“What?” Herewiss was more interested in her cloak.
“Soulflight.”
He stared at her, amazed, and forgot about the cloak. “How—where did you get it?”
“I have my sources,” she said, with a tiny twist of smile. She was watching him intently, studying his reactions, and for the moment Herewiss didn’t care whether she was seeing what she wanted to or not.
“Are you a seeress?” he asked.
She shrugged at him. “In a way. But I don’t use the drug. It fell into my hands, and I’ve been looking for someone to whom I might responsibly give it.”
For a bare second Herewiss’s mind reeled and soared, dreaming of what he could do with a dose of the Soulflight drug. Walk the past and the future, pass through men’s minds and understand their innermost thoughts, walk between worlds, command the Powers and Potentialities and speak to the dead—
But it was a dream, and though dreams are free, real things have their price. “How much do you have?”
“A little bottle, about half a pint.”
Herewiss laughed at her. “I would have to sell you the Brightwood whole and entire with all its people for that much Soulflight,” he said. “I’m only the Lord’s son, not the Queen of Darthen, madam.”
“I’m not asking for money,” she said.
“What then? How many times do I have to sleep with you?”
She broke out laughing, and after a moment he joined her. “Now that,” she said, “is a gallant idea, but unless you have the talisman of the prince who shared himself with the thousand virgins, I doubt you could manage it. Not to mention that I’d be furrowed like the fields in March, and I wouldn’t be able to walk for a month. How would I run the place?”
Herewiss, smiling, looked again at her cloak. The fire had died down somewhat, and he could see the stars more clearly—countless brilliantly blazing fires, burning silver-cold. He also perceived more clearly that there was a tremendous depth to the cloak, endless reaches of cool darkness going back away from him forever, though the cloak plainly ended at the back of the chair where the lady leaned on it.
He looked at her—dark hair, green eyes like the shadowed places about the Forest Altars, wearing the night—and knew with certainty who she was. Awe stirred in him, and joy as well.
“What’s the price, madam?” he said, opening himself to the surges building inside him.
“I’ll give you the drug,” she said, “if you will swear to me that, when you find out your inner Name, you’ll tell it to me.”
Herewiss considered the woman stretched out in the old tattered chair. “Why do you want to know it?”
She eased herself downward, looking into the fire again, and smiled. After a silence she said, “I guess you could call me a patroness of sorts. Wouldn’t it be to my everlasting glory to have helped bring the first male in all these empty years into his Power? And as all good deeds come back to the doer eventually, sooner or later, I’d reap reward for it.”
Herewiss laughed softly. “That’s not all you’re thinking of.”
“No, it’s not, I suppose,” said the innkeeper. “Look, Herewiss: power, in all its forms, is a strange thing. Most of the power that exists is bound up, trapped, and though it tries to be free, usually it can’t manage it by itself. The world is full of potential Power of all kinds, yes?”
He nodded.
“But at the same time, loss of power, the death of things, is a process that not even the Goddess can stop. Eventually even the worlds will die.”
“So they say.”
Her face was profoundly sorrowful, her eyes shadowed as if with guilt. “The death is inevitable. But we have one power, all men and beasts and creatures of other planes. We can slow down the Death, we can die hard, and help all the worlds die hard. To that purpose it behooves us to let loose all the power we can. To live with vigor, to love powerfully and without caring whether we’re loved back, to let loose building and teaching and healing and all the arts that try to slow down the great Death. Especially joy, just joy itself. A joy flares bright and goes out like the stars that fall, but the little flare it makes slows down the great Death ever so slightly. That’s a triumph, that it can be slowed down at all, and by such a simple thing.”
“And you want to let me loose.”
“Don’t you want to be loose?”
“Of course! But, madam, forgive me, I still don’t understand. What’s in it for you?”
The lady smiled ruefully, as if she had been caught in an omission, but still admired Herewiss for catching her. “If I were the Goddess,” she said, “and I am, for all of us are, whether we admit it to ourselves or not—if I were She, I would look at you as She looks at all men, who are all Her lovers at one time or another. And I would say to Myself, ‘If I raise up that Power, free the Fire in him, then when the time comes at last that we share ourselves with one another, in life or after it, I will draw that strength of his into Me, and the Worlds and I will be the greater for it.’ And certainly it would be a great thing to know the Name of the first male to come into his Power, lending power in turn to me, so that I would be so much the greater for it…”
Herewiss sat and looked for a moment at the remote white fires of the stars within the cloak. They seemed to gaze back at him, unblinking, uncompromising, as relentlessly themselves as the lady seemed to be.
“How do I know that you won’t use my Name against me if I ever do find it out?” he said.
The lady smiled at him gently. “It’s simple enough to guard against, Herewiss,” she said. “You have only to use the drug to find out Mine.”
The look of incalculable power and utter vulnerability that dwelt in her eyes in that moment struck straight through him, inflicting both amazement and pain upon him. Tears started suddenly to his eyes, and he blinked them back with great difficulty. Full of sorrow, he reached out and took her hand.
“None of us have any protection against that last Death, have we,” he said.
“None of us,” said the innkeeper. “Not even She. Her pain is greatest; She must survive it, and watch all Her creation die.”
Herewiss held her hand in his, and shared the pain, and at last managed to smile through it.
“If I find my Name, I will tell you,” he said. “I swear by the Altars, and by Earn my Father, and by my breath and life, I’ll pay the price.”
She smiled at him. “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll give you the drug to take with you tomorrow morning.”
A silence rested between them for a few minutes; they rested within it.
“And if I should in my travels come across your Name,” Herewiss said, “well, it’ll be my secret.”
“I never doubted it,” she said, still smiling. “Thank you.”
For a while more they sat in silence, and both of them gazed into the fire, relaxed. Finally the lady stretched a bit, arching her back against the chair. The shimmer of starlight moved with her as she did so, endless silent volumes of stars shifting with her slight motion. She looked over at Herewiss with an expression that was speculative, and a little shy. He looked back at her, almost stealing the glance, feeling terribly young and adventurous, and nervous too.
“Let’s pretend,” he said, very softly, “that you’re the Goddess—”
“—and you’re My Lover—?”
“Why not?”
“Why not indeed? After all, You are—”
“—and You are—”
—and for a long time, They were.
***
Something awoke Herewiss in the middle night. He turned softly over on his side, reaching out an arm, and found only a warm place on the bed where She had been. Slowly and a little sadly he moved his face to where Hers had lain on the pillow, and breathed in the faint fragrance he found there. It was sweet and musky, woman-scent with a little sharpness to it; a subtle note of green things growing in some patterned place of running waters, sun-dappled beneath birdsong. He closed his eyes and savored the moment
through his loneliness; felt the warmth beneath the covers, heard the soft pop of a cooling ember, breathed out a long tired sigh of surrender to the sweet exhaustion of having filled another with himself And despite the empty place beneath his arm, that She in turn had filled so completely with Herself, still he smiled, and loved Her. With all the men and women in the world to love, both living and yet unborn, She could hardly spend much time in one place, or seem to.
He got up, then, moving slowly and carefully with half-closed eyes so as not to break the pleasant half-sleep, half-waking state he was experiencing Herewiss wrapped a sheet around himself, went out of the room and padded ghost-silent down the hall to listen at the next door down. Nothing. He pushed the door gently open, went in, closed it behind him. Lorn was snoring faintly beneath the covers.
Herewiss eased into the bed behind Freelorn, snuggled up against his back, slipped an arm around his chest; Freelorn roused slightly, just enough to hug Herewiss’s arm to him, and then started snoring again.
Herewiss closed his eyes and sank very quickly into sleep, dreaming of the shadowed places in the Bright-wood, and of serene eyes that watched eternally through the leaves.
***
When Herewiss came down to breakfast, Freelorn was there before him, putting away eggs and hot sugared apples and guzzling hot minted honey-water as if he had been up for hours. This was moderately unusual, since Freelorn almost never ate breakfast at all. More unusual, though, was the fact that he was up early, and looked cheerful—he was usually a late riser, and grumpy until lunchtime.
Herewiss sat down next to him, and Freelorn grunted by way of saying hello. “Nice day,” he said a few seconds later, around a mouthful of food.
“It is that.” Herewiss looked up to see Dritt and Moris come in together. Dritt was humming through his beard, though still out of tune, and Moris, usually so noisy in the mornings, went into the kitchen silently, with a look on his face that made Herewiss think of a cat with more cream in his bowl than he could possibly finish.
Herewiss reached over to steal Freelorn’s mug, and a gulp’s worth of honey-water. “Is she making more?”
Freelorn nodded. “Be out in a minute, she said.”
Segnbora came down the stairs, pulled out the chair next to Herewiss, and sat down with a thump. She looked tired, but she smiled so radiantly at Herewiss that he decided not to ask her how it had been.
“Did you give her our best?” Freelorn asked, cleaning his plate.
“It was mutual, I think.”
Freelorn chuckled. “I dare say. Where are Lang and Harald?”
“They’ll be down—they were washing up a few minutes ago.”
“Good. We should get an early start—if we’re going to find this place of yours, I want to hurry up about it. And I would much rather see it in daylight.”
“Lorn, I doubt it’s any worse at night.”
“Everything is worse at night. With one exception.”
“Is that all you ever think about?”
“Well, there is something else, actually. But it’s easier to make love than it is to make kings.”
Lang came thumping down the stairs and sat down across from Segnbora. “How was it?”
“Oh please! It was fine.”
“This hold,” Lang said, “will we be seeing it tomorrow?”
“If the directions I got are right.”
(They are,) Sunspark said from the stable. (Tomorrow easily. I can feel the place from here.)
“Before nightfall?”
“I think so.”
“Good.”
“I wish you people wouldn’t worry so much,” Herewiss said. “It’s not haunted, as far as I can tell.”
“—which can’t be far. Nobody will go near the place! Morning, Harald.”
“Morning.” Harald sat down across from Herewiss. “How was she, then?”
Segnbora sighed at the ceiling. “She was fine. Twice more and I can stop repeating myself…”
“Can you blame us for being curious? I mean, a lady like that—” But as Lang said it, the smile on his face caught Herewiss’s eye. A little reflective, that smile, and reminiscent, almost wistful.
The kitchen door swung open, and Dritt and Moris and the innkeeper came out laden with trays; more eggs, more steaming honey-water and hot apples, with a huge bowl of wheat porridge and a pile of steamed crabs from the river. They put the things down, and as the grabbing and passing commenced, Herewiss looked over the heads of Freelorn’s people to catch the lady’s eye.
She was back in her work-day garb, the plain home-spun shirt and breeches, the boots, the worn gray apron; her hair was braided again into a crown of coiled plaits. Though she was no less beautiful, she seemed to have doffed her power, and Herewiss began to wonder whether much of their night encounter mightn’t have been a dream provoked by good wine. But she returned his glance, and smiled, winking at him and patting one of her pockets, which bulged conspicuously. Then back she went into the kitchen.
Herewiss reached for a mug of honey-water, and a plate to put eggs on.
“How was it?” Dritt said to Segnbora.
Segnbora smiled grimly and put a fried egg down his shirt.
***
When it was time to go, they gathered outside the door that faced the ferry, and the innkeeper brought out their horses. First Lang’s and Dritt’s, then Harald’s and Moris’s, and then Segnbora’s and Freelorn’s. Herewiss watched as the lady spoke a word or two in Segnbora’s ear, and when Segnbora smiled back at her, shyly, with affection, Herewiss felt something odd run through him. A pang, a small pain under the breastbone. He laughed at himself, a breath of ruefulness and amusement. Why am I feeling this way? Am so selfish that I can’t stand the thought of someone else sharing Her the same night I did? What silliness. After last night, I’m full in places I didn’t even know were empty. Such joy—to know that the Goddess Who made the world and everything in it is holding you and telling you that She loves you, all of you, even the parts that need changing— I should rejoice with Segnbora, for from the look on her face this morning, she’s known the joy too…
The lady brought out Sunspark last of all. To judge by the arch of his neck and the light grace of his walk, he was in remarkably good temper. When Herewiss took the reins, the lady bent her head close to his.
“It’s in the saddlebag,” she said. “Remember me.”
“I will.”
“I’ll remember you. You understand me—somewhat better than most.” And she smiled at him; reflective, that smile, reminiscent, even wistful.
Herewiss swung up onto Sunspark’s back; the others were already ahorse, awaiting him.
“Good luck to you all,” said the innkeeper, “and whatever your business is in the Waste, I hope you come back safe.”
They bade her farewell in a ragged but enthusiastic chorus, and rode off to the ferry. There was not much talk among them until they crossed the river; though Sunspark bespoke Herewiss smugly as they waited for the second group to make the crossing.
(The lady is likely to lose her guests’ horses, the way she keeps her stable,) it said.
(Oh?)
(She left my stall open. Did you know there are wild horses hereabouts?)
(It wouldn’t surprise me.)
(And what horses! Look.)
Herewiss closed his eyes and slipped into Sunspark’s mind. It was twilight there, and the plain to the west was softly limned and shadowed by the rising Moon. Standing atop a rise like a statue of ivory and silver, motionless but for the wind in the white mane and the softly glimmering tail, there was a horse. A mare.
(How beautiful,) Herewiss said. (So?)
(It was an interesting evening.)
(I thought you didn’t understand that kind of union,) Herewiss said.
(The body has its own instincts, it would seem,) Sunspark answered, with a slow inward smile. (It will be interesting to try on a human body and see what happens….)
Herewiss withdrew, with ju
st a faint touch of unease. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be involved in the experiment that Sunspark was proposing.
(But there was something more to it all than that,) Sunspark went on, sounding pleased and puzzled both at once. (When first I saw … her … I thought she was of my own kind, for she was fire as well. And I was afraid, for I am not yet ready for that union which ends in glory, in the dissolution of selves and the emergence of progeny. Yet … there was union … in glory even surpassing that of which I have been told. And I am still one….)
(What happened to the mare?)
(Oh, she lived,) Sunspark said with a flick of its golden tail.
(By your standards or by mine?)
(Yours. Even had things not gone as they did, I would have been far too interested to have consumed her.)
(I’m glad to hear it….)
Herewiss opened his eyes to watch Segnbora, Dritt, and Freelorn approach, pulling on the ferry-rope. Dritt was facing back toward the opposite bank, looking at the lone figure that stood and watched them. Experimentally, Herewiss reached out with his underhearing. He caught a faint wash of sorrow from Dritt, overlaid and made bearable by an odd sheen of bright memory. Then the perception was gone.
Something was strange. When the group was assembled again and once more riding eastward into the rocky flats, Herewiss rode up to Freelorn’s side and beckoned him apart.
“A personal question, Lorn—” he said softly.
“Yes, I did.”
“Did what?”
“Sleep with her last night.” He said it a little guiltily, shooting a glance at Segnbora out of the corner of his eye. “Before she did, I guess. And let me tell you, she was—”
“Please, Lorn.”
“Listen, I didn’t—I mean—”
“Lorn, how long has it been since something like that mattered with us? You love me. I know that. I have no fears.”
“Yes, well …“
“Besides,” Herewiss said, grinning wickedly, “so did I.”