by Diane Duane
Herewiss swung Khávrinen up with elbows locked and let it charge—his only option, for running was as hopeless as a slash-and-cut duel would be. The blade into the eye, she heard him thinking, and Fire down the blade, enough to blast the brain dead. I hope—
He never had a chance. While still twenty feet away the deathjaw screamed horribly as fire suddenly bloomed about it, eating inward through flesh and muscle and sinew quick as a gasp. The still-moving skeleton burned incandescent for a moment more before the swirling flames blasted bone to powder, then ate that too. The deathjaw was gone before its death shrieks faded.
And Sunspark appeared—a brief bright coalescence like a meteor changing its mind in midexplosion, steadying down to the horse-shape again. It came pacing over to Herewiss and Freelorn and Segnbora, exuding a feeling of great pleasure, its mane and tail burning merrily as holiday bonfires. (You called for me?) it said to Herewiss, who was gasping with deferred terror.
He gulped for breath. “I believe I did,” Herewiss said.
Sunspark looked at Freelorn with an expression of good-natured wickedness and said nothing.
“Thank you,” Freelorn said, courteous enough; but there was a touch of grudge in his voice.
Sunspark snorted. (Gratitude! Next time I’ll choose my moment with more care. A little later, say.)
“Choose the moment—!”
(So that you’ll appreciate me more.)
“You mean you watched those things attack us and you didn’t—!”
“Lorn, enough,” Herewiss said. “It doesn’t think the way you do. Luckily for us. Loved,” he said to the elemental, “did you notice any other wildlife in these parts while you were having breakfast?”
(Singers,) it said, looking to the northwest. (The ones with fur.)
“Wolves? Perfect.” Herewiss glanced down at Khávrinen, which blazed just long enough to burn the blood off itself. “We won’t be climbing the Fane until sunset, since a Summoning there works best at twilight. But damned if I’m going to put up with any more Fyrd in the meantime. I’ll go have a word with the wolves and see if I can work something out. Now, how do I manage this—”
He frowned, closed his eyes. Fire swirled outward from Khávrinen, hiding both sword and wielder. The pillar of brilliance shrank as it swirled, and sank close to the ground. When the blue Flame died away it left behind a handsome cream-white wolf with orange-brown points and downturned blue eyes.
(Not bad,) Sunspark said, (for a beginner.)
Herewiss grinned a wolf-grin. (Stay close till I get back, loved, just in case the Fyrd try again. I won’t be long.)
The wolf bounded away through the long grass. Watching him go, Segnbora dug down in her belt-pouch for a square of clean soft cloth, with which she began cleaning off Charriselm’s blade. When she’d finished, she looked thoughtfully at the Fane. It seemed to gaze back, calm and blind and patient, waiting for something. Fyrd so close to this place—that’s unheard of. All the rules are changing.
But after this, nothing is going to be the way it was. Not even me.
“You going to stand there all day?” someone shouted at her. Freelorn and the others were in the saddle, getting ready to ride down to the Fane. Segnbora swung up into Steelsheen’s saddle and went after them.
***
Somewhat later she sat with her back against the trunk of an old rowan tree near the lakeshore, watching the long shadows of men, horses and trees drown in slow dusk. The Fane, half a mile away across Rilthor’s water, shone golden as a legend where its heights still caught the sunset. The mirroring water lay still in the breathless evening, the mountain’s burning image broken only by the wakes of gray songswans gliding by. It’s really more a hill than a mountain, Segnbora thought, stretching. The Fane was no more than half a mile wide at the base, broad at the bottom and flat at the top, stippled roughly with brush and scrub pine. Nothing so spectacular…except for what you can’t see.
And it was the unseen which all day had kept their camp so abnormally quiet. Freelorn had spent most of the afternoon pacing and frowning until Herewiss returned from his parley with the wolves, reporting success and a throat sore from much howling. Now he sat under a nearby alder, meditating, with Khávrinen flaming in his lap. For a long while Herewiss hadn’t moved, gazing across at the Fane with an expression half wonder and half fear, while Freelorn took to pacing again. Harald and Moris had been keeping so close to one another that one might have thought they had been lovers for only a week or so, rather than years. Dritt and Lang had become obsessive about caring for their horses, and the otherwise fearless Lang had been looking over his shoulder a great deal. Even Sunspark, in its horse-shape, had been cribbing quietly at an elm tree, leaving small scorched places bitten out of the bark.
Segnbora laughed at herself then, a mere breath of merriment. And look at me. All the time I’ve spent on the trail, a hunted woman—and look what kind of watch I’m keeping. My back turned to open country, where Goddess knows what could be coming up from behind—and me sitting here staring at this silly hill as if it’s going to jump out of the water and come after me! Yet that silent, remote benevolence kept watching her, kept waiting.
In the distance a clear melodious sound, like the night finding its voice, rose up—joined a moment later in the long note by another voice wavering downward a third, and yet another, higher by a fourth. The unsettling harmony sent a delighted shiver down her spine. The wolves were on post as their rearguard, singing to while away the watch.
The Goddess’s dogs, Segnbora thought. It was the old affectionate name for them, the votaries who sang to Her mirror, the Moon, through all its phases, silent only when She was dark and dangerous. Where the Moon tonight? Segnbora wondered, glancing upward. It hadn’t yet risen. But she was distracted, as always, with the sight of the first few stars pointing through the twilight, and the memory they always recalled.
How old was I? Segnbora wondered, though wondering was vain. Very small, she’d been—small enough to still be wearing a shift instead of a kilt, but large enough to push open the front door of the old house at Asfahaeg and escape at bedtime. She’d gone out into the dark, unsure just what she was looking for—then had glanced up and found something, a marvel. Not just sunset, or dusk, or dark, but a sky burning with lights, every one solitary and glorious; and she knew, small as she was, that somehow or other she and those lights were intimately connected.
Now Segnbora knew them as stars, knew their names, knew about the Dragons who had come from among them, and about the Goddess Who had made them. But the wonder had never left her: that desire to get closer to those lights that called her—and, eventually, closer to the One Who had made the stars. When the Rodmistresses tested her at the age of three and found the Fire, she’d been overjoyed. Everybody knew that when you had the Flame, you got to talk to Her more often than most.
But years of study had failed her. School after school had been unable to provide her with a focus strong enough to channel the huge outflow of her Power—and so there had been no breakthrough, and no truedreams in which the Goddess walked. After much bitter time Segnbora had admitted the truth to herself, that she was never going to focus. She might as well give up sorcery and lore and Flame and all the other timewasting for something useful, as her father had always said.
And, having given up, so it was that she’d met the Goddess at last. She was good enough with Charriselm to go looking for a job as a guard. She found one, in a little Steldene town called Madeil—and found Freelorn in the mucky alley behind the tavern there. Later, fleeing from an old keep in which the aroused Steldenes had besieged them, the group had come across a little fieldstone inn on the border between Steldin and the Waste. It had seemed strange at the time that there should have been an inn out there at the very edge of human habitation, but the innkeeper had put them all at ease. Finding that they were short of money, she offered to share herself with one of Freelorn’s people to settle the scot. A common enough arrangement, and Segnbora had
won the draw for the privilege.
It had been a sweet evening. The innkeeper had been fair, but there was more to her beauty than that. A long while they sat together by the window of Segnbora’s little room, she and a white-shifted shadow veiled in hair like the night, talking and breathing the apple-blossom scent while the full Moon went softly up the sky. The talk drifted gradually to matters that Segnbora usually kept deeply hidden—old joys, old pains —while the brown-and-beige-banded pottery cup went back and forth between them, filled with a wine like summer wind running sweet under starlight.
I’m talking a great deal, Segnbora had thought, not so much frightened by the intimacy as bemused. The wine— But the wine was not intoxicating her; she was seeing and feeling, if anything, more clearly than usual. Shivering with delight at the feeling of magic in the air, she drank deep of the cup, deeply enough to drain it…and found it still three-quarters full. Two hours we’ve been drinking from this cup, she realized, and she only filled it once.
She looked across at the other, then, and realized Who had come to share Herself with her, as She comes to every man and woman born, once before they die. Not Mother now, as she had been at dinner, feeding them all and gossiping about the Kingdoms, but the aspect of the Goddess Segnbora loved best—Maiden about to be Bride, Creatress about to create something as beautiful as the multitude of stars. Back and forth a few more times that cup went, while Segnbora drank deep of building joy and anticipation, and named the Other’s name, and saw her joy reflected a hundredfold, a thousandfold, incalculably.
Then she went to bed. And was joined by warmth that enfolded, and lips that spoke her name as if she was the only thing in creation. She was intensely loved; and was given to drink of that other cup that brims over forever, the endless source. She drowned, eternally it seemed, in the deep slow bliss of her own deity, and the Other’s…
The bark against her back was hard as Segnbora blinked, glanced down from the sky. Oh, again, she thought, someday again…!
Though the odds of that were slight. Once in a lifetime, in that manner, one might expect the Goddess. Otherwise, only at birth did one see Her, in one’s own mother—quickly forgotten, that sight—and at death, when the Silent Mother, the Winnower, came to open the last Door.
Segnbora glanced across the lake, at the Fane standing silent, watching her, under the constellations of early summer. He’ll be ready soon, she thought. Somewhere to northward the wolves started singing again.
Someone came lurching along toward her in the darkness, walking loud and heavy as usual. Oh, Lady, not now, she thought with affectionate annoyance, as Lang plopped down next to her. “Are we waiting for Moonrise?” he said.
He smelled of unwashed horse and unwashed self, and Segnbora wrinkled her nose in the dark—then shook her head at herself, for she had no call to be throwing stones on that account. “Just full nightfall,” she said. “I guess the theory is, if you’re crazy enough to climb the Fane, then exercise your madness in the dark as the Maiden did. ‘Out of darkness, light; out of madness, wisdom—’”
Lang nodded. “How crazy are you?”
His tone was uneasy. Segnbora’s stomach knotted, hearing in his words a reflection of the nervousness she’d been trying to ignore. Worse, she didn’t feel like talking. Segnbora wished for the thousandth time that Lang wasn’t thought-deaf.
She plucked a blade of grass from beside her and began running it back and forth between her fingers. “I think I told you about my family, a little,” she said.
Segnbora felt his confusion, typical of him when she chose to come at a question sideways. Lang rarely understood any approach but the head-on kind. “Tai-Enraesi,” he said. “Enra was the Queen’s sister of Darthen, wasn’t she?”
Segnbora nodded. “I’m related to quite a few people who’ve been up that hill. Béorgan, and Béaneth, the doomed Queens. Raela Way-Opener. Efmaer d’Seldun. Gereth Dragonheart…” She trailed off. After a while she said, “To be where they were… I don’t know how I can pass the Fane by—”
Lang slouched further down against the tree. His face was calm, but his heart was shouting, Yes, and look what happened to them! Béorgan and Béaneth dead of the Shadow or of sorrow, Raela gone off through some door and never heard of again, Efmaer dead in the mountains, or worse, in Glasscastle—
Segnbora twitched, resettling her back against the rowan’s trunk. She heartily wished there was something else left to try, but over twenty years she had exhausted the talents of instructors all over the Kingdoms. This was a last chance: if she failed this, she could finally rest.
“I thought I might talk you out of it,” Lang said, very low. “I like you the way you are.”
“I don’t.”
“But if you go up there there’s no telling what’ll happen to you—”
“I know. That’s the idea!”
Lang drew back, pained.
“Look,” Segnbora said, regretting his distress. “Twenty years of training, and I’m Fire-trained without Fire, I’m a sorcerer who doesn’t care for sorcery and a trained bard who’s too depressed to tell stories. It’s time to be something else. Anything.”
“But, ‘Berend—”
The use of the old nickname, which Eftgan had coined so long ago, poked her in a suddenly sensitive spot. She laid her hand on Lang’s, startling him out of his frightened annoyance. “You remember the first time we met? You tried to talk me out of joining up with Lorn, remember?”
“Stubborn,” Lang muttered, “you were stubborn. I couldn’t stand you.”
She gave him a humorous look. “Maybe change isn’t such a bad thing, then?”
After a moment he squeezed her hand. “Care to share afterwards? If you haven’t turned into a giant toadstool or some such, of course.”
Her heart turned over inside her. When Lang made such offers, there was always more love in his voice than she could match, and the inequity troubled her. It had been a long time since her ability to share had been rooted in anything deeper than friendship. “Yes,” she said, hoping desperately he would be able to lighten up a little. “You disturb me, though. You have a prejudice against toadstools?…”
Lang chuckled.
“You two ready?” said another voice, and they both looked up. Herewiss was standing beside them with Khávrinen sheathed and slung over his shoulder. Freelorn was with him, arms folded and looking nervous.
“What do you mean ‘you two’?” Lang said. “I prefer to die in bed, thanks.”
Segnbora squeezed his hand and got up, brushing herself off. “You found the raft, I take it.”
“Hidden in the reeds,” Freelorn said. “In fact, the reeds were growing through it in places. Evidently not many people come this way.”
“Just the three of us are climbing, then.” Herewiss said. “Still, it’s probably better that we all go across—in case any Fyrd get by our rearguard.”
Lang got up, and the four of them went off to join the others by the lakeshore. Dritt and Harald and Moris were standing at a respectable distance from the raft, for Sunspark was inspecting it suspiciously.
(You really want me to get on this thing?) it said to Herewiss as he came up. (That water’s deep. If I fell in there—) It shuddered at the thought.
“So fly over,” Herewiss said, stepping onto the raft from the bank.
Sunspark gazed across at the Fane, its mane and tail burning low. (There’s a Power there, and in the water,) it said. (I’m not sure I want to attract Its attention quite so blatantly…)
“Then come on.”
THREE
The Goddess’s courtesy is a terrible thing. To the mortal asker she will give what is asked for, without stinting, without fail. Nor will She stop giving until the gift’s recipient, like the gift, becomes perfect. Let the asker beware…
(Charestics, 45)
They all climbed onto the raft. Sunspark came last, picking its way onto the mossy planks with the exaggerated delicacy of a cat. But it stood quite still in th
e midst of them as Herewiss and Freelorn poled the raft. No one broke the silence. Out on the water the feeling of being watched was stronger than ever.
At last the raft grounded, scraping and crunching on a rough beach of pale pebbles. Herewiss stepped off, Freelorn behind him, and each of the others in turn. Everyone winced at the seeming loudness of their footsteps. Segnbora, second-to-last off, thought she had never heard anything so deafening as her light step on the gravel. Sunspark, behind her, got off and made no sound at all. It was carefully walking a handspan above the shore.
They were not only watched, they were felt. There was no mistaking it. There was no threat in the sensation; the regard running through them was patient, passive. But whatever fueled it was immeasurably old, and huge. As the Power reached up into them, the others looked at one another, wondering, finding old companions suddenly somehow strange.
Segnbora understood the sensation as most of her companions couldn’t. The Fire within her, dwindled to nearly nothing because of years of lack of focus, now suddenly leapt up as wildly within her as if a wind blew through her soul. The Power pushed at her, urging her toward the mountain. At the same time it looked through her at the others, and looked through them at her, determining what changes would be made—
Oh Goddess, she thought, this is what I’ve needed. There was no mistaking the Source of what stirred here, though this half-slumbering immensity of calling Flame was only the least tithe of Her Power. And I’m terrified—
Herewiss and Freelorn stood transfixed, keeping very close to each other. She couldn’t see their faces, but Freelorn had stopped nervously hugging himself for the first time since the morning. Khávrinen in its back-sheath was blue-white with Fire: its light shone through seams in its scabbard, and the hilt blazed like a torch. “There’s the trail,” Freelorn said quietly, looking upward.
