That was the last thing I heard before my brains leaked out my ears.
“Magrog devour me before ever I touch nivat seeds!” Words took shape as if they sat in the bottom of a well. “Are you sure he should travel, my lord? The brothers would gladly keep him here at the abbey. It’s astonishing; they still consider him one of themselves—even Nemesio.”
The cold air that brushed my face stank of manure and mold and mud. Mind and body were raw, gaping wounds.
“Ah, Stearc, I don’t think traveling could make things worse. He’ll be safer at Renna while he endures this siege. If he has a mind left by the end, Saverian will find it. Right, Valen?” The muffled voice of my tormentor moved closer to my ear. “My physician’s skills are exceptional, complemented and honed with a mage’s talents. You will marvel.”
I could not answer. My mind was long dissolved, my tongue thick and slow. They had tied rags over my eyes and plugged my ears with wool as I screamed. Light, sound, touch tortured my senses like lashes of hot wire.
“As you’re the only one can draw sense out of him, Lord Prince, it’s good he’ll be with you. And if it makes you ride in the cart and keeps you out of the wind until this cough is eased, that’s a double blessing.”
“I’ll survive. Brother Anselm has refilled all my bottles and salve jars. It’s still more than a month until the solstice. Valen is the concern for now. I need him well. It was I that Kol forbade from entering Danae territory, not Valen. Unless I can think of some gift to placate them, it will be left to Valen to warn the Danae of Sila Diaglou’s plot to exterminate them.”
“But if the pureblood’s vision was true, and we’ve actually found Sila Diaglou’s hiding place…that’s more promising than any of this Danae foolishness. Fedrol has already set up a discreet watchpost on the hill.”
“Carefully, Stearc. I’m still debating whether I was mad to set off the landslide, minute though it was. The priestess must not suspect that Valen recognized the place as more than a convenient site for an ambush. Was Gildas a fool to lead us there or are we the fools to believe we’ve gained a slight advantage?”
“We are certainly fools. Godspeed, Your Grace. Tell my daughter I will see her at the warmoot.”
“I doubt she’ll hear any greetings out of my mouth, but I’ll do my best.”
When the world jolted into movement, I screamed. They had bundled me in blankets and cushions and moldy wool, but to little avail. My bones felt like to shatter.
For hour upon hour, aeon upon aeon, I existed in darkness, in company with Boreas as he sobbed out his torment, with Luviar as he cried out mortal agony, and with Gerard, alone and freezing, as he fought so desperately to live that he tore his hand from an iron spike. I felt my own hand rip and my own belly tear, spilling my bowels into the cold to be set afire. I screamed until I could scream no more. Tears leaked from beneath my aching eyelids. Life shrank until I felt trapped like a chick in an egg.
Only the one voice could penetrate my mad dreams, and I clung to it as a barnacle to a ship’s sturdy keel. I tried to croak in answer, just to prove to myself I yet lived.
“We must travel to the Danae, Valen,” he said one mad hour. “Luviar believed that the world’s sickness derives from their weakness. Everything I know confirms that. Our estrangement from them surely exacerbates it. But, tell me, should we walk or ride as we approach them? My father said the Danae ride wild horses when they please, but most prefer to walk, to feel the earth beneath their feet. Perhaps it would show our goodwill to walk into their lands.”
“I hate horses,” I croaked, “and they hate me.”
He laughed at that and I hated him. Gram was Osriel; Osriel was a gatzé, Magrog’s rival.
We traveled onward…and the voice touched me again and again. I cherished it like sanity itself and loathed it like the cruelest Registry overseer.
“Tell me about your grandfather, Valen,” he said. “What did he steal from the Danae? They wear clothes only when they wish to hide among us or when the whim takes them. They carry nothing from place to place save perhaps a harp or pipe and would as soon leave it and make another as carry it. What do you steal from such folk? Tell me, Valen.”
Everything hurt—my hair, my eyebrows, my fingernails. He could stop it, but he wouldn’t, and anger enabled me to muster moisture enough to spit in the direction of his voice. “Their eyes, perhaps. Their souls.”
In the ensuing silence, pain came ravaging, and I wept and pleaded. “I’m sorry. So sorry. Please speak to me, my lord. The silence hurts.”
His breath scraped my face like hot knives. “Do not speak of matters you do not understand, Magnus Valentia. I am your master and your lord. My purposes are not yours to judge.”
As the flood of misery swept me along, my tormentor spoke less and less, and I sank deeper into chaotic dreams. I drowned in fear and pain, suffocated in madness, too weak to claw my way out. Though I feared him above all men, only my master could grant me breath.
“Here, taste this. It’s very sweet—makes Voushanti heave. But your sister told me you had a special love for mead.”
“Bless you, lord,” I whispered as the wagon jolted onward. “Bless you.” I licked what he dabbed on my lips and mourned because it tasted like pitch instead of mead. But I did not tell him so, because I was afraid he would abandon me to the dark and the visions. “Please speak to me, lord.”
“I’m sorry for my reticence, Valen. I’ve naught of cheer to report. So if you’d have me speak, then you must excuse my mentioning serious matters when you are so sick. Every hour brings us closer to the solstice, and I am in desperate need of a plan. How do I find the Danae? How do I persuade them to trust me? If you don’t get well—of course, you will—but if you don’t, I’ll be in a pretty mess.”
“Likely I’ll be sicker on the solstice,” I mumbled into the moldy wool. “Even if I survive this.”
“And why would you be sick on the solstice? I expect you to have your head clear of this cursed craving long before then. From what your sister told me, you’re never really sick.”
“Solstice is my birthday.” The effort of conversation made my head spin. “Always sick.”
“Indeed? You must have been a horrid child. Did you make yourself sick on your birthday? Too many sweets? Too much wine?”
This birthday…what was it? I had thought of something…before sickness and mania took me. Something nagged, like dirt left in a wound. Mustering every scrap of control I had left, I dug through the detritus of memory. Seven. The mystery of seven. My grandfather had confirmed it.
“On some birthdays, my disease got worse. On my seventh birthday, I set fire to my bed and ran away. On my fourteenth: I hurt so wicked, I took nivat the first time. Twenty-first: thought my prick would fall off. Almost killed a whore…” The wagon lurched and bumped. I clutched the blankets, shivering, and fought to keep talking. The dark waters of madness lapped at my mind. If I sank below the waves, I would never rise. “Gods, I am a lunatic. Always have been. But Janus says I’ll be free on this birthday—twenty-eighth. Dead, more like. Every seven years, I go mad.”
He was so quiet for so long, I panicked, flailing my arms in the darkness. “Please, don’t leave me, lord. Please!”
“I’m here, Valen.” He caught my arms and laid them gently at my side. I welcomed the searing torment as he laid a firm hand on my head. “That’s an extraordinary tale…seven, fourteen, twenty-one…and now twenty-eight. It reminds me of something in Picus’s journal. Picus was my father’s tutor, himself a monk as well as a sturdy warrior, sent to protect Father as he grew up in Danae fostering, and to ensure he learned of his own people. Picus wrote endlessly of numbers and their significance, especially seven and four. He it was who calculated the sevenfold difference in the spending of life in Aeginea. The Danae themselves pay no heed to numbers past four—the completion of the seasons that they call the gyre and their four remasti, or bodily changes: separation, exploration, regeneration, maturity…”