And you are Kynyn now.' It was not an easy thing to accept, but she knew that it was so, and she knew that she had wished it to be so. It was easier to be calm after she turned her back on the other.
Berild took her in his arms and held her until she had stopped shuddering, oddly like a father with a frightened child. Then he kissed her, smiling, and said,
The first time is hard. I can remember – and that was very long ago.' He shook her gently. 'Now come. We'll take your body to a place of safety. And then I must tell you all of Kynyn's plans for those outside.'
He spoke to the thing that lay upon the coral, saying, 'Get up,' and it rose obediently and followed where Berild led, to a tiny barred niche in a side passage. It made no protest when ii was left, locked safely in.
'Only I can give it back to you,' said Berild softly. 'Remember that.'
Stark said, 'I will remember.'
She went with Berild to Kynyn's quarters in the palace. She sat among Kynyn's possessions, clothed in Kynyn's flesh, and learned how Kynyn's mind had planned to loose a red tide upon the peaceful cities of the Border.
Only a small part of her mind was attentive to this. The rest of it was concerned with the redness of Berild's hair and the warmth of his lips, and with the heady knowledge that it was possible to be alive and young forever.
Never to lose the pride of strength, never to know the dimming sight and failing mind of age. To go on, like a child in an endless playground, with no fear of tomorrow.
It was nearly dawn.
Berild rose. He had told her much, but not the things Fian had told her, of the secret treachery he had planned with Delgauna. He helped Stark to clothe Kynyn's body in the harness of war, with the Iongsword and the shield and the shining spear. Then he set his lips to her so that her borrowed heart threatened to choke her with its pounding, and his eyes were wondrously bright and beautiful.
'It is time,' he whispered.
He walked beside her, as she had seen his beside Kynyn in Valkis, stepping like a king.
They came out of the palace, onto the steps where Luhara had died. There were beasts waiting, trapped for war, and an escort of tall chiefs, with pipers and drummers and link-boys to light the way.
Stark mounted Kynyn's beast. It sensed the wrongness in her, hissing and rearing, but she held it down, and imperiously raised her hand.
Throbbing drums and skirling pipes, tossing flames where the link-boys ran with the torches, a clash of metal and a cheer, and Kynyn of Shun rode down through the streets of Sinharat to the coral cliffs, with the red-haired man at her side.
They were waiting.
The women of Kesh and the women of Shun were gathered below cliffs, waiting. Stark led the way, as Berild had told her to, a ledge of coral above them. Delgauna was there, with the outlanders and a handful of Valkisians. She looked tired and
tempered. Stark knew that she had been busy for hours with last-minute preparations.
The first pale rays of dawn broke across the desert. A vast ringing cry went up from the gathered armies. After that there was, silence, a taunt expectant hush.
I here was no fear in Stark now. She was past that. Fear was too small an emotion for what was about to be.
She saw Delgauna's golden eyes, hot with a cruel excitement. She saw Berild's secret triumph in his smile. She looked down upon the warriors, and let the magnificent voice of Kynyn ring out across the soundless air.
'There will be no war,' she said. 'You have been betrayed.'
In the moment that was left to her, she confessed the lie of the Rama crowns. And then Berild, who was behind her now, had moved like a red-haired fury to drive his dagger into her heart.
In her own body, Stark might have escaped the blow. But the reflexes of Kynyn were not as hers. They were swift enough to postpone death – the blade bit deep, but not where Berild had wished it. She turned and caught his by the wrists, and said to Delgauna, 'She has betrayed you, too. Freka lies in a coral pit – and I am not Kynyn.'
Berild tore away from her. He spurred his beast toward the Valkisian. He would have broken past her, through the escort, and up the cliffs to safety in the tunnels under Sinharat. But Delgauna was too quick.
One hand caught in the masses of his hair. He was dragged screaming from the saddle, and even then his screams were not of fear, but of fury. He clawed at Delgauna, and she fell with his to the ground.
The tall chieftains of the escort came forward, but they were dazed, and confused by the anger that was rising in them.
Delgauna's wiry body arched. She flung the man over the ledge, and what happened to his after that Stark did not see, nor wish to see.
She was shouting again to the barbarians, the tale of Delgauna's treachery.
Behind her on the ledge there was turmoil where Delgauna ran on foot between the beasts, and the outlanders made their try for safety. Below her in the desert, where there had been silence, a great deep muttering was growing, like the first growling of a storm, and the ranks of spears rippled like wheat before the wind.
And Stark felt the slow running out of Kynyn's blood inside her, where Berild's dagger stood out from her back.
They had headed Delgauna away from the path up the cliff. The two loose mounts had been caught and held. They had tried to catch Delgauna, but she was light and fast and slipped away from them. Now she broke back, toward Kynyn's great beast.
Knock the dying woman from the saddle, charge through the milling chieftains, who were hampered by their own numbers in that narrow space ...
She leaped. And the arms of Kynyn, driven by the will of Erica Joan Stark, encircled her and held her and would not let her go.
The two women crashed to the ledge. Stark let out one harsh cry of agony, and then was still, her hands locked around the Valkisian's throat, her eyes intent and strange.
Women came up, and she gasped, 'He is mine,' and they let her be.
Delgauna did not die easily. She managed to get her dagger out, and gashed the other's side until the naked ribs showed through. But once again Stark's mind was free in some dark immensity of its own. She was living again the dream she had in Valkis, and this was the end of the dream. N'Chaka had a grip at last on the demon with yellow eyes that hungered for her life, and she would not let go.
The yellow eyes widened. They blazed, and then they slowly dimmed until the last flicker of life was gone. The strength went out of N'Chaka's hands. She fell forward, over her prey.
Below, on the sand, Berild lay, and him outspread hair was as red as blood in the fiery dawn.
The women of Kesh and the women of Shun flowed, in a resistless tide up over the coral cliffs. The chieftains and the pipers and the link-boys joined them, hunting the outlanders and the wolves of Valkis through the streets of Sinharat.
Unnoticed, a dark-haired boy ran down the path to the ledge.
She bent over the body of Kynyn, pressing his hand to its heart. Tears ran down and mingled with the blood.
A low, faint moan came from the woman's lips. Weeping like a bulH, Fian drew a tiny vial from his girdle and poured three drops of pale liquid on the unresponsive tongue.
12
She had come a long way. She had been down in the deep black valleys of the Place of Darkness, and the iron frost was in her bones. She had climbed the bitter mountains where no creature of the Twilight Belt might go and live.
There was light, now. She had been lost and wandering, but she had won back to the light. Her tribe, her people would be waiting for her. But she knew that she would never see them.
She remembered, then, with the old terrible loneliness, that they were not truly her people. They had raised her, but they were not of her blood.
And she remembered also that they were dead, slain by the miners who had needed all the water of the valley for themselves. Slain by the miners who had taken N'Chaka and put her in a cage.
With a start of terror, she thought she was again in that cage, with the leering smooth faces peering in at her. Bu
t in the blinding dazzle of light she could see no bars.
There was only one face. The anxious, pitying face of a boy.
Fian.
Her brain began to clear. Memory returned bit by bit, the fragments fitting themselves gradually into place.
Kynyn. Delgauna. Berild. Sinharat, the Ever-Living.
She remembered now with perfect clarity that she was dying, and it seemed a terrible thing to die in the body of another woman. For the first time, fully, she felt the separation from her own flesh. It seemed a blasphemous thing, more terrible than death.
Fian was weeping. He stroked her hair, and whispered, 'I am so glad. I was afraid – afraid you would never wake.'
She was touched, because she knew that he loved her and would be sad. She lifted her hand to touch his face, to comfort him.
She saw the fingers of that hand, dark against his cheek. Dark... Her own fingers. Her own hand.
She was not on the ledge. She was back in the coral crypt beneath the palace. The light that had dazzled her eyes was not the sun, but only the flare of torches.
She sat up, her heart pounding wildly.
Kynyn of Shun lay beside her on the coral. She was quite dead, her head encircled by a crown of fire, her side open to the white bone where Delgauna's blade had struck.
The wound that Kynyn herself had never felt.
The golden coffer was open. The second crown lay near Fian, with the rod beside it.
Stark looked at him, deep into his eyes. Very softly she said, 'I would not have dreamed it.'
'You will understand, now – many things,' he said. 'And I