Winter Death Part 5

Because I killed a man, Kayla.

She felt the harsh shock she had felt upon first hearing the words; felt the panic as she had attempted to deny the truth of them by finding the lie in her mother's mood. It wasn't there.

Bbut why? How?

I forced him to feel my despair, my self-loathing, as if it were his own. He was not trained; not aware that what he felt came from outside of his core; he could not cope with what it was I placed there. I did not lift a hand, of course, but the end was the same as if I had.

And worse.

I look at my hands now, and I see a killer's hands. I look at my hands, and I see worse: I taught this Gift. I pa.s.sed it on. But-but what does that have to do with Riverend? Nothing. Everything.

The Holds are so dark and so isolated people can go mad in the winters. And do.

But...with my Gift, here, among these people, I can remind them, without words, of the spring and the summer; I can give them hope. They take hope, and they make of it what they will, and we survive until the pa.s.ses open.

But is that so different? If you make them feel what they don't feel Is there a difference between watering a plant and drowning it? Here, in Riverend, there are few. The ore the mines produce is needed by the King. I have chosen to help these people, as I can, because I have grown to love them.

She had been silent, then.

Promise me, Kayla.

I promise, Mother.

In the end, she slept.

And the great beast was waiting for her, eyes red with fire, wings a maelstrom of emotion. He was despair, anger, loathing, but worse: He made mockery of the transience of the things Kayla valued: Love. Loyalty. Hope.

And who better to know of transience than she? She had buried a husband, a mother, a father. But worse, so much worse.

The dreams had always been her terror and her salvation.

When she lost her oldest child, Darius, unnamed and unnameable, had come to her in the untouched winter of a Riverend that was barren of life, and she clung to his back and wept, and wept, and wept.

Her youngest was old enough to walk, not old enough to speak, and he was also feverish, and she prayed to every G.o.d that might have conceivably lived, and in the end, weak and almost weightless, her second child's fever had broken.

But he never recovered, and although he seemed to take delight in the coming of spring, in the warmth and color of summer, the weight he had lost did not return.

And she had wept then, at the start of winter, because she knew what it would mean. But at least, with her second, she had time. She told him stories. She sang him songs. She held him in the cradle of aching arms, and she comforted him, and herself, until she was at last alone.

But she was considered young enough in the village, if her heart was scarred; she was twenty-two. Her oldest son had survived six years, which was better than many, and the oldwives gathered to discuss her fate, and to ask her to marry again.

She had almost forgotten her mother's words, that day, and the promise she had made to her mother-for her mother was dead, and that death was so less painful than this terrible intrusion of the living. She had had nothing, nothing at all. She had carried the blackness and the emptiness within her until it had almost hollowed her out completely. She felt it now; it was a visceral, terrible longing.

A desire for an end. An ending.

And she knew it for her own.

The dragon nodded, wordless; swept back huge wings, opened its terrible jaws.

They were kin, she thought. He offered nothing but truth.

Two things saved her.

The first was the flash of white in the darkness: Darius, the Companion of winter in Riverend. And the second, more real, more painful, the small fingers that bruised her arms, the whimpering that reached her ears, that pierced the fabric of a dream she could not escape, tearing a hole in the wall between sleep and the waking world.

The child was weeping. She held him, and the ache in her arms subsided. This was what she was. This was what her mother had taught her to be: comfort. Hope.

But when he called for his mother in the darkened room, she answered; she could not deprive herself of that one lie.

In the morning, grim, she rose. The child was sleeping, and his peace was fitful, but it was there. She dressed in the odd, gray uniform she'd been given, admiring the quality of its workmans.h.i.+p, if not the choice of its colors. Then she lifted him, waking him. He was disoriented, but only for a moment; she let him throw his arms around her neck until she could almost not breathe for the tightness of the grip. She loved that breathlessness.

"Daniel," she told him gently, "I need you to talk with Darius. I need you to stay with him."

The boy's smile was shy, but it was genuine.

"I-I have work to do today. Darius is not really allowed inside."

"But he's not a horse!"

"No...he's not a horse. He's better than that, and I'm sure he'll let you ride him if you want. Come. Let's find him."

The halls were bustling; there were more people in the Collegium than she had ever seen in the Hold, and she found their presence almost overwhelming. But she discovered two important things from the young-the very young-man who stopped to talk to her. The first, where breakfast was served-and when, that being important-and the second, where the Companions were stabled.

She knew breakfast was important, and stopped for just long enough to feed Daniel. Then she carried him to where she knew Darius was waiting.

He met her eyes, his own dark and unblinking. Without preamble, Kayla set Daniel upon his back. He accepted the burden.

:You made a weapon out of him.: :No, Kayla. He made a weapon out of himself He thought that that was the best way of proving his worth to a distant father.: :But his father-: :His father loved him, yes. Loves him still.: :If he was truly an Empath, he would have known that :The Kings,: Darius said sadly, :are taught to s.h.i.+eld themselves. Against all intrusion, all influence. They must be strong.: :And his youngest son was so insecure that he couldn't infer that love.: Darius was silent.

:My mother knew him.: :Your mother...knew him, yes. Your mother could have reached him, had she lived; your mother was the one who discovered his Gift, the strength of his Gift.

Your mother was the woman who insisted that he be moved from the court and taken to a place without the politics of power.: :But she must have known-the dreams, the dreams I had-she must have had them: :I...do not know. She could have reached him. The Heralds who have some hint of your Gift...could not. He made a weapon out of himself and the forging was completed with the death of his Companion.: She knew, then.

:He...he killed his Companion?: :No! No. But the loss broke something in him. No other Companion can reach him now, and believe me, Kayla, we have tried. He is one of the Gifted; he can hear us all, if he so chooses.: :But this must have happened years ago-: :Yes, but few.: :That's not possible. I felt him years ago. In my dreams. I...: But the dreams had been different. She had felt loneliness, isolation, the desperate desire to be loved.

Not madness.

:You are powerful, Kayla. What you felt then was true. It is far, far less than what you will feel now. Far less. Kayla, I must warn you-: :I know.: :Those who are affected, always, are those who have some hint of the Gift. When the Gift is strong, the effect is not sleep...: :It's death.: :Yes.: Gisel summoned her shortly after. Darius informed her of the summons, and she hastened back-with some difficulty, for the building really was a maze of pa.s.sages compared to the simplicity of the Hold-to the rooms in which they had first met.

"I'm ready to meet him now," she said, before Gisel could speak.

Gisel raised a brow. "There are things you should know about- "

"There is nothing I should know that you will tell me," Kayla replied softly. "But I believe that this-this prince-has been hunting for me for much of my life, and it's about time I stopped running."

"Hunting for you?"

"In my dreams," Kayla replied.

Gisel added nothing. "The Grays will do. Gregori is here, in the Collegium.

We've sent all those who might be affected as far away as we can; distance seems to have some affect on his ability to-to reach people."

"But not enough."

"Not enough, no. Understand that we have not explained this to the world at large. It is treason to speak of it. I will have your oath, child, that you will comport yourself as a Herald-as a true servant of the King."

Kayla nodded. And then, quietly, she knelt, her knees gracing the cold stone floor.

The two women traveled; Kayla let Gisel lead, and made no attempt to memorize their journey, to map the long halls, the odd doors, the hanging tapestries and the crystal lamps. She could see other things more clearly. Once or twice she reached out for Darius, and when he replied, she continued.

Until they reached a set of doors.

She froze outside of them, almost literally.

"Do you know why Darius waited?" she asked Gisel softly.

"Waited? To Choose you?"

Kayla nodded.

"No. He told us that he knew where you were to be found, but he refused to tell us how to find you until this spring."

She nodded again. Touched the door. It was cold. Winter cold. Death cold.

Within these walls, beyond these doors, the dragon lay coiled.

"Will you wait outside?" Kayla asked. It was not possible to give an order to this woman.

Gisel ignored the request; she pulled a ring of keys from her belt and slid one into the door's single lock.

Whatever Kayla expected from the rooms of a prince had come from stories that Widow Davis told the children. She had long since pa.s.sed the age where stories were necessary, but she wanted them anyway. She gazed, not at a room, but at a small graveyard, one blanketed as if by snow, hidden from sight unless one knew how to look for it.

She knew.

Her dead were here. Her dead...and the losses that death inflicted. She faced them now. Swallowed air, shaking.

"It's hard," Kayla whispered. "When they're gone, it's so d.a.m.ned hard."

"What?" Gisel's sharp tone had not softened in the slightest.

"To feel loved. To know that you are loved. I think-I think sometimes it's the hardest thing in the world." She entered the room unaware of the weight of the King's Own's stare.

A young man lay abed.

He was older than Kayla; he had to be older. She knew this because of her mother's words, her mother's memory. But had she not known it, she would not have guessed; he was slender with youth, and he lay curled on his side, shaking slightly, his eyes wide and unseeing. She felt his pain as if it were her own. As if it were exactly her own.

She did not know if she loved Darius.

That was truth. He was part of her in a way that she could not fathom, did not struggle to understand. But she did not know if she loved him.

She could say with certainty that she had loved her husband. Could say-no, could not say, but could feel-with certainty, that she had loved her children, the children that life in Riverend had taken from her one by one.

And she could say with certainty that this man-boy, this terrible dragon, this hunting horror, had loved his Companion. Or had felt loved by him.

The loss she felt was profound and terrible. It dwarfed all losses that she had ever suffered but one. "Leave us," she whispered.

Gisel hesitated for only a minute, but that minute stretched out into forever. And then she was gone. "All right," Kayla said quietly. "It's time you and I had a talk."

She touched his face; his skin was clammy.

His eyes, wide and unseeing, did not turn toward her, but something beneath them did.

Kayla looked into the red eyes of the dragon.

And trapped within them, she saw a child. Or a mirror.

She had never dreamed of flight, although the other village children often spoke of it. She had never dreamed of wings; the only time her feet left the ground in her dreams was when she rode a Companion who could cross the walls that darkness imposed upon her dreaming.

"Gregori," she whispered.

He did not move. But the beast did. It knew exactly where she was, and the waking world offered her no protection, no place to hide.

Gregori.

Dragon name. Prince name. Powerful name. He turned. You!

Yes.

I know you.

Yes. I am Kayla.

Despair washed over her. Despair and more: death, images of death. The loss of her home. The loss of her village-of Riverend, the home she had promised her mother she would protect. But there was more. She felt the death of her husband as the mines colapsed, as oxygen fled, slowly enough that fear and hysteria had time to build. She felt her father's death, the snap of his spine, saw-although not with her eyes-the pale whites of eyes rolled shut when no hands were there to gently drawn lids across them.

Her mother's death followed.