He fluttered his eyelashes at them again, then simply faded into the cave wall.
Rosalind called out, "No! Wait, come back here. Where is Sarimund?"
There was only silence. The red Lasis was gone.
They stood inside the cave opening, looking out beyond the river in the distance, at the far end of a vast flat plain to Mount Olyvan, and at its peak the dark brooding fortress of Blood Rock that speared up toward the moons.
They heard a scuffle, panting, grunts. Suddenly standing before them was Sarimund, and he seemed to shimmer, his golden hair brilliant beneath the bloodred moons. He muttered, "Ah, you are hare," and he gave them a beautiful smile.
Rosalind stepped up to the beautiful man who looked like an angel. "I first saw you in a vision. You were stirring a pot. You told me I would be with you soon."
"And here you are, my beauty. Here you are. Ah, to see you as a woman grown."
"Are you my father?"
"I? Certainly not, but I will say that I have held you close for a very long time, the spirit of you, the promise of you. Now I am here and let me tell you it was difficult. Although Bifrost believed you would come, Taranis did not. He believed I had failed, that too much earth time had passed, but you are here and that proves that I did not." He cupped graceful hands beside his mouth and shouted, "Do you hear me, Taranis? I have succeeded. I am the bringer of peace—"
"—and destruction," Nicholas said. "That is what you told her."
"Yes, both she and I are the bringers of peace and destruction."
"Are you speaking to us, in English, or are you thinking all of this to us?"
"I speak beautiful English."
"But it is modern English you are speaking," Rosalind said.
"Even a dumb beast like the Tiber keeps abreast of things. His English is halting, but the grammar is well nigh perfect, which surprises me since he has the brain of a fig.
"You have met Bifrost, known as the Scholar. He was hollowed out when his mate was killed in a moon storm so long ago. Everything lasts for a very long time in the Pale, affections included."
"Where is the Pale?" Nicholas asked.
Sarimund studied Nicholas's face. "The Pale is as close as those three bloodred moons above our heads, yet it is apart, a study in contrasts. But it is as real as an eternal dream. Am I not real? Am I not standing here before you? Do you not see me? Am I not speaking to you?"
"You could be another specter like Captain Jared," Nicholas said.
"His is not idle curiosity, Sarimund," Rosalind said, lightly touching his arm, a very real arm, the muscles rippling beneath her fingers. Whatever he was, he was no specter. "Listen, we are here because you brought us here. You set this all into motion almost three hundred years ago when you convinced Captain Jared that he owed the little girl the debt, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Did you really bring a storm to destroy Captain Jared's ship, or was it all an elaborate illusion?"
He made a choked noise in his throat and his golden hair lifted, very nearly standing on end. "The little girl had no bite to her, no impertinent questions for a wizard, but you, the woman, do," he said, now visibly calming himself. "I am more powerful than you can begin to imagine, I can whip the skies into a froth of madness, I can—"
"Yes, yes," she said. "Then you wrote the Rules of the Pale and prayed I would find it, somehow, so everything would be in motion."
"No, I did not pray; a wizard casts his spells, and waits to see them unfold. And waits. And watches. And guides. Of course you found it."
"Well, yes, I suppose you did that right, though you were a bit on the late side. And you finally released the final pages for me to read, but still that last page was stark white and perfectly blank. I only realized a little while ago that you had written Prince Egan's name on that page."
Nicholas said, "You planned for the little girl to come to the Pale, but she didn't come because it wasn't yet her time. Nearly three hundred years passed before she came, not a little girl, but a woman."
Sarimund said, "I know. It has driven me quite mad to know I was so very wrong in my calculations."
Nicholas said, "How could this be? Why did you want her in the first place?"
"After I left the Pale, wondering if Epona had indeed birthed my son, Taranis visited me in my dreams one night. He dreamed to me that Epona would kill our son—Prince Egan—because she'd somehow divined what he, the man, would become. Taranis said I had to stop her or the Pale would be thrown into incredible chaos, and he didn't know if he would be able to fix it. He said there was no wizard, no witch, no creature here in the Pale to help me so I must rely on humans. What could a human do, I asked in my dream back to him. He puffed out a whiff of flame and I swear to you I felt a sting of heat. He told me I was a wizard and a human, wasn't I, and I awoke. He was right, and so I settled into my wizard's brain and cast about for other witches and wizards on earth as strong as I. I found two separate, very powerful wizard lines that stretched back into time, meeting at one point back in the times of the Crusades. One was the Vail line. In my time your powerful line was represented by Jared Vail, a ship captain then, but not simple. He was brave, many times too brave. Ah, he was filled with strength, but being human, living in your constricted civilized world, he did not realize what he really was. I knew then that Jared Vail was the one. And you were there in my mind, Isabella, in the same time, representing your powerful line, and you were so clear, so strong, so very magic. I knew that both of you would be successful."
She said, "You saw the little girl. Why would you believe a little girl would have a better chance of saving Prince Egan than a grown woman, namely me?"
"The little girl was a light so bright no evil could touch her. She saw everything clearly, she could not be deceived by either magic or evil. But now? Is your light still as bright, your eyes as clear? Is the little girl still burning bright inside you? We will see."
"What does that mean— we will see!" Nicholas asked. "You're telling us you do not know?"
"Now is now, even though in the Pale, the present can bleed into the future or shrink into the past, though time itself is not really a factor, and thus I cannot know what will happen."
Nicholas looked angry enough to strike Sarimund.
Rosalind said, "When the child didn't come, why didn't Epona kill your son?"
"The point of the spell was to stay her hand until you arrived, Isabella, until you could come to the Pale to save him."
Nicholas said slowly, "You froze time?"
"That is a crude way of saying it, but yes, Egan has remained a little boy. When you save him, Isabella, he will become the man, the great wizard ruler he was meant to be."
Rosalind said quickly, "There is a problem, however. I don't know who I am so I cannot know what the little girl was and how her strengths would aid—" She stopped dead in her tracks. She stared from Sarimund to Nicholas and back again. Sarimund smiled at her and slowly nodded. She swallowed. Then she gave them a brilliant smile. "My name is Isabella Contadini. I was born in San Savaro, Italy, in 18I7."
"And your name is the same as it was then in Captain Jared Vail's time," Sarimund said, then leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
48
Sarimund gave her a graceful bow. "Yes, your birth was greeted with great celebration, Isabella. You already had an older brother, you see, so the heir to the duchy was secure."
"Duchy?" Nicholas asked, an eyebrow raised.
Rosalind grinned up at her husband. "Oh, dear, Nicholas, I fear you're not of high enough rank to have married me."
"Tell him who you are, my dear," Sarimund said.
"I was born to Duca Gabriele and Duchessa Elizabeth Contadini. My mother is English, daughter of the Duke of Wrothbridge, and she married my father when she was seventeen years old—my father was visiting London as a young man, saw her riding in Hyde Park, and wanted to marry her, and so they married two months later. I loved hearing that story, near
ly every night I asked my mother to tell me of it after she had shooed away my nanny to kiss me good night. She paused a moment, and a spasm of pain crossed her face. "My mother," she said again, and pictured her glossy red hair, the way she'd felt her heartbeat when she held her close against her, how she smelled, of violets, she remembered now. My mother. Over the past ten years, she'd wondered, usually in the deep of night, if she had a mother, if she was alive and thinking of her, wondering where she was, and Rosalind would cry at the pain of both of them.
She whispered, terrified of the answer, "Are my parents still alive?"
Sarimund nodded. "Yes, both of them are in fine health." "And my brother?" "Raffaello as well."
She wanted to shout, to leap about. She had a mother who had loved her, petted her, who wasn't afraid of her because she was magic. Magic? But it was true, she remembered it well. And her father, standing beside her mother, tail, his thick black hair brushed back from his face, a perfect man who'd once let her sit beneath his chair while he conferred with an ambassador from Austria. She'd been so excited she'd vomited on the ambassador's boots. Her father, she remembered now, had laughed—once the ambassador had left. She frowned. Her father's eyes, had she seen them somewhere? She said slowly, "My grandfather died while my father was visiting England and so he became the Duke of San Savaro after his return to Italy."
She grabbed Nicholas's arms, shook him. "I have parents, Nicholas, and I remember them! They loved me, very much. I have a family!" She began to dance around in her excitement. Nicholas grabbed her and held her tight. He kissed her lightly on her mouth, kissed the tip of her nose, smoothed his fingertips over her eyebrows. He said, "Where is San Savaro?"
Rosalind grinned up at him, so excited her feet still danced. "It is on the spur of Italy's boot. San Savaro is also the capital city of the duchy. It is near Nardo, oaiy five or so miles from the Ionian Sea. We had a summer palace overlooking the sea. I swam there with my brother. I remember one night I went down to the beach to swim under a full moon, not something I should have done, naturally. I heard my parents laughing. They were swimming in the sea, just like my brother and I did." She paused a moment, tapped her foot. "Do you know, I'm wondering now if they were simply swimming."
Nicholas laughed. "A woman is married for less than a week and she knows everything."
Sarimund ahemmed. "Isabella, it's time to tell my lord what happened."
Nicholas frowned at him. "How do you know she can remember what happened to her?"
Sarimund shrugged. "She could not be allowed to remember before, it would have been too dangerous. Mr. Sherbrooke would have felt compelled to contact her family in San Savaro, despite his own misgivings. But now the time is right. Tell him, Isabella, what happened to you."
Suddenly the knowledge was there, alive and terrifying in her mind, and she trembled. "He was my father's cousin— his name was Vittorio. He knew I'd seen what he'd done because he was magic, you see, and he knew I was magic as well. He sensed me, he knew I saw him smother the small babe then lay it back in its dead mother's arms."
Nicholas said, "There was no one else there to see this?"
Rosalind didn't want to but she pictured that horrible scene in her mind. The dead babe and its dead mother and Vittorio standing there, staring down at them, a bitter smile on his mouth. She would never forget that, never. "No, only I saw him kill them."
Nicholas was frowning. "You were a child. Few people believe a child. Why would Vittorio take action against you?''
"If I'd told my father, he would have had the bodies of Ilaria and the babe examined. They would have seen the marks of Vittorio's fingers on her neck. Perhaps the physician would know the babe had been smothered."
Sarimund said, "Isabella, do you know why Vittorio murdered his wife and babe?"
She shook her head.
Sarimund said, 'Theirs was an arranged marriage, naturally, but Vittorio was vicious and unnatural in his sexual demands. Mixed with the magic was madness, only his father Ignazio did not want to face it, he never had.
"There came a time, however, when Ilaria hated her husband more than she feared him. She took a lover, a young man who sang beautifully, a wandering young man who left soon after he'd made love to her. He never knew she bore him a son and Vittorio killed them both."
Nicholas asked her, "What did Vittorio do to you?"
"Tell him, Isabella. You remember."
"Vittorio caught me before I could get to my father." She fell silent a moment, looked over the barren plain, then shrugged. "I'm sorry, but I don't remember anything else."
Sarimund continued. "Vittorio didn't want to kill you. Even in his madness, in his fear that he would be found out, he still loved you, and he loved your father like a brother. But he knew you could not remain in Italy or you would tell your parents, and he knew your father would believe you. Vittorio knew your father was a very powerful wizard from a long line of powerful wizards. As far back as any could remember, there was magic in the Contadini line. In both your lines, there has always been powerful magic.
"Vittorio knew if he didn't do something quickly he would be executed for his crime, that or thrown into a madhouse. So he immediately caught you and gave you over to one of his trusted men to take you to England. I found this destination rather curious since your mother's family is English, but no matter, he must have had a plan, though I never learned what it was.
"It seems Erasmo—the man Vittorio put in charge of you—witnessed you go into a trance. He was very superstitious, and it scared him badly. He believed you a witch and evil." Sarimund shrugged. "So he tried to beat you to death. Indeed, he left you for dead in that alley.
"Ryder Sherbrooke found you and nursed you back to health. Ah, dearest Isabella, I am sorry your memory was closed behind the stoutest of doors, but it was for the best, for everyone. Erasmo told Vittorio you had died of a sweating sickness on the journey. He said there was nothing to be done to save you, and Vittorio believed him.
"Ryder Sherbrooke decided, rightfully so, that no search should be made for your family. He wasn't willing to take the chance that someone would try to kidnap you again." Sarimund lightly touched his fingertips to her brow, touched his thumbs to her temples. "Do you remember now?"
She nodded slowly, never looking away from him.
She said in a child's voice, broken and sad, "I'm sitting cross-legged in a small cabin on one of Vittorio's trading ships, the Zacarria , and my hands are folded just so on my legs. I'm concentrating on my father. I know he and my mother are frantic because I was suddenly just gone, disappeared. Even though I know I'm at sea, far away from Italy, I still believe he can save me. My father is so strong, you see, so very good, and he knows me, knows what I think and how I think. He tells me I am his magic princess and he will make very certain my future husband is a powerful wizard so I will always be safe. He tells me that nearly every night before I sleep, right after Mother kisses me good night. He always smoothes my eyebrows with his finger, just like he does Mother's." Rosalind broke off, lowered her head, and the tears came, hot and thick. A child's tears, she realized, not really her tears, not a woman's tears, but remembered tears and perhaps they were the most painful.
Sarimund touched her cheek. "Tell him, Isabella."
After a moment, she said in that same sad child's voice, "I'm focusing with all my strength on my father, and I see him. He is striding back and forth in front of Mother, and he is very angry, and scared. She's trying not to cry. My brother, Raffaello, is there and he looks very angry as well. He is striking one fist against his open palm, cursing. I call to my father, once, twice, then I scream at him in my mind. I see him turn quickly to face me.
"But at that moment Erasmo came into the cabin to tell me we had finally reached England, that we'd docked at Eastbourne, and he was taking me ashore. I suppose when he saw me, he at first believed I was sleeping, but I wasn't. I stared up at him, through him really, and cursed him in another's vo
ice, and in another language, yet he understood. It frightened him very badly. He screamed at me that he'd heard I was a witch and thus vile and evil, and so he dragged me off the brigantine and into an alley to beat me to death. A cabin boy tried to stop him. Erasmo clouted him and tossed him into the harbor. None of the other sailors tried to stop him.
"I awoke at Brandon House, and remembered nothing of what had happened. After six months, I sang my song and spoke. After I'd been at Brandon House for several years, Uncle Ryder told me why they hadn't tried to search for my family—he feared someone would try to kill me again. His son, Grayson, was my best friend. I think he feared for me and thus he stayed very close for many years, though he never said anything about it." She shrugged. "When Nicholas came back to England, I suppose he set everything into motion. And here we are now, in the Pale. Am I really magic, Sarimund?"
He smiled at her. "Oh, yes. Your line is long and powerful, as I told you, as is the Vail line. However, unlike the Vail line, who forgot their magic"—he smiled now at Nicholas—"that is not exactly true. Galardi Vail, your grandfather, liked to toy with wizardry, but he never imagined that it was actually inside him, waiting to be freed. Your line, Isabella, the Contadini line, never forgot, which is why you were so strong. It is only when you lost your memory that you lost your magic."
She nodded slowly. She said, "Erasmo was right. I was a witch, a powerful witch, and I knew it, but—"
"You still are. You are here and that makes you even stronger. Don't forget it."
She said in some wonder, "I remember now when I was a child in San Savaro, I knew my father was spoken of behind hands, and with awe and pride, mostly, when the rain fell and none had been expected, or when a woman birthed twins unexpectedly, or when disease struck the fields and yet the barley and wheat still grew tall. All believed it was my father's doing. He was magic and all knew it. He was also deeply good. He said I was just like him. I was his magic princess."
She turned to Sarimund. "My parents—do they still remember me?"