The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [113]
In his own current life, Laz had at times tasted a similar resentment, though always with some immediate cause: his sisters’ privileged positions in the mach-fala, his mother’s political ambitions that would have deformed him into a kind of man he hated. Still, his own feelings had been close enough to Tren’s that he could use them as an entry to that other life. He set himself to meditate upon it, here in this dun where once Lord Tren had lived. At last, after the wheel of stars had made a quarter turn in the sky, Laz discovered the source, an abscess gone septic deep in Tren’s soul.
Tren felt he had lost something. Some treasure was being denied him, something that mattered as much as life itself, something that should have been his, had someone not stolen it. Tren lived wrapped in a bitter certainty that he’d been cheated, denied, robbed, yet he could never find out what that something had been or who had taken it from him. Alshandra and her glorious visitations, a goddess one could see, a vast power who made herself manifest in the common world—she had seemed to supply that lack, to restore what had once been his. But in the end, she, too, had revealed herself to be another cheat, another lie, another robbery, when she’d died in the sky above Cengarn, torn to pieces like a fox among hounds.
But what had Tren lost?
“Sorcery,” Laz whispered. “It had to be sorcery. I must have studied it in one of the earlier lives, then lost it or had it taken away—” He fell silent, choking on the sure knowledge that some great abuse had cost him the one thing in life he’d ever truly loved. Dallandra said she had information about two lives, he thought. She never had time to tell me about the other one.
And Marnmara had told him something about a past life, hadn’t she? Something like, “You did great evil—”
“Ah, there you are!” Faharn kicked open the door and strode into the chamber. He carried a bucket of water in one hand and a candle lantern in the other.
Laz could have cheerfully strangled him, but he reminded himself that Faharn had no idea of what he’d just interrupted or of the importance of the insight he’d just driven away. One of these days I must tell him the great truth, Laz thought. Then he’ll understand.
“Wash water?” Laz managed to sound reasonably civil.
“I heated it at the cookhouse hearth, though it may or may not still be warm.”
“As long as it’s not icy cold, it will do. My thanks.”
“The prince wants to see you in his council chamber,” Faharn went on. “So I thought you might want to clean up.”
“I do, but when does—”
“In a bit, is all the page told me. He’ll come fetch you. The page, that is, not the prince.”
“I assumed that.” Laz flashed him a grin. “My thanks for the warm water.”
Laz had just finished washing and was putting on a clean shirt when the page arrived, carrying a candle lantern. Laz gathered up the wax-coated tablets and stylus that Faharn had put out for him and followed the lad into the hall.
“Beg pardon, good scribe,” the page said, “but how can you write with those hands?”
“How?” Laz grinned at him. “With some difficulty, that’s how.”
The lad blushed and hurried on ahead of him. Laz followed the bobbing lantern light down a twist of the stone stairs and into what had once been the women’s hall of the dun. Laz remembered that Tren’s aged mother had once held a shabby court there for the rare visits of other noblewomen. Now it had been turned into a council chamber of sorts. A long table, lit with a lantern at either end, held a map of the Northlands, made from two whole parchments stitched together and anchored with a couple of large stones to fend off the drafts from the open window. Behind it, in a half circle of rickety chairs, sat the prince, flanked by the two men of the Mountain Folk who’d accompanied him at dinner. The page bowed low. Laz reminded himself to act humble and knelt in front of the table.
“The Horsekin scribe, Your