The Lady of Han-Gilen (37 page)

At once and as one they broke off. Slowly Mirain’s hands
met, palm to palm. The Exile’s mirrored them.

As her palms touched, the circle blazed up, white light and
black fire, then dimmed again. But a shimmer lingered, a wall of power, and
within it nothingness.

Not until one of them fell might that wall fall; nor could
any open it, man or mage, god or demon. They were alone, utterly.

Elian reeled on her cold perch. She was alone, sundered,
torn.

She had eyes. And power, though forbidden to pass the
barrier, could see all within.

At first there was little to see. They stood motionless,
facing one another.

Though nothing with mind or power could pierce the wall, a
thin wind slipped through the emptiness. It stirred their long tunics; made
witchlocks of the Exile’s hair; blew Mirain’s mane into his face. He shook back
the heavy mass, to little effect; shrugged; let it be.

The Exile raised her hands. A tendril of darkness uncoiled,
reaching, groping for the light.

Sparks leaped. The darkness whipped back.

Mirain stood unmoved. His face was lost in the tangles of
his hair. The wind, strengthening, danced about him. Playful fingers caught his
tunic, tossing it away from his body, whipping it round and round, binding,
tightening.

His swift hands caught and gathered the wildness of his
mane, twisted it back from his calm face, knotted it behind him.

The wind fled. His tunic fell loosely to his feet. The knot,
which should never have held, kept its place unaltered.

Elian’s stiff lips bent in the beginnings of a smile. The
first round, it seemed, had gone to Mirain.

He was in no haste to press his advantage. He forsook his
rigid stillness, wandering a little in his half of the circle, setting down his
feet with feline delicacy. Round, sidewise, back, step and step and step, with
a cat’s precision, a dancer’s grace.

With each step a glimmer of light grew in the nightstone, a
tangled skein of pale fire circling the Exile’s feet, weaving among them,
drawing together, closing.

Her clawed fingers swept down, rending the web.

He laughed and whirled like a devil-dancer, lithe dark body
in a circle of pale leather. The web, torn, spun up the Exile’s lank form,
knee-high, hip-high, breast-high.

She tossed her head. He spun faster, faster, faster.

The web shredded and tattered. A blur of black hummed within
a blur of white.

With a vicious, whip-sharp crack, he stopped. His eyes flamed.
His hair was free again, witch-wild, his garment a tatter. His breath came
hard. And yet he smiled.

The web had melted into the night. His enemy inclined her
head very slightly.

“You have the beginnings of art,” she conceded. “Will you
play further? Or shall we do battle at last?”

Mirain fought with light and fire and with his supple voice.
The nameless one opposed him with darkness visible, in a wall of living
silence. Against his spear of levin-fire she raised a shield of night; against
his weaving of subtle melody, a stillness that swallowed all sound. The rising
dawn illumined his half of the circle, but in the other, deep night reigned.

At first Elian did not credit her eyes. Mirain’s half of the
circle was smaller. No—he had moved; her eyes were weary; the growing daylight
deceived her, dulling the shimmer of the dawnstone.

He stood as he had stood since the battle began in earnest,
and the line of darkness crept toward him. His body swayed; his voice sang
three lines of an ancient cantrip. The advance halted.

Elian’s hands knotted; her breath caught. The darkness in
the circle was a handspan less. Mirain’s face glistened damply; his eyes were
squeezed shut, his body rigid. All his strength bent upon the holding of that
line.

Slowly, inexorably, the darkness advanced. He trembled
visibly with the effort of resistance. His enemy was as still as a standing
stone, without expression save for the thin grey line of her lips.

The mark of her power approached his feet. Step by step he
retreated. Step by step the dawnstone dulled and blackened.

The line began to bend. Before and beside him, to the full
stretch of his arms, the light lingered. But night held the rest.

His back touched a pillar. Beyond it he could not go; the
shield walled him in. All about him, save only where he stood, was darkness.

Slowly he sank to one knee, bowed as if beneath a mighty
burden. The light beneath him had lost all its brilliance, flickering greyly,
pallid as winter fog.

His enemy came toward him without haste and stood over him,
blind eyes bent upon him. She had him, and she knew it.

His breath rattled in his throat. Her hand rose, swept
sidewise, cast him helpless to the ground.

And she turned her back on him. She faced outward.

The circle wavered, stretching. About Elian’s feet wove a
small furred cat-creature, singing a yowling song. The Exile’s power yearned
toward it.

Elian snatched it up. It came as if it were pleased to come,
warm and solid, supple. It nestled in the hollow of her shoulder.

She, tensed to leap back, to cast up her shields, to sunder
witch and familiar, could move no muscle of her body. Her scarred cheek
throbbed. The beast ended its song and began to purr.

“Yes,” said the Exile. “She knows you, my swift one, my
dancer in the grasses. We are kin; we are sisters in power.”

A shudder racked Elian: deep, pulsing, black-red denial.
With terror in it. Because she set her will to refuse the truth.

The Exile gestured behind her, not in scorn, not without
respect. “He was strong, as befit his heritage. But he had not the strength
that I have. He will have no part of the dark; he who is born of the burning
noon denies the night with all that is in him. Look now. See. Know what he
would make of the world.”

Sunlight. Green places. Water falling, and white cities
rising, and fields rich with the harvest.

Sunlight. No night. No relief of the cool dark, no light of
stars. Green withered, blackened, burned. Water shrank into dust. White walls
cast back the light in blinding splendor, in carrion stench. White bone lay
bare beneath fire-ravaged flesh; the land itself was stripped, seared, destroyed
by the merciless light.

Armies rode through the shattered country. As they rode,
they sang a hymn to the Sun; and cursed the dark; and saw only beauty in that
desolation.

Faintly within it, something moved: a human figure, gaunt,
scorched, staggering with hands held out in supplication. The army fell upon
it.

It shrieked once, suddenly cut off. The army passed. The
dust was dark, dampened with blood; but in a moment the sun had drunk the last
of its wetness.

“No,” said Elian. A shaft of agony pierced her center. She
clutched it, doubling. “No.”

“Indeed,” said the Exile, “no. He has seen the light and the
white city. He has not seen its price.”

“Not our child. Not—”

“Your child?” The woman was astonished. “We do not take the
lives of the unborn. That is for the gods alone; or for men who fancy
themselves better than gods. Your king’s price is for the world’s paying. The
price of fire, and of the balance’s breaking.”

The pain was passing, draggingly slow. Elian drew herself
up. The familiar had not even shifted its grip. It had solidity but no weight;
strength, but very little bulk to house it.

She could not force her hands to tear it away. They
flattened over her belly. “You will not have our child. I will die before I
surrender him.”

“Or her,” said the Exile. “Or can you not endure the
prospect of a daughter?”

“I can endure either, if only it lives to be born.”

“Can you?” The woman approached the circle’s edge. “You may
gather your power to stand against me. You are strong enough; you can will
yourself to be blind enough. Or you may stand with me. You bear in your womb
both weapon and healing: seal of the balance, seal of the Sun’s dominion. What
your brother and lover has been, this seed of his shall be a thousandfold.”

Elian reeled. Needle-claws brought her snapping erect. The
cat mewed softly. Warning. Imparting strength.

It was evil.
Evil
.

It was a cat. Small, swift, quick-tempered, centered on
itself. When it chose, as it chose, it could bestow its affection. It did not
regret its marring of her face; it did not begrudge her battering of its body.
It was power, and its purpose was simply to be.

“And,” said her kinswoman, “to bolster waning power, of body
or of mind.”

Elian’s eyes squeezed shut against the vision. It blazed
within, unconquerable.

Traps within traps within traps. Danger and daring and a
spice of treachery, to lure Mirain. Mirain, to lure his lifelong shadow.

Mirain was to die. She was to suffer it, or to accomplish
it. To be seduced. To give her soul to neither light nor dark, but to this
thing called balance, that was no god she had ever known.

Mirain was the greater mage, perhaps. She was the greater
power. Because of what she was, mage’s daughter, royal seed, child of night and
fire; and woman, and bearer of a child.

This child. Sunborn, mageborn, ruler of the world.

If it lived. Her eyes opened, blinded with vision; met blind
eyes that could see beyond sight.

The Exile loved her, because she was blood kin; hated her,
envied her, but loved her. And would take her life without the slightest qualm,
if she chose awry.

“There is no choice,” gritted Elian. “There is only the
light and the dark. I was born in the light. I cannot embrace its enemy.”

The Exile’s hand shaped potent denial: a sign in the air,
red-gold, gleaming in the waxing morning. “They are not enemies. They are one.
Stand with me, sister. Defend them against their sundering.”

She pleaded: she who was as proud as Elian had ever been.
She begged. She all but wept for the world that would lie beneath the hammer of
the Sun. The wars, the souls cast down into death, the blood poured out in
rivers in Avaryan’s name. And in Mirain’s.

Elian’s heart clenched with love of him. And yet . . .
and yet . . .

Follow your heart, they bade her. Listen to your power. They
know. They see what cannot but be.

Almost she laughed. She had writhed in agony over a pair of
lovers, each perfect of his kind. She had not known what agony was.

The cat settled in her arms. She rubbed its soft ears. It
purred.

It lay against the spark of her child. Defending.
Strengthening.

All her understandings swayed and unbalanced and fell. Good,
evil. Dark, light. Friend, enemy. Hate, love, peace, wrath—all one, all mingled,
all lost in a mad tangle of changes.

She could not endure it. She would lose her poor wits; she
would die. She could—not—

The Exile raised her hand. Offering. Beckoning.

Elian’s hand moved of its own will. The cat sang its joy.

White fire reared up above the shadow that was the Exile,
and swooped down. The world shattered in an explosion of light.

It was very quiet.

Elian swayed in emptiness. She was still afoot; she could
not understand why. Nor, for a long while, could she understand why she should
not be.

The cat was gone. Perhaps she had dreamed the whole of it.

Abruptly and violently her stomach overturned itself. She
crouched, gasping and retching; and some of it was hysteria, laughter well past
the border of madness, for long shafts of sunlight dazzled her streaming eyes.
Morning sun. Avaryan had found his way at last into the mountain’s crown.

Sick, half blind, she crawled in a ragged circle. Her hand
jarred against an obstacle. A hand, long and bone-thin; an arm; the charred
ruin of a face.

The eyes had escaped, blind now within as without, opened
wide upon nothingness. There was no horror in them, and no surprise at all.
Only peace, and something very like triumph.

Elian’s breath caught. This was the shape of her vision:
white hair spread on pale stone.

And black beside it. Mirain lay where the last great surge
of his power had cast him, limbs asprawl, golden hand flung up beside his face.
His eyes were closed, seemly; no mark of burning stained him.

His tunic had fallen awry. Carefully she smoothed it,
covering his nakedness. Her hand shrank a little, briefly, from touching him:
as if he could loose his fire upon her. Sun’s fire.

He had made her choice for her. Or she had, as she always
did, in tarrying until it made itself.

She looked at him. She saw a man whom she loved, whom she
would gladly die for. She saw . . .

Her mind’s eye closed. Her choice was made. She would not
seek to unmake it. His truth, the Exile’s truth—here and now, it made no
difference. All that mattered was Mirain.

oOo

“Sweet merciful gods.”

Elian looked up. She had heard nothing, seen nothing. Yet it
surprised her not at all to hear her brother’s voice, to see him there with the
Lord Vadin beside him, armored and helmeted and bearing each a sword. The
blades, she noticed, had seen use.

Men thronged at their backs. She saw Lord Garin between two
grim women of her own Guard, and Prince Omian grey-faced and staggering, and a
flock of men of both Ianon and the Hundred Realms. Cuthan stood in front of
them all with his smooth braids fallen in a tangle and blood on his cheek, and
a red blade dripping on the grass.

Elian rose slowly. “You took your time,” she said. And
cursed her tongue.

He stared at her, mute, his eyes dark with misery. She tried
to comfort him, but no words would come. She could only touch him.

His arm was rigid, but he did not pull away. He had stopped
seeing her.

Halenan had sunk to his knees beside Mirain. Somewhere in
the ranks, someone cried aloud.

Ashan’s heir shouted and struggled and suddenly broke free.
A dozen swords flashed up. Blood sprayed wide.