Sometimes, she thought as she watched the youngsters who came to the Tower for basic training, they gained as much from what went wrong in love as from what went right. Eventually, they learned that a comely appearance or a noble family name or even the way ardor masqueraded as intimacy counted far less than the quality of another person’s character and most of all, the sympathy of temper and of mind.
If she and Lian had followed their youthful inclinations, if they had become lovers, she would not have suffered any lasting harm. Lian, on the other hand, this most precious treasure of the people of the Yellow Forest, the first chieri child to have been born in many human lifetimes . . .
Lian would have changed, polarized, body and mind and heart’s desire forever fixed. Bonded too young, anchored to maleness in response to her own femaleness, Lian would never have had the chance to grow into full chieri maturity. Would never be able to choose who and what he or she might become.
Lian had walked with her to the boundaries of the Forest. The leaves had cast gold-hued dapples across their path. For a moment, she had imagined the sky was weeping flowers for her, for them both. Lian had not touched her during their journey, not even the slightest brush of a finger. Her skin felt as if it were starving. David Hamilton had come with them, his eyes watchful, his expression somber.
They had reached the edge of the sentinel grove. Beyond, trees stood widely spaced and solitary. Lian had held back and would not meet her eyes. She’d thought, Not a word for me, my heart, not a glance? Am I as dead to you as I once was to my parents?
She’d shifted her pack across her shoulders and turned her back on the person she had once believed was the touchstone of her soul.
“Kierestelli,” David had said. “Beloved daughter of my friend. When you see him, tell him that we hold him ever in our hearts.”
I will not see my father, she had thought in a sudden flare of anger. She had set her lips and said nothing.
“Of all the men of the Seven Domains, we hold Regis Hastur in the highest honor,” Diravanariel had murmured, the words like running water over stone.
At any other time, she would have drunk in those phrases, let them nourish her spirit. As long as she had lived among the chieri and felt herself cherished by them, had seen the joy her very existence brought them, she had been able to forget the agonizing truth at the center of her own life.
Her father, that same Regis Hastur, had brought her to this place and left her with these people. She had understood at the time that he did so for her own safety. The world of men contained those who would harm the helpless and innocent, most particularly the children of their enemies. And Regis Hastur, the man who could have been king, had many enemies.
He had brought her here, and he had promised he would come for her when the danger was past. Season after season, she had watched for him, and still he had not come. He had sent no word, no token, no messenger. From her mother, whose love she had never before doubted, there had been only silence. Eventually, she had been forced to acknowledge the truth.
They had forgotten her. They no longer wanted her. The son her mother carried had taken her place in their hearts. Either that, or they were both dead. In the end, the difference did not matter.
Then had come the day when she herself must leave the people who had become her own, whose love had given her a measure of peace. She had been a fool to trust in their constancy. Who in all the wide world could ease this second betrayal? As she set her feet toward the path and the meadow beyond, she had glanced back. A moment was enough, and that moment changed everything.
Wetness gleamed on David’s cheeks. Chieri did not weep, but in their bearing she saw such grief, it put her own to shame.
Lian had looked up, hair falling like a cascade of tears around that perfect face. Rain-gray eyes caught hers. A thought like the distant, rippling notes of a harp touched her mind.
I will never cease to love you, Kierestelli.
And now, years later and leagues away, in this Tower she had made into her fortress, that same name reverberated through her.
Kierestelli.
She had known that her mother, Linnea Storn, still lived, now Keeper of Comyn Tower. News might reach Nevarsin slowly, but it did come. Her brother, Dani Hastur, had grown to manhood, set aside his heritage, married for love, and fathered a son of his own. In time, Regis had died. That news had come swiftly, but not even for her father’s funeral would she expose herself. Nothing she could do would bring him back. He had long since ceased to be an adored parent.
After all this time, when she believed herself safe from the past, her mother had found her.
Without thinking, Silvana went to the table beside the door. Dried fruit, butter toffee, and nuts rolled in crystallized honey were arranged on a platter, beside a pitcher of sweetened mint-water. Laran work drained the body’s energies, sometimes dangerously. She wasn’t hungry, and that was a bad sign. Shock and fatigue could be a deadly combination, especially when combined with cold. She scooped up a handful of dried apples and forced herself to chew them well. The tart sweetness flowed over her tongue. She ate a few nuts and a piece of the candy. Her trembling eased. She felt steady enough to make her way to her own chambers.
The authority of a Keeper within her own Tower was absolute. No one had ever questioned Silvana’s desire for privacy, even when it bordered on reclusiveness. She had once felt safe, her barricades inviolable. Now that her isolation had been breached, now that the worst had happened, she did not know what to do.
Would Linnea accept her rejection? Would she tell anyone else? Would Nevarsin Tower soon find itself the center of Comyn attention?
Silvana lowered herself into an armchair beside the empty hearth of her sitting chamber, acutely aware of the vulnerability of these stone walls. She was no stranger to gossip and power struggles, to ambition and alliances and petty jealousies. Tower society might be small, but it was in every way a microcosm of the larger world.
They will not leave me in peace. The long-lost child of Regis Hastur is found, they will say. And then some will whisper that I have a claim to the Domain of Hastur . . .
Her heart drummed against her ribs. She wondered in a wild moment if it might batter itself into bloody pulp.
The room, once a haven of calm, now closed around her like a cage. Every furnishing and ornament, all the things she had collected so carefully over the years, each one a thing of grace and simplicity, took on a sinister aspect. They altered in her sight into instruments of torture, such as had been used during the Ages of Chaos.
I don’t belong here. I have never belonged here.
Silvana had never been one to wallow in self-pity. Such abuse of the spirit was unknown among the chieri. She had seen its devastating effects in many she encountered in the human world, the people of Nevarsin village as well as travelers. Those injured in mind sought healing at the Tower, little suspecting that they themselves were the origin of so much of their own misery. In her care of such unfortunates, she was never less than scrupulous, for in all her laran work she never allowed herself the slightest self-indulgence or lapse.
This was no time to relax her own standards of integrity. The question she posed to herself now was whether, having been discovered, she should continue in her role as Keeper. She had been taught, and had accepted wholeheartedly, that the Towers must function apart from the distinctions of rank and privilege. No Comyn lord, not even Hastur of Hastur, had the right to influence the work of the circle. That principle had been established only after a long and bloody history. During the Ages of Chaos, when kings and great lords commanded their own Towers, the land itself had been torn and poisoned. Fiery death had rained down from the skies, and generations of beasts and children had been twisted into monsters—
Silvana jumped to her feet and paced the width of her room. Her thoughts, usually so calm and rational, jumbled together like fractured
shadows. What was wrong with her? The sorrows of the day were more than enough for any one person to bear—why must she manufacture more?
If the Comyn lords, descendants of those ancient war leaders, learned who and what she was . . . if they came after her, sought to draw her into their power schemes . . . what then? Even if she refused, even if they accepted her refusal, her identity—her name, her parentage, her history—would be public.
Regardless of her parentage, she was a trained Keeper. She had not ceded her conscience to any other person. It was no one else’s concern who her parents had been, whether she possessed the Hastur Gift, that she had grown up among the chieri, what work she did, or what dreams she cherished.
Silvana came to a halt, facing the mullioned window that overlooked a garden courtyard. She turned her attention inward, felt the strong bones of her body, the balance of nerve and muscle, the flow of her blood, the slowing rhythm of her heart. Below her feet, the stones of the Tower hummed with the accumulated psychic imprints of a millennium of Gifted minds. Panic receded, but not caution.
Now that her initial shock had abated, Silvana felt a resurgence of confidence. She could drive away those who would invade her sanctuary. Even though Keepers were no longer regarded with almost religious reverence, she could disable or even kill any man foolish enough to lay hands upon her without her consent.
If by some chance, however, they should learn where she had passed those years, who had sheltered her . . . if they were able to backtrack her path, what then? The odds were minuscule, but even the slenderest risk was intolerable. Once the larger world had been alerted, she would not dare to contact her old friends, not even to warn them. If she were to do so, it must be now.
To leave now, to bolt like a brainless rabbit-horn, to abandon her responsibilities as a Keeper, none of this was rational. She could be wrong; she prayed to Aldones, Lord of Light, father of her fathers, that she was indeed wrong.
She could not live with the consequences if she were right.
In her early years at Nevarsin Tower, Silvana had rarely ventured outside unless some duty required it. As she had risen in the ranks of matrix workers through under-Keeper to her present rank, she had found less and less reason to do so. The ancient stone walls had become a welcome barrier, screening out the village and the world beyond.
It took her only a short time to give instructions to send to Arilinn for one of their under-Keepers, claiming an emergency, and to prepare and pack those few possessions she deemed necessary. Over the years, she had maintained the aloofness of a Keeper so well that no one questioned her leaving the Tower at an hour when the rest of the leroni were resting. Matrix work, including relay communications, tended to be done at night in order to minimize distractions from the unfocused psychic emanations from the village population.
The sun was well up but not yet at its highest point when Silvana made her way along the narrow, twisting streets of the city. Wearing a cloak of ordinary brown wool, worn boots on her feet and a pack slung over her back, her head bowed and shoulders hunched, she looked like any other mountain-bred woman. The cloak and boots had been a gift to the Tower from a smallholder in payment for saving his wife and babe during a difficult birth.
Today was a market day. The stone-cobbled streets carried a stream of farmers, their carts piled with wild greens, onions, and ice-melons, fur traders leading laden chervines, country folk anticipating a day of merriment, housewives intent on the best price for cooking pans and needles, and a troupe of ragged musicians.
Silvana slowed her pace, wary of drawing attention to herself as someone leaving the village when all others were heading in. She tugged the hood of her cloak over her distinctive copper-bright hair. The crowd swirled around her. She noticed the round, apple-blush cheeks of the children, the musical voices of the women, the call and response of the vendors—
“Fine chervine-kid wool! Soft as baby’s hair!”
“Nuts! Pitchoos and hazels! Who’ll buy my fresh roasted nuts?”
—and a dozen small acts of kindness. A boy barely older than a toddler stooped to pat an old dog lying at the feet of its master, a seller of ribbons. A grizzled horse dealer fed an apple to a pony. A young woman, visibly pregnant, helped an elderly man up several steps and into a doorway.
A strange feeling, part amazement and part regret, arose in her. She had not seen as much of the community in all the years she had lived here as she had in these few minutes. She had not expected it would be so difficult to leave.
These people were not her enemies, but they could never be her friends. She had served them with the Gifts of her mind—laran healing, the manufacture and delivery of fire-fighting chemicals to safeguard the forests on which so many of them depended, and speedy communications along the relays. But she had never known them or they, her. They were good and simple and without influence. Her early experiences had taught her all too well the powerlessness of good will in the face of determined evil.
That thought propelled her through the markets, down the steep, walled streets, and past the outskirts of the village. Only then did she allow herself to glance back. Beyond the village, the cristoforo monastery clung to the everlasting ice. A trick of the wind carried the sound of bells calling its denizens to prayer. She wondered if Lew Alton was among them and for a moment regretted not bidding him farewell. They had visited but rarely during the last few years, due to his declining health, yet he would grieve her absence. Not too much, she hoped.
The trail followed the contour of the mountains as it dipped toward the valley below. Silvana settled into a brisk traveling pace. The boots were too big for her, and she had briefly considered sandals such as those the monks wore. An impulse had led her to solve the problem with two pairs of thick socks. Very soon, she realized what a lucky choice she had made. The trail, although as well traveled as any in this part of the mountains, was littered with small stones. When she had lived with the chieri, she had never worn shoes; she would have danced down the trail. Her years of Tower work had turned her feet soft, so she was grateful for the cushioning layers of wool and leather.
She thought, I have become a creature of stone and fire, and wondered how her foster kin would receive her.
Her doubts did not linger. The mountain winds, redolent with the sweet wild smells of spring, blew them away. Clouds scudded across the sky that was somehow much larger and deeper than it had been in Nevarsin. She threw her head back to watch a hawk hovering on the thermal currents, and her spirit soared to meet it.
Her muscles ached from the unaccustomed exertion, but her bones hummed in contentment. Memory sharpened. She remembered which plants would nourish her and which to avoid. For the time being, however she dared not delay.
The day wore on. The land grew more rugged, the vegetation wild and twisted. Shadows pooled in the folds of the hills, chill as winter nights. In the distance, a wolf howled. At least she was well below the tree line, so she need not fear the giant flightless banshees. But she was growing weary, and fatigue would make her more vulnerable to the cold.
Silvana crouched in a copse of tangled, willow-thin yellowbark saplings and considered her situation. Night would soon be upon her, and she found herself reluctant to light a fire. She could draw upon her Keeper’s discipline to avoid hypothermia, but that would use metabolic energy at an accelerated rate.
In the Yellow Forest, she had never been cold. The seasons had shifted like dancers in a round, green to gold to silver to green again, each with its own harmony.
She laid one hand on the nearest trunk. Friend, she thought, using the chieri word.
She slipped her pack off her shoulders and settled herself in a cross-legged posture. Her knees twinged, then eased. The muscles in her lower back relaxed. She closed her eyes, breathing deep into her belly to focus her thoughts. Her awareness of the world narrowed to the bark, its texture and density, and then the living wood inside.
As if flowing through her own veins, she felt the movement of the sap, the slow yearning for warmth and light, the sure and intimate intelligence of the soil, the minute droplets of water bathing the roots, the steadfast bedrock. Moisture and minerals rose, molecule by molecule, into the budding leaves. Tiny creatures, insects and worms and things invisible to the human eye, transformed the debris of last year’s leaf-fall into humus.
The borders of her human personality dissolved. As effortlessly as drifting into sleep, she found herself in communion with the tapestry of soil and water and living things. She knew the weight and texture of such a unity, so like that of a working matrix circle. Instead of human minds, each focused through a starstone and then gathered, harmonized, woven together by herself as Keeper, these streams and currents were purely natural in origin. No tree required a starstone to amplify its essence; no bird labored under a lifetime of anxiety every time it spread its wings. No mariposa ever attempted to dominate its fellows.
Distantly, as if it were happening to someone else, Silvana felt wetness in the corners of her eyes. She had come home to a place she had forsaken so long ago, it had vanished from her thoughts. Her body, however, and the deep sure workings of her dreams, and the core of herself from which arose the power of her psychic Gifts, these had not forgotten.
Although she had always been able to sense things she could not see and touch, her laran had woken fully during her sojourn with the chieri. Trees and stones, sky and brook and wolf had been her teachers, her companions. She had learned reverence for the balance of fast and slow, hot and cold, light and dark, life and death. No wonder the work of a Keeper had come so easily to her, she who had danced in the forest. Sometimes, her time there had seemed like a dream, too beautiful to be real. Now she realized, as her awareness shifted and she came back into her separate self, that the forest years had been the enduring reality and the years of stone and fire, only a fleeting apparition.