Last Night

by Jennifer Powell

the future. She could not bear the thought of Mrinda given to someone else, could not imagine her own work lost, as would inevitably happen with age. Chastity was the only way to present the full range of their powers into adulthood, but all would fade with time, regardless.

  Around them the forest sizzled quietly, hummed to itself. “Deyant,” Mrinda said, “please listen for once. Before we find the meadow, you have to listen…”

  But Deyant did not want to listen, did not want to understand. “No!” she shouted, and rushed off along the path, forcing Mrinda to hurry behind.

  Almost at once blue light flared around them, so their faces were coated with color. Before them stretched an ocean of azure grasses, needle-sharp and waving gently in the still night air.

  “Stay by me!” Deyant stepped out into the sparkling meadow. The blue grass hit her thick boots and the bottom of her cloak. Blades of the tallest grass and the blue flowers whipped around her as if a tornado filled the clearing, though the air was still. Where the grass struck Deyant’s cloak, sparks leapt into the night with a whine. Overhead Ki’rin was invisible behind a dull blue haze, and no stars could be seen at all.

  Directly ahead a silvery sphere sat suspended over the flower tops, which curved around to caress its soft, translucent surface.

  “Mrinda, hurry up!” Deyant already sounded thin and distant. She could not take her eyes from the living sphere which seemed to fill the broad meadow completely.

  “Deyant, you have to listen to me,” Mrinda pleaded. “You don’t really need me.” Her words tumbled over one another. Deyant had to strain to hear her, and with an effort she turned to meet her sister’s gaze.

  “Deyant…Dey, I can’t go in with you.”

  Deyant could feel the creature inside the cocoon, so close as it awaited the time of entry into her world, and she was distracted. She wanted only to go to the creature, to move her mind into the cocoon in that way she had always known. The forest-spawn called to her, and Mrinda’s words made no sense at all.

  “We must go in now,” Deyant urged, eyes blazing.

  “Deyant, I can’t go into the sphere with you,” Mrinda repeated, her voice firm now. As she stepped at last onto the grasses of the meadow, blue light swirled in her wake. “I can stay here. I can hold the paths for you, but I am not strong enough to enter.” Her tone faltered. “Not anymore,” she finished in a whisper.

  Deyant, attentive at last, looked at her sister with dismay. “You can’t mean that.”

  “It is the truth. Johnah and I have been lovers since Half-Night." She hesitated before Deyant’s angry face, but her sister remained silent. “Johnah says it is better this way. I wanted to tell you,” Mrinda whispered. “I tried to tell you.”

  Deyant felt her sister try to hold their mingled fields, to come closer, but she was unmoved. Hurt ran around inside her chest like water, and she turned back to the sphere, gazed at the shimmering surface where something living seemed to speak in the silky gray mists. She felt hot and yet clammy. She shook with anger and the sphere was so soothing. In all the world, it held the only light.

  She walked away from Mrinda without a word, toward the cocoon. As she walked, she reached out with her fields. She felt the warmth within the soft surface as her mind brushed across it and began to probe inside. She laid her cheek against the sphere, only dimly aware of her sister behind her. The grasses slapped and stung against her clothes. Deyant let her cloak fall among the waving blades.

  This time was no different than any other—the pull between Deyant and her enemy was terrific. At these moments Deyant could well believe that something within her was forest-touched. Heat flooded her chest, and the mists scorched like acid. Only skill born of long experience kept her fields in place as she was sucked into the cocoon.

  Inside all was still. Much like the outside it was pale silver and soft, endlessly wide though Deyant could have touched the sides with her fingertips. But she looked only to the other, the one who stood before her in a guise she knew well, and feared.

  From outside the cocoons, you could never tell what creature the forest was birthing. Sometimes it created entirely new forms. At other times it would repeat some older pattern of terror. Like a favorite plaything, now and then an image would be reborn. Before her now was a figure rimmed in orange flame, a figure squat and thick with a wide gaping mouth and eyes like embers.

  “Oh la…” she chanted to her foe, surprised to find it lovely. “Ah la, burning one.” This was like the monster Tyree had failed to conquer, down near Riverways and the mountains there. The area was still charred down to the stones, and nothing grew where this creature had walked. Tyree had failed and that was the end of him. Unlike Deyant, Tyree had already been growing old for this work. Once the creature emerged whole and strong, it had taken five of the talented, working in concert, to bring it down.

  The burning elemental was still half-formed, limbs no more than a promise of arms and legs to come. It could barely move—only the eyes shone with intelligence and danger. What good fortune to arrive before it was fully formed! She might be able to dominate its will for the seconds needed to reach out, reach inside to the one precise spot where she could twist the monster back into non-being.

  “But they never told me you were beautiful,” she murmured to the forest child and then shook her head to cast off the disquiet. Tyree will grow no older, she reminded herself. Nor will the ten thousand who died when a monster, a monster just like this one, ravaged the villages of Riverways. And that fool Johnah thought to tame such things with prayer!

  Deyant forced her attention back to the task, struggling to bring her fields into the proper alignment. The hurt she felt at Mrinda’s betrayal and the seductive beauty of the flames before her made it difficult to focus. Instead she stood staring into sweet, red eyes that urged her to enter. She yearned toward the creature whose beauty only she could see.

  “I’ve come to kill you,” she said aloud, and still she hesitated, caught in her heart’s cauldron. When she reached out at last to touch its mind with her own, instead of the cautious wisps she had been schooled to use, something stronger burst forth and she felt her fields rush full strength into the monster.

  At once she knew her mistake but she could not stop. The creature felt no confusion; it absorbed her easily, with a small inner sigh. It fed on her emotion, but she was caught by more than a monster’s power. Her anger answered the call, and melted unresisting into the alliance of human and forest-spawn. Her sense of betrayal, her fury at her sister, joined with the forest’s blood-thirst as if they were one thing.

  With her strength to draw on, the creature began to grow and change. Its body swiftly developed to full form. As Deyant’s fields joined with the beast’s, her human body dropped to the ground unnoticed. The newly bound pair stretched huge arms above a head haloed with flame, then cried out in a voice full of firestorms. Molten rock flowed through their veins, and at that moment they shared only one emotion—a passionate hatred of the puny, water-filled folks who swarmed across their world like vermin.

  The cocoon burst leaving only a slight mist that vanished with a acrid stink. They stood cloaked in fire, surrounded by the wildwood that welcomed them, and their flames did not burn the blue-sparked meadow. Mrinda crouched in shock at the wood’s edge while the tall grasses lashed out to strike her full in the face.

  Deyant, who was the monster, reached out with one flaming hand to crush the woman. Deyant saw her sister, while the forest-spawn saw only an enemy to be destroyed. They roared their hatred as one. Mrinda did not try to run, but looked back and forth from Deyant’s crumpled body to the monster moving toward her, horror in her eyes.

  “Protect me, Father,” she prayed aloud, “from this your creation.”

  Deyant stopped their arm in mid-reach, while curious visions passed through their mingled minds, visions that meant little to the forest-spawn, but everything to Deyant. She saw her own human home, built of dark stone carved from the mountains that edge the t
own of Terrilli. She saw Terrilli itself as it would be springtime with markets full of food, the smell of roast meats, and the sound of the people as they talked and laughed together.

  The forest-spawn, glimpsing Deyant’s memories in its own mind, was filled with a murderous rage. Deyant thrilled to the raw anger. Once more they reached out for Mrinda, who stood before them calmly.

  The portion of the monster who was Deyant saw her sister’s lips move silently, and joined with the forest’s own power she recognized again the places in Mrinda that were hidden from her now, dark and full of secrets. The answer so strong in the entwined creature they had become was cut short by a flood of sorrow, as all of Deyant’s hurt despair washed through them. Deyant felt herself alone for a moment, separate from the burning creature, and once more she stopped their arm from killing, entranced as human memory flooded them.

  Again she saw Terrilli, this time as it had been when she and Mrinda were young, with the dreaded woods thick right up to the road and only a few farms where today there were many. In her mind she returned to their childhood, and walked with her sister into the forest.

  Easily she and Mrinda brought into view the paths of the forest, limned with blue light. Deyant was heedless, exhilarated by her powers. Just as she often