If it could be put to good use, she might save some of the children that way, healing whatever hurts had been done them … and being able to heal might win supporters from those long damaged by her family.
“Let’s go to my room,” Paks said. “Quieter there.”
Dorrin was expected at table with the king; she was sure Selfer or Bosk would come looking for her. “I must leave word that I’m busy—”
“I’ll tell them I wanted to confer with you.” Paks grinned. “For now, nobody interrupts me.”
11
Paks’s room, at one end of the palace complex and a floor higher than her own, looked to have been a servant’s once. Plain, a pair of narrow beds separated by a carved chest, a bare wood floor. A wardrobe stood against one wall; the opposite had pegs at various heights. Paks’s cloak hung on one; her pack, neatly rolled, was at the foot of her bed.
“They could do no better for the paladin who saved their king?” Dorrin asked.
“They could, but I chose to move here,” Paks said. “I needed solitude, not care, for a while.” Her face had sobered, but now it lightened again. “Besides, this gives us the privacy I’m sure we need. Here—sit down on that bed.”
Dorrin sat, bemused by the shift in authority, as if she herself were a recruit facing a captain for the first time.
“Give me your hand,” Paks said next. Dorrin held out her hand; Paks’s hand on hers felt warm and dry and oddly soothing. Dorrin waited; Paks said nothing, but looked past her, into something Dorrin could not see. Slowly, she felt something else, something that seemed to pass from Paks to her, a strange tingle that ran up her arm and from there into her head, and down her torso. She wanted to pull her hand back, but Paks had a firm grip. She glanced up. Paks’s eyes were closed, her face unreadable, the slightest furrow of a frown between her brows, as if she were concentrating.
When Paks released Dorrin’s hand, she sat down on the opposite bed. Dorrin waited.
“That was … interesting,” Paks said. “Someone blocked your magery long ago, except for that light. Did you know that? Do you know who?”
“No,” Dorrin said. “I suppose my uncle, or a cousin.”
“I don’t think so,” Paks said. “From what you say, their contact would be evil, and leave a residue I should pick up. This was not an act of malice, but of protection. Who, that could do such a thing, might have chosen to do so?”
One name came immediately to mind. “The Knight-Commander of Falk,” Dorrin said. “When I trained there, when he found out who I was, I told him about my small talent. He let me stay, but said I must not use any magery while there, having learned only its wrong uses. He might have blocked it.”
“And not told you?”
“I can think of no one else,” Dorrin said. “He is the only one outside my family who knew that I had it.”
“Then we should ask him,” Paks said.
“He died,” Dorrin said. “Some years after I was knighted, I heard that he had died. The new Knight-Commander I have never met.”
“Ah. I wonder if he has the same powers. At least he is here; we can ask.”
“Do we need to involve him?”
Paks cocked her head. “I think so. I am not a Knight of Falk … I am not even a knight, for that matter, so I do not know what he did or how it was done. I do know we should not meddle in things like this without understanding them.”
“I will go—”
“No. I will go, and while I am gone, if you have such rituals as the Girdish knights have, to pray and prepare for a trial of some kind, that is what I think you should do. You have great deeds before you, Captain, and whether your magery can be restored and trained or not, you need time alone to ready yourself.” Paks leaned forward and patted Dorrin’s hand. “Do not worry, Captain. I will not be long.”
Dorrin sat on the bed, thinking. Worrying. Thinking how long it had been since she prayed to Falk in anything but a crisis. For the king’s life, she had prayed. For Paks’s safe return from torment, she had prayed. But though she wore the ruby, it had been years since she prayed for guidance, for Falk’s Will to be clear to her. She had substituted, she realized, Phelan’s orders, Phelan’s well-being, for the will of the gods, though she held herself true to them as she understood them.
As she had understood them as a runaway, as a young woman.
Time to do more than that. Time to do better, to outgrow her role as Phelan’s captain, as Paks had long outgrown hers as Phelan’s soldier.
By the time Paks reappeared with the Knight-Commander of Falk—who looked decidedly grumpy at being dragged up flights of back stairs with little explanation—she had prayed for aid and guidance and felt, for the first time in years, connected once more to Falk’s Company.
“Captain Dorrin!” the Knight-Commander said. “So it is you I have come to see—Paksenarrion here would not say.”
Dorrin had risen; Paks, vanishing from behind him in the doorway, reappeared with a chair. “Here, sir—if you will take a seat—”
“Hmph.” He sat, still staring at Dorrin, frowning.
Paks moved past him and sat cross-legged on the bed opposite Dorrin. “If I may, Captain, I’ll explain—”
Dorrin nodded, and Paks began. “You have heard, sir, that Captain Dorrin has been appointed by the prince and Council in Tsaia to take over the dukedom of Verrakai?”
He glanced from one to the other. “No … I had not.”
“Well, then, she has. And the difficulty is, as I’m sure your predecessor told you, that the Verrakai retain the old magery—the outlaw magery—and misuse it to maintain their rule. And she herself inherited that ability.”
He nodded, now staring hard at Dorrin. “So my predecessor told me, when he was old and ill. She had it, but had refused to use it cruelly, and thus had left Verrakai for Lyonya and our Hall. I was surprised he accepted her—you.”
“Did he tell you everything?” Dorrin asked. “That I came under a false name, that my family pursued and demanded my return, that he protected me from them?”
“Not that you came under a false name, no. I would not have let you stay, had you done that to me.”
“I understand, sir,” Dorrin said. “But it was his decision at the time.”
“He was an interesting man,” the Knight-Commander said. “And he felt strongly about you. He was glad to see you linked to Phelan—he felt you had an important role to play there.”
“I did?” Dorrin felt only surprise. “He never told me.”
“He wouldn’t. But on the road from Tsaia, was it not your cohort who defended the king long enough to save him from attack—including by your relatives?”
“Yes, but—”
“So what, now, is your need? I’m assuming your need, since this paladin brought me here speaking of great need.”
“Yes, sir.” Dorrin put her thoughts in order. “As Paks said, and your predecessor probably told you, I inherited the family magery, but was never trained in its use—I refused to cooperate with the training they attempted and eventually escaped …”
“What was that training?”
“In cruelty.” Dorrin felt the familiar tremor in her hands, and clenched them together. “It—it was their belief that our power was retained because of … of blood magery. When a child—when I—first showed any talent—such as making light, then we were taken into the—the inner keep. The old keep, with its dungeon. And there made to see what they believed maintained our powers.”
“Describe it.” The Knight-Commander’s voice was hard and cold as winter stone.
Despite herself, Dorrin’s voice trembled. “It was … it was an animal, that first time. A rabbit.” She could still see it, in her mind, the terrified, trembling little creature, heart beating so fast and hard, nose twitching. She had felt its fear and her own had doubled. Other rabbits, in wicker cages stacked along one side of the chamber, all terrified. She tried to swallow; her mouth was nearly as dry as it had been then. “They showed me first … my uncle made light, as I had, and then … then he hurt the rabbit and it screamed and his light grew stronger.”