Springwar (12 page)

Strynn started to reply, but paused. A knock had sounded on the door to the outer chamber—her nominal sitting room. She waited until it repeated: three raps, then three again, then two. Fine: It was safe. She rose, hastening through the door even as Rann moved to lock it behind her. Strynn heard the bolt shoot home as she stepped from sitting room to vestibule.

A third cadence had begun before she was able to shoot all three bolts and heave the heavy panel open. It was Kylin syn Omyrr, of Music, with his harp in tow. He was a bit shorter than either Rann or Avall, which put him on the low end of average, and was elegantly—almost daintily—built. Typical for him, he wore house-hose and short-tunic of velvet, the textures compensating, he claimed, for his lack of sight. He also wore a sylk blindfold across his eyes, and carried a slender, silver-chased cane Strynn had made him from an aborted sword.

“Is this a bad time?” he ventured, wrinkling his nose—to
catch the scent of her perfume: one of several ways he identified her.

“Not at all,” she murmured, whisking him inside and resecuring the door. “In fact, Rann and I seemed to have blundered from discussion to actual plotting. We could use another head.”

“Music helps the brain think more harmoniously,” Kylin chuckled, his voice smooth as the fabric that covered him. He walked soundlessly in low velvet boots to the door to the workroom. Unerringly, Strynn noted. He paused there expectantly while she turned the key.

Rann shot the bolts from inside as soon as she began, and ushered them both in, helping Kylin to his own former seat, before locking the door again and securing another chair for himself. The light was failing and the room held a comfortable gloom that encouraged conversation. Kylin sniffed the food appreciatively and helped himself to a fish in sauce. “You eat better than I do,” he murmured.

“Try getting pregnant and see how you’re fed,” Strynn shot back, with what she discovered was honest good humor. She didn’t like having Kylin out and about in the hold—too many things could happen to him there. But he was the Hold-Warden’s favorite musician, and also had other obligations, including those to his craft, in which he was both student and teacher. His quarters were here, however; Strynn had secured that as a clan boon after Eddyn’s savage attack on the harper, the bruises from which were still fading.

In any case, her circle was now as complete as it could be without Avall and his twin: her bond-sister, Merryn. The wine was calming her, too, while at the same time sharpening her wits by filtering out extraneous worries. Which is how it worked with creative people.

“We were talking about leaving,” Rann told Kylin, just loud enough to be heard above the harper’s subtle melody.

“Who is
we?”
Kylin murmured. “And what, exactly, do you mean by ‘leaving’?”

Strynn tried to glare at Rann, but couldn’t without feeling a hypocrite.

“The three of us, in theory. We’re not really safe here, and
it’s only going to get worse, especially for Strynn as her time approaches. Me … I’m ready to go back out if I have to, but Strynn won’t let me. Plus I’m bound by oath to Avall to look after her. Oh, I could find somewhere in this warren to hide, and ghost about surreptitiously, but that would be a risk, if for no other reason because if I
was
caught, people would want to know why I thought I had to hide. Nor would I have a good answer. But perhaps I should—just to hear what’s being said. I think … I can use Strynn’s gem to help with some of that. With your permission, of course,” he added, to Strynn.

“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.

“Surely you’re not serious,” Kylin yipped. “With your time almost upon you.”

“Women have given birth in the Wild before,” Strynn answered tartly. “I’m strong for a woman and we’re not talking about going all the way to Tir-Eron.”

“We weren’t really talking about it at all,” Rann grumbled. “This is getting a little too serious.”

“Div?” Kylin guessed. “You were thinking of the three of us sheltering at Div’s hold?”

“I was thinking of that
in extremis
—if we learned there was actual threat against us.”

“It makes sense, though,” Kylin told them seriously. “You
are
running a risk by staying here. You’d run far less risk there, and be closer to Tir-Eron when the thaws come. And don’t think I don’t know that you’re going mad trying to decide what you feel about her—and wanting to get back.”

“I could release you from your vow to protect me,” Strynn offered.

Rann shook his head. “That’s all I really have of Avall right now—beyond the fact that he’s not precisely dead.”

“Are we going to try that again tonight?” Kylin wondered.

Strynn shrugged. “I see no reason we can’t go ahead and do it now—maybe at sunset, since that’s supposed to be a powerful time of day.”

“We’ve got half a hand, then.”

Kylin looked at Rann. “Rann, forgive my rudeness, but
what exactly
do
you feel about Div, now that you’ve built some distance?”

Rann closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then a long quaff of wine. “I shouldn’t answer, because once I give one, I’ll feel bound to it, and my feelings could alter.”

Strynn kicked him gently. “How do you feel
now?
This does have a bearing on a lot of things—if nothing else, on whether we can consider her an ally. She may wind up in the clan, after all, or under clan protection. We’ve a right to know what we’re taking to our bosom.”

Rann took another deep breath. “I’m not sure I
love
her, exactly. She’s too different from any woman—any person, actually—I’ve ever met. She clearly likes me, but I don’t know if that’s for myself or for what I represent—a chance to attach herself to a high clan. I
think
it’s for the former, but I’m just not sure. She can’t have children, though, so that might be a problem, since I still have to sire my three. But she’d probably be willing to share, since she has already.”

“But only with Avall,” Strynn cautioned. “Women are used to sharing their men with their bond-brothers, and vice versa. Would she share you with a woman?”

“She might. I won’t really know the answer to any of these questions until I’ve spent more time with her. Still, I
do
think about her a lot. I miss her. I keep thinking of things here I’d enjoy showing her, but I’m not sure if that’s love or simply the fact that it
is
fun to show off those things to those who don’t have our … advantages.”

“Enough to chew on, in any case,” Strynn sighed, glancing at the time-candle, which had exhausted another finger. “If we’re going to try to contact Avall, I’d suggest we be at it.”

Rann put down his mug with a dull click, and rose. A tinkling run with impossibly nimble fingers concluded the piece Kylin had been playing.

The ritual had—almost—become familiar, yet Rann found himself apprehensive. Probably because every time he’d undertaken it before his return to Gem-Hold, he’d been
partnered with Avall, using Avall’s gem. Since then, he’d done it once—with Strynn and—effectively—Kylin, simply because adding people—people one was close to, at any rate—added to the strength of the sending.

Trouble was, Strynn’s gem was smaller than the one Avall had found, and had a different feel—like the difference in taste between goats’ milk and cows’.

Not that he hadn’t come to value these moments of closeness, even as he’d likewise come to dread their aftereffects. At the moment, they were waiting for Kylin to finish bathing. It helped him relax, he said. Working with the gem made him nervous because his earlier encounters with it had been so traumatic—first when Strynn had been moved by sympathy to merge minds with him, so that he could see through her eyes, and later, when Eddyn had wrested that secret from him, with utter disregard for his mental or physical well-being.

He was running late, though, and Rann was getting fidgety. Strynn was as well, though she masked it by gliding about arranging candles and pouring drinks. She was, Rann thought, a vision of loveliness in her loose white robe, with her long black hair unbound down her back. Avall was a lucky man indeed.

He wondered if he was up to it. Linking was at once exhilarating and draining, and he’d had one mug of wine too many, so that he was poised on the edge of drowsiness.

They’d know soon enough, he supposed, because Kylin padded in from the bathroom, still damp across the torso, and with his hair plastered sleekly to his head. Like Rann, he wore only house-hose, because they’d learned that bare skin aided the connection.

Rann rose reflexively and steered the harper toward the bed, placing a pillow behind his neck and shoulders before scrambling in beside him—in what would become the middle. Strynn took one final look at the candles, nodded approval, and claimed the other side. Rann felt, rather than saw, her push up her right sleeve—the one on his side. A brief sound of fumbling he didn’t bother following with
his eyes, and she passed him the gem. He took it gingerly, studying the warm sparks of life within its ruby depths before setting it on his chest above his heart. Meanwhile, Strynn had taken the small paring knife they’d come to use exclusively for this rite and had made a tiny incision in her right palm. He heard her gasp as the blood began to ooze. “Done,” she murmured, passing the blade to Rann.

He nudged Kylin with his free hand. “Do you want help, or can you—?”

“I can,” Kylin whispered back. Rann eased the knife carefully into the harper’s fingers. “Done,” he echoed a moment later, returning the knife to Rann.

His turn now, and he dreaded it. Pain was never pleasant, though he’d grown used to this particular kind. A deep breath, and he closed his eyes and slid the edge across his palm.

It hurt less than expected, though it brought more blood—Strynn had obviously been at it with her whetstone since last they’d used it. He gasped as it bit, then passed it back to Strynn, who returned it to its sheath.

That accomplished, he found the gem and clasped his bleeding hand atop it. It began to draw immediately, but at the same time it sent an odd tingle of heat and energy into him, as if he were slowly being thawed after weeks of cold. He felt his senses altering as well: slowing down, so that he could watch each exaggerated flicker of the candle flame across the room.

“Ready,” he murmured.

His partners moved, each laying a hand atop his on his chest. He felt their blood mingle with his, as they shifted again to bring their bare shoulders into contact.

And
he
was flowing, too: into the jewel, and through it into Strynn and an apprehensive Kylin. And with that flow, they likewise flowed into him. He balanced those tides by some method he couldn’t have described if he’d wanted to, while at the same time admitting certain parts of them that awakened—or empowered—certain parts of him.

It was one of the things they now knew with reasonable
certainty. Every person, regardless of sex, had a male aspect and a female, and each of those aspects responded more strongly to certain stimuli. This kind of link awakened and strengthened those things and made the whole mind—the whole
self-
—stronger in turn. It worked best, Rann suspected, if one merged with a person of each sex—a second woman would probably have been optimal. Lacking one, this seemed the best configuration, and Rann was the guide because he had the most experience of the three. Both parts of his mind were also open, whereas if Strynn had claimed control, there would have been two male minds striving to fill space ideally suited to one.

Rann felt himself at once contracting and expanding, and tried to center his thoughts—and those shadow-thoughts that joined his from Strynn and Kylin—on a single goal.

He and Strynn had touched Avall’s
self
briefly, last night: not awake, but not dead. All they’d felt was heart-stopping cold.

It was time to try again.

A deep breath, and Rann let himself sink further, until he barely seemed a discrete entity. At the same time, he let himself rise above himself and move outward—beyond the room, beyond the hold, into the high-arching dark. Strynn was with him, and Kylin—less fearful now. But they supported him, rather than directed, and so it was he who began the quest—down the local tributary of the Ri-Eron, and thence to that river itself.

That was where they’d seen Avall fall. That was where the fleeting touch they’d had of him yesterday had seemed to lead.

But Rann felt nothing.

He tried harder, felt his strength start to go thin, wishing he had access to Avall’s stronger stone, or that he had some way to seek one of his own in the mines without being seen. Strynn no longer could, because of her condition; nor could Kylin.

He’d just started to withdraw when his awareness brushed something.

Something familiar.

Not thoughts so much as feelings such as the body experiences when it is alive but little more.

Cold.

Cold beyond cold, yet cold warmed with life.

“He still lives,” Strynn breathed beside him.

“He does,” Kylin agreed.

Rann took a deep breath. “Shall we try for Tir-Eron? Or Merryn?”

“Both,” Strynn replied. “But quickly. I’m very tired.”

Rann didn’t reply. Drawing on the last strength he had, and knowing that even that was insufficient, he once more launched himself into the not-place that was the Overworld, moving toward what passed there for Tir-Eron. He could see it, but couldn’t reach it. He shouted for Eellon anyway, at the same time building a picture of the old Clan-Chief in his mind.

It was like shouting from a mountaintop. The air rang with the effort, but the distance swallowed it.

He tried for Merryn, then, but even in the Overworld he could only glimpse, very far away, War-Hold’s surrounding mountains.

“Tomorrow,” he sighed—and gently shifted the hands off the gem, before folding it into Strynn’s palm.

Kylin, he discovered, slept. Strynn didn’t; he could hear her softly weeping. As carefully as he could, he rose from between them and climbed out of bed.

He shivered—once—twice. A third time. Somehow he made it to the bath, where he turned on the water as hot as it would go and spent the next half hand soaking. Trying to drive away the cold that had entered him from Avall. Wondering if either of them would ever be warm again.