“You?” she said to the horse. It raised its head, flicked an ear, and blew a soft whuffle. “You are Paks’s horse—”
A stamp of hoof. Dorrin understood that Paks belonged to the horse, not the other way around.
“There’s a comfortable stall in the stable,” she said. The horse scratched an ear with a hind hoof and turned away, walking down toward the stream. Dorrin heard a chuckle from her escort; she shrugged and rode on into the stableyard, her heart lighter at the thought of seeing Paks.
She went in through the kitchen. The cook looked up. “You’re later than I thought you’d be. Them villagers keep a-wrangling till dark?”
“No,” Dorrin said. “They had a surprise for me.”
“A wet one, I see,” the cook said, glaring at Dorrin’s boots and the floor.
“That’s why I came in this way,” Dorrin said. “Where are our guests?”
“Front hall. What happened? They throw you in the river?”
“No, there was a problem with the well.” Dorrin squelched on through. “I need a bath; I’ll go straight up.” At least she could now bathe in more privacy than the servants’ bathhouse without fear of being killed by some clever trap.
She came down, wearing the soft slippers she favored in the house. Paks and the royal courier were seated around a small table someone had moved from the kitchen, and one of the kitchen maids was dishing out something that smelled almost as good as the fire-roasted lamb. The maid glanced up and saw her.
“My lord Duke—shall I set a place in the dining room?”
“No—I’ll sit here. Just bring a plate and things.”
The courier had jumped up, almost knocking his chair over. “My lord Duke—”
“Sit down, both of you.” Dorrin dragged a chair to the table. “I’m sorry I was later than I said I’d be. The visit did not go quite as planned.”
“A judgment?” Paks asked.
“I thought it was to be a judgment, but as it turned out, it was several other things as well. But let us talk of lighter things as you eat. You were at Kieri’s coronation, Paks, were you not?”
“Indeed.” Paks swallowed hastily. “The Lady was there—it must be strange to have your grandmother as co-ruler.”
“And you had good weather on your journey here?” She had no idea where Paks had been in the meantime, but that could wait.
“It rained one day,” Paks said. “But the road was sound. And you?” she said, turning to the courier.
“Two days,” he said. “How long is the ride to Chaya? I have a message for the king.”
“And I a message for your prince from the king,” Paks said. “He regrets he will be unable to attend the coronation, for concerns of state in his own realm. He will send an envoy.”
After he finished, the royal courier excused himself to use the bath Dorrin had offered.
“I just found out today is my birth-day,” Dorrin said when they were alone.
“You didn’t know?”
“No. The name-day, not the birth-day, mattered to my family, and my name-day was Midsummer Eve. My villagers knew, though, and lured me out to celebrate it their way. If I had not been able to tell them of the prince’s messenger, I’d be there yet.” Dorrin looked at Paks; it was still hard to believe this young woman—so young—had been through so much. She still had the same open, engaging grin that had made her such an attractive recruit, but the gray eyes had wisdom beyond her years. “So—you are on your way to the coronation in Vérella, I suppose? I’m glad you came this way.”
“No,” Paks said, picking up another stuffed pastry. “One coronation a year is enough. I came here because I felt it.”
“Felt—”
“I can’t explain. I had to come, as I had to leave Chaya and wander the woods in Lyonya awhile. This is delicious—do you eat like this every night?”
“Not quite,” Dorrin said. “The cook made something special for the prince’s courier and, I suppose, you.”
“This place is huge,” Paks said. “The entrance hall’s as big as some granges.” She eyed the dish of plums and then looked straight at Dorrin. “Are you happy, Captain—Duke, I mean?”
“Happy?” Dorrin bit back the comment she’d almost made—happiness was a child’s wish, not an adult’s duty—but Paks was clearly happy, and she was no naive child. Paks’s easy patience pulled answers out of her. “Sometimes. I had forgotten how beautiful it could be. Not the house; the house is …” She shook her head and left it there. “But the land. The land and the people. It’s softer land than Kieri’s—the king’s—was. Settled longer, cared for longer. The kitchen orchard’s thick with fruit this year. But as I said in Chaya, I never meant to come back. They didn’t want me back. It was …” Again she stopped, feeling tears burning her eyes.
“Their evil is not your fault, Captain,” Paks said.
“I know, but—” In halting phrases, at first, Dorrin told Paks what had happened, the discovery of Verrakai’s use of others, even their own children, to transfer personalities from one to another, the traps and poisons she’d had to disarm before she dared sleep in any of the beds. The deaths.
“I had to do it,” she said. “And I know that’s what my family would say about what they did. They had to, it was … expedient. If I had not, they would have killed others—and how many there are loose in the land I do not know, since I don’t know if all the transfers are recorded in the family book.”
Paks reached out and touched her hand; Dorrin felt a rush of goodwill and strength. “You have a hard task,” Paks said. “But you are faithful; that much is clear. Your people love you already, or they would not have celebrated your birthday.”
“I am better than my uncle, under whom they suffered,” Dorrin said. “Their gratitude is too great for the little I have done so far. It is all undoing—undoing curses, unsetting traps—before I can do anything real,” Dorrin said. “Though today—” She paused.
“Tell me,” Paks said, taking a plum from the bowl.
“The villagers had a well; my uncle cursed it.” Dorrin told the rest of it, hurrying through the details and staring at her hands clasped on the table, for she felt tears rise again and did not want to cry in front of Paks.
“Undoing such evil is no small thing,” Paks said, when Dorrin paused for breath. Dorrin looked up to see that Paks’s eyes glittered with unshed tears in the lamplight.
“It is so … so sad,” Dorrin said, past the lump in her own throat. “And it makes me so angry. All that waste, all that unnecessary pain and struggle … the years they had to send someone all the way to the stream for water, and why? Because my uncle chose it.” She stopped again; Paks said nothing. “And then, at the end, where I expected water fouled past cleansing … the well was dry.”
“Completely?”
“Yes. I felt the rock. Dry as Andressat in late summer; dry as if it had never been a well. I sat there, with the bones wrapped in my shirt, those pitiful bones—” Tears came despite her intent; she felt them on her face, but went on. “And when I asked the gods, no words came to me, nothing, and so I cried, as—as I am now.” She choked, then found her voice again. “My family—does not—cry. All I could think—was the waste—the misery—the pain—we have caused. Year after year, and for what? And then the water came.”
“Came how?” Paks asked, leaning forward. “And where?”
“Out of a cleft of the rock. It is—scarcely believable. I cried like a child, tears dripping right onto the rock, and then … the water came creeping out of that cleft.”
“Did it frighten you?” Paks asked. “You down a well and the water rising? But wait—you had a rope, you could get out safely.”
“Not quite,” Dorrin said. “It came slowly at first and then suddenly, a gush that lifted me up like a branch in a torrent.” An echo of the joy she’d felt at the water dried the tears on her face as she grinned. “What I’m sure will be told behind my back for the rest of my life, one peasant to another, is how I looked, rising up on that gush of water half naked, with my burden of bones wrapped in my shirt.”