The Night Voice (41 page)

Shade had brought her children to meet her “sister” . . . and Chane himself.

Where else might a mortal sage and a vampire find peace and contentment without judgment? He did not need to feed, with the orb nearby, and she had everything she required. They had each other most of all.

More years passed.

Chane had once imagined a life with Wynn in the Numan branch of the Guild of Sagecraft. This life was close enough—better—but as he now stood staring at the empty bridge, there were other nights he wished to tear out of memory.

The first had not registered upon him until too late.

He had paid no notice to small lines that grew on Wynn's oval face or the few strands of gray that appeared in her wispy brown hair. He knew she would age while he would not, but she had barely passed the age of fifty, and there was so much time left for them.

One night, she did not eat.

When he asked, she told him she was not hungry. He should have listened to the way she said this. In the following nights—and days—she barely ate at all.

The look of discomfort, then pain, began to show on her face.

He wanted to take her to a coastal city for a physician. She was too weak for the long journey. He wanted to take her to the tree in the hope that she might be able to call to someone through it for help. She became too weak to walk that far, and then so fragile that he feared carrying her.

He grew desperate to find some help, and so he dressed to shield himself before entering that far cavern alone. Even protected, he felt himself begin to burn. He threw Wynn's cloak over the crystal for more protection, and then realized he would still have to remove a glove to . . .

When he and Wynn had gone among the Lhoin'na, he had not dared to touch Chârmun.

Would its offspring allow him to do so? Would it affect him like touching the white petals he once used in the healing potion that had stopped Magiere? And even if he could touch it, what then?

He was not a white sage, one of Chârmun's chosen.

By his nature, he was its enemy. If it killed him, Wynn would have no one to care for her.

He stood there in growing discomfort and then in pain, until smoke began to seep out around his clothing. Finally he fled into the passage's dark, out of reach of the sun crystal's light. Frustrated panic drove him back to Wynn, and he desperately hoped that someone would soon come to them.

One night, Wynn could not sit up.

That this happened during another supply visit by white sages was pure chance. Even so, Chane knew it would take a long time to get a message to Magiere, Leesil, and especially Chap.

But he sent a message with the sages. He also begged them to send him a difficult-to-obtain ingredient called boar's bell. They had hesitated to agree until he told them what it was for.

They left.

Chane waited.

Shortly thereafter, Chuillyon arrived and brought two healer sages of the Lhoin'na guild branch. They brought the boar's bell and more
Anamgiah
blossoms, but the blossoms did nothing for Wynn, not this time. Chuillyon took the healers back to the tree and sent them home, though he remained awhile longer.

Chane used the boar's bell to re-create the potion to stave off dormancy that he had once needed to guard over Wynn while they had searched for the orbs. In this way, he could care for her both day and night.

On the sixth following night, just before dawn, Chane lay beside Wynn, their heads on the same pillow. Her eyes were closed, and he thought she was asleep. Then her hand sought out his, though her eyes did not open.

“I would rather have lived my life here with you,” she whispered, “than with anyone, anywhere else, in this world.”

His throat tightened, and he was about to answer, when the bedchamber was suddenly too quiet. Afraid to even shake her, all he could do was whisper her name, over and over, louder and louder, until his rasping voice tore at his own ears.

The silence had come when Wynn stopped breathing.

He lay there all day and through the next night with his face pressed into Wynn's shoulder. When he finally emerged, Chuillyon was still there in the outer room. The tall Lhoin'na said nothing and only nodded respectfully.

Rather than burn again, Chane let Chuillyon place her body in the cavern with the tree. He gathered stones from outside the peak for the elder sage to
mound up her grave cairn. Chuillyon left after promising to look for Magiere and the others himself, though it was already too late for them to come.

Chane now often crossed the bridge to reignite the cold-lamp crystal on the far side—just in case someone arrived. Until tonight, he had not thought of the sword Magiere had thrown at him. Only tonight had he brought it and left it at the chasm's far side.

It was a warning and an invitation.

He had a “life” because of Wynn, but that life was now over.

And yet he would—could—not die with her a third and final time.

All around him the stench of lamp oil was thick. He had spread so much of it that even the bottomless chasm's air had not yet dissipated those fumes. It had taken most of the previous night to scavenge enough for his need. But it would not be enough to be certain.

The presence of the orb beneath the tree's roots would still reach him. Yes, he could have fled the mountain and gotten far enough away that its constant feeding of him could no longer heal his wounds. Even then, he could not be certain that fire would finish him rather than leave him charred to rise yet again.

There was only one way to be certain of following Wynn.

How long did he wait there, sipping from the flask of potion to keep himself awake? How many times did he cross that bridge, now shivering from lack of dormancy, to relight that one cold-lamp crystal at the far side? Was it more than one night, another day, three or maybe four?

In the silence, he heard distant footsteps on stone.

When Chane looked, the cold-lamp crystal at the bridge's far end had dimmed again, but not enough to hide someone standing near it. That someone finally reached down to grasp the falchion's hilt and then strode slowly along the bridge.

She no longer wore the studded leather armor, for that had been lost—cut off her—the morning after all had ended outside the mountain. Instead, she wore a plain shirt beneath a dark brown cloak that she flipped back over away from her sword arm.

Magiere stepped off the bridge's near end. She did not look a day older than the night when she had been struck down by an arrow. Then again, neither did he.

“Wynn is gone,” he said flatly in his rasp.

She had maimed his voice, when she had taken his head with that blade once before. And that was the only way to be certain of a final death. But all she did was look away toward the passage beyond him where his home—Wynn's now-silent empty home—lay.

Magiere's eyes turned back on him.

“You knew this would happen eventually,” he said. “So do it . . . since this is what you have always wanted.”

She watched him with no emotion on her pale face framed in blood-black hair.

“No.”

Chane flinched at her one word, suddenly panic-stricken in grief. Where was the monster in her, now that he needed it for the monster in him?

“It's not what Wynn would've wanted,” she said, “not for you, not for either of us.”

Chane began to shudder, either from too many nights without dormancy or just the despair of failing to follow Wynn.

“I won't come back again,” she said. “I am leaving, and I suggest you do the same. That staff will never go out, and now that Wynn is gone . . .”

Magiere dropped the falchion. It clattered on stone as she turned away. She was three steps onto the bridge before he lunged after her.

“You had a life because of her,” she said, pausing but not turning back. “Don't waste whatever's left. Don't do that to her. I won't do that to her . . . for you.”

Chane stood there, watching her leave. He took up the falchion, prepared to go after her. She never broke stride and never looked back.

“I am nothing without her!” he shouted. “So let me be nothing!”

“And how's that possible?” she said. “You came back—twice. Maybe a
monster, and maybe something else, because of her. Would she want that wasted?”

He stood there so long after Magiere was gone. Someone had to be in there, waiting at the tree to take her away. Whoever that had been would be gone as well, unable to take an undead out of this place the same way. But Magiere's words kept burning him.

Maybe a monster . . . maybe something else . . . because of . . . her.

How was he to go on without the one person who had loved him? Yet how could he willfully end the life she had given him?

Chane stared down at Magiere's falchion in his hand.

He threw it off the bridge, though he never heard it hit bottom. He would gather only a few things before leaving this empty place.

• • •

Magiere was numb when a white sage returned her to the royal grounds of Bela. Chuillyon had planted his sprout—now a tree—of Chârmun there when they had all returned after those final nights near the peak.

She was still numb at the end of the long ride to Miiska.

There was something that Chane hadn't thought on in the years that had passed.

He had come back twice, but how could this be possible if there wasn't
something
inside him that was able to come back? She was more than the monster she'd been made to be, so why not the same with him? It didn't change any choice she'd made in hunting the undead or in what he'd done before Wynn, but now . . .

But perhaps like her there was more than a monster—there was
someone
—in him.

Magiere reached the stable up the street from the Sea Lion tavern. She left the horse with the young attendant still there. But when she was nearly home—finally—she stalled, thinking of Wynn.

No one should've been out in the trees toward the shore behind her home,
but that was where she heard voices she couldn't quite make out. And upon getting closer . . .

“She was your friend as well as Mother's,” a woman's voice insisted. “You should have gone. I would have, but I thought to come here first.”

“Your mother needed to go alone this time,” a man answered. “It's the last time. And you don't know everything . . . about how it might end.”

Hearing the voices brought both relief and the grief that Magiere had held off. But she wasn't going to cry for a lost friend—not yet—and she walked off into those trees. She didn't care about being quiet and barely caught sight of a short woman in a long dark robe among the night-shadowed trees near the sea.

That one turned. “Mother?”

A man struggled up from beyond a tree nearer the shoreline, and moonlight across the water haloed him in a glimmer that caught hair once fully white-blond.

“It's about time,” he said. “So, is he finally dead or not?”

Magiere closed quickly, right past Wayfarer, and threw her arms around Leesil.

“You know better than that,” she whispered, suddenly so weary.

“Still had to ask,” Leesil whispered back. “Sooner or later, you and Chane were going to have it out. I knew even I couldn't hold that off.”

Magiere leaned back, looking into her husband's beautiful amber eyes. She saw his fright at having let her go alone fade. She also saw the lines in his face, the locks of hair that were now more white-gray than white-blond, and the exhaustion of the wait that she felt herself.

“As long as you came back,” he said.

All she wanted then was to go home and stay there with him. There was no telling how long she would have him. Yes, she had grown older as well, but not as much as he.

In the end, how long would she have to live without him? That was too terrible a thought, and she had to look away. And there was Wayfarer, watching her with as much worry as Leesil had.

“Get over here,” Magiere said softly.

Wayfarer, still too small for one of her people, slipped in close and wrapped her arms around Magiere. It felt good to hold her again. No matter how often the girl returned now, it was never often enough for Magiere. She didn't even care about those ridiculous little wooden trinkets braided into the girl's dark hair or how much the girl—no, woman—had changed over the years.

“All right, girl,” Magiere growled. “Where is that husband of yours?”

Wayfarer hesitated and let out a long, slow sigh. “He . . . could not . . . face it.”

“So he's off playing with his deer again?”

The girl's eyes widened and scrunched in a scowl. This was followed by a sigh that was more of a scoff. How much she—all of them—had changed.

“Clhuassas—
listeners
—are not deer!” Wayfarer admonished. “And he is not
playing
with—”

“I don't care!” Magiere released Leesil and grabbed the girl by both shoulders. “You tell Osha we'd better see him by solstice or—”

“Yes, Mother,” Wayfarer interrupted, with a roll of her green eyes.

“Here we go again,” Leesil grumbled.

Magiere ignored him, finishing, “Or I'll go drag him back here by his hair!”

“Yes, Mother!”

There was silence for three breaths before Magiere straightened with a quick snort.

“Fine, good enough. Now let's go
home
.”

She grabbed each of their hands and pulled them along as she headed toward the back door of the Sea Lion's kitchen. The high-pitched squeal of a child rose somewhere upstairs in the tavern.

Magiere stopped in her tracks and let go of Wayfarer and Leesil as she stared up at the windows of the top floor.

A laugh, like from a boy, was followed by the crash of pottery shattering and furniture toppling. More squeals and laughter were cut short by a deep rolling growl—but only for an instant.