Black dawn (33 page)

Sylvia gasped out, "
Hellewise
... ."
Her own violet
eyes were huge and frightened.

Then she just stood frozen.

Hunter was ranting on. Maggie could hear him
vaguely, but all she could see was Sylvia, the shud
ders that ran through Sylvia's frame, the heaving
of Sylvia's chest.

Appeal to their true hearts,
Maggie thought.

"Sylvia," she said. "I believe in you."

The violet
eyes turned toward her, amazed.

"I don't care what you did to Miles; Maggie said
.
"
I know you're confused-I know you were un
happy. But now you have a chance to make up
for it. You can do something-something
important
here.
Something that will change the world."

"Rivers of blood," Hunter was raving. "And no
one to stop us. We won't stop with enslaving the
humans.
The witches are our enemies now. Think
of the power you'll feel when you drink their lives!"

"If you let this Wild Power be killed, you 'I!
be
responsible for the darkness coming," Maggie said.
"Only you.
Because you're the only one who can
stop it
right now."

Sylvia put a trembling hand to her cheek. She
looked as if she were about to faint.

"Do you really want to go down in history as the

one
who destroyed the world?" Maggie said.

"As Maiden of all the witches ..."
Aradia
said.
And another, deeper
voice
seemed to follow on

hers
like an
echo
,
As Mother o
f all the witches
...
"And in the name of
Hellewise
. .

And in the name of my
children
..
.

"As you are a Hearth-Woman ..."

As you are my own daughter, a true Hearth

Woman
...

"I adjure you!"
Aradia
said, and her voice rang
out in double tones so clearly that it actually
stopped Hunter in mid
tirade.

It stopped everyone. For an instant there was
ab
solutely
no sound in the courtyard. Everyone
wa
:
looking around to see where the voice had come
from.

Sylvia was simply staring at
Aradia
.

Then the violet eyes shut and her entire body
shivered in a sigh.

When she spoke it was on the barest whisper of
breath,
and only someone as close as Maggie
wa
:
could have heard her.

"As a daughter of
Hellewise
, I obey."

And then she was reaching for Delos's arm,
anc
Delos
was reaching toward her. And Hunter
wa
:
shouting wildly, but Maggie couldn't make out the
words. She couldn't make out Sylvia's words,
ei
.
ther
, but she saw her lips move, and she saw the
slender pale fingers clasp
Delos
's wrist.

And saw the lance coming just before it
piercec
Sylvia's heart.

Then,
as if everything came into focus at once

she
realized what Hunter had been shouting in
i

voice
so distorted it was barely recognizable. "Kill her! Kill her!"

And that's just what they'd
done,
Maggie thought
her mind oddly clear, even
as
a wave of horror and
pity seemed to engulf her body.
The lance
wen
right through Sylvia.
It knocked her backward
away from
Delos
, and blood spurted all over the
front of Sylvia's beautiful green dress.

And Sylvia looked toward Hunter
Redfern
and
smiled. This time Maggie could read the words or
her lips.

"Too late."

Delos
turned. There was red blood on his
white
shirt
his own, Maggie realized. He'd tried to get
in the way of the guard's killing Sylvia. But now
he had eyes only for his great-grandfather.

"It stops
here!"

She had seen the blue fire before, but never like
this. The blast was like a nuclear explosion. It
struck where Hunter
Redfern
was standing with his
most loyal nobles around him, and then it shot up
into the sky in a pillar of electric blue. And it went
on and on, from sky to earth and back again, as if
the
sun were
falling in front of the castle.

CHAPTER
20

Maggie held Sylvia gently. Or at least, she knelt by her and tried to hold her
as
best she could with
out disturbing the piece of broken spear that was
still lodged in Sylvia's body.

It was all over. Where Hunter
Redfern
and his
most trusted nobles had been, there was a large scorched crater in the earth. Maggie vaguely re
called seeing a few people running for the
hills
Gavin
the slave trader had been among them. But
Hunter hadn't been one of them. He had been at ground zero when the blue fire struck, and now
there wasn't even a wisp of red hair to show that
he had existed.

Except for
Delos
, there weren't any Night People
left in the courtyard at
all.

The slaves were just barely peeking out again
from their huts.

"It's all right," Jeanne was yelling. "Yeah, you
heard me
it's all right!
Delos
isn't dangerous. Not
to us, anyway. Come on, you, get out of
there
what
are you doing hiding behind that pig?"

"She's good at this," a grim voice murmured.

Maggie looked up and saw a tall, gaunt figure,
with a very small girl clasped to her side.

"Laundress!" she said. "Oh, and PJ.-I'm so glad you're all right. But, Laundress, please
... ."

The healing woman knelt. But even as she did, a
look passed between her and Sylvia. Sylvia's face
was a strange, chalky color, with shadows that
looked like bruises under her eyes. There was a
little blood at the corner of her mouth.

"It's no good," she said thickly.

"She's right," Laundress said bluntly. "There's
nothing you can do to help this one, Deliverer, and
nothing I can do, either."

"I'm not anybody's Deliverer," Maggie said. Tears
prickled behind her eyes.

"You could have fooled me," Laundress said, and
got up again. "I see you sitting here, and I see all
the slaves over there, free. You came and it hap
pened-the prophecies were fulfilled. If you didn't
do it, it's a strange coincidence."

The look in her dark eyes, although as unsenti
mental as ever, made Maggie's cheeks burn sud
denly. She looked back down at Sylvia.

"But she's the one who saved us," she said, hardly
aware that she was speaking out loud. "She de
serves some kind of dignity.
. . ."

"She's not the only one who saved us," a voice
said quietly, and Maggie looked up gratefully at
Delos
.

"No, you did, too."

"That's not what I meant," he said, and knelt
where Laundress had. One of his hands touched
Maggie's shoulder lightly, but the other one went
to Sylvia's.

"There's only one thing I can do to help you," he
said. "Do you want it?"

"To become a vampire?"
Sylvia's head moved
slightly in a negative. "No. And since there's wood
next to my heart right now, I don't think it would work anyway."

Maggie gulped and looked at the spear, which
had cracked in the confusion when the guards ran.
"We could take it out--!"

I wouldn't live through it. Give up for once, will you?" Sylvia's head moved slightly again in disgust.
Maggie had to admire her, even dying, she still had
the strength to be nasty. Witches were tough.

"Listen," Sylvia said, staring at her. "There's
something I want to tell you." She drew a painful
breath.
"About your brother."

Maggie swallowed, braced to hear the terrible de
tails "Yes."

"It really bugged me, you know? I would put on my nicest clothes, do my hair, we would go out ...
and then he'd talk about
you."

Maggie blinked, utterly nonplussed. This wasn't at all what she had expected. "He would?"

"About
his sister.
How brave she was. How smart
she was. How stubborn she was."

Maggie kept blinking. She'd heard Miles accuse her of lots of things, but never of being smart. She
felt her eyelids prickle again and her throat swell
painfully.

"He couldn't stand to hear a bad word about you," Sylvia was saying. Her purple-shadowed eyes narrowed suddenly, the color of bittersweet nightshade. "And I hated you for that. But him ... I liked him."

Her voice was getting much weaker.
Aradia
knelt
on her other side and touched the shimmering sil
very hair.

"You don't have long," she said quietly, as if giv
ing a warning.

Sylvia's eyes blinked once, as if to say she under
stood. Then she turned her eyes on Maggie.

"I told
Delos
I killed him," she whispered.
"But
...
I lied."

Maggie felt her eyes fly open. Then all at once
her heart was beating so hard that it shook her
entire body.

"You didn't
kill him? He's alive?"

"I wanted to punish him
... but I wanted him
near me,
too...."

A wave of dizziness broke over Maggie. She bent
over Sylvia, trying not to clutch at the slender
shoulders. All she could see was Sylvia's pale face.

"Please tell me what you did," she whispered
with passionate intensity. "Please tell me."

"I had him ... changed." The musical voice was
only a distant murmur now. "Made him a
shapeshifter
...
and added a spell. So he wouldn't
be human again until I wanted
. . ."

"What kind of spell?"
Aradia
prompted quietly.

Sylvia made a sound like the most faraway of
sighs. "Not anything that
you
need to deal with,
Maiden.... Just take the leather band off his leg.
He'll always be a
shapeshifter
...
but he won't be
lost to you...."

Suddenly her voice swelled up a little stronger,
and Maggie realized that the bruised eyes were
looking at her with something like Sylvia's old
malice.

"You're so smart ... I'm sure you can figure out
which animal
..."

After that a strange sound came out of her
throat, one that Maggie had never heard before.
Somehow she knew without being told that it
meant Sylvia was dying-right then.

The body in the green dress arched up once and
went still. Sylvia's head fell back. Her eyes, the
color of tear-drenched violets, were open, staring
up at the sky, but they seemed oddly flat.

Aradia
put a slender dark hand on the pale
forehead.

"Goddess of Life, receive this daughter of
Hellewise
," she said in her soft, ageless voice. "Guide
her to the other world." She added, in a whisper,
"She takes with her the blessing of all the witches."

Maggie looked up almost fearfully to see if the
shining figure
who
had surrounded
Aradia
like an
aura would come back. But all she saw was
Ara
dia's
beautiful face, with its smooth skin the color
of coffee with cream and its compassionate blind
gaze.

Then
Aradia
gently moved her hand down to shut
Sylvia's eyes.

Maggie clenched her teeth, but it was no use.
She gasped once, and then somehow she was in the middle of sobbing violently, unable to stop it.
But
Delos
's arms were around her, and she buried
her face in his neck, and that helped. When she got
control of herself a few minutes later, she realized
that in his arms she felt almost what she had in
her dream, that inexpressible sense of peace and
security.
Of belonging, utterly.