Memory of Fire

by Holly Lisle

Outside the walls. Out of confinement. Out into fresh air, and freedom. "Absolutely," Molly said. "When?"

  "As soon as you put on riding gear. We have coats waiting for us in the front hall, but I did not wish us to have to wear them all the way from here. It would be too warm." He smiled and handed her the clothes.

  Quilted pants with partial covers of split leather on the insides of the thighs and calves; tall, lined boots with blocky heels, a thick cotton shirt and a quilted vest and fur-lined leather gloves. She put them on when he stepped out of the room, and was admiring her reflection when he came back in. She looked—very upper-crust outdoorsy. She'd always admired the look on women who could carry it off, and now, to her delight, she discovered that she was one of those women. Taller and thinner never hurt the hang of clothes, even if she had lost about a cup size in the bust.

  "Ready?"

  "You would not believe how ready. Let's go."

  Outside, he gave her a leg up on a huge bay horse and had her ride the beast in a slow circle around him. She'd done some riding in her off time when she'd been in the Air Force and had loved it; the cost of getting and maintaining a good horse and the amount of time necessary for upkeep, however, had kept her from getting her own once she got out. She hadn't forgotten how to stay on a horse's back, but she was definitely only a weekend rider.

  "You sit well," Seolar commented.

  "Just don't go too fast. I've never really gotten good at galloping and jumps."

  He nodded. "We shall have a pleasant tour of the country-side at a comfortable pace. There are hampers on the packhorses; we shall have a lovely lunch, and you'll discover what a wondrous place this can be."

  "I hate to ask, but what about the…ah, the problems you mentioned last night. And the ones I've already seen in action."

  "They won't notice me. And with you wearing the necklace, they won't notice you. According to all the historical information we have about it, it will protect you from all attacks, both magical and physical, so long as you wear it."

  "Neat—but I'm surprised someone else hadn't confiscated it long before now. That seems like a handy thing to have."

  Seolar shrugged. "None but a Vodi can wear it."

  That she found terribly interesting. "Anyone try?"

  "Yes. There was a reason why we took so long giving it to you. We had to make sure you really were the Vodi first." He didn't elaborate, but from the expression on his face, she decided she didn't want to press for details.

  She was studying the huge wicker panniers strapped on the packhorses with amazement. They were taking along enough food to feed a good-size regiment. And she bet it wasn't MREs, or the Orian equivalent. She glanced at Seolar, thinking, Here is a man who has never met a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. She decided she could like that about him.

  The two of them and their six horses crossed a huge timbered drawbridge, rode out of the walled enclosure and down a cleared path in the forest. They rode side by side, frequently in companionable silence unless he decided to point out a landmark or interesting wildlife, or unless she had a question about something she saw. She found the trip very pleasant; they saw a gorgeous waterfall and the incredible forest and beautiful snow-covered farms that sat in the center of little swatches of cleared land. From time to time they saw people out, but though the people waved, none ever approached.

  As the sun rose in the sky, Molly found herself wondering about her companion. "Tell me about yourself," she said at last. "Up to now, you've told me plenty about me, and plenty about your world, but almost nothing about you."

  He shrugged casually. "There is little enough to tell. I am my parents' only surviving child—my father was Imallin of this domain until his death, my mother survived him by half a dozen unhappy years, longing every day to rejoin him beyond the Veil. When my father died, I became Imallin—I have watched helplessly as my people died off and I sought with every means at my disposal for you. That has been the whole and consuming feature of my life—the governing of my people, the saving of my world, and finding you. It makes me quite boring to talk about."

  "What about children of your own? A wife, a lover? Hobbies and interests?"

  He sighed. "I have been too busy to meet a woman I could love, and in any case, I dreaded having children that I could watch die the way I watched my brothers and sisters die. I lost an even dozen," he said quietly, and Molly glanced over, expecting to see in his eyes the same emotion she heard in his words. His face, however, hid his feelings far better than his voice; she saw nothing in his expression but the same serenity she had seen there all day.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Thank you," he said. "It did not leave me eager to try my luck with a family until I had found you."

  "Because I could stop the diseases."

  He glanced at her sidelong. "That, too."

  She smiled at him uncertainly. "That, too?"

  He shrugged. "All along we have believed that you would do more here than simply cure our ills—that you would become one of us, and bring magic to our world. I intended to see what that magic would be before I made any decisions."

  "What if you had never found me?" Molly asked, thinking that he had left his life on hold for an awfully big uncertainty.

  "Then the veyâr would have ceased to exist in my generation, as would some of our cousin races—and what would my happiness have mattered in the face of that?"

  What, indeed.

  "Have you ever had the chance to have a little fun?" she asked him after a while.

  "I like to dance," he told her. "I like to ride—fortunate for me, since I do so much of it. I raise petai—very pretty decorative fish—in indoor ponds. You saw some of them last night. I garden a bit in the summer when I have the chance." He shrugged. "I enjoy reading a great deal."

  "I like the gardening. And the reading. I've never tried dancing."

  "There are things you've never told me about yourself, either," Seolar said, "and they aren't things I could find out about you from other means. Do you have a husband somewhere? Children? I know about some of your interests, of course—the painting and the musical instrument, anyway. I know you like chocolate, and I must admit that, having tried a few pieces, I very much like it, too. But I have often wondered what your personal life has been like."

  Molly sighed. "I spent years in the military, which I liked, and years alone, which I've also liked. I haven't had much of a personal life. A few short-term boyfriends, but men find my reaction to people in public places disconcerting."

  "How so?"

  "Well, here nothing happens to me when I'm near someone who is terribly ill. But back ho—back on Earth," she corrected herself, "I'd get deathly ill. Clutch my gut, start vomiting, roll up in a little ball and turn all gray…" She laughed a little. "It made dates an adventure, because I would never know when I was about to get too close to someone really sick. Pretty soon, I just stopped trying."

  "But that doesn't happen to you here. So here you can have a normal life."

  Molly looked at the horses, at the packed panniers, at her rich clothing, and thought of her beautiful apartments in the fine castle behind her, and she laughed softly. "Somewhat better than normal, I think."

  "Good." He looked extremely pleased, but he didn't say anything else.

  CHAPTER 11

  CAROLINA FLU REACHES WEST COAST

  LOS ANGELES, California (AP)

  The influenza strain currently devastating the East Coast has arrived on the West Coast with sudden, shocking force. Within six hours after the first positive diagnosis of Carolina flu in Good Samaritan Hospital, doctors diagnosed 56 more cases, and reported 29 fatalities. Case numbers are expected to rise dramatically over the next few days.

  Plans for both the declaration of a state of emergency and for a regional quarantine are under discussion…

  Ballahara

  THE PICNIC LUNCH, if such a repast could be called anything so mundane, took place in a sheltered glade where the sun had melted away most
of the snow and a ring of trees kept the air as still as indoors. The food was wonderful—the hot foods kept hot by clever insulated warming dishes, the drink—another nonalcoholic beverage—chilled, sparkling, and hinting of apples, the desserts rich and varied.

  Molly and Seolar chatted about matters of no importance, told stories about their lives, and simply relaxed, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation, they ceased to be the Imallin and the Vodi, and began calling each other Seolar and Molly. The picnic went from delicious to delightful, and as a result, neither of them paid any attention to the weather. They should have.

  The first fat flakes caught Molly on the cheeks. She looked up and realized that the sun was gone and the sky had turned an ominous gunmetal gray. "Oh, no," she said.

  Seolar glanced around him. "We need to pack everything quickly and get back." He whistled, and abruptly there were veyâr on horseback pouring into the secluded glen.

  Molly gasped.

  Seolar said, "I dare not travel alone, ever—and I would be doubly foolish to travel with my world's sole hope unguarded. For all that your necklace will protect you, my world still needs me to make sure that you meet the people you have to meet, and have access to the things you'll need in order to carry out your mission as the Ninth Vodi. My men have kept their distance, but they have been watching over us."

  Seolar's guards had the lunch repacked, the horses saddled, and everyone on the trail and moving quickly in a new direction before Molly could really grasp the significance of spending the rest of her life watched, if even from a discreet distance, by armed guards.

  No more real privacy, ever. No more taking off on a whim and going wherever she wanted alone. The spontaneity gone from her life.

  But she had to balance the importance of spontaneity against the fact that here she did not have to hide from crowds. Neither did she have to dread sudden, agonizing encounters with terminally ill strangers. No more futilely trying to drain the ocean with a thimble—what she did here mattered to the individuals she helped, but also mattered to the world. And what was that worth: knowing that her life was not pointless?

  A lot.

  She'd never really been all that big on taking off at a moment's notice anyway, she told herself as the group trotted along a well-cleared path. Her moments of spontaneity had pretty much been limited to late-night searches for fast-food french fries, for which she sometimes developed an unbearable craving. No worry about that here—she was a world and possibly a universe away from the nearest greasy fry.

  The snow was coming down harder. She remained warm and comfortable…but she could barely see. Seolar, riding beside her in the center of the group of scouts and outriders, said, "We're going to have to go faster, Molly. This is getting worse. We have safe shelter ahead, but it will do us little good if we lose our path."

  She dreaded trying to hang on to her seat if her horse moved at any gait faster than his easy, boneless trot. "I don't know that I can go faster."

  "Then you'll have to ride behind me," Seolar told her. "We can't get trapped away from shelter—blizzards here can last for days."

  She thought about trying to hang on to him at a canter, with no stirrups to balance in and no saddle to grip. "I'll manage," she said grimly, and urged her horse to a faster gait.

  The ride terrified her. It became a reckless, nightmarish blur of snow that stung her eyes, the muffled thunder of a dozen sets of hooves over packed snow, the panting of the horses, the occasional smack of an untrimmed branch across her face, the terror of falling from her horse and being trampled by it and the packhorses and the riders who followed, none of whom would be able to slow down in time to miss her. Chilled, frightened, hanging on for her life, she thought she felt the heavy necklace she wore vibrate—and immediately after, she experienced a fugue state—or perhaps it was a vision, or a hallucination—in which she became a woman lost in those same woods on foot, caught in a blizzard, freezing alone in the dark and finally dying. The fugue didn't release her until the woman took her last breath. The vision added a surreal hellishness to an already-nightmarish ride.

  When at last the lead rider called "Halt," and everyone reined in, she had to fight back tears of relief.

  But they had not arrived back at Copper House. Instead, they had reached an unlighted, log-built construction surrounded by a pike fence fifteen feet high. A more unwelcoming place Molly had never seen.

  "This is Graywinds," Seolar said. He dismounted quickly and handed the reins of his horse to one of his men, then caught Molly as she swung off her mount. "Inside," he said. "My men will tend to the animals; you and I must open up the house and start the fires."

  He moved to a place on the wall that looked no different to Molly than any other, pressed his hands against the logs in a quick pattern, and a hidden door opened. He ushered her in first; his men followed behind.

  "Graywinds?" She shivered, partly from the cold but more, she suspected, from the residual terror that the wild, half-blind ride had birthed in her.

  He led her through the ever-denser snowfall to a massive, weathered wooden door, unlocked it with a huge key, and led her inside. "One of a number of houses I maintain so that, no matter where I am in my domain, I can reach defensible shelter in a hurry if necessary. Graywinds is perhaps my favorite of all the houses; I like it even better than Copper House, but it lacks the…well, presence to be an official dwelling for an Imallin. I must, after all, maintain a certain appearance of power in order to maintain the fact of power." He snapped a flint firestarter into a little hillock of tinder, and in the tiny blaze that resulted, Molly could see that kindling, small logs, and larger logs were already set to catch. That single spark had a lovely fire blazing in the hearth within minutes. And by the flickering light of the flames, she got her first clear look at Graywinds.

  She could have called it a log cabin, but it was built on a grand scale, with timber framing, a vaulted ceiling, and big fireplaces at either end of the long, narrow main room. From where she stood, she could see a circular staircase that led up to an open second floor, a sort of loft clearly set up as a bunkhouse. To her right and her left lay closed doors. Seolar noticed the direction of her gaze and said, "We have a good kitchen and storerooms through that door, and a bathing room and toilet through there"—he pointed left—"and bedrooms and dressing rooms over that way," as he pointed to the doors on their right. "Most of the men will sleep upstairs. Two will sleep in the barn to guard the horses." He glanced at her. "It's quite safe. Not, of course, the impregnable fortress that Copper House is, but the roof here is copper, and so are all the stabilizing rods in the walls and all the pins. And I made sure copper was mixed into the chinking. Of course we have a copper-free workroom here, too."

  Molly frowned. "Copper-free? Why would you want that? Can't the…" She dropped her voice to a whisper. "…Can't the rrôn get into places that have no copper?"

  He looked at her with clear surprise. "The rrôn? You haven't worked out the connection between copper and magic—but no. You have made no forays into magic, other than the healing that you do in the Great Hall, and there, of course, there is no copper." He shook his head. "Copper is not just an impenetrable barrier to the rrôn. And to the keth." His voice dropped on that last word. So the keth must be the creatures who were worse than the rrôn. Wonderful. "Copper is an impenetrable barrier to magic. You were completely safe from any attacks by our enemies while you stayed within the Copper Suite, but had you tried to work your own magic in there, you would have found yourself unable to cast the simplest of spells. Here, our protection is less complete; nevertheless, I have found it sufficient, and it has been twice tested within my lifetime."

  "So I could not work magic within these walls?"

  "No. You could not heal anyone unless you took him into the workroom, or went outside and moved a bit away from the walls. I could not tell you the effective radius of copper, but I know that even the most powerful of the Old Gods must be some ways away from it."

&nbs
p; Molly looked thoughtfully at her wrists. She had been wearing copper-threaded rope on her feet when she healed that first child. The Old Gods couldn't do magic while close to copper, but she could do magic while wearing it? Not on the actual hand in question, but still—interesting.

  One by one the men came in, shaking off snow at the door, hanging coats and boots on the wall of pegs, talking with animation about the sudden storm, about the horses, about the ride. They sounded happy to be safely in shelter, and a bit amazed by the sudden awfulness of the weather. They gathered around the fire, pulling up chairs, and then three pulled out instruments—one a wooden flute; one a deep-voiced dark-wood cousin of the recorders Molly knew; and one a small, fat-necked, many-stringed cross between a lute and a guitar. They started playing a song all of them seemed to know well, and several began to sing and clap, and the next thing she knew, Seolar was asking her, "Would you like to dance?"

  "I've never been much of a dancer."