Something living in the Sun. Something that was part of the Sun; a living thing, its soul, the way the soul lives in a body. But also, something that left, that went voyaging. And then got caught away from home . . . got lost. That got trapped somewhere it shouldn’t have.
And in a flash, literally a flash of light, Nita understood it.
I have a problem with crowds, Penn had said to her once.
Nita swallowed. And why wouldn’t you, she thought, if something inside you was used to this kind of life? Solitary, so alone, built to be that way, happy to be that way. But stuffed into a place where you couldn’t get out, where you were trapped and crammed in tight and tied down by thought and emotion, by fear and pain . . . She thought about how Ronan had been, sometimes, his edginess and troublesome ways when the Michael Power had been inhabiting him, an immortal crammed into so small a space, physically and temporally. Of course Ronan’s still a pain in the butt sometimes but it wasn’t all him being the pain all the time—
Nita thought about Penn’s grandfather, too. You have an outrider, he’d said, practically the moment he laid eyes on her. And his grandson . . . how long did he suspect? Nita thought. Is this why Penn never wanted to spend time with him? Because his grandfather knew, but didn’t know what to do? Just hoped, maybe, that in another culture what was inside him would either find a way to sleep peacefully and leave his grandson alone—or else escape at last?
And now, here, finally, concentrated, was all that power—everything it needed to break its prison, to get free. And the spell was in sync with it. The spell’s been trying to break the connection, to let it go! “Do you get it now, Penn?” Nita said. “You’ve had it exactly backwards. You don’t want to be controlling anything to do with the Sun. You want to be taking the control structures away! You’ve got something in you that’s been in your family for a long, long time, stuck in your souls one after another, generation after generation, and it’s never been strong enough to get away before. But now it is! You’ve got the connection, you’ve got the spell! Turn it loose, let it go, set it free!”
He stared at Nita, shaking his head. “I don’t—”
“You do! You said I had something that you needed. This is it! What you needed is what I see!” She could hardly see him through the blaze of fire, the great wings beating. All she could do was grip his hands until he squeezed his eyes shut with the pain, and had no choice but to see what she was seeing. The spell was active, the linkage was there, the vision ran down the linkage and Nita felt it shock through Penn as if her hands were a live wire he’d grabbed.
The shock hit her too; Nita fell to her knees, shaken, as the vision departed from her. She felt Kit come up behind her to help her as Penn went staggering away from them toward the core of the spell, the Speech-notation all around him flaring with furious golden fire as he stumbled through it, disturbing its power flow.
There at the core of the spell, Penn reeled a moment in panic or indecision. Then he fell, collapsing onto the innermost power control statements, obscuring them, taking them out of the circuit. And as he fell, fire flowered upward.
Nita had to laugh out loud from delight now, looking up at the huge and blinding shape towering over them, throwing its wings wide, first one pair, and then another even larger. This was the fulfillment of the visions of burning that had been haunting her dreams. Flamboyant, Nita thought, isn’t that what I said about him all that time ago? Now I know why! The immense shape kept growing, rearing up and up from the lunar surface like a great fierce bird. It beat those massive burning wings so that shadows fled and flickered among the craters in the mountain peaks, as if the whole surface of the dark side of the Moon was alive with fire. It’s a good thing we’re turned the other way right now, because if they could see this from Earth . . . !
The fire burst higher upward, and as it did, it found a voice and roared with joy. Free, it cried. At last, at last!
Like everyone else on that crater-plain, Nita stood transfixed. She thought she had never heard a more beautiful voice. It was warm; it was glad; it was fierce with incalculable power. And it was female.
If Nita could’ve spared breath for anything but wonder, she would’ve burst out laughing. Oh, Penn. Is this why you’ve always been trying so hard to impress the ladies? Or were you just overcompensating . . . ?
But the urge to laugh left Nita as that impassioned and startling regard turned from the great company gathered around them to fix on her. Nita held very still. She didn’t quite feel like a mouse under the eye of a hawk, but that fiery gaze was profoundly unnerving nonetheless.
One who sees, said the fiery shape—immensely grave, immeasurably joyous—take my thanks. Not until I was seen again could I be found. Not until I was found again could I be freed.
All Nita could think to do was bow: Who knew what the protocol was for this kind of meeting? If there even was any. “Elder sister,” she said, “go to your place, and go well.”
I go! the great voice cried. And the form of fire launched itself up into cislunar space, and then arced around inward and made for the Sun.
And not far away, on the other side of Penn’s spell, Dairine stood staring down at it. The wizardry lay there still burning, afire with power, discharging like crazy: it was hard to make out anything definite from it. The whole thing was alight like a—
Wait, Dairine thought. Because one place where the semiconscious Penn wasn’t lying was not alight. Or rather, its boundaries were: but not the empty inside of it. Nothing was written there: no power moved.
It’s a lacuna.
You always have to leave a little wiggle room for the elemental presences, Mehrnaz had said, as if it was something very basic and elementary and it was surprising that Dairine didn’t know it.
And even Penn had mentioned it. A way we remember when the Sun was different, when it breathed differently. And all the characters of the Speech in that spot had been faded down into conditional status, into and/or. Something had been there once, something that wasn’t there now.
A lacuna, a loophole, a place where something isn’t.
Except that something is. Because otherwise, why would his spell be misbehaving like this?
Because there had been something else in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t supposed to be in the lacuna. Something that wasn’t designed for it. And whatever happened here, whatever that creature was—an elemental presence, Mehrnaz’s voice whispered again—it was now heading for the Sun to fill the real physical space or place that the spell-lacuna represented.
And when it gets there, whatever’s in there right now will be destroyed!
For a second Dairine was struck speechless and numb by sheer dread. Then she bent down and scooped up Spot, able to think of nothing but how the Sun had tried speaking to her once and she hadn’t understood it but Roshaun had, even though something had been wrong, something had been missing that she couldn’t understand. There’s something wrong here, Sker’ret had said; he’d been monitoring the wizardry they were working. Something’s interfering with the magnetic flow at this level. A darkness . . .
An empty place that should not have been empty. The memory in Penn’s spell of a space waiting to be refilled. For the elemental presence to reassert itself . . . And then Roshaun’s spell on the Moon that had failed when he was pulling energy out of the Sun while fighting the Pullulus, even though the spell should have worked, it really should have. Except his data was skewed because there should have been something in the Sun and it wasn’t—
“We need the coordinates for where we did the spell,” Dairine said as soon as she could find some breath again: she felt like she’d been punched, and even now she was fighting for air. “The one where we fixed the Sun when he was visiting and it was acting up! Project the solar rotation forward to now. Then pull the structural and locational data from the lacuna subset into the calculation, come on, hurry up, Spot—!”
Done, he said. Execute it?
“Yes!!”
They vanished.
Seconds later Dairine stood above the boiling, roiling surface and stared down into it, shaking all over. All alone now, no one but Spot to help her, no other backstop. Below her, nothing but the fire that would destroy her if the fragile force-field bubble protecting her should fail. Strong as the wizardry was that was keeping it in place, it wouldn’t last forever. Even with four other wizards holding it with her, the last time Dairine had been party to this wizardry, it had always been in danger of collapsing within a matter of minutes.
And out there, somewhere between here and the Moon, another danger was approaching. She had very little time. If that shape of fire got here before she’d done what she had to do—
She refused to think about that. “Okay,” she said to Spot. “One of the things I need, I’ve got. The other’s at home. I need you to open a very narrow transit window to my bedroom and get me the Sunstone.”
That . . . It was very rarely that she heard Spot hesitate. That is going to be dangerous. If it breaches the force field—
I knew I should have brought it with me. Dammit, I knew. “Never mind, do it now,” Dairine said, and held out her hand, waiting.
Spot was silent.
The next thing she felt was a flash of nearly unbearable heat. Stunned, Dairine opened her mouth to cry out, probably the last sound she would ever make—
And something heavy fell into her hand: a heavy gold collar, with a big cabochon stone set in the front of it, its pale yellow color almost completely washed out in the light blasting up from the star around her.
“Right,” she muttered, and managed with a struggle to get the collar around her neck. The wizardries embedded in the stone weren’t so much the issue here: its real value at the moment was as a targeting device.
The perception of heat around her was increasing nonetheless. There was only so much power built into the force field: if the local temperature flared, if she had to spend too long here, the force field would fail and she would cease to exist a millisecond later. To try to conserve some power Dairine whispered a few words in the Speech to tighten the field, snugging it in around her and Spot until it was barely more than a sheath around her clothes and skin. There wasn’t a lot of air stored in it, the wizardry that ran the shield would only run it as long as she was conscious, and when she used up the last of her oxygen—
Never mind. There in that torrential brilliance Dairine closed her eyes—not that this helped that much, such was the awful potency of the light around her—and did her best to get into sync with the Sunstone. She’d spent months teaching it to be sensitive to the Sun’s moods. Now, though, it was another set of moods she was searching for. A former user’s—
Dairine held still, listened. It was hard. As the Stone’s sympathy with the star around her settled in deeper, the noise of its burning, of its life, became more and more inescapable, more deafening every second. Dairine squeezed her eyes shut, concentrated, did her best to block out that noise. It was other life she was more interested in.
Local temperature is increasing past shield tolerance, Spot said softly.
“Ask me if I care,” Dairine muttered, concentrating on the stone. The noise around her, the roar of the star, kept getting louder and louder. The Sunstone’s not enough. It’s been too long since he’s been in contact with it—She’d been afraid of that, but she had to try the stone first, because if she tried the stone and her other solution and neither of them worked, then she would have to give up. And if she had to give up . . .
From out of her pocket, Dairine pulled the thing she was hoping she wouldn’t have to use: the chain of emeralds held together with a single strand of the Speech—the gems Roshaun had given her, saying, They’re like your world’s color, everything’s so green, I always think of you when I see these. And the chain—
She tucked Spot under her arm, stripped the round emeralds off it and stretched the long chainlike sentence in the Speech between her hands. It was two names, actually; a long version of hers restated in the Wellakhit style, Dairine daughter of Elizabeth daughter of Pearl and so on back ten generations and more to match his: Roshaun ke Nelaid ke Teriaufv ke Umren . . . But in his strand of the chain were words and concepts and feelings that did not appear in the public version of his name, just as there were in hers—things no one else knew but they two alone. At first Dairine thought about pulling the two strands apart. Then she thought, And what if this doesn’t work? If I’ve got to go, I’m going with them still wrapped around each other.
She wrapped the twinned strand of Speech-made-concrete around the fist of the hand that was holding Spot to her, and gripped the Sunstone with the other, closed her eyes again, and concentrated. That ridiculous lazy drawl of his, the long, graceful gait, the truly silly height of him, the bizarre dress sense, that supercilious smile: all these things she summoned up. And the way his eyes softened and went strangely quiet that time he said “Just” friendship? A poor modifier for so high and honorable a state.
Under her the fire roiled, the subsurface turbulence growing. Local temperature increasing sharply, Spot said. Survivability index is decreasing. Force field duration estimated fifteen seconds . . .
“Going to use another ten of those looking,” Dairine muttered. And maybe another five . . .
—and just kept listening, listening. That voice, laughing, scorning, speaking in anger or pain; you are the only one who hears me. The only one. Around her the fire licked and blasted at her shield, and Dairine hung on, stopped breathing, turned off the life support because it was eating energy, the roar scaled up—
And she heard it. The whisper. So weak, so faint.
Down! she said to the force field. Obediently, it sank further into the Sun’s roiling plasma. The whisper was weaker. But it was also closer.
Down!
She sank faster. The heat began to pierce the shield now. Nonsurvivable in five seconds, Spot said.
Dairine let go of the Sunstone, thrust her arm out into the fire, reached, felt around—
Her hand touched something that wasn’t plasma.
Dairine clutched it, desperate. Get us out! she screamed to Spot as all around a new wave of turbulence rose up around her as if from a sea suddenly agitated to storm.
The roaring scaled up once more until it obliterated everything. White fire utterly blinded her as the shield began to collapse.
She felt the familiar fizz of a last-ditch transit spell folding in around her. From light, everything abruptly flashed into darkness as a great burning winged shape came diving in past her through the corona and arrowed into the surface of the Sun as if into a pool.
Under Dairine the chromosphere heaved and rippled like the liquid it was. The enraged corona lashed at her as everything went black. And the last thing Dairine knew was the sense of something heavy, inescapable as gravity, dragging her down . . .
A bare moment later she came down on something hard and cold with a heavy weight clutched in her arms, crushing her. I can’t breathe. Am I in vacuum? But she didn’t care; the coldest vacuum to be found from one end of the universe to the other couldn’t have kept her from opening her eyes right then. Wheezing, her chest tight with fear or anoxia, she didn’t care which, Dairine opened her eyes to see what she held.
It was something in humanoid shape, long, lean, still afire with terrible light, too bright to look at—limbs splayed every which way, a heavy dead weight. Dairine gasped again, struggled up from beneath, desperately blinked her tearing eyes to try to see something besides a blur. As she tried to sit up, long hair fell into her face—sun-golden, silken fine. In anguished haste she pushed it away, squinting and wincing into the raging glow around what she held, trying to see something that mattered more than hair—a face, eyes with life in them, a chest with breath in it—
What Dairine held stirred weakly against her. She felt a heart beating, she heard a wheeze of breath. And now the tears in her eyes weren’t entirely to do with the light, though that blazed still. “Oh G
od!” she moaned, trying again to sit upright, but he was too heavy, and she was too tired all of a sudden, it was all hitting her at once . . .
An instant later there was a shape bending over her, even taller, nearly as lean after months of pain suffered for the one who’d been lost. He helped her with the weight, shifted it so that Dairine could at least sit up. Nelaid was holding her in one arm and his son in another, gasping with shock as awful as Dairine’s. He looked up into the dark of the space above the Moon and cried, “Miril!”
And barely a gasp later Roshaun’s mother was there in a spill of silver-fair hair, taking everything in, pulling off her long outer robe and wrapping her son in it. Roshaun shone through it like a candle. Nelaid and Miril bowed themselves over him, holding him tightly, shaking with their own anguish and relief. “He’s breathing,” the Lady Miril was whispering, “O Aethyrs be thanked, he’s breathing . . . !” And then she threw her arms around Dairine. “Daughter, he’s breathing, what did you do . . . ?”
“What I taught him,” Nelaid said, his voice muffled as he once more held his son close.
“What he taught me,” Dairine muttered, and rubbed at her eyes, still tearing uncontrollably. But it wasn’t so much because of the light now. That was slowly fading, and even through the blurring of her eyes Dairine could make out the long nose, the clean-cut features. There was a slight frown stamped on them.
Someone came astronaut-bouncing along toward them, a little clumsily. “Sorry,” Dairine’s dad said, thumping to his knees beside them, “I keep thinking I’m getting the hang of this and then I fall over again. Dair, what the hell was that, what did you just do there?”
“Got in trouble,” Dairine said between heaves of breath.
“You have no idea,” her dad said, “no idea how grounded you are!”
“Okay,” Dairine said, and fell over on him.
He caught her and held her in a way not too much different from the way Nelaid was holding Roshaun. Nelaid’s voice was choked. “Oh, my son, how are you even here, how does this come to be, what have you been doing?”