“Good.”
Rest easy. Determine your future with no worries that any enemy will interfere. Do you wish to question the woman yourself? The last question was from Ziddari.
“No. I’ve no interest in lies. She confuses me.” Yes. That was what they wanted to hear.
Then we’ll leave you to your own occupations.
And so I had to figure out what I wanted. The decision had seemed easy before, and now Seri had muddled everything. My thoughts kept running in circles, and I couldn’t decide what I believed, or why I had done the things I’d done, or what I was going to do about any of it.
I jumped up and fumbled about the room, gathering up Seri’s “gifts.” Out on the balcony, I burned the map of the Leiran stars and threw the stone and the wood and the fruit pit as far away as I could. I fingered the mirror, happy I couldn’t see well enough to know how my eyes looked this time. All black, I guessed. Even reflected light made me wince. I pulled the wood away from the metal and burned it, and then I melted the metal into a lump and threw it away, too. Grabbing my cloak, I felt my way down the stairs.
There were guards everywhere in my house. I told them I was going riding in the desert and threatened to tear out their eyes if they tried to stop me or even let their thoughts dwell on what I did. After a quick stop by the kitchen, I set out for the stables. Summoning up what little power I had, I used it to help me find familiar landmarks. I put out the stable lantern, made it to Firebreather’s stall without breaking my neck, and sat down to wait. Firebreather shied away from me until I’d talked to him a little. But it wasn’t for the horse I’d come.
“Awful dark in here.”
“Leave it that way. I’d just rather tonight.”
“Whatever you say.”
“I brought you some food, there in the pack by the gate. Sorry, no jack.”
“I told you I’m not choosy.” I heard him rummaging in the pack and then settling down in the straw. “You’re in a bother,” he said between bites.
“Have you started reading human thoughts as well as horses‘?”
“Don’t take a genius. You’re sitting here in the dark. You forgot to yell at me for anything. You brought me food without me acting pitiful or nothing. You’re not thinking straight.”
“I needed to talk, and I get tired of talking to myself. I argue one way, and it sounds right and reasonable, and then I turn around and argue exactly the opposite, and it sounds just the same.”
“I’ve seen it. Means you think too much.”
“It’s about those things I told you of. The stone and such that appeared in my house.”
“Did you find another one?”
“Yes. And I found out who did it.”
The silence stretched so long, I began to think he’d gone to sleep. “Blazes,” he said at last. “Who was it?”
“My mother.”
Another long silence, and then a totally unexpected question. “Is she all right?”
“No. Not all right at all-”
From out of the darkness a body pounced on me and pinned me to the floor, leaving me spitting straw and with both my arms twisted behind me. His elbow encircled my neck. “Damnation, you didn’t kill her? If you killed her, you are dead this instant. I don’t care whose friend you are, or how great a sorcerer you are, I’ll break your neck. Don’t think I can’t do it.”
He was wild and furious, and I almost believed he could do it. “She’s not dead. Just a prisoner. How do you-? Let me up. I won’t hurt you. I swear I won’t. Damn, you know her! You came here with her, didn’t you?” I twisted around and shoved him off me. Then I felt my way back to the wall, sat up, and brushed the straw off my face.
“I came just after. She don’t know I’m here. But I’ve promised- Curse every bit of this place. I’ve promised- Oh, shit, shit, shit!” I hoped he hadn’t broken his fist when he slammed it into the wall of the horse box.
“Why did you come here? Why did she come here? Don’t lie to me.”
“We came to get you. To take you back.”
“To destroy me?”
“Destroy you? Why in the name of perdition would the Lady Seri want to hurt you? She grieved herself to death for you and your da for all those years, living in Dunfarrie where there was only such as me for company, and the very day she figures out who you are, you get snatched out from under her nose. She picks up and chases you through the mountains in the winter, and to a new world where she’s like to get herself killed, then follows you into this cursed place, and you think she wants to hurt you?”
“She wanted vengeance on her brother. She didn’t know I was her son.”
“It’s true she didn’t at first. She didn’t want to stay at Comigor, but do you know why she did? Because everyone thought you were loony. She wanted to help you because she loved her brother, but she came to love you, too. She only put all the clues together after you was gone. She about went crazy.”
“That’s not right. She brought Prince D’Natheil to Comigor to kill me, and Lucy, and Mama’s baby… for her revenge.”
“The Prince was getting his head put back together. He’d been half crazy for months. He didn’t even remember she was his wife until that day in the council chamber. He couldn’t look at her without his head trying to bust open. Don’t you know anything? I know… knew… the Prince, and he never ever would kill an old lady or a child, whether it was his own or not. He never would. You don’t know what all he did for me who was an ignorant nobody he’d no reason to look at, much less care for.”
My head was about to twist inside out with the confusion. “He killed my father… Tomas… the man I believed to be my father.”
“It was Zhid magic what killed Duke Tomas.”
“How do you know? Why do you think anyone would tell you the truth?”
“Nobody told me nothing. I was there. I saw it.”
This was impossible. “I don’t believe you.”
“Look in my head. Can’t you tell what’s real and what somebody planted there? What good is all this sorcery if you can’t figure out when a person is telling you the truth?”
“I could tell.”
“Then do it. We’ve got to save the Lady Seri. I owe her and the Prince most everything, and to stop me trying to save her, you’ll have to kill me first, so you’d best get on with it.”
I fumbled about in the dark until I found his head, and I put my hands on the sides of it and told him to think of anything he wanted to tell me. Only that. By the time I pulled my hands away, I knew everything the Leiran boy knew from the time he first met Seri in Dunfarrie until the day my father, the Prince, had slit himself open so I couldn’t be corrupted by killing him. The Leiran boy wouldn’t tell me anything else-about how he got to Zhev’Na or how they planned to get me out. He wouldn’t think about the Prince, except how kind he was, and how he just couldn’t believe the man was really dead. But it was enough, and I could look no further anyway. Never had any injury hurt so much as the truth.
“Hey, are you all right?”
I couldn’t answer him. It was not all right. It could never be all right. I was able to add so many things he couldn’t know. The Lords were going to win. They had made me into what they wanted, and now I’d given them the very piece that would ensure their victory-a hold on me. They hated my mother as much as they hated the Prince. Maybe more. I almost laughed. I’d been wrong about every single thing in my whole life, blind long before my evil starting eating my eyes away. The Leiran boy had seen so clearly. He had asked how I could think the Prince had killed Lucy when I had only seen his knife in my dreams. But Darzid had twisted my dreams from the beginning.
A rustling in the straw. The Leiran boy had gone. Just as well. I would most likely betray him, too. But before I realized what was happening, a smear of light appeared in the horse box. I turned away, but not quickly enough.