Читать книгу Shadows of Destiny - Rachel Lee - Страница 9

We should listen in, Cilla thought, an impish smile on her dark features as she met Tess’s eyes.

Without a doubt, Tess agreed, meeting her gaze. She was still sometimes surprised at the ease with which she and her Ilduin sisters could touch each other’s minds, and remembered the first time she had noticed this ability, as Sara and Tom had demonstrated their love for each other.

Ahem! Cilla and Tess immediately looked to Sara’s window, where Sara was glaring back at them with a mock stern expression. Can a girl have a bit of privacy, please?

Cilla put a hand to her mouth to suppress a laugh, mirth dancing in her eyes. But sister, you are the only hope we have!

Get your own man, Sara thought with a toss of her head, followed by a wink.

I’m trying, Cilla thought. I’m trying.

Tess laughed aloud and drew Cilla aside. “Come, sister. Let us walk together and leave sweet Sara to enjoy her new marriage.”

“Of course,” Cilla said. “’Twas only sport.”

“And pleasant sport at that,” Tess said, her smile fading. “But as our men have gone to discuss things manly, perhaps we should take the opportunity to advance our own knowledge.”

They walked toward the temple slowly, as if reluctant to end the celebratory mood and resume the hard work that lay before them. Even Tess’s visit to the Bozandari camp had seemed almost a royal visit, born of a dream. The snow wolves had slipped away into the hills around Anahar, and now, even with Cilla beside her, she felt very alone as she walked to face the gods.

“Have you any news of Ratha?” Tess asked.

“He has withdrawn within himself,” Cilla said, shaking her head. “I try to tell him it was not his fault that Giri fell, that it is not wise to grieve alone, but he will hear none of it.”

“Do Anari believe in life after death?” Tess asked. For all the time she had spent in the temple at Anahar, she knew little of their religion.

“Yes,” Cilla said. “Of a sort. Giri is beyond the veil now, in the garden of the gods, but his life there—if life it be—is nothing like life here. Those who pass beyond the veil become all and nothing, united yet unique. All of those beyond the veil can feel one another’s thoughts as we Ilduin can, if thoughts they have at all.”

Tess nodded, ghosts of memories flitting through her mind, wispy and unapproachable.

“You do not remember what your people believe,” Cilla said.

“No,” Tess replied. “Although my heart tells me it was not far different from what you have said.”

Cilla smiled. “Why did you ask?”

“We grieve not for those who have passed,” Tess said. “Their pain has ended, their struggles complete. We ought not to be sad on their account, for the life they have now—whatever it may be—is better than any they have known. No, we grieve for ourselves, for the holes that are left in our own lives by the passing of those whom we loved.”

“This we are taught as well,” Cilla said. “It is as if a piece of flesh has been cut from one’s arm. We do not feel the pain of the flesh which is gone. We feel the pain from the flesh that remains, raw and open and torn. Until the body can repair it, the pain remains. But it is never fully repaired, for the scar we build is not the same as the flesh it replaces.”

“Exactly,” Tess said, squeezing her sister’s hand.

“You are saying that Ratha needs time to build a scar over the hole that Giri’s death has left.”

Tess nodded. “And until he can do that, dear sister, he will be too pained to feel your love for him. Or his for you.”

“Give me not false hope,” Cilla said sharply. Then, after a moment. “Forgive me, my lady. I did not mean to scold you.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” Tess said. “And I am not your lady, but your sister. I must have someone in my life who pays me no homage, but simply shares with me this journey of life.”

Cilla nodded. “Yes, sister.”

“And I give you no false hope,” Tess said. “Trust not in what you see on Ratha’s face just now, nor hear in his words. Ratha cannot look upon you, nor hear you, nor speak to you. Only his grief sees you, hears you, and responds. Grief cannot love. But Ratha can.”

Tess sighed and looked down at the colorful, rainbow-hued cobbles beneath their feet, trying desperately to recall the song that the stones of Anahar had sung when they had summoned the Anari. That song had seemed to open doors within her, to fill her with a sense of awe that had been good, unlike much of the awe she had felt since awaking with no memory.

“Grief,” she said, “is not a gentle thing, Cilla. It claws at us like a ravening beast, and is loathe to release us from its grip. Worse, we find it hard to accept that someone we love is lost to us for the rest of our days. ’Twould be easier for Ratha had Giri left on a long journey with no intent to return. For at least then he would have known his brother still existed somewhere within this world, and that eventually he might hear Giri’s voice again in this lifetime. He has no such hope now. But eventually he will find acceptance, and with acceptance he will return to you.”

Cilla squeezed Tess’s hand. “I pray that you are right, sister. For my heart both leaps and aches every time I see him. Long did I gaze upon him in my childhood, when I hid among the rocks and watched him play. Longer, it seems, was he lost to me after he was taken away into slavery. Then he returned, and it felt as if I had found the missing part of my own soul. And now…”

“Now he is gone again,” Tess said. “For a time. But only for a time, sister. You have been patient these many years. Let not patience fail you now.”

“Listen to you two! Gloom and sorrow!”

Tess and Cilla turned to see Sara, running to catch up with them. Her face shone with the glow of a new bride.

“And why aren’t you in your room with your husband?” Tess asked.

Sara giggled. “Men, it seems, lack…stamina.”

Cilla held up a finger. “You asked for privacy, if I recall? Now you will tell us what we could have heard for ourselves?”

Sara shook her head. “No. I have said all that I will. But a woman cannot live only in her husband’s arms. Not this woman, at least. I need time with my sisters as well. So scold me not for my presence, nor if I should leave you. Tom will not sleep all day, and I will be there when he awakens.”

“I’m quite sure you will,” Tess said, laughing. She turned to Cilla. “Come, let us hurry to the temple, while he sleeps, lest Sara’s…needs…call her away before she can learn anything.”

“Somehow,” Cilla said, “I think she is learning quite a lot. Just not of Ilduin lore.”

Sara smiled. “With sisters such as you, a bride needs no groomsmother. Perhaps the gods will be more delicate.”

“That,” Tess said, sighing, “would truly surprise.” And deep within her, she felt the stirring of anger, anger that her sister’s joy must be overshadowed, anger that they all grieved so much, not only for the past, but for the future as well.

No one, she thought as her steps carried her closer to the temple, should have to grieve for that which had not yet passed. But that sorrow, it seemed, was the fate of the Ilduin.

“The young prophet emerges,” Erkiah said with a smile as Tom entered his chamber. “Although now that you are wed, I suppose that ‘young’ no longer applies. Pray, Tom, tell me why you lie not in the arms of your bride?”

Tom blushed behind the leathern mask that covered his eyes, leaving only slits for him to see through. Ever since Tess had healed him from fatal wounds received in a Bozandari ambush along the road to Anahar, his irises had grown so pale that he could no longer bear bright light. The mask Tess had thought to make for him had saved him from being virtually blind. “I pretended to sleep. I love her like a fish loves the river, yet we have been so busy these past days in preparation for the wedding…and I found myself missing my studies.”

Erkiah waved a hand at his young charge. “Apologize not, my friend, neither to me nor to her. Apparently she waited only minutes after your ruse before scurrying off to meet her sisters at the temple and continue her own work. In other times, lovers might pale at such a thought. But you both know there is much to be done and little time in which to do it. The shame is only that you could not speak openly of it, one to the other.”

“I fear I am not yet accustomed to marriage,” Tom said. “Nor is Sara, I suppose.”

“I pray that you will have time to grow into it,” Erkiah said, sadness on his features. “For all that has happened, the greater burden lies before us.”

“And Lord Archer’s strength will fail,” Tom said.

Erkiah nodded. “Sadly, yes. Thus it is foretold. It weighs upon us to ascertain how, and when, and stand ready to fortify him.”

“Show me those prophecies, please,” Tom said, walking to the shelves on which Erkiah’s scrolls lay. “Nothing we have learned together will matter if in this we err.”

“You speak truth,” Erkiah said. “If my memory fails me not, that text is on the second shelf, third scroll from the right.”

“If ever your memory fails you,” Tom said, reaching for the vellum, “the gods themselves will quake with fear.”

“You do me too much credit,” Erkiah said, laughing. “I am but a man, and like any other I am prone to error.”

“But not in matters of consequence.” Tom met his eyes, then unrolled the top of the scroll. “Eshkaron Treysahrans. Your memory does not fail.”

Erkiah nodded and watched as Tom stretched the scroll over the table and weighted the corners with candlesticks.

He shuddered and spoke. “I would that I had forgotten. This is a text I have not read since I was a young man. It frightened me so that never again have I touched it, save to pack it for my journey here, and unpack it upon my arrival.”

Tom studied him gravely. This was not the Erkiah he had come to know, eagerly seeking knowledge as a hungry man at morning. “I would ask why it frightened you, but I know your answer already. You will tell me to read it, for then I will know.”

“That is true,” Erkiah said, “though hardly prophecy.”

“Of course it was not prophecy,” Tom replied, smiling. “It is simply what you always say.”

“Prophecy,” Erkiah said, “would be to tell me why I say those same words each time.”

Tom shook his head. “No, it takes no prophet to see this. If I simply commit to memory all that you say, I can never be more than your pale image in the mirror of time. Your wish is that I will be greater than that, and thus you compel me to read for myself and challenge you.”

Erkiah smiled weakly. “I would that we had met in happier times, my son. Were it such, we might spar thus hour upon hour and take joy in the sparring. Alas, we have no such luxury.”

“We will,” Tom said firmly. “We will.”

The Eshkaron Treysahrans was the most difficult of the prophetic writings, but Tom slogged through it with a determination that Erkiah found both admirable and almost frightening. While the name of its author had been lost in the sands of time, Erkiah considered it to be among the oldest of the prophecies, and the one least changed by the pens of the intervening scribes, in large part because few had chosen to transcribe it. His copy might be the only one still in existence. If not, he doubted there were even a half-dozen others.

The title of the work—The Death of the Gods—gave little clue as to its meaning. Unlike the titles of most prophecies, this seemed to have been chosen by the original author, for reasons that had little to do with illuminating the text itself. In fact, the author had gone to great lengths to avoid precisely that sort of illumination.

The text was divided into three sections. The first was a series of riddles without either answers or, it had seemed to Erkiah, any connecting subject line. The second part was a fragmentary chronology, beginning with “the death of the last of the First” and ending with “the birth of the first of the Last,” without any context to identify what beings, or even what kind of beings, were referenced. The few scholars who had appended notes to this section had served only to muddle the issue, with interpretations ranging from the gods themselves to the Firstborn to the Ilduin and even, among the last scholars to attempt, to the Bozandari nobility.

It was the third section—Aneshtreah, or “Admonitions”—which had struck fear in Erkiah those many years ago. In the style of a stern master writing to a recalcitrant young student, it was a series of warnings, each more dire than the last. Its central message was one about trust, or, more aptly, suspicion. It began:

Trust not your mother.

In pain has she born you, in hardship sustained you,

And great her resentment, though hidden it may be.

Trust not your father,

For first when he spawned you was last as he fed you,

And greater his wrath at the end of the day.

And so it continued, admonishing the reader to trust neither man nor beast, friend nor foe, neither wife nor children, neither master nor servant, neither god nor priest. The cold dissection of each relationship left no room for honor, commitment or even love. The final stanza banished all hope:

Trust not the Shadow,

For shadow must fail in the presence of light,

The Dark One must yield to the Fair in the fight.

Trust not the Light,

A dagger he wields for the heart entombed,

While cruelty unbounded his soul attuned.

“By the gods,” Tom whispered as he sat back from the scroll. His face was ashen. “It cannot be.”

Erkiah nodded. “So I thought as well, my friend. And yet, thus it is written.”

“Do I read this right?” Tom asked. “Lord Archer is the Shadow, and the Enemy the Light?”

“The legends say that Ardred was the fairer of the brothers,” Erkiah said. “And surely it does not surprise you that Archer would be called the shadow. From his hair to his visage to the way he has slipped through this world almost unseen for all of these years.”

Tom shook his head slowly. “But if that is true, then Archer will fail us.”

Erkiah simply nodded.

Tom’s face fell as he completed the thought. “And our future rests in the hands of Ardred.”