Strands of Starlight (34 page)

“Who is that?” he asked abruptly. “I've never seen her before. Is she with this household?”

“Her name is Janet Darci, messire,” said Brendan. “She was sent up from Saint Blaise as a . . . guest.” He coughed politely.

There was a grace about her that reminded Roger of another girl-woman he had once seen. What was going on in those Free Towns?

His shoulder throbbed again. “She's very pretty,” he said as she passed out of sight around the corner of the curtain wall. “I must meet her someday.” But the ache from the old wound shifted his thoughts to the Free Towns, to the indignity he had suffered in the forest just outside Saint Brigid. The Towns would pay for that. So would the Elves. “Have you found out anything more from the witch?”

“I spoke with Brother Karl last night. She is delirious and must rest for a day or two before we can have another”—he coughed again—“talk.”

“Let her rest. And then find out what we need. When Cranby returns, he can finish his work on the proclamation. With any luck at all, we can be ready by midsummer.” He looked at Brendan. “And by the way, Lord Marshal, you'll be traveling with us.”

“Me? Messire, I—”

“Get away from me. And learn how to use a sword for something more than spearing fruit.”

White-faced, the marshal departed. For a minute, Roger debated following Janet, but decided against it. He needed to have the letter read. And there would be time for Janet later on.

***

Terrill and Miriam rode north through Malvern Forest, following hidden paths beneath new-leafed branches that dappled them with May sunlight. Once again Miriam traveled upon these secret, elven ways by the permission and strength of another, but that did not matter to her, for she had put aside considerations of pride and achievement and had focused instead upon the woman who lay in the dungeon of Hypprux, upon what had been done to her, upon what might be done in the near future.

Torturers' methods varied with their personalities. Perhaps Mika had been given over to one who had taken pity upon the old midwife and had only shown her, time and again, the instruments he would use on her body unless she told the inquisitors what they wanted to hear. Perhaps Mika was still unharmed.

But the lifelines and the lattices told Miriam that other probabilities were greater. Torturers were frequently only interested in money. Usually they were actually sadistic. Every joint of the mortal body was known to them, and they would, if necessary, dislocate each one in pursuit of what the inquisitors considered to be the truth. Feet would be converted to pulped masses of bruised flesh and pulverized bone. Compound fractures. Veins removed one by one. Blood . . . Eyes . . .

She was no longer looking at the forest path, but at the niter-encrusted walls of the dungeon in the Chateau. She saw herself strapped into the chair, saw Mika shackled beside her, saw an incongruous flash of red-gold hair as a tall, slender Elf maid was methodically dismembered.

With an involuntary cry, she fled back to the forest. The sun shone warm on her back, but the roots of her hair were damp with sweat. Wiping her face, Miriam centered herself on the stars, recalling that although her memories were human, her body and her heart were not. She could weigh, she could plan, she could act.

Varden worked his magic and his healing. Terrill fought with terrible precision. Talla danced. Natil played her harp. And the energies of the stars flowed through their abilities and quickened them, so that the flame of talent turned blue white with stellar fire. Now she herself, Miriam—once of Maris, but now of Malvern—partook of that light, that energy; and as she looked into the many futures, she saw her actions drive into the potentials like shafts of lightning.

Night came, but they still traveled. Beneath her, the horse trotted on. Before they had started on this journey, Terrill had brought her to the mounts that he had tethered at the edge of the forest and had told her to introduce herself. “Horses,” he had said, “bear us of their own will. We must ask their permission.” And he had gone off to inspect their packs then, leaving her alone with the animals. She knew instantly that the dapple gray was named Cloud, and the roan, Nightflame.

The two mares regarded her curiously. Miriam almost felt that they looked within her. “My name is Miriam,” she said, “I'm . . . a healer.”

Cloud and Nightflame waited.

“And . . . and . . . I'm an Elf . . . in a way. It's hard to explain.” The horses' brown eyes held her. There was too much happening. Her anger still raged, but it battered impotently against the starlight.

When you can love him . . .

Sympathetically, Cloud nuzzled her.

“Will you . . . will you bear me?”

The horses deliberated, but when Cloud took the sleeve of her tunic in her teeth and shook it softly up and down, Miriam did not need the physical confirmation. She had already heard:
I will.

Near midnight, Terrill signaled a halt. “There is a clearing ahead,” he said. “We will rest there.”

“I'm not tired. I don't think I have to sleep.”

“You did not sleep last night. The circle of waking has closed for you, but I think it would be wise for you to take an hour or two. In any case, we must have a care for those who bear us.”

He touched Nightflame and moved on. Miriam followed him to the clearing, and together they brushed the horses and found them grass and water. After a simple meal,. Terrill spread a thick quilt on the ground and gestured Miriam toward it.

Miriam spread her hands. “I really don't think I can sleep.”

The Elf examined her for a moment. “You were thinking about Mika some distance back, were you not?”

She looked away. “And about myself.”

Terrill gestured again at the quilt. “I will fetch your cloak. Sit. It is May, but the earth is cold under the trees.”

He wrapped her in her gray cloak, threw his own about himself, and sat down before her, cross-legged, knees almost touching hers.

“You have been losing your need for sleep ever since Varden changed you,” he said, watching her. “You are . . . still changing.”

She met his eyes. “I know.”

“How do you feel about that?”

She hesitated. “It's hard to say.”

“Are you frightened?”

“Not anymore.”

“Happy?”

“Yes.”

Terrill's eyes flickered. His fair hair, falling softly to his shoulders, framed a face that, like Varden's, would not have been out of place on a woman. “I will ask you to sleep later on. For now, I want to teach you something else. Give me your hands.”

She did so, and when he took them, she felt a warmth spring up within her: a gentle, golden glow.

“Now find the stars.”

She closed her eyes. There they were, clear and bright, as always.

“Miriam . . .” she heard his voice in her mind. “Miriam, your nature has changed. I called you Elf this morning. I do not think that I was overly premature in doing so. Before, just after Varden transformed you, you fought both the starlight and yourself; but you grew nonetheless, and as you slowly accepted yourself, you grew more quickly. You seem to be able to do many things instinctively, which is good, for I would not know how to teach them to you. But there are some things I can teach: I can show you something of what we are . . . of what you are now. Here, though, I work somewhat blindly, because what has happened to you has never happened before. It is an indication that your nature was, from the beginning, receptive to ours. And I think it is also a mark of the Lady's favor.”

“Who is the Lady?”

“Simply: everything,” said Terrill. “That is part of what I want to teach you this night. Are you afraid? Will you go where I take you?”

She watched the drifting starfields. Growth. Changes. She found that she was smiling. “I trust you.”

“I do not think I have heard those words from you before.”

“I've been thinking them. For a long time.”

The stars drifted in silence. Then: “It is well, Find a star that pulls you in its direction.”

Mentally, she turned, searched. The gleaming patterns of light shifted and settled. There was a bright, blue spark ahead of her, calling. “I see.”

“Reach out to it. Do not fear: where you are going, you are safer than you have ever been in your entire existence.”

“All right . . .” She reached, and the star reached in return, grew quickly until it filled her sight, blanketed her in incandescence. There was a sound like the roaring of ocean waves, and then she was standing in the midst of a grassy plain. Above her, a night sky blazed with unfamiliar constellations. Before her stood a Woman who was robed in blue and silver. Her hair was dark, Her eyes were clear and gray.

The Lady looked at Miriam, and the healer bowed deeply to Her. She felt Terrill beside her and was grateful for his presence. “We call her
Elthia Calasiuove,
” the Elf said softly. “She is . . . everything. The trees, the horses, the ground beneath us, the sky above our heads. I am She, as are you. But you know this.”

“I . . . I know now.” Her throat felt dry. She had seen Her before in David's carving, but that encounter had been, for all its immediacy and power, distant. Here now was immanence. Here was divinity. Here was the reified existence of compassion and love made manifest.

“She wears this form for our convenience,” Terrill continued. “In this, we are privileged, and we love Her dearly. As She loves us.”

“But . . . what . . .”

The Elf's face was tranquil, as though here, under this strange sky, in the presence of this embodiment of immanent love, he could forget past grief and old pain. “She made us,” he said simply. “She
is
us.”

Miriam turned to her. “You've helped me,” she choked. “In the forest, and before. I think You've been with me from the beginning, but I didn't know it. In the church, I said that I'd serve You. And I will. But now that doesn't seem like much to give You. It's all I have, though.”

The Lady spoke. “In giving yourself, child, you give everything. And therefore am I honored.” She came forward and stood before Miriam, her gray eyes mirroring starlight.

“My Lady . . .” Miriam gestured at herself. “I . . .”

“It is well, child.”

She was slowly becoming an Elf. And that was good. Everything was good. “Do you . . .” Miriam's vision blurred with tears. She felt Her hands upon her head.

“Be at peace . . . Mirya.”

When her vision cleared, she was sitting with Terrill on the thick quilt. Stars twinkled through the canopy of leaves. Terrill's face was calm, peaceful.

“As I said,” he murmured, “we are privileged.” He released her hands, and she felt suddenly tired, as though sleep were, after all, a good thing, something that she needed in order to absorb what the Lady had given her, to progress a little farther on this strange journey that had started on a stone slab under the moon, or even before. . . .

Terrill went on. “Because of what we are, because of our nature, it is good that we see Her in this way. Elves do not merely believe: we know. And what you have seen tonight is the knowledge. But do not forget this: She is you. She is I. Everything that you touch, everything that you see is, at once, both part and totality of Her. Because She loves us, She wears a particular form, and we can go to Her. But do not be mistaken. She is everything, and everyone.” A smile softened his face for a moment. “But you know this.”

Head tilted back, she was looking at the stars. Yes, she knew it. She could never forget now. “I think I'll sleep for a while.”

***

She saw everything.

The world was before her, intricate and varied, changing from moment to moment in the Dance that went on in all things. She saw the lives of people, of plants, of animals, saw the teeming, human built cities and the slow, graceful fertility of forest and lake.

A fish leaped, and the ripples that spread out upon the waters of Lake Onella mirrored the trembling of the wine in a chalice lifted in that moment by an aged priest celebrating his last Mass in a hamlet in Ireland, were mirrored in turn by the unfolding petals of a flower passed—dying even in the act—from the hand of a Poor Clare to the hand of a priest in a garden in Sicily. And in like manner, the ripples of lives spread, expanding in interconnected lattices of starlight more intricate than any flower, than any ripple of water, than any liquescent trembling of candlelight upon wine.

And, as if she were a falcon rising above the land, her awareness expanded, her keen sight perceiving everything in every minute detail: soldiers lighting torches in a barracks; molten gold in a crucible; nervous horses rubbing against one another; a harsh-voiced tinker throwing a pot at a mud-splattered woman; a palace built of marble in the alpine highlands; Russian peasants gathered around a stove, drinking . . .

. . . trees, stretching off and away for miles, giving way to grasslands that in turn gave way to the sea. The world turned beneath her, an immense, imponderable weight that she suddenly held in her mind as though she held a ball in her hands . . .

. . . and then, further, the sun glowing behind her and the moon to her right, wheeling with the days, the months, the seasons. The stars were above her head, beneath her feet. She turned and looked into a universe that went on forever.

And she felt it all. She was the fish, the ripple, the poor Clare, the flower, the gold, the soldiers, the horses, the forest, the grass, the sea, the earth, the sun, the stars, the infinite.

For a moment she understood. The Lady was an emblem only. Miriam knew that. But she knew also—she did not merely believe—that She was absolute reality: a part, the totality, of everything . . . including Miriam of Malvern.

But even as she strove to grasp the unity and love that was offered her, she felt them both slipping away, the connections riven apart by white-hot wedges of passionate rage. In moments, the width of her vision had narrowed once again to herself: bundled in a cloak, curled up on a warm comforter under the trees, memories of rape and torture burning in her mind.

She awoke sobbing.

It was still dark, and as Miriam's tear-filled eyes cleared, the faint swirls that swan in her sight coalesced into stars. She was in the clearing. An hour had passed since she had lain down, perhaps less.