5

She saw.

The candle’s flame opened and enveloped her. The next thing she knew, Dally observed an entire city fashioned from stone as dark as slate, with a massive castle at its heart. And yet despite the forbidding color, Dally knew this was a haven against all the forces that threatened their realm.

She saw.

A gathering of many races. Elves and Ashanta and men. Dally did not know of their existence until then, and yet now she could name the individuals. Kings and queens and leaders, all. Chieftains of the badland clans. All united against the forces that sought to enslave mankind.

She could name those as well now. The Milantians. The race of wizards, defeated ten centuries past, now on the rise once more.

Dally watched them crown Shona, saw her take the oath to lead them in the battle to come.

Then she realized with a start that Shona was scarcely older than she was herself. And yet there was something about how Shona wore the mantle of power that made her age of no importance.

Then Dally realized Shona was a mage as well. A warrior queen with the wizard forces at her command.

Dally saw how this gathering broke the treaties of a thousand years and realized that it was intended as an affirmation of the need for change.

She realized this was also why Mistress Edlyn and her accompanying wizards had entered Dally’s village. Because the treaties had been revoked by the same urgent needs of this new age.

She saw.

After the ceremony, Dally watched as Hyam returned to the Elves’ hidden realm. The Elves kept four guards on formal duty by the secret forest portal, waiting for him.

Hyam came to a tree that served as home and sickroom both. He climbed a living staircase and entered a balcony, where his wife Joelle lay.

Dally knew in the mysterious gift of the candle’s awareness that Joelle’s life breath had been stolen by a Milantian mage. The mage had been destroyed, but Joelle remained trapped within this coma. There was nothing the healers could do. She slept and did not dream, scarcely breathing, held to this earth by the slightest of physical bonds. And by Hyam’s love.

The scene shifted, and though the two figures remained exactly as they had been, Dally realized time had passed. Far too much time. A year and a half by human count, though here in the green kingdom time did not possess the same relentless grip. Hyam had come and gone several times, traveling far and battling his way through several skirmishes. Then returning. To this place.

Twenty-nine days before this one, Joelle’s nursemaids murmured soft greetings and departed. Hyam knelt by her side so as to fit his face close to hers. When that was not enough, he burrowed into the warm softness where her hair fell over his face, cutting off his connection to anything beyond his bond to Joelle. He breathed in the warmth and tasted her skin. The Elves had used some flowered fragrance when they washed her, and it tingled softly on his lips. But it was still her, the unique beauty still there, even when her breath came so softly he feared it had stopped altogether.

Then Dally heard, “Hyam.”

Hyam lifted his head. Joelle was watching him. “Beloved, are you . . .”

Her shush was soft as the dusk. “Listen to me. I am departing.”

“Joelle, no, you mustn’t, you can’t—”

Again the shush, gentle as a first kiss. “Hyam, you must live for us both.”

And she was gone.

She saw.

They buried Joelle as they would an Elven queen. The last remaining king of the Elves, Darwain, and his wife served as Hyam’s seconds. The regents of the hidden realm sang a lilting dirge to the tree that had sheltered Hyam’s beloved. Then the queen turned to Hyam and declared that her friend the tree would be honored to serve as Joelle’s pyre.

Hyam spoke the required words, though Dally knew it almost wrenched his own life from his body. “Let it be done.”

As the sun rose over the emerald kingdom, Darwain and his wife chanted words that resonated deeply. Joelle remained where she had breathed her last, upon the balcony, so high above them she might already have ascended partway to heaven.

Then the Elven rulers went silent, and the tree burst into flames.

Though the funeral party ringed the tree’s base, they felt nothing, for all fire was directed upward, as fierce a power as it was silent, carrying Joelle aloft on her final earthly voyage.

Dally watched as ashes were gathered in three urns. Hyam intended to spread the contents of his urn around the garden Joelle had planted, the one surrounding their home within the magical grove. The second urn was accepted by the senior wizard of Falmouth Port, a greybeard named Trace. Dally knew he intended to burn it with the collective mage-force of every Falmouth wizard. The third was to be transported to the Ashanta territory from which Joelle had been banished. For Hyam’s wife had been a forbidden mix of human and Ashanta blood. Her exclusion had been overturned by the coming of a new age. And now Joelle’s remains would be planted by the Eagle’s Claw offering stone, granting her a permanent resting place in the land from which she had been expelled.

The procession wound through the woodlands, back to the palace at the lake’s heart. There Darwain and his queen made all welcome. The minstrels sang, and the company of men and Ashanta and Elves knew the peace of shared sorrow. And the company struggled for a means to show Hyam that he was not alone. That he was, in fact, a friend to all.