Moments seeped past in the dark. The horses whinnied. The cart jostled. The hand on my head quivered. My master’s voice shook when he took up again, though he had dropped it near a whisper. “You have always been rebellious…out of place…never sick, save for this peculiar disease festering in your bones. Your grandfather favored you above all his progeny…the same man who stole a treasure from the Danae…to which he claimed a right. Janus de Cartamandua, by coincidence the very same man who provided unimpeachable witnesses to your pureblood birth—his own two boyhood friends.”
Of a sudden, hands gripped my shoulder like jaws of iron.
“How blind I have been,” he said, “I, who have read Picus’s journals since I was a child. Think, Valen. Of course you can’t read. Of course confinement and suffocation madden you…make you feel as if you’re dying. Confinement within the works of man kills them. But you don’t die from it. Remember on the day your sister was to take you from Gillarine, Gildas gave you water—I’d swear on my father’s heart it was from the Well, already tainted with Gerard’s murder—and it poisoned you. But, again, you did not die, only got wretchedly sick, because you are both and neither. By all that lives in heaven or hell, Valen…”
And the truth lay before my crumbling mind, as gleaming and perfect as the golden key of paradise, as solid and irrefutable as the standing stones of my long questioning now shifted into a pattern that explained my father’s loathing and my mother’s drunken aversion and every mystery of my broken childhood. My father’s damning curse hung above it all like a new-birthed star in the firmament: You are no child of mine.
Indeed, my blood was no purer than Osriel the Bastard’s, at most only half Aurellian—and that half given me by Janus de Cartamandua, not Claudio. But unlike that of my rightful king, the taint that sullied my pure Aurellian heritage was not the royal blood of Navronne, but that of a pale-skinned race whose members were exceptionally tall, had curling hair, and could not read. Thou, who art without words, yet complete.
“…you are Danae.”
The cart bucked once more, and I lost my feeble hold on reason. The tides of pain, fire, and madness engulfed me, and I heard myself wailing as from a vast and lonely distance.
PART TWO
The Waning Season
Chapter 8
The angel sponged my chest with warm water and chamomile. I scarcely dared breathe lest she realize I was awake—or as much awake as I ever seemed to get amid my cascading visits to hell and heaven. The sponge moved lower. A pleasurable languor settled in my belly and spread to knees and elbows. This moment was surely wrought in heaven. But who would ever have expected heaven to smell like chamomile?
She lifted the sponge, sloshed it in a metal basin, and squeezed it, the sound of dribbling water setting my mouth watering as well. Her washing was always quite thorough, the water deliciously warm, her fingers…ah, Holy Mother…her fingers strong and sure. Her hands were not the tender silk of a courtesan’s, nor were they rough and callused like those of a dairy-maid or seamstress, but firm and capable. Tough, but unscarred. Her voice named her female, but when she leaned across me to reach my sprawled arm, her body smelled of clean linen hung out in the sun to dry. An angel, then, not a woman. But her hands…
“I think you are beginning to enjoy this too much, Magnus Valentia.” The angel’s breath scalded my ear. “Either you are feigning sleep or your dreams have broached the bounds of propriety. Know this, sirrah: I would as soon tongue a goat as indulge a man’s pleasure—no matter the marvels of his birth.”
The warm sponge touched my groin…I groaned as gatzi drove me back into hell.
Magnus Valentia. The name attached itself to me in some vague fashion throughout my ensuing visit to the netherworld. As familiar spiders crept through my bowels with barbed feet, breeding their myriad children, who then flooded out of my nose and mouth and other bodily orifices, and as gatzi strung me up on a cliff of ice and lashed me with whips of fire, I examined the appellation carefully. Shoving aside pain and madness—what use to heed the twin keystones of my universe?—I turned it over and over in my ragged mind: Magnus Valentia. It wasn’t quite right. Not a lie, but not truth either. The few bits of truth I experienced—the angel’s sure hands, clean smell, and astringent tongue, the clean cold air that blasted my overheated face from time to time, an occasional taste of pungent wine, the plucked notes of a harp—had a certain rarefied quality about them, a hard-edged luminescence that distinguished them from mania.
The uncertainty of name and birth dogged me until I next came to my senses—or at least what portion of them I could claim. A flurry of hands rolled me over in the soft bed and restrained my wrists and ankles with ties of silk. I could not fathom why my caretakers bothered with such. The only movement I seemed able to command was licking my parched lips.
A hand on my forehead brought the world beyond my eyelids into sharper focus. I smelled…everything…dust and stone, the faint residue of burning pennyroyal, rosemary, oil of wintergreen, medicines and possets, old boots and dried manure, cinnamon and ale, evergreen branches, chamomile, and soap. But unlike the usual case of late, the varied scents did not corrode my flesh. Hell’s minions had been using my senses as instruments of torture.
“The spell seems to be taking hold,” said the woman—the angel. Her voice crackled like glass crushed under a boot. “His last seizure spanned only an hour, and each seems milder than the one before. He no longer tries to injure himself. His body now responds to pleasure as well as pain. As Your Grace has rejoined us, perhaps he’ll open his eyes. He reacts to your presence as to none other. And not entirely with terror. Does that annoy you, lord?”
Someone drew up a sheet of soft linen to cover my naked shoulders and the touch of its fine-woven threads did not make me scream. I almost forgot to listen as I contemplated this odd experience.
“Will he have a mind left after all this? I need him capable. This very hour would be none too soon.” The man’s voice slid into my thoughts like a sharpened stake into soft earth, rousing a frantic need for sense and strength. Despite his intriguing language of sanity and reason, instinct screamed that to lie here bound and muddleheaded in his presence was dangerous.
Filled with eager dread, I fought to open my eyes, but succeeded only in stirring up remnants of madness. Just punishment. I had broken vows…indulged perversion…done murder…soiled my bed…and now I had to pay. Dancing shadows swirled in the landscape of my head, parting to reveal scarlet light glaring from the empty eye sockets of sprawled corpses, a brawny man pinned to the earth with wooden stakes, skeletal fingers drawing me into the snow-blanketed bog, pulling me down and down into the icy mud. Drowning…suffocating…freezing…yet never, ever dead. Seven times seven times seven years was I condemned to live and die, buried in the ice. A wail rose from my hollow chest.
The angel’s hand on my back silenced my cry before it reached my throat. Her sere voice swept away the nightmares as if they were no more than ash, drifting like black snow about my bed. “I cannot even venture a guess as to his state.”
She moved away. A clank of iron, various rustlings and thumps, and a mumbled “flagro” produced a rush of sound and a moment’s blistering heat behind me, surging to attack the legions of winter.
“Yet indeed the fellow’s constitution is extraordinary,” she continued. “A fortunate man—that is, one who did not die gnawing his own appendages—would experience the most acute nivat sickness for six weeks after quitting the doulon. Certain effects—nausea, high-strung nerves, tremors, and sweats—would then linger for nigh on a year, and susceptibility to the craving for the rest of his life. This man, or whatever you think he is, is emerging from the acute illness after only a fortnight. Perhaps your theory as to his birth explains why. Whatever the source of his resistance to nivat’s worst effects, each succeeding hour convinces me that this sensory disorder that remains is, indeed, fundamental to his body’s humors. Yet I see no more evidence of immortality or inhuman strength in him than I see of wings or halos or blue sigils glowing from his skin. Look at the scars on his thigh and shoulder. He’s been wounded a number of times, and he’s been enslaved to the most virulent of all enchantments for near half his life. No physician could tell you more of his nature than that. Consult priests or talespinners, if you insist on more.”