“Not yet. There’s luck to be had in remaining hopeful.”
The morning was majestic. Seemingly overnight all the willows of the land had clothed their bleak, reaching branches—the Mother Tree in glory. The wraith-ridden ground mist snaked back to its night coverts while the cresting sun inflamed the tops of trees, turning the freshly leafed-out willows into green lanterns.
From behind the colossal stone came a rush of meadow grouse.
Witgern fell to his hands and knees, roughly pulling Avenahar down beside him. “Something’s there. Don’t move.”
He eased forward alone, ash spear positioned for a quick, hard throw.
As Avenahar waited, the dawn felt hollow and raw. Her mother was there or she was not. You couldn’t beg mercy from the Fates; they’d no respect for human yearnings.
Finally she heard Witgern’s shout, shuddering like a loose harp string—“Are you living woman or spirit!”
Then, the miracle of a reply. “Witgern.” A living voice, a woman’s, hurt and human. “Dearest of friends. Did . . . did not Avenahar come with you?”
Auriane.
Witgern again, gibbering now—“. . . It cannot be, it’s a vision conjured by all my cries to Hel to bring you back . . .”
Avenahar vaulted to her feet and sprinted round the stone, breathing heavily as a distance runner, fearful of looking, desperate to see.
She staggered to a halt next to Witgern, who stood with arms outstretched, rapt and still as if one of the Sun’s daughters appeared before him. There, knee-deep in a pool of pale woodruff flowers, was Auriane.
She was garbed as a seeress of the people.
Avenahar found herself immobilized by the sight of the beloved and familiar married to the ancient and grand. The mantle of power fit her mother as comfortably as the supple sheath fits the knife. The spirit-calling stones lining Auriane’s cloak glimmered with dark authority. The thin crescent moon at her forehead married her to the peaceful eternity of the night sky. In one instant Avenahar scarce knew her mother, then in the next, thought—Yes, she has always been this. Auriane’s knotted elmwood staff was adorned with a spray of heron feathers—to speed an initiation begun so late? Her autumnhued hair was unruly as a woodwife’s. The subtly spotted wildcat pelt that lay across her shoulders matched a quiet, fierce soul. She seemed an epiphany of the wild in hues of granite, earth, stone dust, and bronze. The forest saved her, then made her its own, Avenahar thought as she began to shiver, eyes flooding as she stood in stunned gratitude.
“Of course I came,” Avenahar managed. “This is too great a gift.” The livid memory of the day she’d bolted off into the forest struck Avenahar a blinding blow. She felt a pain like a wasp sting on the heart. “I . . . uttered such vileness to you . . . killing words, that can’t be called back. How your heart must have died as you searched for me. There is no way I can make amends.”
“Avenahar, beloved. No.”
The rich tranquillity in those words caused Avenahar to feel a flutter of communion with something shining and kind, and greater than them both. Still she turned from her mother in a fever of regret, pulling a section of her cloak over her head.
“Stop this,” Auriane said urgently, striding swiftly to her daughter. “I raised you to be proud. What harm in a show of youthful fire? You are the daughter I prayed the gods for.” She grasped Avenahar’s shoulders and turned her about. “Avenahar. We’ve one soul between us. There’s no need to beg forgiveness or accept it.”
The balm in those words worked its way into Avenahar’s mind, and she let the cloak drop back in place. The serpent-form fibula claimed Auriane’s attention.
“Did you ever learn who gave you that?” Auriane whispered with dread.
Avenahar covered it with her hand.“‘. . . A good and brave man who would have given me all he had, had fortune not taken him away,’” she quoted her mother’s words. “I should have listened. My ears were shut and locked.”
Auriane fiercely gathered Avenahar up and clung to her daughter as if she were the source of all life.
“Do you know now, there was no vileness in your birth?” Auriane said then. “How beloved you are of the gods . . . how beloved of me? . . . that you belong here . . . how wholly, gloriously, you belong?”
“Yes, but why did I have to become a loathsome daughter to learn it.”
“No more of that.” Auriane held to Avenahar so tightly she lifted her daughter from the ground. “Avenahar,” she said, her face turned to the sky. “You will be great among our people.”
The words filled Avenahar’s breast with warm liquid gold.
“Ah, the sight of you two together,” Witgern broke in grandly from behind them, “makes a man feel the horn is full, the fire lit, the hall crowded with good companions. Come, I’ve mead to share.”
And then they sat, resting their backs against the stone that had brooded in the grass for millennia. The summer sun was in them. The wildflowers had grown high enough to wall them in from the eyes of the forest. Auriane related all she knew of Arria, of the baleful mystery of what had befallen Marcus—then told them, as she concluded the tale of her escape, “. . . and I lay there too weak to stir while cavalrymen combed the riverbank for me. Their horses nearly stepped on me. When they gave it up and dusk came, it was Gunora who found me and saw me carried to safety. Gunora nursed me to strength. She told me I’d collapsed in the one place along that stretch of the river where I was neatly hidden from the eyes of anyone scouring the banks. I had high protection, I think.”
Witgern heard all this in silence, then said, “I thought I was your slayer. To find instead that I’m your deliverer . . .”
Auriane looked at him, baffled. “Why would you think yourself my slayer?”
“The bridge,” Witgern said as if he expected her to know.
“What of the bridge? Witgern, you are saying . . . you caused the bridge to fall?”
“Last autumn I learned that a gaggle of Roman vermin bound for the great war were to cross that bridge on their way to the East. So I commanded my men to saw through the trestles. They worked all through the night, but—”
“You’re jesting,” Auriane said, laughing.
“—but the bridge refused to collapse, that day,” Witgern said. “What vile luck I thought it, then. It just needed the winter rains to finish the work.” His voice grew hoarse. “It waited, Auriane. The bridge waited. It fell for you.”
“Gods above and below, that is wondrous,” Auriane said, laughing while her face shone with tears of amazement. “Witgern. Your acts are blessed. I cannot believe this. No, I can. That was a haunted day, aswarm with marvels.” She leaned back against the stone and said, “Witgern, you brought me home.”
“And Baldemar’s sword?” Witgern ventured, eyes narrowed, intent. “You have it still?”
“I have it. But not for war. I mean to return it to my father’s barrow.”
“No. Not yet! Auriane, what if you could go out in battle dress one final time, and live—then return to this new life you’ve set out upon?”
“There’ll be no pardon if I thwart my birth fate again.”
“The Fates went to a bit of trouble to unite you with it.” Testily he added, “As did I.”
“And without that sword, I would never have escaped the nets. It means you saved me from death twice, Witgern, and I owe you a debt that I can’t repay in this life. But I’ve taken the oath at the forest altar.”
“But Auriane, Chariomer has—”
“Witgern, let her be,” Avenahar interjected firmly.
“Witgern, Ramis was ready to let her false accusers slay her,” Auriane said with more patience, “just to preserve me to take her place. So I intend to try. I came today only because I wanted you to see me before I go to the caves. Avenahar can visit me there. But no man can.” She dropped her voice. “You must tell no one I’m still living, not your First Companion, not a priest of the settlements, not a seeress, should she ask. You must let Sawitha believe I d
rowned. You’ll not know me again until I’ve become adept in the ways of the seeing-women.”
Avenahar saw the tautening of Witgern’s jaw—he did not accept this. He looked hard toward the far hills of the north where Chariomer was camped; they were dark as basalt beneath scowling clouds, as though Wodan himself glowered down upon the invader. Snakes of wind moved through the woodruff flowers, promising unknown troubles to come.
But Witgern spoke no more of war that day.
When Auriane was ready to depart, mother and daughter walked alone along an elven path through flower-decked May trees. Avenahar felt a shy hope like that of the furred beast edging from its winter hole. Her life was here. There was no sadness in this. For her, the precarious future promised grand adventures, not terror and woe. She was a young Wolf who would seize peace and gift it to her people.
“Witgern doesn’t believe you, you know,” Avenahar said. “He’s certain you’ll take up that sword again when you hear the people cry out to you.”
“And that would please you, too, I suppose.”
“No. It wouldn’t. I couldn’t bear it.”
“This must be someone borrowing Avenahar’s skin.”
“Promise me you’ll stay away from war.”
“What have you done with Avenahar? Her soul’s trapped in a jar somewhere, isn’t it?”
“Stop this! By every calculation of the wise, you shouldn’t be alive. You weren’t saved just so you could drive off a bandit chief. Though that needs doing. But leave that for Witgern and me. I sense the river was a last warning . . . a crossing of a dreaded precinct . . . and you don’t mock these things.” A silence, then Avenahar added with a thickening throat, “Yet, I fear you will.”
“Well, my hotheaded daughter became an elderwoman while my back was turned.”
Auriane said it smiling, but within, felt a shift of unease. When lying beneath the willow I dreamed I went back to war. She sensed the intrusion of something divine and not necessarily benign. But she lifted the elmwood staff and said, “This is my life now, Avenahar.”
“Promise me you’ll not let anything seduce you from it. Marcus . . . I believe Marcus would have wanted it so. I think that, wherever he is, he knows all these things, too.”
A cry Auriane couldn’t express—Marcus, you are alive and I will see you again in this life—swelled in her throat, stifling speech, so instead she caught her daughter’s capable hand in her own, both seeking comfort and giving it.
THEY ARE THE gold beneath a river, a knot tied by holy hands, an oracular gift, Witgern thought as he watched Auriane and Avenahar grow small among the festive trees.
Auriane. You make me want to pick up a harp. I didn’t save you. Your captors should have known you can’t slay the blessed. You’re one who ever makes anew with your soul. Somehow you will always be here, like the mountain ash. You’ll haunt these rivers and forests a thousand summers from now.
Lady of the Light Page 56
