“Sit here, Bard, by the fire. Lorill, just throw a few more logs there on the fire and then you can go back to your post—don’t be foolish, man, I’m no maiden leronis to be sheltered and chaperoned, and I’ve known Bard since he rode his first campaign! He’ll offer me no harm!”
So there was still one person alive who trusted in him. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, a seed of creeping warmth which lighted the frozen waste inside him, as the fire warmed his chilled and exhausted body. Lorill had gone away. Melora lifted a small, fragile table and set it between them.
“I was having a late supper before going up into the relays. Share it with me, Bard, there’s always more than enough for two.”
There was a basket of fragrant nut bread, still warm, sliced into slightly crumbly chunks, some rolls of soft cheese flavored with herbs, rich and pungent, and a crock of hot soup. Melora poured half of it into a mug which she shoved in his direction, picking up the crock and drinking her share from it. He sipped, feeling the hot soup, and her calm trustfulness, spread life back into him. She finished her soup and set the crock down, spreading the cheese on the bread, which crumbled so that she had to hold it together with her fingers; even so, it dropped crumbs in her lap, which she gathered up and flung into the fire.
“More soup? I can send for more, there’s always some in the kitchen over the fire—you’re sure? Have that last piece of bread, if you want it, I’m stuffed, and you’ve ridden a long way in the cold. You’re beginning to look a little less like banshee bait! Well, Bard, what’s happened? Tell me about it, why don’t you?”
“Melora!” He crossed the room in a rush to kneel at her feet. She sighed, looked down at him. He knew she was waiting, and suddenly all the enormity of what he was doing struck him, How could he ease the enormous agony of his new burden of knowledge by laying it on Melora’s shoulders? He said, and heard his voice, harsh and uncertain like the new baritone of a boy whose voice is just changing, “I should never have come here, Melora. I’m sorry. I—I’ll go now. I can’t—”
“Can’t what? Don’t be foolish, Bard,” she said, and reached out, with those fat but curiously graceful hands, to lift his face up to hers. And at the touch of his temples, suddenly he knew that she could read it all, that she knew it all, in one enormous rush of awareness. The rawness of his new pain communicated itself to her, without words, and she knew what he had done, and how it now seemed to him, and what had happened.
“Merciful Avarra!” she whispered in horror; then, softly, “No—she was not so merciful to you, was she, my poor fellow? But you have not deserved her mercy yet, have you? Oh, Bard!” And her arms went out to fold him close against her breast. He knelt there as if she was, for that one moment, the mother he had never known, and he knew he was near to tears. He had not wept since Beltran died, but he knew that he would weep in another moment, and so he struggled upright, holding himself taut against further breakdown.
“Oh, my dear,” Melora said in a whisper, “how did it ever come to this? I blame myself, Bard—I should have seen how very much you needed love and reassurance, I should have found some way to come to you. But I was so proud of myself for keeping to the rules, as if they were not meant to be set aside for human needs, and in my pride I set all this in motion! We all live with the mistake we make—that’s the dreadful part. We can look back and see the very moment where it all went wrong, and that’s all the punishment we ever need, I think; to live with what we do, and know how we did it. I should have found a way.”
Sudden memory of Mirella, that night in the camp when Melora had sent him away, reminding him proudly of the proper thing, came back to him; Mirella, at the door of the tent, whispering “She cried herself to sleep…” Melora had wanted him as much as he wanted her. If he had even known that! If he had even been sure of that, he could have been gentler with Beltran… but how could Melora blame herself for his sins and mistakes? She did, and he could never ease her of that, and so in a terrible way he had wronged her, too.
“Is there no help for it? Is there no help for any of it? I can’t live like this, with this—this burden of knowledge, I can’t—”
Still gently touching his face, she said, with infinite gentleness, “But you must, my dear, as I must, as Carlina must, as we all must. The only difference is that some of us never know why we suffer as we do. Tell me, Bard, would you rather this had not happened? Do you truly wish it?”
“Wish I had not done what I did? Are you crazy? Of course—that’s the hell of it, that I can never undo any of it—”
“No, Bard, I mean, do you really wish that Carlina had never shown you this, that you were still the man you were a few days ago?”
He started to cry out: yes, yes, I cannot bear knowing, this way, I want to go back to ignorance. Carlina had laid this burden upon him with laran, perhaps with laran a way could be found to take this monstrous knowledge from him again. And then he realized, head bent, with a new kind of pain, that it was not true. For him, to go back to ignorance would be to risk repeating what he had done, becoming, once again, the kind of man who could commit such atrocities; who could wound a brother, lame a foster brother for life unheeding, rape and torment women who cared for him… he said, his head still bowed, “No.” For even if he did not know about it, all the pain of Carlina, all Melisendra’s suffering and the beauty of her forgiveness, would still be there, but he would be unaware of any of it. He could no longer imagine what it would be like, not to know; he would be like a blind man in a garden of blossoming flowers, treading down beauty without caring.
“I’d rather know. It hurts, but—oh, I’d rather know!”
“Good,” Melora said, in a whisper. “That’s the first step— to know, and not to block it away.”
“I want—I want, some way, to—to try to make amends— for what I can—”
She nodded. “You will. You can’t help it. But there will be so many things you can’t make amends for, and even when it tortures you, you have to learn to—to go on, somehow, carrying the weight of it Knowing you can’t undo anything you’ve done.” She looked at him sharply. “For instance, should you have left Carlina alone with this?”
He said, still unable to look at her, “I should think I would be the one person she would not want to see.”
“Don’t be too sure of that; you have shared something, after all, and some day you will have to face her again.”
“I—I know. But after—after that I couldn’t be there—reminding her—and I couldn’t bear it. I—I sent Melisendra to her. She’s—she’s kind. I don’t know how she can be, after all she’s been through, all I did to her, but she is.”
Melora said, “Because she sees into people. The same way you do, now. She knows what they are and what’s tormenting them.”
“You do, too,” he said after a moment “What is it? Is it just—having laran?”
“Not entirely. But it’s the first step in our training. Which is why Carlina returned you, really, good for evil. She gave you the gift of laran, which was the first thing she herself had been given.”
“Some gift!” Bard said bitterly.
“The gift to see ourselves. It is a gift, and you’ll know it in time. Bard, it’s late and I must go into the relays—no, I won’t leave you like this. Let me send word to Varzil—he is our tenerézu, our Keeper—and he can send someone else to take my place there; your need is greater right now.” Bard remembered that he had seen Varzil of Neskaya—was it at Geremy’s wedding? He could not remember; time was telescoping into a blurred and continuous past He did not know when or how or why he had done anything, only the enormous conviction of a guilt past endurance and a horror of himself, so great that he felt he could never again hold up his head. Anything he did, anything, was going to create endless catastrophe. How could he live this way? Yet dying, would create catastrophe too, so he could not settle anything by taking himself away from the opportunity to do more harm…
Melora touched his hand.
“Enough!” she said sharply. “Now you are beginning to indulge yourself in self-pity, and that will only make it worse. What you feel now is only the aftermath of exhaustion. No more! I tell you—” and her voice was softened—“when you are rested, and can absorb what has happened to you, you will be able to go on. Not to forget, but to put it behind you, and live with what you can’t mend. What you need now is rest and sleep. I’ll stay near you.” She rose and picked up the little table, replacing it, tugged a heavy footstool, thickly upholstered, in front of the chair.
“I should have moved that for you—”
“Why? I’m not exhausted or crippled. Here, put your feet up—yes, like that. Let me get those boots off. And take off your sword-belt, you don’t need it. Not here.” She pulled aside a curtain to an alcove at the far end of the room. He realized that it was where she slept. She brought him a pillow from her own bed. “The chair’s comfortable enough, I’ve slept here plenty of nights when someone was sick, and I knew I’d be called at any moment. If you need to go out in the night,” she added forthrightly, “the place you’re looking for is just past the end of this corridor down the stairs, and it has a door painted red. It’s for the guards; it would be a scandal if I let you use the bath in my suite, since you’re not one of us here.” She tucked a knitted shawl around him. “Sleep well, Bard.”
She went past him, extinguishing the lamp. He heard the creak of her bed as she climbed into it. Strange, how light-footed she was for such a big woman; he could not hear her steps at all. Bard touched the fuzzy texture of the shawl under his chin. It made him feel, somehow, as if he were very small and young; he had a curious flash of his foster mother tucking him up in a shawl like this after some childish illness. Strange. He had always thought of Lady Jerana hating him and treating him cruelly; why had he forgotten the times when she had been kind to him? Had he wanted to believe she hated him and wanted ill for him? It could not be easy for a childless woman to foster her husband’s strong, healthy, well-loved child by some other woman.
As he dropped off to sleep he could hear Melora breathing; the sound was oddly reassuring, that she would let him—a man who had never treated a woman with anything but cruelty—sleep in her very room. Not that he had any designs on her—he wondered, suddenly, if he would ever be able to feel desire for a woman again without this terrible awareness of all the harm he could do. Carlina has had her revenge, he thought, and then in a wry flash of insight he wondered if, since his own mother gave him up, he had never believed he was loved because he’d felt, without knowing it, that even she did not find him worthy of love. He didn’t know; he was beginning to think he knew nothing about love. But he knew that Melora’s trust was, somehow, the first step in his healing. Clasping the pillow that smelled sweetly of some fresh scent about Melora, he slept
When he woke, it was a day of soft-falling snow, one of the first snowfalls of the year in the Kilghard Hills, and silent flakes, melting as they fell, were drifting across the windows. Melora sent him to borrow a razor and a fresh shirt from one of the guards, and to join their mess at breakfast. “That way,” she said, smiling at him merrily, “they will know that I am not entertaining a lover from outside the Tower, which is not proper during my term of service here. I’m not overly concerned for my reputation, but it’s not done—to bring scandal on the Towers that way. Varzil has enough to contend with, without that.”
As he went to eat hot, fresh nutbread and salt fish fried into cakes, with the guards of Neskaya, Bard felt a little shamefaced pride; the Lord General of Asturias, to join a common guardsmen’s mess? But this was not his own country, he would probably not be recognized, and if he was, well, it was none of anyone’s business; surely even a general could come to consult a leronis on urgent private business? Shaved, cleanly clothed, he felt better. After breakfast, a youngster, red-headed, in blue and silver, with the indefinable stamp of the Hastur kin on his face, brought a message that the Lord Varzil of Neskaya wished to see him.
Varzil of Neskaya. An enemy, a Ridenow of Serrais; but Alaric had loved him, and he himself had been favorably impressed by the man when he had come to exchange Alaric for Geremy. Even when he believed Varzil an ally of King Carolin of Thendara, he had been somewhat impressed.
It cannot be easy, to swear to neutrality in a world torn by war! When all the lands lie in flames about you, surely it is easier to join with one side or another!
Bard had remembered Varzil as young, but the man who faced him in the small stone-floored study, wearing a simple robe and sandals rather than the ceremonial robe of office, seemed old; there were heavy lines in the care-worn face, young as it was, and the bright red hair was already graying. Varzil, after all, could not be so young; he had rebuilt Neskaya after its fire-bombing, and that had been before Bard was born, although, he had heard, Varzil had been very young then.
“Welcome, Bard mac Fianna. I will speak with you presently—but I have a few matters to arrange first. Sit there,” he said, and continued speaking with the young man, wearing Hastur colors, who was facing him. At first this made Bard’s skin prickle—so much for the vaunted neutrality of Varzil and the Tower—but after he had heard a few words he relaxed.
“Yes, tell the people of Hali that we will send healers and leroni to care for the worst-burnt cases, but they must realize that the physical wounds that can be seen are not all that has happened. The pregnant women must be monitored; most of them will miscarry, and they are the lucky ones, for of those who bear children from the time of this disaster, at least half will be born marred or deformed; they must be monitored, too, from birth. Women of childbearing age must be taken out of the area as soon as possible, or they will run the same risk, if they conceive children before the land has healed, and that may not be for years.”
“The people will not want to leave their estates or their farms,” the Hastur man said, “and what shall we tell them?”
“The truth,” Varzil said with a sigh, “that the land is poisoned past redemption and will be so for years; no one can live there, conquered nor conquerors either. Only one good thing has come of all this.”
“A good thing? And what is that, vai laranzu?”/p> p>“The Dalereuth Tower has joined us in neutrality,” Varzil said. “They have sworn to make no more laran weapons, whatever the inducement; and their overlord, Marzan of Valeron, has pledged to the Compact, and Queen Darna of Isoldir. And Valeron and Isoldir have taken the oath of fealty under the Hasturs.”
Bard’s teeth were set on edge by this. Would all this land lie under Hastur command someday? And yet… if the Hasturs were sworn to fight no more wars except under the Compact, there would be no more such atrocities as at Hali. He had been a soldier all his life, and he felt no special guilt for the men he had struck down face-to-face with the sword; they had had an equal chance to strike him down. But for the men slain by spells and sorcery, for the women and children killed in fire-bombings, he felt nothing could atone, not ever. He felt, too, that his armies could face, and conquer, the Hastur armies with any weapons they chose; why should they need sorcerers too?
When Varzil had finished with the Hastur envoy, he said, “Say to Domna Mirella that I would like to speak with her.”
Bard heard the name without surprise—it was not so uncommon as that—but when the young woman came in, he recognized her at once. She was still slight and pretty, wearing the white robe of a monitor.
“Are you working in the relays, child? I thought you were simply resting, after your ordeal at Hali,” Varzil said. Mirella was about to answer, but stopped when she saw Bard.
“Vai dom, I heard from Melora that you were Lord General of Asturias now—forgive me, Lord Varzil, may I ask news of my family? Is my grandsire well, sir, and Melisendra?”
Bard found, from somewhere, the strength to face her. It was too much to hope Mirella did not know of his depravity; for all he knew, everyone in the Hundred Kingdoms knew, and was ready to spit on the name of Bard mac Fianna, called di Asturien. ?
??Master Gareth is very well, though of course he grows old,” he told her. “He rode with us on the campaign against the Ridenow before they surrendered.” He glanced hesitantly at Varzil. Not a tenday ago, he had hanged this man’s overlord, Dom Eiric of Serrais, after the battle, as an oathbreaker. But although Varzil looked sad, there seemed to be, in him, no hatred for Bard or his armies.
“And Melisendra?”
Melisendra is mother’s-sister to this girl. What has she said of me? “Melisendra is well,” he said, then, on an impulse. “I think she is happy; I—I think she wishes to marry one of my paxmen, and if that is her wish, I will not prevent her. And King Alaric has promised Erlend a patent of legitimacy, so his status need not trouble her.”
Melora said I would find a way to make what amends could be made. This is only a beginning, and so little, but it was a place to begin. Paul’s almost as bad as I am, but for some reason she cares for him.
Mirella smiled at him, sweetly, and said, “I thank you for your good news, vai dom. And now, Dom Varzil, I am at your command.”
“We are happy to have you here while you recover from the shock of what happened at Hali,” Varzil said. “How came you not to be within the Tower?”
“I had had leave to ride in the hills, hunting, with two of my bredin-y,” Mirella said. “And we were just about to turn homeward when the rain came, and we sheltered in a herdsman’s hut—and then, oh merciful Goddess, we—we felt the burning—the cries—” her face turned pale, and Varzil reached out his hand and gripped the young woman’s in his own strong clasp.
“You must try to forget, dear child. It will be with you always—indeed, none of us in any of the Towers will ever be able to forget,” Varzil said. “My youngest sister, Dyannis, was a leronis at Hali, and I felt her die…” his voice trailed off and for a moment he looked inward at horror. Then, recovering himself, he said firmly, “What we must remember, Rella, is that their heroism has taken another step toward the time when all this land will lie under Compact For you know, they deliberately broadcast what happened—while they were dying they kept their minds open so that we should all see, and hear, and feel what they suffered, instead of quickly taking their way out of life… which they could have done, so easily—”