The dark hour before dawn found Sindérian on the outskirts of the ruined city. Her pulse was throbbing like a drum; her heart seemed to have expanded until it filled the entire cavity of her chest. Dismounting and sending the mare away, she began to beat her own path through the brush and tangled growth. Finally, she came to what must have once been the main road cutting across Ceir Eldig: a broad cobblestone pavement, much disturbed in places where the earth had cracked or folded back on itself and a rank growth of grass and weeds had grown up in the gaps between the stones. It made for slow and treacherous going, but always ahead of her, awash in moonlight, she could see her goal, the great eminence on which the wreckage of the Emperor’s palace stood, rising above the chaos of tumbled stone and mounded earth.
It took longer than she had thought it would to reach the base of the hill and begin to climb. By that time the moon had dropped below the horizon and the only light came from the shoals of silver stars swimming far to the south. She knew the Furiádhin would not break camp before sunrise, but she had hoped for a chance to rest and to gather her courage before it came time to act. Unfortunately, the side of the hill was so steep and overgrown—and whatever road led to the top had so thoroughly disappeared—it seemed to be hours before she finally struggled to the summit. There the devastation was just as great: shattered buildings, cracked pavements, a park full of trees grown wild, massive blocks of stone half buried in the ground, piles of dirt and rock where the earth had geysered up. And one lone roofless tower, broken at the midpoint.
She climbed a fragmentary staircase that wound around the tower. It ended abruptly, at the brink of a long drop. From that vantage point, Sindérian had an unimpeded view into the city below—and the camp of Ouriána’s priests, just where she had known she would find them, in the garden of a ruined mansion. They had built fires at either end of their camp, so it was possible to make out their shadowy tents, the picket line of their horses, the two armored guards standing watch. But now a faint flush in the eastern sky heralded the dawn. Time was running out. My own time is running out.
Her mouth was dry after the long climb, her limbs shaking, yet she found she was eager for the contest ahead. All the years of her life had merely been leading up to this one night. For what else had she been born, to what other end had she been trained? Not for the endless, futile struggle on the battlefields of Rheithûn, not to wear out her heart and her talents with the endless grind of years—oh, surely not that. Daughter of a long line of wizards, she would go out instead in a white-hot blaze, like a dying star.
She began to prepare herself for what she knew would be her greatest—and last—spell-casting.
The king—for there had been no emperors in those days—who first instructed his architects to erect a palace for him at Ceir Eldig had chosen this eminence for a reason: it was the place where no fewer than four different ley lines met and crossed. Using the power generated by those lines, that king, his wizards, and generations of his descendants had driven back the Dark for a long age and built an empire so mighty they had believed it would endure to the end of the world. No one had tapped that power for generations, but the force that pulsed along the lines was still there, in no way diminished.
So now, one hand gripping the other, she bent her head, concentrating all her will and desire on one object: calling the power of the lines to her. Sweat broke out on her forehead; she felt mind and body straining with the strength of her intention. For a terrible moment she thought the task was too great, that she was too weak—Then the power answered and surged up to meet her.
In the beginning there was agony, such agony as she had never imagined. It pierced her like thorns, it burned in her veins like molten metal, it singed her like fire. It was too much to bear, yet she endured it. It devoured her, yet she was not consumed by it. And gradually, the unbearable became bearable; the first raw bolts of energy were replaced by a half-pleasurable warmth. Like the salamander, she was learning to live within the fire, as though it were her native element.
And still the power poured into her, still she soaked it up, until her skin tingled and glowed with it and her hair crackled and gave off sparks. Stars danced at her fingertips; fascinated, she drew constellations on the air. She felt that she might level mountains, stem the flow of mighty rivers, turn planets in their courses. Almost she forgot her purpose in the fierce joy of it—until some movement down in the ruins, a shout as someone caught sight of her incandescent figure, recalled her and sobered her.
So she turned her mind to shaping the power to her own ends. As it fed her, so she fed it with her own fierce will. Spells whirled in her brain; patterns formed, a complex web of mental forces strong enough to catch lightning. Then she gathered as much energy as she could hold in one hand, molded it into a javelin of fire, and hurled it into the camp below.
In response to the guard’s warning, Camhóinhann and Dyonas emerged from their tents just in time to see Sindérian’s javelin streak through the air, then explode in a rain of sparks as it hit the ground. By the time Goezenou had joined them, another missile had landed in their midst, and then another. In the chaos of men and horses that erupted in the camp, the three priests were unable to do more than shield themselves and scramble for cover behind sections of broken masonry.
Goezenou and Dyonas met behind a low, fragmentary wall. Scanning the hilltop, from which the barrage seemed to originate, it did not take long to locate a glowing female form, etched against a brightening dawn sky.
“What fool is that who challenges us?” hissed Goezenou.
Though it was not possible from this distance to see her face, Dyonas’s memory was long. “At a guess, it is the girl Thaga was supposed to dispose of at Saer.” As he spoke, he sent a spell to divert one of her more accurate casts.
“And she has followed us all this way? So much the worse for her! A mere fledgling, with no name or reputation.”
Dyonas gave him a contemptuous glance. “Do you claim to know all the wizards on Leal, their names and abilities? Whoever she is, she appears to be no mere dabbler.”
“She is calling up power from the leys,” Goezenou said with a sneer. “Otherwise—” A tree burst into flames behind them, and they broke in opposite directions.
Moments later, Dyonas met Camhóinhann behind an overgrown pile of stones. “The Princess?” said the younger priest.
“I have shielded her,” answered Camhóinhann. “Naturally, that was my first thought.”
A bolt of energy went sizzling past, only inches from Dyonas’s head. “Whoever she is, she must feel she has some chance of defeating us—or else she has been sent to distract us while others approach us from behind.”
“More likely,” said Camhóinhann, “she is one who has just enough inherent power to think she can win by losing. Have a care,” he added as the other hurled an answering bolt in the girl’s direction, narrowly missing her. “If you had hit her…!”
“I am not quite a fool. I understand that much.” There was a loud crash when a wall fell, followed by a curse as Goezenou crashed through some bushes to the left and joined them behind their rampart of stone. “While we draw her fire, what will you do?” Dyonas asked Camhóinhann.
“I will weave a net of spells to hold her,” said the High Priest. “Once we have her fast, we can decide what to do with her.”
Stone erupted at Sindérian’s feet as Dyonas’s searing bolt of energy crashed into the staircase, sending flying shards of rock in all directions. One grazed her temple, another passed through the palm of her hand and out the other side. Reflexively, she closed both wounds; with so much power surging through her, it took but a thought to heal them. A fiery axe spun through the air, barely missing her head. By now, all the trees on the hill were burning—but she gathered light and heat out of the air, shaped them into balls of flame, and threw them, one after the other, into the camp below.
Then the Furiádhin changed their tactics. The first spell nearly took her by surprise. She felt her bones begin to melt, her body fraying, growing thin and insubstantial. Struggling to remain solid, she slashed runes on the air, forced out their names in a dry whisper—for she courted death, not transformation. Spell after spell they threw at her, trying to warp her out of human form: she was furred; she was feathered; her skin turned warty and amphibious; she had the slick, scaly body of a fish. Each spell she countered, returning to her own shape. Then came a blast of magic more devastating than any that came before. The breath in her lungs turned to smoke, her blood to sand; something drove her out of her body and into the wind.
Blinded, disoriented, she lost all sense of self and nearly dissipated. Then someone down below shouted her name and it pulled her back into her body as a lodestone draws iron. The next spell that came her way she snatched out of the air and sent hurtling back again.
A mile from Ceir Eldig, Prince Ruan spotted Sindérian’s mare grazing under a tree. This he took as a very bad sign—one that she had no intention of leaving the ruined city alive.
“It seems that she was less willing to risk the animal’s life than her own,” he muttered under his breath.
The sky was rosy with dawn before he finally found the track she had made for herself on the edge of the city. “Perhaps we aren’t so very far behind her,” he heard Kivik say behind him. “Perhaps we woke before she meant us to. Surely her spell was meant to last until morning.”
But Ruan was not to be deceived by any such false hope. “We slept exactly as long as she intended we should. We are meant to arrive too late to interfere, but not so late we’re unable to take advantage of any opportunity she makes for us.”
When they came out on the road, they made better progress, though still so slow that Ruan was cursing his horse in impatience long before they came within sight of the palace on the hill. The trees on the eminence were all aflame, like a fiery crown; had the wind not been in the wrong direction he would have smelled the smoke long before.
Between the smoke and the flame, he could barely make out Sindérian atop the tower. “We will never reach her from this direction, not through the fire. May the Fates grant us a way to the top on the other side!”
He tried to keep her in sight as they circled the hill, but coming around on the other side it was hard to see through the turmoil of magic roaring around her. Only now and then could he catch a glimpse of her face, very white and strained. For a terrible moment she disappeared, seemed to melt into the chaos of the air; and without even realizing he was doing so, he shouted her name. He felt a cold shock of relief when she reappeared again, swaying unsteadily, but still alive and on her feet.
He scanned the slope, searching for the quickest way to the top. Below the tower the face of the hill was almost sheer, but a little to the west there appeared to be a path, not much overgrown. Swinging down from the saddle, he tossed the reins to Aell and began to climb. He heard Kivik and Skerry crashing heavily through the dry brush behind him. More agile than either of them—and more determined—he soon outdistanced them.
In the camp below, thread after thread of shining silver spun out from Camhóinhann’s hands. But before he could bind them together they faded, and it was all to do again. “There is too much magic in the air; it is distorting the spell,” he told Dyonas. “I cannot hold her this way. I must try something else.”
Rolling a furious eye in the High Priest’s direction, Goezenou scrambled atop a pile of rocks. “Let us have done with it then. It has gone on too long already.” Making signs on the air, he called out a word that crackled like lightning, and a slender column of light appeared in his hand. Too late, the others understood what he was doing.
As he drew back his arm to cast his weapon, Camhóinhann and Dyonas both cried out warnings at once—but Goezenou’s spear of elemental fire had already left his hand.
On her precarious perch above, the young wizard took the full force of the spear. If she called out in agony as it pierced her, no one heard her, for there was a loud concussion in the air like two thunderstorms crashing together, and the tower on the hill rocked. For just a moment she remained standing, silhouetted against the morning sky, illuminated by the fire of Goezenou’s spell.
Then the fire died, and there was only a broken body falling. Falling from the tower in a shower of stones.
Ruan was nearly to the top of the hill, craning his neck to get a better look, when something streaked through the air, heading straight for Sindérian.
She might have moved, she might have dodged it. She did neither. Ruan watched, raging at his own helplessness, as the spear impaled her, the air boomed, the tower rocked. He watched her body tumble more than a hundred feet to land among the jagged stones below.
There was no hope, no hope at all. If the spear had not killed her, the fall had surely done so. There was no reason for him to turn as he did and start back down the hill, stumbling into Kivik and Skerry along the way. In his haste, he slid almost to the bottom before he was beaten back by a wall of force: a mighty wind that seemed to rise from Sindérian’s broken body, scattering leaves, rocks, and bushes, and almost knocking Ruan himself off his feet.
As the wind grew in violence, it went roaring toward the Pharaxion camp. On every side, the forces of nature began to run wild. Goezenou was the first to die, thrown to the ground and buried under a rain of stones. Two guardsmen standing outside Winloki’s tent were swept away by the turbulent air. Trees were ripped out of the ground. Any of the horses that had not already pulled up their pickets and fled did so now.
For a moment, it seemed that Dyonas would ride out the storm, until a tremor passed through the earth under his feet, opening a wide crack. Unable to save himself, he dropped into the fracture, and was crushed to death when another tremor brought the walls clashing back together again. Only Camhóinhann continued to defy the fury unleashed by Sindérian’s death: he stood chanting spells, buffeted by wind, stones, tree limbs, even the flying body of one of the acolytes. Battered and bloody as he was, he still stood.
Then, as suddenly as it had risen, the wind fell again, and all was silent.
From their vantage point halfway up the hill, Kivik and Skerry had seen the devastation in the Pharaxion camp. They, too, would have climbed down had the wind not pushed them back. And when it was over they could only stand, stunned, as Winloki emerged from her tent and ran to Camhóinhann’s side. They watched her slip her hand into one of his, speaking urgently.
His other arm dangled at his side, and blood dripped from his forehead. But even injured he still retained sufficient power of will to call back one of the horses. The great grey gelding returned: agitated, dancing and sidestepping nervously, but obedient. It stood just long enough for Camhóinhann to mount, offer his good hand to Winloki, and pull her up into the saddle with him. Then he gave the gelding its head, and it leaped into motion, heading south.
Only then did Winloki’s kinsmen recover from the surprise and grief that had held them motionless. Running and sliding as Ruan had done, they stumbled to the foot of the hill. And there they found him, along with Aell, kneeling beside Sindérian’s body.
He had moved her from the sharp rocks where she had first landed. Blood was spattered everywhere. One sleeve of her dress was soaked with it; the hair on one side of her head was matted with it. There could be no doubt that bones had shattered in the fall, though her gown covered the worst of the damage.
As they approached, Ruan glanced up. He had been in the act of feeling for a pulse in her throat, but one glimpse of his face was enough to confirm what they already knew.
“So she is gone then,” said Kivik.
Ruan only nodded wordlessly before bending to imprint a kiss on her ice-white brow, her cold lips.
Then there was a sound overhead like an enormous heart beating. Looking up, they saw Faolein descending in a flurry of white wings. Instead of landing, the owl hovered in the air just above Sindérian’s face, with his wings beating and his yellow eyes glaring. As the men watched in pity and horror, Faolein gave a shriek like a dying man and rent his own feathery breast with his beak—
—and Sindérian, standing at the gate of death, between the immense pillars of light and shadow that mark the threshold between one world and the next, and wholly intent on the glory that lies beyond—the cities of burning gold, the rivers of molten silver, the immense figures with rainbow-colored wings who stand sentinel outside the city walls—felt the lightest of touches, as if it were hardly more than a breath, and heard somebody calling her name.
Turning, with great reluctance, from the light ahead of her to the shadows behind, she found herself face-to-face with Faolein: back in his own form, as she had known him for most of her life, the great wizard, the wise and gentle teacher.
“Father,” she said. “You have come to comfort me, even here on the threshold of death. But it wasn’t necessary to follow me. Do not think that I am afraid, or that I relinquish my life with any regrets.” She laughed softly, joyfully. “In truth, I have seen what waits for me on the other side, and I am longing to go there.”
“Nevertheless, you are overhasty in your departure,” said Faolein. “When Nimenoë died, she linked the threads of your life to those of Winloki’s. She meant it for her own child’s protection, knowing how strong you were, how strong you would become. But that is why the aniffath was ineffective against you. It was the one thing Ouriána needed to take into account in weaving her spell—and did not know. This I learned when I stood where you stand now, many months ago. But even before that, I knew this hour would come. That is why I died at Saer, that is why I turned away from the gate when I might have passed freely. That is why I allowed myself to be sundered, one half existing in the world of the living, one half remaining here all of these months. It has been an uncomfortable existence, but it was necessary to give you this message: you may cross over the threshold if you choose, but that would be an act of cowardice.”
He held out a hand. “Do not turn fainthearted now, you who have always been so courageous. Let me show you the way back.”
Her elation began to fade. In its place came bewilderment and the beginning of fear. “But there will be pain there, heartache and loss. I don’t wish to return to any of that. And my body is broken. Perhaps it can never be repaired.”
“Perhaps not. I cannot tell what awaits you—that vision was not granted me. You may live only a day, or a week, or for many years. You may spend all that time crippled in mind and body—or worse.”
Her confusion only deepened. “And to that you urge me to return?”
“When I made my choice at Saer, I thought as a man and a father. My understanding is greater now. The Fates are compassionate; when they allow us to suffer it is only that we may learn and grow, that we may be purified and better suited for the world beyond.”
She gazed at him doubtfully. “Not all are purified.”
“Some do refuse the gift,” he said. “They die with many hard lessons still unlearned.”
“Am I, then, so weak and faulty?” she protested.
But she knew that she was. Her impatience, her tendency to act on impulse, these were the least of her faults. Instead of rejoicing in her strength of mind and body, her many rich gifts, she had struggled with despair all this last year. And despair had led her to misuse the rune, to choose the sacrifice—not out of necessity, not in the spirit of acceptance—but as an escape from her own fear and confusion. At the least, that had been presumptuous; at the worst, wicked and cowardly.
But Faolein was none of these things. “You will not be able to return with me,” she said.
“I can go with you only part of the way. My life is done. What yours will be I do not know.” He held out his hand again. “But short or long, joyous or agonizing, I ask you to choose life.”
The touch of his palm was like the resumption of pain after blessed respite. Yet with it came a dread sense of inevitability. With one last regretful glance back over her shoulder—at the glorious city, at the shining river and the glimmering plain—Sindérian took a reluctant step in his direction, reluctantly allowed him to lead her on.
And going back was worse than dying; it was like passing through white fire, it was like being crushed and compressed and molded to fit back into the broken shell of her body. She did not know how huge she had become until the confines of the flesh required her to become small again. Nor did she fully comprehend what she was giving up, until the darkness washed over her and blotted out the light.