The brand rose again without touch and began to whirl, shooting flame into the dark. She glanced at the wall. Was that damned camera still running? “Put that thing back before someone sees it!”
It stopped, then settled with perfect gentleness into the fire bed. “Better?” he asked.
Her heart raced, and tea and ale churned. “Was that demonstration of control designed to reassure me? Because it failed. What are you doing?”
He inhaled, and she thought she saw impatience, frustration, anger—an army of dangerous emotions. Every bit of her flinched, but she made herself meet his eyes.
“All right. I hoped if I just turned up, they’d let me in before they thought about it. Once in, I knew it would be a different game. I didn’t expect the guard on the gate now it’s over.”
“It’s become a habit.”
“A bad one. Once I was stopped, I could only try persuasion. Nothing would work if I stormed my way in. It’s like that night in Surrey Green,” he said, “and you. I need…welcome, Jen.”
“The town’s not going to fall in love with you.” It was an indirect response to his declaration of love, and she saw him note it and put it aside as she had. Their feelings were not the crux of this matter. “What do you mean ‘nothing would work’? What are you trying to do?”
He flexed his hands in a gesture of frustration. “I don’t know. I know I need the town, and I need you. I can pay my way,” he added, almost pathetically. “I’m still a fixer.”
“More than a fixer.”
“True. But I could do only what a fixer did.”
His desperation tormented her. Whatever he’d become, he’d done it for them all—for the town, for Gaia. They should be welcoming him, but a wounded animal is a wounded animal, no matter what the cause.
“If you could pretend to be the old Dan Fixer…” She answered herself. “But you can’t. We all know, or at least guess. You’re a hero of the Hellbane Wars, mighty and to be feared. Do you know they renamed Bond Street Dan Fixer Way?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“But you’re stuck with it.” She eyed him. “Why do I feel comfortable all of a sudden? Is it magic?”
“I don’t think so.”
The relief only lasted a moment. “Are you saying you don’t know? Don’t know what you’re doing?”
“No, not that. But I can’t say there isn’t any…radiance from it. If there is, I can’t do anything about it. Does it matter?”
It was an anxious question, and she didn’t know the answer. She raised her knees and rested her weary head on them. “Explain, Dan. Please. Explain what you’re trying to do.”
He picked up a dead stick, an ordinary one, and poked at the fire. “The remaining fixers are all more or less as I am now. In power. Hellbanes are a powerful potion.”
“Is that why you let everyone think you were dead?”
He nodded. “We had to decide what we’d become before we could decide what to do. We could have disappeared, let everyone think us dead. The thing is some of us are…out of control. Mad, I suppose. But mad with great power. We’re guarding them, but it takes nearly all our resources. Perhaps they’ll heal. If not…”
“You’ll kill them?” She was proud of her calm voice.
“We’ll have no choice. We can’t spend all our energy on them.”
“Why not? We miss fixers, but we can cope.”
He shook his head. “Gaia needs fixers. We have to rebuild the system.”
“What, with a handful of you? Perhaps Alice Cottrel had the right idea and you should stay at Hellbane U and come when called. For important things only.”
“I’m not talking about that kind of fixing.”
“What, then?”
“If the blighters come back. We have to be ready, and we have to find a better way.”
Blighters back? But her mind fixed on the pain at the end of the sentence.
“What happened, Dan? What did you have to do?”
“You don’t want to know.”
She gripped her hands together. “Tell me anyway.”
He tossed the stick into the fire, and it burst into wild flames, making her flinch away.
“All right. It was my idea, clever lad that I am. Fixers were dying one by one, and the blighters only grew stronger. We all wanted to rush out and fight, but I persuaded everyone to play with their magic like I’d been doing, to find the stuff training had locked up in us.”
His eyes brightened for a moment. “It was amazing what some of us could do, Jen, the power we could draw on. It became clear that the presence of so many blighters was making us stronger, day by day. But what to do with it?”
Any light in him died. “Do you remember what I said about power gained and lost? We figured out that we could act in a group and have even greater destructive force, but we still couldn’t modulate it. What we needed was blighters bunched in huge numbers, and that doesn’t seem to be their way.”
Jenny was trying to follow his logic, but mostly she was following something that ran beneath his words. Something terrible.
“So we baited a trap.”
Her mouth dried. “With what?”
He leaned back on stiff arms. It might have been a relaxed posture, but it wasn’t. “They like people more than animals, but they really love fixers—like I love Walker’s spiced meat pies, and you love those big strawberries your father grows. A solitary fixer draws blighters from all around. Perhaps they fight over the prey. I don’t know…”
She stared at him, but apart from that betraying pause, his tone was flat.
“So we formed troops of the ideal size—about forty, as it happens. We’d form a circle and put the bait in the center. When the blighters rushed in to feed, we cleared the area. We’d get thousands sometimes, and the juice would flood into us, making us stronger still. Then the troop moved along and did it again. And again. And again. Troops had to merge, of course, in time…” After a moment he said, “It was mostly my idea, and it worked.”
She was still trying to form words when he added, “We drew lots. My name was never drawn.”
After three swallows, she managed, “How—how many of you were there in the beginning?”
“More than a thousand—” Like a violently untethered spring, he curled forward, hands over his face. “One thousand two hundred and twenty-three.”
And eighteen came home. Day after relentless day, numbers dwindling, lots drawn, good-byes said…
“We all wanted to be noble sacrifices, but the fear’s too strong. So we used magic to hold the bait. Right in the middle. It’s most efficient that way.”
She scooted around the fire and gathered his pain tight into her arms.
“You dread being chosen,” he whispered. “You dread not being. You dread living—”
“Dan. Dan…don’t. Don’t think about it.” Oh, how crushingly stupid.
He turned to her and clung, and she did the only thing she could and held tighter still. She wished he’d cry, but he’d surely drained himself of tears long ago.
“You don’t want to be here, where you’re not wanted,” she murmured, rubbing her face against his hair, stroking him, tears escaping. “If it’s me you want, I’ll come with you. Anywhere.”
He turned his head against hers to brush lips. “It’s you I want, Jen. It’s you I need. You. I thought of you, dreamed of you. When I wanted to throw myself into the blighters because it would be easier, I thought of coming back to you.” He kissed tears from her cheek. “Don’t cry, love. Don’t cry.”
“How can I not? But you’re home now, Dan. Home.”
Then she realized what she’d said. She drew back, cradled his face, looked into his eyes. “It’s important to you? That you come home?”
“I don’t think I can carry on without it, but…there’s more. I’m the only one with a real home to come back to. To heal, I need you. To live, I need you. But I need the town, too. To do what needs to be done, to be what I need to be, I need
my family, your family, our family, our friends. Those are the roots of the tree that I am, the tree that magic is, the tree of the future.”
She remembered then what he’d said. “When the blighters might return?”
“I don’t think we destroyed them, Jen. We zapped a lot of them, millions maybe, but I think in the end they retreated. We were down to eighteen, and though we were each bloated with power we were close to the end. Yet they went. If this is their life cycle, perhaps they retreated with enough energy to reproduce, or whatever they do.”
“The last time must have been a thousand years or more ago.”
“But that’s because they ate this place almost to extinction. We’ve survived. If we slacken birth control, we could build the population again in a generation. Even without that, it’ll probably be back in a century or so. Or Earth might send more settlers.”
Jenny pressed her face against his shoulder. Eighteen left, all crippled in some way, yet they had to be teachers for a new generation of fixers who might be needed within decades—needed to sacrifice themselves again? He was right. There had to be a better way.
Dan and the few other sane fixers would have to come up with that better way while training new ones. And they’d have to train them in the wild magic as well as the old sort.
She remembered Polly’s baby. She knew now he’d been right. They shouldn’t interfere too much with nature, but that meant the world must change so that it could accept that. Accept that, no matter the personal suffering, the magic must be restrained unless the blighters returned to feed again. To lead all this, Dan needed his home, and above all, he needed her.
She turned to touch her lips to his brow. “I am home. I am yours. Always.”
Lips joined, and she tasted need and lingering ashes. No, need was too frail a word. Starvation. A gaping hollow in the soul he’d tried so hard to hide from her. She could not deny him the feast, no matter what the cost. Gathering him into her arms, she deepened the kiss, took the ashes, held him close, until she felt the first desperation diminish.
“Come, love, come.” She pulled his shirt loose and put her hands to the hot skin of his back, already rolling him out of the fire’s low glow into some privacy. They tore at clothes, and he thrust deep within, seeming to burn her in the surging connection with those alien places only he could touch.
She climaxed quickly, but he went on, pounding into her until she wanted to protest, to cry out to him to stop. She braced herself and bore it, knowing he was far away, seeking something deeper and stronger than mere orgasm. Something healing for those invisible, terrible wounds. He drove her through two more mechanical annihilations before he shuddered and stopped, limp as the dead.
She winced as she bore his weight, knowing it symbolized some of what was to come. His need was great, but she would grow strong enough to bear it. His healing would draw on her, but she would be a deep enough well. His thoughts would not always be centered on her, but that was as it should be. He was a hero, and a hero’s intent is always on the greater goal.
Dan had become what he was in order to save them all. She could do no less. For his sake and the world’s, she’d feed and nurture him.
And, tomorrow, she would bring him home.
They dressed as the sun began to rise and breakfasted on stale bread and stewed tea. They laughed about that, remembering the park and the horrible boiled tea there. They talked of the future, gently. He thought there might be many people like her, with a little fixing ability that could be developed so they could take on some of the load.
“Perhaps everyone on Gaia’s that way,” she said. “It could explain why it’s such a flourishing, stable world.”
He met her smile. “Which it is, and will be.”
When the sun was up, they extinguished the fire, packed his bag, and walked up to knock on the postern gate. The wide-eyed gatekeeper opened it and put the formal question.
“What business brings you to Anglia?”
Jenny answered. “I’m Jenny Hart, citizen, and this is my chosen partner, Dan Rutherford Fixer. We’re returning home.”
The rule was ancient and absolute. Any citizen’s partner had freedom of the town.
“I’ll have to see about this,” the gatekeeper said, shutting the door on them.
Jenny looked at Dan, trying to see him as others would see him. She thought he looked as he always had. He’d done something magical to make his hair short again, and he didn’t think it would grow so fast anymore. Some of the stress was fading from his features.
They’d made love again with the dawn, that time for her. When she murmured about cameras, he said he’d blocked them. She knew for sure now that she wasn’t bringing wildfire into the town, but winter fire, and she would be its hearth.
The gatekeeper returned to open the gate for them. Holding hands, Jenny led Dan through to face the bewildered, hastily assembled alders.
The trouble with heroes is that they want to come home.
But home needs its heroes, and home is also their just reward.
Shadows in the Wood
by Jennifer Roberson
Awareness stirred. Then stilled. Stirred again, weakly; was like a weary man struggling to open eyelids grown too heavy for his will. Opened. Closed. Awake, then asleep.
He had lived in darkness so long he did not at first believe such a thing as light existed. But it sparked at the edges of awareness, kindled fitfully into life. A very quiet life it was, timid and halting, but incontrovertibly life. He recognized it as such. And in that recognition, he acknowledged sentience. Victory at last over the enemy.
At last? For all he knew, it had been no more than the day before now, this moment, that he had been defeated. Enspelled. Entrapped. But with sentience and awareness came also understanding that such imprisonment as his had been conjured to last a lifetime, or a hundred lifetimes of men older than he. For time out of mind.
But he was not…man. That he knew. The body, the soul, remained imprisoned. Only the mind, the barest flicker of awareness, bestirred itself out of the long, enforced lethargy.
He wondered what had awakened him. Here, there was no scent, no sight, no sound. He tasted nothing, because he had no mouth. He merely was, when before, for time uncounted, he was not.
Was not.
Now, again, all unexpectedly, he was.
Astonishment. Relief. Exultation.
Alive. Not as men marked it, for he, in this place, was nothing approaching human. He had no heart to beat, no mouth to speak, no eyes to see; neither ears to hear nor nose to smell. No body answered his will. No pulse throbbed in his neck. But for now it did not matter. Something in him sensed, something in him knew, release after all was possible.
Someone is coming.
No more than that.
Someone is coming.
It was his comfort. It was his joy. It was the light against the darkness, the shield against the spear.
Someone. Someday.
For now, it was enough.
England, 1202
She felt the morning fog drift down and settle, a cool caress of dampness upon her face and hair, insinuating itself beneath the peaked hummock of rough-spun blanket draped across one shoulder. She burrowed closer into the blankets and hides to the warmth that was male, to the Crusade-scarred body grown precious years before; beloved before even they met in carnal congress beneath the roof of the tiny oratory built onto her father’s manor at her mother’s behest.
All dead to her now: father, mother, brother; even the manor, which now was held by the Crown, embodied by a man she knew as heartless. John Lackland. John Softsword. John, King of England. Who refused to return to her the hall into which she had been born, in which she had found a worthwhile living even after she knew herself the only one left of her blood. A man, a king, who listened instead to another man she named enemy: William deLacey. High Sheriff of Nottingham.
The warmth, the body beside her, sensed her awakening and began its own. He turned towa
rd her, drawing her nearer, wrapping her in his arms and legs. One spread-fingered hand cradled the back of her skull, tucking her head beneath his chin.
He stroked the black strands escaped from her braid. “Cold?”
She felt more than heard the words deep in his chest and smiled. “Not now.”
The prickle of unshaven jaw snagged her hair as he shifted closer. “’Twill be winter soon.”
“Too soon,” she murmured, twining her limbs more tightly with his.
One hand wound a strand of her hair through his fingers. “I had hoped to offer you more than a rude cave and a bed upon the ground.”
Of course he had. And would have: wealth beyond imagining, power, title, castle. But he, as she, was denied that legacy, stripped of all his father had labored to build even as hers had labored, even as hers was stripped, albeit in death. Her father had been a mere knight, his a powerful earl, but it mattered little to sheriff or king. Knight and earl were dead, and the heirs of both, through royal decree, lacked such claim as would put them beneath the roofs their fathers had caused to be raised.
She gazed upward, blinking against moisture. The only roof now they called their own was the canopy of trees arching high overhead; their hall made of living trunks rather than hewn pillars; windows not of glass but built instead of air, where the leaves twined aside and permitted entry to the sun. Such little sky to see, here in the shadows of Sherwood, where their only hope of survival lay in escaping the sheriff’s men.
She and Robin—formerly Sir Robert of Locksley, knight and honored Crusader, companion to now-dead Lionheart—took such privacy as they could find in the depths of the woods, laying a bed some distance from the others, friends and fellow outlaws, screened by the lattice-work of limbs and leaves, of bracken and vine. A pile of small boughs, uprooted fern, an armful of hides and blankets spread upon the hummock. Some would call it rude, a peasant’s crude nest. But so long as he was in it, she would call it home.
Yet Robin was right. Already autumn’s leaves fell, cloaking the ground and everything upon it, including themselves. They would soon have little warmth, and less foliage to hide behind. It was close on time to go to the caves.