The Garden of the Stone by Victoria Strauss

Author:Victoria Strauss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Microsoft
Published: 2011-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

A long time later—or perhaps not: Konstant could not really tell—the light seemed to move closer, a powerful illumination that made twinkling jewels of the falling sleet, and burned his eyes so that he closed them and struggled to turn his head away. He felt hands on his body, lifting him, laying him on a soft surface in a warm place. He opened his eyes to see whether he was dreaming, but what he saw was so strange that he closed them again.

Travel followed. He woke intermittently to a sense of motion, and once was aware of being carried through the cold of the outside world. He woke again to discover that he had come to rest, in a bed heaped with coverings that were far too heavy. He threw them back; someone drew them up, murmuring in a language he did not understand. He thought he felt power, enclosing him as intimately as his skin, reaching into his body to make right what was wrong; he thought he heard a voice, speaking in his own language, but when he tried to answer his tongue was too thick to form the words. Afterward, he was not able to tell what had been true and what was dream—huge, disjointed fever-dreams, complex and terrifying.

At last he rose from a long dark interval with no dreams at all and found himself properly awake. The fever-fires that had burned in him were gone. His body felt cool and light, as if the whole of him, inside and out, had been scoured clean. He lay on his back in a wide bed, naked underneath the quilts. Around him was a large room, with smooth white walls and a high white ceiling. A covered light burned on a table—the clear powerful illumination of this world, steadier than candles and warmer than mindlight. The air was deeply quiet. He could hear the singing of the silence, a pressure against his ears.

Cautiously he raised himself to a sitting position, propping himself against the drift of pillows in which he had been nested. Besides the bed and the table, the room contained an armchair covered and cushioned in maroon fabric, and a tall cabinet with many drawers. A patterned rug in stormy shades of red and blue covered most of the floor, with dark polished boards visible around its perimeter. There were two doors of a wood that matched the flooring, one half-open and one closed, and a smaller set of double doors. Gem-blue draperies along one wall indicated the presence of windows. Otherwise, the walls were bare, without ornament or decoration. It was a room of considerable austerity. Yet the richness of the fabrics and the intricate beauty of the rug seemed to indicate that it was taste, not want, that made it so.

The room raised many questions, as did his presence here. But one thing was not in doubt. Konstant knew, with absolute certainty, whose house this was. He sensed the truth all around him, filling the room as completely as the air: power, the unmistakable pulse of an awesomely great Gift.

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