Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (42 page)

“You’re not looking,” he said.

His voice seemed to come from very near; the sound of it was localized again, rather than feeling like gravity or some other universal force that spoke from inside your bones, or your heart. Lee looked around for him, and slowly realized that it was
possible
to look around; that she had knees, and was kneeling on them… which was a good thing, since if she’d been standing, she would surely have fallen down by now. Lee blinked, and once more saw the darkness behind her eyes, which she’d thought she would never see again. And the stars dimmed through the thickening smoke of reestablished being, and were not stars, but just roses, burning in the twilight…

“Just roses,” she said, and then had to laugh rather weakly. ” ‘Just’…Gel?”

Not far away she heard the rustling as he staggered to his feet. “I’m here,” he said. “Wherever ‘here’ is. What just happened… what
was
that?”

“I rotated the core,” the Elf-King said. “Or actually I took away what was stopping it from rotating. It finished doing what it wanted to do, aeons and aeons ago…”

Gelert got to his feet, shook himself, prepared to wince…then didn’t. “Huh,” he said. “My ears are better—”

Someone pushed open the patio door from the living space of the house, came out onto the deck and stared up the hillside at the three of them.

The Elf-King smiled slightly. “Come up,” he said.

That first Alfen came up, followed by about ten others, singly; Alfen in ExAff livery, others in street clothes. All of them were carrying weapons. All of them came partway up the hill, then stopped, looking in confusion at Laurin. Lee looked at them in some slight confusion herself, for they didn’t look quite right somehow. They were all good-looking enough people to be sure, but—

“Lord…” said the one who had led them out. 
“Rai’Laurin…”

“Well,” Laurin said, “what is it?”

There was one of those long silences, and the Alfen all looked at each other, holding their guns as if they were sticks, awkward, suddenly useless. “Lord,” said another, “we came to kill you.”

“So I gathered,” the Elf-King said. “Or to destroy this.” He glanced around him at the glory of the roses, and from their light the Alfen actually flinched a little, as if they thought it might do them harm. “Well, what will you do now? Do you know what happened?”

“Rai’Laurin,”
 another one said, “you changed the world. The worlds…” Some of them fell to their knees, looking at him with foreboding and terror.

Laurin shook his head. “The world changed itself,” he said, “as it’s wanted to do for a long time. Nothing stopped it, all this while, but us. If I changed anything, it was my own heart. Now if you don’t still want to kill me, maybe you’d like to get up, and go home, and see how matters go in Aien Mhariseth; help may be needed there. I’ll follow shortly.”

Obedient, they got up, those who had been kneeling, and they all turned to go. “And we’ll need another
mrinLauvrin,
” the Elf-King said. “Tell the Survivor Lords we’ll convene to choose one when I return.”

The Alfen nodded or bowed to him, and went. Some minutes after they passed the gates, a silent cordon of small craft leapt up into the evening sky and headed upward and eastward.

Lee stood there, trying to recover herself, and looking out across the valley, which had finished reasserting itself, toward the mountains and the sea. “It’s still so beautiful,” Lee said, looking out across the mountains. “But beautiful differently…” That painful squeeze of the heart was gone now; the mind and heart could rest comfortably in this landscape, instead of flinching from them and returning, again and again, in obsessive desire to let that beauty somehow rub off, sink in.

“That was because the core never rotated completely the first time, when we were the only world,” the Elf-King said. “We were in the way. We were stuck, all of us resisting the change; so it gave us what we wanted, and kept us the way we were, refusing what was supposed to come next…”

“Supposed? Who supposes?”

He shrugged. “I just read the handwriting on the walls of the Worlds,” he said. “I don’t pretend to be able to analyze it. But what happened is what’s been trying to happen for a long time—the same kind of thing that Midgarth kept doing again and again, in a small way, being born and dying and being reborn, cyclically. I don’t think it’s going to do that anymore, though. Now that the whole sheaf has finally rotated properly, Midgarth can settle down. No more Fimbulwinters. When that world’s people come home from this last migration, they may find the Gods’ chessmen in the grass again, one last time. But this time the Gods will be able to sit down and finish the game, and start a new one without the whole world having to start over from scratch.” He smiled.

Before, Lee would have had trouble looking at that smile without having to hide her eyes, as if indeed a God were smiling it, blinding—but not now. He was still handsome, but he no longer wore that terrible beauty as if it was armor, or a weapon. “You’ve changed,” she said.

“I’m mortal,” he said. “I couldn’t have done that by myself: and you were right…it took living, not dying.

That was your gift…”

Slowly he came toward her. Before, the slow approach would have filled Lee with unease. Now, she felt a small smile of her own stirring. “You’ve shifted the whole nature of your people,” she said. “A whole species reborn…”

“Not just ours,” he said. “But when I first heard the word ‘genocide,’ I knew it had to have an opposite. I couldn’t imagine what that would be. It took you to teach me that.” He stood before her, now, and took her hand.

“You took a big risk,” Lee said, “that I’d have the slightest idea what to do…”

“You took a bigger one,” Laurin said. “But the myths told me to trust you. There’s always a mortal woman—always one who willingly chooses the impossible, the unthinkable, and becomes the bride of infinity and the mother of universes. It was just a matter of finding the one who would say ‘yes,’ and not regret the choice…”

Lee wanted to glance away, embarrassed; but he wouldn’t let her. “A lot of your people may be angry with you…” she said at last.

“Maybe not as angry as they would have been before. For everything’s different, now. They’ll still live long, long lives: maybe even longer than before the shift, who knows? The lives of other humans, too, will be far longer now… for the gift that we were keeping to ourselves is going to be a lot more widely distributed. So will others,” he said, and smiled a harderedged smile. “The transmission speed of fairy gold is now identical in all the worlds. ExTel and its ilk can use their armies for something else… if indeed their executives aren’t distracted more or less completely from their business plans by what’s happened to 
them
.”

“I want to go there,” Lee said.

“But you’re there now,” said the Elf-King.

She and Gelert turned…and found that he was right. The gating which had been a strenuous business was now the matter of a moment. With Gelert, Lee looked westward. Lake Val San Fernando and to the southeast was there again. Yet—

“Are you sure?” Lee said. The vista below her 
looked
 like Ellay. All the streets seemed to be in the same places. But there was something—Lee would have said, “something wrong about it” —except that, emphatically, there wasn’t. There was something 
right
 about it. Yet the air didn’t  look any cleaner. The sea didn’t look any bluer. Traffic on the San Diego Freeway looked as backed up as ever. Or maybe that was just the result of all the astonished drivers, stopped in their tracks by the bizarreness that had just overwhelmed their world, who had stopped their cars and were now standing around in the middle of the 405, staring at each other and their city and trying to figure out what the heck was going on with everything.

The Elf-King smiled. “It’s made new,” he said. “Though people are going to have trouble describing what’s happened for a while. What are they going to say?” And he laughed; the first time Lee had ever heard him laugh for sheer amusement, no irony or fear about it. “That one afternoon, everything was going along as usual, and the next moment, the world had become Paradise?” Now his grin became ironic, and tinged with some sadness. “I don’t think it’s going to be quite 
that
 good.”

“No,” Lee said.

“But as for you and me,” Laurin said, “all the possibilities shift as well…if we can let go of our own pain.”

Lee turned to him, surprised. 
How could you tell—

Because the vision you had, you passed to me
, he said. 
How else could I have seen what to do with
 
the worlds, except with the gift of Seeing truth, and implementing it?

But it’s not what it was
, she said. 
Everything you’ve done—

We’ve
done
, he said.

She had to accept it. 
It’s all a wonder. A wonder beyond wonders. The world has started over. All
 
the worlds are new. And there are a hundred more to explore…

And every one of them is the core of its own sheaf
, Laurin said. 
The possibilities will only keep on
 
unfolding. Every world that’s born now has the chance to make itself over, to make itself more
 
perfect, as soon as it’s ready…

“And so can you,” the Elf-King said.

She looked at him without comprehension. “In the myth,” Laurin said, “the Elf-King steals the princess from her lover, and brings her to rule over his people beside him. Though perhaps that’s an archetype that needs to be reworked somewhat.”

“In the myth,” Lee said, “she stops her people and the Elf-King’s from fighting by 
agreeing
 to rule his realm beside him. ‘And there she lives under the mountain yet, and is young forever, and can never die…’” Lee looked at him gently and with some regret. “I think the archetype is working matters out for itself in a different direction, something a little less simplistic. For my people, and for yours; and for us too. Because…I couldn’t—” She stopped, frustrated. “I can’t explain in words,” Lee said at last. “Look—”

She had to stop and think for a moment how to do it. This was no longer Alfheim, or Alfheim as it had been. But the space was still nearly as malleable, and so Lee bent her will against it and showed it the way she wanted it to part. “Just a step this way,” she said, and took his hand.

He took that step as she did, so that together they suddenly stood amid the short, harsh, summer-parched grasses that grew at the edge of her favorite vantage point, the topmost ridge of Topanga Canyon, where the old road down bent westward just so. There it all lay, the late-afternoon vista she had driven up here a hundred times to see—everything rose-golden with haze or smog; the glitter of distant glass and steel all softened in the saffron light, movement on streets and around buildings becoming remote and sweetly obscure; freeways streaming and shining, winding slowly down warm hillsides and pouring themselves in and out of the long stripes of shadow cast by downtown’s brave towers. The soft, crumpled hills drowsily embraced the city, leaning back against a sky blue only in the east; and off westward, the molten sea and haze-thickened sky reflected one another, blazing cinnamon-gold in the afternoon, while the honey sun poured down on Our Lady of the Harbor, where the statue of Her stood huge on that precipice above Malibu, gazing down in silence on Her city—

The man beside her stood silent. Lee looked down at it all, and breathed out in longing and irrational pain, looking down into the light.

“That,” she said. “How could I ever leave that? I love it too much, and the people in it. It’s where I do my work; it’s 
why
 I do my work. Without the threat to that, to the people I serve there, I’d never have done for the worlds what I did. 
That
 drove me. And I can’t leave it now. It’ll need me more than ever.”

“I understand you,” Laurin said. “I loved this, too.” He looked over his shoulder through the still-patent gateway in the air at the garden, lingering in the shadows behind them. “It was unique, endangered, as I was endangered…and I loved the roses even more because of that. But now they’re safe. Now the garden can bloom again in Aien Mhariseth, without fear. Now the curse is lifted, and twilight becomes just one more time when the roses burn. Maybe the sweetness of the danger is gone. That may take me a while to get used to. And yes, that’s sad. It’s more of a price than I ever thought I’d have to pay.” He breathed out.
“But it’s worth it!”

After a moment, Lee nodded. “Yes, of course it is.”

His smile was sorrowful, but edged with humor. “But you knew that already. Better than I did, probably. And if we can’t stand a little sadness, a little suffering, then we’re not worth much as gods.”

Lee glanced over into the lengthening afternoon, where God stood all golden in the light, Her arms raised in astonishment and joy at what She had made. “She’s not the jealous type,” she said, “but I’d still be careful how I talked…”

The Elf-King laughed. “She won’t mind if you hold Her place until She gets used to the new shape of things,” he said. “And Justice will still have plenty of work that needs to be done, for there’s going to be more than the usual amount of confusion in all the worlds for a good while.”

“As long as we’re not out of a job,” Gelert said.

“Oh, no,” Laurin said. “Why should a world reborn necessarily imply complete perfection? We’re all in for interesting times.” He rubbed his face in a gesture that was the same as that of the man on his knees in the garden, though not quite as hopeless.

“‘We’…”

“I can’t speak for others,” Laurin said, “but you and I will have more work to do together. We’re standing 
in loco parentis
, and it seems likely enough that there’ll be teething pains among these worlds—spots where things have gone wrong and we’ll have to intervene. Physicality has changed. For all I know, some of the laws of science, some physical laws, have changed, too. We may have to go off and do some tinkering with that, here and there.”