“If you bring me word that Kol has won his challenge, I will joyfully accept the personal reprieve,” he said, after reviewing every nuance of my story. “And that you could be destined to heal these plagues and storms leaves me in awe and inspires hope for our future. My faith in you is immeasurable. But I must and will raise the revenant legion. Tales of hope and faith will not persuade Sila’s fighters to lay down their arms, even if you were to stand before the hosts in all your glory to deliver them. Do I not fight the battle two days hence at Dashon Ra, then it must be fought another day in Ardra or Morian. Here I can set the terms. If you’ve brought me an alternative, Valen, then tell me.”
And I could not. Though I believed Osriel’s enslavement of dead souls would carry him down a path of wickedness no honorable intent could redeem, I had no argument to stay his hand. Sila Diaglou and her grandmother would leave Navronne in ashes and Aeginea desolate.
My conversation with Elene was little easier. We sat stiffly in her chilly retiring room. The hearth fire had already been banked. I spoke of her father’s courage, but gave no details of his horrific end. And I confessed that I had not been able to redeem my promise to turn Osriel from his path. “I’ve brought him hope, though,” I said, but did not reveal how slim. “How goes it with”—I waved vaguely at her belly—“you? You seem well.”
“I could not hide it longer from Saverian. She says all seems to be as it should be. A hundred times I’ve thought to tell Osriel, but then I say: If he did not change his plans for me, why would he change them for a child he does not even know?” She did not weep or plead this time. Nor did she invite an embrace or comfort.
“Hold your secret close, mistress. Even so important a matter, from one who is dearer to him than all others…I doubt it could sway him just now. He is too locked into this course, and at the least, we need him clearheaded. But there will come a time when it’s right.” I hoped.
We agreed to leave for Gillarine at midmorning.
I returned to the tower room assigned to me, threw open the window, and sat on the bed to unlace my boots, imagining each of my friends doing the same. Each of us alone, anticipating the trial to come. Of a sudden I could not bear solitude. I relaced my boots and hurried down.
I gulped great breaths of air before descending the stair to Saverian’s den. You’re being wholly irrational, I told myself. What difference does it make what she thinks of you? No answer made itself known, and would have made no difference anyway. I needed to see her.
“Saverian?” I tapped on the open door.
“I’m here.” The rattling and banging going on inside the low-ceilinged chamber where we had revived Voushanti served as evidence enough of that.
It was impossible to tell what she was doing, beyond removing every bottle, box, and packet from her well-ordered shelves and putting them back again. I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, waiting for her to turn around to see who had come.
I cleared my throat. “I thought you might be interested…as my physician…as a matter of your studies…” Weak. Insipid. “As you weren’t with me this time, and I found myself thinking about you right when something most astonishing happened. I fell out of my body—”
She spun about, a nasty-looking pair of sprung forceps in her hand. “You damnable, god-cursed, splotch-skinned toad. How can you let him do this? I’m to bleed him? Watch him suffer? Watch him die? And then perform this despicable enchantment to bring him back to lead an army of dead men?”
I felt unreasonably stung. “I tried to talk him out of it. I thought you knew what he planned.”
“About the dead men’s eyes, and giving the Harrowers to the dead, yes. That’s vile enough. But not the other. Not murdering him. And of course Riel chooses to explain my part in his villainous little scheme after you vanished without saying anything to anyone. No one knew where you were going or when or if you might come back, and then the boy told us what Gildas did to you, and I can’t conceive of how your mind or body can deal with the doulon again so soon. And every moment I thought we’d have to take Voushanti through another death ritual. He must either taste your blood soon or die again—it’s surely some marvel of your damnable blood that he has survived this long. So comes tonight, and after worrying myself half sick, you stroll through the door all politeness and deference to Riel, and offering such kindness to poor, half-crazed Elene, and such honor to that brave child—able to work this magic of yours, twisting them all inside out for love of you. But I won’t do any of it. Not for you, not for him, not for anyone. By this unmerciful, coldhearted, god-forsaken universe, I won’t.”
But, of course, she would, because she loved Osriel and believed in him, though it ripped her asunder. And somehow hearing that concern for me had some small part in her fury scratched the itch that had driven me down into her pit of a workplace to stand in the way of this outpouring.
“Please believe me, Kol is doing all he can to see that Danae magic will carry Osriel through what he needs to do. If all goes well, you’ll not need to retrieve him from death. And I yet hope that somewhere in the great mystery that’s to happen on that night, we’ll find him an alternative to his legion of revenants. As for Voushanti…I’ve already told the prince that the mardane will not die again. I’ll let the man suck my marrow if that prevents it.” I stepped close enough I could feel the heated air quivering about her, and I could smell the salt in the tears she would never shed. “You know why Osriel’s chosen you for these hard things—because he knows of no one more clever or sensible, no one more skilled. Because he knows you will do it only if you are convinced it’s right, and we have no choices left. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I was going. I was already half out of my head when I left. But I’d like to tell you what’s happened, because you were with me through the other, and I need—I think you might understand the parts I’ve not told anyone…”
I told her all of it—about my doulon sickness, about my guilt over Luviar and my shameful liaison with Malena, and my horror that she might carry a child of my loins. I told of exploring the Well, and how awkward and ungainly I had felt tripping over my feet in my mother’s footsteps, and how quiet and lonely it had been to be the Well, and how terrified I was of losing myself, and how it was the memory of her touch and her good humor that had soothed my fear, so that I had been able to yield my boundaries when I had to…
When I began to sweat and hold up her ceiling for fear of it crushing me, we moved outdoors—and still I babbled as I had never done in all my life. She asked sensible questions, and gifted me with thoroughly unsentimental encouragement when I confessed my doubts that Valen de Cartamandua could possibly be destined to heal plagues and pestilences, and she laughed when I told her of stinging tentacles and blue-scribed feathers in unlikely places.
When the stars had spun out their rounds, and she sat pinched and shivering in the well yard, no matter that I had given her the heavy cloak and wrapped her in my arms, I bent down and laid my forehead on her hair, inhaling its clean scent. “I thank you for this,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me. Next time, you must do the talking.”
She pushed me away, quirked her mouth, and stuffed the cloak in my lap. “Perhaps I’ll conjure myself into a tree, and you can dance around me—or I’ll come to you when you are living as the Well and can’t talk back.”
I slept long and deep that night, and I dreamed of dancing around her and of hearing her speak in the rustling of leaves and bubbles of starlight and the silence of stones.
“I presume the lighthouse is still at the abbey,” I said when Brother Victor joined Jullian, Elene, and me in Renna’s well yard on the morning before the solstice. “Never thought to ask.”