“It’s a thought. How close are they, Spark?”
(Some miles. You have time to finish that, at least.)
“All right. Watch that door…“
(Oh,) Sunspark said dryly, (if anything comes out of it, you’ll know shortly…)
Herewiss thought of slime and the smell of burning, and stropped harder.
***
The polished outer walls of the hold had a walkway recessed into the top surface, a double noncrenellated battlement, accessible by a long flight of those oddly staggered steps which led up from the inner courtyard. Herewiss leaned on the outer battlement and watched Freelorn and his people approaching. Sunspark, beside him, wavered palely in the sunlight like heat-shimmer above a pavement in summer.
“Look at all those mules. I wonder who he stole them from?”
Sunspark made a don’t-know-don’t-care feeling. (There’s something,) it said, (something that I couldn’t catch while they were further away—can you hear it?)
Herewiss reached out with his underhearing. Because of his fatigue, all he got was a faint confused impression of a number of emotional systems going about their business, and a fainter one of two specific systems somewhat at odds with themselves.
“Slight unease,” he said to Sunspark. “I’m a bit off today, and I don’t usually do too well anyhow unless I’m at close range. They’re half a mile away.”
Sunspark shrugged. (Freelorn,) it said, (and Segnbora, I think.)
Herewiss nodded slowly. “It didn’t take long for what I saw to start happening, alas. This isn’t good, Spark, their negative emotions are going to fray at the binding—”
(Work on Freelorn, then,) Sunspark said. (You would anyway—)
Herewiss caught a sudden pang of jealousy, a flurry of angry, swift-moving brilliances like swords flashing in sunlight. Sunspark was trying to conceal it, and Herewiss laughed softly.
“I bet you’d like to burn him.”
The elemental flinched away in chagrin. (I would,) it admitted.
“I think I’d have been suspicious if you hadn’t wanted to. We all do as our natures dictate, Spark. I know it’s hard for you to understand how I can love you both, but believe me, I can, and I love neither of you the less for loving the other more—”
(I’m not sure I understand this.) Sunspark sounded ashamed.
“Trust me, Spark. I will not give you up for him.”
(Neither will you give him up for me—)
“That’s right, little one. Firechild, trust me. You haven’t done wrong yet by doing so. Nor have I,” he added with a gentle smile, “in trusting you. By rights and the Pact you could have parted company with me after you saved me from the hralcin.”
(It would seem,) Sunspark said, smiling back, (that there are some things more important than even the Pact. Do what needs to be done, loved. I’ll be within call till this evening.)
It vanished. Herewiss looked over the wall at Freelorn, alone at the head of the approaching line, and went down the stairs to meet him.
At the bottom of the stairs Herewiss paused, slightly irritated by the sight of the dust lying thick all over the courtyard’s polished gray paving. He was usually a tidy sort, but lately there had been too much to do—swords to be forged, doors to be looked through. And then the hralcin had come. He thought of cleaning the courtyard now, but he was too tired to want to do it by sorcery, and he didn’t have a broom.
He walked across the court to where there appeared to be a solid wall, facing west. It was only a small illusion, rooted in where the wall would have liked to be, where it had been before Sunspark disposed of it. The illusion, which he’d erected earlier in the month, was a sop to his own insecurities. It made him nervous to live alone, or nearly alone, in a hold that had a great gaping hole in it. Herewiss looked up at the wall, reached out with his arms, and spoke the word that severed the connection between was-once and seems-to-be-now. The wall went away.
Freelorn and his people were very close, and Herewiss leaned against the wall and waited for them. They’re all there; thank You, Goddess. I couldn’t cope with one of Lorn’s guilts right now, if one of them had been hurt or killed. Or my own, now that I think of it…
Blackmane whickered a greeting at Herewiss as Freelorn dismounted. No Lion coat? Interesting! Herewiss thought as Freelorn hurried over to him, his eyes anxious. Freelorn reached out hesitantly, took Herewiss’s hands in his and gripped them hard. They stood that way for a long moment, each of them searching the other with his eyes, almost in fear.
“Well,” Freelorn said, gazing at the ground and pushing the dust around with one booted toe, “I’m back.”
Herewiss reached out and drew Freelorn close, and hugged and kissed him hard.
For a few minutes they just hung on to one another, sniffling slightly. “I, uh,” Freelorn said, his voice muffled by talking into Herewiss’s tunic, “I was—oh, Dark, loved, you know how I am when I can’t get my way.”
“It’s not as if I wasn’t being stubborn myself. Or snide—Lorn, I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” Freelorn gave Herewiss a great bone-cruncher of a hug and then held him away, peering at him with concern. “Are you all right? You look as if somebody smote you a good one in the head. And look at your eyes, they have circles under them.”
“Smote me—” Herewiss laughed. “I feel like it. It’s been a busy week. Come on in, I’ll tell you about it later.” He looked at Freelorn, noticing something that hadn’t been there before, a look of tiredness and discomfort and depression. “Are you all right?” he asked.
The expression on Freelorn’s face partook of both relief and loathing. “Later,” he said. “It’s been a lively month.”
Freelorn’s people were leading their horses into the courtyard, and as Herewiss glanced toward them he saw Segnbora passing through the gate. Her expression was hard to make out clearly, for the late Sun was behind her; but she looked pained, and puzzled as well. Herewiss looked back at Freelorn, took him gently by the arm and began to walk back into the hold with him.
“Lorn, where did all those mules come from?”
“Osta.”
“You did go ahead, then—”
“Yes indeed.”
They passed into the coolness of the hold. “And you made it out all right.”
“It’s just as I told you, no one knew about the secret way in from the river. We didn’t even have to kill any of the guards. By the way, we brought a plains deer in with us. Didn’t see any reason why we should use up your supplies.”
“You always were a considerate guest. Lorn, what are all the mules for?”
“I was getting to that. They’re for the money.”
Herewiss led Freelorn into the great lower hall, and they sat down beside the firepit in chairs that Sunspark had brought in from the village to the north. “Six mules? How much did you get?”
Freelorn made a smug, pleased face. “Eight thousand talents of silver.”
“Eight thou— You mean you went into the Royal Treasury and stole all that money and got away again?”
“I didn’t steal it,” Freelorn said with mock-righteousness. “It’s my money.”
“My Goddess, maybe I should listen to you more,” Herewiss said, reaching down for a brown earthenware bottle and the lovers’-cup. “Lorn, you should’ve killed the guards. It’d be kinder than what Cillmod’s probably doing to them.” He broke the seal on the bottle-stopper, opened the jug and poured.
“Maybe. But I have the money now. We can have a revolution.”
“Just like that,” Herewiss said with a laugh, and drank from the cup. “May we be one, my loved.” He passed it on to Freelorn.
“As is She.” Freelorn drank, and his eyes widened. “Lion’s Name, this tastes like Narchaerid.”
“It is.”
“South slope, too. Mother of Everything, it’s like so much red velvet. What year?”
Herewiss held up the jug to look at the bottom. “Ninety-two, it says.”
“Dark, what am I worrying about the year for? How are you getting that out here?”
Herewiss flicked an amused glance at the fire pit. An ordinary fire appeared to be blazing there, but the pattern of the flames had repeated twice since they’d been there. “I have my sources,” he said.
“Well, whatever. How long can a revolution take, anyway? You should hear the kind of things going on in Arlen. The people are getting sick of Cillmod. It was a bad year at harvest, there were omens and portents: sheep miscarrying and two-headed calves being born, and fruit dying on the trees before it was ripe—” Freelorn drank deeply, and his eyes over the rim of the cup were troubled. “In a lot of the little villages we passed through, everyone was hungry a lot of the time. It’s bad back home.…“
“Well, the reason is obvious—”
“Of course.”
“After all, not even Cillmod is stupid enough to go into Lionhall,” Herewiss said. “And he hasn’t been enacting the rites of the royal priesthood, even if he knows them—”
“That wasn’t the reason I meant.”
Herewiss raised his eyebrows.
“Me,” Freelorn said, very quietly, studying his cup.
Herewiss looked at his loved.
“Me,” Lorn said, not looking up. “Dusty, they’re starving because of me, because of what I was scared to do.” He laughed just once, a sound so low and bitter that it twisted in Herewiss like a knife. “Because I was afraid to get caught and put on a rack, afraid to spend a few days dying…. There was a village—it was five houses and two cows, and acres and acres of stubble. It hadn’t rained for months, and nothing would grow but a few radishes. The people—there were only about four of them left, all the others had starved or left—they came out and offered us hospitality. Radish soup. They were all thin as rails, and one of them, this little old man, was lying in the house on a straw pallet, dying of starvation. They had all been giving him their food, trying to keep him alive, but it was too late, he was too far gone.”
Lorn took a swallow of wine. “I think he suspected who I was. He asked if I would bless him. I did, and he died. Right there…. Then I found out he was twenty-two. I’d thought he was those people’s father. He was their son. How many days, weeks, had he been dying?…”
“Oh, Lorn—”
“No,” Freelorn said, looking up at Herewiss through the tears. “Don’t try to make it better. It can never be better.” He stared at his cup again. “And I don’t want it to be. How many other deaths like that am I going to have to make good to the Goddess after I die? I’m the Lion’s Child. Their deaths are mine. And there was what She said to me at the Tavern…”
Herewiss kept silent. After a few breaths, shaking his head, Lorn said, “No more running. No more. All the other reasons, the Arlene lords getting restless and wanting a real king again, Cillmod botching his relations with Darthen, the queen being in trouble, her armies getting demolished by Reavers down Geraithe way, and her nobles starting to become willing to support me—none of it matters. None of it matters but that man’s head in my lap. The poor cracked voice saying, ‘The King is back.’”
Freelorn was quiet for a few seconds. “That was mostly why I came back so quickly,” he said. “There were other places we could have hidden all this money. Darthen, in particular. But I had to come back and tell you: I can’t stay here with you. I have to turn around and go back. Even if I die of it. Which I may. No, let me finish. Cillmod’s forces have been overrunning the borders of Darthen, raiding for food. He may be ignoring the Oath of Lion and Eagle, but I can’t. I have to move to defend Darthen. Even if I have to do it by myself.” He smiled, wistfully, and with pain. “It’s what a king would do. Though I’m not sure where to go from there.…”
Herewiss reached out, took Freelorn’s hand and held it. “I just wanted to say that I missed you,” he said. “And I’m sorry we fought. And sorrier that I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt when you said you could pull off the Osta business. But seeing you now, hearing you… I can’t say I’m sorry about that.”
Freelorn looked at Herewiss and smiled. “Nor I,” he said. “It’s all right.” And he handed Herewiss the lovers’ cup. “We’re one, loved.”
“So may it be.” Herewiss drank off the cup in three or four swift draughts and looked at it with satisfaction. “Let’s get a little sozzled,” he said, “and I’ll tell you my news after dinner.”
“You mean I’m going to have to be drunk to believe it?”
Herewiss chuckled and poured more wine.
***
A long while later Herewiss and Freelorn and all his following sat around the fire pit, in various states of repletion. The stripped-down carcass of the desert deer was still on the spit. The fire in the pit had died down to a soft glow of embers, with only an occasional tongue of flame showing. Most of Freelorn’s people were half-dozing in their chairs, except for Segnbora, who had pled time-of-moon pains and retired early. Herewiss and Freelorn sat together, apart from the others, cups in hand.
“A hundred and eighty-four permanent doors,” Herewiss was saying wearily. “I gave up trying to count the ones that are here one day and gone the next. A lot of them move around; whole new wings of the building appear and disappear. There are more doors at night than during the daytime, and more than half the doors at any one time show water. But beyond that…” He trailed off.
“None of them was what you were looking for.”
“I can’t make them change,” Herewiss said. “And the closest I’ve come is something that doesn’t bear discussing.”
“No?”
Herewiss considered the wine in the lovers’-cup, breathed in, breathed out, a long moment of decision. “No,” he said. “If there’s a somewhere that men have Flame, I wish them joy of it and good weather, ‘cause I’m never going to get there. Not at this rate.”
“No luck with the swords?”
“I break them,” Herewiss said, fumbling around for the wine-jug and refilling the cup. “I should start a business: HEREWISS S’HEARN. SWORDS BROKEN. NO JOB TOO LARGE OR TOO SMALL.”
Freelorn gazed at him sadly, and Herewiss shook his head and took another drink. “Lorn,” he said softly, “what happened while you were gone?”
“Huh?”
“With Segnbora.”
“That’s one of the problems with having a sorcerer for a loved,” Freelorn said in a resigned voice. “Let me have some of that.”
“Surely. No, Lorn, it’s just the way you looked when you came in, and the way she looked at you…. I’m not blind.”
Freelorn drank some wine, held the cup in his lap. He looked suddenly very tired. “We—were in comfort with each other—it was nice. I fell a little in love with her, I guess. I needed to talk, especially after I left here so mad—though this had been going on to some extent while we were escaping from Madeil, before we got trapped. She was always there to listen, and what I thought seemed to matter to her, really did. So we—got close—but I began to notice that she never told me anything back, not that it says anywhere that you have to, but she never seemed to tell anything about herself. She would listen, but never give—or never really share.”
He drank again. “Well, when I got lonely, I asked her to sleep with me, and she said yes. I guess I thought it might have been different there. But it wasn’t. She still couldn’t share.” His voice grew lower, and the pain of the words scraped it raw. “She was good—she was very good—the way she was very good at listening. But she still couldn’t, didn’t share. Not that she wasn’t responsive, or warm, but there was no—” He gestured with the cup, looking for the right words. Finally he held the cup out to Herewiss to be refilled, and took a long moment’s refuge in the wine. “She couldn’t—I don’t know. She couldn’t let go. Couldn’t trust me. I wanted so much for her to…but she didn’t dare….”
Herewiss sat there and let the silence grow again. And now he uses the pain to punish himself for what he knows to be his part in i
t, he thought. “Was it your fault, Lorn? You sound guilty somehow.”
“No…I don’t know.” Freelorn sighed. “I think maybe I slept with her because I missed you. Instead of you, as it were. Does that make sense?”
“It does. Though, Lorn, don’t sell her short; there are enough good things about her that I’m sure she’s worth sleeping with on her own…”
They sat there in silence for a few moments. Freelorn looked around at the polished gray walls, dim in the faint firelight.
“I wish there was something I could do for you,” he said mournfully.
“Lorn, you’re my loved, you’re my friend. I can live without the Power, but not without friends. And I may have to get used to living without the Power pretty soon—it doesn’t have long to run in me without focus.”
“What we need,” Freelorn said solemnly, “is a miracle.”
Herewiss began to laugh, the kind of laughter that is a breath away from tears.
“No, I mean it,” said Freelorn. “I’m the King’s son of Arlen, descended in right line from Héalhra Whitemane, and by the Goddess if there’s anyone who has a right to ask the Lion for a miracle, it’s me.”
Herewiss laughed until he was weak and his sides hurt, though some small corner of his mind was surprised that he could laugh so hard over something so painful and serious.
“Me,” Freelorn was saying, “I’ll do it. I will.” He finished his cup of wine, and held it out to Herewiss again.
“Haven’t you had enough?” Herewiss said as soon as he gained control of his laughter.
“I’m talking about miracles,” Freelorn said with infinite weariness, “and all you’re interested in is how drunk I am.”
Herewiss poured again for Freelorn. “You throw up and I’ll make you scrub the floor.”
“Throw up! This stuff is like mother’s milk,” Freelorn said, spacing the words with exaggerated care. “Thanks.” He smiled, a small gentle smile strangely at odds with his inebriation. “Come to bed with me tonight?”