I have seen the result of breeding, parent with child, in certain backward sties of villages. They say it makes for imbeciles, for any weakness in such a close relationship is amplified. But she and I had no weakness; if we bred it would be strength adhering to strength. My sons should be also my brothers, but what sons, with Power to ride the skies and run across the seas. Her race begun again, with two to guide it, two without hubris, who had come through the fires and understood their lessoning.
I had never even dreamed a dream of her to bring me comfort.
Five months had sloughed from me, and I had not changed. Only the shame had sunk away. It seemed not to concern me. I had done with it. That onerous millstone on my neck had lost its weight. The incest of Hwenit and Qwef had seemed little in the face of death. And ours, in the face of eternity, how much more little.
I retraced my way to the White Mountain, and saw its peak in the ocean with that awareness of homecoming I never felt before in my days among the tents and towers of humanity. Then, like a child, I thought she would be gone, abandoning her Lectorra brood already, and the ill memory of me, to journey in some disguise even my Power could not unravel.
At that, I understood for sure I must not lose her, for the earth is not the earth without some light to see it by, and she was mine.
Then, looking up, I glimpsed her on the path of the cliff above me, and I can argue no more with what must be.
I need explain nothing to her; she guesses it all. Her wisdom, which her eyes revealed to me in their brilliance, is a calm that stops the mouthing of excuses or falsehoods. Where she stands—the blue sky, the blue mountaintop behind her, the blue mantle about her that leaves bare her white girl’s shoulders and the slim, strong arms of her youth—where she stands is the end of this chaos, the horizon of the wilderness, which opens on another land.
I will be judged by none but she. No other knows my life, nor how I have been constrained to live it, nor what I have gleaned, nor what I am entitled to. At the end she is mine, and she will not deny me now, for I am no longer ignorant of the fate that binds us. Seeing her there before me, the final gem in the circlet, I half suppose this road was mapped for both of us, before even we were born.
Worship or deny them, we are all, perhaps, in the hands of the gods.
*Shadowfire by Tanith Lee
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Tanith Lee, Hunting the White Witch
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