It was a slender young man of middle height with red-brown hair trimmed to his collar who strode into the garden on a wet afternoon, only nine days after his message.
"You made decent time," I said, once I'd loosed my embrace enough to allow a look. Dark brown eyes sat deep in his narrow face. You could not gaze into them for long without understanding that this quiet, graceful young man had seen and known things of awesome and dreadful consequence.
"It would have been faster if Vroon could have transported us," he said. "We haven't yet figured out why his 'hops' about the countryside don't work any more. Nothing of the Bounded seems to work quite right lately. Fortunately Paulo can still convince a horse that a league is no more than fifty paces. I had no choice but to ride along."
At the mention of his name, a tall, gangly, freckled young man hurried around the corner of the house into the shade of the rose arbor. I extended my hand. "Paulo! He'll be so happy you've come."
"We worried we'd be too late," said Gerick, as I dragged Paulo into an embrace. "Your weather seems as foul as ours. The roads north are a mess."
"He was determined to wait for you," I said. "Come. He's in here."
With a smile and a handclasp, Kellea yielded Gerick her place at Karon's bedside. Karon's face brightened as our son drew the stool close to the bed and touched his hand. To see the two of them together, bearing such love, respect, and friendship for each other, was everything I had ever asked from life.
A glance over my shoulder took me back to the front hall. Paulo had accompanied us no farther than the sitting-room door and now stood outside on the stoop, facing away. "The horses did more than I asked," he said huskily when I laid a hand on his shoulder. "Like they knew."
"Bless you for getting Gerick here," I said. "And for coming yourself."
"Never thought it would be so bad. He needs someone to do for him what he done for me."
"I keep hoping for it, but unless Gerick can help him, we're out of choices. It's four months until Ven'Dar's autumn visit."
Paulo stepped off the stoop. "I'll be in the stable."
I caught hold of his leather vest. "Go to Karon first. You are his son every bit as much as Gerick. Our groom will care for your horses until you get there."
When I followed Paulo inside a short time later, he was sitting at Karon's bedside, speaking quietly to the man who'd rescued a lame, illiterate peasant boy from a desolate future and entrusted him with his life and the survival of three worlds. Paulo had justified Karon's trust many times over, but the young man had never lost his wonder at it.
Gerick was around the corner in the housekeeper's room, splashing his face with water at the washing table. As he grabbed a towel from the stack and blotted his face, he caught sight of me and motioned for me to stay where I was. He threw the towel in the basket beside the table. Returning to Karon's room, he touched Paulo on the shoulder and murmured a few words to the two of them, then joined me at the door.
"Tomorrow, after I've had a little sleep, I'll see what I can do for him," he said as we strolled down the gravel path between the muddy beds of struggling violets and summerlace. "Kellea says she's already tried all the simple painkilling things I know how to do. So that leaves the soul weaving business. I'll do it, but it's just … if I try it now, I might never get back to my own body. We scarcely slept all the way down here."
As the only Soul Weaver known outside of Dar'Nethi legend, Gerick could actually leave his own body and enter another, either taking control of that body or lending his knowledge, skills, and strength to the other person. When his purpose was accomplished, he could slip back into his own skin, leaving his host whole and undamaged.
"Will you be able to help him?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. He doesn't think so. But perhaps he'll be able to guide me into something useful once I'm joined with him. I just don't know."
At twelve, Gerick had been one of the most powerful sorcerers in any world, the prodigy of the murderous Lords of Zhev'Na. But since he had rejected the life they had planned for him, he rarely spoke of sorcery and, according to Paulo, used it even less.
We returned to the house, poked up the fire, and sat with Karon for an hour. Gerick and Paulo fought off sleep and told us of the heavy snows and freezing rain that clogged the roads from the north. Their failure to see a single thriving field along their route boded ill for the coming winter. Their own land's always-unstable weather had taken a turn for the worse in the past months as well. Paulo had been on his way to Yurevan to find someone who could teach them to engineer drainage canals to control the Bounded's unusually severe barrage of storm waters when he'd stopped at the inn called the Two Thieves and found my message.
Kellea soon shooed us all to bed. Everyone needed rest, and she didn't want three more patients to take her time. On that night it was Gerick who helped his father sit up and who whispered comfort as Kellea's herbs worked their mercy.
None of us watched as Gerick left his own body and entered his father's on the next morning. It seemed too intimate an act for public display. I sat in an upstairs window seat with an open book and tried not to hope. Just as well. After an hour Gerick burst out of the front door below me and vomited violently into the undergrowth. For a long while after, he stood beneath a tree, hands clasped behind his neck, his elbows squeezing his bowed head. He didn't need to tell me his attempt had been fruitless.
And so we settled in to wait. As so often happens, grief unleashed a reservoir of laughter. We played lively games of chess or draughts at Karon's bedside where he could listen to the progress of the game.
Kellea astonished us by singing in a rich contralto a variety of Vallorean folk songs, a repertoire she had apparently acquired as a child. She admitted sheepishly that no one had ever heard her sing until her husband surprised her at it when she thought no one could hear.
Gerick and Paulo recounted more tales of their struggle to make the Bounded live. The past months had seen their first large-scale harvest, but also some worrisome failures of the glowing sunrocks that enabled them to grow food enough for all in their sunless world.
I passed on greetings from dear Tennice, Gerick's tutor who had been forced to cancel a journey to visit Karon by a lingering lung fever, and I reported on their friend, our young Queen Roxanne, and her continuing struggle with the Leiran nobility. Four years after her father's death, my old enemy's daughter had at last succeeded in wresting professions of fealty from every member of the Council of Lords, who had once sworn that an ox would rule the Four Realms sooner than a woman. I hated to think of her hard-won concessions tested by a hungry winter.
But all that was before a rain-washed sunset four days after Gerick's arrival, when a sharp knock on the door announced two visitors from Gondai. For a short while, I thought my summoning prayers had been answered after all.
"As soon as he wakes in the morning, we'll take him home." The slender man in robes of dark blue silk gazed down at a sleeping Karon. Though his ageless complexion and fair hair and beard could leave one guessing, Prince Ven'Dar had seen his sixty-fourth birthday. The network of fine lines on his open face had been carved by laughter, but on this night his gray-blue eyes seemed uncharacteristically shadowed, as if he, too, had not been sleeping well.