The Silver Mage (74 page)

Some hundred yards west, Valandario found a rivulet of fresh water digging itself a channel through the grass. It slithered rather than cascaded down the cliff face, then lost itself in the sand, but up on top it ran deep and clean enough for drinking. She unloaded her stock, watered them, and set them out to graze, then walked over to the tower. The half circle of wall, gray stone mottled here and there with green moss, stood to a height of about ten feet.

Ancient, broken, gutted by Time and sea storms—still the remaining stones gave out a peculiar energy. Val felt it as a tingling in the air and smelled it as the clean sharp aftermath of lightning. Someone had worked dweomer in this tower, someone powerful enough that the traces had lingered for over a thousand years. She ran her fingers along one flat stone, about five feet above the ground and set next to what seemed to have been a doorway. Under the moss she felt deep-carved runes, still readable by touch.

“Lords of Aethyr!” she called out. “Grant me your protection in your temple!”

She felt their answer as a cold ripple down her back. The lightning-scent intensified around her. She stepped through the doorway and looked down. The grassy ground fell away some ten feet from the threshold. How far it would be safe to go was debatable.

“Lords of Aethyr! My thanks to you!”

Valandario turned and walked back out to ordinary ground. That evening she took one of the long sticks from her canvas lean-to and consecrated it as a ritual staff. She wanted to test the footing before she trusted her weight to the cliff edge.

In the morning, once the tide of Aethyr ran strong out on the etheric, Valandario stuffed the black crystal down the front of her tunic. She took her sword in her left hand and the staff in her right and walked back to the tower door. After a brief invocation to the powers of Aethyr, she stepped over the threshold and felt the etheric forces gathering around her. By tapping with the staff, she determined that she could safely walk some three feet in.

She laid the staff down and with the sword slashed a circle out of the tall grass, just a small one, perhaps two feet across. She took the black crystal and placed it in the center, then picked up her staff again. She’d barely begun the ritual invocations when she saw a glimmering point of turquoise light appear above it.

“Be welcome in the name of the Light!”

The point expanded to a circle and changed to a pale lavender. The circle extended itself into a shimmering silver cylinder, some ten feet tall. Within the smokelike interior another turquoise point appeared and gleamed, then swelled itself into a vaguely manlike shape, glowing with white light. The King of Aethyr himself had deigned to appear.

With a swing of her arm, Valandario used the staff to sketch out the sigils of Aethyr. The sword she laid crosswise at her feet. The King acknowledged her with a nod.

“Have you brought this crystal back to us?” The thought came to her mind as a chorus of voices, not a single voice, even though a single figure floated inside the pillar.

“I have,” Val said. “I believe it has been consecrated in your name.”

“You are correct in that. We shall retrieve the shadow, for that is what this black stone is, and reunite it with its true self. Child of Air, break the circle!”

Val laid the staff down across the edge of the circle in the grass. The spirit stone began to glow, first with its usual dark fire, then with a brighter, cleaner light. It shone gray, turned silver, and with a sound like a pair of hands slapping a drum, it rose from the earth. It hovered some three feet above the grass for a few heartbeats, then began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, ever faster until with a burst of light as blinding as a lightning flash, it disappeared. From the sky above came three booming knocks of no natural thunder.

“The crystal has gone to its true home!” the King’s voice echoed the thunder. “The Great Ones approve.”

“The working is done,” Val called out. She knocked the butt of her staff three times on the ground. “May any spirits bound by this ceremony go free.”

“It is finished, in truth and deed.” The silver King of Aethyr began to fade within his pillar. His voice rustled like wind in distant grass. “Farewell, Child of Air! You have done well this day.”

His image swirled, faded into a beam of sunlight, then disappeared altogether. Val picked up her sword and slapped it against the grass to earth any lingering forces within it, then retrieved her staff. With a long sigh of exhaustion, she walked across the threshold and out into the ordinary world of the grasslands, the sea, and the sky, where the dawn had brightened into day.

When she lay down in her blankets that morning, Valandario fell asleep almost before she could pull them up to her chin. She found herself in the Gatelands of Sleep, which her mind conceptualized as a green lawn stretching out in front of a garden of roses. By the gate into the garden Aderyn stood, smiling at her, in the form of the silver-haired teacher she remembered so well.

“Val, Val,” he said. “It’s time you laid aside your long grief.”

“I know,” she said. “And I will.”

“I must ask you an enormous favor. It’s time for me to be reborn. Will you be my mother?”

“I never wanted a child!” Val was startled into truthfulness.

“I know that. Never would the Lords of Wyrd force a child upon a woman dead set against it. Why do you think I’m asking? It’s your choice, Val, your free choice.”

Valandario hesitated, remembering herself as little more than a child, orphaned by a flash flood that had swept away her parents and half their alar. Aderyn had taken her in, raised her with his own son, so patiently and so well, perhaps because she wasn’t his bloodkin, and thus her success or failure had been less important to him than Loddlaen’s. He was watching her patiently now, his face carefully composed to show no emotion that might influence her choice.

“For you, I will,” Valandario said. “I would be honored.”

He did smile, then, a flicker of relief.

“But you know,” Val went on. “I’m going to have a difficult time conceiving on my own.”

Aderyn laughed, so heartily that she knew his astral self had already turned toward life once again. “So you would,” he said. “Meet the ships coming from the Southern Isles. Remember that: meet the ships.”

With a glint of light like sun on water, he vanished. She woke, sitting up in the grass, seeing the long shadows of late afternoon, and wondering if the dream had been true or just some odd fancy. Perhaps she was merely lonely, envious of Dallandra, nursing her child, and of Sidro, so elated to be pregnant again at last. Yet his last words stayed with her: meet the ships.

On a day when a warm wind drove away the rain clouds, Valandario returned to Mandra to find the town preparing for a festival. Down by the harbor, they’d set up long tables and dug pits, where several sheep were roasting for the meal ahead. Musicians sat on the grass and tuned their instruments or practiced bits and pieces of songs.

When Val arrived at their house, Lara and Jin greeted her with delight, and as they were carrying her goods up to her old chamber, Lara explained.

“Ships are coming from the Southern Isles,” Lara said. “We’ve got a lookout on the roof of the new temple, and he saw them this morning. If this wind keeps up, they should make landfall tonight.”

“Wonderful!” Val said. She was thinking that she’d arrived just in time. “New temple?”

“The town built it this summer. It’s not very splendid yet, but it does have a few statues of gods inside.”

Just at sunset, the town crier went running through the streets. Four ships were pulling into the harbor under oars. As Valandario walked down with Lara and Jin, she felt oddly calm. She’d convinced herself, she realized, that she’d merely dreamt about Aderyn and his messages. Surely they couldn’t be real, surely they could have nothing to do with Jav.

But he arrived in the first boat, a sailor with jet-black hair and golden eyes. Valandario was watching from the beach when she spotted him, leaping onto the wooden pier. A shipmate threw him a rope, which he hitched around the nearest bollard. With the knot secure he walked a few steps down the pier, hooked his thumbs into his leather belt, and stood looking wide-eyed at his new homeland. Or his old homeland, to which he’d returned—when he glanced her way, Valandario recognized him.
Jav!
she thought.
Oh, Jav, do you remember me?

Not, of course, that he would know that he did. Still, he took a few more steps, staring at her, smiling. She climbed the steps up to the pier, and as she walked toward the ship, he came to meet her with the rolling walk of a man who still expected his footing to rise and fall under him.

“Good morrow,” he said in a soft, dark voice. “I seem to have come to the most beautiful spot in the world.”

“I—” Val could feel her face burning, and he laughed.

“Forgive me,” he said. “My name is Braelindar. What’s yours?”

“Valandario Gemscryer.”

“The Wise One!” It was his turn to blush. “Meranaldar told us about—” He dropped to one knee and looked down. “Forgive me, Wise One! I didn’t mean to be so forward. I—”

“It’s perfectly all right. I’m not in the least insulted.”

“You’re sure?” Brae raised his head to look into her eyes.

“Very sure.” She smiled at him. “Oh, do get up! It’s not like I’m royalty or some such thing.”

He did as she asked, then grinned at her. “Things are truly different here,” he said. “They warned us, but I don’t think I realized just how different they’d be. Back in the islands I’d never have dared speak to you, much less—uh, well.”

“Uh, well what?”

He laughed, she joined him, and they stood smiling at each other while the rest of the shipload of immigrants hurried past down the pier to their new homes on the land.

I
n the Halls of Light, they spoke to him of the work ahead.

They stood in pillars of crystal, pale lavender or mottled silver. They themselves appeared as shafts of light, glinting inside their crystal towers. He himself was but a glimmer of light, a beam of sun, perhaps, glinting on a stream, flickering, uncertain. Yet he heard them.

“They have all been born,” they said in a thousand voices that were yet one voice, “those twisted souls you once failed, they who are called changelings. They have left behind the world of images, and they must learn now to live in the world of flesh, as children of the Westfolk, Children of Air. It is your task to help them learn. Will you remember?”

In the Halls of Light there are no lies.

“I will try to remember,” he said. “I will strive to remember.”

“You will be helped to remember. Aderyn, your name was once. You will learn to fly again.”

In the midst of the light a lack of light appeared, a shapeless thing, not a true darkness, for there can be no darkness in the Halls of Light, but still, it opened. He stepped to its edge. Among the crystal pillars a tiny flame of gold burned, quivering. He could hear its cry of pain.

“You’ll follow me, Evandar,” he said. “In due time you will follow me, and I shall father you a body. Dallandra’s child will be your mother, and she will cherish you. They have promised.”

“So we have,” they said. “Farewell and remember!”

He took one more step and fell, soaring, spiraling down and down through indigo light until he floated above a pair of golden auras that marked elven bodies. He recognized Valandario even in his disembodied state, because once she’d been his pupil in the dweomer. Deep within her body he perceived a dark knot of unensouled flesh, his body to come. For a moment he hesitated, remembering the freedoms of the Halls of Light.
Courage!
he told himself.

With a wrench of will he surrendered to the pull of the flesh. He sank down into the dark prison and slept.

I UNDERSTAND THAT SOME FEW
things will vex readers if I leave them untold. Once Avain had flown free to her true home, Laz moved into her old tower, his refuge for the rest of his days as he unwound the evil wyrd his life as Alastyr had given him. Kov and Mara married and had the children the island demanded of them. And, speaking of offspring, during his meditations in the tower at Dragon Meadow, Salamander did remember that Hwilli had once been his mother and Rhodorix his father, all those long years before.