I dropped my soiled gloves and stubby garden knife on the bench beside the door, kicked off my muddy boots, and followed Kellea back to the sitting room, the largest room in the old redbrick gatehouse at Windham. We'd converted it to a bedchamber when Karon could no longer manage stairs. Weeks had passed since he'd been able to leave his bed.
Tonight he lay on his side, facing the door, thin, far too thin, like a creature of frost and dew that might evaporate in a warm west wind. Pain rippled beneath his taut, transparent skin in a punishing tide. Kellea had lit only a single candle and set it on the windowsill behind him so it threw his face into shadow. Even so, a flicker of light illuminated his eyes and the trace of a smile softened his face when I came in.
"Ah, love," he said. "I knew . . . the day was . . . not yet done. Not while you can appear before me . . . the image of life itself." Every few words he would have to clamp his lips tight to let a wave pass without crying out.
I pressed my finger to his lips. "I must disagree. This day is indeed done. I am ready for sleep after an exhausting slog about these bogs we call our gardens. Despite the late frost, everything is trying desperately to bloom and needs trimming or coddling. The gardeners do their best, but you know I can't bear to keep my hands out of it. And remember, I was up early this morning answering five thousand letters from friends and acquaintances, and five thousand more from people we've never heard of, asking as to the 'great physician's health,' or the 'most esteemed historian's recovery.' We've had fifty offers of grandmothers' poultices, thirty of herbal infusions, twenty of Isker goats known for the potency of their cheese and milk, and five of pretty young women to 'warm and liven' your bed. I refused them all in your name. It was very tiring."
"Even the young women? I'm always so cold . . . and very lonely here while you sleep in that dreadful chair."
I drew the thick wool blanket over his shoulders, shivering myself in the unseasonable chill. "Most assuredly the young women. If anyone is to warm your bed, it will be me. I will take up my sword and slay the woman who attempts to get there first."
Only you can appreciate the marvels of my mental condition enough to have me now . I felt more than saw his teasing smile. As happened more and more at the end of the day, his words echoed in my head, not my ears. Speaking directly in the mind was far easier for him. For once I have all of my memories, no lost identity, and no extra soul contained within my own, making me do things I'd rather not. And I'm neither dead nor disembodied — though these days I wish I could be rid of the wretched thing and live without it as I once did .
Kneeling beside his bed, I laid my head on his pillow where I could feel his breath on my hair.
Tassaye, beloved. Softly . He brushed my damp eyes with his cold fingers. Life is not done with me yet. I've been in and out of it so many times, you must trust my sense of it. If you can put up with me so long, I'm determined to be here when Gerick comes in the summer .
"And of course, Ven'Dar may come early and carry you off to Avonar to see a proper Healer, but unless he arrives tonight, you must rest and save your strength. As soon as I've washed my face and hands, I plan to do the same. Dream well, my love."
I kissed his fingers and his eyes and straightened his blankets before I left him. Then I watched from the shadows as Kellea forced him to sit up and drink her sleeping draught. He hated for me to see how hard it was for him to move. Only after he dropped into blessed insensibility did I bring my blankets and pillows and settle in the chair beside his bed.
"Hear me, Ven'Dar," I whispered a short time later, stroking Karon's graying temples to smooth away the lines illness had ground into his handsome features.
"Come early this year." As on every other night, I envisioned my plea taking flight like a red-winged night-hawk, streaking through the airs of the Four Realms and across the Bridge to Avonar, the royal city of the Dar'Nethi, and into the ear of Prince Ven'Dar, Karon's dearest friend. As on every other night, I received no answer.
Kellea nodded a good night and blew out the candle, retiring to her own bed in the room at the top of the stair where she was in range of my call. Not in a thousand years would I be able to repay her service. Karon moaned softly in his sleep. I prayed he did not dream of his terrible days.
Mother . . .
I sat up straight, knocking the pillows from the chair, sleep and shadows and starlight confusing my eyes.
Mother, I'm on my way . . . soon as I can . . .
"Gerick! Good . . . yes . . . soon." Though distant and faint, the voice in my head was unmistakable. I felt more than heard him acknowledge my answer.
I must have spoken aloud, for the light-sleeping Kellea appeared at the doorway with a candle. "What's happened? Is he—?"
"No, no. It's all right." I almost laughed. "Gerick is coming. He mustn't have used any power for three months for me to hear him at such a distance."
"You're sure?"
"I wasn't asleep, only quiet enough to hear him. Paulo must have found my letter at the Two Thieves. I was so afraid. . . ."
"It will be good for him to be here."
Exchanging letters with our son was complicated and unreliable, especially in the past year when a plague of vicious bandits had afflicted the northern roads. Every midwinter at the season of Seille, Karon and I traveled to a barren hillside in northern Valleor. There Gerick would meet us and take us through an enchanted portal into the primitive, shadowy realm he called the Bounded, a land born of his mind and his talent from the chaotic Breach between our human world and magical Gondai. And once a year at midsummer our son would come to us for a week to soak up the sun and revel in a few days' freedom from his responsibility for an entire world. Karon had not been ill when we'd made our farewells at the dawn of the new year, and it was still four weeks till midsummer.
Faint light filtered through the window as Kellea touched my shoulder the next morning, warning me that the ajuria was about to abandon Karon for another day. She dared not give him more of the potion than she did already. Though it might ease him longer, it would begin to eat away at his mind so that he could never totally emerge from its cloudy comfort. He didn't want that. .
"My ministering spirits," he whispered as I washed his face with a damp cloth. "It's a wonder every man in Leire is not taken to his bed so pitiably as I, just to have the two most beautiful women in the world coddle him so."
"You may flatter all you wish, sir," said Kellea, pulling up a short stool beside the bed, bowl and spoon in hand, the weapons of their daily war. "But I am still determined to get breakfast down you."
"Ah, no . . ."
"Hunger has nothing to do with it, nor do your incessant claims that everything tastes beastly, which I will not credit. Seri will tell you why it is more important than ever to take care of yourself."
As I knew it would, the news of Gerick carried Karon through the ensuing days. We talked a great deal of our son's kingdom, marveling again at his odd, deformed subjects who called themselves Singlars. They worshipped the young man whose talent had given shape to chaos, creating them a home, and who now struggled alongside them to make their world live. After five years of his leadership, they had created thriving markets and trades among themselves, had embraced the rudiments of schooling, managed their first ventures into the arts, and given birth to their first children. Gerick had not wanted to be their sovereign, but when fate had presented no alternative, he had thrown himself into it, learning what he needed as he went along. Karon and I had watched with pride and amazement as he'd grown into a wise, disciplined, generous, and self-assured monarch at the ripe old age of twenty-one.