by Sandra Waugh
“I believe, Twig, that you might have liked to see how this journey ends,” I murmured. Then I laughed a little shakily. “Perhaps you could read of it in my book.”
He looked at me straight. “I do not need to read it; I have faith that you will succeed. Now you must have that faith as well.”
I took a deep breath. I tried not to let my own doubt cloud the moment.
“Trust yourself, my lady.” The gnome stood and adjusted his waistpack. There was nothing he could do about his collar, though. It flapped loosely, giving the neat little man a newly rakish look. I had to grin at that.
“Ah! The final token!” Twig said suddenly. “What did I say it was?”
He knew the answer, but he seemed to want me to say it. “A gift of something taken—”
“No, not you, my lady.” He’d turned to Gharain. “Rider, you tell me what the final gift is.”
“Something claimed and freely returned.”
“Yes.” The gnome stared hard at Gharain. “Claimed, and freely returned.”
Gharain made no move.
“Ah,” said the gnome. “Not yet ready, I think. But do not wait too long.”
“Twig!” I cried out. “You are fading away!”
“Not to worry, my lady, not to worry! It is time, then. The sun has completed her cycle.”
“Bid goodbye, Twig, please?”
He waddled to me. I could hear his footsteps, only barely see his form. “A true goodbye, in Tarnec fashion.” Hand to heart, he bowed his head. Gharain and I both echoed the gesture, and I could see that it moved the gnome. He cleared his throat—and then it was a sound only, for we could no longer see him. A wisp of light was all that remained, like a sheer puff of smoke.
His voice stood out once more, firm and wise. “Rider, do not wait until it is too late!” Then to me, it seemed, he shouted, “Look west at the sunrise!”
“The sun rises in the east,” I started to say, but already the smoke was dissipating.
“Farewell!” came his thinned voice. The smoke drifted up and was gone.
Gharain and I sat silently for a very long while.
“WHAT DO WE do now?” My question drifted like dust in the hollow space. I could have expected an answer from Twig. Now there was nothing.
Outside, the storm had not abated. Like a demon, it howled and shrieked beyond our burrow while we sat long and silent, the gnome’s absence heavy between us. I couldn’t look at Gharain now that we were alone. I studied the moonstone instead, which still gleamed with bright warmth, and wondered how long its helpful fire would last. And then I wondered at all the help I’d been offered along the way—wondered if it were true what Twig had said about having done well thus far. Had I been on the path to reclaiming the crystal orb, even if I hadn’t known it?
“ ’Tis your choice, Lark, is it not?”
Gharain’s response was made so quietly that I had to turn to hear him. When he caught my eye, he gave me a small grin, warm in the gem’s light. “Isn’t that what Twig was asking you to do—trust yourself?”
I nodded halfheartedly and turned my gaze back to the moonstone.
And he echoed me very softly. “So? What do we do now?” I had to turn again, to see if he was jesting, but his beautiful face held no humor.
Heart’s desire—unspoken, it filled the space. I looked away, blushing, my hand reaching unconsciously for the ally token. Gharain watched me, which made my fingers tremble. He was calm enough. “You are missing the last gift.”
“From you.” Now the blush crept down my chest and throat.
There was silence for a time, until I was obliged to look up. He was still watching me, something almost triumphant in those sage eyes—something deeply pained as well.
“I caused a great tragedy,” Gharain murmured. “You are right to reject me. And yet …” He smiled a bit. “You once said that I came to you in a dream. Do you know that you came to me in one as well?”
“A dream?” I managed.
“The Guardian,” he murmured, his gaze lifting as he remembered. “Calling to me, mine to awaken. I wanted—” Then his smile fell away. “It has been many lifetimes since a Guardian was awakened. I thought she was needed. I did not know I would be the one to make the Guardian needed.”
My voice was too husky. “Fate—”
“My dream did not reveal you; I only knew you were near. When a message came, inviting me to find you, I raced to the search, and—and I found her. Erema.” Gharain winced. “I was raw, so desperate to be in love and believe.… What you felt in Dark Wood was the same power that claimed me, only I had no one to keep me from the madness.”
“She caused it. She knew your want. She changed your fate.” All our fates.
“I was consumed by desire.” He shuddered. “And then a horror I could not bear. I tore through our last battle with Troths with unsated fury and a feeling that I could not wait to die. But it was over too soon, and I still lived, and—”
Gharain looked at me, shaking his head in wonder. “You were there on the ledge, as if you waited for me—arms around the white horse, the two of you gleaming in the moonlight.” He winced. “I watched, and waited. And I thought nothing but that I must kill you.”
My voice was husky. “If not you, then someone else—”
“But it was not someone else, Lark. I was the one too easily persuaded—too easily manipulated.” He took a breath. “Unworthy to be made your Complement.”
It hurt to hear. “How can you say unworthy? You did not ask to be my Complement. You suffered the king’s desire for it, didn’t you?”
“Lark, I didn’t have to do it. We always have a choice. Nay, I wanted to.”
“But your face! You looked as if you could not bear to touch me.”
“I could not bear that the king granted me that honor after what I did.” He waited for a time. Then softly, curiously, he murmured, “You refuse me, not because of Erema but something else.”
I watched him, eyes wide; I could not release his gaze. What he said was true.
A faint smile returned. “It gives me hope that I will right this wrong.” Gharain shifted ever so slightly closer, quizzing me with his look, and the connection between us hummed strong. “A most terrible error I made, and yet you refuse me because of a dream.”
I hesitated, then forced my head to shake, to break eyes. “I do not blame the past, but I cannot change what I have seen. You will fall in love with someone else, and you will kill me.”
“No.” He was severe. “I have caused enough wrong—”
“Gharain, you carved your sword straight through me.”
I was brutal, his face so awful that I added softly, “It did not hurt.”
“No! I cannot, could not harm you—I could not survive that!”
But the deepest wound was already inflicted. I had to sound calm if he was not: “Two dreams, Gharain. Please understand, then, that if you could not live with the regret of one, I cannot live with the regret of the other.”
He was still fierce. “I can’t—I won’t believe it!”
“It is what I saw, Gharain. My dreams do not lie—”
This time he reached for me. He took my arms in his powerful grip and drew me a breath away to face him. “And I told you that even if your visions do not lie, they can still be misinterpreted. Did I not misinterpret?” He leaned forward, his lips nearly touching mine. “You will not yield to truth,” he murmured. “You find excuses; I think you protect your heart—”
He made me tremble. “It is not mine that I protect.”
“Then whose? Certainly not mine.” He whispered, “I know I will not harm you.”
And then his mouth did touch mine, so light, warm, and my breath came out like a whimper before I pulled back.
“It is not me that you are meant to love, Gharain.” I could hardly speak the words, my want for him was so intense. “It is my cousin, Evie. She is lovely and kind. When you meet her, you will—”
“I dreamed of
you.” Once more he leaned to brush my lips. “I am your Complement.”
Once more I pulled back, barely, for he did not let me go. “Choice or not—you are not required to feel anything for … for me.” I was breathless. He was too close. “You said yourself that you did not see me in your dream. Another Guardian it was, maybe. Evie bears a mark.…” And then I begged him, “Please. I will not be able to turn from you—I need to turn from you!”
“For Evie?”
I nodded because I no longer trusted my words.
Gharain sat a little straighter. “Mark or no mark,” he murmured. “There is more beyond that single touch than an awakening of power. You know it, you feel it, and yet you will not yield to truth.”
It was at that moment that the ground rumbled beneath us. I fell forward, my hands smashed under my chest. I screamed out at the threat this time, fearing Gharain would be torn from me here in Dark Wood, but his hands did not let go. He was solid as the earth shivered, keeping hold of my arms, keeping his gaze locked on mine.
“It won’t stop!” I gasped. “This will never stop!”
“Lark—”
It would never end, these upheavals. Another lurch sent clods of dirt raining down. What defenses I’d put up crumbled under the stark fear of this endless flux, of losing him. “Don’t let it take you, Gharain!” I raged at him, begged him. If he fell through as he’d done before, I’d have no strength to drag him back.
A severe jolt almost broke us, knocking us both to one side. Gharain’s hands slipped to my wrists. We rolled over, struggling for a hold, for stability—struggling to clamber to our knees. There was no sanctuary, no place of safety. Even beneath the oak they’d found us.
“Lark! Listen to me! I have you! I won’t let go.” Gharain held on firmly even as the quaking tugged at us to part. “See? I’ve your hands. I have you!”
I gritted my teeth to stop their chattering. A glimmer moth fell by my knee, shaken loose by the quake, and writhed on the ground. Beneath the roar of rain and thunder and wind, and groaning earth, I watched the moth struggle, using the leverage of its wings against the earth to right itself and flick back to the safety of the oak roots.
Leverage. I looked at my hands, small within Gharain’s fists. Three times, at least, my hands were on the ground when a rifting calmed. It could not be coincidence.
“Let go!” I yelled.
He shook his head, misunderstanding. “I’ve got you!”
“No, Gharain! Let go! Let me go!”
He released me and I reached my shaking hands to the dirt floor, feeling with sickening horror the emptiness after his strong hold and the lurching of ground beneath my cold palms. I slammed them into the dirt, grunted out a cry, and pressed.…
And with a hard sigh, the earth deflated beneath us and was calm.
I fell facedown, but came up laughing, spitting dirt. “I did it! It worked!”
Gharain was sitting up, sliding over to me. “It was you.” He helped me come upright, sitting to face him, and taking my wrists again in his grasp. Immediately his bright energy flowed through. “Your hands …”
I was jubilant. “I pressed my palms into the earth and it calmed! The earth responded to me!”
He grinned wide. “The verse, Lark, your verse: Power of hand … Your hands against earth.” Gharain shook my wrists gently in a loose grasp and then paused, staring down at them. In a lower voice, he said, wondering, “And yet, when we first fell and you pushed yourself up, nothing changed. It was, I think, because I was holding you.”
“Your touch redirected my energy,” I agreed. There was silence. And then I looked up at him, memory warming through me, beyond his grip, his words. “Your touch,” I said very softly. “You affect me.”
“I thought we shared … and yet we do not.” There was disappointment in his voice.
But I shook my head, a light dawning. “No, we do not share. ’Tis not sharing.” I sat up a little higher. “ ’Tis a circle. A cycle. Do you remember the wicks springing to life between our hands? Our touch flows energy between us—a give-and-take. Gharain, you balance me.”
There was a tremor to his hold, but he laughed a bit. “So this amazing feeling is the give-and-take of Balance, that together we inspire life to thrive.”
The wicks had thrived. I was hoarse. “Nayla said it to me: it is what we give to Earth that allows her to provide. She was speaking of me, Gharain! Of—of us …” My voice faded, abruptly shy.
His grip changed, warmth flowing through me, charged and strong. And he asked what I’d once asked, needing to hear my answer aloud: “What do I give? Lark, our Life Guardian, connected to the Earth and all she provides, what do I give to you? Say it. Say it.”
My own hands were shaking. I whispered back, “Love.”
His eyes searched mine. “I do love you, Lark, you already knew that.”
And it was true. In this small moment in time, Gharain did love me. Deeply. I knew it through every sense, every pore of my body. And the exquisiteness of that truth welled up and spilled into me as brilliant happiness, boundless strength.
We give love, Nayla had said, to bring forth bounty.
I took his hand and pressed it against my heart, hearing the sharp intake of breath from both of us at the touch. “Look, Gharain, at what you do.”
The Rider smiled his achingly beautiful smile, which I returned, understanding. It no longer mattered past or future, broken heart or death. In this moment, Gharain loved me. And so for now there was only this: this circle of Balance completed, flowing warm and charged between us. It was brief, what I could claim, but it was pure and honest. It was my truth.
“Gharain.”
“Yes, Lark?”
“I yield,” I murmured, and felt his lips take mine.
Sometime later in that night, I felt the sweep of something light against my cheek and then Gharain’s lips by my ear. “Lark,” he whispered, “I return these to you. I’d kept them, to have something of you near always. But now I have you.”
And I turned to him and sought his mouth once more, and he let the feathers brush down my skin before reaching an arm back to tuck them into my sack—these namesakes, and sign, and summons. This gift.
Mine.
The earth shook often through the night—shimmers, above and below us—powdery dirt sprinkling down and the oak roots trembling in their hold of the ground. The storm had faded; all that was left was the groan of tremors—sounds that had terrified me earlier and did no longer. Gharain’s arms hugged me close anyway. “You are beautiful,” he whispered warm against my neck. Dark Wood could have fallen around us and I do not think I would have minded.
The moonstone was dimming, and though the glimmer moths continued to spread their glow, our burrow was now cast in a blue-tinged hue. The ground shook beneath us once gently, once harder; Gharain’s arms tightened, though he slept. I stirred at the motion and then let my head turn once more into the crook of his shoulder, smelling his bare skin against the mossy bed we lay upon.
And the ground shook. And shook again. I closed my eyes and smiled.
It was only at the soft scrabble of claws that I stirred. It was not loud, nor even frightening, just a sound that did not belong to the place. My lashes were heavy with sleep; I peered through them half-opened. And perhaps I would not have seen it in the dim light—but the smell then burned through my nostrils, rank and pungent, and I forced my eyes wide to look.
I’d fallen away from Gharain—he lay with one arm still beneath me, sprawled faceup in a luxurious and deep sleep. Our bed was warm and soft—who would not have been so innocently open beneath that starry glitter? The stench hit me again, and I froze where I lay, barely allowing my head to turn fully to the side, to look past Gharain’s tanned chest gently rising and falling, past to the Troth that shuffled, then crouched at his side.
My breath sighed out of my body—the silent deflation before panic. How had the beast entered the burrow when Twig had so carefully defined a boundary?
With the sparest motion, my eyes flicked to the opening, to the terrible realization that the Breeders had used the tremors to shake loose the wood betony from its impassable line—vibrations had forced the stems to roll down and away from the entrance. The passage was clear.
The Troth supposed us both asleep—a small ignorance that allowed me to watch him contemplate Gharain’s prone body, as if wondering what to do with him. The thing leaned down to take in the young man’s scent. My stomach churned beneath rigid limbs; I barely dared breathe. He scored Gharain up and down with his gaze, and a clawed digit sketched an imaginary line above his chest, as if choosing the exact spot where to strike. And then, for the briefest instant, I saw Erema in the creature’s place, her fingers splayed above bared skin, claiming him, and then the fingers were claws once more, and gray-mottled.
Gharain’s sword lay against the earthen wall to my left. I did not hesitate. The slimy arm of the Troth drew up, and I rolled toward the weapon, reaching for the hilt to pull it close and swing. At the noise, the Troth reared his head with a screech through his nostrils and his jagged teeth gnashed open.
Something was wrong. The metal of the sword was burning cold—too heavy in my grasp, twice the weight I’d imagined, resisting my efforts to clasp it. I needed two hands to drag it forward, to force it to me. And neither did that work, so I scrambled to my knees and wrenched it up, ignoring the burn to haul it toward the Troth as if the view of the sword alone would be enough to frighten away the beast.
Maybe it was. In that brief moment between shriek and sword, the Troth reared up, grunting and snorting through those gashes of nostril and then bursting forth with another screech that sent Gharain leaping to his feet before arcing back from the wild swipe of claws. The Troth bounded for the opening.
“Lark, no!” Gharain shouted as he saw me, but it was too late. I was stumbling to the burrow’s entrance, into the dimmest of dawns, dragging the sword behind, fear and fury propelling me outside to challenge the terrible thing. I trampled over the useless wood betony and out into Dark Wood, which crowded, soaked and heavy, around our tiny shelter. I’d forgotten how quickly its wild energies could seize my senses. At once, the whirling fury was there, whipping straight through me. I clenched my teeth against the pulses charging up my bones.