Reign of Shadows - Deborah Chester [5]
“He is a good man.”
“He’s cold and unfeeling!” Caelan burst out. “Damn you, why have you started worshiping him like this? You used to think he was as strict as—”
“But since I started studying here, I understand severance.” Agel folded his hands in his wide sleeves and hunched himself against the cold. It was nearly dark now, and the soldiers could only be heard on the road. They marched in unnerving silence—the brutal force of the emperor evident and thrilling. “It is a total philosophy of life,” Agel said. “It is completion.”
Caelan rolled his eyes. Everything angry and rebellious in him rose up, roaring inwardly against hearing any of it again. “It’s not for me.”
“You must learn to accept it if you are to heal.”
“I don’t want to heal,” Caelan said in exasperation. “Why can’t you accept that?”
“Because it’s in you.”
“It’s in my father, not me!”
“But you have the gift. You are his blood. He tested you and said you could sever. I remember when he did it.”
“The ability to do something doesn’t mean it’s my destiny,” Caelan said. “I know they teach that here, but you don’t have to believe everything they say.”
“The ways that are taught here are good ways,” Agel said.
“But they aren’t the only ways,” Caelan argued. He saw no change in Agel’s expression and sighed. “What’s the use? You’ve turned to stone, just like the masters here. You’re becoming exactly like my father.”
A smile dawned across Agel’s face. “Really?” he asked in delight. “You really think so?”
Disgust filled Caelan. Without answering, he shouldered past Agel and headed down the steps to the courtyard.
Agel followed close on his heels, and in silence they hurried toward the hall.
In the gloom and quiet of evening, the courtyard had an eerie, deserted feel. Light glowed warm from the narrow window slits in the buildings, and the air smelled of peat smoke. The wind still blew sharp and bitterly cold, knocking old snow off the roofs in soft drifts of white.
No one was supposed to be abroad by the last stroke of the Quarl Bell. All residents of the hold had to be indoors before nightfall, safe within the warding keys and secured from the wind spirits that hunted during the long winter darkness. Which, Caelan thought to himself, was only an elaborate way of enforcing a strict curfew.
It seemed that everything at Rieschelhold was buried under an endless series of rules. Living here was like dying a slow death. Caelan hated the tall stone walls, hated the confinement, the serenity, the order, the iron routine that never varied. At home he could always find a way to escape his tutors. He lived for wild gallops across the glacier, his horse’s mane whipping his face, the icy wind whistling in his ears. The mountains, the sweeping views of the top of the world, the endless sky. And at night, the breathtaking display of colors from the light spirits.
That was living.
But here, in the marshy lowlands, the winters were bleak and rainy and the summers were hot and insect-riddled. Beautiful days were wasted cramped inside classrooms. The joy of life, the urge, the passion were all driven away in favor of severance, which meant to be cold, aloof, detached, emotionless, and dead as far as he was concerned.
Caelan tipped back his head to look at the starry sky. His heart ached for freedom. But even if he sent for the scrivener and wrote another letter to his father, begging for release, it would be a waste of time. Beva E’non wanted his only son to be a healer; therefore, the son would be a healer. Close of subject.
Accept it, Caelan told himself as he and Agel crunched across gravel, then reached the cobblestones. Grow up and do as you’re told.
But even when he forced himself to concentrate and really tried to do his lessons, his heart wasn’t in the work. He wasn’t a scholar, never had been. And always in the back of his heart gnawed the question of what kind of healer he would be. How could he cure anyone? How could he reach the depth of empathy necessary to sever illness and suffering from the lives