| |
Just down the hill from the old visitors’ dormitory—empty now for many years—there was a little arbor built along the path and surrounded by rhododendrons and cherry trees. It was a cool spot to sit on a summer day, with a shaded a bench and a little fountain. But this was autumn, now, and Caedmon had to sit with his hands bundled into his cloak against the wind that was whipping down from the high glaciers.
Farther down the slopes, he could see the evergreens fade into the irregular carpet of yellow aspens and shamelessly red maples. And out beyond that, past the foothills, the hazy blue fields and farms of Newshire, cut out of the old Northarad Wood. It would still be autumn down there for a month or more, but judging by the wind today, winter would be coming to Diernemynster soon.
The fountain was still going, however. It stopped every year at the first frost, and started again on the first warm day of spring. The bowl was made of some, strange opalescent material, like mother of pearl, but it changed color according to the time of day and the observer’s mood. At the moment, it was dark blue.
No one knew the spell that did this; it had been lost with the woman who had made the fountain. She had hated Diernemynster, or so Harald Huldassen had told Caedmon once. Apparently she had preferred living in Leornian, where she was treated as the queen long before she gained that title by marriage. But now there was almost nothing left in Leornian that she had built. “And someday,” thought Caedmon sadly, “there will be nothing there that I built, either.”
The country Leofe had guided for centuries no longer remembered her as a real, flesh-and-blood woman. She was an idol, a painted icon of pious virtue. So her only true memorials were here, in this place she had turned her back on.
What had happened to her before she took her life? Some people said that so much magy drove her insane. Other people said it was an excess of worldly power, instead. Old Harald and Astrid had drawn a different moral from her terrifying example. They had decided that it was sex that had driven the great Leofe mad. So the rules of Diernemynster had been changed to demand celibacy. Caedmon had no particular wish to break that rule; he knew from experience how much simpler it made life when you weren’t involved in romantic entanglements. And yet, he sometimes suspected that love had nothing to do with what had destroyed Leofe. Then again, no one would ever really know, one way or the other.
Then there was poor Kuhlbert. His forge was a little farther down the path past the fountain. People still used it, of course. Even at Diernemynster, where people could shape metal with their minds, there were always people who preferred doing things by hand. Kuhlbert had been one of those eccentrics, which was why he had spent so much time at that forge. Almost everything he had ever made was gone now, too. Astrid had his sword, though—brought back in dubious triumph from the battlefield of Oasestadt. Kuhlbert had gone there to fight, thinking that he was fulfilling Earstien’s will, thinking that he could hold back the Myrcian tide. “But we killed him,” thought Caedmon sadly, “and Oasestadt fell anyway.”
Both of these Machtigmagnars had been convinced that they had a special destiny, a special purpose, and a special part in Earstien’s design. But in the end, neither of them had achieved much of anything. Leofe was remembered primarily for writing the Halig Leoth. What would she think of that, if she knew? If someone (perhaps Harald) had asked Leofe what Earstien’s purpose was for her life, she would never have said, “To write a book.” Sadly, though she and Kuhlbert had shown great promise, very little had come of it in the end.
Perhaps then it was the same with Ellard. “I wanted him to have a great destiny,” thought Caedmon, “but maybe it is not wise to hope for that.”
Leofe had been great, and it had ended with her dead and her true memory all but erased from Leorniac history. Kuhlbert’s fate was crueler, in some ways. Everyone remembered his deeds, but they remembered him as a terrible villain. “Maybe it was wrong of me to tell Ellard that he had a great destiny. Perhaps I merely set him up for failure and disappointment.”
The more Caedmon thought about it, the more he was sure that it was all his fault. He ought to have been firmer with the boy. He should never have encouraged his impertinence. He shouldn’t have told him he was Earstien’s chosen, with an impossibly bright future.
The sound of footsteps came down the path, confidently sloshing through mud puddles and kicking aside piles of leaves. Caedmon knew that walk even before he saw her. “Hello, Astrid,” he called.
She strode into view and nodded by way of greeting. Her hair—nearly all gray now—was braided up on her head, and she was wearing her usual, long gardening apron. She sat primly at the other end of the bench from him and said, “I’ve just finished with Ellard Koehler, and I’ve assigned him his penance. He seems to have a very high opinion of himself, I must say.”
“For that, I must take the blame. I have always told him he was special.”
“Hmph. My mother always told me I was special, Caedmon, and it didn’t turn me into an egotistical jackass. I think you are blaming yourself too much. Ellard is contrite, and so once he has finished the penance, I think we can all agree we need say no more about that business with Stasya. You say the girl and Pallavi are now...where?”
“They are going to Briddobad.” He had gotten a falcon from Pallavi a few days earlier, announcing their intended destination.
“That’s just as well. Whatever fascination the girl had for Ellard, it is over now, and it will be best if they do not see each other. Frankly, Caedmon, I suspect the girl must have given him encouragement.”
“I am not sure that is fair.”
“You were never a young girl, Caedmon, so you don’t know what we are like at that age. Be that as it may, I have given young Koehler his penance. I think it will do him good to do something for the community here. I had thought about putting him in charge of my mulch and fertilizer beds and the kitchen garbage detail for five or six years. His revulsion at the idea nearly sold me on it. But then I remembered that Earnwine was looking for someone to help him reorganize the library.”
Caedmon nodded. Then an alarming thought struck him. He reminded Astrid that he had seen Ellard in the archive at the Bocburg reading a book that contained detailed descriptions of dark magy. “Are you sure it is...wise to let him have unfettered access to the library? Might he not find the volumes there something of a temptation?”
“Everything truly dangerous is well secured,” scoffed Astrid. “And I daresay Ellard will find temptations no matter what task we set for him. That is the nature of existence, I am afraid—to produce temptations.”
“True, true. But...forgive me, Freagast, but it seems to me that your original instinct—to give Ellard a low, menial task—was perhaps better. It would be best if Ellard were not encouraged to see himself as special.”
“Ha! What good will it do to tell him that now, Caedmon, after you have filled his head with glorious dreams for more than eighty years? No, he will work at the library, and we will all have to hope for the best.”
Astrid left, and Caedmon sat, motionless, with his head in his hands. He would have liked to hope for the best, but where Ellard was concerned, he had very little hope left.
***
STASYA WIPED HER FEET carefully at the back door, and then deposited her basket of herbs on the little kitchen table. Overhead, an inverted garden of dried flowers and plants hung from the ceiling. There was a huge, wild array of colors, sizes and shapes, but after Stasya bound up her new cuttings in twine, it took her only a few moments to find where they were supposed to hang. Pallavi’s system for organizing her herbs was quite logical, once you got used to it.
All the windows of the little cabin were open, as they had been for nearly two weeks, now that spring was finally here. The winter had been terribly cold and they had continued to get snow right through the month of May. On the first day of June, when the snow had finally melted, Pallavi had remarked that “spring” would be three weeks long this year. The older woman had complained about being shut up in the cabin much more than Stasya, for whom being snowbound all winter was perfectly normal.
“At least you’ve got a privy,” she told Pallavi, “and you don’t have to run outside in a blizzard.”
But now the weather was warm again, at long last, and people were discovering that the long, hard winter had brought the most wonderful good fortune. The plague seemed to be gone; according to Pallavi’s friends in the city, this was the first time in two years that there had been no cases of it. Day after day, they waited with bated breath for the first death, but there were no reports that anyone was sick of anything worse than a cold or a toothache. Merchants came riding in from Pinburg and Juldee, bringing news that the plague was over there, too.
Stasya found a little bread and some cheese on the kitchen table, along with an entirely typical note from Pallavi: “Here’s lunch for you dear. I worry about you getting so thin.” Stasya, to the best of her knowledge, was precisely the same size she had been when they had arrived at this cabin outside Briddobad eight months earlier. But Pallavi insisted on fussing and worrying over her, and Stasya still found this kind of concern novel enough that she did not mind it. She ate the cheese and went through the parlor to the front veranda.
Pallavi was sitting there on the steps, examining a little girl who had an infected cut on her finger. The girl’s parents hovered nervously nearby as Pallavi finished cleaning the wound and covering it with an herbal poultice. When she was done, she hugged the girl and gave her parents instructions about the care of the wound. They promised to bring the girl back if the wound did not heal, and then the girl’s father shyly handed over a bag of dried apples as payment. “Well, if you insist,” said Pallavi, taking one before passing the bag off to Stasya.
When the girl and her parents were gone, the two hillichmagnars sat on the veranda and ate every one of the apples. “By the way,” said Pallavi, “do you know where those people were coming from?”
“No, where?”
“They came in a caravan from Nivia, up in the Empire. They rode all the way through Loshadnarod, and they say the plague is over there, too.”
“Really?”
Pallavi turned the shriveled core of an apple over in her hands thoughtfully. “You know...this means you could go home if you wanted.”
Stasya looked out from the veranda, over their long, sloping front lawn, and across the blue, misty valley to the next ridgeline, where Briddobad stretched lazily. The strange, twisted, gilded spires of the temples glittered in the sunlight. You didn’t see things like that on the high plains.
“No, I think I’ll stay here, if that’s alright with you,” she said.
“Oh, my dear girl, of course it’s alright with me.”
“Perhaps I may go in a century,” thought Stasya, “but not today.”
––––––––
THE END