“And I did that to her,” I whispered. “Frain, I have hurt you in every way.”
“Never mind,” he mumbled into the fair silk of my shirt.
“How can you abide me? How can you not kill me?”
“No more of that,” he said sharply, and Fabron broke in, bending over him urgently.
“Frain,” he begged, “come back to Vaire with me. Things may not always seem the same, so hopeless. If you are not better by spring—”
“No.” Frain stood and faced him. “My father, I wish I could stay, I wish I could always be with you. But I must go, and now, within the hour. Even though the day is half spent.” His words were firm, but a wild desperation was growing in his eyes.
“Only wait a day or two,” Fabron pleaded, “an hour, even, until I have thought of what to say to you—”
“He should not have to bear it even another hour.” It was my own voice, coming out of me as I listened in vague surprise. “I know that tug. By Adalis, by the ancient Five…” I trailed to a stop, feeling the invisible eyes in the room, feeling fate brooding like a dark bird in the rafters. Such a cruel fate, such a lonely fate. There would be no king for him to kill.
“Go see Grandfather,” I told Frain. “I will make ready your horse and provisions.”
He kissed his father, and then we went out, leaving Fabron standing like a stone. He stood there a day and then took horse toward Vaire without a word to me. He could not face Frain again; he could not face Acheron.
Within the hour Frain left Daymon Cein and came to me, dreamwalking, where I awaited him in the stable. “Grandfather knew already,” he told me.
“Of course. He would.” That sly old man.
“He said there would be no place for me, no rest, even in Acheron. He said I must find healing and dwelling within myself.”
“But you are still to go?” I could not help asking.
“Of course. I have no choice. It is only for—for love of you that I have waited this long. You are strong now. You will be able to manage without me.”
It was true. I briefly considered belying the truth, making a weakling of myself, but I had felt the wing of fate. “I will ride with you as far as the Wall,” I said.
“All right.” He mounted, took the reins with his one good hand.
We rode out at walk and gentle trot, all the way to the Hill of Vision with scarcely a word between us. A few years before we would have raced the distance, whooping, in half the time. But we felt no desire to speed our way that day.… How the wheel had turned. Fate rode above us on the wind; I could almost see it. Ever since my brother had set foot in that dark mountain lake he had been changed in some subtle way—what strange force was tearing him from me?
“It is not your fault, any of it.” Frain hurled the words defensively into the silence.
“Oh, it’s not, is it?” I glanced over at him, baiting, amused in spite of myself. But he faced stoically forward.
“No. None of it,” he said flatly. “You were not well.”
“And you’re a prig,” I flared, suddenly annoyed. “Must you always be perfect, Frain?” Why would he not shout? But he did not have the strength for anger.
“Perfect?” he murmured in honest disbelief. “I have always been a shadow next to you.”
I snapped my head around to look at him, then rode on a while silenced by insight. “So you truly must go alone,” I said at last, hesitantly, hating to admit it. “I—it hurts me that you have to brave it alone. You were always there for me.”
“Great Morrghu,” Frain whispered, reining back his horse as if he had sighted a panther. Sudden sweat of fear ran down his face.
We had arrived. Just beyond the shattered Wall the twisted trees stood, idly whistling and twittering and popping the joints of their twiggy fingers, much as they had ever done. “Great Morrghu,” Frain breathed again. “What has happened?”
“I told you.” I thought I had. “Did I forget to tell you? On that same battle day, just as I was learning the true meaning of despair, they suddenly rushed down. The trees, I mean—they moved. The Boda who held this Wall fled, scattered, but the trees stopped where they stand as suddenly as they had come. Grandfather says to let them be and let the Wall lie, too, for it is no use trying to shut out Acheron. That is where Abas made his mistake.”
Frain stared in terror. I felt no concern for the haggish trees, only for him. He sat stiff with fear on his mount.
“I know they’ve moved, but I—they’ve changed. They’re leering, contemptuous, they’re—they’re naked.”
“They always looked obscene to me.” I eyed him with pity and a foolish hope. “Brother mine, it is still not too late to turn back.”
“No, thank you. I am in thrall. I might as well be dead as disobedient.” He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “This is going to be harder than I thought, that is all. Tirell, go on back.”
I looked down at my horse’s mane and shook my head. Frain sat bolt upright in surprise. He had not thought I would refuse him so simple a request.
“Go on back,” he repeated. “I don’t want you to see me shaking.”
“I have to watch,” I told him, trying to discipline my voice, “or I am likely to dream against all reason that I will see you again, that you have turned aside to wander Vaire or the Lore Dahak, that some wind of chance will bring you back to me.” The words broke the taut control I had managed to maintain for his sake. Tears fell down from my eyes and onto my hands that plaited the horse’s mane.
“All right,” Frain acceded softly. “All right, my brother.” He reached over to me and we embraced; I remember yet the warmth of that embrace. Then he turned and, not even shaking—but with eyes shut tight—he spurred his horse into Acheron.
I lingered awhile. Then I rode slowly back to my bride with the words of an old song, a lament, hazily forming in my mind.
Like a swan on the still willow rivers,
Like a swan on the streams of Ogygia,
My sorrow floats the winding ways,
The shadowshining ways of mind.
Like a serpent out of a mountain cavern,
A serpent of wind, my sorrow stings.
My love, oh when will I see you again?
My love, oh my little child?
It seemed so unfair, what he had to face. He was only seventeen.
Epilogue
I had become a foolish old man in many ways—I, Daymon Cein, the great seer! And I felt sure my time must soon come. I no longer took any particular notice of anything. I lay in my warm chamber and let my mind stray; sometimes it happened on truth and more often on shadows, mice scurrying through forgotten garrets.… But when Frain left, vision swept me up one last time on wings the strongest I had ever known, vision like none I had experienced since that first searing night under the White Rock of Eala. But I was young then and hung back for fear of annihilation, and this time I was old and no longer afraid. I was no longer … I was not. I was with Frain. I was at one with Frain.
I rode with him, I feared with him, I plunged with him into the forest. I fared with him for days. To be sure, my body lay in its chamber in Melior. It moved, ate a little, even spoke. Tirell prowled around it, came and went and pestered. There was no need for me to concern myself with him; he had Recilla to look after him.
“Is Frain all right?” he demanded.
“He travels through Acheron.” The strange black lotus of Acheron drifted through my dreams and his, the stooping trees whispered over us both, the moss brushed my face. The terms of that land were not the terms of Vale. Tirell’s question seemed meaningless there. Frain was no longer unhappy, any more than a floating leaf is unhappy.
“But is he any better?” Tirell insisted.
“He is himself, as he has always been.”
“Contrary old man,” Tirell muttered, and stalked off. But he came back the next day and sat beside me for hours.
“Frain has come to the lake,” I told him on toward evening.
“Your beast, lying by the verge. Only it is no longer black, but white. The reflection is black.”
The beast inclined its head at Frain’s approach. He walked over to greet it, stroking the curve of its neck, then knelt by it and looked into the water of the lake. He gasped and nearly toppled in, almost as if some bodiless thing had caught at him. But he held onto the beast for support, turned his face away and hid it against a white, silken flank, quivering. I saw nothing in the lake, not even myself; what could he have seen? I said nothing to Tirell, having no answer.
“There is his mother,” I said after a while. She must have been there the whole time. She sat on a grassy bank beneath a willow tree, clad in moss green, quiet as the lake.
“What! Fabron’s wife?” Tirell could not remember her name.
“Mela, yes.” I paused, caught up by the Sight. “What is the matter with the swan? It has gone black, and the wing trails crookedly through a pale shadow in the water.”
“What about Mela?” Tirell asked impatiently.
“He is walking over to her now.” She was a regal, red-haired presence, not the Mela he had known, and he did not recognize the goddess as the wan queen, tangled in bitterness, whom he had tried to save. Nor, in any mortal sense, did she know him—I think. It was Acheron, after all. But she addressed him with a mother’s tender mockery, for she was at one with the All-Mother now.
“I have come to speak with Shamarra,” Frain told her.
“Fool,” she chided. “You poor fool. What ever gave you the notion that you could woo a goddess? Only princes of the line of Melior possess that dangerous privilege.”
“I thought I was such a prince when I began. And now—”
“You are trapped like a fly in a casement. Poor fool, can you not see that you would have loved her anyway? You are what you are.”
Frain shrugged, standing restively before her. “Where is Shamarra?” he asked in a tone just short of demand.
“Well, let me tell you.” She gestured amiably, forgiving his impatience in her eagerness to talk to someone, for very few folk came there. “Sit, child, and let me tell you the tale. Shamarra was very angry at your so-called brother Prince Tirell. Yes, very angry indeed.”
“I can well believe it,” Frain muttered, seating himself resignedly on the gray-green slope.
“So she sent the trees to destroy him while he was exposed in battle,” Mela went on in a kind of awed delight. “An act of interference far exceeding her authority. She had already pressed her limits by leaving her lake unattended and following a mere man with such unbecoming devotion—and getting herself humiliated after all—”
“I don’t care about that,” Frain burst out. “Where is she?”
“I am telling you,” Mela reproved. “She sent her minions toward Melior, and the All-Mother herself had to trouble herself to stop them. Adalis was mightily in wrath.” Mela shivered. “Shamarra should never have come back here at all. She had forfeited her position by leaving.”
Frain did not say a word. He got up stiffly, licking his dry lips, waiting.
“So Adalis laid a punishment on Shamarra. She stripped her of her personhood and gave her to the wind.”
“What? She is dead?” Frain whispered in shock. Mela shook her head ruefully at his innocence.
“No, not dead! Immortals do not die so easily. She wanders with the wind. She is a bird.”
“What is happening?” Tirell demanded.
“Shamarra is gone.”
Dusk was coming on. Frain turned without a sound and walked to the verge of the darkening lake, where he stood staring at the black and crippled swan.
“Not that one,” Mela called to him, “Nothing so favored. Shamarra is not to fly with the flocks of Ascalonia. She is a night bird.”
How appropriate. She still ruled death, then. I wondered if Frain knew that he wooed Vieyra.
He looked at his hands. “Where? Lore Tutosel?” he asked softly.
“Adalis knows.”
Frain sat by the lake as dusk deepened into night. He refused the food Mela offered him, and she left him there alone. I knew he could not feel anything quite so unreasonably as he formerly might have, not in that place of shifting shadows, of dreams and reflections. Still, I felt a nudge of fear. Mela also must have felt some small tug of anxiety, because sometime in the starless nadir of night she came out to him, walking easily without a lamp.
“Do not go into that lake unless you are fully prepared to die,” she warned. “A strange fate lies on the mortal who enters it and lives.”
She could not see his face, and neither could I, but I felt the lurch of his heart. “And what is that fate?” he asked evenly.
“Well, he would have to be a special one.…” She hesitated. “He would have to be very pure to survive. But supposing one come whose own darkness did not drag him down, he would become immortal, yet enslaved.”
“To what?” Frain no longer hid his agitation.
“To whatever passions ruled him at the time. A more cruel fate than you might be able to imagine.”
But he comprehended all too well. “Then there is to be no end of this?” he whispered.
She did not hear or understand, but perhaps she understood his mood. She sat by his side and spoke to him in motherly tones. “Frain, you seem to be a nice young man. I just want you to know that if you go in that lake there is no hope and no turning back. So think well.”
“Go away,” Frain said. “I wish I were dead.”
She shrugged and returned to her pavilion. Frain sat by the lakeside through the night, his feet nearly in the water. Immortals do not weaken and die, but they can be killed.… I sat with him in terror, though my body lay on the couch at Melior. But he did not move until owl light turned to dawn and into early sunrise. Then he glanced at the brightening mountain peaks behind him. And he rose and stood entranced, his back to the lake.
“I should have known,” I sighed.
The heights had called him from his earliest days. And what now could hold him back from them? He stripped his horse of its gear and turned the animal loose to crop the lakeside grass. He nodded at the white beast, shouldered a pack of provisions, and started away westward.
“Wherever are you going?” Mela called to him from her doorflap. Nothing lay that way except vast ranges of mountain peaks, scaling ever higher.
“To seek death,” he called back, smiling sourly.
“Death?” She frowned, perplexed. “There is death everywhere, and nowhere more than here.”
“Ah, but I am very particular. Her name is Shamarra.” So he knew. The immortal in search of his doom. “And I Will find her if I have to go as far as Ogygia to do it. If I have to beard Adalis herself.” He walked on as he talked.
“Swans and serpents! But youngster, why?” Mela cried in exasperation. “She no longer has any very winsome face.”
Frain paused long enough to turn and cast her a glance of astonished scorn. “Because of what I am,” he said finally. “Good-bye, Lady.”
“Frain, listen to me.” She took a few steps after him. “You can no more reach Ogygia than yonder crippled swan. Even if you could find it, what makes you think Adalis would speak to you? The penalties are severe for impertinence. And what makes you think Ogygia lies west?”
“A vision.” My vision of long ago, forsooth! He had listened well. He smiled at his mother—she had come close enough for a smile. “Good-bye, old woman,” he told her almost gaily, and turned to the path.
“He’s on his way,” I whispered to the King who sat by my bedside. Tirell heard and asked me, “Where?” But I never answered. I was with Frain.
It took him days to climb those awful cliffs. All those days I lay uneating, unresting, unwaking, suspended in the magic and terror of his journey. Sheer rocks and tiny, clinging plants, spiraling winds and ever more limpid sky.… It was all sky at the end. He found the dim trail at last, made the
top of the last divide, and looked beyond. I could see his smile, nothing more—a marvelous, ardent, lovestruck smile. Something utterly beautiful lay there. He took breath, gazing like a stag that scents the wind, with quivering attention. Then he stepped out of sight.
I never told Tirell. I spoke no word to any living person concerning any of this. For at the moment Frain traversed that tall divide, I, too, passed a barrier. The dead go through many changes; they fly in form of moth or hawk; they swim the flood beneath. But it is a voice from the nameless beyond that speaks to you now.
The Golden Swan
The loom, and on the loom
The vatic colors woven,
The prophecies within the web.
The lake, and in the lake
The mirroring reflection,
The shadowshining face of fate.
The grove, and in the grove
The riddle of the goddess,
The dwelling of the guessing god.
Prologue
In her secluded valley in the midlands of Isle lived Ylim, the weaving seeress, and thither rode young King Trevyn with Dair, his small son. Dair was a wolf. Leggy, half grown, he bounded along by the horse, his paws huge and playful, his slate gray fur unruly. Sometimes Trevyn smiled and slapped the saddle, and the yearling wolf would leap up to ride with him for a while. Dair was a wolf because his mother had been one at the time of his birth. She had since taken back her human form and returned across the sea to Tokar, Trevyn surmised. He was a Very King and a sorcerer in the truest sense; the kiss of the goddess was on him. But he did not know what to do for Dair. Destiny is a personal matter.
The young wolf entered the cottage at his heels and sat courteously by his side. “Laifrita thae, Ilderweyn,” said Trevyn to Ylim. “Sweet peace to thee, Grandmother.” It was the Old Language, the language of the Beginning, which only a special few still remembered. She was not his grandmother in fact, though she might have been grandmother of earth and moon.
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