"It's over," she said simply. "The Warmother will come to trouble you no more."
Belegir closed his eyes in relief, but the tears Glory had somehow expected of him did not come. The Warmother's unbinding had changed everything, everyone she'd known here in Erchanen. Even him.
"There is more to tell?" he asked, after a moment.
"A lot," Glory said. She glanced back over her shoulder. Cambros and Ivradan were fawning on the white mare, like boys with a flashy new car, and Tavara was regarding Glory warily from a safe distance. All of them seemed somehow more normal, more there, as if some missing ingredient, like salt in stew, had suddenly been supplied. "I don't think I did what you wanted. What Cinnas wanted. I'm sorry for that."
"It is the way of heroes," Belegir said gently, reaching out to take her hand. His eyebrows rose at the sight of the makeshift bandage. "I think you must hear now what the Oracle told me, Slayer."
Glory's eyes opened wide in apprehension. "Oh, no, Bel, I don't reckon—"
But Belegir was strong enough now to argue. "Leave us," he told Tavara firmly.
The young healer bobbed an unwilling curtsey and walked away toward the others.
"It cannot harm you now," Belegir said to Glory. "You have done what you came to do, have you not?"
"I . . . yes," Glory admitted. Still holding his hand, she moved from her knees to a cross-legged seat that was a little less uncomfortable. She had the woozy, light-headed feeling of too many hours awake on too little food, and hoped to be able to sleep soon. But she owed it to Belegir to listen to what he had to say.
"That night when the Oracle came to me, it said that you would bring to the Allimir such sorrow and disaster as our people had not known for a thousand years. I did not know what to think. I thought then that Erchane meant you must fail in your task . . . but She did not, did She?"
"No," Glory said reluctantly. But you're all still alive! You've got a chance now! she wanted to protest. "You know what Cinnas did, don't you?"
"He bound the Warmother upon the peak of Elboroth-Haden of the Hilvorn, then called Grey Arlinn," Belegir said. "He bound her by binding her into mortal form."
Glory squeezed his hand gently with her fingertips—it hardly hurt at all—and then released him. She rubbed at her eyes. "She was all of you, first. He took her out of all of you—the spirit of War—and gave her a single form. His daughter, Charane. That was what—that was who—he chained to a rock up there. I had a chance . . ." She stopped, staring off into nothing. "I could have killed Ivradan, and he would have taken Charane's place, and everything would have been just like it was. But I couldn't do that."
Couldn't kill Ivradan to save the rest of the Allimir, but she could drag him into mortal danger without a backward glance, couldn't she? And found it easy enough to try to kill anyone else that looked at her cross-eyed, didn't she? She knew she'd done the right thing—but it didn't seem very logical, somehow.
She shook her head wearily.
And what, she suddenly wondered, would have happened to all those mercenaries the Warmother had imported if she had taken the easy way out, and chained War up again? Would they have all gone back to their own places and times just as if She hadn't summoned them up in the first place? Or would they still have been here, with the Allimir as helpless as before against them?
Did I make the right choice after all?
"So I guess I undid Cinnas' original spell," she said, after a long silence. "You're back where you started. Back in the Time of Legend."
And now the tears she'd been expecting did come. Only they were hers.
She scrubbed at her eyes angrily with the tips of her fingers—if anybody here ought to be grizzling, it was Belegir. "Sorry," she whispered. "Sorry."
Belegir patted her knee. "Do not weep for us, Slayer. It is Erchane's will, and a problem to be faced another day. Now you must rest, and have your own wounds seen to. Tavara, attend us!"
The healer came hurrying back as if she'd just been waiting to be called—as she undoubtedly had been.
"See to the Slayer's injuries, taken in honorable battle," Belegir said decisively, "then let her sleep undisturbed."
Too exhausted to resist—or even think straight—Glory allowed herself to be led off.
The Allimir rescue party had packed in quite a lot of gear on their string of ponies, or else had gone out shopping while Glory's back was turned. One corner of the cavern had been set up as a combination surgery and supply dump, concealed behind a standing screen that must have come from somewhere inside the Temple complex, as it was far too large to have been packed in.
Tavara took Glory behind it and seated her on a makeshift stool, then disappeared again. When she returned a few moments later, she was carrying Glory's other clothes—the jeans and T-shirt she'd left behind.
"If you will remove your armor, Slayer . . ."
"Easier said than done," Glory muttered. She managed to unlatch the clasps down the right side of her corset, but could not manage to twist around to get at the ones on the left. Tavara came forward and helped her, peeling away the filthy, clammy leather shell that was glued to her with an accretion of sweat, mud, blood, and other things best left unremembered. Fortunately, a girlhood spent in gymnastics had pretty much erased any trace of body-shyness Glory might have been born with. Tavara draped a blanket around Glory's shoulders, and waited.
Glory looked down at her boots, up at Tavara, and shrugged.
"Sorry," she said simply. Between her hands and her back, there was no way she could get those boots off.
Tavara knelt before her and tugged. First one boot, then the other, came loose with a grinding, sucking sound. Glory wiggled her feet, sighing in relief. Hello, toes. She stood—carefully—and pushed the bedraggled remains of her Elizabethan slops down over her hips.
"Any chance of a bath?" she asked hopefully. Now if she could just get those damned bracers off. She never wanted to see any part of this S&M rig-out again!
"Soon," Tavara answered, sounding like nurses everywhere. "What did you do to your hands?"
Glory looked down at them. They were mittened in the black velvet panniers she'd torn from her costume, and only the fingertips showed. The dye had run, staining her skin a greyish black—at least, she hoped it was the dye. She'd torn a couple of fingernails. The fingers looked swollen, and her hands felt stiff.
"Ripped them up pretty good, didn't I?" she said disinterestedly. "Just help me get these bracers off," she added, "And then you can bandage to your heart's content."
The leather bracers that covered her arms like opera-length gloves laced for fit, and normally Glory just slipped them on and off like bracelets, trusting friction to keep them in place, but they'd been soaked through and dried several times since she'd put them on last, and by now they'd shrunk a bit. After struggling with them for a few moments Tavara got a knife and sliced through the lacings. She pulled them open, freeing Glory from the last vestige of Vixen the Slayer.
Only . . . not. She's me now, and I'm her. It's not the clothes, or the makeup, or the sword. It's all the rest. It's what's inside.
Tavara brought another blanket and let Glory stand to wrap it around her sarong-style—apparently this was going to take a while—then started to unwrap the makeshift bandage that covered her hands. It was soon apparent it was stuck to the flesh (a happy thought, that), so Glory got to balance a bowl of green-tinged water on her knees, soaking the cloth on her hands free (the dye ran, turning the water black; a relief of sorts), while Tavara gave her a makeshift sponge-bath and exclaimed over each of the various cuts and bruises she discovered as though Glory had gotten each one of them just to make extra work for Tavara.
Glory wasn't really looking forward to seeing what was underneath the velvet. She could still feel the way the hilt of the sword had dug into her flesh with a thousand tiny needles. And then the Warmother had bled all over her.
"You tore the bandage on your shoulder loose," Tavara said accusingly.
&nb
sp; "Hurm?"
"Here. On your shoulder. I told you to leave it there until it fell off, and you didn't. Does this hurt? There's a bruise."
"Bleeding hell!" Glory yelped, as Tavara dug her thumb in just below Glory's right shoulderblade. "Of course it hurts, you fool girl—I sprained it!" And a little quarterstaff practice on top of things hadn't helped any.
She glared over her shoulder at the little Allimir in a fashion that would have had the healer cowering under the furniture a few days before, but now Tavara stood her ground.
"I'll strap it for you so you can rest it, once you've dressed. There's bruising and some scrapes, but it doesn't look too bad."
"That's because it isn't your shoulder," Glory muttered under her breath. The jolt of pain had roused her to full wakefulness again, and she started picking at the wet cloth, pulling it away from her hands. Whatever was in the water seemed to numb the pain, or else she was used to it by now. Tavara didn't object as she peeled her hands free and dropped the wet cloth to the floor. She held her hands up, inspecting them critically.
Both palms were starred with dozens of bloodless wounds, covering them from the heel of the palm all the way to the middle of the second finger joint, all the places where her hands would have touched the sword. They looked like razor cuts, and where they intersected, there were pits in the skin where chunks of flesh had been torn away. Both hands were swollen, as if from a burn, but her right hand—the one that had held the stake—was puffiest, covered with tiny broken blisters.
All things considered, Glory was just as glad it had been too dark to see clearly up there on the mountaintop.
Even Tavara didn't have any smartmouthed nursery rejoinder to make when she saw Glory's hands.
"What did you touch?" she said in a small voice.
"Something poisonous," Glory said. "But they bled a lot."
"Then that— That's good. It will have washed the poison away."
I hope, hovered unspoken between them.
Tavara bandaged her hands with a thick black foul-smelling salve that felt cold and gluey, followed by yards and yards of bandage going halfway up her arms until her hands resembled thumbless boxing gloves. She daubed Glory's other scratches with something that simply burned, and then finally relented and helped Glory into her jeans and T-shirt. It was something of a shock to confront once more the image of her doppelganger—painted, coiffed, and immaculately armored, glaring menacingly up at her from her own chest.
"Live the Legend." Ah, if you only knew . . .
True to her word, Tavara put Glory's arm into a sling to immobilize the shoulder, then bound the arm against her side with more strips of bandage, covering up the Vixen-image.
"Do not, I ask you, Slayer, destroy more of my handiwork," the little healer said scoldingly.
"Do my best," Glory said, her words slurred with exhaustion. "An' if I starve because I can't hold a spoon, it's on your head."
"You will not starve," Tavara said, smiling now. "Come."
She led Glory back to the fountain. Her bed was laid out beside it, and Ivradan was waiting for her, scrubbed up and dressed in fresh clothes. He looked tired, but pleased with himself, and was holding a steaming mug in each hand.
"Felba and Fimlas and Heddvi are here," he said happily. "All well."
It took Glory a moment to place the names.
"The ponies She . . . ?"
"She only sent them away," Ivradan said happily, "and so they sought the nearest place where they knew they would be fed. They came here, arriving before night fell."
No wonder the others had been so stunned at the sight of them, showing up the morning after their horses did. It hadn't been Maidarence at all. It had been them coming back from the dead.
"And it's all right?" Glory said fumblingly, not quite sure of how to ask the right questions.
"No harm can enter here," Ivradan said soothingly. "Come. Sit. I have brought soup for you. You will sleep—we will both sleep, and tomorrow Belegir will tell us what we must do."
She was too tired to pick holes in his logic. She managed to get herself down into a sitting position one-handed—awkward, with the bed so low—and let Ivradan hold the cup for her. It held a thick broth, with a faint undertaste, but tired as she was, Glory hardly cared if Tavara had been spiking it. She was asleep before she finished the mug.
She half-woke a few times, just far enough to remember there was no reason to wake up, and went back to sleep, wallowing in unconsciousness as in the ultimate self-indulgence. Once somebody pulled her hair, but after a while they stopped. She cuddled Gordon tighter and ignored them, her face buried in the toy elephant's mold-scented dusty plush.
Eventually hunger—and more pressing needs—roused her to full consciousness again. She pried open her eyes, and bopped herself in the face with a large bandaged mitt when she tried to rub her face. There was something under her arm.
Gordon.
Sometime while she'd slept, someone had taken Gordon away, and cleaned him, and put him back together again. He'd been restored to his original roundness; the bullet-holes had been carefully patched before they'd brought him back and tucked him in with her again. The color and the fabric didn't match, but it was at least blue, carefully oversewn around the edges to hold it in place against the well-loved plush. She kissed him gently on the forehead, working the tips of her left-hand fingers to the edge of the bandage so she could touch him. Good old Gordon. A real trouper. Not many stuffed elephants could say they'd faced down a demon-queen and survived.
She sat up cautiously, and looked around. Everything was quiet. The others were all asleep. She didn't know how long she'd been out—long enough, obviously, to get herself turned around from all of them. What she needed now was to find the jakes.
Aside from the bum shoulder, and her hands, she wasn't in too bad shape, all things considered, though she wouldn't be in competition condition any time soon. She got to her feet without much difficulty, leaving Gordon on her pillow, and went padding barefoot toward the temple steps. She knew she could find something to make do with up there—better than wandering around down here until she woke somebody, anyway—and besides, she knew she could be alone there. Now that all this was over, she thought she was entitled to a bit of a think.
As she got to her feet, she realized that the Allimir had done more for her while she was sleeping than repair Gordon. Someone had brushed out her hair and rebraided it into two loose braids. Must've been dead to the world and all found, she thought, looking down at them. A nice gesture, even if a little unsettlingly intimate. She wondered which of them had done it.
Sore muscles protested as she went up the broad shallow steps, but it was no more stiffness than a little stretching would cure. She'd give the shoulder a couple of days rest and then see if Tavara had any liniment for it. If these people had horses, they must have horse-liniment, and that would do fine for her, too.
A few minutes later, having debased one more solid gold bucket and another acolyte shift, Glory sat down on one of the benches in the Presence Chamber and took stock of her life.
What happened now? She wasn't any closer to getting home than she had been the day the door fell off her dressing room, as far as she could see. The Allimir were in a little better shape—but now they were sharing the plains of Serenthodial with a job-lot of imported villains and frighteners, none of whom looked like good candidates for honest work—except maybe the Amazons, and Glory still wasn't sure how they'd got mixed up in all of this—and all of whom were likely to be just as much trouble for a bunch of farmers trying to get the crops in as the Warmother had been. The first thing the Allimir were going to need was an army of their own, and where were they going to come up with one? They might not be all that peaceful any more, but they still didn't know anything much about the arts of war. And she couldn't teach them.
Maybe Erchane'll send them a nice drill-sergeant next.
And there was one other thing still bothering her.
If Bele
gir's dream had been true, what about hers?
"Slayer?"
The voice behind her caused her to levitate with a shrill unheroic squeal. She spun around, cursing her awkwardness, to find Ivradan standing in the doorway.
He was undressed for sleep, capless, his long chestnut hair hanging down over his shoulders, barefoot as she was, wearing only his loose linen undersmock and calf-length trousers.
"I woke and saw you gone. I thought you might have come this way," he said.
"So I did," Glory said, taking a deep breath and trying to slow her racing heart. It seemed almost odd not to feel the springy resistance of the corset when she did so, but it was going to be a cold day in whatever passed for Hell around these parts before she put that outfit on again.
"My turn to ask you, I reckon: what happens now, Ivradan?" she said, when she was sure her voice was steady.
"Now we can return to our homes, and rebuild the Allimir nation," Ivradan said. "It will not be easy, of course."
"Not with a bunch of pissed-off mercenaries wondering where their meal-ticket's got to," Glory said. She sat down on the bench again.
"There will be . . . intemperance," Ivradan admitted reluctantly. "Peace-breaking. Even violence."
"Lots of that," Glory agreed. "Harsh language. People may even lose their tempers from time to time."
Ivradan blushed and hung his head, looking embarrassed.
"But you'll need all those things," Glory said urgently, wanting to comfort him. "They're what you'll have to have to survive. Maybe you don't have the Warmother around any more, but she left you a whole world full of enemies."
"That is what I must go and tell them," Ivradan said. "With your permission, I will take your horse, and—"
"My horse?" Glory interrupted, confused.
"Maidarence," Ivradan said. "I know that the Amazon queen gave her to you, but she is wonderfully fast, faster than our ponies, and so I thought . . ."
"Take her, take her," Glory said, waving at him with her free hand and feeling unaccountably irritable. "I reckon she's really yours anyway. Likes you better than she does me, anyhow. When are you going?"
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