When I had joined with him at Windham, again as we had crossed the Bridge, and the third time on that last night at Mistress Aimee's house, I had thought no one could endure such pain as his without madness. My soul had been seared with his longing for release, entwined with his grief at leaving us. Yet even in his torment, my father had been filled with the joy I had come to recognize as his unique gift. He treasured life so very mush.
But when I entered his body that rainy afternoon at D'Sanya's hospice, I thought I might suffocate. He could see, but the colors of the world were flat. Objects had no substance and no meaning beyond their shapes and dimensions, none of the history, associations, nuances, or sensations that a Dar'Nethi absorbs with every breath of his life. I tried speaking in his mind, but he evidenced no sign of hearing me. My father was blind and deaf and mute and numb in every way of importance to him.
"I'm sorry," I said, after I'd left him and come back to myself, sitting on the floor shivering in the suddenly chilly room. "I'll get this done as quickly as I can."
He smiled tiredly and leaned back in his chair. "So it's not just my imagination. That's a relief."
Chapter 6
I left my father reading the stack of letters from my mother and retraced my way to the main house. The rain shower had left the sky gray, the cloisters dripping, and the courtyards smelling of damp earth. When I came into the public rooms, I wandered lost for a while, looking for someone to ask where I could find the library. The consiliar Na'Cyd glanced at me over the heads of two men in the dark blue tunics and black breeches that seemed to be the livery of the hospice staff. But he made no move and was soon reengaged in conversation.
I opened a door that seemed likely, only to find a group of five or six chattering people clustered around a confused-looking elderly man. Mindful of the rules of privacy, I backed out of the room in a hurry, only to collide with someone who had walked behind me in the passage.
"I'm sorry," I said, managing not to fall on top of him by grabbing the doorjamb.
Unfortunately, a paper packet flew out of his hand and split open on the floor, scattering its contents down the passage, red juice and pulp smearing the sand-colored tiles. A fruity scent filled the passage—raspberries. With a hiss of exasperation, my victim—short and dark-haired— dropped to the floor, snatched up the ripped packet, and began scooping the remaining berries into it. I crouched down to help.
"You might find walking with eyes front somewhat
more fulfilling on the whole."
Not a youth, as I'd thought at first, but a girl. Her dark hair, lopped off so short around her face and neck, had confused me. She didn't look up. My own surreptitious glance revealed little—a slim untidy young woman wearing a wrinkled linen shirt of dark green, scuffed black leather vest, and tan trousers. I couldn't see her face.
Gathering raspberries enough to fill both hands, I stood waiting stupidly while she stuffed her own gatherings into the packet, got back to her feet, and held out the bag.
"I was trying to locate the Lady D'Sanya," I said, dropping the fruit into the soggy paper. "She said she would be in her library. Can you tell me where that is?"
"Second door on the left, just . . . just beyond . . ." She stared at my hands, which were wet with sticky red juice. "Just beyond the fountain."
I shrugged and held my hands awkwardly away from my clothes. "Serves me right for being clumsy."
Her eyes flicked upward, but only briefly, allowing me a quick impression of dark eyes in a narrow, fine-boned face.
"You can use this to wipe them," she said, almost swallowing her voice completely as she offered a handkerchief she pulled from her trousers' pocket. She kept her eyes averted.
Assuming she was one of D'Sanya's guests who wished to remain private, I kept my own eyes down while I dabbed at my hands. The white linen square was soon sticky and red. Ah, damn … I hadn't thought. The scars across my palms were repulsive.
Returning the stained kerchief, I quickly crammed my hands into my pockets. "Sorry again," I said. "Good day."
I felt the woman's gaze on my back as I hurried down the passage toward the door she'd pointed out, pulling on the thin leather riding gloves that I had looped over my belt.
The library was immense: a high, painted ceiling, tall windows of colored glass, at least twenty lamps, and so many books that a staircase reached up to a walkway that encircled the room halfway up the walls. The Lady stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, looking from one side to the other as if trying to decide where to start.
She had changed into a long-sleeved red shirt, a gray vest embroidered in red, yellow, and green wool, and an ankle-length skirt of gray leather, split like trousers. A gold bracelet worked like a vine wound up one forearm, bright against her red sleeve.
I greeted her with a bow.
"I keep thinking I should start reading all of these," she said, "so I might understand everything that's happened and everything that's been learned since I was a child. But I never cared for reading books. My mother always said it was because I wasn't grown-up enough. Even yet I can't sit still for it. Do you think that means I've not grown up yet?"
"I don't know."
As a child at Comigor, I'd heard the kind of witty replies men make to such questions from a lady, but I'd never learned the art of devising them myself. It was critical that I make this woman's acquaintance and gain her trust, but I was beginning to think even Paulo was better suited to it than I.
"Do you ride?" I said, unable to come up with anything more clever, and unable to take my eyes off her.
"I've been told I sit a horse quite fair." Putting one finger by her mouth, as if to tell a secret, she leaned her head toward a gray-haired lady who sat frowning over a book. "Mistress S'Nara," she said in a loud whisper, "do you think the young gentleman is asking me to accompany him on a riding excursion?"
"Indeed, Lady, I do." For a moment, the old woman reflected D'Sanya's radiant smile. Her face crumpled into a knot as she went back to her book.
"Well, are you, sir?" The Lady's eyes sparkled with laughter.
"I— Yes." Demons, why was it so hard to talk to her?
"I'd accuse you of reading my thoughts, but I think you might be reading my clothes, instead—certainly from your fixed glance. Or is it just you've never seen a lady's riding skirt?" She spun about until the wide legs of her leather skirt billowed out like a wind flare. Then she patted the reading lady's hand and waggled a summoning finger at me. "Come along, then. Let's ride away."
As we strolled through the hospice and across the yards to her stables, she told me how she'd coaxed the Dar'-Nethi Builders into spreading her house across the meadow rather than piling it up tall as was the usual Dar'Nethi preference. "I didn't want my guests to be stacked one upon the other, and the views are lovely enough from all the windows."
And she talked of the difficulties of bringing seventy people from every part of Avonar into one household and making them feel welcome, yet not compelled to mold their renewed lives into some image of hers. Her experiences made me think of the Bounded and the difficulties we'd had building a life there, and believed that she might be interested in hearing about those things, if ever I could trust her enough to tell her of them. For the moment, I simply listened. She never seemed to stop talking, as if she were trying to make up for a thousand years of silence in one day. Yet none of it was the nonsensical stuff my sometime mother Philomena had spewed endlessly when I was a child.