Just as well
, I thought, as I bowed to Elinor and Gordain, and watched from the path as Blaise kissed them both. To see him awake would have made things more difficult than they were already. As I waited, I cast a few enchantments around the cottage. A spell to keep the water clean. Another to ward off diseases borne by air. Another to give warning to Gordain and Elinor if anyone approached. And one to keep the goats and the fields fertile. It was all I could do.
“You are satisfied?” said Blaise after the cottage lights had disappeared behind us. The freshening wind of passing midnight stirred my hair as we walked.
“Thank you.”
“You saved my life twice in one day, and the lives of many others. You eased a boy’s pain that knew no solace. It seemed only right that I should do the same.”
“You took a risk,” I said, bitterness and grief competing for the remnants of my spirit. “I am, after all, a man of violence. And there is no small danger to your sister and her husband to leave him there. You must know it. He is possessed by a rai-kirah—a demon. He’s only a child, but later . . .”
Oh, Verdonne’s mercy, I did not want to think of later. I needed to tell Blaise how to find a Searcher to come for the child when he was old enough. So many things to tell the young outlaw before I left. No reason to stay any longer; I was sick of lies. The only remaining question was where to go. Not to Aleksander; the Prince would no longer believe I was his spy, not after today. Nor to Ezzaria; the glimpse of my child—beautiful, loved—had only made the breach with my people wider, our ignorance more inexcusable.
“So you haven’t figured it out. Your eyes see so much that the rest of us cannot; I never expected it would take so long for you to understand.”
“Figured out what?” I had been lost in my self-pity and believed I had missed something of the conversation.
Blaise stopped in the middle of a meadow, where the moonlight fell clearly on his tired, angular face. “Look at me,” he said, pointing to his own eyes. “Pass your hand before your eyes and do whatever it is you do, then look at me. Tell me what you see.”
With a feathered brush upon my spine, I did as he said and stared into his clear gaze as I had in the tavern the first time I met him, as I had done three times since then, trying to discover what made him what he was. Again, I saw the good and simple man. No arrogance. No slyness. A man at peace, awash in stillness. Again, I felt the faint dizziness and saw a scattering of images laid one upon the other. I had assumed it was my own state of mind that caused the ghosts of faces and landscapes to flicker through my head whenever I examined Blaise, as if somehow the hard, shining surface of his eyes was reflecting my own visions. But this time I realized that I was seeing Blaise’s images, not my own. The Nyabozzi castle as he soared over its walls to open the gates. The streets of Vayapol as he scouted for Derzhi guardsmen. The Makai Narrows in the rain from a point higher than the cliff tops. Myself huddling to the walls in stupefaction at the enchantment I had witnessed. A thousand colors. A thousand shapes. Yet there was nothing to explain his insistence. He appeared to be the sum of his memories, as was every man.
“Now look again, Seyonne. Tell me what you see.”
The lock of my gaze on his still held. Yet something had changed. Something was released. A thrumming at the outer reaches of my hearing set my blood cold. Denial came to my lips even as I pushed my seeing deeper. Even as I opened my ears. Even as I began to hear and see the truth that lay exposed before me . . . the dissonant music intruding on my soul, the blue flame that burned behind the dark eyes.
Demon
. I backed away, looked this way and that, trying to determine how I could get back to the cottage before Blaise could stop me.
His huge hand gripped my shoulder. “I am a man. Nothing more. Nothing less. I make my own choices. Live my own life.”
Madness . . . fear . . . disbelief. The world was caving in on me again.
“Look at me, Seyonne. What has changed? Nothing of any importance. Nothing.”
His passion held me still, forcing me to look, to think, to question yet again the most fundamental tenets of my life—to stand on my head, to walk on my hands, to listen and believe, not only paying service to intellect and reason this time, but to ignore all my deep-bred fears and allow the world to take on a wholly new aspect. I had to work at it a very long time before I could comprehend. Yet in one heartbeat, as spent storm clouds thin and vanish before the midday sun, all came clear. “You’re one like my son.”
Blaise nodded, but he did not smile, just motioned me to walk beside him. “We need to talk,” he said. We had walked only an hour to get to Wellyt Vale, but it took us two to return.
“I was born in Ezzaria to a midwife, and one you call a Searcher,” Blaise told me as we wandered through the towering pines outlined dark against the stars. “Though they saw what I was, they rebelled against your custom. My mother knew where children like me were laid out to die, and she and my father came for me as soon as the rites were done. My father had traveled widely in his work, of course, so he knew where to take us. For many years we lived on the outskirts of Vayapol, getting help from the priests of Dolgar when we were in need. As a skilled midwife, my mother was able to keep us fed, while my father searched the world for some help for me. Though they were sure that I would fall into demon madness eventually, a child could want no better loving than they gave me. They taught me nothing of Ezzaria, nothing of your ways, nothing of your magic—for fear, I think, that I would betray you all someday. But, as years passed and I grew up as any boy, I like to think their fear began to fade away.”
“They must have been extraordinary people. To leave everything behind. To risk so much.”
Love radiated from Blaise’s quiet face. “Aye. They were indeed. And in his travels and searching, my father came upon other extraordinary people. A few, born like me, who had somehow survived. A few others, both Ezzarian and not, who had been ‘possessed,’ yet found their experience quite unlike the horror Ezzarians would expect. My father persuaded them to come together in Manganar, to learn from each other so that someday he could go back to Ezzaria and explain what he had found. It was his greatest hope . . . to go back someday. I’ve always marveled at this feeling you carry for your land and for each other.” I thought this wistful comment odd. How can one miss what one has never known?
“So what happened?” We came to the top of a treeless ridge and walked along the crest, the wind lifting our cloaks as it spoke of the change of season.
“My mother kept in contact with one of her friends among the Ezzarian midwives. And in the years after our escape, she would take in others that were laid out to die.”
“Farrol,” I said.
Blaise nodded. “He is my brother in all but blood. I’ve not done right by him . . . I’ve let his rashness go too far . . . you see it so easily. But it’s hard . . . There were seven of us altogether.”
“Elinor?” I almost didn’t ask it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“She is my natural sister. But she’s like you, rather than me and the others. Anyway, I had no idea of any of this. Everything was fine until I was ten.”
“The Derzhi conquest.” When the world had changed and every Ezzarian was required to be enslaved.
“Everyone went into hiding. Dolgar’s priests took in as many of the children as they could, keeping us at the hermitage outside of Vayapol. I saw my father only once more after that. It was the middle of one night when I was thirteen and one of the old priests took Elinor and me out behind the goat pen to see him. He was sick. Starving. He could not get work anywhere, dared not be seen, dared not come to the hermitage lest he be followed and bring the law down on us. But on that night he had come to tell us that our mother was dead. A Derzhi woman whom she had once helped give birth had sent out servants looking for her, because she was ready to deliver again. My mother would not refuse, thinking that no harm would come from one of her friends. But as soon as the child was born, the woman’s husband took my mother to the magistrate.” Blaise studied my face intently, as if he could somehow squeeze out an explanation of such vileness. “She had no power of sorcery anymore. She had given up all practice of it because of me, and my father said that it had all faded away. But they put her through these rites they use for sorcerers . . . and my father watched it from hiding. He said she was dead when they took her out . . .”
It was a child’s question, filled with knowing sadness, yet not quite bereft of hope. But I could give him the sorrowful answer. “It’s not possible to survive the Rites of Balthar without using melydda,” I said. “I had a great deal of power and used it all, and it was sixteen years before I knew I didn’t die from the rites.”
“Sixteen. I had wondered.” The child was gone. Only the man remained.
“So you lived with the priests and decided to spend your life righting the ills of the world that killed your parents. And somehow you developed power such as no Ezzarian ever dreamed of.”
“Not exactly. What power I have has been there all along. The shifting started when I was eight. I was lucky that my father’s friends were close by. It was painful at first, of course, before they taught me how to manage it.” He folded his arms in front of him and glanced my way. “When I shifted those first times, my parents were terrified. They were sure my rai-kirah was tormenting me, but I was just frightened. I was the first of the children to go through—”
“Wait just a bit.” I said, my mind swirling in confusion. “The first? You mean the rest of them can do this . . . shifting?”
“Yes. Of course, all of us born this way—Farrol, Davet, Kyor, the others. Your son will do it, too. It’s why you need to know—so you can help him. Farrol says I’m a madman already to tell you any of this. But we’ve lost all of the elders, those who knew anything of Ezzaria and the things you learn there.”
I could feel his struggle to say these things, and even in my wonder at the revelation, all my burgeoning hope—that my son could grow to be a strong and honorable man like Blaise—was balanced on the point of a knife. “What is it you want of me?” I said.
“We need to know if you’ve been taught what happens to us. If you know how to prevent it.”
The confusion was not improving. “I don’t know . . . prevent the shapeshifting? Why would you want—?”
“Because we go mad from it . . . or worse.” He broke a dead branch from a sickly fir tree and snapped it into ever smaller pieces as we walked, throwing the bits into the woods in disgust. “Gradually it gets more difficult to change back to human form, and there comes a day when you can’t. You stay in the form you’ve chosen . . . a beast forever . . . locked in until you become one with it and forget what you were.” He hurled the last stick into the sky as if it might catch the attention of some wayward god. “Or you can choose the alternative . . . equally happy. If you feel the change coming on and choose not to shift, you lose your mind. The more you shift, the sooner it happens.”
“Saetha.”
“She chose not to change. Her natural form, the easiest for her to shift to—you find it as you experiment with shifting—was a cat. She rarely shifted, so she was almost forty when the time came. She was a healer, and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her skill . . . to be so limited . . . to forget everything of importance to her. So she refused it and spent every one of her last days healing. In less than a season, she was as you see her now. I’m so afraid that somewhere inside her she remembers what she was.”
I once knew a slave, a Fryth woman who fed me during a month I was chained to the wall in my third master’s cellar. She told me that I should be at peace with my slave’s lot, for her gods had told her that every happiness has its price, and that those who climb to the greatest heights are always those who have the greatest price to pay. I thought I had seen the living example of those words in Aleksander, but the Prince’s tally had been nothing compared to this I heard from Blaise.
“And you change so often in this business of yours . . .”
“It is necessary. But it means I have very little time, and there’s so much to be done. I know I’m not the only one who can do this work, but Farrol is rash, Kyor is young, and now Davet is dead.” He shook his head and straightened his back. “Gods, what am I doing? I’d no intention of telling you so much. This is not about me. It’s about all of us. It’s about your child. I thought maybe you would be willing to tell us.”
“But we don’t know anything. I wish I could say differently. But I . . . none of us had any idea there was even such a possibility as this. I know of nothing that’s been written or passed down to so much as hint at it.”
“Ah, well then. Since no one ever mentioned it, I thought that must be the case, but then most of the ones I’ve asked were in no state to remember everything—”
I would not let him finish. “We learn new things all the time. I have skills. It’s possible I might be able to help. I’ll look again, and if there’s anything to be found, I’ll find it. I promise. And there is one matter I can certainly help you with . . . about the other . . . about these changes you’re trying to bring about in the world. I need to tell you a few things about myself—”
“Blaise!” We had walked down the path from the woods and into the center of the camp. Before I could say anything more, Farrol came running, sword drawn, and with him four more of the outlaw band. Torches were blazing through the camp. “Thank goodness you’re all right.”
“Why should I not be?”
Farrol placed the tip of his sword in the region of my heart. “Because you’ve been consorting with a Derzhi spy. We’ve finally tripped him up. We’ve caught his accomplice, sneaking about the camp, ready to bring the villains down on our heads. And we’ve got the evidence writ in pen and ink. Sealed by the royal devil himself.”