by Andre Norton
Tirtha looked to the casket. Warmth—the warmth had grown. The scroll fashioned of ancient skin hung across the lid, touched her two hands, for Crytha had left it unrolled when she had put it there. Tirtha struggled to grasp some wisp of thought hovering at the very edge of her consciousness, the importance of which—yes! It was important! Hawk was the guardian—she was Hawk!
But the Great One was not here, unless some portion of her dwelt within Crytha, now armed with the shadow sword. Certainly she was not in Tirtha. What could be done, must be done—that would be of Tirtha's doing. She began her own moves, though her broken body lay inert. To use power only a little—that added to one's talent. To be a guardian of Power—one did not remain unchanged! She was left only her thoughts.
She envisioned the casket as it had been in her dream, standing on the high table, open, an equal distance from both lord and lady. What lay within—what must be guarded? An open casket—perhaps now she was fatally loosing what should be bound—but she would be a part of this battle, not an inanimate prize for them to fight over.
Two of them—lord, lady . . . Did it then take two, a man and woman, to complete the full pattern? Balance was ever a law of nature, perhaps of witchery also. Witchery—the Falconer had called it that, her own small dabblings in the unknown. Yet he carried now what this axe man out of Escore called a “named weapon,” one of four of power.
Two to summon—Alon?
Tirtha did not raise her eyes to the boy where he stood beside her. She tried to shut from her mind, from her, the outer world beyond. If they moved into battle, there was nothing at all she could do now to aid and perhaps she could hinder. Therefore let her try this.
It was like feeling one's way along a passage in deep dark, through unknown halls and runways, never sure of taking the right turning. Two and an open casket . . .
“Nirel . . .” Names, true names were of importance. He had given his into Alon's keeping; yet she had been present when that was done. Therefore, whether he had intended it or not, it was also hers, though he might not have gifted it directly. “Nirel . . . Nirel . . .” Three times called—the power lay in such calling.
She did not look to him either. Had she even called aloud so that he could hear?
“Give me”—now she spoke deliberately, with the full power of her thought behind what she would say—“your sword hand.”
The metal claw—that was not the man. She must have flesh to flesh, even as it had been in Hawkholme with those others of whose blood she was.
Did he hear? Would he answer? Tirtha centered her thoughts, concentrated with all the force she could raise. Those dark corridors—yes! She had chosen a way that was open, though to where it might lead she did not know, and there was danger in this. But what could stand as true danger to one who was already dead-alive? Danger to him also, but at this moment they were all in peril, and who could balance one against the other as the worst?
Tirtha still watched the casket. However, she was aware of movement at her right. A shadow fell across the upper part of her body. There was the claw, wedged into it the sword, but stretching out to her breast and the casket was a true hand of browned skin, grimed with trail dust, bruised and blood-stained.
The casket—when they had tried to take the casket from her in the outer part of Hawkholme men had died. To take, yes, against her will, in opposition to the guardianship. This she invited, and she believed that she now held that right. If she were wrong, Nirel would die horribly. Yet if he had any such fear, the steadiness of his hand did not betray it.
His palm fell over her hands where she kept her locked grip. She could not feel the warmth of it against her own deadness or perhaps she could not because of the fire rising in the box.
“Raise!” Her voice rang out commandingly. “Lord of the Hawk, help me to raise!”
She saw his hand tighten over hers. A sweep of his fingers flipped away that roll of pictured skin. As if some breeze which could not be felt caught it, it fluttered up. But her inert hand so tightly clasped in his was moving—yes!
At that very moment there came a roar of sound so blasting they might have been struck deaf. Instantly, a vast wave of darkness followed, washing out from behind where Tirtha lay. Things moved in that darkness. She heard cries, saw quick flames that might have come from axe blades, from swords, even from the lashing of a cord whip.
No, this other task was for her, for Nirel. If he followed his warrior's instinct now and arose to fight whatever had spread from the trap, they were lost! He must not!
The blue light from the sword in his claw still hung over her, joining the glow from the box. And his hand remained on hers! He was slowly raising that lid, even as she had asked of him. Still she could not see what lay within, for the box was so placed that the opening was on the other side.
The lid arose until it was straight up, and the glow from within burned bright and even. His hand remained firmly on hers, holding them so.
Now Tirtha cried aloud: “The time is served, Ninutra—Hawk bond is given.”
What loomed out of the dark before her, standing at the foot of her supine body—this was not the woman of the impressive face nor her priestess. This was another. Nor was he . . .
Human in his outward form, or did he wear that as he would wear clothing when he treated with her kind? He was weaponless, nor did he wear mail—rather a tight half garment, which seemed made of reptile skin clinging tightly to his lower limbs, reaching to his waist. It was black, but the edges of the scales glinted with the scarlet of new shed blood. Above it the dusky skin of his torso was smooth, his face awesomely handsome, his head capped with a tight-fitting covering of the same jet and scarlet scaled skin, enclosed at the brow edge by a broad band of scarlet gems. He raised his hands slowly, and Tirtha could see webs of skin as he spread wide his fingers.
He straightened them out flat as if waiting for something to be laid upon them. Nor needed he to voice his demand; he desired what Nirel and she together had uncovered.
“Time is served.” His lips did not move, but words rang into silence. For though that black cloud still swirled about, there was no longer any flash of weapons through it, no sound of a struggle.
“I . . . am . . . the . . . Hawk. . . .” It was as if a heavy weight rested on Tirtha so that she had to force out those words with a pause for breath between each of them.
“You die. . . .” he returned, with that same indifference she had sensed in Ninutra. “Your death can be swift and in ease. It can be otherwise. . . .”
“I . . . am . . . Hawk. Lord and Lady—theirs the guardianship . . .”
“Lord?” There was mockery in that. “I see no lord, only a discredited beggar of a masterless fighting man.”
“He is what I choose by my own right. . . .”
For a moment Rane made her no answer. He was looking, she knew, to Nirel. And as if she had seen it written on the air between the two of them, she knew what Rane would do, was doing now. He was calling upon age-old beliefs, all the prejudice of Nirel's people, drawing upon their disgust for women which abode within the mind and memory of the man beside her, striving to use such to end this alliance. She could not fight this portion of the battle—it was Nirel's alone. Perhaps it was already lost.
Yet still his hand remained on hers, and the claw-held sword was steady to light that joining.
What did Rane raise in Nirel? Tirtha could not guess. Nor could she reach out, she discovered, to aid the other in his fight. Would the fact of sword-oath, as great a bond as that was among his kind, be any armor against such an assault as this?
“Fool, die then!”
Rane's palms turned down. He no longer waited for a gift. His fingers crooked. Through her ran pain—red pain—a fire eating away her body inch by inch. She struggled to keep back her screams, wondering how long she could. Let Nirel release this common hold, and that other—the victory would be his!
The fragment of skin with its scrawl of pictured symbols, which had b
een fluttering in the air above the box, though it could not be wind-borne, suddenly began to twist upon itself. Even through the haze of her pain, Tirtha saw it change. The twisting substance took on a bird shape—not that of the gray bird which was Ninutra's messenger. This one was darker, black of feather as the clouds about them.
It . . . it lacked a foot, its head drooped, its wings beat with such a manifest effort that it could barely keep aloft. But it flew straight toward Rane. Then, with a last desperate burst of speed, it sped into his face as if determined to pluck out an eye, as Tirtha had heard the war falcons had once been battle-trained to do.
The Dark Great One threw up an arm to beat the flyer away. As he did, that claw, so close to her own body, moved also. The sword of power that had been found in a place of death hurtled through the air, crossing over the casket from which, in its passing, it appeared to draw more light—went on—aimed at the dark-skinned breast of him who threatened.
There came a blast of red, of black, if both could be the color of flames. Tirtha was blinded by that vast surge of energy, that upward flare. She felt the pressure laid on a hand coming to life—alive to agony. Nirel's flesh against hers, so tormented and torn, was forcing down the lid of the casket, to seal it again. She twisted under a final upsurge of agony, and at last she screamed in a way that tore at the very lining of her throat.
Dreamy content, a feeling of rightness in the world—what world? Where? She was dead. Could one dead feel the beating of a heart, draw deep breaths of scented wind? There was no pain, there was only . . .
Slowly Tirtha opened her eyes. Sunlight beamed over her head—the sun of early summer. She was stronger, more alive than she had ever felt before in her whole pinched, grim existence, as if she had been truly dead before and only now awakened into life. Her body was whole. Instinctively she used a healer's sense without thinking to assure herself of that. In fact, it was as if she somehow stood above and beyond that body and could see into it. There were no broken bones, no harm. She was healed!
She lay in a strange place—a round hollow filled with red mud that gave off an odor akin to certain herbs she knew. There came a tapping. She looked down. Mud had been mounded over her body, had hardened into a crust that covered her. A bird now perched upon the smaller hump above her upturned feet, and with its bill, it was chipping away at the covering which fell in flakes. A bird? No, a falcon, black and strong and standing on two feet!
There was a stir by her side. Quickly she turned her head. Nirel knelt there, even as he had done when they had united to open the casket. There was no encrusted blood matting his dark hair, no sign of any wound. His fine-drawn body was bare, unscarred. He, too, was picking at that which covered her, picking with two hands. The cruel claw was gone, he had ten fingers busy at his task.
She gasped and he smiled—such a smile as she thought could never have touched the somber face she had learned to know so well. Then he raised his restored hand, spread, retracted, spread again, those fingers.
“It . . .” The wonder of that or of her own healing encompassed her, and her voice was lost in it.
“It is witchery,” he said with such a light gaiety that she wondered if this could be someone else wearing Nirel's body. Then she looked into his falcon eyes and knew that could not be so. “The witchery of Escore. We have been here long, my lady, but it has served us well.”
She remembered. “The casket!”
“There is no more geas for the Hawk,” he told her, as he pulled away with his new-found fingers a long strip of dried clay. “That witchery has been reclaimed by the one who set it, having once sent forth the casket into safety with those of your clan who swore to guard it when the Shadow fell here in the long ago. It was returned that it might serve now as a weapon in the right hands.”
“Ninutra?”
He nodded as he pulled off more of the clay, then clasped her hand, drawing her up toward him. She looked from those entwined hands to him.
“I am still a woman.” She forgot Great Ones and their dealings.
“As I am a man.”
“And a Falconer?” She could not yet accept this change in him. Dim in her mind was that dream vision, Lord and Lady under the Hawk, closed in a bond she had never known or thought to know, but which might possibly exist again.
He turned his head and chirped. The bird arose from the crumbled clay, gave a cry, alighted on his shoulder.
“In so much as this”—he lifted his free hand and caressed the feathered head which bent to his touch—“do I hold with the old. But now I am a Hawk—did not you yourself name me so, my lady?”
Was there a shade of anxiety in that? Could it be that he looked to her for reassurance?
“A Hawk,” she returned firmly, and allowed him to steady her on her feet. More than their bodies had been cleansed and healed here. There might lie before them much that was of the Dark—more pain, more needed strength, but neither of them would walk alone again.
“Alon?” For the first time she remembered the third one of their comradeship.
“He too seeks a destiny—that which is truly his.”
Tirtha nodded. Yes, that would also follow. Alon in his own way was now free.
“A Hawk,” she repeated softly. “And let them ’ware all hawks henceforth, my lord, Nirel.”
His arm was about her shoulders where the weight felt right, a part of a life to be. The falcon took wing and spiralled heavenward as together they walked away from what was past and could be forgotten at will.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Andre Norton
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5699-4
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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