The Girl and the Guardian

  And there, in the rising moonlight, she saw Korman also, pressed cruelly into the thorns, standing or hanging at the Lady’s side, his undertunic torn and stained, and blood coming from the fresh puncture wounds in brow, neck, wrists and ankles, through which the Mother Thorn now controlled his life, feeding into his veins what was necessary, keeping him awake or in a coma as it wished. And strangely, his sword stood embedded in the ground before him. Both captives had closed eyes, but they seemed to stare at the world and look down on her, by some sense other than sight.

  She slipped off the back of the serpent and cried with great choking sobs. Thornfoot glided round and round the alcove, snapping at nothing, in some altered state of his own, as if he had slipped back into madness to hide from the pain. And, lurking just behind Korman’s feet in the dry thornlitter was a little creature no one had remembered, and it shivered in the dark, and snapped at any insects that came near him.

  Hidden in the dark secret passage in the thorns, Hithrax waited, but a silver mist covered Shelley and Thornfoot from his sight, just as it had Korman – at first. They were walking in Faery, though they did not know it, yet Korman and the Lady were still prisoners there, in the thorns, as if their plight was somehow part of both worlds.

  ‘Goodbye for now, Korman! I’m going to look for Ürak Tara. I’ll try not to let you down. Sorry, I lost Bootnip. But I will be back!’ she whispered. ‘And goodbye, Lady! You are the most beautiful being in this whole world. One day, you’ll be able to talk to me and hold me in your arms, and make everything all right again.’

  Then she had a clear flash of Goddess-insight, as when she saw all those things in the mindstone in Barachthad’s cave, or when she was in the Crystal Lotus on the summit of Baldrock. She said, ‘Now the Fire and the Rose are one – Korman of the fiery sword, and the Lady who is the Rose of Aeden. Though they stand in the darkness, the power of their union will light the way for the Kortana.’ And she was glad, knowing that she was speaking of herself.

  Before she left the alcove of suffering, Shelley went to the sword, wondering why the Aghmaath had not taken it, and tried to pull it out of the ground. A jolt of power went through her body, but it did not burn her as it had Hithrax; instead, she was energised from head to foot. In that moment she understood: the sword Arcratíne was a living crystal, related to the Arcra, and there in the heart of darkness it stood for the lost Arcra, linking Heaven and the Zagonamara through Korman and the Lady in a circuit of power, keeping the life of Aeden from dying as the darkness grew. But it could not take the place of the Arcra forever; it was not built for it, and sooner or later the Aghmaath would find a way to take or destroy it.