War Maid's Choice-ARC (56 page)

“War maids certainly ought to understand changes if anyone can,” Leeana agreed feelingly. “Unfortunately, they haven’t had any experience with war maid
wind riders.
No one has!”

<
I know war maids fight on their own feet, but you can be far more dangerous on my back than on foot,
> Gayrfressa said in an almost hopeful tone. <
Think how much faster you can move! That alone would be a huge advantage, wouldn’t it?
>

“Sometimes, at least. On the other hand, you’re not exactly built for creeping about in the grass, now are you?” Leeana teased gently. “That’s where war maids spend a lot of their time, you know,” she added more seriously. “And however effective a wind rider might be,
one
wind rider by herself is hardly going to constitute what you might call a concentrated striking force, is she?”

<
No, but
—>

It was Gayrfressa’s turn to cut herself off, and Leeana nodded.

“I understand,” she repeated. “Now I really do understand, dearheart. And we
will
work it out somehow, I promise. I don’t have a clue
how
yet, but I’m sure something will come to me.” She chuckled a bit sourly. “I already knew I was going to have to explain the wedding bracelet, given the Charter’s position on war maid marriages. I don’t suppose there’s any good reason why we can’t go ahead and add this to the situation, as well.” Her chuckle turned into a laugh. “By this time, Balcartha and Mayor Yalith ought to be used to my making problems for them. If they aren’t, it’s not for lack of trying on my part, anyway!”

She felt Gayrfressa’s silent chortle of agreement meld with her own, and her heart eased. They
would
find a way to work it out. She didn’t know how, but she was certain something would come to her, and—

Gayrfressa turned a bend and came to a sudden halt as the trail which would become a proper road—and an
Axeman
road, at that—someday soon abruptly disappeared. It didn’t peter out, or fade. It didn’t even end, really. It simply...
stopped
, cut off as if by a blade, and the thick carpet of pine needles from years past spread out before them unmarred and unmarked.

Leeana stiffened in the saddle, her head coming up and her eyes widening as her own astonishment merged with Gayrfressa’s. She opened her mouth, although she didn’t actually know what she intended to say. But before she could begin on whatever she might have been going to say, she saw the redhaired woman seated on that carpet of needles, leaning back against the tallest, thickest pine tree she’d ever seen in her life. And that was just as strange as the disappearance of the trail, because the woman hadn’t been there when Gayrfressa stopped. For that matter, Leeana felt certain—or
thought
she did, at any rate—that not even the
tree
had been there when Gayrfressa stopped.

She shook her head, but the surprises weren’t quite finished yet.

The woman at the base of the pine tree wore plate armor. Reflected light curtsied across its burnished surface like rippling water as the cool breeze tossed the pine trees and let shafts of sunlight burn golden through the canopy. She wore a surcoat over it, and for some reason, Leeana wasn’t certain of the surcoat’s color. It seemed to be black, but perhaps it was actually only the darkest cobalt blue she’d ever seen or imagined. Or perhaps it was a blend of colors from a midnight summer sky no mortal eye had ever beheld or envisioned. Leeana didn’t know about that, but the device on the breast of that surcoat was a white scroll. It was picked out in gold bullion and tiny, brilliant sapphires and rubies, that scroll, with silver skulls for winding knobs, and bound with a spray of periwinkle, the five-lobed flowers wrought in showers of dark amethyst. The woman wasn’t especially tall by Sothōii standards. Indeed, she was several inches shorter than Leeana...which meant she was also shorter than the huge, double-bitted axe leaning against the same pine tree.

The woman seemed unaware of their presence, her attention concentrated on the mountain lynx stretched across her lap. It lay on its back, totally limp, all four paws in the air as she rubbed its belly and smiled down at it. A helmet sat beside her, and her hair—a darker and even more glorious red than Leeana’s—was bound with a diadem of woven gold and silver badged with more of those amethyst-leaved blossoms of periwinkle.

Courser and rider stood motionless, frozen, trying to understand why the world about them seemed so different, and then the woman looked up, and Leeana’s throat tightened as midnight-blue eyes looked straight into her soul.

The woman gazed at them for several endless seconds, then clucked her tongue gently at the lynx across her lap. The cat—it was enormous, probably close to seventy pounds—yawned and stretched, then gave itself a shake, rolled off her lap, and stood. It looked up at her, then butted her right vambrace gently and affectionately before it glanced at Leeana. It regarded her for a moment, supremely unimpressed by her or even by Gayrfressa, then gathered its haunches under it, leapt lightly away from the redhaired woman...and vanished into thin air in mid-leap.

Leeana blinked, but before she could speak or otherwise react, the woman had risen, coming to her feet as if the armor she wore was no more encumbering than a war maid’s chari and yathu. She stood gazing up at Leeana, and somehow, despite Gayrfressa’s towering height, it seemed as if
Leeana
was gazing up at
her
.

“Give you good morning, daughters,” the woman said, and a strange shiver, like a flicker of lightning touched with ice and silver, went through Leeana. She knew she would never be able to describe that voice to anyone, for the words which might have captured it had never been forged. It was woven of beauty, joy, sorrow, celebration—of tears and terror, of memories lost and dreams never forgotten. It was freighted with welcome and burnished with farewell, and wrapped about it, flowing through it, were peace and completion.

Leeana never remembered moving, but suddenly she was on her feet, standing at Gayrfressa’s shoulder, left hand raised against the mare’s warm, chestnut coat, and the woman smiled at them both.

“Lady,” Leeana heard her own voice say, and inclined her head, for she knew the woman before her now.

Isvaria Orfressa, firstborn of Orr and Kontifrio, goddess of death, completion, and memory and second only to Tomanāk himself among Orr’s children in power. A quiet terror rippled through Leeana Hanathafressa as she found herself face-to-face with the very personification of death in a quiet, sunny pine wood she knew now was somehow outside the world in which she’d always lived. Yet there was no dread in that terror, no
fear
, only the awareness that she gazed upon the ending which must come to every living thing.

“I haven’t come for you, Leeana,” that awesome, indescribable voice said gently. It sang in Leeana’s blood and bone, murmured from the roots of mountains and sent endless, quiet echoes rolling across the heavens. “Nor for you, Gayrfressa.” Isvaria smiled at both of them. “Not yet, not today. Someday I will, and gather you to me as I gather all my worthy dead, and, oh, but the two of you
will
be worthy when that day comes! I’ll know you, and I’ll come for you, and you will find a place prepared for you at my table.”

Leeana inhaled deeply, feeling the power of life racing through her with the air filling her lungs, the blood pumping through her veins, and knew that in some strange way she had never been as alive as in this moment when she stood face-to-face with death Herself and saw in Isvaria’s face not terror or despair but only...welcome.

“But that day is not today,” Isvaria told them. “No, today I’ve come for another purpose entirely.”

“Another purpose, Lady?” Leeana was astounded by the levelness of her own tone, and Isvaria shook her head, her smile broader and warmer.

“You’re very like your husband, Leeana—and you like your brother, Gayrfressa. In this universe, or in any other, all any of you will ever ask is to meet whatever comes upon your feet.”

“I don’t know about that, Lady,” Leeana replied, more aware in that moment of how young she truly was than she’d been in years.

“Perhaps not, but I do—
we
do,” Isvaria told her. Then her smile faded, and she reached out and touched Leeana’s cheek ever so gently. That touch was as light as spider silk, gentle as a breeze, yet Leeana felt the power to shatter worlds in the cool, smooth fingers touching her skin so lightly. “We know, just as we know you, and we’ve waited for you as long as we have for Bahzell and Walsharno.”

“I don’t understand,” Leeana said, and felt Gayrfressa with her in her mind.

“Of course you don’t.” Isvaria cocked her head, those bottomless eyes studying Leeana’s face. “And I’m sure it’s a bit overwhelming, even for someone as redoubtable as you and Gayrfressa, to encounter so many deities in such a brief period of time.” She smiled again. “Time is a mortal concept, you know—one we’ve been forced to come to know and share...and abide by, but one that would never have occurred to us, left to our own devices. In that respect, you mortals are mightier than any god or goddess. And in the end, just as you created time, you’ll transcend it, and in the transcending you’ll heal or damn us all.”

Leeana swallowed, and Isvaria shook her head quickly.

“I haven’t come to lay the burden of all eternity upon you and demand you take it up today, Leeana!”

“Then may I ask why you
have
come, Lady?”

“Yes,
very
like Bahzell,” Isvaria murmured. Then she stood back slightly, folded her arms, and looked at the two of them levelly.

“My daughters, both of you have roles to play in a struggle which began before time itself. Has Bahzell told you what my brother Tomanāk explained to him about the nature of time and the war between Light and Dark?”

“He’s...tried, Lady,” Leeana said after a moment. “He said there are many universes, each of them as real as our own yet separate. Some are very like ours, others are very different, but Light and Dark are at war in all of them. He said that everyone—
all
of us—exist in all those universes, or many of them at least, and that we’re the ones who determine who finally wins in each of them. And that, in the end, the final confrontation between Light and Dark will be settled by how many of those universes each side controls when the last one falls.”

“Not a bad explanation, at all,” Isvaria told her. “But not quite complete. Did he tell you not even a goddess can know exactly what future, what chain of events and decisions, any single mortal in any single one of those universes will experience?”

Leeana nodded, and Isvaria nodded back very seriously.

“That, my daughters, is where mortals’ freedom to choose—and ability to fail—enters the equation. In the end, it all depends upon you and your choices. Oh, chance can play its role, as well, but over the entire spectrum of universes, chance cancels out and choice and courage and fear and greed and love and selfishness and cruelty and mercy—all those things which make you mortals what you are—come into their own.

“Yet the great pattern, the warp and woof of reality—
those
we deities can see clearly. Those are what guide and draw our own efforts to protect this strand as it works its way through the loom of history, or to snip that one short. It’s there, at those moments, that our champions—and those who love them, Leeana Hanathafressa and Gayrfressa, daughter of Mathygan and Yorthandro—take their stands in the very teeth of evil to fight—and all too often to die—in defense of the Light. And no being, no mortal and no god, can know for certain whether they’ll triumph or fail before that very moment. My daughters, I know no better than you whether or not this world in which you live, this universe which is all you know, will stand or fall at the end of time. That decision rests in your hands. Not in mine, not in my brothers’ or my sisters’—in
yours
.”

Leeana swallowed, and Isvaria touched her face once more.

“You’re fit to carry that burden, Leeana, whether you realize it or not...and you will. In every universe, in every time, when the moment arrives, you will. And if the Dark triumphs, it will
never
be because you failed the Light in that moment of need. But I tell you this, as well—if the Light triumphs in this universe of yours, it will triumph through you and Bahzell.”

Leeana’s eyes went huge, and the fingers touching her face cupped her cheek gently.

“Power and possibilities, outcomes and events, swirl so thickly about you that even a goddess can see only dimly. And we can take advantage of that dimness, we deities, and...manipulate it so that our enemies are even blinder than we. Not always, not in all places. We must choose our times, pick those events where it becomes most crucial for our enemies to guess rather than to know. Your life, and Bahzell’s, are one of those times. We can’t tell you what will happen, or even what you must do, because by the very act of telling you we would affect the outcome. But in every future I see, you come to me, Leeana. And you, Gayrfressa. You come to my table, in all your thousands of choices, and I welcome you. You come through pain, and you come through sorrow, and you come through loss, and you do not always come in triumph. But you come to me unbroken and as you are now, upon your feet and
never
your knees, and the light of you
shines
, my daughters.”

Leeana stared into the eyes of the Goddess of Death, and those eyes touched something inside her. There was a...flicker. A dancing current or a flaring candle flame. She couldn’t put a name to the sensation, not really, yet she knew it would always be there. She might lose it, from time to time, and it would be no armor against fear, uncertainty, doubt...but it would always return to her, as well, and under that fear and uncertainty and doubt there would be this assurance, this promise, from the power to which all life returned in the fullness of time.

“I know it’s a heavy weight to bear,” Isvaria told her, “but you’re fit to bear it, both of you, and love will take you to places the Dark can never come. I do not name you my champions, but I do name you the daughters I’ve called you—
my
daughters. Whether you come to me early, or you come to me late, I
will
be waiting for you, and I will gather you as my own.”