Of Absence, Darkness, page 6
Daniel drew a slow breath of relief. He had almost expected—not that, exactly. But something like that. Something calculated to reassure, but something suited to this world. That sounded about right. Captain Beres was staring at Tenai in absolute shock. Emelan was smiling a little in wry amusement, no doubt recognizing that emotion.
Tenai offered the bloodied sword back to the captain of the guard. “Well?” she asked.
Without a word, he took the sword back from Tenai. His gaze never leaving her face, he closed his left hand over the blade. Blood welled between his fingers—again, just a little. But carrying as much meaning, certainly. “My life and my honor,” Captain Beres said. His voice, so steady a moment before, was a little ragged as he went on. “Loyalty and obedience I swear to you, Nolas-e. I am your man. I beg your pardon for my earlier hesitation.”
“I grant you pardon,” Tenai said softly. “I take your loyalty. Now that you have returned it to me, I will expect you to set no other lord before me, my captain.”
Beres bowed, rose to his feet, sheathed his sword, bowed a second time, and backed away two precise steps.
“Penon,” Tenai said.
The older man took a breath, cleared his throat, and rallied. “Yes, Nolas-e.”
Tenai indicated Daniel and his daughter. “These are my guests. You will show them all possible courtesy, Penon. Inform the staff of this house. See that all those hereabout are informed.”
“Yes, Nolas-e.”
Tenai made another small gesture, this time indicating Emelan. “Captain Beres, this is a man I happened to take up along my way. He has been a soldier, and in a lord's house guard. Now he shall be again. See to it.”
Beres gave Emelan a quick summing look and said, “Yes, Nolas-e.” Emelan returned the captain’s glance without expression and said nothing at all.
“Keep a watch on the south roads,” Tenai added to Beres. “If men or news comes this way from Nerinesir, I wish to know it. I do not expect to hear anything from that direction so quickly, but events may yet surprise me.”
“Yes, Nolas-e.”
Tenai dismissed both Captain Beres and Emelan with a nod and glanced at Daniel and Jenna. “If you will come with me, please, I shall make you at home in my house.”
Tenai's own apartment turned out to include fourteen beautiful rooms, including an elegant little greenhouse, complete with a tiny fountain and colorful fish. Jenna exclaimed over it. Her mother would certainly have enjoyed it. Daniel only wished Kathy could have lived to be here with them and to see this.
“My lord husband loved this sort of folly.” Tenai gave a glance around, half-fond and half-dismissive. “It would have been a shame to let it fall into disrepair. And the staff is proud of it.” There was no grief in her manner or voice, no sense that she felt the loss, only that faint fondness. Daniel was reminded of the time that had passed for her: she really was hundreds of years old, unbelievable as that might still seem. Even after nearly seventeen years, he could not quite imagine ever thinking of his own wife with that kind of dismissive indifference. He didn’t want to imagine that.
The apartment allotted to Daniel and his daughter was not quite as large as Tenai's own, but it was generous enough. There was a door by which they could have private access to Tenai's rooms, if she chose to allow it. All the locks were on her side of doors.
“The arrangement is meant to allow a lord to install a discreet mistress,” Tenai explained to Daniel, a touch drily. “A close friend may occupy such an apartment, or a foreign lord with whom the lord of the house wishes to make private arrangements. There are multitudinous uses. I trust you will find it sufficient for your comfort.”
Daniel glanced around at the elegance. “I'm sure we will.”
“Among other things, it will make clear your status to my household.”
“Yes, and about that, Tenai—”
A door opened and closed, in some outer room, and someone clapped hands, somewhere quite close by.
“Come,” Tenai called, with no evident surprise.
The someone proved to be three young women and a pair of young men, all in light robes and slippers suitable for indoor wear. They lined up in a row, hands clasped in front of them and eyes modestly lowered.
“Your names, please,” Tenai requested.
They gave them, in a soft chorus: the girls were Enera, Setai, and Melesa. The young men were Tebin and Dart.
Tenai studied them. “Enera. You are, perhaps, Demera's sister? Or cousin?”
“Cousin, Nolas-e,” murmured the girl, whom Daniel judged to be a bit younger than Jenna.
“There is a resemblance. Are you afraid of me?”
The girl glanced up through her lashes, a shy look but not a fearful one. “No, Nolas-e. Demera told me—nothing about your private business, Nolas-e, but she told me you were kind.”
Tenai laughed, though without discernable humor. “It's just as well I spent so little time here at the last. Very well, Enera. You may serve me, if you will, and I shall endeavor not to contradict your cousin’s good opinion. You others: my guests are foreign, wholly unaccustomed to our manners. You will find them good-hearted, however, and willing to learn. I am confident you will not shame my house.”
The young people murmured assurance.
Tenai glanced at Daniel, swept her gaze across his daughter. “Be at ease,” she requested. “Jenna, Daniel. These people will assist you in everything. You have had many questions, I know. You may speak to these persons quite freely. Is this well enough?”
Jenna nodded, looking, to her father's experienced eyes, a little frightened and lost.
Setai came half a step forward and bowed, a tiny gesture, just a bob of the head. “There are baths ready—” she made a slight bend of her body to the right, and she and Melesa went off that way, taking Jenna with them. Jenna threw one look over her shoulder toward Daniel, but she was already relaxing, responding to the obvious friendliness of the other young women.
Tenai smiling, nodded to Daniel. “And these young men will see to your needs. I trust you will be comfortable. I ask you will bear with any awkwardness, as I know many of the customs here will be unfamiliar. Please be patient with everything. Rest well, my friend. I will see you in the morning.” She turned toward the door that led into her private apartment.
Daniel took a step after her. “Tenai—”
She stopped and turned back. Her smile was wry, but seemed to him to express genuine humor. “All will be well. You have had a difficult and tense introduction to Talasayan, but truly, you will be safe here, Daniel. Whatever may come, no peril will attend you tonight. You and Jenna will be quite safe. This is my house. Fear nothing. We shall all rest this night, and I shall see you when the day brightens tomorrow.”
If someone had twisted Daniel’s arm, he’d have had to admit that just at this moment, a hot bath with plenty of soap was indeed looking more desirable than practically anything else in the world. Two worlds, possibly. Sighing, he nodded and let her go, turning at last toward the waiting young men and his own bath. With supper no doubt to follow, he assumed, and a real bed after that. All but limp at the thought, he allowed himself to dismiss all less-immediate concerns.
Undeniably odd to be attended by quiet, earnest staff, but then they probably found him odd and foreign too. Fortunately, they were willing to leave him alone in the bath. With soap, thank God, and warm towels and a soft robe. He hardly noticed anything about the bedroom, when he finally found it down a short hallway from the bath, except that it was warm and the bed was luxuriously soft. It was impossible to hang onto worry after that, impossible even to wonder if Jenna was all right. He knew his daughter was fine. He knew they were safe, both of them, at least for tonight, because Tenai had promised it was so.
-4-
In the morning, when Daniel worked his way reluctantly out of the very soft and comfortable bed, Tenai had already gone out. Galt, Tebin explained, had gone with her. So, to Daniel’s slight unease, had Jenna. Though he knew his daughter would be perfectly safe—though he knew Tenai would look out for her no matter what—he would still have liked to just check in with his daughter.
He had to acknowledge, however, that he was glad he hadn’t been awake to go with them. Ah, the resilience of the young! Not that Tenai was exactly young. She was merely ... not aged. He wondered, now, how he had failed to notice that sixteen years hadn’t changed her at all. He truly hadn’t realized that, until now, when he finally had the leisure to think back over everything that had happened and notice that. Surely before another sixteen years had passed, everybody would have noticed. He wondered what Tenai would have done then. Probably she wouldn’t have explained that she’d surrendered mortality to a literal incarnation of death as the price for his help against an immortal king.
Or maybe she would have explained it exactly that way. In fact, she had. Daniel just hadn’t believed her.
The young men brought a generous breakfast, laying out the dishes on the apartment’s wide balcony. This included a kind of rice porridge with bits of pork, not actually bad, but odd to American tastes. Daniel was relieved to find that breakfast also included eggs, peaches, and very good bread, with butter and tart black jam. No coffee, more’s the pity. But there was a kind of sweet, spicy tea that wasn’t bad.
Daniel watched butter melt into the warm bread and thought wistfully about toast. It would have been a little too dark—the spring on his old toaster always stuck a little and so the toast always was a little dark, even on the lightest setting. Jenna had told him he should get a new toaster, but Daniel was used to the old one and thought he would miss the faint taste of charcoal if he got a new one.
Toast and microwaved bacon and orange juice and coffee. And maybe a Danish or two, though Jenna didn’t like him eating junk food and would give him a look if she saw the pastries. She would have orange juice and a whole-grain bagel with cream cheese and lox. Daniel hadn’t ever understood how she could eat lox for breakfast. Probably she had liked the rice porridge.
He had always cherished their mornings together. Though he’d encouraged her to go out of state to college, though he’d told her she ought to try dorm life and get a taste of independence, he had in fact been almost painfully relieved when she’d chosen a university close enough that she could continue to live at home. Which, he knew very well, she had done for his sake. He had meant to make her get an apartment once she’d been accepted into graduate school—make her spread her wings, since she was born to fly.
And now they were here, instead.
When midwinter arrived, would Tenai want to return to ... he couldn’t quite help but think the real world. Or would she remain here? He had a hard time imagining her leaving this world, now that he’d had a chance to see her fitting herself back into it. She had so obviously come home.
Maybe the king, what was his name, Mitereh something, maybe he would force Tenai to leave again. Maybe he wouldn’t want to wait till midwinter. Maybe he’d be willing to start a war to force her out of this world, even if she wasn’t.
Probably Daniel could borrow a whole lot of trouble if he tried. That did not actually seem a useful exercise.
If Tenai did want to return along with Daniel and Jenna, or decided she had to return ... hmm. Explanations of what had happened might be tricky. Maybe they could tell something of the truth. An enemy of Tenai’s had tracked her down and ... and what? Daniel—or more likely Jenna—would need to think of a brilliant bit of fiction.
He gazed over the edge of the balcony to the village below Tenai’s manor. The neat fields stretched out beyond the village, with darker woodlands beyond. The whole scene looked very ... quaint, he supposed. Not quite real. Rather like a painted backdrop. It had felt much more real when he’d been riding through it for day after day.
One of the young men had brought clothing for him. Not actually too different from American clothing, which made things easier. Brown trousers, a cream-colored shirt that laced up the front, and a brown vest with blue embroidery down the front. Daniel dressed carefully. The trousers were meant for a man with longer legs and somewhat less bulk. Daniel fastened them with a certain amount of difficulty, grateful for the vest that disguised his too-ample midriff. He looked at himself, a little uneasily, in a tall mirror. He still looked like an ordinary middle-aged psychiatrist of generally sedentary habits, only dressed a little oddly. He still looked like himself. After he had lived in this house, in this world, for the months that led up to midwinter ... he wondered whether he would still recognize himself then.
*
The house was beautiful. Daniel wandered through it for a while, admiring and a little uneasy, hoping he wasn’t annoying the staff. He wound up, frankly bored, in a comfortable chair in the apartment he and Jenna had been given, waiting for Tenai and his daughter to return. He wished he could read the script in which all her scrolls and books had been written. Since he couldn’t, he found himself dozing again. He dreamed of Tenai as he had first seen her, striking and dangerous, caged by walls of silence she had built around herself: he dreamed she spoke, but the words that came out of her mouth were swords whose blades ran with blood. He woke, jerking upright, his heart beating hard. The breeze that stirred the sheer draperies at the window was slow and hot. Midafternoon, maybe. He pushed himself upright, gingerly because he’d stiffened up again. Not young enough to fall asleep in a chair. He should go walk around the house or something, work the kinks out of his neck and back. Maybe one of the staff would tell him the titles of the books. Even knowing that much would be interesting and informative.
Jenna found him not long after that. She was perfectly safe and happy. Obviously. She was bubbling with enthusiastic descriptions of villages, of flocks of cream-colored sheep and a stream with a wide bridge just below a wild little waterfall. She also informed him that there would be a banquet that evening in honor of Tenai’s return, and, ignoring Daniel’s groan at the thought of attending a no-doubt formal event, insisted on showing him the clothes Tenai had sent for her. All in shades of blue, embroidered with tiny pearls over the bodice and at the hem.
“And she sent this for you,” Jenna said, bouncing on her toes and waving a hand at another outfit. Daniel groaned again. Blue and brown, and not quite as fancy as he’d feared, once he’d gotten a good look at it. No pearls, at least. But, unlike the clothing he was wearing now, the vest was stiff with embroidery: abstract wave-like shapes in dark blue over the lighter blue of the cloth.
“Melesa’s going to help me do my hair,” Jenna said, still in that bright tone that implied nothing could be more fun than a banquet. “She’s going to be playing—she plays something called a kithe, she showed it to me, it looks kind of like a guitar, but not as big and a lot rounder. It sounds kind of like rain falling.”
“How nice,” said Daniel, not really listening. “Listen, where’s Tenai now, Jen?”
“In her study, with Galt,” his daughter informed him, not in the least concerned.
When Daniel found Tenai, indeed, she was in her study, with what looked like all the province’s records for the past sixteen years piled around them on tables and on the floor. What kinds of records? Daniel wondered. Records about cattle, maybe; about crops and the grinding of grain and the building of houses. Enough to keep plenty of accountants busy. If they had accountants here. Maybe they’d just had Galt.
The young man looked exhausted. Tenai did not. She was as cool and untouchable as ever. She sat at her desk, leaning back in her chair, regarding Galt expressionlessly. Galt stood in front of the desk, his big, bony hands clenched together in front of him, white-knuckled with tension. Tenai gave Daniel a slight nod of recognition—not, he thought, welcome—when he came in. Galt didn’t even glance his way, as though he didn’t dare look away from Tenai. Daniel slipped into a chair to one side and folded his hands in his lap.
“Yes,” the young man said to her, in response to some question Daniel had missed. His voice was as tense as his hands.
“Why?” Tenai asked him, her manner neutral. “My previous steward found the original village sufficient.”
“Hacara—Hacara was a good man, Nolas-e. But he was ... he had become rigid in his outlook. Sometimes—sometimes he did not see clearly. The houses of the old village were not in good repair. They were cold in the winter, and unclean in the summer. They brought too much illness and discomfort. Folk who are content work better for their lord, Nolas-e. The new villages cost to build, but the cost—the cost—” For a second, Galt seemed to lose track of his argument. He blinked, collected himself, and finished, “The cost was recovered over the next seven or eight years, Nolas-e, in higher yields in other areas.”
“Perhaps those areas would have yielded well anyway. Perhaps the link you try to draw does not exist.”
“Nolas-e, your folk worked longer hours because they were sick less often, and worked more effectively because they were content. At least part of the increase was due to those differences.”
“In your judgment.”
“In my judgment, which I had to depend on, Nolas-e, because neither you nor your lawful steward were—were available.”
“And Penon agreed with you.”
Galt hesitated, probably not knowing what response Tenai wanted to that. She did not help him, either, not with her neutral tone and cool expression. He said finally, “Yes, Nolas-e.”
“I see you also removed the post, and the block.”
“Hacara—in my judgment, Nolas-e, your steward had come to depend on those things too much. The people feared him too much. They were ready to fear anyone set over them.”
“You courted their favor. One might expect a slack attitude to result.”
“I courted their trust, Nolas-e, and their pride. If the people do not trust the judgment of their lords, they are afraid. If they are afraid, they look over their shoulders too often. A man looking over his shoulder can't plow a straight line, Nolas-e. And a man who feels no pride in his work will not care whether the line is straight.”
