Son of Avonar by Carol Berg

Author:Carol Berg [Berg, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Epic
ISBN: 9781101098745
Google: CJaGSVugTrgC
Amazon: 0451459628
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

The morning dawned cool and gray, as did most summer mornings in the Uker valley, but the rising sun burned off the fog early. I awoke cramped and tired from the night on the dirt floor of the charcoal burner’s hut, and the lingering disturbance of my dreaming was hard to shake. Stars of night, why could I not be rid of it? Perhaps if I could get the unpleasant prince and his annoying servant on their way, I could go back to Dunfarrie and bury it all again. Yet I wondered. My cottage now seemed as remote as D’Natheil’s Avonar.

Tennice and Baglos were quiet that morning, too, brows furrowed and shoulders tight as we passed around chunks of dry black bread, spread with a paste of beans and leeks that was long past fresh.

D’Natheil showed no interest in breakfast, but sat in the open doorway, intently scribing his wood chip with the point of his knife.

“What is it he makes?” I asked Baglos, as I smoothed my still-damp clothes into some semblance of order.

“I’ve asked, but he does not respond.”

“Is he well? He looks ill… or, no, maybe thinner somehow.” The growing sunlight revealed a tracery of lines around D’Natheil’s eyes. I’d not noticed them before.

Staying out of arm’s reach, Baglos questioned the Prince. D’Natheil shook his head, but rather than lashing out at the Dulcé as was his morning habit, he graced Baglos with his smile, the smile that was everything of good humor and unsullied delight.

The smile was the only constant in D’Natheil. I had never known anyone to change so rapidly, not only in the seasons of his mood, but in his physical appearance as well. I could no longer envision him as he had been on that day he appeared naked in the woods behind my cottage, but I would swear by everything I valued that it was not as he looked today or yesterday or a week ago. I had thought him little more than twenty, and from the Dulcé’s tales I judged that close to accurate. And yet on this morning he looked almost of an age with me, as if these past days had laid brushstrokes of years and care on the canvas of his face.

Baglos denied it. “He is as he is, woman. Anything else is only your imagination.”

I told him that my imagination had been unused for so many years it wouldn’t know how to invent such a business. But, then, after a fortnight without, the Prince had shaved his face this morning. Perhaps that was the difference.

It took me a while after entering the gates of Yurevan to decide what had changed about the city since I had last visited. The mottled stone buildings of the University still dominated the city from its hilltop site, their cloisters welcoming the brightest thinkers from all the Four Realms. The winding brick streets were marked only by time, not war. Ironwork of intricately designed flowers and beasts still ornamented balconies and walls, and the flowers still bloomed in their charming niches.

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