“Not to worry,” Ivan said to Danica. “Me and me brother’ll have to go to town soon anyway, to stock up for the winter. Get yer business and yer meeting done and we’ll set off right after. It’s not a long road to Carradoon, but ’tis better, in these times, that ye don’t go down it alone.”
Pikel nodded his agreement and they parted, the dwarves heading down the stairs for the kitchen and Danica to her room. Ivan and Pikel missed Cadderly, too, the young woman realized. She gave a flip of her strawberry-blond hair, which hung several inches below her shoulders, as though that symbolic act would allow her to put her troubles behind her for the moment. Like the stubborn hair that inevitably found its way back around to her face, though, Danica’s fears did not stay away long.
She desperately wanted to see Cadderly, to hold him and kiss him, but at the same time she feared that meeting. If the young scholar rejected her again, as he had in Shilmista, her life, even her dedication to her studies, may well lose all meaning.
“I didn’t see much,” Danica admitted, adjusting her position on the edge of Headmistress Pertelope’s cushioned bed. “I was guarding against the approaching battle. I knew Cadderly and Elbereth would be vulnerable while they cast their summons to the trees.”
“But you’re convinced that Cadderly played a role in that summoning?” Pertelope pressed, repeating the question for perhaps the fifth time. Pertelope sat near Danica and was clad in her usual modest garments. “It wasn’t the elf prince alone?”
Danica shook her head. “I heard Cadderly chanting,” she tried to explain. “There was something more to it, some underlying power …” She struggled to find the words, but how could she? What had happened back in Shilmista, when Cadderly and Elbereth had awakened the great oaks, was simply miraculous. And miracles, by definition, defied explanation.
“Cadderly told me he had played a role,” a flustered Danica responded at last. “There was more to the summons than simply repeating the ancient words. He spoke of gathering energy, of a mindset that brought him into the trees’ world before awakening them and coaxing them into ours.”
Pertelope nodded slowly as she digested the words. She held no doubts about Danica’s honesty, or about Cadderly’s mysterious, budding power.
“And the elf wizard’s wound?” she prompted.
“By Elbereth’s description, the spear had gone a foot or more into Tintagel’s side,” Danica replied. “So very much blood covered his clothing—I saw that much for myself—and Elbereth hadn’t expected him to survive for more than a few moments longer. Yet when I saw him, not long at all after he was wounded, he was nearly fully healed and casting spells at our enemies once more.”
“You have seen spells of healing performed here at the library,” Pertelope said, trying to hide her excitement. “When that Oghmanyte priest broke his arm wrestling you, for example.”
“Minor compared to the healing Cadderly performed on Tintagel,” Danica assured her. “By Elbereth’s word, he held the wizard’s belly in while the skin mended around his fingers.”
Pertelope nodded again and remained quiet for a long while. There was no need to go over it all again. Danica’s recounting had been consistent and Pertelope knew her to be honest. The headmistress’s hazel eyes stared into emptiness for a time before she focused again on Danica.
The young monk sat quietly and very still, lost in her own contemplations. To Pertelope’s eyes, a shadow appeared on Danica’s shoulder, a silhouette of a tiny female, trembling and glancing around nervously. Extraordinary heat emanated from the young monk’s body, and her breathing, steady to the casual observer, reflected her anxieties to Pertelope’s probing gaze.
The headmistress knew that Danica was full of passion, yet full of fear. Merely thinking of Cadderly stirred a boiling turmoil within her.
Pertelope shook the insightful visions away, ended the distant song that played in the recesses of her mind, and put a comforting hand on Danica’s shoulder. “Thank you for coming to sit with me,” she said. “You have been a great help to me—and to Cadderly, do not doubt.”
A confused look came over Danica. Pertelope hated that she had to be cryptic with someone so obviously attached to Cadderly, but she knew Danica wouldn’t understand the powers at work on the young priest. Those same powers had been with Pertelope for nearly a score of years, and Pertelope wasn’t certain even she understood them.
The bed creaked as Danica stood. “I have to go now,” she explained, looking back to the small room’s door. “If you wish, I can come back, and—”
“No need,” the headmistress answered, offering a warm smile. “Unless you feel you’d like to talk,” she quickly added. Pertelope intensified her gaze again and bade the song begin, searching for that insightful, supernatural level of perception. The trembling shadow remained upon Danica’s shoulder, but it had grown more calm, and the young monk’s breathing had steadied.
The heat was still there, though, the vital energy of anticipated passion. Even after Danica departed, the door handle glowed softly from her touch.
Pertelope blew out a long sigh. She slipped one of her arm-length gloves off to scratch at the shark skin it hid and tried to recall her own trials when Deneir had selected her—had cursed her, she often believed.
Pertelope smiled at the dark thought. “No, not a curse,” she said aloud, lifting her eyes toward the ceiling as though she addressed a higher presence. She played the song more strongly in her mind, the universal harmony that she had heard a thousand times in the turning pages of the tome she’d given to Cadderly. She fell into the song and followed its notes, gaining communion with her god.
“So, you have chosen Cadderly,” she whispered.
She received no answer, and had expected none.
“He could not otherwise have accomplished all of those ‘miracles’ in the elven wood,” Pertelope went on, speaking aloud her conclusions to bolster her suspicions. “I pity him, and yet I envy him, for he is young and strong, stronger than I ever was. How powerful will he become?”
Again, except for the continuing melody in Pertelope’s head, there came no response.
That was why the headmistress often felt as though she had been cursed. There never were any answers granted. She had always had to discover them for herself.
And so, too, she knew, would Cadderly.
SIX
A BEGGAR, A THIEF
Cadderly purposely avoided looking at the guardsman as he moved through the short tunnel and under the raised portcullis leading out of the lakeside town. All along his route to the western gate the young scholar had observed people of every station and every demeanor, and the variety of shadowy images he had seen leaping from their shoulders had nearly overwhelmed him. Again the song of Deneir played in his thoughts, as though he had subconsciously summoned it, and again, aura remained the only identifiable term. Cadderly couldn’t make sense of it all, and he feared his new insightfulness would drive him mad.
He grew more at ease when he had put the bustle of Carradoon behind him and walked along the hedge- and tree-lined road with nothing more to attract his attention than the chatter of birds and the rustle of squirrels gathering their winter stores.
“Is mine the curse of the hermits?” he asked himself aloud. “That it is!” he proclaimed loudly, startling a nearby squirrel that had frozen in place on the camouflaging gray bark of a tree. The rising volume of Cadderly’s voice sent the critter hop-skipping up the tree, where it froze again, not even its bushy tail twitching.
“Well, it is,” Cadderly cried to the rodent in feigned exasperation. “All those poor, wretched, solitary souls, so frowned upon by the rest of us. They are not hermits by choice. They possess the same vision that haunts me, and it drives them mad, drives them to where they cannot bear the sight of another intelligent thing.”
Cadderly moved to the base of the tree to better view the beast.
“I see no shadows leaping from your shoulders, Mr. Gray,” he called. “You have no
hidden desires, no cravings beyond those you obviously seek to fill.”
“Unless there be a lady squirrel about!” came a cry from down the path.
Cadderly nearly leaped out of his boots. He spun to see a large, dirty man dressed in ragged, ill-fitting clothes and boots, the toes of which had long ago worn away.
“A lady squirrel would turn his mind away from those nuts,” the stubble-faced man continued, advancing easily down the road.
Cadderly unconsciously brought his ram-headed walking stick up in front of him. Thieves were common on the roads close to the town, especially with winter fast approaching.
“But then …” the large man continued, putting a finger on his lower lip in a contemplative gesture. Cadderly noted that he wore mismatched, fingerless gloves, one black, one brown leather. “If the lady was about, the squirrel would still have no ‘hidden desires,’ since the unabashed beast would seek to fill whatever his heart deemed necessary, the call of his belly or the call of his loins.
“I’d be one to choose the loins, eh?” the man said with a lascivious wink.
Cadderly blushed and nearly laughed aloud, though he still hadn’t figured out what to make of that well-spoken vagabond. He peered closer, trying to find a revealing shadow on the man’s shoulders. But Cadderly’s surprise had stolen the song fully, and nothing rested there, except the badly worn folds of an old woolen scarf.
“It’s a fine day to be about, talking to the beasts,” the man went on, seeing no response forthcoming from Cadderly. “A pity, then, that I must get myself inside the gates of Carradoon, in the realm of smells less pleasant, where high buildings hide the panorama of beauty so easily taken for granted on this most lovely of country roads.”
“You will not easily pass by the guards,” Cadderly remarked, knowing how carefully the city militiamen protected their home, especially with rumors of war brewing.
The vagabond opened a small pouch on the side of his rope belt and produced a single silver coin.
“A bribe?” Cadderly asked.
“Admission,” the beggar corrected. “ ‘One must spend gold’—or silver, as the case may be—‘to make gold,’ goes the old saying. I will accept the lore as true, since I know I will indeed secure some gold once I am within the town’s wall.”
Cadderly studied the man more closely. He wore no insignia of any lawful guild, showed no signs of any craft whatsoever. “A thief,” the scholar stated flatly.
“Never,” the man asserted.
“A beggar?” Cadderly asked, the word coming out with the same venom.
The larger man clutched his chest and staggered back several steps, as though Cadderly had launched a dagger into his heart.
Cadderly did notice some shadows then. He caught the flicker of a pained look beneath the man’s sarcastic, playful facade. He saw a woman on one shoulder, holding a small child, and an older child on the man’s other shoulder. The images were gone in an instant, and Cadderly noticed for the first time that the man had a slight limp and a blue-green bruise on his wrist just above the edge of the brown glove.
Waves of nausea nearly overwhelmed the young scholar. As he focused his senses, he felt the emanations of the disease clearly and knew beyond doubt why that intelligent, articulate man had sunk to such a lowly station.
He was a leper.
“M-my pardon,” Cadderly stammered. “I-I didn’t know …”
“Does anyone … ever?” the large man asked in a snarling voice. “I do not appreciate your pity, young priest of Deneir, but I’ll gladly accept your pittance.”
Cadderly clenched his walking stick tightly, mistaking the remark as a threat.
“You know of what I speak,” the beggar said. “The coins you inevitably will throw my way to alleviate your guilt?”
Cadderly winced at the biting remark. He was surprised, too, that the beggar had discerned his order, even though he wore his holy symbol prominently on the front of his wide-brimmed hat. The large man studied Cadderly intently as the tumult of emotions rolled through the young priest.
“Pig,” the man said with a sneer, to Cadderly’s surprise. “How terrible that one such as I should have sunk to the level of a street beggar!”
Cadderly bit his lip in the face of such dramatics.
“To wallow in the mud beside the wretches,” the man continued, throwing one arm out wide, the other still clutching at his mock-wounded chest.
He stopped suddenly in that pose and turned a confused expression Cadderly’s way. “Wretches?” he asked. “What do you know of them, arrogant priest? You, who are so intelligent—that is the weal of your order, is it not?
“Intelligence.” The beggar spat with distaste. “An excuse, I say, for those such as you. It is what separates you, what elevates you.” He eyed Cadderly dangerously and finished, deliberately, “It is what blinds you.”
“I do not deserve this!” Cadderly declared.
The man threw his hands above his head and blurted a mocking, incredulous shout. “Deserve?” he cried. He jerked the sleeve up on one arm, revealing a row of rotting, bruised skin.
“Deserve?” he asked again. “What, pray tell me, young priest who is so wise, do those kneeling before, and crawling from the alleys of Carradoon deserve?”
Cadderly thought he would burst apart. He felt an angry energy building within him, gathering explosive strength. He remembered when he had awakened the trees in Shilmista, and when he had healed Tintagel, had held the elf wizard’s guts in while a similar energy had mended the garish wound. A page from The Tome of Universal Harmony flashed in Cadderly’s head as clearly as if he held the open book before him, and he knew then the object of his rage. He eyed the bruises on the large man’s arm, and filled his nostrils with the stench of the disease that had so tormented the man’s soul.
“Pieta pieta, dominus …” Cadderly began, reciting the chant as he read the words from the clear image in his mind.
“No!” the large man cried, charging ahead. Cadderly halted the chant and tried to throw up his arms to block, but the man was surprisingly fast and balanced for one so tall. He caught hold of Cadderly’s clothing and shook the young priest.
Cadderly saw an opening, could have jammed his walking stick up under the man’s chin. He knew, though, that the frustrated beggar meant him no real harm, and he was not surprised when the man released him, shoving him back a step.
“I could cure you,” Cadderly growled.
“Could you?” the man mocked. “And could you cure them?” he cried, waggling a finger toward the distant town. “Could you cure them all? Are all the world’s ills to fall before this young priest of Deneir? Call to the wretched, I say!” the beggar cried, whirling and shouting to the four winds. “Line them up before this … this …” He searched for the word, his dirty lips moving silently. “This godsend!” he cried at last.
A nearby squirrel broke into a dead run along the branches across the path.
“I don’t deserve this,” Cadderly said again, calm.
His tone seemed infectious, for the large man dropped his hands to his sides and his shoulders slumped.
“No,” the leper agreed, “but accept it, I pray you, as but a small penance in a world filled with undeserved penance.”
Cadderly blinked away the moisture that came into his gray eyes. “What are their names?” he asked.
The beggar looked at him curiously for a moment then his lips curled up in his first sincere smile. “Jhanine, my wife,” he answered. “Toby, my son, and Millinea, my young daughter. None have shown signs of my infection as yet,” he explained, guessing Cadderly’s unspoken question. “I see them rarely—to deliver the pittance I have gained from the guilty arrogants of Carradoon.”
The beggar chuckled, seeing Cadderly’s blush. “My pardon,” he said, dipping into a low bow. “I, too, am sometimes blind, seeing the well and fortunate in a similar light.”
Cadderly nodded his acceptance of that inevitable—and excusable—fault. “Wha
t is your name?”
“Nameless,” the beggar answered without hesitation. “Yes, that is a good name for one such as me. Nameless, akin to all the other Namelesses huddled in the squalor between the towers of the wealthy.”
“You hold such self-pity?” Cadderly asked.
“Self-truth,” Nameless answered without pause.
Cadderly conceded the point. “I could cure you,” the young priest said again.
Nameless shrugged his shoulders. “Others have tried,” he explained. “Priests from your own order, and those of Oghma as well … I went to the Edificant Library—of course I went to the library—when the signs first appeared.”
The mention of the Edificant Library brought an unconscious frown to Cadderly’s face. “I’m not like the others,” he asserted more forcefully than he had intended.
The beggar smiled. “No, you’re not,” he agreed.
“Then you will accept my aid?”
Nameless did not relinquish his smile. “I will … consider it,” he replied. Cadderly caught an unmistakable glimmer of hope in the man’s dark brown eyes, and saw a shadow appear atop the man’s shoulder, a shadow of the beggar himself, gaily tossing a small form—Millinea, he somehow knew—into the air and catching her. The shadow fell apart quickly, dissipating in the wind.
Cadderly nodded somewhat grimly, suspecting the dangers of false hope for one in that man’s position—suspecting but not truly understanding, Cadderly knew, for he was not, for all his sympathy, standing in the beggar’s holey shoes.
The young priest tore the pouch from his belt. “Then accept this,” he said, tossing it to the large man.
Nameless caught it and eyed Cadderly, but made no move to return the coin-filled purse. It was an offering holding no false hope, an offering of face value and nothing more.
“I am one of those arrogants,” Cadderly explained. “Guilty, as you have accused.”
“And this will alleviate that guilt?” the beggar asked, his eyes narrowing.
Cadderly couldn’t hold back his chuckle. “Hardly,” he replied, and he knew that if Nameless believed the purse would alleviate his guilt then Nameless would have thrown it back at him. “Hardly a proper penance. I give it to you because you, and Jhanine, Toby, and Millinea, are more deserving of it than I, not for any lessening of my own guilt. That guilt I must carry until I have learned better.” Cadderly cocked his head to the side as a thought came to him.