Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [63]
“If you only made the effort …”
“I tried, I truly did. I joined in the gossip and the revelry.” Saryon sighed. “But it proved too difficult. I’m getting old, I suppose. I’m asleep two hours before most people in Merilon even think about sitting down to dinner.” He glanced around him at the stone walls that glowed softly with a magical radiance. “I enjoy living in Merilon. Its beauties seem to me as new and awe-inspiring as they did on that day I first saw them, seventeen years ago. But my heart is here, Dulchase. I want to pursue my studies. I need access to material here. There’s a new formula I’m devising and I’m not quite certain about some of the magical theorems involved. You see, it’s like this—”
Dulchase cleared his throat.
“Ah, yes. I’m sorry.” Saryon smiled. “There goes Father Calculus again. I get too enthusiastic, I know. At any rate, I was planning to make my request to return here, then I received this summons from the Bishop ….” Saryon’s face grew shadowed.
“Cheer up. Don’t look so frightened,” Dulchase said casually. “He’s probably going to offer you condolences on the death of your mother. Then, like as not, he’ll invite you back himself. You’re not like me, after all. You’ve been a good boy, always eaten your vegetables, that sort of thing. Don’t worry about anyone at court. Even as boring as you undoubtedly were, my friend, you could never outbore the Emperor.” Dulchase glanced sharply at Saryon’s averted face. “You have been eating your vegetables, haven’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” Saryon answered hastily, with an attempt to smile that was a dismal failure. “You’re right. It’s probably nothing more than that.” Glancing at Dulchase, he found the Deacon staring at him curiously. Once again, the terrible burden of guilt for his crime assailed him. Feeling completely unable to stay around the shrewd, penetrating Deacon any longer, Saryon made his rather confused goodbyes and hastened away, leaving Dulchase to stare after him with a wry grin.
“I wish I knew what rats are crawling around in your closet, old friend. I’m not the first to wonder why you were sent to Merilon seventeen years ago. Well, whatever it is, I wish you luck. Seventeen years might as well be seventeen minutes as far as His Holiness is concerned. Whatever you’ve done, he won’t have forgotten, nor forgiven either for that matter.” Heading back to his own duties, Dulchase shook his head with a sigh.
Leaving Dulchase, Saryon fled to the haven of the Library, where he could count on being left alone. But he did not study. Burying himself beneath a mound of parchment, well out of sight from any who might chance by, the Priest put his tonsured head in his hands, feeling as miserable as he had when he had been summoned to Vanya’s chambers seventeen years earlier.
He had seen Bishop Vanya on numerous occasions during the past years, since the Bishop always stayed at the Abbey when visiting Merilon. But Saryon had not spoken to him since that fateful time.
It was not that the Bishop avoided him or treated him coldly. Far from it. Saryon had received a very kind, very sympathetic letter on the occasion of his mother’s death, expressing the Bishop’s deepest sympathies and assuring him that she would rest in the same tomb as his father in one of the most honored places in the Font. The Bishop even approached him during the funeral ceremonies, but Saryon, under the guise of being deeply grieved, turned away.
He was not comfortable in the Bishop’s presence. Perhaps it was because he had never truly forgiven His Holiness for condemning the small Prince to death. Perhaps it was because, whenever he looked at Vanya, Saryon could see only his own guilt. He’d been twenty-five years old when he had committed his crime. Now Saryon was forty-two, and he felt he’d lived more in these last seventeen years than he had in all those first twenty-five! What he’d told