Free Guardians of the Keep: Book Two of the Bridge of D'Arnath by Carol Berg

would
    the balance between the two have settled out after four months of Dassine’s care? Perhaps he would
    seem more like Aeren again, the half-mad stranger I’d found in the forest six months before who was
    somehow both of them.
    First I had to decide where we would meet. Large as it was, Comigor Castle provided few places
    where I could receive visitors unobserved. Privacy was a rare commodity in a great house. I had only
    just persuaded Nellia not to come walking through my bedchamber door at any hour as she had when I
    was a little girl. But my bedchamber was hardly suitable. I wasn’t sure whether Karon would even
    remember me as yet. Dassine had said he would have to “take him back to the beginning” to restore his
    memories. It was all so strange!
    I considered the battlements. No one went there but me, fair weather or foul, but despite the
    emerging stars’ promise of fair skies, the bitter wind still howled from the wild northlands as fiercely as
    the wolf packs of famine years. And the snow lay deep on the surrounding countryside, so I couldn’t ride
    out.
    One other place came to mind. Located on the eastern flank of the keep, where morning sun could
    warm the stone, was a walled garden, wild, neglected, locked by my father on the day my mother
    succumbed to her long illness. Once the garden had been thick with flowers and herbs native to the far
    southeastern corner of Leire whence my mother had come at seventeen to wed the Duke of Comigor.
    The customs of Comigor, a strictly traditional warrior house, allowed a bride to bring only one of her
    father’s retainers to her new home, and my mother had chosen, not her personal maid or some other
    girlish companion, but a gardener. The poor man had spent eleven years fighting Comigor’s bitter winters
    and hot summers to reproduce the blooms and fragrances of his lady’s balmy homeland, only to be sent
    away when she died because my father could not bear the reminder of her.
    For many years after her death, I had climbed over the wall to read and dream in the peaceful
    enclosure, watching the carefully nurtured plants grow wild and die away like a fading echo of my young
    girl’s grief. Now I held the keys to the house, and with them the key to my mother’s garden, a place
    deserted, secluded, and most importantly, invisible from any vantage point within the castle.
    Unable to sleep for my anticipation, I wrapped myself in a cloak, let myself through the garden gate,
    and strolled among the bare trees and shrubs and the sagging latticework of the arbors. The Great Arch
    of the stars still lit the darkness like a reflection of D’Arnath’s enchanted Bridge.
    I didn’t question that they would come. “At the sun’s next rising,” Dassine had said, “at whatever
    place you are.” If I’d told anyone in the world what it was that I anticipated so anxiously as I awaited
    dawn in my mother’s garden, that person would have thrown me in an asylum. I wrapped my hand tightly
    about the pink stone, allowing its heat to warm my freezing fingers.
    The sun shot over the garden wall, causing me to blink just as a streak of white fire pierced the rosy
    brilliance. Squinting into the glare, I spied a short, muscular man, who leaned on a stick as he hobbled
    toward me along the gravel path. His white robe flapped in the breeze, revealing a rumpled shirt, knee
    breeches, and sagging hose. Dassine. Alone. Bitter disappointment welled up in my throat. But when the
    sorcerer raised his hand in greeting, I glimpsed another figure. That one remained at the far end of the
    path, almost lost in the fiery brightness. Tall, broad in back and shoulder, he too wore a white robe. A
    white hood hid his face.
    “Good morning, my lady,” said Dassine, his breath curling from his mottled beard like smoke rings.
    Though tired lines surrounded them, his blue eyes sparkled. Gray-streaked brown hair and beard framed
    his ageless face like a striped corona. “Am I never to find you