No time to wait for Herewiss to come back, Segnbora thought, shaking all over. Just have to do it myself—
Hurriedly she knelt and took Skádhwë two-handed, resting the point a shade to the left of her breastbone. Mdaha, she said, and in that moment was informed by her ahead-memory that Herewiss was not going to be healing her…
Oh wonderful! Sithesssch!
Sdaha—
Sehe’rae!
And she pushed the sword in, hard.
The greedy shadowblade slid into her with shocking ease. At last Segnbora found out what it was like to be run through, and tried to scream past the terrible feeling of her heart shuddering around the intruding blade, trying to beat, trying to beat, failing. All that came out of her throat was a choked cough.
Inside, she felt her Fire leap together with her heart’s blood and burst outward. Blind with pain, she groped for support, willing herself to stand and do what she had to. But she found no support. The darkness went red, and then black, and she fell forward….
***
…a long fall, the longest one, but it had an end. There was a voice crying Get up! Get up!, the voice of someone familiar. Her mother perhaps, or Eftgan. Had she overslept again? The Wardress would be furious—
She was lying on something hard. She rolled over to push herself up on her hands and knees, feeling the sword in her fist. Probably one of those rocks the Dragon’s thrashing had dislodged had hit her in the head. She felt weak and stumbly. She pushed upward, shook her head to clear the daze out of it, looked up.
A pang of terror twisted in her heart like a knife of ice. This was no cave. True, there was empty darkness all around, but before her stood two doorposts blacker than any night, going up and up forever, out of sight. Between them stars blazed—endless depths of them, a patient silent glory she had seen before in dreams and visions, but never for real. This was the last Door, the Door into Starlight.
No, I’m not ready! she cried, staggering to her feet. But her protests made no difference to the insistent forces shoving at her back. They were stronger than she. They impelled her, whispering to her that it was over, that her struggles were done.
The Shore! she thought with longing. Mother and Father. Lang! Tears rose at the thought of him, at the image of his last confused grab for the ledge. Loved, I have a great deal to tell you. Maybe it’s not too late.
But something was wrong. There was a great silence in her mind that shouldn’t have been there.
Hasai? she said, letting herself be pushed toward the Door as she searched in mind for him. You’re dead. Are you there too?
No answer.
I’m not going! Segnbora thought, on the very threshold. But she had no way to stop herself. She was being pushed too hard, and she was holding something in one of her hands. A darkness….
Swift as thought she used the last-chance block that Shíhan had taught her was for emergency use only. One hand on the hilt, the other bracing the steel from behind.
Segnbora screamed with agony in that eternal silence as Skádhwë, ramming against the impermeable blackness from which it had been torn, sliced deep into her hands. The darkness shoving at her back was merciless, and cared nothing about her anguish. Through her sick pain, Segnbora realized who was pushing her closer to the Door. She fought back, feeling her blood flow from hands and heart. There was something she needed to remember. Something—
I am Who I am. And knowing that, It has no power over me.
Dismay ran through the force that urged her forward. She forced it back and back, arching herself, and then fell backwards, gasping. Skádhwë fell soundlessly to the invisible floor. Slowly and painfully, she got to her knees, picked Skádhwë up, and stood. It might indeed be her fate to die after she had finished what she had to do. But we’ll deal with this first, she thought, and turned.
Had she been breathing, the breath would have caught in her throat. He was huge, looming above her, dressed in the old clothes he wore while gardening. The big hard hands, stained with leaf-mold and rough with calluses, reached out to her.
“No!” she whispered, and almost turned to flee. But there was only one way to run—through the Door and out of life.
That terrible smile leaned closer.
“No!” she said. It was a squeaked word. A little girl’s voice, terrified, but still defiant.
The smile lost some of its certainty.
“No,” she said again, more strongly, her voice sounding strange in the utter silence. She raised her head, met those hungry eyes, held them…held them.
He was not as large as he had been. Certainly he was no larger than any other man. He was smaller, in fact, than many she had killed at one time or another.
Raising Skádhwë, she took a step forward and watched the fear spread across his face. Balen had used brute strength to overwhelm the child she had been, but she was a child no longer. He was unarmed, and she was armed with a weapon against which there was no defense. Another step she took, and he backed away. She almost took the final step, but paused. It would be easy to kill him, yes. Possibly enjoyable.
But for how long? Would this be just another form of running away? If she should instead accept him—
Kill him! her heart said to her.
I give him into your hands, her heart said to her. Do with him what you will.
The great silence on this side of the Door surrounded her.
Even he didn’t kill me, she thought.
She lifted her eyes to Balen again. Trembling, he shot her a terrified glance. In that blunt and brutal face, she saw again what she had seen in Lang, and Herewiss, and Freelorn, and even the Fyrd.
Her.
HerSelf.
Segnbora tossed Skádhwë away.
Very slowly, even with fear, she went to the man, reached out to touch his shoulders. He winced at the touch, as if gentleness burned him.
“Goddess,” she said. “Shadow. I know Who You are.”
Balen looked at her face, and then looked away again in anguish. Segnbora couldn’t bear such terror. She reached out to take his face in her hands.
“Balen,” she said, speaking the name aloud for the first time in her life.
He blinked in confusion.
“I seem to be getting a lot of practice at being others, these days,” she said. “First Dragons… then Myself. I see that this is what the practice was for. To see You for what You are. Just Her, in another suit. A tool to make me what I am, no less than the beautiful face and the ever-filled cup were tools. You were a little rougher on me than you might have been, perhaps. You were the sword. But my hand was on the hilt. I destroy. And I create…” She gulped, feeling tears start. “Time I got started. I’ve bound you into my life all this time, my poor rapist. Enough of it. Go free.”
He squinted at her in terrified disbelief.
“Beloved,” she said. “Go free.”
Drawing him close, shaking all over, she laid her lips on his, once and gently. Then she hugged him tight. When she opened her arms, he was gone.
Weak from the sudden release of so much emotion, Segnbora sat down hard on the invisible surface and wiped her eyes, then realized that the wetness on her hands was more than tears. The weakness, too, probably had something to do with her heart’s blood running down her surcoat.
Oh Goddess, I forgot, she thought, getting dizzier by the moment. Blood loss. I have to get back there. Where’s Skádhwë? I can’t leave it…
Fumbling, falling to hands and knees again, she began feeling around for the blade. Against the dark floor, this was like looking for clear glass in water. The dizziness got worse. She reeled; her sight forsook her. Perhaps she was starting to die.
The sudden pain, an infinitesimally thin line of it, told her she had found Skádhwë again. Grateful for the hint, she grabbed it hard, using the pain to shock herself awake, although she was half dead already.
She pushed herself upright…
***
…on the cold snow, and opened h
er eyes. All around her men and women were covering their faces in horror of something that was coming. She had to get up. Where was Skádhwë?… still sheathed. Good.
Left-handed she fumbled for something with which to support herself, and found a stone. She levered herself up to her knees and managed to stand, though a wobbly stance it was, and probably very temporary. She drew Skádhwë, and saw with dismay that it was covered with blood. Shíhan, were he here, would be scandalized! If you must die, do it with a clean blade, he’d always said. She whipped the blood off the blade in a quick downward slash, third move of the edelle maneuver—
—and Fire whipped down after it.
I am dead, she thought in absolute disbelief, and lifted the sword to stare at it. Fire, raging blue and as impossible to look at as sunlight, trickled down Skádhwë’s black edge. Just a double-thread at first, and then more. It grew quickly, a torch’s worth of Fire, a Firebrand’s worth, a lightningbolt in her hands, burning like a star, throwing her shadow long and black against the cliff.
I have it! she thought in fierce joy, for that one mad moment not caring that she was about to die. She stared backwards at her shadow, the proof of the light—shortlegged, long of neck, wings where she had arms. I’m whole, she thought, and laughed, raising the hand that held Skádhwë. The right wing stretched upward, huge. No! We’re whole! The left arm up now; the wing reached up in response. We may die, sithesssch, but we’ll do it together!
—and abruptly, with a deathpain that shot down her right arm to her heart, that wing-shadow tore away from the cliff, casting a shadow of its own, impossibly coming real –
The second wing tore free, another pain. She saw webs that gleamed like polished onyx and struts rough with black sapphires. Then came the terrible length of tail, the deadly spine at the end of it whipping free, lashing outward, poised above her to protect. And after the tail, the taloned forelimbs, the diamond talons flashing in the blinding Firelight. A neck, the great head, glowing eyes burning not silver now but blue, leaning down over her and glaring past her with impartial challenge at Reavers and Fyrd and the dark something that approached—
“Hhn’ ae mrin’hen,” said the voice of wind and storm from right above her. “Whole at last, yes!”
She stared up at Hasai, so torn between wonder and terror that she couldn’t tell anymore whether her weakness came from impending death or sheer astonishment. Her mdaha gazed down at her, tilting his head in a gesture of greeting, and turned his attention again to the field and the forces attacking the scarp.
She had heard Dragons roar in her mind. But in the open it was something else. Rocks fell down from the cliff, and the ground shook almost as hard as it had before. Not just one voice roared, but two, ten, a score, a hundred. The mdeihei were there too, not as solidly as Hasai, but present enough to be a host of shifting wings and deadly razor-barbs and glowing, glaring eyes, all looking down at the attackers. They sang of a solution to this problem, one that was, for them, not a solution to be feared—a roaring chorus of frightening harmonies and dissonances: death, death, death!
Hasai reared his head back, bared the diamond fangs that few had ever survived seeing, and flamed.
The Reavers fled, panicked. Hasai’s blast of Dragonfire melted the ground where they had been standing. Even the slow-stalking shadow at the southern edge of the field halted at that, as if stunned. Fyrd scattered in all directions but eastward, where the Sun seemed to be coming up.
The scarp was fenced with fire again, but this time the consuming white of Dragonfire, with a tinge of blue to it; and inside the circle a tremendous shape with wings like thunderclouds was rearing up against the cliff, burning in iron and diamond, ineluctably real. And down by one of his hind talons, hanging onto it for support, a tiny figure bleeding Fire from a wound in the heart stared up and up at what had been, and now was.
Segnbora looked with grim, delighted purpose out at the field, at the fleeing Reavers and Fyrd, and down at the thing in her hand that burned with Fire. “Sithesssch’tdae,” she sang to Hasai and the other mdeihei who stirred in shadow along the ledge, “untidy to leave them running around like this, don’t you think?”
The mdeihei sang angry assent in a thunder that echoed from the surrounding mountains, causing a bass obbligato of avalanches to follow.
“Must we send them rdahaih?” Hasai sang.
Segnbora stepped forward to the edge of the shelf where they stood, only partially aware of Herewiss’s and Freelorn’s prone forms. Breathing or not, they’d have to wait until later. “I don’t know,” she said, and raised Skádhwë, thinking hard.
It can’t be done, they say—a gating for more than fifty. However—
She closed her eyes, not needing the physical ones to see at the moment, and drew up a great flood of Power from the tremendous supply they had always told her she’d have. In mind she saw them, every Fyrd in the valley and for miles around. She hated them, and loved them, and did what was necessary. She poured the Flame out of her as if opening a floodgate, until the valley was awash with it.
It was simple to gather up the minds of every Fyrd in the area and hold them all under the surface of that Flame until they drowned. Stop showing off, she told herself severely. You may drop dead in a moment, and there’s business to be done here. Yet she laughed in pleasure as she thought it, and Hasai and the mdeihei went off in a thunderous accompaniment of hissing Dracon laughter. Whether she lived or died, she was going to enjoy this. She had waited a lifetime for it.
The Reavers and the Arlene mercenaries at the other side of the field were fleeing, and she stared across at them, angry and pleased. She could easily kill them all, but she knew Someone Who would prefer it otherwise, if at all possible.
So, she thought, and reached out in heart to feel them all, every last one, mind and soul together. The Rodmistresses had said it was impossible, but behind her she had a supporting multitude who would testify otherwise if she asked them to. She was that multitude. She could contain universes.
Immersing herself in the minds of her enemies, she became them. Before they had a chance to recover from being her, she stepped to the cliff’s edge and lifted Skádhwë. With it she drew four great slashing lines of Flame that fell onto the darkened field, and grew, and grew—
Suddenly the ground within the lines was missing, replaced by five thousand different images blurred together—some of them of the Arlene countryside, or of Prydon city, some of them of the strange cold country beyond the mountains from which the Reavers came. Into the crammed-together vistas fell men and women who cried out in terror and were gone. She closed the door behind them with a word and a sweep of Skádhwë, and glanced up in thanks at the glowing eyes that hung over her. Then she turned south.
There, something dark stirred in its mantle of blackness and glared utter hatred at her. She looked back at It calmly, having loved It before, and unafraid to do once more what was necessary. She reached out to grasp the forces that Dragons could manipulate, and took one more step forward, right off the edge of the cliff. There she stood on empty air.
“Come out and meet us if you dare!” she cried. The song winding around the words held in it the ultimate challenge: inescapable love. Behind her the mdeihei echoed the song in perilous harmonies, unimpressed by the darkness, unafraid.
Trembling, Segnbora stood there while the Shadow gathered Itself up into that terrible crushing wave she had seen before, full of screams and blood and ancient death. It rose higher and higher above her. She lifted up Skádhwë’s flaming length and stood her ground, letting her eyes sink into the Shadow’s darkness, becoming It, accepting It for her own, her dark side, Her other Shadow.
It trembled toward her—then gathered Itself down into a shuddering ball of fear and thwarted hatred, and vanished.
The wind died abruptly, and the sky began to clear. Four thousand Darthenes stood in an empty field with no one left to fight.
Segnbora took a last gasp of breath and walked back onto the cliff,
beginning to feel mortal again for the first time since she had turned Skádhwë against herself. Behind a rock Eftgan lay breathing shallowly. Beside her, two forms struggled to sit up, helping each other. One of them had an arrow in him, but it didn’t seem to be paining him much. As Segnbora came up to them, the taller of the two reached out to his loved and touched the arrow’s protruding shaft. It vanished in a flicker of Fire, as did the place where it had gone in.
She knelt beside them and laid Skádhwë over her knees— a burning shadow, a piece of the night set on Fire. They stared at it.
“You did it,” Freelorn whispered. “You did it!”
She smiled at him. “All your fault, my liege.”
“But what did you do?” Herewiss was looking at her with such a mixture of joy and perplexity that she could have both laughed and cried at once. “I saw what you did to yourself,” he said. “Why aren’t you dead? And where did Cillmod and all those Reavers go?”
“I sent them home, for the time being.” She looked down at her surcoat, brushed at it. There was a neat tear where Skadhwë had gone in through cloth and mail, but that was all. The scar was a faint white seam just to one side of the nightmare’s bite.
“I told you,” said a great voice above her. “Dragons are quick to heal.”
Silver-blue light fell about her as someone else bent low to look curiously at the place where the shadowblade had gone in. She gazed up at him—her shadow casting a shadow of his own now—and at last, the tears came. She reached up to the tremendous jaw as it dropped open, and very gently laid her hand in the Dragon’s mouth, as she had feared to do, as she would never fear to do again. The jaws closed, and self joined with self.
“Now what, sda’sithesssch?”
“Now, mda’sithesssch,” she said, gathering him close and laughing through the tears that fell on the sapphire hide, “there’s a King to escort to his throne. Let’s get busy!”