News of a quieter sort arrived when Medea flew into camp, carrying messages and a passenger. The bards immediately dubbed Prince Dar “Dragonfriend,” an epithet that Medea graciously acknowledged.
“He’s certainly my friend,” she told Dallandra, “so your people can call him that if they’d like.”
The passenger, Pol, whom Laz had freed from slavery, stood quietly beside the young dragon and looked at the trading ground with wide eyes. Contrary to Laz’s descriptions of him, Dallandra decided, he wasn’t so much obese as oddly formed, thanks to the barbarous practice among the Horsekin of turning young boys into eunuchs. He’d continued to grow long past the usual age, so that he was nearly seven feet tall with an abnormally large rib cage and long spindly arms. When he finally spoke, his voice was high-pitched but strong.
“I have messages for the prince.” Pol laid a hand on the leather pouch he carried. “From the Red Wolf dun.”
“Excellent!” Dallandra said. “Am I remembering this correctly? You’re a scribe?”
“Yes, I am, but I’m just learning the syllabary. I can write in Deverrian and Gel da’Thae, though.”
“You’ll pick up the Elvish script fast enough. The prince needs a scribe. The last one left his retinue to settle in the new town up north. Come with me.”
As Pol accompanied her through the camp, Dallandra noticed the other Westfolk doing their best not to stare at him, and he grimly kept his gaze fixed ahead. When they reached Dar’s tent, however, painted with red roses in memory of the Far West, the sight of the flowers made him smile. He reached out and touched one of the images.
“We have these at home,” he remarked, “in the seacoast villages. The legend runs that the People brought them from the old cities.”
“Do you?” Dallandra said. “So something of the Vale of Roses survived. That’s lovely.”
At Dallandra’s urging, Daralanteriel took Pol on as his new scribe. When he read the messages out, Dallandra heard what she’d been waiting for. Lady Solla had been safely delivered of a fine, healthy son. Gerran and his wife and heir would spend the winter with Tieryn Cadryc, then move out to the Melyn Valley with the spring.
“That’s splendid,” Dallandra remarked to Valandario later. “The Gold Falcon clan’s off to a good start.”
“So it is. Gerran will make a decent lord, I think.”
“If he doesn’t, Dar will take him in hand.”
Valandario nodded and pulled her cloak a little tighter around her shoulders. They were sitting in front of Dallandra’s tent and nursing a tiny fire against the chilly evening breeze. Around them swirled the normal sounds of a night camp: children crying, dogs barking, harp music, singing, and the occasional angry quarrel followed by soothing words.
“Summer’s almost gone,” Dallandra said. “Will you be going back to Mandra for the winter?”
“I don’t know,” Valandario said. “I’m too comfortable there.”
“What? There’s naught wrong with being warm and dry.”
“That’s not what I meant. Comfortable in my soul, with my gems and the books all around me. How long has it been since I truly worked dweomer?”
“When you evoked the spirit of Hanmara.”
“Oh, that was just a typical evocation. I wouldn’t call it a real accomplishment.”
“Well, your scrying system is certainly valuable.”
“I know, I know, but once Sidro gets it written up from her notes, anyone with the smallest dweomer gift will be able to use it. I mean real dweomer, something to stretch my mind and soul, something with risks, even.” Val paused to add another patty of dry horse dung to the campfire in front of them. “Ever since I approved Ebañy’s plan to go live in that tower, I’ve felt guilty. I was always badgering him to do more with his dweomer gifts, but I wasn’t using mine fully, either.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“But I would.” Val smiled at her. “I’ve been looking back over my life. When Jav died, I retreated from it, life that is. I’ve been living in a jewel-encrusted shell, Dalla. I’ve forgotten that I’m still young, and I’ve been a coward.”
“Here! I wouldn’t call you that.”
“Thank you, but I would. I can’t even make up my mind whether to destroy the black stone, can I?”
“Why should you, really?”
“It caused a murder, and Evandar meddled with it.”
“That’s true.” Dallandra hesitated then decided against saying anything. She badly wanted the crystal, she realized, wanted to cherish it as the last token of her love for Evandar. It’s Val’s, she reminded herself, not yours to have or destroy. She concentrated on watching the salamanders basking in the tiny flames. For their sake she added a few sticks to the fire.
“I’m going to ride out tomorrow,” Val said eventually. “I want to take the black crystal back to the place where Jav found it, the ruins of that tower. I have the feeling that I’ll know what to do with it once I’m there.”
“But the tower fell nearly two hundred years ago. There won’t be much left. You probably won’t even be able to find the place.”
“He said the broken stones were huge. The tide won’t have washed them away.”
“Ah, I see. Who’s going to go with you?”
“No one. I’m going alone.”
“What? That’s dangerous!”
“I don’t care.”
“Val! You can’t!”
“I’ve made up my mind.” Val rose from her seat. “I’m leaving on the morrow.”
When the morrow came, Dallandra continued arguing the point while Valandario loaded supplies onto her pack mule and saddled up her riding horse. Val merely smiled, refusing to answer. Eventually Dallandra ran out of words.
“If I get into trouble,” Val said, “I’ll call to you mind to mind. Besides, if you’re truly this worried, you can always scry me out.”
“That’s true,” Dallandra said. “Very well, I’ll hold my nagging tongue. The truth is, I keep wanting to beg you for the crystal. It’s the last thing of Evandar’s that I have.”
“I know you loved him, but it’s time to put his schemes to rest.”
“So it is.” Dallandra hesitated, then forced out a smile. “Take it and give it to the Lords of Aethyr then, should they want it. It’s time, indeed, for me to let Evandar go.”
Over the next few days, as she rode west, Valandario was aware now and then of the touch of Dallandra’s anxious mind, watching over her. At first Val found it annoying, but by the end of an eightnight, she began to welcome it. The grasslands stretched out empty to the north; to the south lay only the sea, muttering on its rocky beach. For company she had only the seabirds, wheeling and mewling over the green swells and the dark water that stretched to the southern horizon.
Although she’d brought a canvas shelter with her, most nights she left it tied in a bundle. She lay out in the grass near her tethered horse and mule and watched the wheel of stars while the sea murmured and sang nearby. On nights when the fog came in thickly over land and sea, she gathered driftwood for a fire. She watched the flames, burning blue from the salt crusted on the wood, for half the night. At times she saw strange images among them, of tall towers of stone amid the streets of ancient cities.
On the twelth day she reached the ruins of the old guard tower. A half circle of broken walls stood on the edge of a cliff. On the beach below, the corners of huge stones emerged from nearly two hundred years’ worth of sand and driftwood as if they were swimmers just coming up from a dive. Jav had found the box with the the obsidian crystal somewhere among them when they lay clean and exposed to the open air. If any dweomer objects lay in the sand now, they were too well-buried for her to sense. The remains of the tower wall, however, still stood on the cliff edge.
Some hundred yards west, Valandario found a rivulet of fresh water digging itself a channel through the grass. It slithered rather than cascaded down the cliff face, then lost itself in the sand, but up on top it ran deep and cle
an enough for drinking. She unloaded her stock, watered them, and set them out to graze, then walked over to the tower. The half circle of wall, gray stone mottled here and there with green moss, stood to a height of about ten feet.
Ancient, broken, gutted by Time and sea storms—still the remaining stones gave out a peculiar energy. Val felt it as a tingling in the air and smelled it as the clean sharp aftermath of lightning. Someone had worked dweomer in this tower, someone powerful enough that the traces had lingered for over a thousand years. She ran her fingers along one flat stone, about five feet above the ground and set next to what seemed to have been a doorway. Under the moss she felt deep-carved runes, still readable by touch.
“Lords of Aethyr!” she called out. “Grant me your protection in your temple!”
She felt their answer as a cold ripple down her back. The lightning-scent intensified around her. She stepped through the doorway and looked down. The grassy ground fell away some ten feet from the threshold. How far it would be safe to go was debatable.
“Lords of Aethyr! My thanks to you!”
Valandario turned and walked back out to ordinary ground. That evening she took one of the long sticks from her canvas lean-to and consecrated it as a ritual staff. She wanted to test the footing before she trusted her weight to the cliff edge.
In the morning, once the tide of Aethyr ran strong out on the etheric, Valandario stuffed the black crystal down the front of her tunic. She took her sword in her left hand and the staff in her right and walked back to the tower door. After a brief invocation to the powers of Aethyr, she stepped over the threshold and felt the etheric forces gathering around her. By tapping with the staff, she determined that she could safely walk some three feet in.
She laid the staff down and with the sword slashed a circle out of the tall grass, just a small one, perhaps two feet across. She took the black crystal and placed it in the center, then picked up her staff again. She’d barely begun the ritual invocations when she saw a glimmering point of turquoise light appear above it.
“Be welcome in the name of the Light!”
The point expanded to a circle and changed to a pale lavender. The circle extended itself into a shimmering silver cylinder, some ten feet tall. Within the smokelike interior another turquoise point appeared and gleamed, then swelled itself into a vaguely manlike shape, glowing with white light. The King of Aethyr himself had deigned to appear.
With a swing of her arm, Valandario used the staff to sketch out the sigils of Aethyr. The sword she laid crosswise at her feet. The King acknowledged her with a nod.
“Have you brought this crystal back to us?” The thought came to her mind as a chorus of voices, not a single voice, even though a single figure floated inside the pillar.
“I have,” Val said. “I believe it has been consecrated in your name.”
“You are correct in that. We shall retrieve the shadow, for that is what this black stone is, and reunite it with its true self. Child of Air, break the circle!”
Val laid the staff down across the edge of the circle in the grass. The spirit stone began to glow, first with its usual dark fire, then with a brighter, cleaner light. It shone gray, turned silver, and with a sound like a pair of hands slapping a drum, it rose from the earth. It hovered some three feet above the grass for a few heartbeats, then began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, ever faster until with a burst of light as blinding as a lightning flash, it disappeared. From the sky above came three booming knocks of no natural thunder.
“The crystal has gone to its true home!” the King’s voice echoed the thunder. “The Great Ones approve.”
“The working is done,” Val called out. She knocked the butt of her staff three times on the ground. “May any spirits bound by this ceremony go free.”
“It is finished, in truth and deed.” The silver King of Aethyr began to fade within his pillar. His voice rustled like wind in distant grass. “Farewell, Child of Air! You have done well this day.”
His image swirled, faded into a beam of sunlight, then disappeared altogether. Val picked up her sword and slapped it against the grass to earth any lingering forces within it, then retrieved her staff. With a long sigh of exhaustion, she walked across the threshold and out into the ordinary world of the grasslands, the sea, and the sky, where the dawn had brightened into day.
When she lay down in her blankets that morning, Valandario fell asleep almost before she could pull them up to her chin. She found herself in the Gatelands of Sleep, which her mind conceptualized as a green lawn stretching out in front of a garden of roses. By the gate into the garden Aderyn stood, smiling at her, in the form of the silver-haired teacher she remembered so well.
“Val, Val,” he said. “It’s time you laid aside your long grief.”
“I know,” she said. “And I will.”
“I must ask you an enormous favor. It’s time for me to be reborn. Will you be my mother?”
“I never wanted a child!” Val was startled into truthfulness.
“I know that. Never would the Lords of Wyrd force a child upon a woman dead set against it. Why do you think I’m asking? It’s your choice, Val, your free choice.”
Valandario hesitated, remembering herself as little more than a child, orphaned by a flash flood that had swept away her parents and half their alar. Aderyn had taken her in, raised her with his own son, so patiently and so well, perhaps because she wasn’t his bloodkin, and thus her success or failure had been less important to him than Loddlaen’s. He was watching her patiently now, his face carefully composed to show no emotion that might influence her choice.
“For you, I will,” Valandario said. “I would be honored.”
He did smile, then, a flicker of relief.
“But you know,” Val went on. “I’m going to have a difficult time conceiving on my own.”
Aderyn laughed, so heartily that she knew his astral self had already turned toward life once again. “So you would,” he said. “Meet the ships coming from the Southern Isles. Remember that: meet the ships.”
With a glint of light like sun on water, he vanished. She woke, sitting up in the grass, seeing the long shadows of late afternoon, and wondering if the dream had been true or just some odd fancy. Perhaps she was merely lonely, envious of Dallandra, nursing her child, and of Sidro, so elated to be pregnant again at last. Yet his last words stayed with her: meet the ships.
On a day when a warm wind drove away the rain clouds, Valandario returned to Mandra to find the town preparing for a festival. Down by the harbor, they’d set up long tables and dug pits, where several sheep were roasting for the meal ahead. Musicians sat on the grass and tuned their instruments or practiced bits and pieces of songs.
When Val arrived at their house, Lara and Jin greeted her with delight, and as they were carrying her goods up to her old chamber, Lara explained.
“Ships are coming from the Southern Isles,” Lara said. “We’ve got a lookout on the roof of the new temple, and he saw them this morning. If this wind keeps up, they should make landfall tonight.”
“Wonderful!” Val said. She was thinking that she’d arrived just in time. “New temple?”
“The town built it this summer. It’s not very splendid yet, but it does have a few statues of gods inside.”
Just at sunset, the town crier went running through the streets. Four ships were pulling into the harbor under oars. As Valandario walked down with Lara and Jin, she felt oddly calm. She’d convinced herself, she realized, that she’d merely dreamt about Aderyn and his messages. Surely they couldn’t be real, surely they could have nothing to do with Jav.
But he arrived in the first boat, a sailor with jet-black hair and golden eyes. Valandario was watching from the beach when she spotted him, leaping onto the wooden pier. A shipmate threw him a rope, which he hitched around the nearest bollard. With the knot secure he walked a few steps down the pier, hooked his thumbs into his leather belt, and stood looking wide-eyed at his new homeland. Or his
old homeland, to which he’d returned—when he glanced her way, Valandario recognized him. Jav! she thought. Oh, Jav, do you remember me?
Not, of course, that he would know that he did. Still, he took a few more steps, staring at her, smiling. She climbed the steps up to the pier, and as she walked toward the ship, he came to meet her with the rolling walk of a man who still expected his footing to rise and fall under him.
“Good morrow,” he said in a soft, dark voice. “I seem to have come to the most beautiful spot in the world.”
“I—” Val could feel her face burning, and he laughed.
“Forgive me,” he said. “My name is Braelindar. What’s yours?”
“Valandario Gemscryer.”
“The Wise One!” It was his turn to blush. “Meranaldar told us about—” He dropped to one knee and looked down. “Forgive me, Wise One! I didn’t mean to be so forward. I—”
“It’s perfectly all right. I’m not in the least insulted.”
“You’re sure?” Brae raised his head to look into her eyes.
“Very sure.” She smiled at him. “Oh, do get up! It’s not like I’m royalty or some such thing.”
He did as she asked, then grinned at her. “Things are truly different here,” he said. “They warned us, but I don’t think I realized just how different they’d be. Back in the islands I’d never have dared speak to you, much less—uh, well.”
“Uh, well what?”
He laughed, she joined him, and they stood smiling at each other while the rest of the shipload of immigrants hurried past down the pier to their new homes on the land.
In the Halls of Light, they spoke to him of the work ahead.
They stood in pillars of crystal, pale lavender or mottled silver. They themselves appeared as shafts of light, glinting inside their crystal towers. He himself was but a glimmer of light, a beam of sun, perhaps, glinting on a stream, flickering, uncertain. Yet he heard them.