Not long after the Gardeners arrived, a knob-jointed fellow in a shabby velvet doublet carried in a heavy leather bag and asked one of the serving girls for the proprietor. Pulling a large, well shaped wooden bowl and a graceful hand-spindle from his bag and setting them on the table next to Paulo and me, he asked the formidable Mistress A'Diana if she needed an experienced Wood Shaper to serve her guesthouse. "Fine repairs or new work, indoors or out, for little more than my keep, mistress," he said, wrinkling his brow as he drew thumb and first finger around the battered corner of the table, leaving it smoothed and nicely angled.
"Have you references?" asked the big woman, examining his samples. "I've things need doing, but I don't hire without references."
"I've worked for a number of guesting houses," he said to her back, as she bent to see the repaired table corner. His voice dropped almost to a whisper. "But the folk who could recommend me are long dead." He looked wan and anxious, as if the dead proprietors were waiting to pop out from under the table and grab him.
"Long dead . . ." The proprietress looked up sharply, then straightened, snatched up the bowl and the spindle, and shoved them into the man's arms. "Get out of here, arrigh scheide !"
Two of the Tree Delvers growled and stood up, and the Weather Worker spun in his chair to look, almost toppling it in his haste. The pale Wood Shaper grabbed his bundle and scurried out of the room. The guests returned to their activities, but the conversation at several tables turned grim and quiet enough that we couldn't understand it.
"What did she call him?" asked Paulo. "Meat-eater?"
I shook my head. "Flesh-eater. It's an old Dar'Nethi name for the Zhid."
"But he wasn't—"
"No. Not any more. I guess some people don't care to do business with those who might have spitted their brothers on sticks." I sopped up the last of the gravy in my bowl with a hunk of bread, but then dropped the soggy bit without eating it.
As his gaze drifted over the other guests, Paulo wiped his knife on the last piece of bread. "But it wasn't their fault. And they don't even remember what wickedness they did, so Master Karon says. Might as well kill them as heal them if you're not going to let them live and work."
I shrugged. "Some of them wanted it. Liked it. They may not remember. But some wanted it." And I wondered if the restored Zhid truly forgot . . . deep in their bones . . . even if they knew it wasn't their fault.
We left before the Singer had finished her tale, as I was dozing in my wine. Anxious and unsettled, I'd not yet caught up with my sleep after sitting up with my father through his last night of illness.
"I can always tell when we're off on another chase," Paulo said as we trudged up the steep, narrow stair. "Always starts with you not sleeping right and me getting dragged off someplace I'd rather not be."
His turn to tease. But I hadn't forgotten Roxanne's letter, so I didn't laugh as I might have another time.
I decided that my first visit to the hospice had better be a careful one since I didn't know the lay of the land, so I left Paulo in town to listen for gossip while I rode alone through Grithna Vale. I wasn't prepared for the Vale of Grithna any more than I'd been prepared for the Lady D'Sanya.
The Vales of Eidolon are a series of broad valleys that seam the mountains ringing the royal city of Avonar. Each of the fifteen Vales has its own character, wild or cultivated, forested or grassy, dotted with towns and villages or sparsely settled. Grithna is a rugged area to the north of the city, one of the "lost Vales" that was destroyed either in the Catastrophe itself or in the early years of the war. Where limestone cliffs had once risen from thick forests and fertile meadows, nothing was left but dead trunks, parched earth, and blasted rubble.
But five months before, so Ven'Dar had told us, D'Sanya had come to Grithna and touched its barren earth with her tears. Now her Vale sported a woodland in its prime. Intermingled with a new growth of rowans and birches, the lifeless trunks of thick-boled oaks and ashes had developed wide, spreading canopies of green. Shrubs heavy with bright red berries grew thickly in any thread of sunlight, massing in colorful ranks along a rutted roadway that led up the heart of the valley.
As always when I saw such a place, my mind went out on its own, assessing where watchers could get the best view of the road, locating the rock piles where archers could take effective cover and harass an oncoming force, noting the crowding trees where warriors divested of noisy armaments could lurk and move unseen alongside their prey until the word was given. Unwary travelers along this road would be easy blood for the taking. The Lord Parven had been a master of military tactics. Though the Lords were no longer a part of me and their voices were long silenced, their lessons had not died with them.
In late morning, I reined in at the top of a long rise. Below me lay a well watered valley surrounded by barren peaks. Broad, green, stream-threaded meadows and a swath of woodland. Some cultivated fields. And a cluster of structures centered by a sprawling white house with a red tile roof, its walls hung with ten years' growth of ivy. A low wall of white stone completely surrounded the house and a vast expanse of the valley floor, some of the enclosure left in pasture, some carved into gardens and orchards. The wall had only one break, a single gate with two upright pillars and a stone lintel.
The day was fine and hot as I rode down the hill and across the half-league of meadow. The glare had me squinting. After five years living in the ever-night of the Bounded with its purple lightnings and green stars, I wasn't used to the sun. I didn't miss it all that much, not the way Paulo did.
The gate was not guarded. A child jumped down from her perch on the wall and pushed open the white ironwork as I approached. Before I'd even dismounted in the gravel yard, two Dar'Nethi men hurried out, offering to tether my horse in the shade of a spreading beech tree alongside two other mounts. If I had not fetched him in an hour, they would take him down to the stable to tend him. The Lady D'Sanya herself waited on the wide columned steps to greet me, a tall, slender, gray-haired man standing just behind her.
"Blessings of life," she called, smiling. "Welcome, sir."
"Lady." Halfway between the house and the tether rail, I bowed and extended my hands, and then awkwardly retreated after my horse to retrieve the things I'd brought. I yanked two bags from my saddlepacks and held them up as if to explain why I had not rushed to her feet right away. "Some things for my father." I felt like a ten-year-old.
"Of course." Her gown floated as she moved, a gauzy thing, pure white, which set off the brilliant eyes that almost made me forget my purpose in coming. "Did you have a fair journey?"
"Quite fine," I said, as I walked across the gravel yard. Investigators had found two dead Zhid half a league from the place where she had walked out of the desert with blood on her tunic and a knife in her hand. I needed to remember that.
"You're staying in Gaelie? At the Hawk's Bill, I suppose. Mistress A'Diana looks grumbly, but is very kind."
"Yes."
Tongue-tied dolt . I couldn't come up with anything to say. How was I ever going to question her? And I had been giving advice to Paulo!
Stepping aside, her gown swirling about her like smoke, she extended a hand toward her companion. "May I present Na'Cyd, consiliar of this hospice, the dear gentleman who makes my life purest ease and pleasure. I have but to voice an idea, and Na'Cyd executes it more perfectly than I could imagine."
The man extended his palms, and I returned his grave politeness.
The Lady motioned to the wide doorway that centered the porch. Every one of her fingers had a silver ring on it, not gaudy but fine and delicate. "Please come in, Master … ?"