Magda smiled gently. “I’d have to get in line for the chance; after Damon, and Ellemir, and Lady Rohana… about all I could do for her would be to sponsor her if she decided she wanted to work for the Terrans, and considering that she’s Heir to Aillard, I doubt she’d be given that option. But if you mean, would I love her as my own—do you doubt our oath, freemate?”
Jaelle touched the hilt of Magda’s knife which she wore at her belt. “Never, breda.”
“We should go in,” Magda said. The great violet disk of Liriel was rising, almost at full; the largest of the four moons. The bluish crescent of Kyrddis hung almost at the zenith of the sky. Stars were beginning to shine through the clear pallor of the falling night, and an icy wind was beginning to blow over the heights, a veritable jet-stream of a wind which tore at their hair and buffeted them toward the cliffs. Magda clung to a frost-rimed wall to keep her balance against the fierce gusts. It was not dark; all round them the growing light of the moons was reflected from snow everywhere.
“Are you cold? Have some of my cloak,” Jaelle said, putting it round her with her arm around Magda. Magda smiled as they snuggled together under it.
Jaelle said seriously, “I need to talk to you alone, just for a few minutes. I wish I didn’t have to go back at all, Magda. I’m not needed in the Forbidden Tower. My laran isn’t that strong; never has been. I’m hardly a competent monitor, and you—a Terran!—you are as powerful a technician as Damon himself. They love me, perhaps, but don’t need me. In a very real sense I’ve never been needed anywhere. People don’t need me, don’t cling to me the way they do to you. Even my daughter comes to you for mothering, instead of me; she sees it too, Magda, the thing that makes people come to you. I’ve never known—where to go, or why.”
Magda listened, appalled. Ever since she had known Jaelle she had envied what she thought was the younger woman’s confidence, sense of purpose, the intensity with which she flung herself into things with a whole-heartedness Magda herself had never known. It had never occurred to her that Jaelle felt this way.
“That’s not true, Shaya. You’re so much stronger than I am in so many ways. You’re braver than I am. You don’t hold back and panic, and hash everything over in your mind all the time—”
“Oh—courage,” Jaelle said, faintly smiling. “Damon told me once that he thought courage, a soldier’s kind of courage, the kind I have, just means I haven’t enough imagination to be afraid. Damon himself admits he’s a horrible coward, physically, because he has too much imagination. And I have so little. No imagination, not half the brains you have or half the sensitivity either. Maybe what I need is the kind of wisdom they have, these sorceresses of that legendary City. I’m like Camilla. Maybe I need to go and ask them why I was born and what life is all about for me.”
“There are times I’ve felt the same way, Jaelle. But we both have ties. Duties, responsibilities—”
Jaelle moved restlessly away from Magda. She was pacing at the very edge of the cliff in a way that made Magda wince. Courage? Or a lack of imagination, knowing she would not fall, so why did she need to worry about what could happen if she did?
“Oh, Margali, can’t you see? There’s no reason for me to go back. In a sense it seems my whole life has been leading up to this, a chance to find out what’s real, what’s under the surfaces of life. To make some sense of it all. Maybe these leroni of the Sisterhood know the answers and can tell me. Or help me find out.”
“Or maybe they only claim they can. Like Aquilara. To give themselves importance. And it’s all tricks.”
“No. Can’t you see the difference? Aquilara’s full of arrogance and—and hates you and me because we really have laran and she doesn’t though she wanted us to think she did. I’m thinking of—well, Marisela. She doesn’t argue about why life happens, or try to convince or convert anyone, she just does what she needs to. I want to know what it is that she knows. The legend says if you get there under your own energies they have to take you in, and if they don’t I’ll sit on their doorstep until they do.”
The idea had its attractions; to know what life was truly all about, to fling yourself straight at the source of wisdom and demand to know. Yet there were other duties, obligations, responsibilities.
“Would you really go after this kind of wisdom and leave me alone, Shaya?”
“You wouldn’t be alone, Margali. You’re not the kind of person to be alone. And anyway, you have Camilla—”
Magda gripped her hands tight.
“Jaelle—bredhiya, my love, my freemate, do you really think it’s the same thing?” Love wasn’t like that, Magda knew, it couldn’t be pigeonholed that way. “I simply cannot believe you are jealous that Camilla and I—”
“No, oath-daughter.” It was rare that Jaelle called her that now, but it came from the first of their many pledges to one another. “Never jealous, not that. Only—” Jaelle held her hands tightly; in the reflected moonlight, snow-light, her face was very pale, her great dark-lashed eyes somber in the pale triangle of her face. It seemed for a moment that a flood of memories reached out and enfolded them.
Jaelle looking up at her like a trapped animal, awaiting the knife-stroke of the hunter; she had saved Jaelle from bandits who would have killed them both, but now Jaelle in turn was prisoner, not the captor who had forced the Amazon Oath on her unwilling; now with a single stroke of her knife Magda could free herself, she need not even kill. She need only walk away, leaving the wounded Jaelle to die of exposure.
Jaelle, in the cave where together they had faced floodwater, death, abandonment, starvation. Jaelle, for whom her laran had wakened. The exchange of knives, the oath of freemates.
Jaelle, close to her in the Tower circle, bonded by the matrix link, closer than family, closer than sex, closer than her own skin…
Jaelle, clinging to her, her face covered with the sweat of hard labor, the night Cleindori was born; rapport between them so close that years later, when Shaya was born, even the stress of birth was not new to her; less conscious of agony than of fierce effort, terror, triumph and delight; Cleindori in a very real sense her own child, since she too had struggled to bring her to life.…
Whatever path she chose, always it seemed that Jaelle had been there before, and she only a clumsy follower in her steps. Even now…
Then the rapport fell away (how long had it lasted? A lifetime? Half a second?) and Jaelle said quietly, “No, bredhiya mea, viyha mea, not jealous of Camilla. No more than you are jealous of Damon.”
But there had been a time, Magda remembered, when she had been jealous of Damon, painfully, blindly, obsessively jealous of Damon. She could not bear that either, any more than she could bear, after she and Jaelle had come together as if destined, that any man could give Jaelle anything she could not. Now she was ashamed of that brief jealousy, her fear that Jaelle could love her less because she loved the father of her child. She had fought through and triumphed, still loving Jaelle, and loving Damon just as much because he could give Jaelle the one thing she could not, for all her love.
“The one thing that could make me hesitate would be leaving you, Margali. Even Cleindori has a dozen who would be glad to rear her if I could not. But you have something to return for. I don’t. What do I have ahead of me but to go back, take the Aillard seat in Council when Lady Rohana is gone? And why should I want to do that? In the Renunciates, and also in the Forbidden Tower, we are working so that the Domains need not depend on Councils, and Comyn, who try to keep laran in their own hands for their own good. The Hasturs who rule the Council don’t want independent subjects, thinking for themselves, any more than they want independent women.”
“Then isn’t it your job to take that Council seat and help them change the way they think?”
“Oh, Magda, breda, don’t you think I’ve been through all that in my mind? I can’t change the Council because, at heart, the Council doesn’t want to change. It has everything it wants the way it is: power, the means to work for its
own greed. Now when people don’t work for it of their own free will, it bribes them with promises of power of their own, and an appeal to their greed.”
She turned and paced restlessly along the cliff, her face starkly moonlit. “Look what they did to Lady Rohana! They said to her, ‘It doesn’t matter to you that you are not free; you have power instead, and power is more important than freedom.’ They bribed her with power. I am so afraid that they will do that to me, Magda, find out what I want most, and bribe me with it—I simply cannot believe that all the Comyn are corrupt, but they have power, and it makes them greedy for more. Even the Towers are playing the game of power, power, power, always over other people.”
“Maybe that’s simply the way life works, Jaelle. I don’t like it either. But it’s like what you said about bargaining, haggling in the market; it makes each party think he’s getting the better of the other.” Magda’s smile was strained. “You said you liked haggling.”
“Only when it’s a game. Not when it’s real.”
“But it is a game, Shaya. Power, politics, whatever you call it—it’s simply the way life works. Human nature. Romantics among the Terrans think the Darkovans are immune to it because you aren’t part of an interstellar Empire, but people do operate because of profit, and greed, as you say—”
“Then I don’t want any part of it, Magda. And I know they will try to bully me into taking that Aillard seat in Council, and within ten years I should be as bad as any of them, using power because they have convinced me that I am doing good with it… ”
“I think you would be incorruptible, Jaelle—” Magda began, but Jaelle shook her head with a wise sadness.
“Nobody’s incorruptible, not if they let themselves be tricked into trying to play those power games. The only thing to do is to stay outside them. I think maybe the leroni of Avarra, the Sisterhood of the Wise, could show me how to stay outside. Maybe they know why the world works that way. Why good and evil work the way they do.”
Jaelle turned restlessly, her cloak flying.
“Look at Camilla. She has a right to hate—worse than Acquilara. Did you hear her say she was a Hastur, at least that she had Hastur laran? And look what they did to her! But she’s such a good person, such a loving person. And Damon, too. Life has treated him badly— but he still can love. The world is so rotten to people, and people keep saying it isn’t fair—”
Magda murmured, “The cristoforos say it: ‘Holy one, why do the wicked flourish like mushrooms on a dead tree, while the righteous man is everywhere beset with thorns… ?’”
“Magda, did you ever think? Maybe the world isn’t supposed to be a better place? Maybe it goes on the way it does so that people can choose what’s really important.” Jaelle spoke passionately, striding to and fro into the face of the wind, her auburn curls flying from under the hood of her cloak. She had forgotten the cold and the jet-stream wind.
“Let the Council, and the Terrans, play power games with each other. Andrew walked out and did what he could somewhere else. Let the Towers have their political struggles, under that horrible old hag Leonie Hastur—I don’t care what Damon says, he may love her, but I know she is a tyrant as cruel and domineering as her twin brother who rules the Council! Between the Council, and the Towers, where is there a place for the use of laran? But Hilary and Callista found another way, even though the Towers were corrupt. Let women wear chains in the Dry Towns, or be good wives in the Domains, unless they have the courage to get out of it—real courage, not my kind that’s just lack of imagination. Courage—to get out of the Dry Towns, or their own chains, the way my mother or Lady Rohana did, or the way you did when you found the Guild-house—”
“But your mother didn’t get out of it, Jaelle. She died.” For years, Magda knew, Jaelle had concealed this knowledge from herself.
“Sure she died. So did yours. So will you and I some day. Since we’re all going to die anyhow, no matter what we do or don’t do, what sense does it make to go around scared all the time, crawling, and putting up with a lot of rotten stuff just to hang on a little longer? Look at Cholayna. She could have stayed nice and safe in Thendara, or accepted your offer to send her back from Nevarsin. Even if she died here, wouldn’t it have been better than turning back at Ravensmark and knowing she’d failed in what she set out to do? Living is taking risks. You could have stayed in the Guild-house and obeyed orders. My mother could have stayed in the Dry Towns and worn chains all her life. She might have died when Valentine was born even though, but she’d have died in comfort, and I’d still be there. In chains.” She looked pensively at her bare wrists.
“It’s all there is, Magda. We can’t change life. There’s too much greed and profit and—and safety. Human nature, like you said. We can only get out of it. Like Damon when he founded the Forbidden Tower. He could have been blinded—his laran burned out, because he wouldn’t back down and promise to use his donas only in the way the others, the ones with the power, said he should. But if he’d done that he’d have been blinded anyway; he’d have done it to himself. And he knew it.”
Magda knew Damon’s story. She knew she did not have that kind of strength. Except, sometimes, when Jaelle forces me to follow her into some mad challenge…
“So don’t you see, Magda? I can go back and play dreary games of power in the Council, or I can go ahead, to whatever these leroni can teach me—”
“You said that courage was needed to set up the Forbidden Tower, and we have a place there—”
“That was Damon’s trial of integrity, Margali. Not mine.” Jaelle turned and faced her freemate. “Only I can’t go if it’s going to hurt you that much. That’s the one thing that could stop me. I won’t do it over your— your dead body.”
There was such a lump in Magda’s throat she could hardly speak. She didn’t have to; she gave Jaelle her hands again.
Shaya, my love, my treasure, do what you must do.
And you’ll come too, Margali?
Suddenly Magda knew that Jaelle’s quest had become her own. But she had, perhaps, stronger ties. A weakness, now, not a strength, but:
I don’t know. I must see Cholayna safe. I brought her here and I cannot abandon her now. I’m not sure, Jaelle. But I won’t try and hold you back.
“I had hoped we could go together,” Jaelle said aloud as they turned back toward the buildings. “Margali, we must go in, we’ll freeze.” And indeed it was growing colder, the cold no longer bracing and stimulating but deadly. “I suppose you’re right; if you’re not ready, it wouldn’t be right for you. But, oh, breda, I want to say, we go together or not at all. I couldn’t bear to leave you behind.”
But always, Magda thought, Jaelle was that one step ahead of her.
“Lead on,” she said lightly, “and I’ll follow as far as I can. But just now I’d prefer to follow you in out of the cold.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Four
Magda was dreaming…
There was a circle of robed figures around a fire; dark hooded figures, gathered around something that lay at their center. Magda could not see what it was, nor see what they were doing to it; only that there was a sound like the screaming of hawks, and with every cry of the hawks there was a pitiable crying, so that for a moment Magda thought in horror, it is Shaya, they have my little Shaya there, they are hurting her. The fire at the center shot up and surged high, and Magda could see that it was no child, but the naked figure of a woman, lying bound in their circle.
Magda tried to rush forward to her, but it seemed that she was held in place by invisible bonds; chains like the chains of a Dry-Town woman.
“For the love of God, help me, Lorne! You got me into this, now you have a duty to get me out of it!”
It was Lexie’s voice. She had known all along somehow that it was Lexie lying there helpless, and that she had been responsible for the act or omission that had landed Lexie there.
She struggled against her bonds, but the hawks went on screaming. She could s
ee what they were doing now; with every surge upward of the flame, the hawks swirled, borne on the currents of fire, and swooped over Lexie’s inert figure, and with every downward swoop they tore into her naked flesh, carrying away great dripping hunks of blood and skin, while Lexie screamed, terrible screams that reminded Magda horribly of the time she and Jaelle had been marooned in a cave with rising floodwater, and Jaelle had miscarried Peter Haldane’s child. She had been delirious, not fully aware what was happening much of the time, and in her delirium she had screamed like that, as if she were being torn asunder, and Magda had not been able to help her. They had come so close to dying there.
And now it was Lexie screaming. And it is my fault; she was competing with me, and that was how she got into this.
Again Magda strained against her bonds to rush forward to Lexie, but there was a curious blue fire in the air, and in that evil glow she could see the face of the black sorceress Aquilara.
“Yes, you always want to ease your own conscience by being so ready to help other people. But now it is your task to learn detachment; that her troubles are not of your making, and that she must take the consequences of her own actions,” Aquilara explained callously. It sounded so rational, so reasonable, and yet the screams tore at her as if every stroke of the razor talons and cruel bloody beaks fell on her own heart.
“Yes, that is what they are doing,” Aquilara went on explaining. “They will tear and tear at that false and sentimental conscience of yours which you think of as your heart, until it is gone from your breast.” And Magda, looking down, saw a great bleeding hole opening in her chest, from which a screaming hawk carried away a piece of flesh…
The Saga of the Renunciates Page 107