Enchantress from the Stars

by Sylvia Engdahl

  Why he felt called upon to meet his fate bravely, Georyn could not have said, for what purpose would be served now that all hope was quenched? Yet somehow not to do so seemed a betrayal, a betrayal of something that he could never willfully abandon. It seemed near to being sorry that he had chosen to pursue the quest, and he was not sorry. He had failed, but that which to him was represented by the Enchantress still existed; there was yet the Emblem, hidden though it was, and some good would therefore surely abide. So as the long night wore away he endured, and mastered his failing spirits; and he told himself that he could withstand any trial the Dragon’s slaves might devise for him, save only one.

  But at first light of dawn that one seemed all too likely to confront him, for he was taken again into the presence of the Enchantress; and at once he perceived that she faced some new and overpowering jeopardy. Pale and drawn was she now, and her eyes were distant; Georyn felt that in her mind, perhaps, she lived again in the enchanted realm, that fair realm from which she had exiled herself for the sake of this ill-starred venture. She was clad in a simple tunic of white, the collar of which lay open, and her neck was bare of any chain. He dared not think that she might have been deprived of the Emblem, even as he of the Stone. Yet her terror was now painfully evident: she shivered, and when she greeted him her voice trembled. He resisted the desire to question her, for the guard stood by; but he had little doubt as to the purpose for which he had been brought here. And indeed, his suspicion was soon confirmed, for behold! That guard held forth the Stone temptingly, and as he did so he smiled an ominous smile.

  Georyn gazed at it with longing, yet stayed his hand. He was aware that his mere imprisonment or death would not satisfy the Dragon’s minions; they could have killed him long ago had that been their sole interest. Rather, the free surrender of his will was wanted, and that it should be sought through threat to the Lady had long been his most harrowing fear. He saw now the full measure of the submission that they would attempt to force. Much evil could be wrought by its misuse, the Enchantress had warned when first she bestowed the Stone upon him. And had she not said that those who served the Dragon were but men bewitched? This one was now smiling upon him as if to say that such thralldom was not really so bad; and that if he would but consent, he could win the fellow’s friendship! Well convinced was Georyn that the Stone would be given back on no terms save as the instrument of his enslavement, and that he would refuse not at his own peril alone, but at the Lady’s also.

  “You hesitate, Georyn,” she said softly. “There is nothing to fear; take the Stone.”

  He turned to her, perplexed. She would not counsel him to yield, even to save herself; of that he was certain. “It is not to be thought that this henchman of the Dragon, whether he be demon or merely bewitched, offers me power out of love for good,” he demurred.

  “Is it not?” the Enchantress answered. “Perhaps you can scarce believe so. But no matter, for the Stone is regained, and you are free now.” Seeing that he made no move toward it, she took it into her own hand; and by that token he knew that the thing itself was unsullied.

  “Free? To what end am I free, with the fell creature’s eye upon us both?” Georyn protested. “There are terms, Lady, and I cannot accept until you name them.”

  “They are beyond your understanding. Go now, Georyn! You are to be released; go while you have the chance.”

  “I shall not leave you in their hands.”

  “You must, or all the quest is vain. There is very little time.”

  The quest? Had hope been born anew, then, that the defeat of the Dragon could be accomplished? Perhaps he could yet turn the Stone to good if he took it with that purpose! But more terrible would be the penalty if he defied them thus; looking upon the Enchantress, Georyn was sure that she had resigned herself to some dire fate of which she was desperately afraid. For he knew her mind; and although her eyes were resolute, he sensed much that lay behind them; and his heart forebode that her confidence was feigned. Thus was he convinced that the prophesied doom was indeed upon him, whereby he must give up either that which he most valued or the quest itself.

  “Lady,” he said slowly, “you have always spoken truth to me, save only in the matter of your own peril, which you have oft kept hidden. I must have the whole truth now: is your life forfeit if I continue this venture?”

  A look of surprise crossed her face, and he saw from her wavering gaze that he had struck close to the mark. But she evaded it, saying, “We deal with graver matters than my life or yours, Georyn; we influence the futures of worlds.”

  “You have not answered my question. Is it not true that if I challenge the Dragon now, either with or without the Stone, its servants will kill you to punish my defiance?”

  Steadily the Enchantress replied, “To my certain knowledge, they will not kill me whether you succeed or fail, nor will they do me any other injury.”

  Georyn could not believe that the Lady would tell him so direct a lie, yet it was obvious that she was concealing something. “You will be unharmed, though you remain hostage?” he persisted.

  “That is not for you to choose. If you forsake the quest and go at once from this place, you may save yourself bitter sorrow; but you will not help me by it, and much that has been will go for naught. Oh, Georyn, do not lose courage now!”

  Then Georyn bethought himself that should he in this evil hour fail to attempt the thing, he would betray the Lady’s goal as well as his own; if for her an ill fate was indeed appointed, she would suffer it to no purpose. There was thus but one course he could take. Yet how could the Dragon be vanquished when the final condition had not been met and the dark spell was still in force? If his worst fear was unfounded, and no action of his could seal the Lady’s doom, then the mysterious sacrifice was yet to be made; that it should be remitted was clearly impossible. The ways of enchantments were not so capricious as that!

  He stretched forth his hand, and once again the Enchantress placed the Stone therein; but as she did so her fingers shook, and her eyes brimmed with tears. He was going now to a sure defeat, Georyn realized. He had not even any sword. All was in ruin, for the condition could never be fulfilled; yet if for a while the Stone would give him the power to oppose evil, then it was better to die thus than to submit.

  “I know little of magic, Lady,” he said haltingly. “I am but a woodcutter’s son, and there is much that is not given to men to understand; but of this I am sure: there is more to things than we imagine. Beyond the stars are worlds without number, perhaps, and had I never sought to look beyond my own I should be the poorer for it. Is it not so with you also, that your spells have meaning whether the Dragon be killed or no? And mayhap there are other forces for good, which we do not see.”

  With a wan smile, she replied, “The wisdom that you set out to find has been yours from the beginning. It is as you say, or so the Starwatcher has told me.”

  “Then surely the Emblem will guard you, though you be forbidden to use it openly; I cannot believe otherwise!”

  “You must not expect that,” she said in a low voice. “Believe rather that should I not be guarded, and should aught befall me that is a grief to you, there will be no cause for your trust in enchantments to falter. For I no longer have the Emblem, and its power will be no less for my misfortune.”

  He stared at her, aghast. Small wonder she stood now in fear of darkness to come; the Emblem was in truth not hidden, but gone! “You have not given it to them?” he demanded.

  “No, Georyn, I have not. You know, surely, that I would never do so; rather, it has passed beyond chance of their seeing,” she told him.

  Then ere he could question her further, the guard came forward, speaking strange words to the Lady; and she answered in her own tongue, the tongue of the enchanted realm. With growing dismay Georyn perceived that no more was she feigning the manner of a simple village maid, and he cried out, exclaiming, “He knows you for what you are!”

  “Yes,” she admitted slowly, “he
, but no other. I have told him the truth; it was necessary, and it has not harmed our cause.”

  “It was he who gave back the Stone,” Georyn whispered. “Lady, was that the price? Did you bargain thus for the Stone’s return?”

  She did not answer. She had no need to answer; he knew. If neither the Lady nor the servants of the Dragon had the Emblem, then it was doubtless unmade, vanished into the very air after the manner of enchanted things. Had she not told him that should her enemies ever learn that she was an enchantress, she would cease to wield any magic? “You have lost it, lost it by revealing yourself,” he said sorrowfully. “You have bought back the Stone at the cost of your own power!”

  “That was not quite the way it happened,” said the Lady, but she did not meet his eyes. “Let us speak no more of it, Georyn! It is nothing that need worry you.” But Georyn was sore distressed. She had given up her power for his sake, when he was so soon to die in any case. It seemed likely to break his heart.

  And then suddenly a light burst forth upon him, and wonder took him, and a great resolve. This was the thing that had been foretold! The sacrifice had been not his to make, but hers. Naught had been specified as to who must break the spell that guarded the Dragon; it had been said only that the one who did so must give up whatever that person deemed most necessary to the triumph of good and must face an apparently grievous failure. To the Enchantress, what could be more necessary to good than the talisman from which all her magic sprang, and what failure more grievous than recognition by the servant of evil from whom she had vowed to hide her identity? Yet she had revealed herself and thereby lost the Emblem, and even so had the final condition been fulfilled.

  Thus it came to pass that hope unlooked for surged through Georyn, and the Stone in his hand pulsed with a mighty strength; and he went forth in expectation not of defeat, but of victory. For he knew that the evil spell was now indeed broken after all, and the time for the slaying of the Dragon was come.

  As soon as Georyn had been released, Jarel came back to escort me to the ship. After the hours of agonizing suspense it was a relief, I guess, to have the time run out. But I was scared all the same. Scared and a little rebellious. If something’s hard but necessary, well, you may have to do it, but you don’t have to like it.

  Up until that moment I hadn’t been able to find any way to accomplish the thing demanded of me. The room was absolutely bare of possibilities, no sharp objects, nothing. I hadn’t contacted Father again; in fact when he’d tried to communicate, I’d withheld response, once I was sure it was not a rescue attempt. I couldn’t have borne an exchange of thoughts with him, now that I’d broken the Oath. And besides, it would have been too hard on him. Some things you have to take on alone.

  Jarel smiled at me. “Your protégé’s free, for the moment,” he said quietly. “As far as the Research Center’s concerned, he’s off the hook. I told them his heart wouldn’t stand the liftoff. I’d have said the same about yours, but on that, they’d check me; we’d blow the whole deal.”

  “Will he have any chance, do you think, to—”

  “I just don’t know, Elana. Right now everybody’s wrapped up in getting that ship off, which is the only reason I got away with letting him go when it was assumed that I’d thrown him back with the other prisoners. But if he sticks around camp, he’ll be recaptured. And this isn’t going to work unless it’s timed just right; he’s got to make it pretty dramatic. I hope he’s aware of that.”

  I fought down rising nausea. How could Georyn possibly be aware? I was fooling myself if I thought that I’d made the disclosure from a real hope of saving Andrecia by it. And even if by some miracle he did succeed, I would never know it.

  “He seemed reluctant to take back the Stone,” Jarel remarked. “Is he afraid of the thing?”

  “No! It’s sort of mixed up, Jarel. You wouldn’t be flattered by Georyn’s view of things, I’m afraid. He believed that you had tampered with the Stone, that you had sold out to the powers of evil and were trying to force him to do likewise.”

  “He may be right,” Jarel said unhappily. “About my selling out, I mean. I talk a lot about what’s wrong with the Empire. Yet I stand by and watch, while—”

  “You haven’t a choice! And if you weren’t standing by, how could you help when there’s a chance to? Oh, Jarel, you’re as naive as he is in some ways, I think; you’ve just got a different framework for it.” I broke off; I was not in any mood for a philosophic discussion! But I’ve thought about it since. Poor Jarel, his dragons were less concrete than Georyn’s but no less menacing; and he wasn’t nearly so confident that they could be successfully fought. Of all the stages Youngling peoples have to go through, I do believe the age of disenchantment must be the hardest. To see so much, by methods you think are scientific, that you’ve no faith in there being anything you don’t see—it must be awful.

  “Look, we’ve got to go aboard now,” Jarel was saying. “I’ve delayed as long as I can; they’ll be coming after us in a minute. I’m sorry, Elana. I know it’s going to be rough for you.”

  He doesn’t know the half of it, I thought grimly. And when he finds out, he’ll feel worse than ever; he’ll blame himself.

  I knew what I was going to try. I’d watched out the window, desperate for an idea, and I’d gotten one; needless to say I was not enthusiastic about it, but it was the best that could be managed. Carrying it out might be a problem, though. To drop the Shield was possible for me; I’d proved that with the stunners. But to drop it in this case—well, I just hoped that my nerve would hold.

  Jarel took my arm. “I’ll come to see you often during the trip,” he promised. “And later, at the Center, too. I’ll tell them I’ve got a scientific interest in you. Don’t worry, I won’t let anyone catch on.”

  I didn’t dare to answer, I was so afraid I’d give him a hint of the truth. He’d feel bound to stop me, of course, if he knew what I was planning. And underneath I knew I wanted him to. We went outdoors into the dazzling sunlight of the clearing. Ahead, between us and the ship, was the “dragon.” It did look rather as if it were alive; I had noticed that from the window. And certainly the racket it made would have done credit to the most ferocious of beasts! The colonists had finished burning off vegetation for the time being and were now using the machine to dig a foundation for their first permanent building; it was scooping up tremendous gulps of dirt and rock, crunching them to rubble, and heaping that rubble in what had once been a grassy valley, but which was now almost level with the grade of the clearing. I watched for a few moments, then averted my eyes.

  It’s funny what you recall when you look back on a thing. I remember how brightly the sun shone, and how the light streaming through the leafy wall beyond the blackened rim of the clearing reminded me of the way it had been in that other place, the place by the river where Georyn and I had spent those few happy days. I remember how I thought of my first moment on Andrecia, of the way I’d looked out at the shimmering green meadow from the door of our landing craft and seen visions of thrilling, glorious adventure. Thrilling? Glorious? That was a laugh. Maybe when a character in a book or a film gives his life for some noble cause, it seems that way. But if you’ve been through it, you know that when you are about to die you don’t feel glorious, you just feel sick. You are not looking for glory; you are looking for a way out—or, if you’re past that, you are just numb, and are not looking for anything at all.

  I raised my hand, unconsciously, to where the Emblem had once hung, and of course it was not there. What was more, I no longer even had what it stood for. Georyn, not for the first time, had seen clearer than I: You have lost it by revealing yourself, he had said to me. You have bought back the Stone at the cost of your own power! Yet when you lose a thing, that doesn’t mean you stop believing in it. I’m not doing this because of the Oath at all! I realized. I’ve already broken that. I am already forsworn. So why am I doing it? I guess just because underneath the ritual there’s a goal, and the goal’s wort
h backing all the way.

  I looked up, and across the clearing I saw Georyn. My heart lifted for a moment. He was free! Free to walk off into the forest. If only I could go with him. If only I were really the Andrecian girl the Imperials thought me! If I ran to Georyn, would they vaporize me? That would be the easiest way. But they would not; they would only stun me again, and I’d have lost my chance.

  And of course Georyn did not walk off into the forest. Instead, heroically, he approached the “dragon.” He still had hope, I realized, of “killing” it! I should have clarified that, at least. Again, I wondered what he’d made of my paradoxical warning; it was unlike him to ignore what I said, and he might very well have put a disconcertingly literal interpretation on it. He might even believe that the magic wouldn’t work unless he made some sort of sacrifice!

  For once in my life I was not acting impulsively; I had thought the situation through very, very thoroughly, until I was dizzy with thinking. Yet its implications weren’t evident. Sometimes I marvel at the way things work out, beyond all logic. It’s something the Federation doesn’t know any more about than the Younglings do.

  It all happened quickly and yet, looking back, I see it in slow motion; time stretches when you believe that you haven’t any to spare. I was pretty shaky, and for a moment I was afraid I wouldn’t be strong enough to go through with the thing. Then suddenly Jarel’s hand tightened on mine. I held my breath. Several Imperials had now confronted Georyn and stunned him, but one of their weapons was moving slowly through the air toward his motionless hand! He was doing it, the mission might succeed after all! If only I’d explained that “final condition” better so that in the end, when the monster didn’t die, he would remember and be comforted.