Darkness had crept into the room, darkness and silence, and the food was cold and Sharra could scarce see his face fifty long feet away. So she rose and went to him, and sat lightly on the great table near to his chair. And Laren nodded and smiled, and at once there was a whooosh, and all along the walls torches flared to sudden life in the long dining hall. He offered her more wine, and her fingers lingered on his as she took the glass.
“It was like that for us, too,” Sharra said. “If the wind was warm enough, and other men were far away, then we liked to lie together in the open. Kaydar and I.” She hesitated, looked at him.
His eyes were searching. “Kaydar?”
“You would have liked him, Laren. And he would have liked you, I think. He was tall and he had red hair and there was a fire in his eyes. Kaydar had powers, as did I, but his were greater. And he had such a will. They took him one night, did not kill him, only took him from me and from our world. I have been hunting for him ever since. I know the gates, I wear the dark crown, and they will not stop me easily.”
Laren drank his wine and watched the torchlight on the metal of his goblet. “There are an infinity of worlds, Sharra.”
“I have as much time as I require. I do not age, Laren, no more than you do. I will find him.”
“Did you love him so much?”
Sharra fought a fond, flickering smile, and lost. “Yes,” she said, and now it was her voice that seemed a little lost. “Yes, so much. He made me happy, Laren. We were only together for a short time, but he did make me happy. The Seven cannot touch that. It was a joy just to watch him, to feel his arms around me and see the way he smiled.”
“Ah,” he said, and he did smile, but there was something very beaten in the way he did it. The silence grew very thick.
Finally Sharra turned to him. “But we have wandered a long way from where we started. You still have not told me why your windows seal themselves at night.”
“You have come a long way, Sharra. You move between the worlds. Have you seen worlds without stars?”
“Yes. Many, Laren. I have seen a universe where the sun is a glowing ember with but a single world, and the skies are vast and vacant by night. I have seen the land of frowning jesters, where there is no sky and the hissing suns burn below the ocean. I have walked the moors of Carradyne, and watched dark sorcerers set fire to a rainbow to light that sunless land.”
“This world has no stars,” Laren said.
“Does that frighten you so much that you stay inside?”
“No. But it has something else instead.” He looked at her. “Would you see?”
She nodded.
As abruptly as they had lit, the torches all snuffed out. The room swam with blackness. And Sharra shifted on the table to look over Laren’s shoulder. Laren did not move. But behind him, the stones of the window fell away like dust and light poured in from outside.
The sky was very dark, but she could see clearly, for against the darkness a shape was moving. Light poured from it, and the dirt in the courtyard and the stones of the battlements and the gray pennants were all bright beneath its glow. Puzzling, Sharra looked up.
Something looked back. It was taller than the mountains and it filled up half the sky, and though it gave off light enough to see the castle by, Sharra knew that it was dark beyond darkness. It had a man-shape, roughly, and it wore a long cape and a cowl, and below that was blackness even fouler than the rest. The only sounds were Laren’s soft breathing and the beating of her heart and the distant weeping of a mourning-bird, but in her head Sharra could hear demonic laughter.
The shape in the sky looked down at her, in her, and she felt the cold dark in her soul. Frozen, she could not move her eyes. But the shape did move. It turned and raised a hand, and then there was something else up there with it, a tiny man-shape with eyes of fire that writhed and screamed and called to her.
Sharra shrieked and turned away. When she glanced back, there was no window. Only a wall of safe, sure stone, and a row of torches burning, and Laren holding her within strong arms. “It was only a vision,” he told her. He pressed her tight against him, and stroked her hair. “I used to test myself at night,” he said, more to himself than to her. “But there was no need. They take turns up there, watching me, each of the Seven. I have seen them too often, burning with black light against the clean dark of the sky, and holding those I loved. Now I don’t look. I stay inside and sing, and my windows are made of night-stone.”
“I feel...fouled,” she said, still trembling a little.
“Come,” he said. “There is water upstairs, you can clean away the cold. And then I’ll sing for you.” He took her hand and led her up into the tower.
Sharra took a hot bath while Laren set up his instrument and tuned it in the bedroom. He was ready when she returned, wrapped head to foot in a huge fluffy brown towel. She sat on the bed, drying her hair and waiting.
And Laren gave her visions.
He sang his other dream this time, the one where he was a god and the enemy of the Seven. The music was a savage pounding thing, shot through with lightning and tremors of fear, and the lights melted together to form a scarlet battlefield where a blinding-white Laren fought shadows and the shapes of nightmare. There were seven of them, and they formed a ring around him and darted in and out, stabbing him with lances of absolute black, and Laren answered them with fire and storm. But in the end they overwhelmed him, the light faded, and then the song grew soft and sad again, and the vision blurred as lonely dreaming centuries flashed by.
Hardly had the last notes fallen from the air and the final shimmers died than Laren started once again. A new song this time, and one he did not know so well. His fingers, slim and graceful, hesitated and retraced themselves more than once, and his voice was shaky, too, for he was making up some of the words as he went along. Sharra knew why. For this time he sang of her, a ballad of her quest. Of burning love and endless searching, of worlds beyond worlds, of dark crowns and waiting guardians that fought with claws and tricks and lies. He took every word that she had spoken, and used each, and transformed each. In the bedroom, glittering panoramas formed where hot white suns burned beneath eternal oceans and hissed in clouds of steam, and men ancient beyond time lit rainbows to keep away the dark. And he sang Kaydar, and he sang him true somehow, he caught and drew the fire that had been Sharra’s love and made her believe anew.
But the song ended with a question, the halting finale lingering in the air, echoing, echoing. Both of them waited for the rest, and both knew there was no more. Not yet.
Sharra was crying. “My turn, Laren,” she said. Then: “Thank you. For giving Kaydar back to me.”
“It was only a song,” he said, shrugging. “It’s been a long time since I had a new song to sing.”
Once again he left her, touching her cheek lightly at the door as she stood there with the blanket wrapped around her. Then Sharra locked the door behind him and went from candle to candle, turning light to darkness with a breath. And she threw the towel over a chair and crawled under the blankets and lay a long, long time before drifting off to sleep.
It was still dark when she woke, not knowing why. She opened her eyes and lay quietly and looked around the room, and nothing was there, nothing was changed. Or was there?
And then she saw him, sitting in the chair across the room with his hands locked under his chin, just as he had sat that first time. His eyes steady and unmoving, very wide and dark in a room full of night. He sat very still. “Laren?” she called, softly, still not quite sure the dark form was him.
“Yes,” he said. He did not move. “I watched you last night, too, while you slept. I have been alone here for longer than you can ever imagine, and very soon now I will be alone again. Even in sleep, your presence is a wonder.”
“Oh, Laren,” she said. There was a silence, a pause, a weighing and an unspoken conversation. Then she threw back the blanket, and Laren came to her.
Both of them had seen centuri
es come and go. A month, a moment; much the same.
They slept together every night, and every night Laren sang his songs while Sharra listened. They talked throughout dark hours, and during the day they swam nude in crystalline waters that caught the purple glory of the sky. They made love on beaches of fine white sand, and they spoke a lot of love.
But nothing changed. And finally the time drew near. On the eve of the night before the day that was end, at twilight, they walked together through the shadowed forest where he’d found her.
Laren had learned to laugh during his month with Sharra, but now he was silent again. He walked slowly, clutched her hand hard in his, and his mood was more gray than the soft silk shirt he wore. Finally, by the side of the valley stream, he sat and pulled her down by his side. They took off their boots and let the water cool their feet. It was a warm evening, with a lonely, restless wind, and already you could hear the first of the mourning-birds.
“You must go,” he said, still holding her hand but never looking at her. It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” she said, and the melancholy had touched her, too, and there were leaden echoes in her voice.
“My words have all left me, Sharra,” Laren said. “If I could sing for you a vision now, I would. A vision of a world once empty, made full by us and our children. I could offer that. My world has beauty and wonder and mystery enough, if only there were eyes to see it. And if the nights are evil, well, men have faced dark nights before, on other worlds in other times. I would love you, Sharra, as much as I am able. I would try to make you happy.”
“Laren...” she started. But he quieted her with a glance.
“No, I could say that, but I will not. I have no right. Kaydar makes you happy. Only a selfish fool would ask you to give up that happiness to share my misery. Kaydar is all fire and laughter, while I am smoke and song and sadness. I have been alone too long, Sharra. The gray is part of my soul now, and I would not have you darkened. But still...”
She took his hand in both of hers, lifted it, and kissed it quickly. Then, releasing him, she lay her head on his unmoving shoulder. “Try to come with me, Laren,” she said. “Hold my hand when we pass through the gate, and perhaps the dark crown will protect you.”
“I will try anything you ask. But don’t ask me to believe that it will work.” He sighed. “You have countless worlds ahead of you, Sharra, and I cannot see your ending. But it is not here. That I know. And maybe that is best. I don’t know anymore, if I ever did. I remember love vaguely, I think I can recall what it was like, and I remember that it never lasts. Here, with both of us unchanging and immortal, how could we help but to grow bored? Would we hate each other then? I’d not want that.” He looked at her then, and smiled an aching, melancholy smile. “I think that you had known Kaydar for only a short time, to be so in love with him. Perhaps I’m being devious after all. For in finding Kaydar, you may lose him. The fire will go out someday, my love, and the magic will die. And then you may remember Laren Dorr.”
Sharra began to weep, softly. Laren gathered her to him, and kissed her, and whispered a gentle “No.” She kissed back, and they held each other, wordless.
When at last the purple gloom had darkened to near-black, they put back on their boots and stood. Laren hugged her and smiled.
“I must go,” Sharra said. “I must. But leaving is hard, Laren, you must believe that.”
“I do,” he said. “I love you because you will go, I think. Because you cannot forget Kaydar, and you will not forget the promises you made. You are Sharra, who goes between the worlds, and I think the Seven must fear you far more than any god I might have been. If you were not you, I would not think as much of you.”
“Oh. Once you said you would love any voice that was not any echo of your own.”
Laren shrugged. “As I have often said, love, that was a very long time ago.”
They were back inside the castle before darkness, for a final meal, a final night, a final song. They got no sleep that night, and Laren sang to her again just before dawn. It was not a very good song, though; it was an aimless, rambling thing about a wandering minstrel on some nondescript world. Very little of interest ever happened to the minstrel; Sharra couldn’t quite get the point of the song, and Laren sang it listlessly. It seemed an odd farewell, but both of them were troubled.
He left her with the sunrise, promising to change clothes and meet her in the courtyard. And sure enough, he was waiting when she got there, smiling at her, calm and confident. He wore a suit of pure white; pants that clung, a shirt that puffed up at the sleeves, and a great heavy cape that snapped and billowed in the rising wind. But the purple sun stained him with its shadow rays.
Sharra walked out to him and took his hand. She wore tough leather, and there was a knife in her belt, for dealing with the guardian. Her hair, jet-black with light-born glints of red and purple, blew as freely as his cape, but the dark crown was in place. “Good-bye, Laren,” she said. “I wish I had given you more.”
“You have given me enough. In all the centuries that come, in all the sun-cycles that lie ahead, I will remember. I shall measure time by you, Sharra. When the sun rises one day and its color is blue fire, I will look at it and say, ‘Yes, this is the first blue sun after Sharra came to me.’”
She nodded. “And I have a new promise. I will find Kaydar, someday. And if I free him, we will come back to you, both of us together, and we will pit my crown and Kaydar’s fires against all the darkness of the Seven.”
Laren shrugged. “Good. If I’m not here, be sure to leave a message,” he said. And then he grinned.
“Now, the gate. You said you would show me the gate.”
Laren turned and gestured at the shortest tower, a sooty stone structure Sharra had never been inside. There was a wide wooden door in its base. Laren produced a key.
“Here?” she said, looking puzzled. “In the castle?”
“Here,” Laren said. They walked across the courtyard, to the door. Laren inserted the heavy metal key and began to fumble with the lock. While he worked, Sharra took one last look around, and felt the sadness heavy on her soul. The other towers looked bleak and dead, the courtyard was forlorn, and beyond the high icy mountains was only an empty horizon. There was no sound but Laren working at the lock, and no motion but the steady wind that kicked up the courtyard dust and flapped the seven gray pennants that hung along each wall. Sharra shivered with sudden loneliness.
Laren opened the door. No room inside; only a wall of moving fog, a fog without color or sound or light. “Your gate, my lady,” the singer said.
Sharra watched it, as she had watched it so many times before. What world was next? she wondered. She never knew. But maybe in the next one, she would find Kaydar.
She felt Laren’s hand on her shoulder. “You hesitate,” he said, his voice soft.
Sharra’s hand went to her knife. “The guardian,” she said suddenly. “There is always a guardian.” Her eyes darted quickly round the courtyard.
Laren sighed. “Yes. Always. There are some who try to claw you to pieces, and some who try to get you lost, and some who try to trick you into taking the wrong gate. There are some who hold you with weapons, some with chains, some with lies. And there is one, at least, who tried to stop you with love. Yet he was true for all that, and he never sang you false.”
And with a hopeless, loving shrug, Laren shoved her through the gate.
Did she find him, in the end, her lover with the eyes of fire? Or is she searching still? What guardian did she face next?
When she walks at night, a stranger in a lonely land, does the sky have stars?
I don’t know. He doesn’t. Maybe even the Seven do not know. They are powerful, yes, but all power is not theirs, and the number of worlds is greater than even they can count.
There is a girl who goes between the worlds, but her path is lost in legend by now. Maybe she is dead, and maybe not. Knowledge moves slowly from world to world, and not
all of it is true.
But this we know: In an empty castle below a purple sun, a lonely minstrel waits, and sings of her.
OF SWORDS AND HORSES
CARRIE VAUGHN
Carrie Vaughn is the author of the bestselling series about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show. She’s also written for young adults (Steel, Voices of Dragons), the novels Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age, many short stories, and she’s a contributor to George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. When she isn’t writing, she collects hobbies and enjoys the great outdoors in Colorado, where she makes her home.
Iraised my daughter on Disney princess movies because I’d loved them so much as a girl: the music, the happily ever afters, and those amazing dresses. They made me dream of other worlds, and I’d wondered what it would be like to dance at a ball, to marry a prince, to live in a world with magic.
Maybe I thought that Maggie would turn into me, or something like me. I’d have a friend I could sigh over the movies with, a little girl I could dress in satin princess gowns.
But Maggie’s questions startled me.
“How come the girls don’t get to ride horses and have swords and things?”
Then, I showed her Mulan, in which the girl rides a horse and has a sword, and my six-year-old astutely observed, “But she’s dressed like a boy.”
So I signed her up for fencing lessons.
I read an article in the paper about the local fencing school where one of the students—a girl—had just won a medal in the world championships and a scholarship to Harvard. Who knew Harvard offered fencing scholarships? The school advertised that their classes boosted confidence and increased poise and self-esteem, especially for girls.
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