Strands of Starlight (37 page)

She felt the grief in Terrill clearly now, the starlight linking them, opening lines of sympathy and communication. For an instant, for the first time, she could read Terrill, and the emotion she saw there shook her.

“Know what it is that you contemplate, Mirya,” he said softly. “Life is precious. Any life. Maybe the Elves realize that more than humans because we are fading. Men come and take away our homes. And they take away more than that also: they take away our world, our time. We are immortal, but we will fade, dwindle, dissolve. Our lives will end in a manner that humans cannot understand.” He looked up at the sky, absently felt the back of his neck. “We will eat and move on. Nightflame and Cloud must forgive us.”

She still felt the emotion in Terrill and it made her feel empty, unfinished. “
Ea sel—
” she blinked, fumbled for words that she knew. “I'm sorry.”

Terrill had bent over the packs, but he straightened at her first words, and the look in his eyes made her wonder who he was seeing. “I had to do something once, too. I will tell you this: It brought me no happiness.”

“Did it bring you anything?”

His eyes were sad. Softly, he touched her cheek. “It brought . . .” He faltered. “It brought me sympathy for you.”

She put her hand to his.

“That is why I agreed to teach you.”

“Terrill.” She looked into his eyes. Starlight and starlight. Potentials wove together, split, reformed. She felt them, contained them all within her widening heart. “Thank you.”

“I hope you can say that when your tasks are accomplished.” Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly. “Be at peace.”

“I . . . I can't say what I'd like to say. I wish I knew your language.”

“
Our
language,” said Terrill gently.

Miriam dropped her eyes. She understood now what inflection it was that had entered her speech.

“I will teach you.” He went back to the packs. For a moment, before she went to help him, she stood with her hand against her cheek.

Dusk: the sun gone down behind the Aleser Mountains two hours since; and Malvern Forest darkly shadowed, leaves turning into gray and silver shimmers among the branches, streams fallen into darkness. The evening star was rising in the east. Saint Brigid was full of candlelight shining from unshuttered windows.

A single lamp burned in the church, and Kay was kneeling just within the spill of light. His eyes had grown no less red since Miriam and Terrill had departed, and his hands were sore and blistered from digging graves for Hoyle and Bartholomew.

His voice rose softly in the darkening church as he intoned an antiphon that he had learned long ago from an old Cluniac in Maris. Feeble but genial, the last of an order that had been dissolving in a haze of gracious ornament for over a century, the old man had sat him down in the deserted choir of the cathedral and had taught it to him slowly, showing him how to coax the last small nuance out of the rising and falling syllables of the chant.

It had always had a place in Kay's heart, but these days he was singing it constantly; and he had made one small but potent alteration in the words that held as much significance as the fact that ever since that terrible last morning with Aloysius Cranby, he had chosen to kneel not before the altar, but rather at the feet of David's carefully wrought statue of the Lady.

“
A porta inferi,

erue Domina,

animam meam.
”

Over and over, the words followed one another. Maybe through this plainsong he could find some solace in a world that was speedily going mad. Or send strength and protection to a young woman traveling far away on a journey that could not but end in blood—her own or others' he did not know . . . was afraid to think.

A hand came down on his shoulder so softly that he did not even start. Charity stood behind him. How quiet her footsteps had become these last two days! His voice trailed off into the whispering silence of the nave.

“You have not eaten today, Kay,” she said.

“I haven't?” He blinked at the statue. “I guess I've forgotten.”

“Your father thinks you will blow away in the first strong wind. He wants you to come home for dinner.”

“Has Varden come back yet?”

“He has not.” The priestess tugged at Kay's soutane, and he rose, rubbing the tears from his cheeks. “Sana has not heard from him.”

“Do you think that the bishop . . .?”

“Aloysius Cranby is dead.” Charity said the words without either joy or sorrow. Her eyes flashed in the lamplight, and Kay knew that the starlight was growing on her.

“He's dead?”

“It is so.”

He put his hands to his face again. “Then we're lost.”

“You don't know that for sure.”

“Everything's going to hell. Everything that makes up the Free Towns is being lost.”

Charity only watched him.

“There are too many changes . . . everything's changing . . .”

“I am aware of that, Kay.” She smiled, and the flashing of her eyes turned into a twinkle.

Kay stared at her. Yes, she had changed. “How do you do it?” he said. “You've gone through—what?—two transformations in your life—”

“Three,” said Charity. “I worked leather once.”

He had never heard her refer directly to her previous existence, and her calm tone shocked him.

Charity led him out of the church. “You need to eat.”

“What about you?” said the priest, frightened. “Did that go away? Are you still human?”

“Human enough,” said Charity. Her smile was warm, and though it was tinged with starlight, it was still mortal. Human enough.

“How do you stand it?”

They walked down the street that led to the smith's house. “How do I stand it?” Charity mused. “I never thought about having to stand it,” she said after a time. “I'm here, and there's a reason for me to be here in just this way. If I don't know that reason, then obviously I'm also here to learn it.”

The indigo sky was deepening to velvet black, and she looked up at the stars shining above them. She smiled again, as though her meaning were plain for Kay to grasp and have for himself if he would only reach out and take it.

“There are many things that I have to do,” she said. “And I can do them. There's meaning in that. Meaning enough for me.”

Meaning. Varden was watching them, listening to them, his awareness slipping through the quiet town as it had drifted through forest and field a short time before. For a moment, he lingered at the door of the smith's house as Kay and Charity entered a warm room filled with firelight and lamplight, and then he returned to himself, to a hill that rose above the trees and gave him a clear view of Malvern from north to east to south.

Once, he had brought a broken-spirited healer girl to this same place and had tried to tell her about renewal. He had failed. He had come here tonight to try to tell himself about the same thing. And he had failed.

Meaning.

The very nature of all his kind cried out against the mere marring of a leaf, and yet he had, swiftly and deliberately, left a corpse lying faceup on the road. Cranby's spine had fractured with a dull vibration that he could still feel in his hands. He could still see the bishop's face filling with a mild surprise that ebbed away into the blankness of death. And most terribly of all, he could look at the Dance and see an emptiness that would more than likely be filled by warfare and blood.

Meaning.

Charity was right. Of course she was. But what meaning was there in these interlaced webs of maybes and might-bes that he could see weaving through himself, through the Free Towns, through the world? Varden looked ahead and saw the webs branch into futures so numerous that their images blurred with complexity. He saw the end of the Free Towns, watched the face of the land change as cities grew and highways leaped from one settlement to another.

It did not matter what he or Miriam or anyone did: the time of the Elves was drawing slowly to an end. Varden could see plainly the lifelines of his people fading, growing weaker with each passing year until they were only a soft, dissolving shimmer among the stars. There would be legends among humans, of course, and stories, and confused and puerile tales of beings who dwelt in sylvan immortality until, for some reason, they were no more; but the Elves would be gone, the forests empty.

Meaning.

What meaning could there be? What meaning was there in Charity lying in the middle of the street with a fractured skull? What meaning in a lecherous friar with his throat torn out on the village common? What meaning in a fat priest turned into a pig? What meaning?

And yet it all led inexorably toward a future without his people. The world was leaving them behind.

His own failure combined with the fate of his kind, and he rested his head on his drawn-up knees and wept for everything that lived and died without any certainty that it would live again. The darkness that was not obscure to his eyes grew around him, and the moon rose in the east.

And as the wash of moonlight spattered the hill and the forest with silver, he felt arms about him, and a head was pressed to his.

“Why do you weep?” She said.

He tried to gather his feelings into words. “I weep,” he said after a time, “because we seem to be at the end of everything. Humans will go on, to be sure. But for Elves—what we care about—it seems to be the end.”

“The same could be said of summer roses when the cold season threatens.”

“Roses do not think as do we.”

She was silent for a time. Her arms remained about him like protecting wings. Together, She and Varden looked off across the forest to the plains, and beyond tot he moon that was ever rising.

“What is it that you want, my child?” She said finally.

“I have lost the meaning,” he said. “It was all well when Elves were everywhere and the land was fertile and humans lived upon it in peace. The meaning was clear then. But humans grow and increase, and Elves fade. I cannot comprehend Your pattern, my Lady.”

“Humans and Elves are two, Varden,” She said. “But both are my children. Look ahead. Far ahead. Not one of my children shall be separate from Me. I have been with you all from the beginning, and that shall not change. Look, Varden. Follow the Dance into the future, and know that I love You.”

She left him then, Her steps silent; and he did as She had asked, reaching his awareness out to the corners of the world, tracing the Dance in all its complexity and variants.

The Elves faded. The world changed, changed terribly. Skies turned gray, forests vanished. Men fought wars that spanned continents. Machines conquered the land. Humans sank into a mire of their own making.

Darkness grew on the horizon of future ages, but it was not the quiet, safe darkness behind the stars. This was unlight, denial, and ending from which nothing could ever arise again.

Yet, in the face of that blight, there was a gleaming. In a far country of blue skies and high mountains, the starlight flickered into life, and men and women who had thought themselves human suddenly found that there was old blood in their veins, blood that was awakening, blood that had been spread throughout humanity through the love of Elves and humans here in these last days.

Meaning. Winter into spring.

Roxanne was nursing Lake, getting ready for bed, when she heard her front door open and turned to find Varden taking off his cloak. He came to them quietly, smiled, and wrapped his arms about them both. She noticed that in one of his hands was a wood rose, and when she met his eyes, she saw a single tear make its way down his cheek and fall on Lake's forehead, where it glittered, a small pearl in the firelight.

***

Toward midnight, Terrill and Miriam reached the northern border of the forest. Beyond, the land was rolling and grassy, spotted with small stands of trees, patched with plots of cultivation. Farther on, the grasslands gave way tot he immense flax fields of Hypprux.

“We have a full day's ride before us,” said Terrill. “The road is straight and well tended, but we will have to be careful when we use it. If we can reach Hypprux by tomorrow evening, we can set about finding Mika. With the Lady's blessing, she will be safe by sunrise.”

“Tomorrow evening . . .” Miriam stroked Cloud's neck absently. “That won't give us much time to prepare.”

“We will be prepared enough.”

“What about rest?”

“Rest?” Terrill smiled. “Mirya, how tired are you right now? Are you sleepy?”

“No, not at all,” she said, and then smiled self-consciously.

“We are stopping now only for the sake of the horses.”

They found water and sweet pasture for their mounts, and then they walked out into the grasslands and watched the stars together. A cricket chirped nearby, and Miriam felt it as much as she heard it. Her perceptions were still expanding, but they were becoming so natural to her that she hardly noticed.

She held Terrill's hand. “Will I be immortal, Terrill?”

A long pause. “You will. As immortal as our people can be in this age.”

“That frightens me.”

“Really? Many humans would give great wealth to be immortal.”

“That's because they don't think they can really get it.”

“I had not thought of it in that way.” Terrill sounded relaxed, as though any thought of breaking into an armed keep the following night was far from his mind.

The night wind was cool, the skies clear. They lay on their backs with their heads almost touching. Miriam saw a familiar star.

“Look, Terrill. There's
Mirya
.”

“You will notice that she appears brighter tonight.”

She glanced at him for a moment, detecting double meanings in his words, but his face was serene. “I do,” she said. “But . . .” She reached out and took his hand again. “But it looks as though she could do better.”

“True.”

“And . . .” What did Terrill think of her? She recalled the grief that hung about him, the time he had rushed out of the Elves' cave. But she remembered also the stirring she felt in her heart and the touch of his hand on her cheek. “And what happens when she reaches her full brilliance?” she said softly. “She fades?”