The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (33 page)

“Anglar is the Governor of Renato,” Cristien advised quietly, still clearly upset by Raine’s continuing discord. “We…” He dropped his gaze for a moment and then lifted diamondine eyes back to Raine, suddenly resolute. “We both sit upon Björn’s council. So has it been for longer than I care to recall.”

“Even before the war,” Raine concluded, feeling bereft as he stared at his friend. That they had shared so much with one another yet never this secret…it was a crushing blow.

“Why did you come here, Raine?” Cristien asked again, frowning at him with concern and consternation both. “Were you looking for me?”

“I didn’t know you lived,” Raine answered hollowly. He felt like the entire world was floating away, like there was nothing to hold onto, no truth to ground him. “I was just listening for a voice I recognized and I knew the governors were…” but he couldn’t finish. Instead he fixed Cristien with an agonized look. “I never expected to hear your thoughts.”

“Raine…” 

Suddenly the numb disbelief vanished, replaced by fury. “
Damn it
, Cristien,
why
? Why did you side with him? Why then? Why
now
? What really happened at the Citadel?”

Cristien regarded him with sorrow and obligation equally consuming his thoughts, the force of these feelings cascading into Raine’s awareness such that he was required to confront them too. “I’m not the one you need to hear this from, Raine,” Cristien said then. “Ask yourself, would you believe anything I told you?”

Raine held his gaze tightly, his jaw locked, teeth clenching and unclenching. Cristien was right. Raine wasn’t likely to believe anything the man said now.

“Who would you believe?” Cristien asked then, beseeching Raine’s understanding with his eyes, with the thoughts he willed the other to hear. They were
two truthreaders, each with his own side of the same truth.

Raine looked away. He knew what Cristien expected. He just wasn’t sure if he was willing to do it. He turned his diamondine gaze on the Shade instead. “Anglar, you were at the Citadel. Will you tell me nothing of what transpired?”

“It is not my truth to tell,” the Shade said simply.

Raine looked back to his friend, disappointed but unsurprised. “Very well. Good-bye then, Cristien, Anglar.” He turned to leave the way he’d come.

“Raine—
wait
,” Cristien called after him. Raine could feel the remorse in his thoughts, saw the memories Cristien pushed toward him that he might remember their years of camaraderie and trust.

“No,” he said without turning, feeling the force of the man’s gaze upon his back as fully as the power of his thoughts. They stirred memories long forgotten, but so also brought painful feelings better left buried. “No…it is as you said, Cristien,” Raine concluded quietly. “Things lost can never be regained.”

Raine took his time getting back to the gypsy camp, walking Renato’s streets as twilight came and dimmed to dusk, as the city came alive in the night. He walked down boulevards crowded with masked revelers, with two-headed dragons and mythological gods, with fabled creatures and famous heroes—countless masks each carrying their own story, either imagined or true. Yet on that night, for the First Lord’s Masquerade, all stories were real, each mask brought to brief but vivid life by the reveler who wore it, acting out the role it was meant to represent, a single face sometimes symbolic of so much.

Raine walked with shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets and his fingers wrapped around Björn’s coin, and he thought of Cristien.

They might’ve been brothers, they were once so close. Their years in the Sormitáge had united them through trial and toil as much as through the laughter of long nights and even longer examinations. Raine always felt that Cristien was the stronger of them, though their talent had been matched. But Cristien had always been adventurous—courageous even—willing to explore philosophies and ideas that Raine found uncomfortable because they were too far afield of empirical truths, too close to the purity of faith. He recalled being startled when Björn had asked him to take the Vestal oath instead of Cristien. But now he understood better.

Since the beginning,
Raine thought, shaking his head bitterly, his stomach turning with the knowledge. Cristien had been Björn’s since the very start, since they left the Sormitáge together in search of their own paths.

B
ut if Björn didn’t trust me into his council even then, why ask me to Vestal the realm?

So much about Björn van Gelderan fell beyond Raine’s ken.

Perhaps that’s why,
he thought then. Because he never could understand Björn—not then, perhaps not ever.

And
Dagmar? Alshiba?
Why hadn’t Björn trusted them?

Raine was still sifting through these painful and troubling questions when he reached the gypsy camp. The firelight drew him as truly as the music and cheering might’ve, and he passed through the ring of wagons to find the camp alive with dancing and merriment. The pirate seemed to be at the center of the frivolity, cavorting like a long-legged spider, his waist-length hair wild as he danced, its wavy strands floating on the wind mimicking the smoke rising from the campfires.

For a moment as he watched Carian, Raine wished he might find such release himself. To be able to let go of these many threads, to find peace within, no matter what condition the world at large.

But he couldn’t. The hundreds of threads he held in his mind connected a vast pattern that as yet remained unclear. He honestly feared if he released any one thread, the entire pattern would unravel, and everything he’d worked so hard to gather and understand would be lost.

“You are the Vestal?”

Raine turned to find a woman standing beside him. In the joyous noise of the night, he hadn’t heard her approach. “I am Raine D’Lacourte.” 

“I am Daria.” She pulled her long grey braid across one shoulder and smiled. Deep wrinkles crinkled the corners of her blue eyes, while longer ones connected cheekbones to jaw, but her countenance held a purity as well. Raine imagined she might’ve been beautiful once—she still was, in truth, for beauty had many expressions of form. “The Islander said I should tell you what I saw of your companion,” Daria said. “Would you come?” and she motioned him toward a wagon.

Raine realized she had to be the Healer that Carian had been seeking on Gwynnleth’s behalf. “Of course—please.” 

He followed her inside the wagon and by the light of a hanging lantern saw Gwynnleth’s sleeping form. She looked frail in her slumbering state, her harshly angular features seeming fragile, like a tiny bird lying helpless. So strangely out of character.

Raine suddenly welcomed the chance to be concerned about someone else, to ease off the clenching hold he had on his thoughts, dwelling on personal misfortune. It galled him to realize he’d been so self-absorbed. “What can you tell me of her condition?”

Daria knelt at Gwynnleth’s bedside. She brushed a strand of red-bronze hair from the avieth’s brow and looked gently upon her. “She rests in an in-between. I have heard of it happening but have never before seen it—few third-stranders come to T’khendar, and those that do have often been warned.”

“Warned? Of what?”

“That they cannot take the form here.”

“Ah…” Suddenly explanations began to take shape.

“The way it has been described to me,” Daria continued, “is that the third strand is tied to Alorin differently from the other strands. That is, Gwynnleth’s two forms are somehow supported by Alorin’s pattern alone. Though T’khendar shares many of Alorin’s patterns, the third strand is not shared. Thus, when your avieth friend attempted to take the form, her consciousness had to reach all the way back to Alorin to find it. The distance was too great—the forces between too powerful to overcome. That has created a limbo, where she remains.”

Raine had surmised much of this from Daria’s initial statement, but how to help Gwynnleth for all of that? He frowned at the avieth’s sleeping form, thinking of all that she had done at his behest, risking herself on his order alone. “What can be done for her?”

Daria shook her head. “It is beyond my skill. I have shored up her pattern as best I could, and the Islander, your friend, has been seeing that she takes water and broth, but any help for her—if she can be helped at all, my lord—will only be found in Niyadbakir.”

Niyadbakir
.

The name remained always on the fringes of his thoughts. Niyadbakir, where Björn awaited. And likely Isabel. Where answers might be found if he was willing to pierce the veil of his own failures.

Well, he had certainly started that process, however unwillingly.

He yanked his thoughts back to the moment and gave the Healer a grateful look. “Thank you, Daria. I would offer you coin—“

“The Islander already compensated me, my lord,” she told him kindly, making Raine wonder what that compensation could have entailed. Standing, she nodded to him and said, “The Lady’s blessing upon her.”

“Yes, thank you,” he murmured as he watched her leave.

Then he went and sat down on the bunk across from Gwynnleth. He was still sitting there with elbows on knees when the pirate came in several hours later.

“Oh,” Carian said upon finding Raine. “Hello, I guess.” 

Raine looked up. “You’ve been taking care of her,” he said, feeling wretched and deplorably irresponsible.

Carian cast him a sooty look. “Well, one of us bloody had to. I reckoned it wasn’t going to be you, seeing as how you vanished within minutes of landing here and were gone all night, while I meanwhile tried all manner of resuscitation—in her best interest, mind,” he added defensively.

“You’re right to be wroth with me, Carian,” Raine admitted with a heavy sigh. “I’ve been extraordinarily selfish since we arrived. I thank you deeply for caring for her when all I could think about was myself and my own troubles.”

Carian looked a little caught off by his humble apology. He shrugged his wild wavy hair out of his eyes and spied the Vestal suspiciously, as if waiting for the rest of the story. “You’re awfully morose these days,” he said by way of cautious agreement.

Raine gave him a rueful look. “When we arrived here,” he said, “I thought it might perhaps be the worst imaginable fate. I see now that assumption was a drastic understatement.”

Carian snorted. He threw himself down onto the bunk, dislodging Raine from his position at the other end, crossed his ankles, and slipped hands behind his head. “You know,” he said while gazing at the reflection of the lamplight on the wood-beamed ceiling, “I know how you feel about the Fifth Vestal, but aside from whatever happened with the wars and so forth—which may or may not be Raine’s truth, if you’ll pardon the expression—what’s your bloody oath-brother done since then that’s so terrible?”

Raine gave him a pained look.

“No, I’m serious,” Carian said, shifting to get a better view of the Vestal, who stood now in the shadows by Gwynnleth’s cot leaning against the wall. “He’s got a bonny gig here—maybe not as nice as a life on the account, but the people here are happy, boyo. The realm is at peace, and Adepts are training in Niyadbakir—did you know that?”

Raine shook his head, though he wasn’t at all surprised. Björn would want an Adept army to replace the one Malachai’s war decimated. “You’ve been listening to Balearic’s stories, I take it,” he observed quietly.

“Hey, there’s two sides to every coin,” the pirate returned unrepentantly, “and I ain’t so sure the side everybody sees in Alorin is the right one.”

Neither am I,
Raine caught himself thinking—to his intense dismay.

He retrieved Björn’s coin from his pocket at stared at it lying quietly on his palm. Sometimes the coin seemed a foreign and intensely insulting object that had no right existing at all, but more often it was starting to encapsulate all that Björn was to him: an enigma with no solution, a closed door with no handle and no way to peer inside to glimpse what lay behind. An elliptical puzzle with neither entry nor exit to its logic, encouraging naught but one’s own theories, most of them impossibly wrong.

And despite the many conjectures surrounding it, the coin lay remote, resolute, and utterly indifferent. The coin cared not if others maligned it or smothered it with praise, it simply remained inviolate, a steadfast representation throughout the ages, never altering from its original purpose even to defend that purpose to others. Nothing affected it.
Nothing
changed it!

Impossible! No man can be so immutable!

But Björn was.

The very recognition of this stabbed Raine with agonizing force, for this simplicity lay at the heart of a truth Raine could no longer deny. They had
presumed
…guessed, formed their own theories and declared them as fact. But they had never
known
.

Oh, to be sure, the evidence had implied one thing, yet their hearts had told them another—especially in the beginning. Raine and Alshiba had spent
eons
fighting with themselves and each other over what they would—what they
could
—bring themselves to believe. Raine knew in his heart of hearts that Alshiba still denied many of the truths they’d supposedly agreed upon between them.