Hawkspar
Page 57
She touched me on the shoulder, and I tried to shrug her hand off me.
But she crouched beside me and said, “You’ll not go this way.”
And, with her Hagedwar shield spun huge and both of us wrapped within one gold point of it, she and I ceased to be two people, and became one, fully and completely. We breathed as one, we moved as one, we thought as one. All her memories poured into me, all my memories poured into her, and pain old and new overran both of us for a moment. But I felt joy in her, too, for things I could not imagine. She knew love and motherhood, family that spread in ever-growing circles, the comfort of belonging, the richness of having roots and a place that was and always had been her home.
I knew what she knew; I could see how Ossal had bound the magic of the Eyes to his own soul, and how he had thus trapped himself within the nothing that lay between life and afterlife. I could see how those bonds had been formed, and I could see how I could break them.
Her magic became my magic.
Her hands, or perhaps they were my hands, cupped Ossal’s stone Eyes—the Hawkspar Eyes, the pinnacle of his creation—and one of us, or maybe both of us, broke the lines of power that had filled them with magic for uncounted time. Pain filled me, consumed me like fire, burned through me so fiercely it ripped breath from me, while a roar like the sea in a storm and the screaming of the wind and drowning sailors assaulted my ears and crushed my thoughts. The stench of death filled my nostrils, the taste of rot clogged my mouth.
And then—nothing.
Was I dead?
The voices fell silent. The rush of time’s currents vanished. The weight of the ship, the movement of things beneath it, within it, beside it, above it, all went dark.
The world lay black and shapeless around me.
Everything was gone. My power, my strength, my magic. Gone. I was mortal again, human again, and fully blind.
I was alone inside my head except for the other woman. Talyn. The other daughter of Ethebet, the other sister of the woman in white.
“She would not leave you to fall into darkness,” Talyn said aloud, and I knew she was speaking of Ethebet. “Not when I could step between and set you free.”
“There are more,” I said.
“I know,” she told me. “I saw them leaving as I was coming aboard—and there are others that I felt while you were still bound to the Eyes. I can’t do anything about them—not here. Not now. If we can gather them together with the other master healers, we can release those you brought with you. Those who stayed behind … I don’t know about them.”
I lay there, basking in the blessed stillness, in the absence of tide and current, in the release from the endless agony of other people’s pain.
And then she said, “I’m going to touch your face. I’m going to remove the Eyes.”
“Why? They’re no danger now.”
“They’re not your eyes.”
I didn’t understand, but I allowed her to lay her hands over my face. She was still in my head, inside my skin, as much me as I was her, but I realized that I could not hear her thoughts. I could see her life, I could know what she had done, but I could not know what she was thinking.
Her hands then covered the stone spheres, and within her head—my head—we drew in the golden Hagedwar light around us, and power unlike anything I had felt before—clean, beautiful, sweet power, untainted by Ossal or his perversions or his madness—poured through us. As the light filled us, I knew what we were doing, and I understood how we were doing it.
It was beautiful. We reaching into me, into the smallest parts of me, where Jostfar had hidden the keys to how my body was made, and we spun out of the air and water around us, and out of bits of the music the held the universe together, new eyes. I could feel the hard stone dissolve, I could feel living eyes in place again.
She closed her Hagedwar, and we were two people again.
I slid my hands over my eyes, unable to believe that they were there.
But they were. I opened them, blinking in the darkness, and at first there was only darkness.
Then I began to make out shapes. Legs moving away from me, a door opening. A whisper in the hall; I could not hear what was said. But I could see the legs walking back in again.
I could see.
Colors began to filter into the room. Brown first—the rubbed wood of the bunk frame, gleaming and rich and worn and beautiful.
Then the rich black and the deep green of uniformed legs.
And then a face peering down at me—tanned, with green eyes. With a smile that flashed white teeth. With a braid of black hanging over his shoulder.
“Hawkspar,” he said. “You’re well? It’s … you?”
I knew him by his voice. He was beautiful, and I would never have seen him so beautiful in my mind. I slid out from the bunk and touched his face, staring for the first time into his eyes, looking for the man I loved in those unfamiliar depths.
“No,” I said. “Not Hawkspar anymore. Hawkspar is gone—the Eyes and the magic are no more. I’m Yeri. Yeri Karja av Ro dryn Hoda, of Clan Eskuu. And I have been waiting most of my life to see you.”
He wrapped his arms around me and held me tight. And then slowly, slowly, he turned me so that I faced the window. He stared into my eyes, an expression of wonder on his face. And he said, “Your eyes. They’re the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. All along, you’ve seen this moment, Hawks—Yeri. All along, you’ve seen us growing old together. You simply didn’t know that it was you.”
Redbird waited by the door as we exited the room. She said, “You did it. You brought us to freedom.” And she hugged me, and said, “I got my one wish. You’ll live to see your stories come true.”
We stood, with some awkwardness between us, and I said, “I am sorry you did not find your dream at the end of this.”
She smiled, and I remembered her as the girl with brown eyes—not Obsidian black. Soon she would have brown eyes again. She told me, “I never dared to dream, Mouse. Not once. I lived on your dreams, and you kept me alive and brought me far enough that now I think I can find a dream of my own. Dreams don’t need guarantees, I imagine. I think that sometimes just having one, and a chance to pursue it, might be enough.”
The world of Korre
Tor Books by Holly Lisle
Talyn
Hawkspar
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
HAWKSPAR: A NOVEL OF KORRE
Copyright © 2008 by Holly Lisle
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Maps by Ellisa Mitchell
eISBN 9781466813533
First eBook Edition : January 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lisle, Holly.
Hawspar: a novel of Korre / Holly Lisle––1st ed.
p.cm
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-10: 0-7653-0994-7
1. Women slaves––Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.I775H38 2008
813’.54--dc22 2008005223
First Edition: June 2008