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“Yet you have not given me everything,” she says, and he sees that it is so. He hasn’t given her the pouch. It hangs at his neck as heavy as lead. It is so hard to lift his arms, to dip his head, to pull it free. The pouch gapes open, string unwound, and the rose, wilting now, falls beside the stained nail onto the ground.
“Yet you have not given me everything,” she says. “Two things you carry with you yet.”
He knows the last burdens he carries, but they are not objects he can pass from hand to hand. “How can I give them to you?” he asks, gasping as blood leaks from his wound faster than Rage and Sorrow can lick it clean. Blood trickles from his lower lip, bubbling in time to his breathing. “How can I give you the oath my foster father made, that I forswore? How can I give you the lie I spoke to Lavastine because I wanted him to die at peace?”
“Now they are mine,” she says. She sidesteps in the graceful way of horses.
Where she stood, he sees a young woman kneeling in an attitude of intent meditation, so still that she surely must have been there all along even though it is manifestly impossible for two creatures to inhabit the same space at the same time. The young woman does not seem to see him or even hear the conversation, and she is dressed quite strangely, in a tightly-fitted cowskin bodice with sleeves cut to the elbows and an embroidered neck, and a string skirt whose corded lengths reveal her thighs. Copper armbands incised with the heads of deer bind her wrists, and a gorgeous broad bronze waistband ornamented with linked spirals and hatched, hammered edges covers her midriff. She wears a necklace of amber beads and a gold headdress decorated with finely incised spirals and two curling, gold antlers. In one hand she holds a polished obsidian mirror fixed to a handle of wood carved in the shape of a stag. Her expression is pensive, but it is the contrast between eyes drowned in sadness and a generous mouth that seems ready to smile given the least provocation that makes her handsome.
Then the centaur woman moves between him and the cauldron, so he can no longer see her. He can barely cant his neck back to look up into her face. A bubble of blood swells and pops in his nose as his lungs draw sustenance out of his heart. His vision fades, comes into focus again, and he sways. Her body looms, not because she is as big as the warhorses that carry Wendish lords into battle but because he realizes now that she is not mortal in the same way he is.
She holds out her cupped hands and brings them to his lips. He sucks, and the water slides down his throat like nectar.
Like nectar, it spreads its essence quickly. He no longer feels any pain in his ribs, and the shock of healing is so profound that he falls forward in a daze. Oddly, he feels the prick of the rose on his right cheek, where his skin presses into the earth. The hounds nose him, then settle down contentedly on either side of his prone body. He is so tired.
But he is alive.
Then he hears movement, and a moment later a woman’s voice gasps out surprise and a hand touches his naked back with the kind of stroke reserved for a lover.
“Here is the husband I have promised you, Adica,” says the centaur-woman. “He comes from the world beyond.”
“Did he come from the land of the dead?” This new voice, eminently human and close by his ear, is low, a little ragged, not musical but rather the voice of a woman who is courageous enough to walk open-eyed into the arms of death.
“Truly it was to the land of the dead that he was walking. But now he is here.”
Her hand rests pleasingly on the curve of his right shoulder, as if she is about to turn him over to see what he looks like. But when she speaks, her voice breaks a little on the words.
“Will he stay with me until my death, Holy One?”
“He will stay with you until your death.”
—and then she had lost him and tumbled free, landing hard on her knees with the wind knocked out of her lungs. Her bow lay beside her on the sandy ground. Branches rattled in a dry wind, and a gold feather drifted down through the air to catch in her hand. Coughing, she got to her feet.
“Well,” said the old Aoi sorcerer, letting the half-twined rope fall to the ground as he stood. “This time you have surprised me.”
“I didn’t expect to come here,” she admitted. She had to lean with hands braced on her thighs, catching her breath. Catching the sobs that shook her. She wanted to weep, but that was one of the lessons that Da had taught her, that she’d learned so well that it had become habit: “If you’re crying, you can’t hear them coming up behind you.”
Ai, God. There was nothing she could do for Alain. But she had to be strong enough to find Sanglant and Blessing; she had to be strong enough to come to their aid. She rose, letting her breath out with a shudder, tucked the feather away, and brushed dirt from the knees of her leggings and from her palms. She checked herself reflexively for her possessions: bow, quiver, sword, dagger, cloak, Alain’s ring, the torque Sanglant had given her. Of Blessing she had nothing but the link of shared blood.
“I meant to leave Verna,” she continued, still stunned by the departure of the creatures who had meant to take her with them. “But I didn’t know I’d end up here.”
“Yet you are here.”
“I am here,” she agreed, “But—” But still she hesitated.
“You are still bound to the other world,” he said, not dismayed, not irritated, not cheerful. Simply stating what was true.
“I am still bound to the other world.” Without thinking, she set her hand against the blue-white fire of the stone, and she looked inside.
He leans back against the rock face and lets the glorious heat of the sun warm him. They came clear of the valley an hour or so after dawn and, with the birds singing around him and his mother walking beside him, he understands he is free for now of Sister Anne and her threats and her war. Yet how can he be free from that war knowing what he has learned, that his mother’s people mean to return to Earth from whatever place they have been hiding, or exiled? True, his mother desires to go to Henry. But what will she tell him? And what will he say to his father? Whose story can he believe? On whose side will he muster?
He opens his eyes. Resuelto and the pony crop at what grass they can find upon the hillside. Below, smoke curls up from the cookhouse of the hostel below, and he sees robed figures hastening about. The monks are agitated today. Even the bees are agitated, swarming around flowers but not landing to sip nectar.
His mother crouches to one side of the path, spearpoint driven into the ground by her feet. With her forearms braced on her knees, she intently watches Jerna, who is suckling Blessing. The sight clearly fascinates her, although he isn’t sure why it ought to. Before he begged her to clothe herself in Liath’s spare tunic, it was obvious that the women of the Lost Ones are built no differently than human women in certain regards.
Ai, God. Where is Liath now? He listens, but he cannot hear her.
He dreams that she calls to him across the gulf of the heavens.
