Chapter Four
Ouon Bell tolled ominously over the silent expanse of Rieschelhold, its deep, sonorous voice echoing across the courtyard, orchard, buildings, and snowy forest beyond. Ouon Bell rang seldom; it was the bell of death and tragedy. It began tolling at midday, when Caelan was led from the house of the Elder, and it did not stop.
The sky remained slate gray. Intermittent snowflakes fell. Ushered by the proctors, all the students assembled in somber silence in the courtyard. Big-eyed, the young novices in their short indigo robes stamped their feet and blew on their hands to keep warm. The taller disciples—gangly and awkward in their long cyan robes—looked frightened or grave. The most advanced, the healers, marched along in gray robes trimmed with pale fur, their expressions blank within severance. White-faced and nervous, the serfs clustered at the rear. The proctors moved back and forth among the assembly until not a sound could be heard, not a rustle, not a throat being cleared in the crowd. Only the soft sigh of the falling snow and the low peals of the bell broke the silence.
The masters, robed and cloaked in white, walked the ramparts, stopping at each corner of the walls to sprinkle cleansing herbs of rue, hyssop, borage, and camphor. Then they came down and took their places on the dais before the assembly. Pale figures in the falling snow, their faces might have been carved from stone. Their eyes held only severance.
Crushed in among other bodies, with someone’s elbow in his ribs and another student almost standing on his heels, Agel sought the calming refuge of severance within himself. But his heart was beating too fast and his breath came short.
For the first time in months, he could not find his concentration, now when he needed it most of all.
The bell rang like a dirge. He wanted to weep with anger and humiliation. How could Caelan have done such a risky, foolhardy thing? How could he have let his stupid temper get the better of his good sense? Agel could not forgive him for it. He felt betrayed by his cousin, betrayed and bereft. Agel had thought they would spend their lifetime together, working for a common good, sharing the same occupation and interests, but now there would be no more friendship, no more companionship.
Caelan had thrown his opportunities away. Whispered rumors said he had refused the Elder’s generous offer of forgiveness.
The fool. Agel’s hands clenched into fists inside his wide sleeves. What would become of Caelan now? No one had been disrobed at Rieschelhold for at least two decades. And now, for it to be the son of Beva E’non was incredible, unbelievable.
Agel’s throat stung with embarrassment.
He saved you from a demerit, a small voice reminded him, but Agel brushed it angrily away. So he still had his perfect record thanks to Caelan. Did that excuse Caelan’s own behavior?
A stir made everyone crane to look. Agel saw his cousin coming, flanked by an escort of six hooded proctors walking three on each side. The proctors in front and the proctors at the rear held their staffs crossed, thus creating a cage around Caelan.
The boy walked tall, with his shoulders straight and his chin high. He was a strapping lad, taller than nearly anyone else, still growing out of his clothes. His hair blew back from his forehead like ripe wheat tossed by the wind. There was no shame in his face, no regret. His blue eyes were eagle-keen, almost happy.
Agel felt his eyes sting, and he could have kicked Caelan then and there.
Didn’t the idiot understand what disrobing meant? Once expelled by the masters, there was no coming back.
Agel watched his cousin stride through the parted center of the assembly, the bell tolling over him as though he had died in the ditch. Maybe it would have been better if he had. He had apparently learned nothing from his near fatal adventure.
Agel’s vision blurred, and he struggled to hold back tears. It was not manly to weep, nor was it in accordance with severance. Besides, Agel knew the proctors were watching him. They would always watch him now, seeking any evidence of the taint that Caelan had shown, nay, flung in their faces. The masters would drive Agel harder, for he was now the sole heir to Beva E’non’s great legacy.
Secret pride touched Agel, and unconsciously he straightened his own slim shoulders. As upset as he was over Caelan’s failure, Agel could not help but see this as his chance to shine. The masters’ attention would now center on him. And Agel wanted that challenge. He wanted to excel, to show everyone how good he could be.
Caelan was past Agel now, his gaze straight ahead, looking neither left nor right across the faces that stared at him. Agel swallowed hard. He did not think he would ever see Caelan again. Certainly it could never again be as it was, or with welcome and a glad heart.
Their fates, always entwined, were now separating into two different roads of life. Agel saw his as a path to accomplishment and success. His talent would support his ambitions. One day his fame would surpass that of Uncle Beva’s.
As for Caelan, his path had already grown stony and broken, heading for a life of disappointment and hard times.
Their childhood was finished.
Crossing the courtyard with his escort, Caelan could feel the eyes of the assembly burning into his back. He felt their curiosity and shock flooding over him in a collective mass of emotion that nearly made him stagger. Somehow, he managed to hold it off. This was no time for sevaisin to grip him.
The wind was bitterly cold, flicking sharp little snowflakes into his face. His breath steamed about his face, and he fought not to shiver. He intended to show no weakness. If the masters expected remorse or doubt from him, they would not get it.
All he felt now was impatience to get this over with. It would have been easier on everyone if the proctors had just handed him his cloak bag and put him through the gate. No fuss, no assembly, no scaring the first-termers.
But, no, they had to make a huge ordeal of this, make it bigger than it was. They’d even had to seize one final chance to frighten him by making him think they were going to purify him against his will.
But soon their games would be over, as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t wait.
Reaching the dais, Caelan halted. The proctors parted from around him. Looking straight up into the stony eyes of Elder Sobna, Caelan felt defiance fill him like heat. He smiled.
Twin spots of color blazed in the Elder’s pale cheeks. The Elder’s gaze burned into his; then the mask of severance returned like the slam of a door.
Caelan looked away, indifferent as the Elder lifted his arms and began to speak.
Much of it was in the old tongue, no longer used by edict of the emperor. Caelan understood none of it, and even when the Elder switched back to Lingua, Caelan barely listened.
With his money taken by the soldiers, he had no chance of heading out on his own. He would have to go home. There would be plenty of time on the journey to think of an explanation for his father.
His whole life suddenly spread before him, radiant with limitless possibilities.
“Caelan E’non,” the Elder said loudly, startling him, “what is your answer?”
A hush lay over the assembly as though everyone had held their breath to hear. Even the bell stopped tolling. Caelan had no clue as to what the Elder had asked him.
It was worse than being caught daydreaming in class.
Embarrassment flooded him. He almost started to stammer something; then he caught himself short. This wasn’t class. He was no longer obliged to do anything these men wanted.
Defiant again, he looked up at the Elder and said clearly, “I have no answer to make.”
A gasp ran behind him, and even some of the masters looked disconcerted, but the Elder’s expression did not change. With a nod he stepped aside and gestured at the masters.
One by one, they approached Caelan and touched him briefly on his left shoulder.
“I concur,” each one said.
Master Mygar came last. Old and stooped, he limped forward, his white robes stained and smelly. His palsied lips made him appear to be mumbling to himself, but his rheumy eyes glittered as malevolently as ever when they met Caelan’s.
He did not brush Caelan’s shoulder with his fingertips as had the others, but instead gripped him hard.
“Casna,” he whispered.
It was the word in the old tongue for “devil.”
“You will break the world,” the old man whispered, his eyes rolling back in his head. “You are destruction incarnate.”
Blackness poured into Caelan through the old master’s touch, burning him, defiling him. Such hatred, such decay ... an evil rottenness like a stench in the soul.
Caelan jerked free of the old man’s grasp. Shocked, he stood shuddering and blinking. A clammy sweat broke out across him, and for a moment he thought he would be sick.
He stared at Master Mygar. As the black worm of Mygar’s emotions continued to twist through Caelan’s veins, he saw the old man’s flesh melt away. A bleached white skull stared back at him, and darkness—a living, horrible darkness— writhed and pulsed within the plates of bone, flickering at the edges of the eye sockets.
Appalled by what his inadvertent sevaisin had brought him, Caelan sought desperately inside himself for the patterns of good and harmony. He tried to weave them around the worm of blackness until it stopped twisting inside him and lay still, cocooned in what he had spun around it. Then it faded and was gone, like ashes in his soul.
Still sweating, his knees weak as though they would let him drop at any moment, Caelan managed to regain his breath.
Watching him, Mygar widened his gaze. “Casna” he whispered again, then drew back. “I concur,” he said loudly for the assembly to hear.
Elder Sobna stood in front of Caelan once more. His lingers brushed Caelan’s right shoulder, and this time Caelan flinched. No more emotions came to him, however.
“And I concur,” the Elder intoned. “You are no longer eligible to be trained for the healing arts here or in any part of the empire.”
Caelan blinked in surprise. He hadn’t expected such sweeping finality. Still, he didn’t believe they could enforce it. The masters here might be renowned, but they didn’t run the world.
“You are no longer to wear the blue colors of our training. You may never return through our gates. You will never practice the arts which you have learned here. Our ways and our privileges are henceforth forever denied to you.”
The Elder raised his hands. “Kneel for the disrobing.”
Two proctors reached out to push Caelan to his knees.
“No!” he cried, his voice ringing out across the courtyard. “I’ll never kneel to you, any of you! Here.” He yanked off the novice robe and flung it on the ground at the Elder’s feet. “I have disrobed myself. Now let me go from this place.”
Despite the rule of silence, murmurs ran through the assembly. The masters looked shocked, and even the Elder lost his severance to fresh anger.
Blinking hard, his mouth clamped tight, the Elder pointed at the main gates in silence. They swung open.
The gathered proctors moved aside and Caelan strode out, breathing hard, barely restraining his eagerness.
The bell began to toll again, its dark tone lifting over the countryside.
Head high, Caelan walked through the gates and paused to glance back. He would have liked to have said goodbye to Agel. But the gates slammed behind him with a mighty thud, and the Ouon Bell stopped ringing. For Rieschelhold, he had ceased to exist.
Lightness filled him. Caelan flung his arms to the sky with a shout of relief. Crowing with laughter, he danced in a small circle, kicking up snow. He felt as though he could fly.
“I’m free. I’m free!” he said over and over. Right then it didn’t matter that he had no money, no cloak, and no traveling boots. If he got himself into trouble again out here, no one would come to his rescue. But he didn’t care.
Scooping up a double handful of snow, he flung it into the air and let it rain down on him. “I’m free!”
“Caelan.”
Startled by that quiet word, Caelan lowered his arms and spun around.
A man cloaked in white fur stepped forward from the bushes. He led two white, shaggy mountain ponies by their reins. A pole with a healer’s globed lantern was attached to one saddle.
The man was tall and handsome, with a fringe of straight brown hair showing across his forehead beneath his fur hood. His face held no expression at all, but his gray eyes were dark with the bleakest disappointment Caelan had ever seen.
For a second, everything in this man’s heart lay exposed to the boy—a lifetime of hope, ambition, and plans for the future now in ruin. A dream of companionship, of working together for a mutual aim, now shattered.
Caelan dragged in an unsteady breath. All the lightness in him dimmed. The relief, the joy, the sense of unfurling like a warrior’s banner, faded. He was once again a boy in trouble for his mischief, small and sorry, waiting head down for the word of scolding.
“Oh, Father,” he said, his voice a mere whisper of sound in the falling snow.
Beva E’non drew in his pain, closing it behind the gates of his own will. In silence he turned away from Caelan and mounted his pony. The globe lantern bobbed and shook on its pole as he settled himself in the saddle.
Gazing down at Caelan, he held out the reins to the other pony without a word.
Equally silent, Caelan took them. A wool tunic and cloak lay across the saddle. Caelan shook snow off the garments and put them on, grateful for their warmth. He hesitated a moment, hating to be collected like this, haling to still be a child in a man’s body. But at last he climbed into the cold, stiff saddle. It was his own, the stirrups shorter now than they’d been on his last visit home. He looked at his father’s erect back. The white fur made Beva almost vanish into the snowy landscape.
The man had always sought to blend into his surroundings, to never stand out, to never insist that he be seen or heard. This inner stillness, this silence of manner, appearance, and word, only added to his great mystique.
Hut lot Caelan, it made his father impossible to approach.
Worse, he had not expected Beva to know yet, much less come for him. Beva must have overheard everything in the ceremony. Everyone in Trau would soon know of Caelan’s public disgrace, and it would mark the first failure of this famous man.
How to explain anything to the unyielding back riding in front of him?
Caelan sighed. He glanced over his shoulder at the immense walls of Rieschelhold, and still felt no remorse. His way lay elsewhere, even if he did not yet know what his life was to be. Perhaps now, at last, Beva would accept that.
Frowning, Caelan kicked his pony and followed his father home.