Choices

by Mercedes Lackey

She squinted through the whirling, gritty dust to look across the border. Did she imagine it? There was perhaps a slight shimmer in the air, the way that hot air wavered and formed mirages of water near the horizon in summer.

  But that was all that she could see. Sparrow loved a Herald, but she didn’t possess any kind of Gift, so the properties of the barrier keeping them out of Iftel were invisible to her.

  :The boundary is no longer absolute, but we come in the name of Valdemar. As representatives of another nation, we may not pass without Invitation,: Abilard Spoke. She had never heard such a note of awe and humility in the Companion’s voice. :This is the protection of the Sunlord Himself. Only by His will may we enter.:

  Sparrow craned her neck to peek over Cloudbrother’s shoulder. All she could see was the dusty track continuing in front of them. If she squinted, way down the path she thought she saw a farmhouse or something of that sort.

  And yet Cloudbrother and Abilard both insisted that they could not go one step more along the pathway to their destination. Sparrow slid off her mount to the ground; her sore muscles were grateful to stretch as she considered their situation. Thistle squirmed for a minute, then sighed and went back to sleep.

  She walked forward, put a hand out.

  And something was there. It was a force pushing back against her hand, invisible, not harmful to her yet completely unyielding. It didn’t hurt her, it didn’t come after her. But it wouldn’t let her walk forward either.

  In the far distance, a solitary figure slowly appeared, a small dot traveling on the path to meet them. As it grew closer, Sparrow could make out elaborate, festive robes, bright red and green embroidered with complex geometric patterns. The figure walked with pomp and dignity, like a priest.

  The figure grew closer still, and Sparrow dimly made out the claws, the scales, the iridescent greenish skin. The creature looked like a hertasi, but so much taller, as tall as Sparrow herself.

  “By the Mother,” she murmured. “That . . . that must be a tyrill!”

  She couldn’t believe it. Tyrills, larger than the hertasi she knew in the Vale. Larger than her best friend in the world, the hertasi Rork, who took such tender care of her in the days after she had given birth to Thistle. Risen from the creative fingers of Urtho himself, the stuff of legends.

  Walking . . . to meet them.

  “Sparrow!” the creature called. “Sparrow!”

  The tyrill’s accent was so thick that Sparrow didn’t realize he was calling her name until she heard it several times more. The language was similar to that of Valdemar, a dialect of it, but it sounded ornate and musical, ancient.

  It sounded like the language that Urtho must have spoken, long, long ago.

  And this personage, speaking in the Ancient Tongue, was calling her name.

  She didn’t know what to do. Instinctively she dropped a small curtsy, because politeness and respect were a universal currency. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

  “Hello!” she said. “Yes, I am Sparrow. I come from the village of Longfall in the far north of Valdemar, and lately from k’Valdemar Vale. We come on mission from the Crown of Valdemar. Thank you for your welcome!”

  “Ah, yes, Sparrow k’Valdemar, welcome, welcome. I know, I know. I am the Lord Ivinchi, welcome, welcome. My goodness, you are dusty, drab. I had heard that Heralds were fancy.”

  And Lord Ivinchi seemed disappointed indeed. “I am so sorry,” Sparrow said quickly. “I get disgusted by the filth of the road myself, it is good to meet a kindred spirit. There’s no way to get a body proper clean while traveling, not even if you manage to find a clear-running stream and a nice rock for beating out the laundry! But we all clean up nicely, I promise.”

  Lord Ivinchi brightened. “We shall see, my lady. Please, step forward.”

  “I would most love to, Lord. But, you see . . .”

  Lord Ivinchi stretched to his full height, raised his clawed, bony arms up to the sun. “Nonsense, love. Step! Forward! By the light of Vykaendys, come!”

  Sparrow’s shoulder rolled with a gentle nudge, and she half-stumbled a step. She peeked backward to see the silver muzzle and the bright, cornflower blue eyes of Abilard looming directly in front of her face. His sweet, hot breath blew on the back of her neck.

  :Go, we have found the perfect ally. Thanks to you, little mother. Go:

  Even with Abilard encouraging her with his Mindspeech, she hesitated.

  “I’m not a Herald, you know,” she said uncertainly.

  Lord Ivinchi clicked and clucked his disapproval of her indecision. “Of course, of course, but yes. I know, you do not come alone, but part of a Delegation.” He rolled and trilled the word. “You are an emissary. We hope, of good fortune. Please, don’t be afraid. Step forward now.”

  His kindness convinced her, and she passed through the barrier, which yielded slowly to her passage, like moving through thick jelly. Abilard walked a half-pace behind her, slipping through the barrier without any hesitation.

  “This is the Herald, my heartmate, Cloudbrother, and his Companion, Abilard,” Sparrow said. “He is the official from Haven who is here on business.”

  The tyrill tilted his head in curiosity. “And the child?”

  How did he know? How could he know?

  Sparrow half-turned to show Thistle asleep in the pack on her back. “There he is, my little man. We call him Tis.”

  Lord Ivinchi bowed low, his ornate robes trailing in the dusty path. “Lord Herald, Delegation, welcome, a most humble welcome. I am here to escort you to the Temple of Honored Memory. We are a rustic people, and we have no grand court to receive you. Besides, the Vykaendys-First believes that you will help us most by going straight to the Temple and consulting with the priests there.”

  Sparrow turned to look at her heartmate, sitting tall and slim in the saddle. If Ivinchi had registered the fact of Cloudbrother’s blindness, he gave no indication of it.

  “Thank you,” Cloudbrother said, his voice steady. “It is our honor. How far is the travel to the Temple?”

  “Three days, Lord Herald. And I will travel with you there and ensure you will have good provisions.” He paused. “And . . . water.”

  Sparrow’s heart tugged at the pain in the great tyrill lord’s voice. “We are grateful.”

  And that was the end of the ceremony between them. Lord Ivinchi turned and wiggled his claws in the air. “Terrific. Good, good, wonderful. Let us go until we must rest in the heat of the day. Come, children.”

  From then on, they traveled together, one band with a single mission. To bring water to the thirsty land of Iftel.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night, the little band of emissaries made camp deep in the Vineyards of Glory, on the road to the capital city. The inhabitants of the region had abandoned it in the search for water, but Ivinchi had arranged for two small sealed drums of water to be brought to one of the low-ceilinged temples in the valley where they rested for the night.

  Sparrow gratefully drank. The water was sweet and pure, with only a faint tang of wood resin from the container. Thistle was understandably cranky from a long day of travel on a hot and unforgiving pathway. He needed time to wind down and go to sleep, and by then the moon was high in the sky, and the stifling heat of the day had receded somewhat.

  They made no fire . . . the danger of it spreading to the tinder-dry grapevines was too high. Instead, they huddled outside, where they could catch the breeze and sleep more restfully before taking up the trail before first light the next morning.

  “How sad, all the dead orchards,” she said, hearing the rustle of the dead leaves in the listless wind that blew around the entrance to the Temple.

  “They are not dead, my love Sparrow,” Ivinchi said. “No, no, not dead. They are still alive. They are waiting for water.”

  “How do you know me, Lord?” she ask
ed. She had been wondering all day, but their journey was long, dusty, and hot, and not much talking had taken place on the trail. Now that they rested before sleep, Sparrow could indulge her curiosity.

  “I know many things,” he replied, his flat eyes sparkling in the moonlight. “I know you like scones, and you sleep late if the chance appears, but the chance does not come too much these days. I know as much from your friend in the Vale, the one who saw to you when your little was born. Brother mine.”

  Sparrow gasped. “Rork!” she replied with a growing sense of wonder. Suddenly she felt much more at home in these strange surroundings. “You know Rork! Only he knows these little things about me.”

  “Little things that matter most,” Ivinchi replied. “Little things are not little. Look at your little nestling, he is little. And he is everything. But Rork. He wanted to make sure I looked after you here, and your littleling as well. He is not so little as I had thought! He is a boy, now. The seed of a man.”

  “Yes, they grow fast,” she said. “Too fast, some say.”

  Lord Ivinchi studied her face, his eyes unblinking in the starlight. “Better to grow than not to grow.”

  “Yes, growing means change, and where would we be if things didn’t change? We’d be no better than stone statues.”

  “Even the stone statues will change, in the rain, blasted in war, over time.”

  Sparrow considered this. “Did Iftel change very much, since the Mage Storms? To open, to let people to come in . . . that is a pretty big change, I’d say.”

  Ivinchi’s head lowered, his shoulders slumped, and he sighed. “Yes, it is a change. Some, some of those who fear, they say it is a change that is bad. A change that brought the Thirsty Times to our peaceful land.”

  Despite the heat, a chill worked its way into Sparrow’s bones. “I hope not.”

  “I think it not so, my love Sparrow. For we were once strangers here in the land as well. The land is not so frail as this. But something is ailing here. We must find a healing. Because with drought comes disease, comes death. Too many little ones already suffer.”

  And with that sober thought, Sparrow bade her host good night and rejoined Cloudbrother to sleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night, she and her heartmate flew. In their travels until now, they had stayed earthbound, tethered to Valdemar and its familiar and not-so-familiar contours.

  But now, here in Iftel, they flew together on the plane of dreams, searching for the source of the drought and the disturbances in the Forest of Sorrows, to see if they were linked.

  The hills unrolled below them, blasted by dryness. Sparrow clutched Cloudbrother’s hand, wondering at the scope of the devastation. “How could it get this bad this fast? I thought it took months, years even, for a drought to cause this kind of damage.”

  She glanced at Cloudbrother’s face. He was studying the landscape below them, his face thoughtful, his eyes, open only here in the emanation of spirit, luminous and a little sad. “This is not an ordinary drought. This is the same thing choking the forest up north. It’s not a drought at all, I don’t think. Not the way we think of it.”

  He was scaring her a little, but Sparrow kept her voice steady. “Then what is it?”

  “It’s some kind of malign magic. Not something . . . but somebody . . . sucking the life out of these regions. And after what happened with the Forest of Sorrows, we know it has something to do with . . . well, it also went after me.”

  Sparrow winced. As a five-year-old, her heartmate, then called Brock, had been lured out of their home village by a mist wraith and sickened by a mysterious, deadly fever that robbed him of his sight and almost killed him. Only the swift intervention of the Cloudwalker clan had saved him.

  But this, what was happening here in Iftel, was on a much larger scale than what had attacked one young boy all those years ago. “You think,” Sparrow asked, “that this is your fever, writ large?”

  “There is nothing little, not in matters of magery. What seems small to the ordinary eye can be massively important when it comes to the balance. And I think that something happened all those years ago. The forest became uniquely vulnerable to a threat it hadn’t faced in many hundreds of years . . . and it became vulnerable once again. To a sentient threat.”

  Sparrow stopped her forward motion, hovering uncertainly in the sky. Cloudbrother stayed his flight to hover alongside her, helping her to fly by holding her hand in his.

  “You’re not saying . . .” she forced out, “that there is some kind of evil Mage, looking to invade Valdemar again? Don’t tell me this is happening again!”

  “No,” Cloudbrother said slowly. “But I think a malevolent being from this cloud level of emanation—a demon of some kind—is looking for a portal to slip into the ordinary world. Looking for me. My elders in the Cloudwalkers tried to teach me as much of my illness as they could, so that I could be ready to defend myself in case the sickness returned. I don’t need to tell you that it was no ordinary fever that almost killed me. No fever silvers your hair and gives you an inner sight in exchange for your regular old eyes.”

  Sparrow wanted to stop him, but she knew this information was crucial to protecting not only Iftel but also her own sweet son. This was not change of the kind that frightened the people of Iftel. This was something buried deeply within the man she loved, a burden he had borne nearly all his life. She bit her lip and tried not to interrupt as he went on.

  “The fever drew my soul out of my body, almost all the way to death and the final separation. My shaman elders stopped it, but at a terrible cost. The malady withdrew, for a while anyway, but once I became a Herald and my own strength grew, I only became a more attractive portal.”

  “I really, really don’t like this.”

  Cloudbrother drew her close to him, and she tucked her head under his chin and looked down over the moonlit, drought-blasted vines. It was so beautiful, and so awful, and her job was to stay steady and not run. She didn’t know how this tangle would comb free, but as long as she stood fast, the chance to set things right remained.

  But she was so afraid for Cloudbrother that her heart clenched into a fist.

  * * *

  • • •

  They reached the Temple of Honored Memory after another two days on the road, hidden near the shores of Lake Usho. The priests there had prepared a room in the Temple for Cloudbrother to engage in contemplation.

  These priests did not sacrifice or summon. They sat, and listened, and in the silence sought wisdom. And they assumed that to find the way to a solution for Iftel, Cloudbrother had come to do the same.

  Cloudbrother welcomed the opportunity.

  The travelers carefully washed the dust from off their feet and out of their eyes, and they changed into the robes that the priests provided to them. And Sparrow took Thistle to play in the meditation garden of the Temple, while Cloudbrother withdrew into the room the priests had prepared.

  And there he sat, cross-legged, while Abilard fidgeted uneasily in the gravel garden outside. :I do not like this, I cannot reach him; there is a barrier set around the Temple blocking my mind from him,: Abilard said into her thoughts. :Go to him, Sparrow. I will stay with Thistle. Strengthen him.:

  Soundlessly, Sparrow wound her way through the labyrinthine hallways that led to the chamber in the center of the Temple. The priests did not block her way as she went, but neither did they try to tell her what was happening.

  Cloudbrother was hidden in the center, like a pearl nestled inside a lotus. His skin was ashy gray, and his spine was twisted as if by a great, heavy weight borne on his shoulders.

  Sparrow restrained a cry and instead crept down to where he sat. She touched his fingertips, and they were icy cold. Her palms reached to his face, and his forehead and temples were on fire with fever.

  She closed her eyes, knelt before him.
Leaned her forehead against his.

  And she was swept into a plain of fire.

  A wing of war gryphons flew in formation above their heads, brown and speckled, flying very fast on the tempest wind. In this place, Cloudbrother stood tall, blazing with light, a lightning rod for the force that sought to claim him.

  “I am going to open to him,” he said, looking directly at Sparrow. “That’s the only way. There’s no water in this land to spare; the sunken lake is barely enough to keep the people alive. There is no magic secret that is going to save us. There is only us. I am going to have to do this thing myself.”

  He pointed up. “The water is going to have to come from the clouds from where I was born. This is how my Cloudwalker brothers saved me, and this is how I am going to save the forest. If I open to him, the demon, the energy will flow, and balance will return. A closed system is a dead one, my love.”

  “But it almost killed you last time! It did kill Silver Cloud, the adept who saved you.”

  Cloudbrother smiled sadly. “My brothers named me after the fever did its work. I’m called Cloudbrother because I can walk in the clouds easier than on earth. I was Brock until then. Brock died that day, and I was Cloud born. I need to call the clouds down to break the hold of the one who claims me. Goodbye, Sparrow. I love you. Best thing you could do is hold the line here and just let the rain pour down.”

  Before she could reply, he raised his arms to the sky and lifted his face to the clouds. A rending shriek emanated from the roiling storm above their heads, and the rain began to fall.

  First a drop, then a drizzle, then a downpour.

  Cloudbrother was engulfed in the storm, became part of it. The rain swirled as it fell out of the sky, the clouds darkened.

  Lightning clawed across the face of the storm—a face of evil flashed in the sky—

  And Sparrow slammed back into her body.

  Cloudbrother was sprawled on the prayer mat, terribly still. And the roaring rain pounded on the roof of the Temple, all but drowning out the cries of gratitude of the priests in the garden outside.