“Humans and Endarians are not so different, yet we are an older race. We are much more attuned to the Mother, the world that lets us draw upon her powers as she in turn draws upon the energies of the cosmic. Your mind has been allowed to link with mine because I am your half sister. Some of the same blood flows through our bodies. Some part of each of us is the same. That, and only that, will enable us to do what we must. Where I have only touched your consciousness up until now, we must now join our minds. While this is common among Endarians, it is almost never done with humans. While I do not know what each of us will experience, the process will be a shock. You will gain all my awareness, memories, knowledge, and feelings while I gain yours. A lifetime will pass between us in less than a second, something wonderful, terrible, both.
“The reason we must do this is apparent. It is the only way we will be able to coordinate our efforts to save Katya. I will work to heal her wounds as you control the elemental and keep the entity from doing more damage. Once my work is complete, you will be able to cast the elemental out. Are you ready?”
Carol centered her consciousness. “Yes.”
The merging was instantaneous and devastating. Carol/Kim reeled, enduring the mutual shock as she/they worked to establish a frame of reference. What had seemed firm and well understood crumbled beneath the weight of a new understanding and confusion. Time lost meaning. A lifetime lasted hundreds/tens of years. Endarian/human emotions calmed and raged.
Carol heard her Endarian voice cry out with terrible sadness and longing as Kim’s human voice rang with excitement. She remembered racial memories from eons past, and in her mind the moon whirled around this orb as it circled the sun. Humans lived half-lives, walking the land for such a brief time before they were swept away in the mighty surf of time. Such strange creatures, so intense and brief.
And for Kim, time moved ever more slowly. Emotions, so hot and out of control, so barbaric that they could not be tamed, coursed through her brain. No wonder the humans were seduced by elementals. Surely these feelings were akin to those of their tempters. Kim/Carol reached to snare one with her/their mind, hungry to control it, to make the elemental pay for the evils done to her people since the rift. Such power.
“No.” Carol/Kim’s thoughts echoed, reflected between personalities. “Stay focused on the task at hand.” They clung to the thought.
Slowly their dual consciousness stabilized, merged but separate in purpose. Communication flowed between them at the speed of thought. They were learning, feeling out how they would work in tandem, each performing different tasks with complementary purposes.
They reached into Katya’s mind and seized the infecting elemental, binding Oganj so that their will became its own, limiting its functions to maintaining Katya’s life. They pulled the earthen energy inward, letting it flow through them and into Katya’s body, moving in tiny ribbons to heal damaged vessels and cells, stimulating natural responses.
Oganj had been busy; the entity’s inflicted damage was extensive and subtle. As the moon moved across the sky, the two women worked patiently, and as their joint effort drained their energy, the Endarian side drew more heavily on the Mother.
And then it was done. They drove the elemental out of Katya, hurling Oganj into the netherworld from which it had come.
With another wave of vertigo, Carol felt their minds separate. Her feet slipped from beneath her body, and she sat down hard in the suddenly dead, brittle grass. Kim sagged slightly, then straightened, once again her regal, Endarian self. Carol gazed up into her sister’s eyes, seeing them soften with loving knowledge and acceptance. They now shared a bond greater than any blood tie. They had each lived the other’s life.
A sigh escaped from Katya’s lips, and the girl’s eyes fluttered open. Carol climbed to her knees and took Katya’s hand in her own as relief washed over her.
“Is the bad dream over?” the child asked weakly.
Carol smiled at her as Dan and Kira raced to kneel at their daughter’s side.
“Yes, Katya,” Carol said. “You are going to be just fine.”
Tired as she was after the effort she had expended helping Carol, Kim could not afford to sleep just yet. John had come to her with news that the ranger, Jaradin, had developed an infection that was not responding well to Jason’s treatment. Thus, she made her way to the room beside the infirmary, where Jaradin was being cared for.
She arrived to find Jason and Derek in attendance at the ranger’s bedside, Derek’s face full of dread. Jason stepped aside to let her in. Her first sight of Jaradin made her wince. Although she had treated a wide variety of badly injured people, the depravity of those who would stoop to such torture infuriated her.
His left eye had been gouged out, along with the eyelid. Dark striations traced veins surrounding the empty socket. The other cuts in Jaradin’s face and upper body had been expertly stitched closed and smeared with a medicinal salve with which she was not familiar. But the area in and around the eye socket radiated the highest fever.
Kim’s healing magic was strongest at night, when she could best observe the subtle flow of life energy within her patient and the living things that surrounded him. The next best thing was to find a deeply shaded spot in the forest.
She turned to Derek. “I need Jaradin moved to a place within the forest where the shade is the darkest. We should hurry.”
“I know just such a place not far from the fort.”
The ranger did not hesitate. His long strides carried him out the door, and he whistled to get a soldier’s attention. Moments later he led two men carrying a stretcher into Jaradin’s room. After placing the stretcher on the floor, Derek and the other two men gently set Jaradin on it, then lifted and carried him out.
When they reached the forest, Derek quickly guided them to a place shaded by interleaved branches of three spruce trees. As they prepared to place Jaradin on the bed of pine needles, Kim stopped them.
“No,” she said. “As much of his body as possible must be touching a tree. Especially his head.”
She guided them through the process. Jaradin lay on his right side, curled around the youngest of the trees in a fetal position, his head resting on an exposed root.
“Leave us alone,” Kim said. “I cannot have distractions for what I must now do.”
Jason and the two soldiers nodded and moved off through the woods. But Derek remained. When Kim gave him a questioning look, he responded in a husky voice. “Whether or not you’re able to save him, I will remain with my brother until the end. I will make no sound or movement.”
Kim understood.
She seated herself cross-legged behind Jaradin’s head and softly began to sing. The song had nothing to do with the magic; it was an ancient Endarian melody that helped her attune with the life energy that flowed through the forest. At first, she saw nothing, but as she moved deeper into the trance, dim beads of light crawled beneath the bark of the young tree, barely visible in the light of this day.
Kim turned her attention to Jaradin’s face, now seeing the sickness spreading through the ranger’s veins in a greenish light as opposed to the healthy bluish white of the tree’s life energy. Continuing to sing her gentle melody, she reached out to place her left hand on the tree trunk and her right hand upon Jaradin’s face, circling the eye socket with her thumb and index finger. She formed a channel.
When the exchange began, a tremor passed through Kim’s body as the sickness funneled through her in exchange for the health she drew from the spruce. The two competing energies flowed through her in opposite directions, and she suffered, both from the corruption she pulled from Jaradin and from the knowledge that she was killing one of nature’s treasures, one that had as much right to live out its life as the man she was working to save. As she wielded the life-shifting magic for good and for bad, she silently mourned.
13
Areana’s Vale
YOR 414, Late Summer
With Arn’s warning that Kragan was alive and
seeking to kill Carol in the forefront of her thoughts, Carol spent the next three days reinforcing Hawthorne’s magical wards that she had placed around the vale when the caravan had first arrived, adding to their complexity and range. The process was tricky in that it required her to release control of the elemental she had bound to each ward, but to respond rapidly with a harsh punishment should the entity attempt to break its bonds. The danger was that another wielder might identify the elemental being used and take control of it before she could regain full command.
Thus Carol set up two layers of protection. The outer layer was monitored by a weaker elemental, whose only purpose was to alert her of any disturbance to the inner layer, the ward itself. Carol found that she could immediately detect variations in the wards and counteract an attempted breach.
The lorness was alive once again. To have her magic back felt beyond wonderful, giving her hope for the future she had always envisioned. Perhaps she would yet accomplish enough to make Hawthorne proud, to be the wielder her people needed.
One day, as she practiced manipulating and augmenting her magical defenses, Arn surprised her when he stepped into her open doorway. She knew that he and his comrades had returned from hunting down the protectors, but she had been avoiding him, arguing with herself until she reached the decision that now seemed inevitable: She might scare him off, but she would go no longer without Arn understanding how she felt.
“Mind if I come in?” he asked.
“Sit with me on the porch,” she said, extending her hand as she rose.
She led him to a bench that looked out over the valley beyond. As they sat down, Arn set the small package he had been holding on the bench beside him.
“I’m so glad you came,” she said. “I’ve needed to talk to you.”
Arn’s look of surprise was quickly replaced with his customary stoic smile, but he did not pull his hand away. “What about?” he asked.
Carol swallowed, holding his hand between both of hers. Her heart beat wildly as she pondered what she was about to say. It was lunacy for her to blurt out what she felt, but here he was, and the time for such revelations might never be right. The memory resurfaced of how she had admitted her love for him during the Ritual of Terrors despite her wish to distance herself. Because of that love, she could now wield magic. Because of her love, Kaleal had failed to possess her.
“I’m not sorry that you’ve come to Areana’s Vale,” she said. “I’ve wanted that quite badly, wanted to tell you that I don’t hate you. I thought that you were dead and that I’d never have the chance to let you know how I really feel.”
She frowned. “And now that I finally have the chance, I’m babbling incomprehensibly.”
Arn’s stoic look disappeared, and Carol detected a slight tremor in the hand she held. She tilted her chin upward ever so slightly, looking deep into brown eyes, eyes that held nothing of the icy chill that had made them famous. She took a breath and said the words she had held inside for so long. “I love you.”
Arn stiffened as his eyes seemed to lose their focus. His next breath sounded like someone breaking the surface of a lake after a long dive to the bottom. He struggled to his feet, but she did not release his hand, rising alongside him.
“As a brother, you mean,” Arn said. “I’m sorry for my reaction, but you must understand that I have longed for your acceptance for as many years as I can remember.”
He glanced down at her hands holding his. “I am, of course, thrilled,” he said, “but I came only to bring you a package. Now I have lost my train of thought entirely.”
Carol smiled at the stammering man before her. “Did I say brother? Funny, but I don’t recall using that word.”
“What?” His knees seemed to almost buckle.
Carol stepped in close to him once more. “I love you, Arn Tomas Ericson. Not as brother or uncle or cousin, but as I love life. I don’t know how my girlish crush on you transformed into this, but I do know when I realized it, and that was during our journey to this wonderful new home. I will no longer play the timid girl.”
At that moment, something seemed to break within Arn. He moved so swiftly that Carol almost thought she imagined his reaction, his arms sweeping out as if he were wielding his blades. But he held no weapons. They encircled her waist, lifting her into his embrace. As her lips parted to meet his, her body heat was all-consuming. She felt herself carried back inside the cabin. And as he laid her down on her bed, the desire she saw in his eyes was a perfect match to her own.
The sheath holding the ensorcelled knife he called Slaken hit the floor beside her bed. Carol gasped. Suddenly she could feel his presence and spirit as she had never before managed. The depth of his longing swept her away, a ship tossed by a storm. The tide of emotion tore through her mind, fanning desire’s flames.
When at long last their naked bodies were spent, their passions abated, Carol put her head on his damp chest. Her right arm wrapped around him, as if she could not pull his body close enough to her own, and she slept.
Carol awoke with her arm still wrapped around Arn’s shoulder, shuddering as the last traces of an unremembered dream drifted just beyond her grasp.
She lifted her head to look at Arn’s form and stroked him gently in the fading afternoon sunlight. His body looked as though someone had stretched rice paper over twisted wire. So many scars, so many horrible wounds.
He sighed and shifted slightly so that his long hair moved away from his left ear. Part of it had been cut away, leaving the ear pointed. Carol kissed it gently and cuddled him again.
“I guess we both carry our scars, don’t we, my love?”
Then, ever so gradually, despite the dull ache in her shoulder, sleep claimed her once more.
The small package that Arn had brought was left, forgotten, on the back porch.
Arn awoke from his best sleep in ages, stretching in the simple but luxurious bed, feeling Carol snuggled against him. Her soft breathing told him that she was still asleep, and that sound, mingled with the early-morning twitter of birds, formed the most entrancing melody he had ever heard. He did not want to move lest the motion disturb Carol’s slumber. He just wanted to lie there and feel normal.
He did not know what had brought him to this new and wondrous situation, but he thanked whatever god or gods must have intervened. That small voice always guiding him in the back of his mind doled out reassurance. But Arn also knew that he would have ignored his instinct’s traditional call to leave. He had no inclination to analyze, question, or fight this reality in any way.
When Carol awoke, they arose together. She dressed unselfconsciously, smiling at Arn as he watched her from the other side of the bed.
“You have given me what I dared not dream of,” Arn said, pulling on his boots.
“And what is that?”
“Hope,” he said. “Hope for my future, which until yesterday seemed a fairly bleak prospect.” He had never uttered such words to anyone.
Suddenly Arn remembered what he had left outside. “I brought something that you will want to see.”
He walked to the back porch and retrieved the wrapped package. Turning, he handed the bundle to Carol, who had followed him.
A small gasp escaped her lips as she unwrapped it, revealing an ancient leather-bound tome with odd symbols on the cover and the clasp.
“I found this book on the body of a wielder with a company of vorgs led by a commander, Charna.”
The memory of the vorg who had killed his mother tried to claw its way to the forefront of Arn’s consciousness, but since that would rob him of this moment’s pleasure, he reburied it.
“I’m thinking that perhaps his death wasn’t accidental,” Carol said as she continued to study the book and its clasp.
“He made the mistake of trying to kill me and my friends.”
She walked across the room and sat down in a chair, placing the book in her lap. After several moments, Carol closed her eyes. Then with a word and a gesture of her hand, th
e strap and clasp vanished from the cover of the tome. Ever so carefully, she opened the book to reveal the pages within, brittle with age despite having been treated with a preservative.
Carol’s excitement was plainly visible as she scanned through the pages, then flipped back to the front to begin studying the discovery more closely. After several minutes, Arn cleared his throat. She glanced up in surprise.
She set the book down, stood up, wrapped her arms around Arn’s neck, and kissed him. “Thank you. You couldn’t have brought a gift that would mean more to me.”
Arn gazed into her upturned face. The memory of the giant statue of her in the throne room beneath Lagoth flashed into his mind. The thought sent an icicle of dread through his chest. He would have to tell her about that and everything he had learned about Landrel’s prophecy, but he could not bring himself to do it on this most wonderful of days.
“We have a bit of a problem that we should discuss before I get my day started,” Arn said, “and that is the awkward situation our relationship may put you in publicly. I know that Lord Rafel is fond of me, but I don’t think that he’ll be thrilled with the idea of an assassin being romantically involved with his daughter.”
“My father knows I’m my own person,” she said. “I would welcome his approval, but in the end, I’ll be happy whether he approves or not.”
“The idea of me as a potential son-in-law may cause him a great deal of difficulty.”
“Are you asking me to marry you?”
Arn struggled to maintain his composure. “Gods. I certainly didn’t mean to ask in such a clumsy manner.”
Carol took his hand in hers, stepping in close. “Then say what you mean.”
Arn opened his mouth, then closed it as he fumbled for the words, mortified by the time it was taking him to form a coherent thought. With his left hand, he wiped away beads of cold sweat from his brow.
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