stayed for the whole season, for the hunting, log fires, and dances on the terrace. And when the baron removed to Belenduri for the winter, Miros, with a few other friends, remained at Brovinhu.