Good, thou art, Sacred Princess, it said to her. Sadly for thee and thine, just not good enough.
“There’s got to be a way,” she fumed, after the herald’s departure, as the skittering of claws on stone in the hall outside marked the advance of Malevoiy reinforcements.
“That Bannefin, she had an army,” said Khory.
Elora’s eyes fell on her foe. The Deceiver sat in a huddle, her back to the solid frame of a table, staring at nothing, as divorced from the action as she could manage. She was like a pencil drawing, as each successive wave of energy from the Resonator stripped her of every semblance of humanity. Only a few layers of being remained to her, demarked by a dark silhouette as though she’d been outlined in ink. Once they were gone, once the contours had been frayed to nothingness, there would be no structure to anchor the energy that was her essence. It would drift apart and with it her consciousness. Elora had no idea how long the process would take, at what point the last thought would vanish. It wasn’t something she ever wanted to experience and when she looked into the Deceiver’s eyes she saw a reflection of that fear.
“I can’t do it,” Elora confessed. “I can’t beat them.” She almost laughed, although she felt no humor in her. “I mean, I can try, I will try, with all my heart. But it won’t be enough, Drumheller, will it?”
“Not even with my help, Elora, no. I’m sorry.”
“The Malevoiy represent the strength of ages. Me, I’m a teenager.” Then her gaze settled on the Deceiver, where it had been heading all along. “But you’re not. You wear their armor as a badge of conquest. You fought the Malevoiy and won!”
“For all the good that did me.”
“Help us now.”
“To what end? The salvation of your precious Realms? How do you know our actions won’t make things worse, that we’ll be upsetting the natural order?”
“Explain the prophecy; why else are we here?”
“What the hell d’you think I’ve been trying to do my whole life, you wretched child? Divine the meaning of some stupid story and apply it to the governance of the Realms. Great concept. Pity the execution left so much to be desired.”
“Who said you were meant to rule the Realms?”
“Why bother with an Ascension then, eh? I tried and tried and tried, from this Epoch to the next, and it cost me—everything! You have no conception of the price. I was like you once, full of hope and ideals. Now I’m just tired. I’m like Asana. I’m done. Leave me to my fate.”
“After all you’ve done, you just give up?”
“Can I win? Have you left me the thinnest reed of hope? You fought me from the start, as did you, Peck,” she said to Drumheller with a snarl. Then she shrugged. “The hell with you both.”
How’s that for a joke, Elora thought. Here am I, heart without a full complement of strength or of skill. Here is my enemy, the only one of us who’s actually fought and beaten the Malevoiy, who possesses those qualities in abundance but without the heart to fight.
“The last Realms,” she said aloud, as though a herald had announced it from a watchtower.
“What’s that, lass?” Thorn queried.
“Despair and hope.” She knelt before Drumheller and Khory, and gently removed the dragon’s egg from her pouch. “There isn’t really time to explain,” she said to them. “But I need you both to trust me.”
“The binding spell?” Khory asked.
“I need it released.”
“Have you considered that’s what the Malevoiy are waiting for outside?” Thorn told her. “That’s what they’re counting on. The binding spell is the only protection the dragons have. Break it and the Malevoiy can seize the dragons for their own.”
“I know the risk, Drumheller. I’m counting on you all to keep them clear.”
“While you do what?”
“What I was born to do.”
“Count us in,” the brownies chimed in unison, followed by Anakerie, who said, “Maulroon and those others, they’ll be right pissed to miss this little fracas, especially my brother.”
“Hey hey,” cried Franjean, “someone should live to tell the tale. What’s the point of playing hero elsewise?”
“If I can help it, my friends,” Elora said, “nobody dies today. My word on that.”
She held out the egg. Khory stretched out her own hands, splaying the fingers wide enough to encompass much of its circumference so she could maintain direct contact with Elora and hopefully Drumheller.
“Please,” Elora said, in the face of his reluctance.
With a nod of acquiescence, he joined his hands to theirs and spoke the correct enchantment. Elora felt a thrill of energy tickle the tips of her fingers.
“The Malevoiy,” called Anakerie, watching the door. “I think they know what just happened. They’re on the move!”
“A warding spell like this,” said Thorn with pardonable pride, “they’d feel its neutralization in Sandeni.” Then, seriously, to Elora, “All I ask of you, child, is that you know what you’re doing.”
“Hate to say it, but I’m making it up as I go along.”
“Wonderful.”
She faced the Deceiver.
“I’m beaten,” her lifelong foe told her. “Congratulations. What’s mine—what’s left of mine—is yours, be welcome to it. I wish you better fate than I encountered.”
“I don’t want your damn’ power. Taking it means your destruction.”
“No less a fate than what I intended for you, my girl. Besides, wait a wee while longer, the whole question becomes moot. If that’s your pleasure, be my guest, but you’re wasting valuable resources you may yet need to save your pathetic, mayfly lives.”
“I’m a healer, Elora,” she told her older self, her use of the name serving as the final note of acceptance of this strange and frightening reality. In all the years we’ve been at each other’s throats, she told herself, a bit bemusedly, I never imagined that the person in my life most in need of that particular talent was—myself.
She held out both hands, clasped around the dragon’s egg, and the door plus a fair portion of the wall itself burst inward. Thorn met the Malevoiy with magic, the brownies with raw energy, the women and Luc-Jon with steel, and corpses quickly began to fall.
Visibly trembling, the Deceiver laid her own hands gently atop Elora’s.
Elora’s youth had been defined by bloodshed and disaster. The Deceiver’s was one of unending joy. She had the most wonderful home, foster parents who loved her, and over time, siblings of a sort. The Shadow came later.
At the Deceiver’s Ascension in Tir Asleen, she was given a crown and a throne and was subjected to speeches without number or, she suspected, any significant point at all concerning the practical limits of her power. She had other notions and quickly set them in place. She would bring order to the unruly, she would mandate peace throughout the Realms.
She should have waited. Someone should have counseled patience and a ferocious measure of discretion. She was dealing with Monarchs whose bloodlines went back to the dawning of life on the physical world. They viewed her as a slip of a girl who’d gotten lucky. Some obeyed, some objected, most waited for a sense of the eventual outcome.
When she tried to enforce her edicts, war was declared. The age-old pattern of bloodshed and betrayal once more reasserted itself, as it had since the banishment of the Malevoiy.
The Deceiver had been raised as a Princess, trained—as Anakerie was—to rule. Moreover, she had an intuitive sense of people, an awareness of the strengths of their individual characters and above all their weaknesses. As such, manipulating them became literally child’s play. When she actually was a child, it was fun. A flip of the curls, a bat of the eyes, a dollop of irresistible charm, some cajolery, and she could get pretty much whatever she wanted. Only those who knew her longest, who’d known her in fact before her r
escue from Bavmorda, appeared immune. Madmartigan, Sorsha, the brownies, and especially her champion, the Nelwyn wizard Willow Ufgood.
At first they were a welcome reality check, the only ones she knew who would treat her with the loving disrespect a child needs occasionally to remind her that she isn’t quite the center of the Universe. They told her when she was wrong, offered a reprimand when she did wrong; they weren’t afraid of her and therefore would challenge her when they felt there was a need. Since she had no living parents, they assumed that role for themselves and took that responsibility with total seriousness. Everyone else she encountered considered her the Sacred Princess—at best, royalty; at worst, some kind of living deity. In either case, utterly unapproachable on any level of normal human interaction.
The problem was, something always seemed to be missing from her life. She felt incomplete, that no matter what she achieved she would always judge herself lacking. It was a burr in her soul, it whispered nasties in her ear and made her wonder if others likewise saw this fundamental flaw in her. She thought of the child’s tale of the Emperor’s new clothes and dreamed of striding to her throne wholly unaware that she was stark naked, while her entire court burst their collective gut trying not to laugh. She began to look more closely at every face and ask herself if this one saw the joke or not.
Willow and the others noticed this change in her and tried to draw out the reason for it. She was of the age, though, where stubbornness becomes a primal character trait, up there with rebellion, and the last people she wanted to turn to for anything—as she fought to define and solidify her own unique identity—were her surrogate parents. In time, the mood might have passed. Or the others might have sat her down and had it out with her, as parents will when they see no better alternative. It was an adolescent phase, they told themselves. They trusted her judgment, her fundamental character.
The war changed that. From the beginning they argued against it, Willow most vehemently of all. They didn’t accept her own position that a throne must be unassailable and that ultimately she knew best for the Twelve Realms. They didn’t see what was obvious for Elora, which meant they didn’t trust her, so she stopped listening. And when she grew tired of their disruptions of Council strategy sessions, she stopped inviting them. And when their encounters within the palace of Tir Asleen grew ever more strained, when the estrangement grew to the point where just thinking about them made her upset, she banished them from court.
She meant them no harm, she loved them. What drove her to distraction was the growing fear that they no longer loved her back. How could they, she wasn’t worthy. It was the smallest of perceptual steps from that mark to the proposition that they’d never loved her, that they’d merely used her to further their own agendas—Madmartigan and Sorsha to gain a kingdom for themselves, Willow to become a sorcerer. That they’d never used their relationship for any personal gain only told her that they weren’t very good at it, which again fit neatly into her growing worldview, diminishing them further in her eyes and doing much the same to her, for what did it say about the Sacred Princess herself that she would embrace such consummate losers?
By then, the Realms of the Circle of the World were going for each other’s throats. Had she tried, the Deceiver might have found a diplomatic solution to the conflict, but she had no interest in compromise, only victory. Madmartigan and Sorsha, against type and nature, placed their lives and sacred honor at hazard and brokered a cease-fire and an eminently workable peace. Their Princess pretended to acquiesce and at the parley called to finalize the terms arrived with her newly established corps of assassins, the Black Rose, to decimate her rival Monarchs.
She took no action against Madmartigan and Sorsha; the elves saved her the trouble.
So it went, year after year, generation upon generation. Because she lost faith in her generals, she trained herself in all the warriors’ arts. When she grew convinced that Willow was rousing the local wizards to rebellion, she mastered their arts as well. And remembering the breadth of Bavmorda’s power, it was the most logical progression from the craft of white magic to that of black.
Each decision had its specific rationale. Each could be justified wholeheartedly. Each was necessary. Of that she was certain beyond all doubt.
But each led to further doubt, and that doubt led to the next decision, which cast forth the seeds of disaster, which in turn required yet another decision. Each was a dot of color in the canvas, pure and pristine.
Never once, though, did the Deceiver take the few steps required that would allow her to distance herself from her creation and view the canvas in its entirety, to see those apparently random dots within their whole context. Had she done so, she might have seen that the picture being created was altogether different from her intent.
She grew increasingly isolated and increasingly resentful. She was the Sacred Princess, the responsibility of the future of the world was on her shoulders; why did the populace refuse to understand, to cut her some slack, to accept that she knew best in everything?
Another pulse from the Resonator illuminated the Deceiver and Elora, pitting the heavy outline around the Deceiver’s body even further. It changed the scene about them as well, transporting them to a place Elora knew only too well, the volcanic caldera that was hearth and home to the dragons.
Only this wasn’t quite the place that Elora had left. There was a familiar emptiness, because the dragons of the Deceiver’s history had reached the end of their life cycle, just as had those of Elora’s. That aspect of time remained constant. The difference was that in the Deceiver’s future, they simply died. There were eggs aplenty scattered about the ruins but no catalyst of spirit to inspire them to hatch. And the longer they lay dormant, the more imagination—the capacity to transcend the here and now in favor of something altogether new—fled from the Realms. That was why, as the war dragged ever onward, neither side could find a way to end it. Conflict became the accepted norm, no one could conceive of a world without it, a relationship that wasn’t defined by it. The races of the Great Realms took their cues from the Sacred Princess. As she became more suspicious, so did they. As she embraced the concepts of deceit and betrayal—because the ends eternally justified the means—they did also.
In turn, the harshness of their behavior drove the Deceiver to greater extremes of her own, generating a wickedly self-perpetuating cycle that, with the best and most noble of original intentions, created a society that ultimately eclipsed the brutality and evil of Bavmorda’s regime.
In Elora’s imagination, she and the Deceiver were visiting a museum, strolling along a gallery past vast and complicated tapestries and paintings whose scale encompassed the totality of the Great Realms. A glance told Elora everything she needed to know, and the sight was like the clawed hand of a Malevoiy about her heart. By contrast, the Deceiver had her face up close to every piece, nattering justifications without end for the choice and placement of every strand of thread, every dot of paint. For her, every element was taken in isolation.
Until Elora yanked her other self back to stand beside her.
Elora thought before then she’d seen her share of grief. But she’d never seen a soul mourn an entire world, as the enormity of the tragedy crashed about them. Events could no longer be viewed by the Deceiver in abstract; they had suddenly and irrevocably become personal. Each strand of thread and pinpoint of paint represented a life. The Deceiver had placed them there for a purpose, as individuals; that was how she now found herself forced to relate to them and deal with their loss.
She wanted to die. Elora wanted to let her, because the crushing weight of such sorrow was more than she wanted to bear.
But she was incomplete as well. She lacked the ruthlessness, the indomitable strength of purpose, that had sustained the Deceiver throughout the whole of her long life.
She held out her hand.
“What?” the Deceiver asked of her.
&nb
sp; “What you’ve always wanted,” Elora said. “Me.”
“This is some trick.”
“I can’t take from you, because that would be yielding to despair. Yielding myself, though, letting you win”—she gave a quirky, utterly charming smile that the Deceiver, though the structure of their features was identical, could never duplicate—“I guess that’s embracing hope. Maybe this way we both win.”
The Deceiver didn’t respond at first, as she examined the offer for the hidden trick, the betrayal that was always lurking behind every generous impulse.
“It’s your choice now, Elora Danan,” Elora said to her. “I’ve made mine.”
The Deceiver gripped Elora’s hand in her own, clasping it between both of hers before pulling the other young woman into an embrace.
“This is the equinox,” Elora whispered. “All things are in perfect balance. You have the world, you have the lever.”
“Thank you,” said her other self.
They finally understood how truly precious hope was, having lived through its utter extinction.
They understood how to dream what never was and inspire the best in folks to achieve that, because they had endured the worst.
To the others within the sanctum, their backs to a corner of the wall where the Malevoiy had driven them, it was like watching the first sunrise of spring. The pulses from the Resonator were coming so close together now that the visual din was continuous. The field effect began to coalesce, creating the portal Thorn and Anakerie had witnessed in Sandeni. Again, there was a fearful distortion of the structures of reality itself. Solid stone warped, turning malleable like soft wax before discorporating into blobs of matter that best resembled bubbles of varying sizes. Some of the Malevoiy were snared in the vortex that was forming, shrieking in unaccustomed terror as they found themselves in the grip of forces far beyond their ken and control.
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