:I rather imagined you‘d react this way.: The sword all but sighed, but there was an undercurrent of satisfied humor. :I suppose I have seen true love often enough to recognize it when it smacks me between the quillions. From at least a dozen of my bearers. And lately - first that sorceress who went into repopulating the Plains all by herself, then that Kerowyn child, and now you. I am beginning to feel like a matchmaker. Perhaps I should give up my current calling and set up as a marriage broker. Very well.:
Nyara fought all of her emotions down enough to get some kind of answer out. “Very well, what?” she asked.
:We know what you want. So. Now we get you ready for it. That young man needs and wants a partner, youngster - not a little girl, not just a bedmate, not someone he has to drag about like an anchor and rescue at regular intervals. So, we‘d better start building you in that direction. If,: the sword finished, with a hint of dry sarcasm, :that suits you. :
She sat up straighter. A partner. Someone who could stand alone, but chose to stay with another. Someone who just might come rescue him once in a while.
“Yes,” she said, quietly, calmly, with her chin up. “That suits me very well.”
Chapter Twelve
Trevalen closed his eyes and narrowed his consciousness, pulling his concentration within himself until he was aware of nothing but himself. A moment only, he paused, finding his balance and center, and from deep within - he stepped out. Onto the Moonpaths, into the spirit realms.
By virtue of their close bond with the StarEyed, any Shin’a’in could walk the Moonpaths; provided that it was at night, under the full moon, and he sought the place with unselfish intent and enough concentration. Any Swords worn could walk the Moonpaths on any night; and call and be answered by the leshy’a Kal’enedral, the spirit-warriors sworn to the martial aspect of the Goddess.
A shaman could walk the Moonpaths into the spirit world at any time he chose, and call and be answered by any spirit that lingered there, if the spirit he sought was willing. . . .
That knowledge brought no comfort, only doubt and trepidation. And that is the question, indeed. Is Dawnfire willing ?
Dawnfire. Of Tale’edras, but called by the Shin’a’in Aspect of the Goddess, to serve in a form a Shin’a’in would recognize - the emblem of one of the four First Clans. He had called and spoken with her on several occasions now, but each time he called, it was with questioning and fear deep in his heart. Fear that this time she would not answer.
Questioning his own motives.
Kra’heera had ordered him to remain at k’Sheyna Vale to learn the Star-Eyed’s motive and purpose in creating a Shin’a’in Avatar out of one of the Hawkbrothers. Never had She created an Avatar before, much less one from a child of the Sundered Kin, the magic-users. If Kra’heera had speculations, he kept them to himself. Tre’valen had no | guesses at all.
He had learned nothing of Her motivation in all the time he had dwelt here. He had, however, learned far too much of his own heart, a heart that ached with loss, and yearned for one that he could not touch. Ironic that he should discover the love of his life and his soulmate only after she was - technically at least - dead. But was that not like the Goddess, to create such ironies for Her shaman?
Keep to the journey, traveler. The Moonpaths are peril enough without your wandering off them. He walked the Moonpaths, dream-hunting in the spirit world; keeping safely on the trails meant for the living, and sending his call out into the golden mist beyond where lingering spirits lived. Golden mist, for he hunted by daylight; at night, the mist would be silver. This was not wearisome for a shaman, though one who was not so trained returned to his body weary and drained if he dared to venture here. And as a shaman, he knew that time meant very little in this realm, so he walked onward with patience, waiting for the sign that would tell him that Dawnfire was coming - or not.
One moment he was alone; then she was there, before him, in her hawk-form, hovering above the pathway on sun-bright wings. A great vorcel-hawk, glowing with a fierce inner light, so full of energy that the mist about her crackled.
But this time, instead of coming to rest upon the path as she always had before, she spoke one word into his mind.
:Follow.:
Then she was gone, diving out of the spirit realm with speed he could not match - but leaving behind a glowing trail that he followed back, back, back to his body, to the material world. He sank into himself; feeling crept back to arms and legs, he put on the shell of himself as a comfortable garment.
He took a deep breath, then opened his eyes to find the Hawk that was Dawnfire poised before him. She watched him; before he could blink his eyes twice, the Hawk passing over her, intensifying the glow of her inner fire. Soon she glowed like a tiny sun, as she had when she first transformed.
He looked away for a moment, his eyes watering with the brightness. When he looked back, the Hawk no longer perched there.
In its place was the transparent and radiant form of the woman. He had never seen her this Way in the real world, only in the spirit realm. A woman made of glowing, liquid glass....
He took a deep breath of surprise, as she examined her hands and a smile crossed her lips. He rose from his cross-legged pose, and approached her; not certain that he should, but unable to keep at a distance. “I was not certain that I could do this, though my teachers assured me it is no great accomplishment for me now,” she said, a little shyly. “I was never a mage; I am not really certain how I accomplish the half of what I do.”
This was true speech, and not the stumbling, mind-to-mind talk he had gotten from her aforetimes. He willed his hands to still their trembling and nodded. “I think I can understand how you feel,” he replied. “We are not mages, either, we Shin’a’in. That, we leave to Her.”
She dropped her eyes from his hungry gaze. “I wanted - I wished to be with you, in as real a way as I could,” she said, slowly. Then she looked up, and there was no mistaking the expression she wore, even though her “face” was little more than air and power. It showed a hunger and a desperation as great as his own. “I am not dead. I’m just-different, and I wanted to be like I was, for a while.”
He had never wanted anything more in his life than to take her hand; he reached for her, shaking a little, stretching one hand across more than a gulf of physical distance -
And she reached toward him.
Their hands met - one of solid flesh, one of ephemeral energy. He felt a gentle pressure, warmth - and it was enough, almost. So, they could touch, for just a moment, letting touch and eyes say what words could not.
He withdrew first; she brought her own hand back and set her face in a mask of calm, although longing still stood nakedly in her eyes.
He did not know what to say to her. “I am not only here with you for my own sake,” she said after a moment of strained silence. “I am here – my teachers tell me that I must speak with you, telling you what I have learned because I can see things anew, being what I am now. Things they did not know, and could not see. Maybe that is why I became what I am - not quite in the spirit world and not quite in the material world.”
He nodded and set his own feelings aside; this was the first time she had said anything like this, the first time that she had given any hint of what Kra’heera wanted to know. Not that he had not asked her questions, for he had. Until now she had shown great distress when he had asked her those questions about her current state, so he had stopped asking them. He feared she might stop coming to him; he was afraid he might have frightened her with all his queries.
Apparently not. But then, she was a brave woman, and I do not think that she has ever run from what frightened her.
“When you started asking me questions - I didn’t want to think about them, but I had to anyway,” she told him slowly. “Like this, there is no sleep, no dreams to run to. Once I started thinking, I started asking questions myself. ...”
She stared off somewhere above his head for a moment, and he held his breath, as
much to try and still the pain in his heart as in anticipation of what she might say next. She could say she had to go, leave him forever, for the Goddess willed it so.
This was far from easy for him. He had dreamed of this woman for years, ever since becoming a man. Since he had been initiated as a shaman, the dreams had more power. He had known in the way of the shaman even then that this woman was his soul-partner, and yet he had never seen her. When Kra’heera had asked him to stay and learn of her, he had thought no more of it than any task the Elder Shaman had set him.
Until she had first come to him on the Moonpaths, this Dawnfire, this transformed Tale’edras. Until he had seen her face, and not the hawk-mask of the Avatar.
Now he knew who and what she was, and after the initial joy of discovery, the knowledge was a burden and an agony to his soul, for she was untouchable - out of reach - not truly dead, but assuredly not “alive” in the conventional sense. There was no way in which she could become the partner his dreams had painted her as. How could his dreams, the ??? a shaman, which were supposed to be accurate to within a hair, have been so very wrong?
“There are threats and changes on the winds,” she said, finally, bringing his attention back to something besides his own pain. “Terrible changes, some of them - or they have the potential to bring terror, if they are not met and mastered. One is a lost man of your own people, whom we have faced once already. No Shin’a’in, no Tayledras, no Outlander has the answer to these changes, only pieces of the answers.”
He groped after the answers that her words implied. “Are you saying that the time for isolation to end is at hand?” That in itself was a frightening thought, and a change few Shin’a’in would care for.
“In part.” She did not breathe, so she could not sigh, but he had the impression that she did. “It is easy for me to see, but hard to describe. All peoples face a grave threat from the same source, but three stand to lose the most; the Shin’a’in - ”
“For what we guard,” he completed. That was a truism, and always had been.
She nodded emphatically. “Yes. The Tayledras, also, for what we know - and the Outlanders of Valdemar, for what they are. And somehow those threats are as woven together as the lives of the Outlanders and the Sundered Kin have become in these last few days.” She shook her head in frustration. “I cannot show you, and I do not have the words that I need; that is the closest that I can come.”
But Tre’valen understood; what she said only crystalized things he had half-felt for some time now. “This is no accident, no coincidence, that things have fallen out as they have,” he said firmly.
“It is less even than you guess,” she responded immediately. And that confirmed another half-formed guess - that it had been the careful hands of the gods that had worked to bring them all here together. Him - and the Outlanders. “This path that we are all on was begun farther back than even our enemies know. I can see it stretching back to the time of the Mage Wars. There were cataclysms then that are only now echoing back to us.”
A cold hand of fear gripped his throat at that, driving out other thoughts. “What do you mean?” he asked, carefully.
She searched visibly for words, her gaze unfocused as though she were watching something that she meant to describe for him, like a sighted woman describing the stars to a blind man. “Neither Urtho nor his enemy were truly aware of what they unleashed upon the world. It is as if what they did has created a real echo, except that this echo, rather than being fainter than the original catastrophe, has lost none of its strength as it moved across time and the face of the world. And now - it returns, it sweeps across our world back to its origin.”
“But what has this to do with us?” Tre’valen cried. “Those were mages of awesome power - what has this to do with us and what we can do? Surely we cannot counter their magics! It is all we can do to hold them away from those who would use them!”
She shook her head dumbly, at a complete loss for an answer. “I can only tell you what I see,” she replied, slowly, unhappily. “You asked me of the past and present, and this is what I see. The future is closed to me.”
He was at as much of a loss as she, and slowly lowered himself to a stone within arm’s reach of her translucent form.
They sat together for a long and painful moment, as he tried to think of words to give her; something with a bit of meaning to it.
“This, I think, must be what Kra’heera sensed when he charged me with remaining here,” he said, finally. “He is my senior in much. Perhaps he can give us an answer; perhaps Kethra can, or one of your own people. I shall speak with Kethra and my teachers; I shall relay this to the Kal’enedral. ...”
“When you do this, speak of the need to speak to one another, Hawkbrothers, Shin’a’in, and Outlanders all,” she said, interrupting him. “That much I do see. There has been overmuch of sundering, of the keeping of secrets. It is time for some of this to end.”
“Secrets. . . .” He looked up at her, and he knew that longing and pain were plain upon his face, plain enough that any child would see and know them and the cause.
“I must go,” she said abruptly; she did not “stand up,” so much as gather her energies about her and rise. Her form began to fluctuate and waver, and he held back frustration that she was so near, and yet untouchable except for a moment or two. Despite all that she had told him, his heart cried out for her - his own pain eclipsing the importance of her words.
She turned toward him; held out her hand. “I - ” she said falteringly. He had not expected to hear her speak again, and the sound of her voice made him start in surprise.
She was in a kind of intermediate form; womanly, with her human face, but a suggestion of great wings. Again, the power in her made her difficult to look at as she wore the glory of the noon sun on her like a garment, but he would not look away, though his eyes streamed tears.
“I have seen your true heart, and I see your pain, Tre’valen,” she said. “I - I share it. Beloved.”
Then she was gone, leaving him with a heart torn in pieces, and a mind and soul gone numb.
Darkwind waited for his brother at the edge of the Vale, packs in his hand, and shivered as he looked out on the snow. He was not hardened to this weather, not as he would have been at this time last winter. Then he had sheltered outside the protection of the Vale, and most time not spent in sleeping had been spent in the snow.
He had not gone back to his old ekele except to gather his things and bring them back to the Vale with the help of several friends. He had been one of the first to do so, but now that the Vale no longer troubled the bondbirds, most of the scouts had followed his example and returned to the shelter and safety of the rocky walls and enclosing shields. Probably even Wintermoon would join them when his search was over. Darkwind’s brother was stubborn but not foolish.
Shelter and safety the Vales held indeed - and comfort, which was something only someone who had never been without comfort scorned. This was going to be a hard winter; it had begun that way, and all signs pointed to the weather worsening before spring. The Vale was warm, with hertasi to take care of everyday tasks . . . difficult to resist such comforts, when the winter winds howled around one’s windows and drafts seeped in at every seam. Especially when the ekeles of those within the Vale needed no protections from the cold; when hot springs waited to soak away aches and bruises, when windows could stand open to the breeze - Well, they could if one lived on a lower level, at any rate. The ekeles near the tops of the trees tended to find themselves whipped by wilder winds than those near the ground. He smiled through his shivers at recalling when Nightsky had left her windows ajar - and came back after a lesson to find belongings strewn about the room. She had learned quickly that it was as well to leave the windows closed.
Few lived in those upper levels, in k’Sheyna. With the population so reduced, there was little competition for dwellings nearer the Vale floor. One or two still preferred heights, but never scouts. After returning from a long
day on patrol the very last thing anyone cared to do was to climb a ladder for several stories just to get home to rest.
Darkwind was no different in that respect from any of the rest of the scouts, once the general consensus was reached that a move back to the Vale would be a good thing for all. He had stayed with his father for a brief while, in part to help Kethra at night, then moved into an ekele in the lowest branches. His tree stood near the waterfall end of the Vale, so that both the cool water of the waterfall pools and a nearby hot spring were available. He ran his patrols with Elspeth and her Companion as he had since the coming of autumn, but now he returned with gratitude to the warmth and the comfort of the Vale. And he pitied Wintermoon for his self-chosen exile to the winter-bound forest.
On the other hand, we can’t seem to track down Nyara from within the Vale. I’ve tried Looking for her, but she and that sword - have shielded themselves too well to spot. I am glad it isn ‘t me out there.
K’Tathi had flown in just before he and Elspeth went out on patrol, carrying a message; a written one, since it was fairly complicated. Wintermoon and Skif had given a good portion of food to a tervardi temporarily disabled by an encounter with Changelions. Rather than lose any great amount of time, Wintermoon was leaving Skif with the bird-man, and coming in to fetch replacements and enough food over to keep the tervardi fed while he healed. So would Darkwind be so good as to put together thus-and-so, and meet him and his dyheli friends at the mouth of the Vale at sunset?
Darkwind not only would, he was glad to. It often seemed to him that there was never a great deal he could do for Wintermoon; he and his brother had very little in common, and Wintermoon’s position as elder often led to him being the one to lend aid to the younger brother. Wintermoon seldom asked favors of anyone; he was as much a bachelor falcon as Darkwind, if not more so.
With that in mind, Darkwind went out of his way to root through some of the old storehouses and uncover the last few cold-lights, mage-cloaks, and a fireless stove left from the days when mages in k’Sheyna could lend their powers to making aids to the scouts. It had been a very long time since scouts of k’Sheyna made overnight patrols - and a very long time since any of them had been willing to use mage-made things, for fear that the creatures of the Uncleansed Lands might sense them. He thought that Skif and Wintermoon might well be willing to chance that, since they were between k’Sheyna and the Cleansed Outland. The cloaks kept the wearer warm and dry; there were five, enough for both humans and the Companion and dyheli to sleep beneath. The stove should be good for several weeks of use, or so his testing had confirmed - and should heat the tiny tent his brother and the Outlander shared quite cozily.
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