It took an awful long time. The Prince had closed his eyes so you might think he was asleep, except that he had the same fierce look as was on his face when he was sword fighting. The young master began to shake and moan, and the Prince spoke to me. “Hold him, Paulo. Just don’t touch me.”
And so I did. When the young master quieted a bit, the Prince had me take the jeweled pin out of his ear. It was burning hot when I took it off.
Sometime much later the Prince took his right hand and started to run it real slow around the edges of the gold mask. Over and over it he went, and after a time you could see the metal begin to separate from the young master’s face. Finally the Prince said, so soft that you almost couldn’t hear him, “Cut the binding.”
And when I’d done that, he said, “Dim the light and have one of the towels ready.”
I did that, too.
“Now hold his arms while I remove the mask. Carefully. Please, carefully.”
I’ve never seen such a fearful sight. There was nothing there in the young master’s eyeholes. When I’d seen his changes before, his eyes had turned dark in their color, but now he didn’t have eyes at all, nor anything else there that I could see-just dark holes. The Prince covered him up real quick, as soon as he had the mask off.
“Take the other towels and cut them into strips.” He almost couldn’t talk.
I did as he told me, and we wrapped the strips of linen around and around the young master’s eyes. Then the Prince eased himself into the corner of the tent, shut his eyes, and held his boy close in his arms. I poked my head out of the tent and asked Bareil if he would bring the Prince something to drink. I knew he had to be thirsty after all that, but I didn’t dare go myself without the Prince’s leave.
It was the Lady Seri that brought a cup of wine and a water flask. She knelt down beside the Prince and asked if he could drink. His eyes came open, and it was a fine thing to watch when he saw it was her. He took a sip of the water, then his eyes closed and he went to sleep, and the Lady Seri sat with them through the night. I stayed just by the door.
It was a week before we knew anything. Three more times the Prince worked his healing on the young master. “I can’t tell you if I’ve done enough,” he said to us after the last one. “I think the Lords’ hold on him was released when we took off the mask and the jewels in his ear, but he doesn’t speak… doesn’t answer my questions or respond in any way when I’m with him. He has some places walled off so tightly that I can’t touch them. I don’t know if he has set the barriers himself, or if it’s some part of what the Lords have done to him. All I can do is try to banish those things that don’t belong, heal the places where it looks like he’s been damaged. As for his eyes… Something exists there now. Whether he will allow them to see, I don’t know.”
The young master was never left alone. Though he just sat there not saying anything or even moving, either the Prince or the lady was always there talking to him or holding him, even if it was just touching his hand. Sometimes I would sit with whichever one was watching. One night the Lady Seri was coming into the tent, and she told the Prince how it was a fine night with a full moon such as they’d not seen in more than a year, as you could never see the moon in Zhev’Na. I said why didn’t they go see it together, as I could stay with the young master for a while and call them if there was any change. I knew the Prince and the Lady hadn’t taken any time alone together to speak of. They were shy of each other, more like two who were courting than ones who knew each other so well as they did.
They took my offer, and so I was left with the young master alone. I started talking to him as I had before- about Dunfarrie and how the folks what had called me donkey would be fair surprised when they saw me walking straight, if his lordship would ever get himself together so I could go home, that is.
“And what would you do if you got there? The village horses will have forgotten you after all this time.” It was so quiet I almost missed it.
“Oh, they’ll rem- Blazes! Is that you talking to me or is it my own self?”
“We don’t sound all that much alike most times.”
“Blazes! Damn! I got… I got to tell them… the lady and the Prince.”
“Don’t leave.” He reached out and grabbed my arm. “Please…”
“No. Not a bit of it. I’ll just stay right here. I might just holler out then, if that’s all right.”
“No… I mean… if you’d just wait a little.”
He was scared. Not in the way he’d been scared of the terrible things in his head. Not cowardly scared. He told me how strange it was that he knew me better than he knew his parents, and how the Prince had been inside his head, but such wasn’t like really meeting him in his own body or anything.
I agreed it was strange. My parents had been dead or run off since I was a nub. I couldn’t imagine having them walk in on me, knowing more about me than I did about them, and having all sorts of blood oaths and killing between us. “All I know is that you don’t have to be afraid of them,” I said to him. “They care about you more than anything.”
We talked about other things for a bit, about horses and sword fighting, and about how I had worked in the stable at Comigor and he never even knew it, and how he had seen me outside the window in the council chamber in Avonar, while I’d been watching him inside. And while we talked, the tent flap opened, and the lady and the Prince came in. The young master turned his head that way even though his eyes were still bandaged up. Then he took a deep breath and said, “I think I’m all right.”
CHAPTER 47
Karon
He wasn’t all right, of course. It would be a long time until we knew what the result of Gerick’s ordeal would be. We weren’t even sure he was mortal, for he had neither eaten nor drunk anything for nine days. But we took the bandages off that same night, and he did indeed have eyes again, beautiful brown eyes just like his mother’s. To our joy and relief, he could see with them, too.
Soon he was able to eat as well, not having to resort to the herbs and potions Kellea gave me to help keep things down until the last remnants of the slave food were out of my blood. On the afternoon after he first spoke, ten days after we had left Zhev’Na behind us, Gerick stepped out of the tent and went walking in the sunlight with Paulo.
He wouldn’t talk about what the Lords had done to him or how much of their poisonous enchantments remained, and from the first he alternated between periods of quiet patience and intense irritability. What was most unsettling was how his eyes would take on a dark gray cast when he was angry. I saw no evidence that he possessed exceptional power anymore, only the intrinsic talents of any Dar’Nethi youth who had not yet come into his primary talent.
I believed his dark moods reflected the intensity of his craving for the power he had lost. The glimpses of his experiences I had come across while working at his healing were extraordinary, uses of sorcery alien to anything I knew of, but his determined reserve precluded any deeper questioning about them. And he made it clear from the beginning that he didn’t wish for me to tell him anything of how I or any other Dar’Nethi acquired power to support our various talents. Seri and I were uneasy at his erratic temper, but we agreed it was only to be expected. We would just have to take things slowly. We grieved sorely for his childhood, stolen away in the deserts of Zhev’Na.