Then, looking close into her eyes, he saw where the real change had occurred.
Her eyes. That was the only place: nowhere else but her eyes. Another person, not ever having looked into those eyes before, might not have noticed anything amiss at all. But to Prestimion the transformation of his mother’s eyes was a thing of such stunning, overwhelming magnitude that he was scarcely able to believe what he saw.
In that still-beautiful face her eyes had taken on a blazing, frightful strangeness that contradicted the very beauty in which they were set. They were the eyes of a woman who had lived a hundred years, or a thousand. Deeply sunken now, rimmed by an intricate webwork of fine lines, those transformed eyes stared out at him in a cold, rigid, unblinking way, unnaturally bright, weirdly intense, the eyes of someone who had seen the walls of the world peel back to reveal some realm of unimaginable horrors that lay behind them.
Gone now was that incredible look of serenity, the marvelous radiance that was the outer display of the inner perfection that had been, for him, her most significant characteristic. Prestimion saw the most terrible anguish in his mother’s eyes now. He saw enormous pain in them: pain that was unbearable, but which was being borne nonetheless. It took all the force of will he could muster to keep himself from flinching away from the dreadful gleaming stare of those appalling eyes.
He took her hands in his. There was a tremor in her fingers that had never been there before. Her hands were cold to the touch. He realized fully now how old she was, how worn.
This weakness of hers stunned him. He had always looked to her to be his ultimate reservoir of strength. It had been that way in the time of the war against Korsibar; it had been that way when he had crushed the rebellion of Dantirya Sambail. Now he understood that that strength was exhausted.
I will have vengeance for this, Prestimion told himself.
“Mother—” His voice was hoarse, muffled, indistinct.
“Do I frighten you, Prestimion?”
Determined to give her no sign of the consternation he felt, he forced an unnaturally hearty tone, and a sort of grin. “Of course you don’t, mother.” Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly. “How could you ever frighten me?”
She was not deceived. “I could see it in your face as soon as you came near enough to get a good look at me. A quick little movement at the side of your mouth, it was: it told me everything.”
“Perhaps I was a bit surprised,” he conceded. “But frightened? No. No. You look a little older, I suppose. Well, so do I. So does everyone. It happens. It’s not an important thing.”
She smiled, and the icy harshness of her gaze softened just a little. “Oh, Prestimion, Prestimion, Prestimion, is this any time of your life or mine for you to begin lying to your mother? Don’t you think there are mirrors in this house? I frighten myself, sometimes, when I look into them.”
“Mother—oh, mother—” He gave up all pretense, and drew her close against him, folded her in his arms, held her in a gentle embrace, sending to her whatever he could of comfort.
She had become very thin, Prestimion realized. Almost brittle, as though she were all bones: he was afraid of holding her too tightly for fear that he would injure her in some way. But she pressed herself gladly against him. He heard something that almost might have been a sob, a sound that he had not heard from her before in all the years of his life; but perhaps it had only been an intake of breath, he thought.
When he released her and stepped back he was pleased to see that the fixed hard stare had relaxed a little further, and something of the old warm glow had come back into her eyes.
She nodded to him to follow her, and led him into a simple antechamber nearby, where a flask of wine and two bowls were waiting on a small stone table with an inlaid border of bright mother-of-pearl. Prestimion noticed that her hand quivered just a little as she poured the wine for them.
They took their first sips in silence. He looked straight at her and made no attempt now to avert his eyes, painful as that was for him.
“Was it losing Teotas that did this to you, mother?”
The tone of her reply was a steady, unwavering one. “I’ve lost a son before, Prestimion. There’s nothing worse for a mother than to outlive her child; but I know how to handle grief.” She shook her head. “No, Prestimion. No. It wasn’t Teotas alone that aged me like this.”
“I know something about the dreams you’ve been having. Taliesme told me.”
“You know nothing about those dreams, Prestimion. Nothing.” Her face had darkened, and her voice seemed an octave deeper now. “Until you’ve directly experienced one yourself, you can’t possibly know. And I pray that the Divine will spare you from anything of the kind.—You’ve not had one, have you?”
“I don’t think so. I dream of Thismet, sometimes. Or that I’m wandering around lost in some strange part of the Castle. A couple of nights ago I dreamed that I was traveling up and up and up to Third Cliff in a floater-sled, without ever getting there. But everybody has dreams of that sort, mother. Just ordinary irritating dreams that you’d rather not be having, but you know you’ll forget them five minutes after you awake.”
“My dreams are of a different kind. They cut deep; and they linger. Let me tell you about my dreams, Prestimion. And then perhaps you’ll understand.”
She took a slow sip of her wine and stared down into the bowl, swirling it slowly. Prestimion waited, saying nothing. He knew a little of what Teotas’s deadly dreams must have been like, and Varaile’s, and even, to some degree, Tuanelys’s. But he wanted to hear what his mother had to say of her own dreams, first, before he spoke to her of those other ones.
She was silent for a time. Then at last the Lady Therissa looked across at him again. Her eyes had taken on once more the cold, hard, ferocious glare they had had when he had first stared into them. But that he knew better, he might have thought those eyes were the eyes of a madwoman.
“Here is how it happens, Prestimion. I lie down, I close my eyes, I let myself slide off into sleep as I have done every night for more years than I care to think about.” She spoke quietly, calmly, impersonally, as though she were telling a mere story, some fable about a person who had lived five thousand years before. “And—it happens once a week, perhaps, or twice, sometimes three—not long after sleep comes, I feel an odd warmth behind my forehead, a warmth that grows and grows and grows until I think my brain must be on fire. There is a throbbing in my head, here, here—” She touched her temples and the roof of her skull. “A sensation, also, as of a bright, hot beam of light cutting into my forehead and going deep within. Going into my soul, Prestimion.”
“Oh—mother—how dreadful, mother—”
“What I’ve told you so far is the easy part. After the heat, the pain, comes the dream itself.—I am in court. I am on trial before a shouting mob. I stand accused of the most loathsome betrayals of trust, of the filthiest of lies, of treachery against those I was chosen to serve. It is an impeachment, Prestimion. I am being removed from my post as Lady of the Isle for having been negligent in my tasks.”
She paused, then, and took some more wine, and sipped it unhurriedly. The effort of telling him these things was obviously a drain on her energies.