As far as my own sight or hearing witnessed, no other beings existed in the universe, though I suspected that someone else shared the house with us. On the table in the lectorium I often found two glasses smelling of brandy that I’d not been allowed to taste. And I could not imagine the testy Healer making soup or filling my washing pitcher with tepid water.
“The Preceptors of Gondai have come to wait upon their Prince. I’ve put them off for more than three months, and if I don’t produce you, they’ll cause trouble. I can’t spare the energy to fight them, so you must get up and present yourself.”
“The Preceptors… Exeget, Ustele, the others?” The urgency of his words prodded me to function at some minimal level. I sat up, trying to stir some blood into my limbs.
“Yes, you blithering boy. They sit in my library at this very moment in all their varieties of self-importance and deception. I told them you were sleeping, but they said they would await Your Grace’s pleasure. So if you would like another hour’s sleep before we begin work again, rouse yourself, get to the library, and get rid of the bastards. We’ve no time to dally with them.”
“What will I say? I know nothing more than a twelve-year-old.” My faith in Dassine’s assurances that all I now remembered was truth took an ill turn. What if the memories he had instilled were only wild fictions and not the unmasked remnants of my own experiences? But a glance at the sagging flesh around his eyes reminded me that he slept no more than I. I couldn’t swear that his mysterious game was the only hope of the world as he insisted, but I believed that he did nothing from cruelty or indifference. I had to trust him.
“You will say as little as possible. They’re here to verify that I’m not grooming some impostor to supplant the line of D’Arnath.”
I couldn’t help but be skeptical. “And how am I to prove that? I doubt I can reassure them by telling the story of my life-lives.”
Dassine jabbed at my chest with his powerful fingers. “You are D’Natheil, the true Heir of D’Arnath. You can pass the Gate-wards, walk the Bridge, and control the chaos of the Breach between the worlds. The blood in your veins is that of our Princes for the last thousand years, and no one-no one-can deny or disprove it. It’s true that you’ve had experiences others cannot understand, and we cannot tell these fossils about them quite yet, but I swear to you by all that lives that you are the rightful Prince of Avonar.”
It was impossible to doubt Dassine.
“Then they’ll want to know what I’m doing here with you all these months, which, lest you’ve forgotten, you’ve never explained.”
“They have no right to question you. You are their sovereign.”
Ah, yes. It didn’t matter that in my life in the mundane world, my younger brother, Christophe, had inherited the gift of Command from my beloved father, the Baron Mandille. In my life here in the world of Gondai-in this Avonar of sorcery and magic-I, D’Natheil, the third son of Prince D’Marte, had been named Heir of D’Arnath when my father and two older brothers had been slain in quick succession. When my name had been called by the Preceptorate-the council of seven sorcerers who advised the Heir and controlled the succession-I could scarcely write the letters that comprised it, because no one had ever thought that a third son, so wild, and so much younger than the others, would ever be needed to rule my devastated land.
My memories of D’Natheil’s life ended abruptly on the day I turned twelve, the day my hands were anointed and I came into my inheritance. On that day these same Preceptors waiting for me now had decided that I must essay D’Arnath’s enchanted Bridge and attempt to repair the weakness caused by years of war and neglect and the corrupting chaos of the Breach between the worlds.
Gondai and the mundane world-the human world-had existed side by side since Vasrin gave shape to nothingness at the beginning of time. Dar’Nethi sorcery and human passion created a delicate balance in the universe that no one quite understood. At the time of the Catastrophe, when the Breach came into being and separated the two worlds, upsetting this balance, we Dar’Nethi found ourselves diminished, left without power enough to reclaim our devastated land. And so our king, D’Arnath, built his Bridge of enchantment to span the Breach, hoping to restore the balance. The long war with the Lords and the corruption of the Breach threatened to ruin the Bridge, and only by the power and labor of D’Arnath and his Heirs had it endured a thousand years.
But at twelve I had not known what to do to preserve the Bridge. Dassine told me that my attempt had damaged me so dreadfully that further memories of D’Natheil’s life were impossible. When these Preceptors had last spoken to me, I had been a crass, amoral youth, one whose life was consumed in a passion for war. They would not know me as I really was, Dassine said. It was my other life-Karon’s life-that had transformed me.
My head started to ache with the contradictions and convolutions, and I pressed my fist against my forehead to keep it from splitting.
“Stop!” said Dassine sharply. “This is not the time to think. The Preceptors are not your kindly grandparents. You must be clear-headed.”
“Empty-headed?”
“If that’s the only way. Prepare yourself. I’ll return for you shortly. I’ll bring saffria.”
I dragged myself back from the precipice without looking over it. “Make it strong, Dassine.”
He tugged at my hair. “You’ll do well.”
There was not much preparation to make. I wished I could fit my entire head into the small basin of water on the stand in my room, but splashing the grit from my eyes would have to do. And I had nothing to wear but my white robe. From my first days with him, Dassine had forbidden me to use sorcery to obtain anything beyond his meager provision. Neither of us could afford to squander power, he said, and in truth, I rarely had enough to conjure a candle flame. By the time I knew that I was the ruler of Avonar with the authority to command comforts to be brought to me, I was beyond caring.
Dassine reappeared almost immediately with saffria. I downed it in one long, hot gulp, hoping its pungent sweetness would find its way to those of my extremities that had still not come to the conclusion that they must function. With no more conversation-we had spent more words that morning than during an entire week of our usual business- he led me down a long hallway. Tantalizing telltales of early morning sneaked into the cool, shadowed passage through a series of open doorways: birdsong, dust motes dancing in beams of gold light, the scents of mint and damp earth. It would be so much more pleasant to follow them than to go where Dassine led.
I stood behind him as he pulled open a wide door. “You are greatly favored this morning,” he announced. “The Prince has agreed to a brief audience. My friends and colleagues, His Grace D’Natheil, Heir of the Royal House of D’Arnath, Prince of Avonar, sovereign and liege of Dar‘-Nethi and Dulcé. May Vasrin Shaper and Creator grant him wisdom as he walks the Way.”
Now for the test. I walked through the doorway, fighting that part of me which insisted I did not belong here, that words of royal homage did not apply to me. I tried to focus on this world and its customs and to convince myself I had a place in it. Conviction is everything in a ruler, the father I had loved once told me.
Seven people stood up as I entered the wide, airy room: four men, two women, and one-not a child, but a slight, dark-haired, olive-skinned man, who hovered in the background. A Dulcé. One of the strange race that cohabited this world, a people with an astonishing capacity for knowledge and astonishing limitations in its use.
The six that were not Dulcé arranged themselves in an expectant and diverse half-circle in the center of a scuffed wood floor. One of the six was shorter than average, another enormously fat, one cadaverous, two in the fine tunics and breeches of men of rank, the others in robes of the type worn by scholars, variously brightly colored, dull, shabby, or fine. They, with Dassine as their seventh, were the Dar’Nethi Preceptorate. Though I knew these six only with the unshaded colorations of a child’s mind, I knew what was required to greet them properly. The rituals of kingly politeness had been battered into me by the well-dressed man on the far left, a puffy, balding man with full lips and deep-set eyes. He looked soft but was not. My back ached with the memory of his beatings, and my spirit shriveled with the echo of his self-righteousness.
I had been an angry nine-year-old when courtiers dragged me away from the grimy comfort of a palace guard firepit and took me to the Precept House, the large, austere building that housed the meeting chamber of the Preceptorate and served as the residence of its head. On that night Master Exeget had announced that, as my father and brothers were all dead, I was to be raised up to be Heir, ignorant, filthy beast that I was, no better than a dog, fed on the scraps from the soldiers on the walls.
No one had told me that D’Seto, my last living brother, a dozen years older than me, and the most dashing, talented, and skillful of princes, had been slain by the Zhid. He was the only one of the family who had ever had a kind word for me, and all my awkward, childish striving, played out in alleyway throne rooms and stableyard sword fights, had been to be like him. Exeget did not grant me even the simple courtesy of believing that I might grieve for my brother. Instead he spent an hour telling me how unlike D’Seto I was. I hated Exeget from that moment, for he made me believe it. There was no justice in a universe that infused the blood of kings in such as me, he said, while condemning nobler spirits to lesser roles. Only strict discipline and rigorous training might improve me, and so I was not to return to the palace, but live with him in the Precept House. He had crammed his red face into mine and sworn that if his efforts failed and I was not made worthy of my inheritance, I would not live to disgrace it.
And so, on this morning as the Preceptors gathered to inspect me, I could not look at Exeget without loathing. I began my greetings at the other end of the line, hoping to find the right words to say by the time I got to him. Moving from one of the Preceptors to the next, I turned my palms upward as a symbol of humility and service. Each in turn laid his or her hands on mine, palms down, accepting what I offered, kneeling before me in honor of my office. As I raised them up, one by one, each greeted me in his or her own way.