The Door into Shadow (15 page)

“
Hol,” Segnbora’s mother said, stepping forward to get a better look at Herewiss. She moved like a sleepwalker. “Hol, this isn’t one of them—”

Holmaern looked not at Herewiss’s face, but at his sword, and his face went angry and scornful just for a flash. “This is ridiculous. It’s more illusion. Men don’t have Fire!”

“
This man has it,” her mother said, a touch of wonder piercing the sleepy sound of her voice. “Sir, did you save us?”

“
Lady Welcaen,” Herewiss said. “I didn’t save you. Of your courtesy, tell me what brought you to the inn here.”

“
Reavers,” she said, dreamy voiced, as if telling of a threat years and miles gone. “They came down through the mountains at Onther, looking for food, and overran the farmsteads. We and a few of our neighbors had warning. We got away north before the burnings and told our news here to the innkeeper so he could spread it elsewhere in the countryside. And tonight he woke us up—”

Holmaern turned to his wife, slow realization changing his expression to a different kind of dullness. “‘Kani,” he said. He reached out to touch her, but it was plain from his expression that she didn’t feel as he expected her to. “‘Kani, we’re dead.”

Segnbora saw her mother’s eyes go terrible with the truth. “You’re—” She fought for words. “If we’re— But where’s the last Shore?”

Though Herewiss’s face was very still, something moving gleamed there in the light of his Flame: tears. He gazed down at Khávrinen, and Segnbora felt him calling up the Power again, a great wash of it. This time the framework he built with it took a strange and frightening shape, one she didn’t know.

“
I am the way,” he said, speaking another’s words for Her. He let go of Khávrinen and lifted his arms, opening them to her mother and father. They gazed at him in wonder. Freelorn, across the circle, went pale as if with some old fear.

Herewiss was still there as much as any of them, but within the outlines of his body the stars blazed, more brilliant than they had been even in Hasai’s memory of the gulf between worlds. Within Herewiss, about those stars, was a darkness deeper than that gulf could ever be. Segnbora trembled at the sight of him. Herewiss trembled too, but his voice was steady. “Who will be first?” he said.

Holmaern held Welcaen close. “Can’t we go together?”

Herewiss shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m too narrow a Door,” he said. “Besides, even at the usual Door, everyone goes through alone…”

Husband and wife looked at one another. “We have a daughter,” her mother said after a moment. She glanced around the field, but saw nothing. “Will you send her word—?”

Segnbora’s heart turned over and broke inside her. “Mother!” she said, choking, desperate, feeling more abandoned by that terrible placid regard that didn’t see her than by her mother’s death itself.

“
Segnbora d’Welcaen tai-Enraesi is her name,” her father said, and even through the dullness the words came out proudly. “She was eastaway in Steldin last we heard. Something about some outlaws…but she’s had so much training: she can take care of herself. Send her word…”

“
Father!”

Her tears made no difference; her father didn’t answer. “Come on, Hol,” her mother said, and reached up a little to touch her lips to his—then turned away toward Herewiss. “A man with the Fire,” she said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day.” And there on the threshold of true death, she smiled. “I didn’t, did I?…”

Herewiss shook his head silently, opened his arms. Welcaen moved into them, throwing a last glance at her husband on the threshold of true death. “I’ll wait for you,” she said.

Herewiss embraced her. She was gone.

Holmaern stepped slowly forward.
“Father!”
Segnbora cried as he moved into Herewiss’s arms.

Her father hesitated; his head turned toward her, and the Firelight caught in his hazel eyes. A flicker stirred there, like a vaguely recollected memory. Herewiss paused for a breath, two breaths.

“
Tell her we love her,” Holmaern said. He gathered Herewiss close, passed through, and was gone.

Khávrinen’s Fire went out, and the circle faded to a blue smolder and died. Beside his now-dark sword Herewiss went slowly to his knees, and sobbed once, bitterly. Freelorn went to him, held him close with a helpless look: he was crying too.

Segnbora had no power to do anything but stand and look at now-empty air, and breathe in the fading scent of death.

Herewiss was gasping for control. “It’s not,
that’s
not something people are meant to be! Life—” He gasped again. “Lorn, it’s supposed to be
life
I give—”

Freelorn buried his eyes against Herewiss’s shoulder, then straightened. “And what kind of life would they have had, dead and on the wrong side of the Door, wandering ghosts? What do you think you gave them?”

Segnbora stood still, seeing behind her eyes, with the immediacy that came of Hasai’s presence, old lost times that were somehow also
now:
summer mornings in Asfahaeg, rich with sunlight and the smell of the Sea; winter nights by the old hearthside in Darthis; afternoons weaving with her father, riding with her mother; laughter, anger, argument, joy, the sounds of life. They were real, infinitely more real than what she’d just seen. She turned and walked away, back toward town.

The truth started to catch up with her at about the same time that Freelorn and Herewiss did, in the middle of the hayfield. They stopped her, looked at her as if expecting her to lapse into some new state of madness. “Well?” she said. “What’s the problem?”

“
What are you going to do?” Freelorn said, sounding wary.

Segnbora felt Charriselm’s sweaty grip in her hand and thought of the innkeeper—hurried, merry sharp-faced, with eyes that wouldn’t meet hers. “I’m going to kill someone,” she said, turning toward town again.

“’
Berend!” Freelorn said. She ignored him, hurrying off through the hay, which bit at her legs and hissed at her as she waded through it, faster and faster.
It would have been us next,
she thought.
Someone doesn’t want southern news getting abroad
—
and we came from that direction, just as they did. I might well have been the next one. Wearing the same arms as the last two they killed, who knew whether I might have been looking for them, might have suspected something? Pprobably Lorn and the others would have been killed at the same time, or soon after. And Eftgan, if she stayed long enough and the innkeeper guessed who she was—

Behind her she could feel Fire stirring again. Herewiss had begun another wreaking, and she suspected what it was. Herewiss was a strategist. He would count it folly to kill a spy, and thus alert the spy’s superiors to the fact that that someone had discovered the game they played. He was building around the innkeeper and his wife a wreaking that would later cause them to dream the murders of those they’d agreed to kill, when in fact they would go on their way, unnoticed and unharmed. It was all perfectly sensible, and Segnbora despised the idea.

(Don’t waste your time,) she said, silent and bitter. (He won’t know what’s happened to him until a second after I hit him, when he tries to move and falls over in two pieces. And as for his wife—)

She went quietly through the postern, expecting an empty street. Instead, Moris and Dritt were there. So was Harald, standing silently with their horses. Lang was just joining them, along with Eftgan, who had her cloak about her shoulders and her unsheathed white Rod in her hand.

Segnbora would have brushed past the Queen to take care of unfinished business in the inn, but Eftgan’s hand on her arm, together with her look of concern at the sudden taste of Segnbora’s mind, stopped Segnbora as if she had walked into a wall. “‘Berend?
What happened?”

Segnbora looked down at Eftgan’s brown eyes, so like her mother’s, and flinched away, unable to bear it.

“
Oh, my Goddess,” Eftgan said. “Herewiss?”

In a breath’s worth of silence Herewiss showed Eftgan what Segnbora had found, what he had done for her parents, and the dream-wreaking he had woven and implanted in the innkeeper, and afterward in his wife. “Can we get out of here now?” he said, sounding deadly tired. Sunspark paced to him in its stallion shape, and Herewiss leaned on it, sagging like a man near exhaustion while Sunspark gazed at him in uncomprehending concern.

“
Done,” said the Queen, and gestured with her Rod at the ground where she stood. The wreaking she had been maintaining until they arrived leaped upward from the stone and wove itself on the air, a warp and weft of blue Fire that outlined a tall squarish doorway. The doorway flashed completely blue for a moment and then blacked out—but the black was that of a different night, a long way off. The Door sucked in air. On the other side they could see smooth paving, a better road than the damp cobbles of Chavi.

“
Hurry up,” Eftgan said. “The Kings’ Door is unpredictable, and it’s a strain to hold it for this many.”

One by one they went through, each leading a horse. Eftgan stood to one side of the Door, Flame running down her Rod and keeping the lintels alight. Lang stepped through before Segnbora, his eyes on her, looking worried. Numb, she followed him. The one step took her from the wet lowland air of Chavi, air stinking of death, into air colder, purer, but not entirely clean of the taste. Her ears popped painfully.

The night was perhaps an hour further along here; the stars had shifted. In one part of the sky they were missing entirely. Segnbora looked around the paved courtyard where Freelorn’s people stood grouped among milling horses and men and women in the midnight blue of Darthen. Over the low northward wall she could see faintly, in the starshine, the valley where she had sometimes lived as a child, with the braided river Chaelonde running through it. Many a time she had stood down there looking up at the place where she stood now—Sai khas-Barachael, Barachael Fortress, the black sentinel perched on an outthrust root of one of the Highpeaks.

Dully, Segnbora looked southward to where the stars were blocked from the sky. Looming over khas-Barachael, shadowy dark below and pale with starlight above, the snows of Mount Adínë brooded, impassive and cruel.

“
It’s late,” Freelorn was saying. “We’ll meet in the morning, all of us. Meanwhile, does the Queen’s hospitality extend to a drink?”

Segnbora saw to Steelsheen’s stabling and made sure her corncrib was full, then followed Lang (who seemed to be beside her every time she turned around) to a warmly lit room faced in black stone. There was hot wine, and she drank a great deal of it. The explanations went on and on around her, but she was never as dead to them as she wanted to be.

Snatches of conversation and random thoughts faded in and out of hearing, as they had when she had first come down from the Morrowfane. She would have welcomed Hasai’s darkness to flee to again, but she couldn’t find it. He and the
mdeihei
were, for once,
too
remote. They wanted nothing to do with her, the
mdeihei;
had seen was all too familiar with the kind of death to which they couldn’t admit, and to them she was now carrier of a contagion of terror and impossibility. The more she tried to approach, the more they fled her, afraid of any death in which one could so lose oneself.

After a while she somehow found her way to the tower room they had given her, and to bed. Lang was there too. He held her, and she clutched him, but she found no comfort in his presence. Her thoughts were full of graves, bare dirt, eyes that looked right through her. Her mind talked constantly, again and again making the most terrible admission a sensitive could make:
I never felt you die. I never felt it. How could I not have felt it?!

Tears were a long time coming, but they found her at last; and Lang, more hero than she had ever been, held her and bore the brunt of her blows and cries and impotent rage. Bitterness and a shameful desire for vengeance, they were still all tangled around her soup at the end, but she knew at least she would be able to sleep. At least for tonight….

Over the bed and the room and the fortress, like a great weight, loomed the thought of Adínë, and the last lines from the old family rede, which now might have a chance to come true.
There will come an hour of ice and darkness, and then the last of the tai-Enraesi will die. Flee the fate as you may, you shall know no peace until the blade finds your own heart, and lets the darkness in.

Darkness. That was the key. One Whose sign and chosen hiding place was darkness was coming after Herewiss and Freelorn. She had chosen to ride with them, and to defy It. And It hated defiance, and never failed to reward it with pain of one kind or another.

She could leave Lorn now, and her troubles would cease; or she could stay with him, and they would almost certainly get worse. The Dark One obviously had it in for her. But what could be worse than a head full of Dragons, and to suddenly find oneself orphaned, she couldn’t imagine.

Yet there was the small matter of words spoken under a cold hillside in the starlight, to a man she’d come to love
. My sword will be between you and the Shadow, until you pass the Door—

Beside her, Lang turned over and started to snore.

She lay there for a long time with the tears running down the sides of her face into her ears, and finally made her choice.

Shadow,
she thought at last,
it’s war between us from now on. I’ll die soon enough. But it’s as I said before. You won’t get Lorn – or anybody else, if I can help it.

The darkness about her teemed with silent, derisive laughter. She turned her back on it and went to sleep.

***

Kings build the bridges from earth to heaven. But it is their subjects’ decision whether or not to cross – and if they do, no mere king can guarantee the result.

On the Royal Priesthood,
Arien d’Lhared