The Singers of Nevya (76 page)

But why do you not play?

Mkel leaned his head tiredly against the back of his chair.
I am a Magister instead of a Singer,
he answered. He closed his eyes, and Theo looked at Mreen and put his finger to his lips. Mreen trotted to the door and took Cathrin’s hand.

“Well, that’s nice, isn’t it,” Cathrin said. “And now you’ll bathe, and then we’ll go to the dormitory, where there are nine other children just like you.”

Mreen looked over her shoulder again.
Just like me, Cantor Theo?

He winked at her.
There is no one just like you, Mreen.

Will I see you again?

Of course. I promise.

Mkel opened his eyes to watch them leave, and when the door had closed behind them, he gave a heavy sigh.

“Are there only nine in the newest class, then, Magister?” Theo asked.

“Only nine. Ten, now, with your little one. We have been very worried . . . some think we should force all itinerants, by law, to send their children here for training. Had this been done before, you might have come to Conservatory as a child.”

“But how could the itinerants be forced?”

“Lamdon could take away their privileges, their freedom, even deny them their homes. As you know, itinerants are always welcome in all the Houses, fed and given beds as they need them. I hate the idea of denying them that. But I do not know what will happen to us all if the Gift does not return to us.”

“Magister Mkel, Sira and I both believe that the Gift flourishes at Observatory because of the welcome it receives. You remember Trisa, do you not?”

“Yes, I remember her very well. She ran away from us, and Amric refused to send her back. They have paid a high price for that.”

Theo rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly feeling very tired himself. He had not yet bathed. His muscles ached, and he was hungry. “Do you know, Magister Mkel, Trisa is doing very well at Observatory. Her first
quirunha
was not brilliant, but it was nothing to be ashamed of. The three others are all showing every indication of a good strong Gift—”

“But they speak, surely?”

Theo laughed. “Indeed they do! They have to be reminded often to keep their lips closed and their minds open!” He sobered as he looked at the door through which Mreen had passed. “It is only Mreen who is this way,” he said softly. “Her Gift is so unusual, it must have some special purpose. We are convinced only Conservatory can prepare her properly.”

“Cantor Theo,” Mkel said slowly. “How is Sira? In truth?”

Theo smiled at the older man, and opened his mind so that Mkel would understand fully.
Sira is well, and happy,
he sent.
She sends you her best regards.

Has she forgiven me, then?

I am certain she would say there is nothing to forgive.

Mkel passed his hand over his eyes, a gesture so weary that Theo wanted to touch the man’s hand, to clasp his shoulder as Cathrin did. He shielded his feelings of sympathy.

There is much for which I need forgiveness, I am afraid,
Mkel sent.
She asked me for help, tried to explain . . . I should have listened to her, heard her out. But it cannot be undone now. All I can do . .
. He, too, looked at the doorway where Mreen, wrapped in her cloud of light, had gone hand in hand with Cathrin.
I will do my best for the child. Isbel’s child.

That will be a great deal, Magister.

Perhaps
.

A silence stretched between them, and Theo waited. After some moments, Mkel shook himself. “Now,” he said aloud, striving for a matter-of-fact tone. “You must bathe, and eat. I am sure you are tired.”

“So I am,” Theo agreed. The Magister’s Houseman came forward, and Theo bowed to Mkel and took his leave.

The Houseman led him down the stairs to the
ubanyor
, and as he always had, Theo admired Conservatory’s spare elegance, its polished archways, its high ceilings and broad unadorned corridors. Strains of music floated through the House from the student wing. Theo smiled, remembering the envy those sounds had caused for him years before. Even now he knew he could never be one of the elite, one of the Conservatory-trained Cantors with their refined techniques and sophisticated musicality; but his Gift was fully realized, thanks to Sira, and he had no need to be jealous any longer.

As he sank into the hot water of the
ubanyor
, feeling the warmth caress his tired muscles, it came to him that Conservatory might be ready at last to hear Sira’s message. It would mean change. Many would resist. But Mreen’s very existence was powerful evidence that there could be another way, perhaps a better way.

Probably, he thought, Sira should have made this journey with Mreen, and he should have remained behind.

He stretched under the water, and dropped his head back to soak his hair. On the benches of the
ubanyor
were piles of thick towels, and sweet-smelling bars of soap filled the niches in the carved tub. Fresh linens waited, left by the Houseman, and a meal was even now being warmed for him in the kitchen.

It had been Sira’s decision to stay at Observatory. She could have been the one to make this trip, certainly. He chuckled. At this moment, luxuriating in the comforts of Conservatory, he was glad she had not.

Chapter Ten

Zakri and Berk rode as far into the twilight as they dared. They pushed their
hruss
until the beasts grumbled, but they kept them at the quick pace. It was their second night out from Soren, and they were well into Ogre Pass, their road now flat and broad, the familiar steep mountainsides rising to the east and west of them. Only when the men had begun to shiver dangerously did they stop to make their camp.

Zakri sat his
hruss
, and kept his
filla
inside his hood as he played, not letting his face or more than the tips of his fingers be exposed to the frigid evening air until the
quiru
bloomed about them and its warmth crept in through their furs.

Berk put back his hood to feel the heat on his grizzled cheeks, and took a grateful sniff of fresh air. He dismounted, grunting as he stretched stiff muscles. “It’s almost too much for these old bones,” he growled. “Any colder and they wouldn’t move at all. But I doubt anyone from Soren would dare ride this late!”

“We took a bit of a chance,” Zakri said. To the east he saw Conservatory’s star glinting above the horizon. “But Iban taught me a trick or two about quick
quiru
. And I believe you are right—no one will come after us now.”

He looked up through the
quiru
. Shreds of flat cloud, luminescent in the reflected light of the snowpack, crept across the sky. “How long till the summer, do you think?” he mused.

Berk squatted, laying out softwood for the cookfire. He chuckled. “Are you going to be like the children, Cantor?” he said. “Asking how long? How long?”

Zakri laughed down at him. “So I am,” he said. “How long?”

Berk struck the flint and stone and sat back on his heels as the fire began to crackle. He squinted up into the night. “Let’s see,” he mused. “The deep cold passed a quarter of a year ago. That leaves half a year, so it should be a quarter of a year more before the Visitor shows up.”

“Not soon enough,” Zakri commented, soberly now.

“No,” Berk agreed, “not for Soren.” He sliced dried
caeru
meat into the cooking pot, and threw in a double handful of snow. “By then they’ll have nothing to eat but meat.”

“Yet the itinerants think they can keep the nursery gardens going on their own, with those overlapped
quiru
they waste so much energy on!”

Berk eyed Zakri. “That makes you angrier than anything else, I think.”

Zakri shook himself, and let out a gusty breath. “No, not really. But it is insane—they keep their Cantrix locked in an attic! What is the point of that?”

“The point is that Cho fears her. You were able to shield yourself from his psi, and she might be strong enough to resist him, too. He’s surrounded himself with people he can control.”

“And gotten rid of any others.”

“Yes.”

“But I still do not know what he did to Iban. Or how he made it happen!” Zakri went to his
hruss
, as he had so often in his youth, for comfort. He leaned his forehead against the rough long hair, and pulled at the beast’s ears. It rumbled, and nudged him with its broad head.

Berk went on stirring the
keftet
, adding the green and yellow herbs, crumbling in bits of the salted fish Mura had sent along as a treat. Zakri unsaddled the
hruss
, and as he waited for the meal to be ready, he curried them both thoroughly, tired though he was. He had pushed aside his worry about Sook all day, but now, with the idleness of the night, it rose in him again. He dreaded his dreams.

“Come and eat, Cantor,” Berk said. Zakri obeyed, coming to sit close to the fire, his rolled bedfurs at his back. Berk handed him a full bowl and a spoon, and they both made quick work of the meal, eating every scrap, following the
keftet
with strong tea. When they were finished, their bowls scrubbed out, they sat watching the cookfire burn down, and listening to the vast silence around them. The quiet was punctuated once by the long scream of a hunting
ferrel
. Zakri lifted his head when he heard it.

“That is strange,” he said.

“What is?”

“Iban told me animals rarely hunt near the Pass. Too many humans travel through it, too often, and scare them off.”

Berk snorted. “Cho’s seen to that. No one’s doing much traveling these days.”

The silence stretched again, until Zakri asked, “What do you think Lamdon will do about it, Berk? What can they do?”

Berk stood up to unroll his bedfurs, looming over Zakri like one of the irontrees on the ridge above them. “I think it’s a job for the senior Cantor,” he said heavily, “though I doubt, in these times, they’ll be able to pry him out of his nice warm House.”

“By the Ship, Berk, one would think you did not approve of Lamdon!”

“I’ve been a courier a long time, Cantor Zakri—a lifetime, as my bones are telling me tonight. And I’ve seen a lot. Sometimes I think Lamdon treats the Continent, and the Houses, like they were pieces in a game of knuckle and bone!”

His bedfurs were ready, but Berk stood looking out into the purple night as it folded over the frosty white landscape.

“You know, there’s an old story . . . it’s not as if our Cho v’Soren was the first Gifted ever to go bad.

“Summers and summers ago, before my own father was even born, or his father . . . there was a Cantrix at Perl. The story goes that she was listening to everything around her, eavesdropping on the thoughts of anyone she pleased, and she got hold of some information—she found out the Housekeeper there was selling this and that for bits of metal, things that weren’t his, and then there were other things, some secret of her senior’s he didn’t want known. Generally, she just caused a lot of trouble for everyone.

“In the end, the senior Cantor of Lamdon went to Perl and confronted her, disciplined her. He faced her right in her own Cantoris, and they had it out, psi and all. That’s the part that people remember, the two of them going at it in the Cantoris, and things falling around them, the
quiru
disturbed and the other Gifted in the House hardly able to think for the noise.”

“What happened to the Cantrix?”

Berk shrugged. “I expect she settled down and did her job! It used to be that the senior Cantor was a powerful presence on the Continent.”

“But not now?”

“Well, now the Gift is in such short supply . . . everything seems different. Not since Cantrix Sharn made her tour of the Houses a few years ago have we seen any Cantor leave Lamdon’s courtyard, to say nothing of the senior.”

Zakri smoothed out his own bedfurs, and sat to pull off his heavy boots, sighing with pleasure as he wiggled his bare toes in the fresh air. “You know, Berk, it could be that even the senior Cantor is no match for Cho. His is a weird Gift, a dark one, as if it is turned inside out, the opposite of what the Gift is meant to be. We use the Gift to build, or to create—but his talent is for destruction.” Zakri leaned back on his elbows and stared up into the stars. “My own Gift could have been like that, if not for Cantrix Sira.”

“But you would never have used it in that way,” Berk said with confidence.

“No,” Zakri said. He rolled into his bedfurs, and pillowed his head on his arm, looking up at the distant stars. “No, that would not be in my nature.” Very softly, he added, “But I might have used it on myself.”

“We at Amric thank the Spirit you did not, Cantor,” Berk said warmly.

Zakri smiled at him, touched by the affection in his voice, and even more by Berk’s faith. “Better thank Cantrix Sira, while you are at it.”

“So I will, when I see her!”

Berk lay down in the soft pile of his furs, and drew them around him. Silence fell across the campsite, broken only by the panting of the
hruss
and the occasional rustle of a breeze through the tops of the irontrees. It was a precious moment of peace that Zakri treasured before he fell asleep. It did not last. His dreams were terrible, fearful ones, with Sook suffering at the center of them. He woke in a sweat, tangled in his furs and breathing hard. But there was nothing at all he could do.

*

Zakri had made his earlier visit to Lamdon as Iban’s apprentice, and had been stunned by the profligate way in which they spent their Singer energies, the warmth which caused the House members to wear thin sleeveless tunics and the lightest of boots, and the short-lived nursery flowers that were cut from their stems and set to languish briefly in
obis-
carved vases.

On this visit, the Housekeeper greeted him warily. He was no longer an itinerant, yet no one outside of Amric recognized him as full Cantor. The Housekeeper struggled delicately with the problem of his status. She assigned him a Houseman, and gave him a room reserved for visiting Cantors, but she avoided using his title. Her bows were equivocal, neither deep nor shallow. Zakri repressed a smile at the ambivalence in her expression.