Lorn stood there leaning on the low parapet of the Square Tower, the highest one in Blackcastle, looking southward across the town to the dull hammered-pewter gleam of the river, and the marshes rough and silvery under the first-quarter Moon. It was late, an evening a week after the Hammering. Under him the town was a scattering of streets dim in cresset-light, clusters of peaked roofs, the broad broken part-circle contour of the city’s second wall, long grown over and through with houses; here and there a tallow-glass or rushlight showed in a high window. The occasional voice, a shout of laughter or a snatch of song, drifted up through the cool air, coming and going as the wind shifted.
He swatted a hungry bug that was biting him earnestly in the neck, and looked out past the marshes, south, where patchwork fields and black blots of forest merged and melted together into a dark silver shimmer of distance: no brightness about them but a faint horizontal white line, the Kings’ Road, its pale stone running eastward in wide curves and vanishing into the mingling of horizon and night.
It would be nice to be going that way,
he thought. That was the way to the Brightwood, among other places. Four or five times he had ridden that road, sometimes with his father, on visits of state to the Wood... and later on his own business, for Herewiss’s boyhood home was there. A long time ago, that first visit with its arguments, its snubs, the standoffishness that shifted unexpectedly one night into friendship between a pair of preadolescent princes.
Lorn laughed softly at himself. He had thought Herewiss ludicrously provincial when he first saw him—a dark, scowling beanpole in a muddy jerkin, taciturn and scornful, and overly preoccupied with turnip fields: a “prince” living in an oversized log cabin, with a tree growing through its roof. What Herewiss had thought of him, with his fancy horse and his fancy sword and his fancy father, Freelorn had fortunately not found out until much later. There probably would have been bloodshed.
As it was, Lorn looked back at the memory in astonishment and wondered how he could ever have felt that way about Herewiss. He had been no prize himself. His princehood had just begun to mean something to him— “and too damned much of something!”, he could still hear his father growling, at the end of one memorable dressing-down. Lorn had succeeded in alienating just about everyone in the Brightwood on that first trip, including the one girl whose attention he had desperately been trying to attract. Crushed by a very public rejection, which had ended with pretty little Elen picking him up and dumping him headfirst into a watering trough, Lorn had bolted into the Brightwood, looking for a place to cry his heart out. Around nightfall he found a place, a clearing with a nice smooth slab of stone, and sat down there and wept because no one liked him.
Now he looked back for the hundredth time in calm astonishment at the circumstances that had brought Herewiss to find him, rather than the Chief Wardress of the Silent Precincts... for of course that was the spot he had picked to cry on: the holiest of altars to the Goddess in perhaps the whole world, at the heart of those Precincts where no word is ever spoken by the Rodmistresses who train there, so that Her speech will be easier to hear. There Herewiss found him, and befriended him, almost more out of embarrassment than anything else, and got him out of there before they both got caught. And the friendship took, and grew fast.
Look at him, the
thought came, in a rush of affection, sorrow, unease and desire, all run together in a bittersweet dissonance of emotion. And that second set of vision came upon Lorn again, so that he saw himself from behind, through Herewiss’s eyes as he came out on the tower’s roof. It was uncanny and disturbing. For what Herewiss saw wasn’t just a dark shape leaning on a parapet, but a much-loved embodiment of intent, and old pain, and warmth, and strife that would lead to triumph: a figure incomplete and annoying in some ways, but also heroic and sorrowfully noble—
The underhearing slipped off, leaving Lorn uncertain whether to laugh in affectionate scorn or cry with frustration.
That’s not me!!
he thought. Nevertheless he said nothing, and held still until his loved had joined him. They leaned on the wall together, shoulders touching, looking out southward to where the fields melted into silver-black sky.
“When I first met you that time,” Lorn said, “were you trying to grow a mustache?”
Herewiss began to laugh. “After fifteen years, you ask me that now?”
“Well, I was just remembering, and all of a sudden I remembered this thing on your lip.”
Herewiss laughed harder. “Oh, Goddess. Yes, I was. I’d been working on it for months. But then you arrived, and you had one, so I shaved mine right off.”
Lorn chuckled. “And then Elen told me to grow it back or she’d have nothing to do with me,” Herewiss said. “So I did. I doubt there was much of it there when I found you, though.”
“There wasn’t. It looked like dirt. In fact, I thought it was dirt.”
Herewiss grinned wryly. “Wonderful.”
“Well, you and dirt were never far apart,” Freelorn said. “Farm boy.”
“City brat,” Herewiss said in a poor imitation of a thirteen year-old’s scorn. “You might like dirt too if you touched it occasionally.”
They both burst out laughing, and Lorn slipped an arm around Herewiss’s waist as Herewiss dropped one about his shoulders and hugged him. “I was packing,” Herewiss said. “What do I do with this?”
He nodded off to his right. Lorn glanced over. Sitting on the parapet was their lovers’-cup, the grain of its plain turned wood showing silver in the moonlight, the carved leaf-pattern around the edge indistinct and shadowy. Freelorn was surprised. “All these other times we’ve traveled, you usually carry it... “
“All these other times, I haven’t been anyone particular. Things have changed....”
I know,
Lorn thought, remembering that odd look a week ago at the table, and wondering for the hundredth time what to do about it. “But what are you going to drink out of?”
Herewiss shook his head. “Better you keep it. It would be remarked on... and the less attention is drawn to you while I’m in Arlen, the better. Don’t you think?” And he laughed once more, just a breath of sound this time. “Lorn, don’t look that way. Do you think there’s any cup I drink out of, that I don’t think of you?”
Freelorn shook his head slowly. “It’s the same here,” he said, and the roughness down in his throat surprised him as his voice caught on it. “Anything in that?”
Herewiss handed the cup to him. “Brightwood white,” he said. “My last for a while. My father won’t send it to Arlen any more.”
“That’s a shame,” Lorn said.
“It’s your fault,” Herewiss said. “He stopped trading with them right after he found out that Cillmod was trying to have you killed.”
Freelorn was astonished. “He did that for me?”
Herewiss looked at him in affectionate scorn. “He loves you, you idiot. After all these years, haven’t you got it through your head?”
Freelorn lifted the cup and poured out a quick libation to the Goddess over the edge of the parapet. “Well, here’s to him, then. And Her.” He drank.
Herewiss peered over the edge. “Better hope She wasn’t standing under that.”
“And you,” Lorn said, his voice catching on that rough spot again as his eyes met Herewiss’s in the dark. He drank again, and handed his loved the cup.
“Lorn,” Herewiss said, and drank. The underhearing spilled over again: the cool fire of the wine, held in the mouth for a moment, savored, to catch that flint-touch of sharpness that always reminded the taster of the scent of green leaves just after rain... but the taster wasn’t Freelorn. All this came mixed with a trembling along the limbs, as Herewiss thought of leaving Lorn tomorrow, leaving him all alone, watching him head toward Arlen and not being able to do anything to protect him. Not wanting to need to protect him, truly. But still, one wanted to make sure that things went right— And overlaying all this, a dull mourning, a feeling of simply missing Lorn, missing him even though he wasn’t gone yet: the premonition of the ache that would set in as it had in separations before—the silence on the far side of many a conversation, the empty spot in the next saddle, in the next place at table, in the curve of his own arm; the emptiness in the dark....
It was too hard to bear, the other’s pain and his own both at once.
Don’t make it worse for him,
something said inside Lorn. “Dusty,” he said, and Herewiss only drank again and looked south.
Lorn said that other Name, too softly for anyone but Herewiss and the one Other Who knew it to hear.
Herewiss looked at him, bowed his head. “Yes,” he said.
“You never told me the Fire was going to rub off,” said Lorn.
Herewiss turned the cup around and around on the parapet. “You might have suspected it would,” he said. “I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t say anything. But you know they do it on purpose, in the Precincts.”
Lorn nodded. “Eftgan and Segnbora were paired that way for a while, weren’t they? So that when they shared together, Eftgan’s Fire would wake Segnbora’s up.”
“That’s right. Didn’t work, of course.” Herewiss drank. “Too deep a blockage, and too much power, in Segnbora’s case. But normally it works.” He shrugged. “Theoretically, anyone with the threshold amount of Fire, more than that spark that everyone has, can have it awakened by someone else already focused. Now here I am... and one of the things She told me was that I was to be a catalyst, to start to spread Her Fire around again, and among men as well as women.” He breathed out, hard. “Apparently it’s working, even with just that slight spark. I don’t know why I was surprised. She knows what She’s doing.”
“Dusty,” Freelorn said, with great feeling, “I don’t want the Fire. I don’t even want the underhearing, particularly. It makes me walk into things when it hits.”
Herewiss looked for help at the sky. “Nine-tenths of the human race prays to have the Fire restored to it, and you don’t want it—”
“The other tenth are all Rodmistresses,” Freelorn said, “and sometimes they don’t want it either! I can’t control this, I don’t have time to learn how, and if it gets me in trouble—”
“I can’t block it,” said Herewiss. “It’s involved with the parts of your mind where intuition and hunches live, and if I tried meddling with those, I might just as well chop off your arms and legs and send you to Arlen in a cart: you’d have as much chance of surviving the next couple of months.”
Freelorn took the cup back. “I know, I know.” He drank about half of the wine at once.
“And the only way to stop the Power waking up any further—”
Herewiss fell silent. Freelorn looked at him. “We won’t be doing much of that for the next couple of months, anyway,” he whispered.
“Don’t remind me.”
There was silence for a few minutes, as they passed the cup back and forth.
“I wish you could come with me.”
“Even if it meant—”
“Dusty, it’s just, just that... I don’t want to be a god.” Freelorn looked south. It was easy to fantasize the presence of mountain peaks white in the shimmer of moonlight on the edge of the horizon, even though Bluepeak was hundreds of miles too far away. “Everybody I know is turning into one, all of a sudden. I always wanted you to have your Fire, you worked and suffered and struggled so hard for it, you couldn’t be you without it... but I thought everything else would stay ordinary. Now your Power’s slopping over on everything it touches. And there’s so much of it. The mountains down south aren’t shaped the way they used to be, because of you.” He laughed. “A month around you and Segnbora picks up Skádhwë, four thousand Dragons and enough fire for any fifty Rodmistresses. Pretty soon Dritt and Moris and Wyn and everybody else are going to break through and catch Fire just from breathing your used air.” The laugh had a slightly desperate sound about it this time. “And where does it all leave me, when I want to stay the way I am? Can the you that you are now, love a mere mortal?”
Herewiss looked at him for a few seconds in silence, and then lifted the cup and looked at him over the rim.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s find out.” And he drank, and held the cup out to Freelorn.
Lorn took it and finished it. “I have to finish packing,” Herewiss said. “Come to bed?”
“In a while.”
Herewiss nodded, hugged him one-armed, and headed down the stairs.
*
Lorn leaned there and looked southward for some time, while his mind settled out of turmoil. He had been looking for words to tell Herewiss what was bothering him for days and days; now he wasn’t at all sure that the words he’d found had been the right ones. Underhearing didn’t do you much good when it only went one way. It would be nice if loving was what he had thought it would be when he was young and stupid: perfect understanding, perfect union, effortlessly arrived at. But there was only one lover from whom that could be expected....
His gaze dropped again to that white road, running eastward into night. Nearly four months ago, it had been. He and his people and Herewiss had been hot on the trail of the old Hold in the western Waste, a place surrounded by disquieting legends, but nonetheless a place of which Herewiss had had great hopes. It had been mildly surprising, but not specifically unusual, to find a small inn on the river Stel, at the borders of the Waste. After days out in the wild, they had been grateful to stop there for a night. As often enough happened in Lorn’s travels, they were all short of money, and they wound up striking a typical travelers’ arrangement with the innkeeper. One of them would share with her, that evening, by way of settling the scot. There had been some argument over who would get to do this... for the innkeeper was utterly beautiful; dark-haired, green-eyed, a tall queenly woman full of wit and merriment. Segnbora had finally won the draw, and had gone upstairs after dinner, grinning faintly, to the genial hooting and encouragement of the rest.
Harald and Lang had stayed up a while by the fire to drink, but Lorn had preferred to go straight upstairs to that astonishing luxury, a room of his own, there to revel in a bed with no one in it, especially no one with more legs than he had. Later, of course, he would sneak into Herewiss’s room, or the other way around. But sometimes when you had been traveling with other people for a long time, it was a great joy to slip away and listen to the silence for a while, and watch the moon come up, and not have to worry that the pursuit would find you more easily because of it.