The Walls of Air (Darwath #2) - Page 8

Gil drifted slowly to consciousness, with the puzzled awareness that she had been asleep. The smell of incense clogged her nostrils, choking after the things she had smelled in a dream – if it had been a dream. Soft chanting, strophe and antistrophe, mingled in her ears. She was aware that she sat in a kind of octagonal anteroom, shadowed, dark, and empty. Fishing in her clouded recollections, she thought she must have come here to rest after the other members of the procession had returned from the sunset execution.

Or maybe the execution had been only a dream.

She didn't think so. The mud and snow on her boots were fresh and dripping as they melted on the smooth black stone of the floor. She remembered stumbling in the wake of every man, woman, and child in the Keep across the road to the knoll that faced the gates, hearing the wailing of wolves and wind in the forest and the solitary weeping of the three or four women who would mourn Bendle Stooft and Parscino Pral.

Like a counterpoint to that melody, she'd heard the muttering in the crowds all around. 'Good time, too. When we refugeed from Gae to Karst, the old skinflint charged me a penny for a loaf of bread – a whole penny! And me with six kids starving and no place to lay our heads!' 'Penny for bread?' A man laughed bitterly. 'Him and Pral charged me six coppers for a bit of space on the floor of a wash-house, to spend the night in shelter. I lost my wife that night. For all of me, that Guard could have taken his hands and head, as well as his sodding foot.'

Support your local Guards, Gil thought, exhausted, and raised her head to look around her. Memory came dearer now. She'd been with Janus and Melantrys. Alwir had asked to speak with them up in the Royal Sector. She'd followed them, her vision

greying, as far as the Church and then had fallen behind. Let Janus deal with him, she'd thought. I'm not going to climb the goddam steps on his say-so.

She saw now that the anteroom had been built like a turret against the back wall of the Aisle long after the Keep's original construction as an entrance-hall to the sanctuary itself. To Gil's historian's eye, this type of excrescence denoted some period of overcrowding in the Keep's history, the same overcrowding that had caused the original passageways and cells to proliferate and tangle so alarmingly. The anteroom contained little but a few carved stone benches and an ikonlike painting of an unfamiliar saint being nibbled to death by snakes. On the far wall, a doorway led into the sanctuary itself.

Somewhere a door opened. Chanting drifted from the sanctuary, winding echoes of the monks' voices praising God in an archaic tongue. To Gil it was weirdly familiar, a confusing mirror of her medieval studies, a bizarre reminder of the Void that she had crossed to come here, as perhaps others had also done. The Scriptures Govannin had read in the place of execution had been familiar, oppressing her with the sense of dealing on two planes of reality.

The image of Govannin returned to her, silhouetted against the yellow sunset sky. Like a dark, hard heelstone between the massive pylons of the pillars, she had stood in her billowing cloak; the pillars lay like a gun-sight between the gates of the Keep and the dark notch of Sarda Pass, and Govannin's cruciform arms had formed bony crosshairs, sighting on the small, baleful eye of the sinking sun. Parscino Pral had hung limply in his chains on one pillar, half-dead already with shock and loss of blood. Bendle Stooft had cried and whimpered and pleaded throughout the Bishop's prayers. All around them, the men and women of the Keep had stood like a dark lake of watching eyes. On the other side of the knoll, that silent company had been joined by a second, smaller group of refugees, some two thousand ragged men, women, and hungry children come in silence to observe the justice of the Keep.

Snow winds had whipped across the Vale. The chains had clanked on the pillars, and the keys had rattled in Janus' hands. Alwir read out the charges in his trained, powerful voice, and Govannin spoke her prayers, formally requesting the Lord to forgive these men their sin, but implying by her tone of voice that it was all the same to her if He did not. Then, as the sun vanished into the bruised darkness of the banks of clouds, they had all turned their backs on the doomed men and returned to the Keep as the swift winter twilight enfolded the land.

Gil had a hazy memory of Maia of Thran, leaning on his staff as he limped up the Keep steps between Alwir, Govannin, and Minalde. She did not think she had seen anyone take the muddy downward road back to the Tall Gates.

But that, too, might have been a dream.

Restless with fever, Gil got to her feet and walked to the sanctuary door. From its shadows, she looked into the enormous cell, double the normal height, with a floor space, if cleared, of possibly ten thousand square feet, although Gil's judgement of such things had never been very good. That whole shadowy vastness was lighted by only three candles, burning on the bare stone slab of the central altar; by their spare, small light, the monstrous chamber dissolved itself into a chaos of climbing latticework. Pillars, galleries, and balconies hung suspended one above the other like stone lace, with miniature chapels balanced in fantastic hanging turrets and irregularly shaped platforms winding upward in stair-step spirals; over all of it brooded inanimate armies of demons, saints, angels, animals, and monsters peering from jungles of carved tracery. In the intense shadows, not a soul was visible, but Gil could hear them chanting, chapel answering chapel, throughout that eerie gloom.

She had heard it before, on the road down from Karst -blessings and requiems, vespers and matins. Where did the roots feed across the Void, she wondered, and in which direction? What was the evolution of ideas? Straight transfer or the doubled branches of an archetypical Platonic root? Or something else, something wholly inconceivable? She

wondered about that saint in the anteroom, whose curiously elipsoid eyes held an expression of startlement rather than pain. Was there a Christian saint who had ended his days to give pagan vipers their elevenses?

It was all scholars' games, she knew, and would not alter one whit the threat of the Dark, or the inevitable clash between Alwir, Govannin, and the Archmage. But Gil was a scholar, and no amount of training with the Guards, no matter how many men she killed or what she felt about it, would change that. It was what no one, with the exception of Ingold, had ever understood about her – her delight in knowledge for its own sake, in the Holmesian reconstruction of long-vanished events, and her nosing quest for the uttermost roots of the world.

'Gil- Shalos.'

She swung around, startled. Through the haze of her delirium, backed by the lights of the antechamber, Bishop Govannin appeared like an angel in a fever drearn, sexless and pitiless in the blood-scarlet of her episcopal robes, a creature of inhuman beauty, intelligence, and loyalty to her God. But her voice was a dry, woman's voice. 'You are not well?' she asked slowly. 'At the tribunal you seemed ill, and now it looks not to be going better.'

The wound's a little feverish, is all,' Gil excused herself. 'I'll get over it in a day or so.'

The long, bony fingers indicated, without touching, the slings and strapping that bound Gil's shoulder. 'More than that, I fear,' she said. 'Shoulders can be a bad business.'

Beyond them in the holy place, a fresh wave of chanting rose – for the soul, Gil presumed, of Bendle Stooft. Beside her, the Bishop raised her head, listening with a critical ear. In the golden fog of the lamplight, Gil considered that face, the high, intelligent brow shadowing a deep fanatic's eyes, the stubbornness that scarred cheeks and lips like dueling cuts. Fine, small ears, dainty as shells, ornamented the smoothness of the bald pate where it ran into the old, wrinkled power of the

ropy neck muscles. It occurred to Gil that in her youth Govannin Narmenlion must have been a strikingly lovely woman, the toast of a regiment -except that women with that kind of cold and driving intelligence were very seldom the toast of anything.

'Your Grace? she asked softly, and the dark eyes returned to her as if from a reverie. 'How was the Keep built?'

The Bishop considered the matter carefully, not as Gil's friends among the Guards had. Finally she said, 'I do not know. Which in itself is strange,' she added, her long fingers moving to caress the black stone of the doorway at her side. 'For it is our shelter and our home.'

'Does anyone?'

Govannin shook her head. 'Not to my knowledge. I was considered grossly overeducated for an heiress, yet I can recall no word of that.'

Gil had to smile. 'Yeah, I was – grossly overeducated, too.'

A ghost of an answering smile touched those full ungiving lips. 'Were you?'

'Oh, yes. I was a scholar in my own lands. I suppose in a way that's what I will always be. Would the Church records have any mention of the building of the Keep? How it was done, or by whom?

The Bishop folded her arms, thinking. Past her, Gil saw movement in the sanctuary, grey-robed monks ascending narrow steps, dimly lighted by the amber glow of a censer. They vanished in shadows, but their voices remained, like the sound of winds in the rocks. 'Perhaps,' Govannin said finally. 'Most of the Scripture comes from the Times Before, but it contains teaching and wisdom, rather than engineering. The records that, no thanks to my lord Alwir, we brought here to the Keep go back to the time when the see was here at Renweth, but I do not think they extend into the Time of the Dark itself. But some

might.' She must have seen the brightening of Gil's face. 'Is this important to you?'

'It could be,' Gil said. 'Those records could contain in them some clue, some information, not only about the Keep but about the Dark. What they are – why they came -why they left.'

'Perhaps,' the Bishop said again, after a long moment's thought. 'But for the most part, I think you will find them simply tales of how much the harvest was, who was born and who was buried, and if the rains were light or heavy. As for the coming of the Dark to the Times Before…' She frowned, her dark, fine brows drawing together and the lines in that strong, crepy face hardening. 'I have heard that the civilizations of Before were wicked and debased. Amid their pride and their splendour, they practised abominations. It is my belief, now as then, that the Time of the Dark was just punishment, which lasted for the span allotted by God. The Book of lab tells us that God will let the Evil One have domination for a time, for the Lord's own purposes.' She shrugged. 'I have lived a long time and have learned never to question the motivations of God.'

'Maybe,' Gil said. 'But it seems like a lot of suffering and pain to go through, when perhaps it could be averted. If God didn't want us to learn from history, we wouldn't have hands to write with, nor eyes to read.'

'A wizard's sophistry,' the Bishop replied calmly. 'One by which they are all tempted and all fall. No, I do not criticize the argument, though I do know you are loyal to your wizard friends. But I doubt the utility of struggling against the intent of God. His ways are slow but as sure and inescapable as the coming of the ice in the north.'

'But who,' Gil insisted, 'can know the intent of God?'

'Not I, certainly. And I do not think it evil to learn from history. I am not yet one of those monks who preach the burning of all books and the telling of Scripture from memory alone. Knowledge is power, whether over the Dark Ones, over Kings who would usurp unto themselves what is rightfully

God's, or over sorcerers and mages who do not believe in God at all and whom the Devil uses for his own ends. We can combat knowledge with knowledge and their power with ours.'

'Like the Rune of the Chain? Gil countered a little bitterly. She got a dark, enigmatic look in return.

'The use of such devices is unlawful,' the Bishop said. The Rune of the Chain can be spelled to bind and cripple a wizard's power, and I have heard of its being so used. But using evil's work in any way defeats the good of the cause. Only evil can come of this quest for the Archmage of Quo."

'You don't think a wizard's power might be given to him by God?'

Her tone was perhaps more heated than she had intended. Govannin regarded her for a moment expres-sionlessly, seeming through the fog of fever and lamplight to be nothing more than a bodiless shadow and a fiery gleam of eyes. 'You rush to his defence,' she said at last, and her voice had only the calm interest of a python that watched the world and chose what prey it would. 'Beware of him, my child. He has great ability and much personal charm for a man who has traded his soul to Satan – which is what he has done, though he will not own it. Satan uses such men also, who from ignorance or pride will not see what they have done by giving in to the temptation to power. But I am old, Gil-Shalos. I have seen the other kind of wizard, evil wizards, renegades, headstrong, ambitious, and self-seeking. If you had ever met such a one, who worked for and openly welcomed the powers of Crookedness, you would never again think that the talents of a mage come from or have anything to do with God.'

'But he isn't like that!' Gil protested hotly. Images rushed to her mind and unwise words to her lips. She remembered Ingold standing in the brilliance of the magelight, holding blizzard and darkness at bay until the Guards could get Tir and Aide to the Keep, the old man walking into a tunnel of sounding blackness, surrounded by runes of power that no one else could see, and

the look in his eyes when he had handed her his glowing staff and asked her to guard his back. 'He would never bend to evil, never use his powers for ill. There can be good and bad wizards, the same way there are good and bad men…'

Govannin raised dark, elegant brows. Gil stumbled and broke off her words, her cheeks suddenly hotter than even fever could account for, glad of the veiling shadows. 'I'm sorry,' she stammered, confused. 'I spoke disrespectfully, and all you have done has been kindness to me.' It had doubtless been decades, Gil reflected, since any member of hoi polloi had so lashed out at Govannin Narmenlion.

But the Bishop was only silent for a time, a curious, considering light in her eyes. When she spoke, her dry, cracked voice was kind. 'I like you, my child,' she said. 'You are a warrior as you are a scholar, single-minded, and never without purpose. Your heart is very pure – pure in its scholarship, pure in its violence, and pure in its love. Such hearts can be hurt and can do measureless good and measureless evil, but they cannot be bought or cowed.' She put out her hand, her fingers ice-cold against Gil's cheek. 'I shall send you the Church records, if you desire it, and also someone to interpret the writing for you. The knowledge is my gift to you, with the consequences of what that knowledge shall bring.'

She held out her bony hand, and Gil dropped to one knee to kiss the dark bezel of the episcopal ring.

Later, waking in the barracks from feverish sleep, Gil wondered if this, too, had been a dream. But after supper, Minalde appeared in the barracks, bearing a heavy book which, she said, the lady Govannin had asked if she would take to Gil-Shalos.

'I was coming over anyway,' she explained, seating herself at the foot of Gil's bunk.

Through the doorway beyond her, Gil could hear the noises of the night watch going out, the creaking of leather, the faint clink

of buckles, and Melantrys' light, bantering chaff.

Minalde ran her fingers along the metal-clasped edge of the cover. 'What is it?'

Gil explained briefly her desire to probe the origins of the Keep to learn something of its secrets. 'I mean, hell,' she said, 'there's so much more to the Keep than meets the eye. Like -how come there's a flow of water in the latrines and fountains? Even if the Keep was built over an underground river, the stuff doesn't run uphill. Why is the air fresh in most places, not foul and stuffy? How was the Keep built in the first place? I know it was built three thousand years ago by Dare of Renweth, at the time of the first rising of the Dark,' she went on, 'but how long did it take? Where did everybody stay during construction, if they didn't start on it until after the Dark began appearing? Or were the Dark only down in the river valleys and the mountains safe?'

'No,' Aide answered simply. 'Because there's a Nest of the Dark not twenty miles from here, as you know.'

Gil remembered the tilted slab of black stone in the midst of those clinging woods and shuddered.

'And for the rest of it,' Aide went on, 'you've already told me more than I knew before. I have heard that the magic in Times Before was different from the magic now, but I don't know what that means. I do know that centuries ago there used to be magic places, sort of temples of wizardry, in many cities, not just at Quo – so maybe back then it was the same way. Rudy says that magic is fused into the walls of the Keep.'

At the mention of her lover's name, Aide's cheeks coloured faintly, and Gil hid a grin. In many ways this dark-haired girl reminded her of the freshmen she'd taught; she was sweet, shy, pretty, and very unsure of herself. At such times it was difficult to remember that this soft-voiced girl had passed through fire and darkness, had seen her husband die in the flaming ruin of the battle-broken Palace, and had gone against the forces of the night, armed only with a torch and her own wild courage. She

was the Queen of Darwath, the true ruler of the Keep, sitting at the foot of the disordered bunk with her legs crossed under her multicoloured peasant skirts.

'So anyway, the Bishop offered to lend me the books to look for the answers,' Gil said, edging herself up against her makeshift pillows. 'Gnift's already told me that training or walking patrol is out for at least three weeks… I suppose he's right,' she added regretfully, looking down at her strapped shoulder. 'I'll have to get someone to read them to me and teach me the language, though.'

'Oh, I can do that,' Aide said. 'Really, it would be no trouble. I know the Old Wath and the High Tongue of the Church, which is very different from the Wathe. It would be the first time, you know, that I've ever really used anything that I learned in school.'

Gil regarded her for a moment through the barracks gloom, fascinated. 'What did you learn in school?

Aide shrugged. 'Needlework,' she said. 'Songs, and how to write the different modes of poetry. I did an entire tapestry once of Shamilfar and Syriandis – they're famous lovers – but it nearly drove me crazy and I never did another. Dancing, and playing the harp and dulcimer. Something about the major parts of the Realm and a little history. I hated history,' she admitted, shamefaced.

'Most people do,' Gil said comfortingly.

'You don't.' Aide's slim, well-kept hands traced the curve of the leather cover's embossing.

'I always was a freak that way.' Rudy's teasing nickname of 'spook' was hardly a new one.

'Well, the way you talk about it, it's as if as if it has a point,' Aide said. 'As if you're looking for something. All they ever taught us about history was these little stories that were supposed to be morally uplifting, like the one about the man

who died in a valiant rearguard action for the sake of his comrades, or the story about all those old patriarchs who let the enemy slaughter them rather than be enslaved. That kind of thing. Things that I suspect never really happened.'

The image of a stiff little boy in a powdered wig confessing to his father about who axed the cherry tree floated through Gil's mind, and she laughed. 'Maybe.'

'But if you need someone to read to you, I'll be glad to do it.'

Gil studied Aide's face for a moment in silence. She herself had closed out the UCLA library, the way some people close out bars, far too many nights not to understand. And as for having a Queen as a research assistant – Alwir, Gil reflected, will hardly miss her. 'Sure,' she said quietly. 'Any time you can get away.'

They took over the little cubbyhole in the back of the barracks of the Guards, which Ingold had once used as his quarters. It was private, yet close to the centre of things, and, Gil noted to herself, at the opposite end of the Keep from the Royal Sector and its politics. Aide took to coming there every day, usually bringing Tir with her, to work laboriously through the ancient chronicles, while Gil scribbled notes on tablets of wood coated with beeswax that she'd found in an abandoned storeroom. In another storeroom she found a desk, spindle-legged and archaic, small enough to fit into the narrow confines of her study. She used a couple of firkins of dried apples for a seat.

Thus she entered into a period of quiet scholarship, her hours of transcribing and sorting notes alternating with long, solitary rambles through the back reaches of the Keep in search of some sign of the mysterious circular chamber Rudy had described before his departure. It was from one of these that she returned one day to find Aide sitting at her desk, studying one of the tablets in the dim light.

'Is this what you do?' the younger girl asked, touching the creamy surface with a doubtful finger. 'Is this all?*

Gil looked down over her shoulder. She habitually wrote with a silver hairpin as a stylus, in a combination of English and the runes of the Wathe. The tablet had written on it:

Swarl (?) s. of Tirwis, ss. Aldor, Bet, Urgwas –

famine, snows Pass 2, Tl Gts grsnd 4 (-) – no mtn Dk –

pop Kp 12000 + 3 stmts (Big Ring,??) buried gaenguo

(?) – Bp. Kardthe, Tracho

'Sure,' she replied cheerfully. That's from the chronicles you were reading to me yesterday. It's just a condensation – Swarl, whenever the hell he ruled Renweth, had three sons named Aldor, Bet, and Urgwas…'

'Bet's a woman's name,' Aide pointed out.

'Oh.' Gil made a notation. In the Wathe, pronouns had no gender. 'Anyhow, in the second year of his reign there was a famine, and snows heavy enough to close Sarda Pass. The population of the Keep at that time was estimated at twelve thousand, with three settlements in the valley, one of which was named the Big Ring – don't ask me why. There was no mention of the Dark in the chronicle, which isn't surprising, since we have yet to find any word of the Dark in any of these chronicles, and right around the fourth year of his reign there is a statement that the Tall Gates were garrisoned, though they might have been so for years. The Bishops during his reign were Kardthe and later a man or woman named Tracho -'

'That's the old spelling for Trago. It's a man's name.'

Thanks.' Gil made another notation. 'And in his reign they buried the gaenguo, which I meant to ask you about. Isn't gaenguo the old word for a – a lucky place, or a good place?'

'Well – not so much good as just I guess awesome would be the best word.' Aide reached out with her foot and gently rolled Tir's ball back toward him where he was playing happily on the floor. 'There were supposed to be places where certain powers

were concentrated, where people could see things far off or have visions.'

Gil considered, while Tir came crawling busily back across the crackly mat of straw and old rushes that strewed the floor. Aide bent down and let the infant catch her fingers, then lifted him to a standing position beside her knees. Tir threw back his head and crowed with delight.

'You know,' Gil said thoughtfully, 'I bet what they buried was the old Nest of the Dark.' She picked up the tablet and turned it idly over in her fingers, the touch of the wax as cold and smooth as marble. 'God knows, the place is creepy enough. But it's really sort of an opposite to a gaenguo. The atmosphere disrupts magic rather than channels it. Interesting,' she murmured.

'Interesting how?' Aide glanced curiously up at Gil, holding her son's hands in her own.

'Because it looks as if by that time they had completely disassociated the idea of the Dark from the Nests. Which is less surprising than it seems,' she went on, 'when you consider that the bonfire was the first line of defence against the Dark. Which, of course, is why we have no records at all from the Time of the Dark itself.'

Aide let Tir down, and the child crawled determinedly away in pursuit of his ball. 'How vexing,' she said, inadequately.

'Well, more than that.' Gil sat on the narrow bed of grain sacks and covered her cold feet with her cloak. 'It left everybody completely unprepared for it when it happened again. I mean, before last summer nobody had even heard of the Dark.'

'Oh, but we had,' Aide protested. 'That's what – In a way it worked against Ingold, you see. When I was a little girl, my nurse Medda used to tell me not to get out of bed and run about the house at night because the Dark Ones would eat me up. I think all nurses used to tell their children that.' Her voice

faltered – in the end it had been Medda who had been eaten up by the Dark. 'It was something you grew out of. Most little children believed in the Dark Ones. It was only their parents who didn't.'

Gil momentarily pictured the probable fate of any shabby and unlikely pilgrim who tried to convince the authorities that the bogeyman was really going to devour America. 'I'm surprised Eldor believed him,' she murmured.

'Eldor- ' Minalde paused. 'Eldor was very exceptional. And he trusted Ingold. Ingold was his tutor when he was a child.'

Gil glanced up quickly, hearing the sudden tension that choked off Aide's voice. The younger girl was looking determinedly away into the distance, fighting the film of tears that had appeared so abruptly in her eyes. Whatever her love for Rudy, Gil thought, there is a love there which can never be denied. In the strained silence which followed, Melantrys' voice could be heard, arguing with Seya about whether or not she should get rid of her cloak in a sword fight.

Then Aide forced a small rueful smile and brushed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. 'I'm sorry.'

'It's okay.'

'No,' Aide said. 'It's just that sometimes I don't understand what there was between me and – and Eldor. As if I never understood it. I thought I could make him love me if I loved him hard enough. Maybe I was just being stupid.' She wiped her eyes again. 'But it hurts, you know, when you give everything you have and the one you give it to just just looks at it and turns aside.' She glanced away again, unable to meet Gil's eyes. Gil, clumsy-tongued and unhandy with her own or anyone else's emotions, could find nothing to say.

But Aide seemed to take no offence at the silence. In fact, she seemed to find a kind of comfort in it. Tir, having reached the end of the room, came crawling back toward the girls with his usual single-minded determination, and Aide smiled as she bent

to help him stand once more. He was very much like Aide, Gil thought, watching mother and child together – small-boned and compact, with her wide morning-glory-blue eyes. Just as well, she added to herself, that there's so little of Eldor in his only child. When you're carrying on an affair with a man the Church says is a servant of Satan, it's no help to have the echo of his predecessor before your eyes every time you turn around.

Aide looked up suddenly, as if deliberately putting aside the pain and confusion of that first, hopeless love. 'So where were you?' she asked Gil. The Guards said you'd left right after breakfast.'

'Oh.' Gil shrugged. 'Exploring, looking for something, really… You've never run across any mention anywhere of a – a kind of observation room in the Keep, have you? A room with a black stone table in it, with a crystal kind of thing in the middle?'

'No.' Then Aide frowned, her black brows drawing down into two swooping wings. 'But that's funny – it sounds so familiar. A table – has it a crystal disc, set into the top of the table?'

'Yeah,' Gil said. 'It's part of the table. How did you know?*

'I don't know. I have the feeling I've seen something like that before, but – almost as if I dreamed about it, because I know I've never seen anything of the kind. That's funny,' Aide went on quietly, sitting back against the desk, her face troubled. Tir, whom she had lifted on to her knee, promptly reached for the jewelled clasp that held her hair, and she undid it and gave it to him, her dark hair falling in a river down over her shoulders and her child.

Gil propped the arm in the sling against her knees. 'Why is it funny?' she asked.

'Because – I've had that feeling a lot of times in the Keep,' Aide said in a worried voice. 'As if as if I remembered things, remembered being here before. Sometimes I'll be walking down a staircase or along a hall, and I'll have this feeling of having

been there before.'

'Like deja vu?' There was a technical term in the language of the Wathe for that – a circumstance which Gil found interesting.

'Not entirely.'

'Like the inherited memories that are passed on from parent to child in certain families?' Gil asked quietly. 'You did tell me your House was a collateral branch of the House of Dare.'

Aide looked over at her worriedly in the gloomy yellowish lamplight. 'But the memories only pass from father to son,' she said softly. 'And Eldor told me once that his memories of other lives were like memories of his own. Very clear, like visions. Mine are just – feelings.'

'Maybe women hold inherited memory differently,' Gil said. 'Maybe it's less concrete in women and therefore hasn't been called upon for centuries, because there was always a male heir of the House of Dare. Maybe you haven't remembered because you didn't need to.' Gil leaned forward, the grain in the sacks she