“I guess it was – but you should have said something! It would have made it easier.”
“If that is true, then I am sorry. I certainly would have saved myself a lot of pain.”
She relented before his humility. “Well, I guess it was right that you waited. I did not know who I was before, let alone what I wanted.” She searched his brown eyes, which encompassed her entirely in their gaze, drawing her into his soul. She could spend the rest of her life searching out that soul. He leaned closer.
“What do you want?” he whispered. “Anything you want.”
“I want to fight, and reconcile, and talk, and love you – for the rest of my days.”
“That is what I want too.”
“And I want to rule South Drian. I love it here, and if Trinian consents, would you want to stay?”
“Yes. Yes, I do. These people are very dear to me. Anything else?”
“I want to talk about the Golden King, and find out who He is and how we can serve Him.”
“Yes! I want that too.”
“You know, I find it strange,” she blushed and looked down, suddenly embarrassed, “I think I could love you even more if I knew and loved Him.”
He leaned forward and rested his forehead on hers, gripping her hands tighter. “I just had that same thought. Yet, I did not think I could love you anymore than I do now. But I love you more than I did a moment ago, and more than I did a moment before that…”
“Oh, hush,” she said, and kissed him.
* * *
Afias and Adrea announced their intended union to great fanfare in South Drian, but decided to wait until they returned to Drian to perform their nuptials. Afias remembered how sad Cila was when Trinian returned home with a wife, and he wanted his entire family around him when he brought in the newest member. His heart ached for Trinian, Viol and Cila, for Asbult and even for Lavendier, so Adrea, seeing his pain, insisted that they wait. Until then, they would be content to speak alone, stroll through the gardens, and rule South Drian together.
91
Panormama
In the heavens, the gods were not unaware of what passed below. From the palace, they could see everything with an eagle-eye view, and, roused from their ennui of the ages, called upon by more mortals than ever before, they crowded round to watch the panorama unfold.
Though they had not banned any of Power’s supporters from the celestial home, the band of rebels only showed their faces to hurl insults and boast of their progress. Terror, Despair, Destruction, Resolve, and Passion were now strangers to their brothers and sisters.
For awhile, Death was also a stranger, but he had recently returned to Fate, kneeling his pride at his brother’s feet, asking if it were possible for the Golden King to forgive him? Fate had embraced him readily, eager to see his family whole again. “As for the Golden King,” he told his little brother, “he will do with you what is right. You can only return the favor.”
Knowledge and Death kept careful watch over South Drian and its regal prince. Death was in love with the lady there – it was she who had brought him back to the fold of Fate. Adrea was also the darling of Knowledge, who had found answers through actions where words, flown to the Golden King in prayer, had always failed her. And they both loved the prince, with his magnanimous heart and eager forgiveness, and his willingness to call upon them in his travail.
The other gods, infected by the zeal of their brother and sister, decided to choose favorites as well, and Joy took careful watch of the youngest princess. “She’s not important,” said Knowledge, glancing ahead with her limited foreknowledge. “She will not decide their fate.” But Joy only loved her charge the more for it.
“Yet she never falters in her strength of spirit, and she does not care how small a contribution she makes. I will help her keep her energies.”
Solitude took on the sorrowful princess Cila, eager to bring her some comfort in her unending loneliness. But she did not rest there. As she flew close over the world, descending from a far-off view and absorbing the world through her translucent, divine skin, she found loneliness in every corner of the bereft world. Loneliness of a person, of a nation, of a world. No man was free. And she sought to help the world understand its individual isolation.
Hope blazed like a fiery emblem in the breast of Lavendier, her guiding star in her struggle against herself.
“Has no one taken King Trinian under their wing?” asked Fate, finding them crowded round the parapet, sending down graces like arrows on their special, chosen charges.
“He does not need us,” said Knowledge dismissively. “He has the divine mark; and Gladier besides, who has divine knowledge.”
“I think you overestimate his autonomy,” whispered Solitude. “I have felt the king’s heart, and it is desolate.”
Most of them ignored her, but Peace heard. She looked gently at Fate. “I suppose I will extend my graces to him.”
“Thank you…” he said; but his voice broke with mournfulness and he turned sharply away. Her heart went out to him; gently, she put out her arm and pulled the great god apart from the others. He followed her like an obedient child into an inner chamber, where she sank to the floor, her aura wrapped about her like a gown, her contentment an ocean of calm. As he sat beside her, his obedient motions belying the strong frame that rippled beneath him like a storm brewing on the horizon, she saw that his kind, stern face was breaking in painful agitation.
She asked abruptly, “Could you rule Minecerva?”
He looked at her in horrified alarm, and she added quickly, “I know you would not want to, and you never would. But could you?”
“Anyone can,” he answered her quietly, still shaken by the question, for she had no idea how much the idea tempted him. “That is Power’s strength. The heavenly throne is open for now, and anyone may sit in it at the end of time. Free will will decide the outcome, not fate, not myself, not my actions.”
“But you know how it will end, do you not?” she beseeched.
He nodded and rose, his regal blue cloak dusting the floor, stirring her aura like a cloud in the air. “My watch turns ever on, and I know how it will end.” Again, his face crumpled in misery. “I know both the strength and futility of freewill.”
She sighed softly. “Why does he insist on this?”
“Power?” he asked, and when she nodded, he said, “It is his choice. He is free to make it.”
“Will you not tell me how this will end?”
“You know I cannot, my love. Wait and see. I must do the same.”
“I want Him to come now. My soul aches now, at the end of time.”
Fate returned and rested his large hand on her shoulder. “Care for your king, my dear. He is the key.”
She hung her head. “I always knew I should care for him, but I have avoided it. I am afraid.”
“Why?”
“I must be present against our brother. I do not want to be there. I know what must come. I cannot see it, like you, but I know. He has turned away from our King, and there is only one outcome.”
“And yet you are Peace. You know you must be there to accomplish it. It is your trial through fire.”
“Why do you not have one?” she cried suddenly, her soul riling against her inside her breast. Despite her goodness, this was the one affair that would be her final test, and it stirred up her little sins, airing them for a final cleansing.
“But I do,” he told her gently, looking sadly on the world below them. “It is this. I must watch you help them, help the land I love, and I stand here on the edge of unreachable, unable to guide or command. It is breaking me, slowly. Ah,” he sighed, and the whole heavenly kingdom shuddered with his sadness, “may He come soon!”
* * *
In Karaka, Power was surrounded by his constituents. Terror whipped about the chamber, a tornado of insatiable energy. Despair was draped languidly, effeminately, over a chair, drinking wine. Terror was cross-legged in front of the fire, throwing anything i
n reach at Destruction because when anything hit him, it ricocheted into the wall and exploded, and Terror thought that was uproariously funny. Resolve rolled her eyes at her brothers and the chamber clacked with the sound of her pacing heels, impatient to have the conquering over and done with – she hated this waiting before the final hour. Passion did not mind waiting so long as she looked well doing it, so she was leaning fetchingly against the mantle, sipping a fiery froth.
Power sat on a throne three times the size of the one in Drian, but of the same make. Soon, he told himself, he would rule all the world. If he believed it, he could make it happen. Trinian was only a man. He was a god.
Throughout Karaka, his army was gathering for the final strike. He was relentless and nothing could stop him, for Kelta was no longer a land of men but of automatons, mindlessly obeying his every will and command. And soon, despite Death’s betrayal, Power would send his mindless soldiers through the most secret paths of the dead. He would send them through the middle land, the tunnels that stretched between the mortal and the immortal world, that welcomed souls on their way to the land of the afterlife. Death had told him how to access the land, and the arrogant god thought they needed him to use it, and that by betraying them all and siding with the mortals, Power would lose his ability to march on Drian. But Power was a shade himself, and could command shades, and needed no god of the dead to do it. His men would walk through that bitter darkness and come out the other side, ready and able to invade Drian.
XV
THE SILVER LADY
“A woman is to be found at the center of this salvific event.”
- Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem
92
Lavendier Hears Tidings from Karaka
Lavendier and Jacian plodded upward along the southern wall of the mountain. After three months in Paradise, they had left the home by the lake for a day trip, looking for meat, fruit, or anything else they could scavenge, and this brisk hike through nature served to soothe both their wild spirits. The little prince’s energy had built up day by day, until it was coiled inside of him like a cat waiting to launch itself at any moving thing, and Lavendier, too, had suffered every moment, for she was falling ever faster and deeper for her demi-god friend, who was forever reserved, proper, and collected. Her heart chafing raw, torn between her own doubts and her attempts to give him space, she was trying to escape the growing passions that swelled her heart like water swells a dam, threatening to flood over and engulf her; in the presence of these new feelings, she struggled to recognize what was pure or what was base in her desires, trying to untangle the morality that was so new to her, with little luck, and only increasing infatuation.
The little prince was blissfully oblivious to his aunt’s distress of mind and therefore, by prattling and wandering, effectually kept her from brooding, so that aunt and nephew walked until noon, then afternoon, and finally evening, before Lavendier suddenly stopped still in her tracks and gazed at the sky.
“Why are we stopping?” asked the boy.
“I lost track of the time. We should have turned back awhile ago.”
“Are we lost?”
“No. But it will be getting dark by the time we get home. Let’s go, dear.”
“I’m hungry!”
Lavendier sighed. She wanted to start back, but it would be miserable going if he was going to complain of hunger at every step. She was tempted to tell him to eat and walk, but it would be nice to sit, and there was no danger when walking at night in this land of perfect peace. She knew there was a small cave in the rock face up ahead, so ducking inside, they made a picnic there.
All was well and they were nearly finished, when Lavendier’s skin suddenly prickled and she shushed Jacian’s prattling. Knowing from the tingling in her spine that gorgans were near, she sat still, and suddenly, she realized she could hear voices. Not the grunts of monsters, but the murmurs of real men.
Her heart beat loudly, drowning out the faint noise. Jacian tried to say something, and she hushed him quickly. She took a deep breath and listened again. Sure enough, voices, faint and distant, were filtering into the cave. She followed the sound, feeling how close the gorgans were, and it grew louder as she approached the dark rear.
There was a tunnel that led deeper into the mountain, and Lavendier bid Jacian sit still and silent, and await her return. She moved down the black tunnel, remembering that some of the mountains bordered Karaka, and worrying that some of the enemy’s soldiers might camp on the other side of the mountain. When she reached the end, she came up suddenly against a rock wall. Yet the voices were louder than ever, almost as if she was right in their midst, and the prickling of her spine was electric. Then she saw light at her feet, and realized there was a hole in the bottom of the wall, and the men were directly on the other side, their voices filtering through.
A deep voice was grumbling. “This war’s taking its toll, I tell you. And those stupid beasts are gettin’ better treatment than us, you can be sure of that. Stinking rotten fish – and us fifty miles or more from any seacoast! Can kill off a whole army feeding it this way, ya know, without ever meeting an enemy. We’s as good as dead now as we ever would be in the war.”
A higher, more even voice answered him. “Careful who you say so to. The god’s proud o’ this land and its bareness, I hear tell, and don’t tolerate criping.”
“Who’s criping? I just don’t approve o’ anytin less ‘an human detency.”
“He ain’t human, and you’d do well to remember it, and not grouch as if he couldn’t hear you. He knows everything in his lands, and can go anywhere on a whim. So just shut yer mouth and eat yer fish.”
There was silence for a time, except for sounds like a carnivore tearing its juicy prey, and Lavendier was just about to head back to Jacian when a new third voice suddenly announced, “All Kelta men to report to General Farsooth first thing in the morning. We’re storming Drian in eight days.”
Lavendier pushed her head into the crevice, stilling her breathing.
The first voice answered the third. “What? Drian? We’ll never make that distance in time. He’ll really kill us all this time and for no reason. We ain’t all bodiless spirits!”
“Hush yer mouth!” cried second voice, but third voice answered him. “Word is we’re traveling through Drakans, under the power of the high god. Take us no more than a week to march through. So pack up yer wet noses and get moving!”
There were sounds of scuffling and packing and putting out a fire, such that it drowned out any more conversation of the two men, and under the cover of the commotion, Lavendier made her way back to the prince.
When she returned she had a moment of panic, for the young boy was gone, and the lunch things were strewn about, as if someone had been kicking them around. But as soon as she emerged into the light, he was there, and he let out a terrible scream on sight of her.
She, surprised and anxious, held out her hands, and with a sob, Jacian’s little arms encircled her neck tightly, clinging to her.
“I’m sorry!” he cried, his infant wails trembling the air.
“It’s alright, my darling. It’s alright,” she soothed, rubbing his back and holding him tight. “Why are you crying so?”
It was some time before he calmed enough to answer her. “I - I was frightened,” he hiccoughed. “I thought you were the monster.”
“What monster? What happened?”
“He chased me out of the cave. He had a giant whip, and when he lashed it, there was fire.”
Lavendier looked back into the dark opening. “Stay here,” she said.
“No! Don’t go.” He clutched her hard in panic.
“I’ll be right back. If you call, I will hear you.”
“No, no!”
“Count to twenty, then call me, and I will come back.”
He closed his eyes and began to speed through his numbers like it was a marathon.
“Slowly.” She smiled tightly. “Start again, and I will be r
ight back.” Her neck taught and her hand gripping the hilt of her short-sword, she made her way into the dark opening. But other than the one tunnel, down which she had gone, the cavern was empty.
Inclined to dismiss the incident as a product of his overactive imagination, she went back through the entrance. Jacian finished his counting as she emerged into the light, but his eyes were still closed, so he cried out her name, and exclaimed for joy when she responded right beside him.
“Well, my dear,” she said, taking his hand, “let’s get you home to your mother. I have something to tell them.”
93
A New Princess
Garrity was stacking wood in the light of the full moon when they returned to camp, and Lavendier, leaving her nephew with Adlena, approached him with a heavy step. He smiled when he saw her, set the ax down, and drank from the bucket standing beside the woodblock. He watched her with a discerning eye, noting a mournful taughtness of her pure white brow with concern, for whenever she was worried, the skin on her face would always tighten instead of wrinkle, and Garrity knew and understood.
“Something has upset you. Was it Jacian?”
“He is fine. I left him at camp.”
“So what happened?” As she did not answer right away, he gave her time to think by stacking more wood.
“I encountered soldiers of the enemy.”
He whirled on her and gripped her arms. “Here?”
“On the other side of the mountain. I could hear them through a rift in a tunnel.”
“Are they coming here? Are you both alright?” He looked her up and down, as if suddenly expecting to find a limb missing.
“No, we are fine. They did not see me. But Garrity, they are on their way to Drian. They are going to attack the capital!”
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