At last she whispered, “Then these are not Aquilara’s servants? You are sure of that?”
“As sure as I have ever been of anything,” Camilla reassured her. “She has been coming in every few hours to make sure your fever was under control. But now you really must lie down and rest, don’t think of anything except getting well.”
Cholayna closed her eyes again weakly, and the old woman raised her head, glaring at Camilla.
“A name was spoken that is forbidden in ’Varra’s holy house. What ha’ ye to do wi’ that one?”
“Who? Acquilara?”
The old woman gestured angrily. “Silence! Speak not the names of evil omen! This one said, when thy sickness and weariness should be healed, thy story would be heard. Now perhaps is the very time for that hearing; what do ye in these wilds where no women come save in search of Her blessing?”
“Margali will tell thee, Grandmother,” said Camilla in the mountain dialect. Magda wondered when she had learned it, and saw in Camilla’s mind there was a flash of memory, a year spent as an abused and beaten child, enslaved in a bandit encampment…
“We come in search of Her blessing too.” Magda found in her memory the night when first she had seen the image of Avarra during the first meeting of the Sisterhood. “We seek a City said to be inhabited by the Sisterhood of the Wise. Two of our companions were seeking it, and had gone before. We thought, when we saw your lights in the wilderness, that perhaps we had found that place, and perhaps our comrades also.”
“This one has read thy mind and memory in thy weakness, granddaughter. We are only sheltering in the shadow of Her wings, chiya, and are not of Her sisterhood. Yet thy search does make thee sacred here, where thy companions have not come.”
The old woman’s hand fell on Magda’s shoulder. “Yet tell, what of that other name she spoke now twice?”
“She came to us by night, promised that she could lead us to our comrades.”
“And why did thee not follow her?”
“It seemed to us,” Camilla said slowly, “that truth was not to be found in her mouth, and that to follow such a guide was worse than to wander unguided.”
“Yet thy companion cried out to her in her unknown tongue—”
“Cholayna was afraid of her,” Magda corrected sharply. “Read her mind and memory if you can, Old Mother, and you will know I speak truth.”
Jaelle asked Magda in Standard, “What’s the trouble?”
“She says Rafi and Lexie haven’t been here. Which may mean they have fallen into—” she started to say, Aquilara’s hands, then looked at the old woman’s face and didn’t. “I fear, then, that the two we seek may have fallen into the hands of those we count as enemies.”
The old woman looked from one to another of them, then said slowly, “Thy friend is better, but still very sick. Watch thee by her a handful of days more,” and went away.
Camilla and Jaelle looked at Magda and demanded, “Now what was that all about?”
The old woman did not return that day, nor the next, nor the next. Silent attendants came in three times a day, bringing them food: rough porridge morning and noon, thick and nourishing soup in the evening. The enforced rest was good for all of them; Magda recovered her strength, Vanessa’s frozen feet healed, and even Cholayna began to sit up for a time during the day.
On the fifth or sixth morning—Magda had lost count of the days, as they slid by with nothing to distinguish them—the snow stopped and the sound of silence woke Magda; the wind was no longer wailing and screaming around the buildings. She stepped out into a bright world, the sun dazzling on roofs and the sky so clear that it seemed she could see across an endless landscape of snowy peaks and valleys far below them.
Perhaps Cholayna would be able to travel soon. Magda began mentally sorting through their possessions for gifts they could make to the old woman and to the Sisterhood in return for their hospitality. She trembled at the thought of the return journey down the cliff in the basket. And how much farther must they go? Perhaps the old woman could tell them something about Lexie and Rafaella; at least she seemed to know something of Aquilara’s people and despised them.
Cholayna was sitting up this morning, and had actually eaten some porridge. She looked better, healthier; she had asked for water to wash her face and dug into her personal pack for a hairbrush; but she was too weak to sit up for so long, so Vanessa had come and taken the brush, and was trying to ease the tangles out of the shock of pale hair.
“I can see that you are feeling better,” Magda said, kneeling beside her, and Cholayna smiled.
“I am beginning to feel halfway human again; I can breathe again without knives through my chest! And the snow seems to have stopped. Tell me, Magda, how long have we been here?”
“Five or six days. As soon as you are well enough to travel, we will go on. I think perhaps these people know something of the City. Perhaps, if we ask in the right way, they will tell us.”
“But what is the right way?” asked Vanessa.
“One thing we know,” Camilla said, joining them, “they aren’t in league with—” she stopped, and Magda could read in Camilla’s mind the memory of the exaggerated anger the old woman had displayed when she spoke Aquilara’s name.
It was as if someone not present spoke, not in words:
The name of evil can summon it and be used as a link…
“They aren’t in link with that woman who came and tried to bully us in Nevarsin, in Arlinda’s house,” Magda said. “They have an unholy horror of her very name, though, so they evidently know what’s going on.”
“I wish I did,” Vanessa complained. “That old woman gives me the creeps! Inhuman!”
Jaelle protested, “She saved Cholayna’s life, and you could have been permanently lamed. Don’t be ungrateful!”
“I know what Vanessa means, though,” Camilla said. “Have you noticed, Margali? I don’t expect Vanessa to understand it, she doesn’t know the language as well as you do; you learned it in Caer Donn as a child. You noticed she never says I at all; just stands aside and speaks of herself as someone else. I don’t begin to understand it.”
“I don’t know if it’s ever possible to understand an alien religious practice,” Cholayna said thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should just be grateful that she’s well-disposed toward us.”
“We need more than that, though,” Jaelle said. “We’ve come to the end of the trail. I don’t know of anything beyond here and there’s nothing on the maps. If they can’t tell us where to go on, I don’t know where we can go.”
“And the old woman hasn’t been near us for days,” Camilla said. “When you spoke—” again the hesitation, “a certain name, you seemed to put her off. She’d been so friendly before that, and then—nothing. Not a sign nor a sight of her.” Her smile was bleak.
“Maybe when she found out that some of us had laran she decided we could find our own way from here.”
“But,” Magda said, “that would mean there’s something to find. And that it would be possible to find it from this place.”
That night when the attendants came in to rig Cholayna’s steam tent again—they indicated by signs that she should sleep in it, even if she could breathe well enough during the day—Jaelle went with them down to see to the animals again. When she came back, she beckoned them all close to her.
“Tomorrow, they said, someone will come to talk with us. I gathered, from what the blind woman—her name is Rakhaila, by the way, that’s Hellers dialect for Rafaella—from what she said, there are women here who come and go from—” Jaelle hesitated—“the place we may be looking for. I have a feeling we should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”
“Cholayna’s not able to travel yet,” Vanessa protested.
“That’s another thing we have to talk about. I think perhaps we must send Cholayna back; or leave her here to recuperate further. From something Rakhaila said, this could lead us out beyond the Wall Around the World. There’s no way
Cholayna’s fit enough to make that kind of trip.”
Cholayna said doggedly, “We had this all out before. I can manage. I’ll do it if it kills me.”
“That’s what we’re afraid of, you stubborn old wretch,” Vanessa said. “What good would it do to kill yourself on the trip? Would that do Lexie any good, or you?”
But Magda was not so sure. “We’ve come this far together. I don’t think it would be right to abandon Cholayna here. I think we all go together, or none of us.” She did not know why she was so certain.
But when Cholayna had been settled for the night, Jaelle touched Magda’s arm.
“Breda, we need to talk. Come outside with me for a minute.”
They went out into the long corridor between the buildings. Jaelle led the way to a spot at the very edge of the cliff. The pulleys and baskets hung there awaiting the journey down.
“The steps aren’t so bad,” Jaelle said. “I’ve been down them twice now.”
“Better you than me,” Magda said. “Well, Jaelle, do you remember in Thendara you were saying you wanted a year off to go to the mountains? You’ve had your adventure, haven’t you?”
Above them the sky was sprinkled with the stars of a rare, clear Darkovan night. Jaelle looked away north, to where, Magda knew, the Wall Around the World rose, the end of the known world of the Domains. She said, “Maybe it’s only beginning.”
Magda smiled indulgently. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
It was almost a joke; but Jaelle was completely serious. She said, “Yes. Terrible as this trip has been, I loved every minute of it. I wish I hadn’t dragged you along, because I know you’ve hated it—”
Magda said, “No.” She surprised herself with the word. “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss—parts of it.”
The sudden sense of self-mastery when she had accomplished what she had never believed she could do. Cholayna and Vanessa, friends only in the limited sense of co-workers; now, she knew, they were as close as the sisters she had never known. Would she have wanted to miss that? And in a very real sense it was her quest. From the day she had first seen the robed figures in their circle, first heard the sound of calling crows, she had known that she must follow them, even if the search led over the roof of the known world.
For a moment she knew this, then practicality took over again. “Would you go off to this City out of Kindra’s legends, and stay there?”
“I don’t know if they’d have me. I think you have to—well, to study and prepare yourself a long time first. There seems to be a college of this kind of wisdom and I’m still in kindergarten. But if I decided I wanted to try preparing to be worthy of it? Or if anything happened that I couldn’t go back. On a trip like this, one false step—we’ve all come that close to the edge, Margali. If I didn’t make it back, you’d look after Cleindori for me, wouldn’t you?”
Magda smiled gently. “I’d have to get in line for the chance; after Damon, and Ellemir, and Lady Rohana… about all I could do for her would be to sponsor her if she decided she wanted to work for the Terrans, and considering that she’s Heir to Aillard, I doubt she’d be given that option. But if you mean, would I love her as my own—do you doubt our oath, freemate?”
Jaelle touched the hilt of Magda’s knife which she wore at her belt. “Never, breda.”
“We should go in,” Magda said. The great violet disk of Liriel was rising, almost at full; the largest of the four moons. The bluish crescent of Kyrddis hung almost at the zenith of the sky. Stars were beginning to shine through the clear pallor of the falling night, and an icy wind was beginning to blow over the heights, a veritable jet-stream of a wind which tore at their hair and buffeted them toward the cliffs. Magda clung to a frost-rimed wall to keep her balance against the fierce gusts. It was not dark; all round them the growing light of the moons was reflected from snow everywhere.
“Are you cold? Have some of my cloak,” Jaelle said, putting it round her with her arm around Magda. Magda smiled as they snuggled together under it.
Jaelle said seriously, “I need to talk to you alone, just for a few minutes. I wish I didn’t have to go back at all, Magda. I’m not needed in the Forbidden Tower. My laran isn’t that strong; never has been. I’m hardly a competent monitor, and you—a Terran!—you are as powerful a technician as Damon himself. They love me, perhaps, but don’t need me. In a very real sense I’ve never been needed anywhere. People don’t need me, don’t cling to me the way they do to you. Even my daughter comes to you for mothering, instead of me; she sees it too, Magda, the thing that makes people come to you. I’ve never known—where to go, or why.”
Magda listened, appalled. Ever since she had known Jaelle she had envied what she thought was the younger woman’s confidence, sense of purpose, the intensity with which she flung herself into things with a whole-heartedness Magda herself had never known. It had never occurred to her that Jaelle felt this way.
“That’s not true, Shaya. You’re so much stronger than I am in so many ways. You’re braver than I am. You don’t hold back and panic, and hash everything over in your mind all the time—”
“Oh—courage,” Jaelle said, faintly smiling. “Damon told me once that he thought courage, a soldier’s kind of courage, the kind I have, just means I haven’t enough imagination to be afraid. Damon himself admits he’s a horrible coward, physically, because he has too much imagination. And I have so little. No imagination, not half the brains you have or half the sensitivity either. Maybe what I need is the kind of wisdom they have, these sorceresses of that legendary City. I’m like Camilla. Maybe I need to go and ask them why I was born and what life is all about for me.”
“There are times I’ve felt the same way, Jaelle. But we both have ties. Duties, responsibilities—”
Jaelle moved restlessly away from Magda. She was pacing at the very edge of the cliff in a way that made Magda wince. Courage? Or a lack of imagination, knowing she would not fall, so why did she need to worry about what could happen if she did?
“Oh, Margali, can’t you see? There’s no reason for me to go back. In a sense it seems my whole life has been leading up to this, a chance to find out what’s real, what’s under the surfaces of life. To make some sense of it all. Maybe these leroni of the Sisterhood know the answers and can tell me. Or help me find out.”
“Or maybe they only claim they can. Like Aquilara. To give themselves importance. And it’s all tricks.”
“No. Can’t you see the difference? Aquilara’s full of arrogance and—and hates you and me because we really have laran and she doesn’t though she wanted us to think she did. I’m thinking of—well, Marisela. She doesn’t argue about why life happens, or try to convince or convert anyone, she just does what she needs to. I want to know what it is that she knows. The legend says if you get there under your own energies they have to take you in, and if they don’t I’ll sit on their doorstep until they do.”
The idea had its attractions; to know what life was truly all about, to fling yourself straight at the source of wisdom and demand to know. Yet there were other duties, obligations, responsibilities.
“Would you really go after this kind of wisdom and leave me alone, Shaya?”
“You wouldn’t be alone, Margali. You’re not the kind of person to be alone. And anyway, you have Camilla—”
Magda gripped her hands tight.
“Jaelle—bredhiya, my love, my freemate, do you really think it’s the same thing?” Love wasn’t like that, Magda knew, it couldn’t be pigeonholed that way. “I simply cannot believe you are jealous that Camilla and I—”
“No, oath-daughter.” It was rare that Jaelle called her that now, but it came from the first of their many pledges to one another. “Never jealous, not that. Only—” Jaelle held her hands tightly; in the reflected moonlight, snow-light, her face was very pale, her great dark-lashed eyes somber in the pale triangle of her face. It seemed for a moment that a flood of memories reached out and enfolded them.
Jael
le looking up at her like a trapped animal, awaiting the knife-stroke of the hunter; she had saved Jaelle from bandits who would have killed them both, but now Jaelle in turn was prisoner, not the captor who had forced the Amazon Oath on her unwilling; now with a single stroke of her knife Magda could free herself, she need not even kill. She need only walk away, leaving the wounded Jaelle to die of exposure.
Jaelle, in the cave where together they had faced floodwater, death, abandonment, starvation. Jaelle, for whom her laran had wakened. The exchange of knives, the oath of freemates.
Jaelle, close to her in the Tower circle, bonded by the matrix link, closer than family, closer than sex, closer than her own skin…
Jaelle, clinging to her, her face covered with the sweat of hard labor, the night Cleindori was born; rapport between them so close that years later, when Shaya was born, even the stress of birth was not new to her; less conscious of agony than of fierce effort, terror, triumph and delight; Cleindori in a very real sense her own child, since she too had struggled to bring her to life.…
Whatever path she chose, always it seemed that Jaelle had been there before, and she only a clumsy follower in her steps. Even now…
Then the rapport fell away (how long had it lasted? A lifetime? Half a second?) and Jaelle said quietly, “No, bredhiya mea, viyha mea, not jealous of Camilla. No more than you are jealous of Damon.”
But there had been a time, Magda remembered, when she had been jealous of Damon, painfully, blindly, obsessively jealous of Damon. She could not bear that either, any more than she could bear, after she and Jaelle had come together as if destined, that any man could give Jaelle anything she could not. Now she was ashamed of that brief jealousy, her fear that Jaelle could love her less because she loved the father of her child. She had fought through and triumphed, still loving Jaelle, and loving Damon just as much because he could give Jaelle the one thing she could not, for all her love.