Strands of Starlight (20 page)

For hours he pushed her, driving her back and forth across the clearing, commenting with disinterest on her form at the same time as his sword found weaknesses in her guard. At last he stopped and waited for her to crawl to her feet and face him again. He permitted himself one of his rare smiles. “You are doing well.”

“You always say that, Terrill,” she panted.

“It is always true. Rest now. You have earned it.” He sat down on the grass, calm, dry, with scarcely a hair out of place.

Miriam collapsed in a sweaty heap. “So that's what it was for?”

“The dance. It was for fighting, wasn't it.”

“I could say that. You were transformed, true, but your muscles were untrained. The movements you have learned correct your deficiencies. I could tell you that. But it would be only a partial truth.”

“Wasn't that the whole point, though?”

“Close your eyes,” he said abruptly. “Find your stars. No, you need not stand. But sit upright, for I will not have you slouching like a human.”

She blinked at him, then shrugged and did as he requested.

“All right, good.” She heard this voice in her mind. Terrill was among the stars also, and the vision linked them. “There is a skylark flying northwest of here, just passing a tall pine tree with a lightning scar down its side. Feel it.”

“I don't understand.” She had learned by now that she did not have to speak out loud at times like this. She merely thought the words.

“It is difficult to explain, as there are no words for such ideas in your language. That is part of what I am trying to teach you now.”

Shrugging mentally, she tried to become aware of the meadow and forest around her, but received only a confused mass of impressions and images.

“Start simply, Miriam. Feel the grass beneath you. Feel the air. Hear the sounds about you. Then expand from that.”

She did so, and her awareness spread outward like ripples in a pond. She felt the forest, the many branches and leaves, the movement of sap beneath bark. She could tell tree from tree and stone from stone as she could her right hand from her left.

Northwest was directly behind her, but she sensed the pine tree, tall and straight, a white-lightning scar streaking its length. “Where's the bird?”

“Moving,” said Terrill. “Reach with your mind.”

He helped her, stretching her awareness until she could, suddenly, pick out a small, flying bundle of feathers. The skylark fluttered toward the branch of an oak, seemed to think better of landing, turned, and doubled back toward the clearing.

“Now,” said Terrill, “Feel this: the skylark is but one small part of the pattern—the dance, if you will—that is this forest. What it does, alters the larger pattern. You saw it decide not to alight. Something will happen because of that. The consequences may be large or small, but nothing—be aware of that, nothing—is unnoticed in the dance that goes on about us ceaselessly. And we also are a part of it. Now come back and open your eyes.”

When she had refocused, he nodded at her. “Your powers are great.”

“You keep telling me that.”

“It remains true.”

“What about the fighting dance?”

He sighed at her single-mindedness. “The dance that you know is pattern. Everything is a pattern, even fighting. What the dance that you know teaches is not only fighting, but knowledge of the Dance that you do not know, but which you will have to learn. Of the latter, you just saw a small part.”

She shook her head. “But what does that have to do with fighting?”

“Everything, Miriam.” The sadness crossed his face.

“It doesn't make any sense to me. Fighting is fighting, isn't it? Whether it's against the Church or against that . . . that bastard . . .” Her mouth tightened.

“You think too much about hate.”

“What am I supposed to do?” She flared at his reprimand. She was here for a purpose. One purpose. One only. What did patterns have to do with it? “Love him?”

“What you are supposed to do, Miriam, is become fully human . . . or whatever. . . .”

There was an odd tone in his voice. “Or whatever? What do you mean?”

He did not seem to hear her question. “Look at your hands. You are a healer. How do you reconcile that with that sword you have been using?”

“Are you saying I should quit?”

“I am saying that you must know yourself. And as you are a part of the Dance around you, you must know that also. Did you seriously think that swordplay was going to be a simple matter of hacking meat until it stopped moving?”

Her patience fled. “What are you trying to do to me?”

He was unruffled. He smiled again, sadly. “Teach you.”

Just then the skylark swept into the clearing, plummeting out of the sky like a feathered projectile, and alighted on Terrill's shoulder with a flutter of wings. The Elf did not start. He looked at the bird as though it spoke to him.

Miriam blinked, and the thought came to her unbidden:
A part of the pattern . . .

***

When Terrill had put the practice sword into her hand that morning, Miriam had felt elated; but as she entered Saint Brigid that afternoon, the heat of the day shimmering up from the unpaved street, she found that her feelings were mixed. Yes, she was learning to fight, but Terrill's explanations had taken away the elation. Patterns? What did patterns have to do with it?

When you can love him as you kill him, then you will be ready.

She flinched. She did not want to love anyone, particularly the stranger in the forest. How could Terrill say such a thing after Varden had nearly been killed. One of his own kind! Was that the price she had to pay in order to learn from him?

“Too damned high,” she muttered, scuffing down the street and across the common. Upset and agitated, she plumped herself down on the grass and closed her eyes, looking for peace. The stars burned at her, calmed her.

Idly, she let her awareness grow. She felt the houses and the shops, sensed the people around her, recognized Francis at his forge, Andrew in his shop, and others she knew by name or by face.

But she came upon something unexpected. There was pain nearby, and grief, and tears. The touch of those emotions startled her back into herself, and when she opened her eyes, she heard, very faintly, the shrill yipping of an animal in pain.

She rose. Her long legs carried her quickly down one street and then another, across an open field, and finally to a small orchard of old apple trees that stood by the village wall closest to the river. There were children there, their faces drawn at the sight of the three-month-old puppy that writhed in the dust as it screamed its pain and bewilderment into the hot afternoon air, its left hind leg bent at a crazy angle.

These were no city children of the north, raised amid violence and pain and inured to the sight of suffering. If the people of the Free Towns were different, then so were their sons and daughters. The Elves had come to this village, and they had brought with them something gentle, something healing.

Healing.

One face turned toward her as she hurried up. It was Philip, Andrew's youngest. “We were climbing in the trees,” he said hoarsely as the puppy screamed on and on. “And Deborah wanted to bring the puppy. He slipped from her hands when she was quite up.”

Something was stirring in Miriam, but it was not her power, and it was not in her spine. It was something else, and it was in her heart. The puppy shrieked and yipped, but she pushed her way through the little knot of children, stooped, and took the dog into her arms. She felt it clearly: a small part of the world around her that hurt without cause, a part she could soothe. She straightened, and when she looked at the faces of the children, she saw hope.

“What are you going to do, Miriam? Can you . . . ?”

The dog screamed again and tried to fling itself out of her grasp. “Yes,” she said, wondering why she said it, astonished at this sudden upswelling of compassion. “I can.”

With her mind on the stars, she reached into herself. The power flowed like a warm, sweet river, flooding her mind with soft light. When the flash faded, the puppy blinked at her, astonished. It sniffed its leg suspiciously, then licked her hand and went to sleep in her arms with a small
grrff
.

The children stood for a moment in silence, then cheered. Miriam scarcely heard them. In the wash of peace that surged into the void left by the power, she felt the light of the stars, strong and tranquil, saw, among them, a lattice-work, a web of possibility that encompassed and held infinity within its strands. It blazed at her, inundated her with knowledge of the pattern, of the Dance.

Yes, it was there. Yes, it changed with every decision, with every action. And Miriam as she was once and Miriam as she was now were parts of it, essential to it, just like the children standing around her, their faces awed and happy both, just like the sleeping puppy in her arms.

The strands flashed, then faded. Terrill was right. Everything participated in the Dance. It was not something one could accept or deny: it simply was.

Almost blind with starlight, she pushed the puppy into Philip's hands and stumbled back across the field. Patterns. Patterns. Everything was patterns. Something would happen—had already happened—because of what she had done.

When she reached the priest's house, she closed the door behind her and wiped at her eyes. Kay rounded the corner from the hall, the sleeves of his soutane rolled up and a broom in his hand. He looked at her carefully. “Are you not well, Miriam? Did your lesson go badly?”

Something had indeed happened, she knew. It had to do with her heart. It had widened once when she had been transformed, and now it had widened again, reaching out to contain child and puppy and town and forest. She wondered if it might not continue to widen until it contained the universe.

Terrill will be pleased, she thought, trembling.

“Miriam? Is something wrong?”

She wiped her eyes again. “I'm not sure,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe it's right. I don't know.”

***

Her dreams that night were a whirl of images. She seemed to fly like a falcon, spiraling up until all of Adria lay below her. She saw fields and mountains and rivers and forests, and she saw also the scattering of houses and cities, the works of human beings that crisscrossed the land.

And these last—mortal handiwork—frightened her, and she spread her wings and fled into the stars, looking for something that she had seen before and forgotten. Her heart ached with a want to which she could not put a name, a longing she could not describe.

She hung in the void, her wings cutting starlight, her thoughts skilled. She was safe here. There was nothing here that would hurt her. And as the Dance went on around her and in her, she felt strangely comforted, as if here, amid this sea of stars, she truly belonged.

It was still dark when she awoke, and her pillow was damp with tears. She went to the window and looked out, and though the moon told her that dawn was several hours away, she was not tired. Her mind was clear, her body awake, but the stars in the sky made her heart ache once again. There was something . . . something she had forgotten. It hung out of reach like a name that she could not remember.

She turned around and leaned against the sill, seeing the room in shades of lavender and blue, her awareness reaching out like hands, touching the bed, the chair, sensing the minute impressions her stylus had scored in the wax tablet that lay on the table.

She picked up the tablet. The writing was clear to her.
1348—Jaques Alban
. . .

She had planned so carefully, and she had gotten exactly what she wanted. A new body. And maybe a new fate. She could look up, tossing the tablet back on the table, and feel sure that eventually, she could find the man who had committed that last, final outrage.

“I'm going to kill you,” she murmured, and she knew that it could really happen. But she wondered suddenly if a sword stroke through his body could make up for all her running, all her suffering, or could lend some sense of validity to the act of desperation to which she had driven herself.

The uncustomary thought shook her. “My name is Miriam,” she said softly, looking for comfort in the new, strange litany. “I have red-gold hair. I have green eyes.”

But the words were empty, and she started to cry again because her heart was suddenly empty, too.

There had been a thunderstorm come down from the mountains that afternoon, and George Darci tramped along the edge of the forest, breathing deeply of the fresh, cool air. His green summer cloak caught drips and splashes of water that fell from the overhanging branches, the drops beading on the dense weave until he looked arrayed in diamonds.

He leaned against a tree. If he did not love Anne and Janet so much, he considered, he would gladly throw over Saint Blaise and all that went with it and live in the fest with the Elves. If they would have him. Such a tranquil and quiet life they must lead among the trees! Maybe someday at least he could meet one of the elven ladies and ask her to teach Janet some of their songs. So nice . . .

“Blessings, George. I trust you have had no further problems with wild boars.”

His heart pounded for a moment before he recognized the slender, fair-haired figure that had materialized out of the trees. “Terrill!” he cried. “I'd been hoping to talk with you.”

The Elf permitted himself a slight smile. “The next time you send a message, my friend, do not entrust it to a skylark. They are honest and well meaning, but rather feather-brained.”

“Skylark?” George vaguely remembered something about a skylark but could not put his finger on it.

Terrill shrugged. “Inconsequential. I am here. Have you a need?”

George nodded. “Advice.”

“Speak, then.”

A large drop struck George's cheek and wound its way down to his chin like a tear. “There seems to be a move on the part of the Church and the baronage to declare a crusade against the Free Towns.” He told the Elf of the words of Thomas a'Verne and Baron Paul, and of what he had found out himself about Aloysius Cranby and Roger of Aurverelle. Terrill looked pained at the mention of the last name.