When I reached my mother’s bed, the priest had already come and gone, as had my stepfather, who Ulca told me had never spoken a word. My mother had died only a short time after I left on my errand. I had failed her—had left her to suffer and die with no family beside her. The shame and sorrow burned so badly that I could not imagine the pain would ever go away. As the other women prepared her for burial, I could do nothing but weep. The dragon’s claw dangled next to my heart, all but forgotten.
I spent weeks wandering the castle, lost and miserable. I only remembered the message Xanippa had given me when my mother had been dead and buried almost a month.
I found my stepfather on the wall overlooking the Kingslake, and told him what Xanippa had said. He did not ask me how I came to be carrying messages for such a woman. He did not even signify he had heard me. His eyes were fixed on something in the far distance—on the boats of the fisher-folk, perhaps, dim in the fog.
* * *
The first years in the ruined High Keep were hard ones, and not just for my mother and me. Lord Sulis had to oversee the rebuilding, a vast and endlessly complicated task, as well as keep up the spirits of his own people through the first bleak winter.
It is one thing for soldiers, in the initial flush of loyal indignity, to swear they will follow their wronged commander anywhere. It is another thing entirely when that commander comes to a halt, when following becomes true exile. As the Nabbanai troops came to understand that this cold backwater of Erkynland was to be their home forever, problems began—drinking and fighting among the soldiers, and even more unhappy incidents between Sulis’ men and the local people … my people, although it was hard for me to remember that sometimes. After my mother died, I sometimes felt as if I were the true exile, surrounded by Nabbanai names and faces and speech even in the middle of my own land.
If we did not enjoy that first winter, we survived it, and continued as we had begun, a household of the dispossessed. But if ever a man was born to endure that state, it was my stepfather.
When I see him now in my memory, when I picture again that great heavy brow and that stern face, I think of him as an island, standing by himself on the far side of dangerous waters, near but forever unvisited. I was too young and too shy to try to shout across the gulf that separated us, but it scarcely mattered—Sulis did not seem like a man who regretted his own solitude. In the middle of a crowded room his eyes were always on the walls instead of the people, as though he could see through stone to some better place. Even in his happiest and most festive moods, I seldom heard him laugh, and his swift, distracted smiles suggested that the jokes he liked best could never truly be explained to anyone else.
He was not a bad man, or even a difficult man, as my grandfather Godric had been, but when I saw the immense loyalty of his soldiers it was sometimes hard for me to understand it. Tellarin said that when he had joined Avalles’ company, the others had told him of how Lord Sulis had once carried two of his wounded bondmen from the field, one trip for each, through a storm of Thrithings arrows. If that is true, it is easy to understand why his men loved him, but there were few opportunities for such obvious sorts of bravery in the High Keep’s echoing halls.
While I was still young, Sulis would pat me on the head when we met, or ask me questions that were meant to show a paternal interest, but which often betrayed an uncertainty as to how old I was and what I liked to do. When I began to grow a womanish form, he became even more correct and formal, and would offer compliments on my clothes or my stitchery in the same studied way that he greeted the High Keep’s tenants at Aedonmansa, when he called each man by his name—learned from the seneschal’s accounting books—as he filed past, and wished each a good year.
Sulis grew even more distant in the year after my mother died, as though losing her had finally untethered him from the daily tasks he had always performed in such a stiff, practiced way. He spent less and less time seeing to the matters of government, and instead sat reading for hours—sometimes all through the night, wrapped in heavy robes against the midnight chill, burning candles faster than the rest of the house put together.
The books that had come with him from his family’s great house in Nabban were mostly tomes of religious instruction, but also some military and other histories. He occasionally allowed me to look at one, but although I was learning, I still read only slowly, and could make little of the odd names and devices in the accounts of battle. Sulis had other books that he would never even let me glance at, plainbound volumes that he kept locked in wooden boxes. The first time I ever saw one go back into its chest, I found the memory returning to me for days afterward. What sort of books were they, I wondered, that must be kept sealed away?
One of the locked boxes contained his own writings, but I did not find that out for two more years, until the night of Black Fire was almost upon us.
* * *
It was in the season after my mother’s death, on a day when I found him reading in the gray light that streamed into the throne room, that Lord Sulis truly looked at me for the one and only time I remember.
When I shyly asked what he was doing, he allowed me to examine the book in his lap, a beautiful illuminated history of the prophet Varris with the heron of Honsa Sulis worked in gilt on the binding. I traced with my finger an illustration of Varris being martyred on the wheel. “Poor, poor man,” I said. “How he must have suffered. And all because he stayed true to his God. The Lord must have given him sweet welcome to Heaven.”
The picture of Varris in his agony jumped a little—I had startled my stepfather into a flinch. I looked up to find him gazing at me intently, his brown eyes so wide with feelings I could not recognize that for a moment I was terrified that he would strike me. He lifted his huge, broad hand, but gently. He touched my hair, then curled the hand into a fist, never once shifting that burning stare from me.
“They have taken everything from me, Breda.” His voice was tight-clenched with a pain I could not begin to understand. “But I will never bend my back. Never.”
I held my breath, uncertain and still a little frightened. A moment later my stepfather recovered himself. He brought his fist to his mouth and pretended to cough—he was the least able dissembler I have ever known—and then bade me let him finish his reading while the light still held. To this day I do not know who he believed had taken everything from him—the Imperator and his court in Nabban? The priests of Mother Church? Or perhaps even God and His army of angels?
What I do know was that he tried to tell me of what burned inside him, but could not find the words. What I also know is that at least for that moment, my heart ached for the man.
* * *
My Tellarin asked me once, “How could it be possible that no other man has made you his own? You are beautiful, and the daughter of a king.”
But as I have said before, Lord Sulis was not my father, nor was he king. And the evidence of the mirror that had once been my mother’s suggested that my soldier overspoke my comeliness as well. Where my mother had been fair and full of light, I was dark. Where she was long of neck and limb and ample of hip, I was made small, like a young boy. I have never taken up much space on the earth—nor will I below it, for that matter. Wherever my grave is made, the digging will not shift much soil.
But Tellarin spoke with the words of love, and love is a kind of spell which banishes all sense.
“How can you care for a rough man like me?” he asked me. “How can you love a man who can bring you no lands but the farm a soldier’s pension can buy? Who can give your children no title of nobility?”
Because love does not do sums, I should have told him. Love makes choices, and then gives its all.
Had he seen himself as I first saw him, though, he could have had no questions.
It was an early spring day in my fifteenth year, and the sentries had seen the boats coming across the Kingslake at first light of morning. These were no ordinary fishing craft, but barges loaded with more than a dozen men and
their warhorses. Many of the castle folk had gathered to see the travelers come in and to learn their news.
After they had brought all their goods ashore on the lakefront, Tellarin and the rest of the company mounted and rode up the hill path and in through the main gates. The gates themselves had only lately been rebuilt—they were crude things of heavy, undressed timbers, but enough to serve in case of war. My stepfather had reason to be cautious, as the delegation that arrived that day was to prove.
It was actually Tellarin’s friend Avalles who was called master of these men, because Avalles was an equestrian knight, one of the Sulean family nephews, but it was not hard to see which of the two truly held the soldiers’ loyalty. My Tellarin was barely twenty years old on the first day I saw him. He was not handsome—his face was too long and his nose too impudent to grace one of the angels painted in my stepfather’s books—but I thought him quite, quite beautiful. He had taken off his helmet to feel the morning sun as he rode, and his golden hair streamed in the wind off the lake. Even my inexperienced eye could see that he was still young for a fighting man, but I could also see that the men who rode with him admired him too.
His eyes found me in the crowd around my father and he smiled as though he recognized me, although we had never seen each other before. My blood went hot inside me, but I knew so little of the world, I did not recognize the fever of love.
My stepfather embraced Avalles, then allowed Tellarin and the others to kneel before him as each swore his fealty in turn, although I am sure Sulis wanted only to be finished with ceremony so he could return to his books.
The company had been sent by my stepfather’s family council in Nabban. A letter from the council, carried by Avalles, reported that there had been a resurgence of talk against Sulis in the imperatorial court at Nabban, much of it fanned by the Aedonite priests. A poor man who held odd, perhaps irreligious beliefs was one thing, the council wrote, but when the same beliefs belonged to a nobleman with money, land, and a famous name, many powerful people would consider him a threat. In fear for my stepfather’s life, his family had thus sent this carefully picked troop and warnings to Sulis to be more cautious than ever.
Despite the company’s grim purpose, news from home was always welcome, and many of the new troop had fought beside other members of my stepfather’s army. There were many glad reunions.
When Lord Sulis had at last been allowed to retreat to his reading, but before Ulca could hurry me back indoors, Tellarin asked Avalles if he could be introduced to me. Avalles himself was a dark, heavy-faced youth with a fledgling beard, only a few years Tellarin’s elder, but with so much of the Sulean family’s gravity in him that he seemed a sort of foolish old uncle. He gripped my hand too tightly and mumbled several clumsy compliments about how fair the flowers grew in the north, then introduced me to his friend.
Tellarin did not kiss my hand, but held me far more firmly with just his bright eyes. He said, “I will remember this day always, my lady,” then bowed. Ulca caught my elbow and dragged me away.
* * *
Even in the midst of love’s fever, which was to spread all through my fifteenth year, I could not help but notice that the changes which had begun in my stepfather when my mother died were growing worse.
Lord Sulis now hardly left his chambers at all, closeting himself with his books and his writings, being drawn out only to attend to the most pressing of affairs. His only regular conversations were with Father Ganaris, the plain-spoken military chaplain who was the sole priest to have accompanied Lord Sulis out of Nabban. Sulis had installed his old battlefield comrade in the castle’s newly built chapel, and it was one of the few places the master of the High Keep would still go. His visits did not seem to bring the old chaplain much pleasure, though. Once I watched them bidding each other farewell, and as Sulis turned and shouldered his way through the wind, heading back across the courtyard to our residence, Ganaris sent a look after him that was grim and sad—the expression, I thought, of a man whose old friend has a mortal illness.
Perhaps if I had tried, I could have done something to help my stepfather. Perhaps there could have been some other path than the one that led us to the base of the tree that grows in darkness. But the truth is that although I saw all these signs, I gave them little attention. Tellarin, my soldier, had begun to court me—at first only with glances and greetings, later with small gifts—and all else in my life shrank to insignificance by comparison.
In fact, so changed was everything that a newer, larger sun might have risen into the sky above the High Keep, warming every corner with its light. Even the most workaday tasks took fresh meaning because of my feelings for bright-eyed Tellarin. My catechisms and my reading lessons I now pursued diligently, so that my beloved might not find me lacking in conversation … except on those days when I could scarcely attend to them at all for dreaming about him. My walks in the castle grounds became excuses to look for him, to hope for a shared glance across a courtyard or down a hallway. Even the folktales Ulca told me over our stitchery, which before had been only a means to make the time pass pleasantly, now seemed completely new. The princes and princesses who fell in love were Tellarin and me. Their every moment of suffering burned me like fire, their ultimate triumphs thrilled me so deeply that some days I feared I might actually faint.
After a time, Ulca, who guessed but did not know, refused to tell me any tale that had kissing in it.
But I had my own story by then, and I was living it fully. My own first kiss came as we were walking in the sparse, windy garden that lay in the shadow of the Northmen’s tower. That ugly building was ever after beautiful to me, and even on the coldest of days, if I could see that tower, it would warm me.
“Your stepfather could have my head,” my soldier told me, his cheek touching lightly against mine. “I have betrayed both his trust and my station.”
“Then if you are a condemned man,” I whispered, “you may as well steal again.” And I pulled him back farther into the shadows and kissed him until my mouth was sore. I was alive in a way I had never been, and almost mad with it. I was hungry for him, for his kisses, his breath, the sound of his voice.
He gifted me with small things that could not be found in Lord Sulis’ drab and careful household—flowers, sweetmeats, small baubles he found at the markets in the new town of Erkynchester, outside the castle gates. I could hardly bring myself to eat the honeyed figs he bought for me, not because they were too rich for his purse, although they were—he was not wealthy like his friend Avalles—but because they were gifts from him, and thus precious. To do something as destructive as eat them seemed unimaginably wasteful.
“Eat them slowly, then,” he told me. “They will kiss your lips when I cannot.”
I gave myself to him, of course, completely and utterly. Ulca’s dark hints about soiled women drowning themselves in the Kingslake, about brides sent back to their families in disgrace, even about bastardy as the root of a dozen dreadful wars, were all ignored. I offered Tellarin my body as well as my heart. Who would not? And if I were that young girl once more, coming out of the shadows of her sorrowful childhood into that bright day, I would do it again, with equal joy. Even now that I see the foolishness, I cannot fault the girl I was. When you are young and your life stretches so far ahead of you, you are also without patience—you cannot understand that there will be other days, other times, other chances. God has made us this way. Who knows why He chose it so?
As for me, I knew nothing in those days but the fever in my blood. When Tellarin rapped at my door in the dark hours, I brought him to my bed. When he left me, I wept, but not from shame. He came to me again and again as autumn turned to winter, and as winter crept past we built a warm, secret world all our own. I could not imagine a life without him in it every moment.
Again, youth was foolish, for I have now managed to live without him for many years. There has even been much that was pleasing in my life since I lost him, although I would never have been able to bel
ieve such a thing then. But I do not think I have ever again lived as deeply, as truly, as in that first year of reckless discovery. It was as though I somehow knew that our time together would be short.
* * *
Whether it is called fate, or our weird, or the will of Heaven, I can look back now and see how each of us was set onto the track, how we were all made ready to travel in deep, dark places.
It was a night in late Feyever-month of that year when I began to realize that something more than simple distraction had overtaken my stepfather. I was reeling back down the corridor to my chamber—I had just kissed Tellarin farewell in the great hall, and was mad with the excitement of it—and I nearly stumbled into Lord Sulis. I was first startled, then terrified. My crime, I felt sure, must be as plain as blood on a white sheet. I waited trembling for him to denounce me. Instead he only blinked and held his candle higher.
“Breda?” he said. “What are you doing, girl?
He had not called me “girl” since before my mother died. His fringe of hair was astrew, as though he had just clambered from some assignation of his own, but if that was so, his stunned gaze suggested it had not been a pleasant one. His broad shoulders sagged, and he seemed so tired he could barely hold up his head. The man who had so impressed my mother on that first day in Godric’s hall had changed almost beyond recognizing.
My stepfather was wrapped in blankets, but his legs showed naked below the knee. Could this be the same Sulis, I wondered, who as long as I had known him had dressed each day with the same care as he had once used to set his lines of battle? The sight of his pale bare feet was unspeakably disturbing.
“I … I was restless and could not sleep, sire. I wished some air.”
His glance flicked across me and then began to rove the shadows again. He looked not just confused but actually frightened. “You should not be out of your chamber. It is late, and these corridors are full of…” He hesitated, then seemed to stop himself from saying something. “Full of draughts,” he said at last. “Full of cold air. Go on with you, girl.”