Godbond (31 page)

“Dan,” said Tassida suddenly, urgently, “look!”

Never had I felt less like opening my eyes, but this was Tass who spoke to me. I looked. The forest, starlit and dark. In white starform, and alone, Chal stood silently before me. By my sides, Tassida and Ytan kept still as the stones. This was an eerie one, neither truly dead nor truly alive. But I thought of him only as an old friend, and my heart ached for his sake.

“Your comrade,” I said huskily to him. “Gone.”

His sober, kingly gaze answered me.

“Gone, to—to be with Kor? My lord out of the past, I thank you. But I wish I could—bring him back to you.…”

Chal came and kneeled by me, placing his hand on my forearm, a starlight touch I could not feel. Silently that touch said to me, as he could not say, Be comforted. He asked nothing more of me. But one star-mote hand lifted toward Tassida and his eyes, deep as night, turned toward her—I felt her stiffen. For a moment she met that stardark gaze, then silently she did as Chal signaled her. She drew Marantha. She laid the sword down on the loam at my feet, earth dampened by my tears.

In the sword's pommel, an amaranthine jewel glowed. For a brief moment, an eyeblink, Chal laid his palm on the stone, and the light flowed through his insubstantial hand. Then the shadow-stars of which he was made seemed to swirl and swarm like midges, and he was gone. Tassida reached for her sword, but stopped her reaching hand in midair.

“Dan,” she said in a hushed voice.

“My brother, look!” said Ytan.

Even before they spoke, even before I looked, I felt the fragrance, touching me like sunlight, lying on me as gently as mist of dawn. At my feet, where Marantha's pommel touched the moistened loam, a spire-shaped flower was springing up.

“Amaranth,” Tass breathed.

Sweet flower of healing, Sakeema's blossom. And I knew to my heart of hearts that Kor was in some sense yet with me, as I was yet with him. I knew it to the center of my being. And weeping ceased as if it had never been.

As if coming out of a hurtful dream I stirred and looked at Tass. She gazed back at me tenderly.

“So the amaranth is a better healer than I,” she remarked.

‘You, who healed a battle's worth of dead and wounded?” A wry thought struck me. “You healed them all? Even Pajlat?”

“Even Pajlat,” she affirmed softly. “I had to do all or none, Dan.”

“Scum of Mahela,” I muttered.

“Though I must admit,” Tass added, “I did him last.”

“By my wounds, I hope he has not started up the fray again.” The thought brought me to my feet. Tass and Ytan rose to stand beside me.

“When we left,” Ytan said, “he and his horsemen were riding off to hunt the bison.”

I groaned at that.

“And the Cragsmen have gone back to the peaks,” Tass told me. “But the Otter have stayed for the feast, and so have the folk out of the past. There is a mighty sort of din and dancing and passing of perry wine going on at Seal Hold.”

I stared blankly, for it had not yet occurred to me that there was cause for rejoicing. Ytan said, “Dan, come down. Everyone is asking about you.”

There was peace in me, given by the amaranth, but it was a frail bubble, not yet ready to burst into joy. I shook my head. Ytan took my hand and lifted it in both his own.

“Dan,” he said, almost pleading, “there is one brother yet with you.”

I looked into his fair, moonlit face as if looking into my own, seeing how generous of heart he was, yet how fragile. How he flushed at his own words. When he spoke again, he had roughened his voice.

“You greathearted dolt,” he said, “all the time you were seeking, I knew Sakeema was as close as your right hand. We all sensed it, we Red Harts. Tyee could have told you, but, lunkhead that you are, you would not have believed him.”

“You will lead the Red Hart Tribe, Ytan,” I said to him.

He gawked at me.

“Go down,” I told him, “and join the feast, and tell my people, all of them, that I will come back at sunrise.”

He let go my hand and went, leaving me on the mountainside with Tass.

I sat again where I had been. She sat beside me. I took the forest loam in my hands, shaping it, not quite idly, for I was Darran, and in my blunderheaded way I knew what I was about. The fragrance of amaranth was in my nostrils, and the touch of Tassida's body was warm against my side, and under my hands the moist earth turned to the fairest creature I had ever seen, white, a sort of fair moon-white antelope with but a single horn that spiraled like the lovelocks of Tassida's hair, and it had amaranthine eyes that darkly glowed. It stood before us with head and horn tilted our way, gravely looking at us both as if in blessing.

“Dan,” Tass said to me in a small, stunned voice, “it is the creature from my dream.”

I took her hand. “Look at the horn,” I told her. “It is one, but it is two, entwined. It is our love. The emblem of our love.”

The creature leaped up like joy and bounded up-mountain, where it stood on a high vantage, savoring the night.

Tass said softly, “Dan, if you wish it.…”

There was not much need for us to speak or even mindspeak, since godbond. We knew that we would be together for as long as this renewed world should last. We knew that we would begin as was fitting in a world of new life, and that it would be good, very good, on the mountainside in that sweetest of all nights.

“Indeed I do wish it,” I told her, my voice hushed. “But first there is one thing more I wish to do.”

Again I shaped the earth, and this time I thought not of Tass, or the amaranth, or the good night full of creature sounds, or of my beloved mountains—though all these things strengthened me as I worked—but I thought of the one who had given them back to me.

And then I lifted what I had made, and saw its grace, heard the haunting song, and I released it into flight, watched it fly to the sea, its wingspan as great as the height of a man.

“Blue?” Tass whispered in wonder.

All the colors of the sea were in its feathers, blue and moonsheen and shimmering green and dusky violet and gray. For it was of Kor that I had been thinking. The blue swan would swim on the swells of the sea and sing forever of Korridun.

“Blue swan of Darran,” Tass murmured.

“Blue swan of Korridun,” I told her.

For Kor was the sea king.

Glossary