The city itself is the same as always. Esmelda gave Montborne a hero’s funeral — she said Brassaford had been too great a price for him to pay, and typical Laurean wishcrap like that. Terris said it was his love for Laurea that blinded him to everything else, but I still think he was only out for his own glory. Whatever it was, Esmelda had him cremated and scattered his ashes in the Serenity River. No tree with his name grows in the plaza.
We won’t stay long in the city. Terris is not the old woman, to sit like a dragon-spider in the heart of her web, barely twitching except to reel in her prey. All of Harth calls to him — to see, to taste...to change, as he has me.
“I wish you wouldn’t go back,” Etch says, half-shy like a boy.
I shake my head, thinking of his gentle ways with the horses, and how my gray mare comes up and nuzzles him for a caress or a bit of apple. I think of the son he lost, the dream he hungers to make real again with me. He won’t be alone for long. There are enough widows and daughters out here on the Border who want that dream just as much as he does and would love the sweet-sad mystery in him.
As for me, I am what I am. Whatever else I might have been died that night on the funeral mount.
Terris comes out on the twilit porch. Etch is clean-faced again, but Terris has kept his beard and shoulder-length hair, neatly trimmed.
Etch looks up at him. “You ever find a name for that horse of yours?”
Terris shakes his head. “It’s better not to name some things.”
Etch considers this. “I expect you’re right,” he says, and goes back inside the house.
o0o
At my side, Terris watches the horses settle down to graze. Their coats glimmer like bits of cloud in the growing dark. He stands very close, but he doesn’t touch me. He is not Aram, and I am not the young girl that Aram loved.
He talks of the beauty of the evening, not just here but all through Harth — the wild western coastline, the tundra with its ice and wire-grass and volcanos, the rolling farmlands. The perfumed cities, the riverbank forests, the unexplored jungles beyond the Inland Sea, even the windblown steppe in a way I’ve never seen it before. He talks about them as if they were a single living thing, growing and changing. His words take me to all these wonders, not only places on the map but places in the soul.
Ay Mother, sweet Mother who answers my prayers, what does it matter if I no longer wear the badge and leather vest of Laurea? I serve the secret Guardian of Harth. With my sharp steel. With my heart.
I am a Ranger...
...first again and only.
Publication Information
Northlight
Deborah J. Ross
writing as Deborah Wheeler
Book View Café
ISBN: 978-1-61138-039-2
Copyright © 1995 Deborah J. Ross
February 2011
o0o
First Publication: DAW
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