Heart of Valor - V1 Dec 2004

by Lisa Jane Smith

  There was a soft release of breath. Alys looked over to see the Archon shaking his head slowly. “I grieve for her,” he said. “She had great gifts. She chose to misuse them.”

  “She had? Is she—” Alys hesitated.

  It was Morgana who answered. “The Wild Hunt took her.” At Alys’s expression she added, “It was her choice. And … I think … for the best. She would have hated imprisonment and ignominy.”

  Alys considered this. She had feared Thia Pendriel; probably even hated her. But there had been a magnificence about the woman. She thought she understood.

  The Archon spoke quietly. “So Heart of Valor is safe at last. And yet Mirror of Heaven is not. We have traded one enemy with a Gem for another.”

  Alys hesitated. Then, sliding Claudia off her lap, she bent to pick up the bundle.

  She looked up to meet the Archon’s eyes.

  “I don’t know if Merlin is your enemy or not,” she said, “but he doesn’t have a Gem. He gave it to me.”

  In the utter silence that followed she unfolded the cloak. Blue fire blazed up at her.

  The Archon had come to his feet. His hand reached toward it, then stopped. His dark eyes were on Alys’s face.

  “He gave it … to you. Why?”

  Alys opened her mouth and shut it again. She appealed to Janie.

  “Well, now,” said Janie, half smiling. “I think perhaps she reminded him of someone he knew once. There was … a family resemblance.”

  “It does not,” Morgana added steadily to the Archon, “belong to the Council. Heart of Valor has been passed from one thief to another, and can be said to have no owner. The three Gems in the Lair have always been the Council’s by right. But this one was found by Merlin and given by him to a human. Now it has been restored to that human’s descendant. It is not yours to take.

  “But,” Morgana said, turning to Alys, “it is yours to give. No one here can compel you, but I would advise you to leave it here in the Wildworld. It has brought sorrow before. And only the sorcerei can hold it harmless.”

  Once again Alys found herself hesitating. She looked down at the Gem shining as blue as Claudia’s eyes, and up into the purple eyes beside her.

  “Then I’ll give it to a sorceress,” she said, and laid it in Janie’s arms.

  For a moment, as Janie looked down at it, the mad-scientist expression flashed across her face. She was, Alys knew, envisioning the sort of experimental hypotheses one could test out with a Gem of Power. Then she sighed and smiled at Alys. Rising, she placed it at the Archon’s feet.

  “Know this. That Mirror of Heaven and Heart of Valor will be held harmless and guarded along with their fellows, until the return of Darion or the end of time.” Then, to Alys’s astonishment and confusion, the Archon bowed, first to her, and then to Janie and Claudia. Face reddening, Alys bowed awkwardly back. Janie did a much better job, looking graceful and sorcerous even in her torn blue jeans. Claudia cuddled dumbly to Alys and stared.

  “Alys Lawschildes, Jane Eleanore, and Claudia Diana of Irenahl, take heed. You and your brother are released from the sentence of death imposed by the Council. While the Passages are open, you have freedom of all the lands of Findahl. Let none of the Wildfolk raise a hand against you. And may there be peace between your people and mine.”

  He meant between their family—their household—and the Finderlais, Alys thought. Didn’t he? There had never been peace between the two races, or at least not since the Golden Age of Findahl.

  The Archon’s sudden change of expression and Morgana’s hiss of breath made her turn around quickly. The outer doorway was crowded full of strange people—and strange things. Silently, without fanfare, the Wild Hunt had returned.

  At once every staff in the room was raised—mostly by white-knuckled hands, Alys noted. But the electric tension and the predatory aura of the hunters had disappeared. They now seemed merely very beautiful and very strange.

  To her shock, she recognized the strange and beautiful young man seated on the lead animal. Elwyn was seated behind him. His shirt was in ribbons.

  “Charles.

  What happened?” He dismounted and came to the dais, the rest of the group trailing. “Fell in a bramblebush chasing Thia Pendriel. Got her out, though.” He jerked his head toward Elwyn with some pride. Then he laughed.

  The laugh raised goose bumps on Alys’s flesh. “Here. Take it. You must be freezing.”

  He waved away the cloak. “I’m fine.” He laughed again. In this light his eyes seemed more gray than blue—almost silvery.

  Distinctly alarmed now, Alys turned to Janie, who was exchanging an expressionless look with Morgana.

  “Quite right. It’s time to go,” Morgana said. “Time for all of us,” she added, looking at Elwyn.

  Elwyn smiled ingenuously. One of the riders’ mounts stamped.

  Morgana rested her staff against the Archon’s chair and moved in smoothly until her face was six inches from Elwyn’s.

  “Elwyn,” she said. “Now. “

  Elwyn let out a gusty sigh, leaned sideways around Morgana to dimple at the Archon, and turned.

  Charles turned with her.

  “Didn’t you hear, Charles? We have to get back,” said Alys loudly, seizing his shoulder. “Back home. We all need some rest.”

  “Yes, and what about ‘I guess I’ll just stay with my sisters’?” added Janie, grabbing from the other side. “Remember that?”

  Slowly, the taut muscles under Alys’s fingers loosened. Charles slumped a little. “Oh. Yeah.”

  Elwyn’s move toward him was forestalled by Morgana. “Well, then, good-bye,” she said, looking wistful. The effect of which was rather spoiled when, not waiting for a reply from Charles, she lilted off without a backward look: The Wild Hunt followed her.

  Morgana was examining Charles’s forehead. “I thought I told you to watch out for the signs.”

  “I did,” said Janie defensively. “Things got a little complicated, is all.”

  “Ah, well. No real harm done—this time. We shall deal with it later. Now we leave.”

  The Archon bowed once more. “Morgana of Findahl and Irenahl, you are no longer an exile. Go, with the Council’s thanks, and return, when you will, with our blessing. The quarrel between us is ended.”

  *

  Walking back down the colonnade of light, Alys felt dreamy. Exhaustion, she thought, seeing the pale green of dawn light the eastern sky.

  “What happened to the platinum-plus pigsticker?” said Charles. It was the first thing he’d said since Elwyn left.

  “Oh.” Alys looked down at her empty hands, flexing them. “Merlin happened.”

  “And,” said Janie, “you left the other with the Council. You could have just let them take Mirror of Heaven out of it, you know.”

  “I … didn’t want it.” Alys wasn’t sure how to explain what she meant. “I’m not very good at hanging on to weapons, anyway,” was the best she could do. But Morgana met her eyes with understanding.

  “If the need ever arises,” said the sorceress, “I will make you another. I hope it will not arise.”

  Alys nodded. That was what she’d meant, exactly.

  “Caliborn—it gave me dreams about you,” she said, almost shyly, knowing Morgana already knew this. “But how?”

  “Where did the last dream end for you?”

  Alys cast her mind back. “On the battlefield. When Arthur—when the king—was dying. He gave you the sword and you promised to take care of Guinevere.”

  “And I kept that promise—and the other, the one I made long before, to his mother. To protect her line, Arthur’s line.” She added after a moment, “Merlin asked it of me, as well. His last words, actually.”

  ” The child …’” Alys remembered. “I thought he meant Arthur.”

  “So did I at the time. But he wasn’t rambling. He knew things. Knew, for example, that Arthur’s line would continue, and would need help and protection. The little girl I raised in my house
hold, and her child after her, and so on. Even when I renounced sorcery for a time, the spell to keep their descendants close to me endured. I wanted them nearby, just in case. When you took the sword you wakened it once more. It had always kept a rapport between Arthur and me. Now that rapport was transferred to you. But the vixen knew all this; why did she not tell you?”

  There was a silence. Then Morgana said, “Where is the vixen?”

  The Hodges-Bradley family mentally drew straws, and Alys, of course, lost. She braced herself, and then, as concisely as possible, told Morgana.

  It was as bad as she thought. The little sorceress lost all expression on hearing the vixen’s speech to Claudia, and in the end she simply said flatly, “I see.”

  Alys laid a hand on her arm. “Oh, Morgana. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” said Morgana. “Especially as she was wrong. She was free. Always. But perhaps now she realizes it.”

  Claudia pulled up. Alys thought she was lagging from tiredness until she saw her face.

  “What is it?”

  Claudia was looking down at the white shape in her arms. The soft radiance of the pillars reflected iridescently off soft fur.

  “Benjamin,” Claudia said, “wants to be free, too.”

  Alys, appalled, knelt before her. “You mean …”

  “He wants to stay. And I don’t blame him. I … want him to.” She looked up at Morgana. “If he’ll be safe.”

  “As safe as any rabbit ever is,” said Morgana, a bit heartlessly, Alys thought. Softening, she added, “The touch of magic in him will be to his advantage.”

  Claudia slowly crouched down and loosened her arms. At the last moment, she looked wide-eyed at Janie.

  “I forgot …”

  “Oh, don’t stop on my account,” said Janie hastily. “Believe me, I couldn’t agree more.”

  Claudia let go. Benjamin sat a moment, whiskers twitching. He looked at Claudia and hopped a step away, then another. Then, as she bit her lip and nodded, he hopped straight into the darkness between the columns and disappeared.

  Alys put an arm around Claudia’s small shoulders, while looking up at Morgana’s brooding face. What we need, she thought, is some way to lighten things up around here. A bit desperately she realized she had absolutely no idea how.

  She heard Charles’s voice behind her.

  “I bet,” he said deliberately, “that they still have that iguana down at ProPets.”

  Just as deliberately, Janie smacked him. “You’re insufferable. Also disreputable. Look at you. Look at that disgusting T-shirt—”

  “What’s wrong with it? Just needs a little washing. For that matter, look at you. …”

  They managed to make the squabble last all the way to the Passage.

  NINETEEN

  Midsummer Day

  It was June 21, the summer solstice. The longest day of the year. Claudia, on her way to Morgana’s house, had no time to admire the drowsy beauty of the world around her. Alys’s voice on the phone had been imperative. She had interrupted Claudia’s reading lesson with the new tutor to summon her.

  The back door of Fell Andred stood open. In a corner of the warm kitchen Charles and Janie and Morgana and Alys were bent over something on the floor. The serpent was coiled around Alys’s arm. Everyone was smiling.

  Claudia edged her way between the bigger bodies, bewildered. Then she gasped aloud. The next instant she was crying.

  “Yes, yes,” said the vixen, squirming on the nest of soft, old blanket. “That is to say, yes, but not on the little ones. They don’t like wet.”

  “Oh, they’re beautiful.” Claudia released her stranglehold on the vixen and put out a finger to touch one tiny dark-furred body. She hesitated, eyeing the finger doubtfully. It was grimy.

  “Just this once,” the vixen said. “Anyone else who tries it, I bite,” she added to Charles. Charles leaned against the kitchen wall, grinning.

  “Four of them,” he said. “One for each of us.”

  “They’re not any of them for you,” said Morgana sharply. “They’re for themselves.”

  “All for one and one for all,” Claudia babbled, intoxicated by the feel of velvety plush fur under her finger tips. “I’m so glad you decided to come back,” she added softly.

  “Our den was disturbed,” said the vixen. But, Claudia noticed, she did not move away when Morgana scratched behind her neck where the collar once had been, or bite when Morgana gently cupped a palm around the smallest pup.

  “That one is Thistle. She’ll take after her father, I’m afraid. The others are Berry, Blossom, and Thorn.”

  Charles looked surprised. “I didn’t know you named them. I mean, you don’t have a name.”

  “Of course I have a name! Given me by my own mother, which is in the proper scheme of things. I just don’t happen to like it.”

  “What is it?”

  The vixen looked long-suffering. Charles joined Claudia on the floor to coax, wheedle, and bribe. Alys and Janie, at Morgana’s touch on their shoulders, moved away.

  “Have you given any more thought to the Council’s proposition?” the sorceress asked as they walked out of the house into the golden stillness of the summer day.

  “Yes.” The serpent wound up Alys’s arm and she rested her cheek against its head for a moment. “And … I don’t know. Morgana, I do want to help. And there’s nothing I’d like better than to be an ambassador for our world. But— well, I don’t think I’m right for it.”

  “You’re the best we have.”

  Alys sighed. “No, you don’t understand. It isn’t false modesty. It’s that I make so many mistakes—and so much of what I do turns out wrong… .” She stopped. Morgana was laughing.

  “Well, in that, at least, you are like him. Like Arthur. He made almost every mistake there is. But for a short time he made people want to work together, to put aside their differences. He made them hope. For him, they tried to be better than they were. Even I tried.”

  “But—”

  “If anything is needed, it is the ability to unite, to forge understanding. That you have. I am not saying this rash plan of the Council’s will work. The Wildfolk are wary and suspicious of humans, and humans will be equally suspicious of them. It will not be easy to bring them together. It may not even be possible. Times have changed since the sorcerei were worshiped like gods.”

  “And I don’t think things can ever go back to the way they were.”

  “With fear on one side and contempt on the other? I hope not. If the breach is to be healed, new ways must be found.”

  “And remember,” put in Janie, “unless you agree, there’s no guarantee they’ll let the Passage stay open. Which means I’ll never get to compete for my staff. Don’t you want me to be a sorceress?”

  “I think you’re mostly there already.” Alys turned to Morgana. “I’ll do it,” she said. “For a year, like you advised me. I’ll be proud to.” She laughed suddenly. “Look at us.

  Claudia’s reading, Janie’s going to be a real sorceress; I’m going to be—”

  “—a hero—”

  “Hah. Heroes do things like fight monsters.”

  “Much better,” said Morgana, “to forge alliances and mend bridges. Much harder, too.”

  “And Charles …”

  “What about Charles?” The voice came from the doorway. Charles added, to Morgana, “The vixen wants you.”

  Morgana’s movements were always bird-swift, but this time she flew. Alys, catching a glimpse of her face, smiled.

  Then she gazed at her brother, lounging against the door-jamb—he did a lot of lounging these days—with a shaft of sunlight illuminating his hair. For a moment he looked quite different to her eyes. Older and wilder and more beautiful. But also sad. Then he grinned and scratched his collarbone and the spell was broken.

  “You haven’t seen anything of Elwyn lately, have you?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “Elwyn who? Oh, you mean that nut case with all the hair? No,
can’t say I have. Can’t say I want to, either…”

  Janie spoke in Alys’s ear. “He’s got her anklet in his drawer at home. Really. I’m not joking.”

  Alys pushed aside thoughts of Thomas the Rhymer and Morgana’s father and all the other mortals who had fallen in love with Quislais. Charles would be all right, she knew that somehow. Charles, no matter what maelstrom raged around him, would always end up all right.

  “I’m going to miss him,” she said, as she watched him sauntering off. She was surprised at how true it was. “I’m going to miss everyone.” “Even me?”

  “Especially you. After all, what am I going to do without anybody to argue with?”

  Janie looked at her, then away. She cleared her throat, then frowned. “Well, you don’t have to go to Findahl for a while yet. In the meantime, how about us doing some more sister things together?”

  Alys snorted. “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Slay a few monsters, outwit a few magicians, drain a few Chaotic Zones, negotiate a few treaties …”

  “And after lunch?”

  Janie returned the wry grin sweetly. “I’ll let you know.”

  The hero and the sorceress walked back up the path arm in arm.