The Fall of Neskaya Read online

“At this time of thanksgiving, we offer our hospitality and our deepest thanks to our honored guest. Rumail of Neskaya, your presence here and your actions in fighting the worst fire of many years bring new meaning to the phrase, S’dia shaya. You lend us grace.”

  Rumail nodded and replied formally, “S’dei par servu. For myself, I am glad to have done what I could. My brother, Damian Deslucido, who wears the crowns of Ambervale and Linn, believes that with great power comes even greater responsibility. I could offer no less than my full assistance in such a time of need. Like my brother, I believe that the gift of laran confers an obligation of service. In fact, some say there will come a time when those in the Towers will dedicate their talents only to peace and never to war.”

  “War is terrible enough when fought with sword and arrow,” Beltran Leynier said grimly. “But no man can stand against these devil-weapons unless he commands them himself.”

  Padraic had told Coryn the story of how his eldest brother, who would have been heir to Verdanta, had been killed in the last battle with the Storns of Callarma. His uncles, Beltran’s two surviving brothers, had died in an ambush which had come under the guise of a truce negotiation. As certain as next winter’s snows, his father was right. Neither Callarma nor High Kinnally nor anyone else would dare to challenge Verdanta in the face of superior laran weapons.

  After the faintest pause, Rumail continued, his voice shifting into formal, mellifluous cadences, “In the name of Damian Deslucido the Invincible, King of Ambervale and Linn, I convey to you warmest greetings and salutations. He sends these gifts as a token of his high regard.”

  Padraic, acting in his role of coridom, handed Rumail a parcel the length of a man’s forearm and half its height, wrapped in a cloth which was dyed deep blue and bore the sheen of costly spider silk. Rumail grasped the parcel so that the iridescent fabric fell away, revealing a casket of beaten copper. Murmurs rippled around the table at the sight of such riches, for copper was the most precious of all Darkover’s rare metals.

  With a single swift movement, Rumail tipped the casket open, releasing a cascade of spice packets, lengths of embroidery-covered lace from Dalereuth, strands of Temora pearls, and a magnificent piece of polished amber carved in the shape of a cloud leopard. Margarida, who loved beautiful things, clapped her hands in delight, as did Eddard’s wife.

  Lord Leynier, clearly astonished, offered thanks in equally formal language. Rumail went on to present his primary mission, which everyone at the table already knew: the offer of marriage of King Damian’s heir, Prince Belisar, to a Leynier daughter. What he did not say aloud, everyone also knew, which was that the marriage hinged on the girl’s ability to bear children of exceptional laran. When the first proposal had arrived, Tessa, the only daughter of marriageable age, had been indignant.

  “I will not be barragana to any man’s accursed breeding schemes!” she said in an unusual display of temper, for she was normally the most conventional of the girls.

  “It is an honorable marriage di catenas,” her father corrected her, “and not an unfair bargain.” Although he had the power to force the marriage, he rarely used his authority when his children were truly unwilling. “You would trade what you contribute to the royal bloodline in exchange for a life of comfort and relative safety.”

  Eddard’s wife of less than a year, now visibly pregnant, had brought a sweet temper as well as a dowry of prime farmland to the marriage. Her condition had kept her away from the fire camp, but it was only a matter of time before she stepped into the role of Lady of Verdanta. Tessa would eventually have to marry to find a household of her own.

  “You’d be Queen,” Coryn reminded her. That seemed like a grand enough thing to be.

  “Nobody’s asking you to—” Tessa broke off, blushing furiously.

  “We marry where we must, not where we will,” Beltran said. “Love between a man and his wife comes later, or not, as the gods will it. Meanwhile, we each do what we can for family, for nothing is stronger than the ties of blood.” He left unspoken the thought in everyone’s mind, that alliances un-cemented by fruitful marriage too often proved worthless. The value of such a union spoke for itself, in the names of the smaller estates now under fealty to King Damian.

  In the end, her temper having run its course, Tessa said she would marry this Belisar as was her duty. If, that is, he were kind and tolerable to look at.

  “You have several daughters here,” Rumail said, his eyes sliding from Tessa, darkly lovely and poised with her hair coiled low on her neck in a silver butterfly clasp, to Margarida, with her freckles and snub nose, dressed in a smock she’d embroidered herself, and then for an instant up to the gallery where Kristlin watched along with the other young children. “My brother asks that I be allowed to examine each of them, to determine the strength and suitability of each girl’s laran.”

  Coryn glanced at Margarida. She kept her eyes downcast, yet he caught her flicker of dismay. She was barely fourteen—

  “I had assumed the testing would be only for Tessa.” Beltran said, frowning. “For she is not only the eldest, but of the most fitting age for marriage.”

  Rumail’s expression remained bland as he said, “Yet the most fitting age may not be the most fitting match. Let us at least resolve the question of the laran potential of each girl before we proceed further with negotiations.”

  “If it is truly necessary, you are free to examine them in any way which is seemly for a maid and an unmarried man who is not her relative,” Beltran said, with a trace of heaviness in his voice.

  “It is necessary,” Rumail said. “Laran may lie dormant, or be blocked, or may simply remain as a potential for the next generation.” Coryn could tell from the shift in the man’s voice that now he spoke with the authority of a trained laranzu. “I assure you, what I do will in no way compromise your daughters’ honor, nor will there be any pain. And you, damisela Margarida, may have your nurse present if you wish.”

  Margarida lifted her eyes and said with spirit, “I no longer require a nurse, vai dom.”

  “Dom Beltran,” Rumail continued, leaning forward slightly, “it was not my mission to test your sons, but I would like permission to examine young Coryn. I believe he may also have the donas, the gift.”

  Beltran nodded in assent and signaled for the tables to be cleared away and the evening’s entertainment to begin. Tessa played the rryl particularly well and had a light, sweet voice. Petro, who had no singing ability, accompanied her on lap drum and Margarida on a small reed flute.

  As Coryn set out a cushioned chair for Tessa, he felt Dom Rumail’s eyes on him. A little thrill went up his spine. Perhaps this sense of his was a kind of laran. He might be able someday to pilot a glider with his starstone. Images of hovering, soaring, looking down on forest and meadow from eagle’s height, surged over him. Fervently, he prayed to Aldones it might be true.

  Dom Rumail was given the small chamber used for hanging linens to dry during the winter for his testing. All through the next morning, he examined the girls, beginning with Tessa. Coryn didn’t see her until that evening, for Eddard sent him out to ride the boundary lands around the fire, searching for any deeply-buried embers. Dinner was informal, as was usual on work days, with hot meat pies, aged chervine milk cheeses and dried fruit bars, nutbread and bowls of oat groats with savory sauce laid out in the kitchen. Coryn found the two younger girls and Petro here, chattering away.

  “It was like—” Margarida lifted her hands in a fluttering gesture, “—like dancing on a cloud.”

  “Do you mean he made you go to sleep?” Petro said, scowling. “What’s so grand about that?”

  “You’re jealous ’cause you got left out,” Coryn said.

  “Am not,” Petro said. “I just don’t want some old wizard poking around in my mind. Who knows what he’ll do once he’s in there? He could read your thoughts . . . all your nasty little secrets. How’d you like everyone to know about the time you set fire to Tessa’s hairbrush and then dropped
it down the latrine?”

  Coryn landed a punch on Petro’s shoulder while Kristlin giggled, “So that’s what happened to it. She was mad as Durraman’s donkey for a tenday, thinking she’d lost it.”

  Before Kristlin could ask exactly how Coryn had set the hairbrush on fire, Margarida said, “It was rather nice, what Dom Rumail did. In a dreamy sort of way.”

  “Well, I didn’t like it,” said Kristlin, sticking out her lower lip. Her brows knitted, stormy. “It felt . . . I don’t know, like the way a snake sounds over dry leaves.”

  “You? What do you know?” Coryn grinned. “You don’t even have a starstone yet. You’re just a little girl, running around in boy’s breeches—whose were they, anyway? Fra’ Domenic’s?” he jibed, unable to resist teasing her.

  “What do you care, so long as they weren’t yours?” she said, darting away when he reached out to tickle her.

  One of the house servants came in and said that if Master Coryn had finished eating, could he please attend Dom Rumail? With a tingle of excitement dancing in his stomach, Coryn made his way to the linen rooms. The air smelled faintly of cedar and goldengrass, used to sweeten the sheets and keep away moths. A handful of candles filled the little chamber with gentle light. Rumail sat on a stool, hands loosely folded in his lap. Folded blankets cushioned a low table and formed a pillow.

  “Am I to lie down?” Coryn asked.

  “Not just yet, young master. I have a few questions for you. I have already studied your lineage, so we need not go into that. How long have you been having attacks of dizziness and disorientation? Has the nausea made it difficult for you to eat? Have you had visual disturbances, where things were not the right shape or color or would not hold still?”

  “I didn’t—” Coryn bit his lip. He’d thought he’d done a good job masking his weakness. Eddard hadn’t noticed anything on the fire line, or hadn’t seen fit to mention it. “It’s excitement, that’s all. It has nothing to do with, well, anything.” But even to his own ears, he sounded unconvincing.

  “It has very much to do with the awakening of laran.” Now a steely certainty rang in Dom Rumail’s voice. Coryn felt something darkly powerful emanate from the laranzu. “And it is not a thing to be either ashamed of or taken lightly. These are the symptoms of threshold sickness, which often comes when laran powers awaken at puberty. Often, the stronger the sickness, the more powerful the laran.”

  “Th-this means I really do have it?” Coryn blurted out. Eagerness quivered along his nerves. “Laran?”

  “That may well be, chiyu. It is what we are here to discover. Tell me, what happens when you look into your starstone? Take it out and show me.”

  Coryn unwrapped the stone, his eyes resting on the flickering blue light in its heart. He had the curious sensation of falling into it, going deeper and deeper. After only a few moments, the sense of giddy whirling which was now sickeningly familiar came over him. His stomach clenched and he broke out in a cold sweat.

  “Enough! Look away now!”

  Coryn’s fingers shook as he tucked the starstone back into its silken pouch. Haltingly, he answered Rumail’s questions about the symptoms which, he admitted, had been growing steadily worse over the last season.

  “Is it very bad, this threshold sickness?”

  “It could become so if it is not treated,” Dom Rumail said. “Yet I have seen young people enter the Tower with far worse cases than yours and grow to the fullness of their talents.”

  “What—what must I do?”

  “For the moment, simply lie down and relax as best you can. Leave the rest to me.”

  When Coryn lowered himself to the padded bench, the dizziness intensified. Closing his eyes as he was bid, he felt the touch of a fingertip between his brows. The world steadied. Shortly after, he felt warmth in the pit of his stomach, creeping up his spine. His arms and legs felt heavy and then light. He seemed to be floating on a gauzy, sunlit cloud. His muscles melted as if he had been soaking in a hot spring, like the one Eddard had found on Cloudcap Mountain. Thoughts drifted pleasantly through his mind, as insubstantial as ghosts. No wonder Margarida had enjoyed it, for she was given to daydreaming fancies.

  Once or twice, Coryn became aware of the sound of Rumail’s voice, although he could not make out any words. From time to time, also, it seemed as if the inside of his skull had turned into his bedchamber and there was someone else moving about in it. Man or woman, he could not tell beneath the cloak of misty gray. He felt only a dreamy indifference and no sense of intrusion.

  The visitor drifted across the room, picked up the comb of carved shell from its place on the shelf, pulled a strand of coppery hair from its teeth and placed the hair in an unseen pocket. Then it stooped to open the chest at the foot of Coryn’s bed.

  Coryn watched, now from the vantage of his head upon his own pillow, as the visitor took out every piece of clothing, one by one—his holiday tunic of Dry Towns linex, his best winter cloak of tightly-woven blue wool trimmed with cloud-leopard fur, vest and pants in supple crimson-dyed leather which had once belonged to Eddard and no longer fit him, a dagger with the tip broken off, a box of soapwood scratched with his initials and filled with childish trinkets—poor quality river-opals in a bag stitched by Tessa for his sixth birthday, a stick horse and rider, a handkerchief embroidered with cherries which had once been his dead mother’s.

  The visitor carefully folded and replaced all the items except for the dagger and the handkerchief.

  What did this person want with him, with the things that it had taken, the hair and the dagger and the handkerchief? Coryn could only watch in horrified fascination as the visitor spread the handkerchief on his chest, over his heart, and placed the coiled hair in the center.

  The figure reached up to its hooded head and, with a sharp jerk, drew out one of its own hairs. This it twisted together with Coryn’s hair and wrapped in the handkerchief.

  This wasn’t right, couldn’t be right! Coryn struggled to move, to turn his head, to shout aloud. Dom Rumail, help me! But his voice and body remained locked, as if encased in a block of ice.

  The faceless visitor picked up the dagger and held it over Coryn’s belly. Light glinted on the tip, now whole and needle-sharp, the broken bit filled in with blue glass which glowed eerily from within.

  Coryn glanced around wildly, hoping for something he could use to defend himself. In an instant, he was no longer in his bedchamber. A vast gray emptiness, more barren than anything he could imagine, stretched out endlessly in all directions. He felt neither warmth nor chill, nor any substance beneath him. Overhead stretched an equally formless sky, lighter gray and unchanging as far as he could see. The place was empty except for himself and the gray-robed visitor.

  The tip of the dagger slid into his body with only a pin-prick of pain. He felt it pierce his skin, his muscles, right down to his spinal column and deeper still. In that instant he knew it would not kill him, yet every nerve, every fiber of his body rebelled. With that new ability, he sensed a wrongness beyond words. His vision went white.

  With a twist and a slash, the dagger sliced open his belly. He could not see, but he felt something being placed in his very depths.

  The handkerchief! With my hair—and whose? Why? Why?

  Bits of thought and memory swirled around him, as if he had been caught in a shower of embers from an exploding resin-tree. Something deep within him tore loose from its roots.

  Coryn screamed soundlessly and tried to arch away. Anything, anything to get away, to not feel that terrible wrenching wrongness. He hurled himself this way and that, blind in his desperation.

  A corridor appeared suddenly before him. He bolted down it. The walls folded themselves around him, surrounded him on all sides. A soft gray blanket settled over him, as he became one with the substance of the walls. At last, he was safe. If he could not get out, then no one and nothing could enter. Nothing could reach inside him.

  The next moment, the dagger was gone. Hands pushed the edges
of his wound together. Unearthly warmth surged along the cut, fusing the edges. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. There was no pain. For one long moment after another, there was nothing except his own breathing. Silence and numbness bathed him.

  Dimly, distantly, he felt the hands withdraw. In a body which was no longer his, the fiery streams faded into coolness.

  The hooded figure bent near, until a breath whispered on his cheek.

  “You will say nothing of this. Nothing.”

  NOTHING . . . NOTHING . . .

  Then true darkness took him.

  3

  Bright sun woke Coryn the next day. He opened leaden eyelids and studied the slant of the light. It must be well into midmorning. Why had he slept so late?

  He heaved himself up on one elbow and wondered for a wild moment if he had been abed with lung fever, which he’d had when he was six. Sour cobwebs lined his mouth. He was where he should be, in his own bedroom with the same gray-and-pink smooth-cut stone walls hung with the same ancient tapestries of the legend of Hastur and Cassilda. Ruella, his old nurse, said they were woven by Great-aunt Ysabet, who never married and lived to be ninety-two, enough years to supply a castle twice this size with tapestries.

  He lay in his own familiar bed, with the running stag which was the Leynier emblem carved into the headboard, wearing his own nightshirt. Yet . . . he had no memory of having gotten here.

  Someone had brought in a folding table bearing a platter of fruit and drybread, a bowl with two brown eggs, and a tankard of lukewarm water laced with tonic herbs. He suspected Tessa’s hand in the bitter-tasting water. She’d think it just the kind of wholesome thing to give someone who’d been sick last night—

  Last night!

  Coryn’s hands flew to his abdomen. When he pulled the shirt up, he saw no trace of a scar. He touched only whole, healthy skin. Had it all been a dream? The formless gray plain, the intruder, the dagger—

  He bolted across the room for the dark wooden chest. Throwing himself on his knees, he jerked the lid open. He pulled out one familiar item after another. Yes, there was the cloak, the festival shirt. His fingers touched hard metal—the dagger. The tip was as blunt as ever, a blade deemed safe enough to give to a boy for practice.