She held very still. The nightmare now had the option to retreat It could also answer ritually, or could attack
“How should I fear you?” the nightmare said, sweetly taunting – and its voice was that of Segnbora’s slain otherself, not piteous as during those last moments in Glasscastle, but mocking and cruel. “Rodmistresses in the full of their Power have tried conclusions with me, and you see what happened to them. you?—even focused, and retired from sorcery lest you fail at that too?” It laughed, a sound like bells and poison.
“Be still!” Segnbora said in a voice like a whipcrack. But no power was behind the order, and the nightmare laughed at her, a sound ugly with knowledge.
“You make a fine noise,” it said, flicking its tail insolently. “But all your years’ studies have left you with nothing but knowledge. Spells and tales and sayings – but no Power. Or Power enough – if you dared to use it. Which you don’t!”
She clenched her fists and took a step forward, then stopped, desperately seeking control. (Hasai—!)
“Oh, by all means, call up your ghost,” the nightmare said, stepping forward too, and laughing with the cold merriment of a damned thing. “You don’t dare accept what he has to offer, either. There you are, walking on water, complaining that there’s nothing to drink! And you can’t even make use of what little power you do have. Battles and wars and wreakings pass over you, the earth moves, Glasscastle falls about your ears, and none of it is enough to free you. You’re dead!”
Behind her Segnbora could feel Freelorn wanting to move, and Herewiss holding him still with that same vise-grip in which he had held her at Barachael. The others were frozen, eyes glittering, muscles bound still. Even Sunspark’s flames flowed more slowly than usual. “What a heroine you are,” said the scornful voice. “And dead past all denying. Life gives life. You devour—as surely as I do! Just look at your slug of a leman there.”
The malicious black eyes dwelt on Lang with vast amusement. “He no more dares open himself to you than you do to him. He knows what Eftgan knew: that what you call ‘love’ is nothing but shrieking need. He knows that if he were once to let down his guard, you’d eat him down to the bones like a starving beggar at a banquet and come away unsatisfied, moaning for more.” The nightmare chuckled, the red eyes burning with amusement. “And any hopes he might have of you are vain, for you haven’t opened up to another human being since you were big enough to be stumbled over out in back of the chicken house. Everything that comes out of your mouth is storytelling—everyone’s story but your own. You don’t trust anybody. You don’t trust yourself. And especially you don’t trust yourself with that—what feels like the Fire, and isn’t—”
Humiliation and rage seared through her. Segnbora took another slow step forward, hanging onto the words of the ritual for dear life and not daring to look at Lang. “I may warn thee again: get hence, lest I lay such strictures about thee that from age to age shalt thou lie bound in the never-lightened gulfs—”
“Oh, say the words of the sorcery, for all the good they’ll do,” the nightmare said, baring her yellow teeth in scorn. “As if you of all people could control another aspect of the Devourer! You can’t even manage what lies under the stone at the bottom of your self, festering at the bottom of all your ‘loves’, hating the one who plundered you, taking revenge on anyone else who tries to get in. Freelorn there, he found out what happens to someone who gets closer to you than a sword’s length. There are sharper things to stab a heart with than knives. Why, you even ran across yourself, and didn’t speak six sentences to her before you killed yourself. Pity it didn’t take. There would have been celebrations.” It grinned. “No matter. Shortly there will be—”
Segnbora leaped at the nightmare head-on, grabbing great handfuls of its mane and trying to hold its head away from her. The nightmare plunged and reared, and after a second fastened its teeth into Segnbora’s mailshirt, cracking the links like dry twigs and driving them excruciatingly through padding and breastband, into the breast beneath. It shook her viciously from side to side, as a dog shakes a rat.
With every jerk of its head Segnbora cried out in pain, yet she managed to hold on for some seconds—then let go her right hand’s hold in the mane and grabbed the nightmare’s nose instead, digging her thumbnail deep into the nostril. Now it was the nightmare’s turn to scream: once as she let Segnbora fall, and once again as its backward plunge tore out a great handful of its silken mane.
Segnbora scrambled to her feet, tearing with the pain, doing her best to concentrate on twisting the long hank of mane into a rough cord between her hands. “Are you—so sure?” she gasped as she and the nightmare began to circle one another. “Foolish—letting me get so close. I know how to bind you, child of our Mother. And know how to make an end of you, Power or not. Shortly you’re going to be seeing more of the dark places than you’ll like—”
She sprang again, this time for the nightmare’s flank. It danced hurriedly to one side, but with the second leap Segnbora got astride the nightmare’s back. The nightmare bucked and kicked and reared, leaping in the air and coming down with all four feet together, as a horse does to kill a snake. But Segnbora hung on, legs locked, hands twined in the long mane.
She got one hand down over the nightmare’s nose again, and dug her nails once more into the nostrils. The nightmare screamed, and as it did Segnbora whipped the corded length of mane down and into its mouth. Quickly she brought the ends under its chin and up around its muzzle, and knotted them tight, binding its mouth closed.
The nightmare made a horrendous strangled sound that wanted to be a scream; then turned and raced headlong toward the jagged face of the cliff, intending to buck Segnbora off against the stone. The onlookers scattered out of the way, and Segnbora jumped from its back, rolled, and was on her feet again before the nightmare had time to realize what had happened. Turning to face her again, it reared, menacing her with its hooves. Segnbora ducked to one side and fastened her hands in its mane, pulling. The nightmare grunted and, as she’d hoped it would, jerked away. Too late: Segnbora fell down on the ground again, once again with her hands full of mane.
The nightmare turned and reared. By the time its hooves hit ground, Segnbora had rolled out from under them, and was afoot once more. Her breath came hard, and beneath her mail-shirt the blood was running down her side from a breast bleeding freely and white-hot with pain. But her fear was gone. Nothing was left but wild anger, and the urge to destroy. “I told you,” she said, winding the length of mane between her fists like a garrote. “First the binding—”
The nightmare turned to flee. As it turned tail Segnbora vaulted up over its rump and onto its back, locking her legs tight around it again. Frenzied, the nightmare bucked wildly, but it was no use. This time the cord went around its throat and was pulled mercilessly tight. It plunged and slewed from side to side and tossed its head violently, trying to breathe.
Segnbora hung on, and twisted the cord tighter. The nightmare began to stagger, its eyes bulging out in anguish. Its forelegs gave way next, so that it knelt choking and swollen-tongued on the ground. Segnbora held her seat even at that crazy angle, and pulled the cord tighter still. Finally the rear legs gave, and the nightmare fell on its side. Segnbora slipped free, never easing her stranglehold. The nightmare moved feebly a few times, then lay still.
Holding that cord tight became the whole world, more important even than the agony of Segnbora’s torn breast or the hot blurring of her eyes. She blinked and gasped and hung on as Herewiss and Freelorn and the others ran up and knelt around her.
Lang reached out to her, but Herewiss stopped the gesture. “Is it dead?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.” She could still feel a pulse thrumming feebly through the cord.
“Are you all right?” That was Lang.
“No. Let me be.” The nightmare’s pulse was irregular now, leaping and struggling in its throat like a bird in a snare. How can they look at me? Segnbora thought. It’s al
l true. How can they bear to—
One last convulsive flutter ran through the nightmare’s veins. Then there was stillness under her hands.
Slowly and carefully Segnbora stood up, shrinking away from any hand that tried to help her. The pain in her breast was intense, yet she barely felt it through the pain that hurt worse. Torn again. Torn like – no! Tauëh-stá ‘ae mnek-kej, I don’t want to remember—
She turned and walked away into the darkness beyond the firelight. Her companions stared after her. Their eyes on her retreating back were as unbearable as sun on blistered skin, but still she ignored them.
(A nightmare has no weapon to use but your own darkness.) Herewiss said in her mind, his thought passionless as a leech’s knife. (Resist, and it only cuts deeper.)
She kept walking.
(One night, ‘Berend,) he said. (One night’s pain is all we can spare you. We’ve lost too much time already. Be finished by dawn, or we won’t wait.)
Segnbora shut him out and went off into the bitter night, looking for an end.
THIRTEEN
“Well,” the Goddess said, “your heart didn’t heal straight the last time it broke. So we’ll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.”
Children’s Tales of North Arlen, ed. s’Lange
How long she walked, she had no idea. The stony valley all looked the same. Eventually, she simply sat down and began to weep for life wasted.
At some point the rocky night turned into the night that lay inside her, with stars showing through the great shaft in the roof of her cavern, and the much-muted song of the mdeihei rumbling in the shadows. She didn’t care about them in the slightest, or about the starlight, or the sound of the Sea, or the huge obscure shape of Hasai towering over her in the darkness. She sat hunched up and waited for life to go away.
It wouldn’t, annoyance that it was. A solution occurred to her, but she had no energy for it. And anyway, everything she’d ever done, she’d botched—surely she’d only botch a suicide, too. A life of study without use, learning without wisdom, action without satisfaction, Power without focus, lust without love: what use was any of it? She sat there and tried to bleed to death through the wound above her heart.
“Death is some days ahead of you yet,” said the subdued voice of the Dragon above her, using the precognitive tense.
Annoyed, she leaned gingerly back against the great forelimb, trying not to disturb the blood clotting on her breast, and closed her eyes, squeezing out useless hot tears. “Drop dead,” she said.
“We have done so.”
“Try it again. You missed something the first time.”
“Speak for yourself, sdaha,” the voice of thunder said, its own annoyance and discomfort quite audible.
Tonight, as occasionally happened, she didn’t have to look up at Hasai in order to see him. His eyes burned silver, but they burned low. His talons clenched the stone floor in a painful gesture that made her remember the cave at the Morrowfane.
“I sorrow for your pain,” he said. “But that thing spoke some truth, and you know it. You will not permit us to have what we need, so that we, in turn, may give you what you need. You believe you must do everything yourself. But such perfect self-sufficiency is impossible.”
She shook her head, confused, thinking of what her father used to tell her: You’ll never be able to depend on others, if you can’t first depend on yourself—
Hasai winced at her in Dracon disagreement. “You cannot depend on yourself if you cannot first trust others.”
The words made no sense. Hasai gazed down without moving for a long while, and at last shuffled one huge forelimb back and forth along the floor. “We are you,” he said with terrible intensity. “If you cannot trust us, your trust of yourself will be betrayed every time.”
It was no use. It made no sense.
“Sdaha,” Hasai said, so low it could have passed for a whisper. “What lies beneath your stone that you dare not lay open? What frightens and pains you so that the Shadow would resurrect the memory in the hope you would die of it?”
That got her attention. Lorn was right, she thought. For some reason It genuinely sees me as a threat. If that means I truly have a chance to do It some harm, however small, at Bluepeak—
She leaned sideways and put one hand down upon the smoothed-over stone at the bottom of her mind. It burned hot as flesh beneath a half-healed wound, warning her off. Her insides flinched at the touch of it, and she began to tremble. Under there—
Pain. And the alternative.
Pain, experienced, would stop hurting, she knew. Paradoxical as it seemed, the mdeihei had taught her the truth of that. But will it be so with this pain? Or is the Shadow right to think it will kill me?
She leaned there, shaking. Yet what if It’s wrong? …And there was yet another reason to look under the stone, for if she shied away from this weak spot now, the vulnerability would become deeper still. The Shadow would strike her there again, almost certainly at Bluepeak, when Lorn needed her service the most. She would fail, and fall, perhaps taking her friends with her. Her liege-oath would be broken; the Kingdoms could founder for lack of the enactment of the Royal Bindings, and it would all be down to her.
It’s not fair! She smashed one fist down on the stone. Damn! Damn! Why me? Tauëh-stá ‘ae mnek-kej!
Hasai bent low over her. The dark forms in the shadows leaned in all around her, hearing what passed among them for blasphemy, saying nothing in a darkness that was growing. They could do nothing, be nothing, until she chose. It was all down to her, as she knelt there for what seemed like a long time, in the cold.
“Mdaha,” Segnbora said at last, shaking all over. Slowly, she leaned forward until she was on her hands and knees on the stone. “Mdeihei—”
They leaned in close, the huge form above her, the many indistinct forms in the shadows. She reached behind her, toward Hasai. Wings reached down to shelter her, but it wasn’t shelter she was interested in. Segnbora’s hand found the burning mouth, and jaws closed over it. She pulled those wings down around her, into her, wore them and their body and their heart.
Under the stone, darkness burned. She cocked forward the terrible diamond razors of the wings’ forefingers, intent on the place where her deepest anguish lay. “My mdeihei, this is what you wanted. And what I want now. If we die of it…”
A roar of defiance and challenge went up from the gathered generations.
“Mnek-é,” she whispered: I remember. Her talons raked down and laid her soul bare at last. Stone peeled away, and her control went with it. Night fell.
***
Her nuncle, of course. Nuncle Bal was in and out of the old house at Asfahaeg all the time, busy around the land—gardening, cutting trees, planting new ones. She had watched him about his business often enough, and sometimes she’d noticed him looking at her for a long time. She wondered sometimes whether he was lonely and wanted to play, but she never quite got around to making friends with him. There was too much else to do.
She had the Fire, a lot of it, and pretty soon they were going to send her away to a real school where you learned to do magic with it, instead of just simple body-fixings and underspeech, which were all the Rodmistress down in town would teach her. At the school they’d make her a Rod of her own, and she’d be able to do all kinds of things.
In the meantime, there were lessons and exercises to make the Fire grow, and she was busy with those. In fact, she had stumbled by herself on one special exercise that gave her the same tingling excitement that the Fire did, though in a slightly different way. When she showed her new method to Welcaen, her mother had laughed and praised her, and told her it was fine to enhance the Fire thus, but that she shouldn’t forget to be private when she did it. The most private spot she could think of was the hiding place behind the old chicken house, where the willows’ branches hung down all around, making a dusky green cave. And that was where she had spent most of that warm spring day, delightedly touching hersel
f in that special secret place—until Nuncle Bal came brushing through the downhanging branches and stopped in surprise, to stand there staring at her.
Her mother had told her that usually it was not polite to be naked with someone unless you had agreed on it beforehand. Not knowing how Nuncle Bal felt about it, she pulled her smock back down and smiled at him.
“Hi,” she said.
He smiled back, and all of a sudden she felt cold inside, because there was something wrong with the way he was smiling. Confused, she put out her underhearing and listened.
What she heard made her so scared that she couldn’t pull it back again, couldn’t even move. She never heard anything like this before. Her mother and father when they shared—she knew that feeling. It was warm: a filling-and-being-filled feeling. She wasn’t sure what they were doing, exactly, but it wasn’t this. The feeling that went with this was cold: a wanting, and wanting-to-be-in-something. It was hungry, just hungry enough to take—
He was letting the rake fall against the willow trunk, and she was getting really scared now, so that she started to jump up and run away. But he was right in front of her already, and he grabbed her hard around the throat with one hand, and covered her mouth with the other. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to scream, to cry, but there wasn’t any air. Her ears started to ring and everything went red in front of her.
Nuncle Bal seemed to be saying something, but she couldn’t tell what it was through the red, the black, the roaring. She fell backward into the darkness, silently begging oh please, let it be a bad dream. Let me wake up, please!
After a while the roaring went away some. It was a dream, she began to think, and then heard his voice, thick, low and hungry. “You want it,” he said. Her eyes came open. She saw his twisted smile, shuddered, and squeezed them shut again. “You want it. Sure you want it.”
He was doing something to her smock. What was he— “Mamaaaaa!” she started to scream, tears starting to her eyes. But before she could get the scream out that hand came down on her throat again. The red, the roaring, oh no, pleeeeeeeease –