"I leave tomorrow for Maroth Vale. Will you come?"
"If you wish it." She could have asked for me to give her my eyes, and my answer would have been the same.
"How could I not wish my best friend to be with me?" She nestled closer. "But before we go, friend, there is the matter of one of your secrets that I think we must clarify."
For a moment my instincts shouted a warning. But only for a moment . . . until she turned her head just enough that it was the most natural thing in the world to kiss her.
Chapter 11
From the earliest days of my memory, my mother called me her forget-me-not child. I had the annoying habit of remembering every word and image of every story and song I'd ever heard, and neither my parents nor their guests nor their hired Singers or Storytellers dared leave out a single one in hopes of an early release from my attention. This was but an early sign of a certain singleness of purpose which my brothers preferred to describe as "dogged stubbornness akin to that of a particularly unintelligent mule."
I had a number of annoying habits when I was a child. I constantly interrupted adult conversations with sober, if ill-informed, opinions. I drove my family frantic by disappearing for long periods of time into a tree or some other hideaway and losing myself in a favorite book, ignoring their calls until they'd rousted the town Watch to find me. And I never tired of filling my brothers' boots with mud or hiding their school papers or otherwise getting them in trouble, and then playing the innocent girl child while they reaped the consequences of my tricks. My brothers had fond names for me, too, though certainly less polite than forget-me-not child .
Fond names for annoying habits are a natural part of a happy childhood, and loving parents always assume that those less-than-desirable traits will fade away as childhood yields gracefully to the passage of time. Perhaps that's why I never lost my annoying habits. My childhood did not yield gracefully, but was aborted, truncated, sheared off in the span of a single moment as I hid in the boughs of my reading tree and watched the Zhid slit my mother's throat and drag my father into slavery. And childhood was buried forever one year later when they came back for me and my brothers, the day the cold-eyed boy with the jewels in his ear sealed the slave collar about our necks, while my weeping father was forced to watch in silence. I had thought my life ended on that day, my heart transformed into steel as cold and dead as the collar itself, and it took me many years to discover it was not. But I never forgot.
It was a true measure of my father's goodness that he was able to look upon the person who had destroyed his children and caused his own savage torture with anything but hatred in his heart. My brothers had been used to train the beast in swordsmanship and then discarded like so much rubbish when he grew more skilled than they. They were sent into the desert camps and died there, I believed, for they were never found after the war. I was nine years old when the collar of Zhev'Na was sealed around my neck and fifteen when it was removed by a Healer who wept when he saw how young I was.
To find my father among the pitiful remnants of the thousands who'd been held captive in the Wastes had taken me three months. He lay in a house of healing in the Vale of Nimrolan, scarcely able to walk for the pain of his deformity. But one might say his grievous injuries were fortunate, for the path of life that led to his torture was the same that brought him back to me.
My father was a Speaker, one who can, with study and observation, divine the essence of a problem and judge its truth so that the parties to it may find a wise or just solution. It is an uncommon gift, and the single Dar'Nethi talent that leaves its wielder immune from transformation into Zhid. The power of a Speaker is immense; thus it was imminently desirable to the Lords, but it is born solely of truth, which left it out of their reach. Even the Three of Zhev'Na could not bend truth to their will. And so they took particular delight in enslaving a Speaker, abasing him cruelly, torturing him and flaunting him before the other Dar'Nethi as a reminder that no one could escape the Lords entirely, no matter what that person's gift. But they kept him alive.
Once free and reunited, my father and I had taken up life in the town of Tymnath. A Speaker's services were always in demand, so we lived comfortably enough. I kept our household, cared for my father, read and studied furiously to make up for missing years of education, and eventually pursued my own profession, facing the hard fact that whatever true talent had been born inside me had been destroyed by the slave collar of Zhev'Na. I had come of age without the Way, and like a seedling buried too long beneath a rock, my gift, whatever it might have been, had given up and died away before it ever saw the light. I could do the few small magics that any Dar'Nethi child could do, but nothing beyond. In five years I had grown accustomed to my lack, just as I had to the red scar about my neck, and I had made my own place in the world.
There was certainly work enough to do—rebuilding Tymnath for a start. I excelled at mathematics and had a good eye, so Builders and other craftsmen throughout the Vale of Hester found it useful that I could calculate their costs and sizes, loads and measures, and remember them exactly from one project to the next. True talent would have been nice, but paper, pen, and my mundane skills served me well enough.
It didn't take long to learn that people were shy of those who had been slaves, as if we had carried something more than our red scars from the desert, and it would behoove them not to get any closer than business required. Their discomfort didn't bother me. I had half a lifetime's worth of reading to catch up on and new skills to learn, and as often as we could get away I would hire a carriage and drive my father into the newly reclaimed countryside. It appealed to us far more than the untouched beauties of Avonar and the Vales. We would sit for hours reveling in the smell of moisture on the wind and the graceful brushstrokes of green newly painted over the healthy land, rejoicing in our survival and our Prince D'Natheil's victory over the Lords. After a few years, Papa said he almost couldn't remember what Zhev'Na had been like. I remembered.
In the fourth year of our freedom, Papa's strength began to fail. He lived with pain every day, the Healers' remedies helpful only in passing. They told him that if he would let them try to relieve the twisting of his poor back, then perhaps he would do better. But the healing itself was so excruciating, he could not bear it, and so it was never completed.
When his condition grew so painful that he could no longer work, he began to look for some other answer. More for me than for himself. He feared he was making my life intolerable. I spent hours alternately packing him in ice, then wrapping him in warm blankets with hot stones near the most painful places, and stretching and bending his limbs when he could not bear to do it, so as to keep his muscles working. Eventually I, too, was faced with giving up my work. The Lady D'Sanya's hospice seemed the perfect remedy. Since Papa could not work as he was, he insisted he would lose nothing by giving up his talent, and he wished to set me free to pursue my life without the burden of his suffering.
Our house was lonely without him, so I would spend one week of every three in Gaelie, where I could see him every day. It was on my third visit that I encountered the living beast in the hospice, and then saw him riding like a king on the very road I traveled and skulking in the guesthouse at Gaelie like a pickpocket hiding in the marketplace crowd. When I recognized him, I vowed that he would die.
My father was wrong about my reasons. It was not a matter of revenge. Nothing could restore my family or my childhood or give me talent, and though I was incomplete as a Dar'Nethi, I had not forsaken the Way. I rejoiced in my life and in the life of everything and everyone around me. But the Zhid were rising in the north, and here was their commander going about his sneaking business right before my eyes. I was a daughter of the Dar'Nethi, and I did not forget. No Dar'Nethi would be enslaved again if I could strike a blow to prevent it.