Chapter XVI

The quay was so quiet I could hear every crunch of snow under our boots. The fall itself had almost stopped: only scattered flakes drifted around us, white moving flecks in the frozen vista of blacks and greys and solid unsullied white. Without other sounds, the town’s emptiness seemed to reach out to us, not merely a
desolate but a deadly, listening hush. As if an ambush were
already laid, and the ambushers crouching, poised to strike.

Rathi had disliked the idea of any sortie almost as much as would Azo. Two eventually overrode his protests with a brusque, “Who gains more from time?” The counter that would have moved Azo, if not for my reason. If she cared nothing for strangers’ lives, she would never begin a waiting match that we, denied the sea, needing food and shelter eventually, could only lose.

The quay was not so very wide. Past a ruined cargo-hoist waited the mouth of the nearest street. Snow, water-stained stone, broken windows. A sudden jink shut all but half a bowshot from view. Therkon broke stride and looked at me.

Rathi said curtly, “Down here.”

Bested over the sortie, he had campaigned hotly for the whole crew to go ashore. When Therkon pointed out why they should ward themselves, protect innocent lives, and most important, guard the ship that might take us all away, he had set his jaw. And after a seething pause, announced flatly, “Blades or no blades, the pair o’ ye’ll be toddlin’ babes in there. I’m comin’ with ye.”

“That,” he jerked his hand now at the closest street, “’ll go east-about. The one ye want’s here.”

Therkon gave him a measuring stare. Azo counseled coldly, For good or ill, let the guide go first. Two ruled that if Rathi knew the town well enough to reach the hill with the least chance of ambush, we would take his word.

The second street was half as narrow again, and twisted as rapidly the opposite way. Too well reminded of Amberlight slums and hair-crispingly swift ambushes, Two and Azo had the first knife almost in my hand. Therkon was treading on my heels.
Before me, Rathi walked swiftly but steadily down the street
center, a hand tucked under his weather-canvas, doubtless on the hilt of his own sword.

The street swung again: another vista of neglected or ruined house-fronts, shutters dangling, doors broken or ajar, site on site for ambush amid the mounded snow. The silence under our footsteps stretched my nerves like softened bowstrings. Two was on the verge of a spark.

Rathi glanced left and right and muttered, “Ye’d look, at least, for rats.”

Therkon answered, coolly as on the Aspis, “Too long for them as well.”

The street opened suddenly into a little space with a low broad snow-shape at its centre. Rathi skirted it with one brief mutter of “T’well.” I thought how it would have looked once, the town’s hub. Market stalls perhaps, people with loaves or vegetables, people fetching water, a cart or two jolting past. The busy racket of voices, of ongoing human life.

Rathi veered seaward. Down another street we found a cross-road, and a house-width later, the gate.

One wooden leaf still hung, but the other had rotted at the hinges, leaving shards as warning above the deceptive hump of snow. Sidestepping, Rathi heaved at the standing half. Its snow-muffled Sskrrriiirrk over the threshold stones almost scared Two into a spark again.

Open ground appeared, perhaps once a common pasture, now a mere sward of hummocky white under clumps of snow-spatched, leafless trees. A hundred yards away rose the foot of the hill.

Not Skall, I told my thundering heart. Nowhere near so high, and it’s not raining, and no screaming seagulls, and up there is no Angrir.

What might, what must be somewhere here instead almost undid Two. I only got the better of her as we angled after Rathi into the open snow. “There’s a path, somewheres, over here.”

The path started behind the foothill’s bulge, and followed an easy slant up the hill-crease beyond. A well-trodden path, it had been once. Its beaten depth, and the lines of verge-stones, showed even through the snow. Silent, trying to husband our breaths, we toiled up.

Probably the whole slope would once have carried grass, if nothing else. All that remained was irregular bumps in the blanket of pall-pure white. Except at our backs, it lay utterly pristine. No beast had marked it, not a single bird.

Rathi muttered, “Used to be rooks. A hare or two. Curlews, whaupin’ over the tops. Springs, ye’d hear a wren. Or turnstanes, down t’shore, tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck.”

The little echoing bird-call bounced eerily as a turned pebble itself. I was grateful when he fell quiet.

The crease narrowed. A last scramble through a gauntlet of boulders brought us to the crest.

Wholly treeless, it would have drawn wind at all times, if the merest breeze. Now the air hung immobile, pinned under swollen cloud-bellies. Not a breath slanted the noiseless sift of snow.

Rathi hesitated. Therkon glanced swiftly left, right, behind, before. Two’s upset was blurring my vision. I could barely make out the stones.

At close quarters most stood tall and attenuated, though the shapes and angles of side and top were wildly different. The snow had thatched their salients, laying white patches amid the rust or dun blots of moss, but the rock beneath was all a muted cinnabar red.

I did not try to count them. The circle, I managed to guess, was perhaps half a bowshot across. The stones loomed higher than a man, silent, brooding, lost in their own reveries. Where perhaps not even the circle-makers had impinged.

Without knowing it I too had stopped. Therkon was a pace behind my left shoulder: assuming, I had one ironic moment of realization, the place of troublecrew. Rathi waited on my right. They had checked the surroundings, then, and found them empty. Only the circle remained.

The path, my second step showed me, was also the formal
approach. We had come up on a slight northward curve, curling to find the circle’s gate on the inland side. The circle itself would face outward, over the town, over the sea, into the north-east.

The gate was open, or perhaps had never been closed. Two massive stones, broader than they were high, made a porch for jambs set in the circle itself.

I stopped again. Snow lay between the stone quartet, thick untrampled snow, and shadow, it seemed, more than the scanted light would explain, lingered among those crowded blocks. A stillness came out of them that had nothing to do with the desolation of the town beneath.

The porch stones were marked. Carved, or at least grooved, with wide spiraling circles linked across each face. Their patterns crossed under the spatchings of snow and lichen, like ancient ditches in a half-grazed field.

The force of the stones’ presence, the prickle of my neck-hairs warned, sacred. Consecrated. A place, like the lookout over Iskarda, perilous to outrage.

It would not, could not be the place that actually harbored Sthassamaer.

Two’s tension eased, and my vision cleared. Beyond the portal the circle spread to the hill’s brow, with a spar of three outliers running to either side. The hilltop itself fell left and right in long descending spurs, perhaps where the makers had hauled up their stones.

The evenness of the ground within betokened a clear place, even under the snow. Flattened, if not actually paved. Made for procession, dancing, ritual. A single, tallest menhir stood at its heart.

I did not know I had meant to move until the snow crunched again under my boots, but the men came with me, wordless as very stones. Now the portal’s shadow received me willingly,
welcomingly, I wanted to think, as would Iskarda’s qherrique: a creature recognized, if not known. And the men with me, vouched for by me.

The central menhir was uncarved. Nothing about it said, Focal point. I walked past, carefully keeping to its right, sunward side.

The circle’s farther rim opened before me, two tall slender standing stones flanking another enormous recumbent block. Over its back the fall of snow-cased earth, the spatched clutter of town, rimmed an immense shield of winter-grey sea.

In all that prospect, only snow-flecks moved.

The men were still wordless. Rathi, too, had fallen back a step, for he was no longer in the corner of my eye. I looked out into the emptiness and waited for Two to see, to extrapolate, to find and uncover Sthassamaer.

Two did nothing at all.

The men were waiting. They would expect an oracle. Or some insight, at the very least something noticed about the circle, the land beneath. Something to show I had not merely frozen where I stood.

“Well,” I said stupidly, “we’re here.”

The sound seemed to shudder in the air, a blasphemy. Someone behind me gave a quick little sigh.

“So,” Rathi’s voice said, “ye are.”

* * * *

I did not spin round and hurl the wrist-knife. I did not even try to control Two. I could only stand, feeling bone and blood and muscle congeal to the rigidity of the stones.

Not a place to harbour Sthassamaer. And that had been true. This place had not harboured Sthassamaer. I had brought Sthassamaer with me.

How long had this been planned? How long had it been waiting? How long had it traveled with us, seeking the perfect moment? How much had it known?

How much had Rathi known?

I turned then. Slowly as a circle’s heel-stone, revolving on its pivot. Letting my eyes find the men.

Therkon’s face was pallid, frozen as his limbs. He too had understood.

Rathi was looking at me. I actually saw it happen: a heartbeat’s struggle, a flash of bewilderment. And the dark eyes that had shown such concern for me, for us, were gone.

Sthassamaer looked out at me, through eyes whose pupils, irises, retinas were unbroken black.

* * * *

I ought to have been running, screaming like a rabbit, terrified beyond thought. Two ought to have been paralyzed, or sparking out of control. But in that moment all I felt was red, molten rage.

“You took him,” I said.

“Aye.”

The word was right, the voice wrong. Rathi, but speaking as from the bottom of a well.

“You took him. An ordinary man. A good man. And you took him, like a castle piece, a dice-bone, a toy.”

The face moved. A kind of writhe, that might have been meant for a smile.

“You stole him. And you cheated us. All this time. All this way.”

It nodded its head, as if pleased.

“You got us to Skall. You made me kill people. You sank
Aspis—” the air reddened to opacity—“you drowned them.
Deoren, and Verrith, and Azo!”

It bobbed its head again, as at a compliment.

My hand leapt in Verrith’s reflex, the knife whipped from its sheath and Two flamed like the smallest light gun charged by its handler’s will as we hurled that white lance of light.

Rathi’s body sprang back. The knife vanished in mid-flight. The black eyes widened, and then black spilled from them over the entire face.

Head, beard, shoulders melted into cascading black. Like
water the flood poured down and out and rose again in an
impossible tide, ankle, knee, waist-high, spreading, reaching out, engulfing me.

My feet clove to the snow-bound stones. Two froze with me, paralyzed as the rest.

And the water rose, rapid, silent, black as bilge-seep, cold on my legs and hips as very ice, waist-high, sucking, pulling me down into blackness that had already eaten Therkon, the stones, the hilltop, nothing was left around me, not Hringstenn, not Kaastria, not the Isles, not the rest of the vanishing world.

My eyes had failed already. The black grip was about my chest. In a moment my lungs would stop, and then my heart. Blackness would have it all.

But my ears still worked. Into them, blackness admitted one heavy swashing thud.

And the water stopped.

Blackness hung icy at the base of my throat, shutting down breath. I struggled by intent alone. But I could still breathe. I could still hear. Across my lungs’ susurrus came another, lighter thump. A brief strangling noise. Then nothing at all.

But the water began to ebb.

My throat came free, my shoulders, my chest. My waist. My arms would move. Blackness thinned about me, sinking away to release the earth as well.

Reverse shadows coalesced first, tall standing darknesses on fading dark, then a variegated shadow-dark paling down to murky grey, and then that faded too, a zone of dusk above paling, purifying white.

Shadows assumed color and edge and shape, a tall single menhir, a further rank of snow-patched, earth-coloured stones. The gulf of the portal, the fall of the hilltop, other hillsides beyond. Earth and air reassembled, cold air blessedly clean, flakes of white falling across it into reaches of white untainted snow.

And at my feet, a great outflung swathe of red.

Brilliant living red, glistening like very water, spreading with the speed of water, but hot water, steaming into the frigid air. Red intense as heart’s blood, and carrying the stench of heart’s blood, brutal as the stink of an abattoir, eating out into the unarmoured snow.

With a strange tangled-starfish shape at its rim, a sprawl of dun and weathered grey, canvas, weather-canvas, with outliers of a limp hand. A sidelong fallen boot. A hideous gouting hole to mark the redness’ source.

I looked across it into Therkon’s face.

It was almost as pallid as the snow. His limbs were rigid, but his lips shook. His hands shook too, and the sword he grasped shook with them, scattering crimson drops down into the steaming red.

For a moment I could hear my heart beat. Could hear the blood, melting its way toward earth.

Therkon whispered, “You disappeared.”

I could only stare.

“First the knife. Then you. There was nothing. A hole. A no place.” His voice began trembling as well. “Not you. Not the stones. Not the snow. Not the—Nothing. Nothing was left.

“He,” the sword wavered. Perhaps a gesture, perhaps not. “I could still see him. Fading. Going. I—I—”

He did move the sword that time. One shaky, travestied intimation of a sweep. But it spoke clearer than the words.

I did the only thing I could.

Time seemed to creep over me, slower than half-thawed
water, slow as it must seem to the stones. Painfully, time seamed together past, present, sections of scene, comprehension. The heap was Rathi’s body. The gory odd-shaped hummock over there, a good eight feet away, was Rathi’s head.

I had taught Therkon to use Hvestang. Nouip had said, he would have use for it. A mere human, left with a human weapon, human knowledge, in the face of—whatever Sthassamaer did. In a time of more than human need.

I tried to make my lips move. I could not, yet, bear to look at Rathi—what was left of Rathi—but I was alive. Therkon was alive. He knew what he had done, in both its senses. For me, to me. His was the prior need.

I drew breath at last, consciously tasting the cold, clean air. Something inside me was starting to tremble, but I could still manage words.

“You did what you could.”

The words might have been judgement, indictment, blame. Hatred. I managed to make them understanding. Acknowledgement. Nothing more.

But he was Therkon. He understood.

The white-knuckled clench on the sword-hilt eased. The blade stopped quaking. The eyes, far too big, far too dark, began to lose their distended rings of white. His lips steadied. He drew his own first full, careful breath.

And the eyes, the bronze-dark Quetzistani eyes I knew so well, emptied. No struggle this time. A smooth uncontested transition, from bronze-dark to fathomless black.

* * * *

I think my heart stopped. I know I could not breathe. Only vision, comprehension, seared through me, numbing as a lightning strike.

We had met Sthassamaer at last. And it had made one of my wards kill the second, and the second—I was the only one left. Alone. Alone to face the monster, and the monster’s face . . .

I looked at Therkon, my dearest friend, my companion, I his troublecrew, he pledged to protect me with his own life. The hope and heart of Dhasdein, as he had become my heart.

Now I could not even drive the enemy from the world without his death.

Even if I succeeded, it would only hasten my own end.

I stared back into the blackness that pinioned me, that was watching, knowing what it had done. Savoring, in this waste of horror, what it would do next.

Perhaps it was the disbelief of trying to imagine anything that could conceive, let alone do such a thing, that brought the words. Or perhaps it was Two, fettered even beyond terror’s spark, whose deepest, oldest impulse drew them up.

“Who are you? What are you? How could you ever . . .”

Neither Two nor I could manage any more. But it was enough. The thing smirked. Even yet, I can hardly bear to confront that memory. That look, on Therkon’s face. Then, prolonging the savor, no doubt, it spoke.

“So what am I, madam oracle?”

No doubt it intended a mere fencing point. But the polar ice within me stirred. A feeble movement, action, then Two’s own
familiar blizzard whirl of white.

It had asked us a question, using Therkon’s voice, wearing Therkon’s face. The memory of such questions, from such a source, woke our oldest reflexes: to provide an answer. To assemble facts.

Image-snips flew past: Therkon in the Iskarda council room, speaking of storms and refugees. The woman in the Sea-fort bed, giving us a name. Whale road, swan’s way. Carsia. Therkon on Evvamoor beach, saying, A child hearing sagas on a corner could think of it. Nouip by her fireside saying, Black water. Giving Therkon the sword, the cloak. Saying, with her Sight, You will have use for this.

Another clot of recollections then, the Grithsperry shipper saying, Sea-sark, saying, Where He comes ashore after the winter’s storms, Skatir bellowing, They think you’re Winter’s King! Veenn talking of Hondeland, inundated, Fiskri of gales and lost fishing fleets. Rathi himself—the threads almost snapped—speaking of Rangar, of Hondeland, of the edges of ruin. The images in the White Grebe’s tap-room, dark with candle-wax and smoke. Skatir shouting, He’s of the Isles! Veenn saying, there’s the Mither, and the one who fights her, the Mither’s opposite. The Winter Man.

Myself wearing Nouip’s cloak, bearing Hvestang into a hall on Eithay, up a hill on Skall.

Therkon in the Winter Man’s cloak, carrying the sword.

Then at last, as Nouip had once predicted, the streams of data merged. Two and I looked at the enemy together, and for the first time, we Saw.

We said, “Tiran.”

It blinked. Then it raised Therkon’s brows. I had one stabbing moment to recall how he would have looked, hearing, with the joy of the philosopher, this riddle finally read.

It said, “Very good.”

My heart might have broken then. But the Sight endured: and in its grasp the patterns began to coalesce, images balancing, connections meshing, projections dovetailing, the great mass of knowledge crystallizing from that heart-point out and out about us, making sense of everything.

Black water, rising. Darkness. Winter’s fall.

Summer’s ascent, dawn over Phaerea. The world opening to the sun.

A story pattern, a belief pattern, a world pattern. A pattern found and framed by storytellers, but not to please the imagination. Framed because it spoke humankind’s understanding, human remembrance of the truth. The greatest pattern of all.

“You are the Winter dark. The Mother’s foe. In autumn, the one who prevails.”

It raised Therkon’s eyebrows, and looked obscenely pleased.

“So you have brought winter. Not once, not in season, not in its rightful place, but out of time, beyond the Isles, over the world’s bounds. You have not stopped with ice and snow. You have wrecked, and overthrown, and inundated, and destroyed.”

It was preening. There is no other word. It did not shift the sword, it did not move Therkon’s body. But the eyes glistened, and the ambient air conveyed it. The thing preened.

“You have been bringing winter, out of season, these five years.”

It nodded. Gravely, judicially, as Therkon might at a sensible, approved council proposal. And then I understood what Two and I were doing.

Our words were not flattery, not outrage. Not seeking to
manipulate, nor recapitulation, either. We were laying down an indictment. Bringing it to judgement. Reciting its offence.

And it was accepting the guilt.

“Why did you do this?”

The way it gazed back at me wrung my heart. Because, so like Therkon, so heart-breakingly like Therkon, it looked, for a moment, slightly bemused.

Then it said, “I am winter. I can prevail.”

It sounded exactly like Therkon too. Alone, I would have had to bite my tongue on pleas and protests and screams of, Don’t, don’t do this, come back to me, come back!

But Two and I were one, and as one we spoke.

“This is spring.”

It glanced around the snow, and smiled.

“Your place now is to retreat. To yield, and wait for
autumn. To go.”

It looked at me in amusement and let that say, I am here, in the ascendant, and you have no way to alter that. All your talking may delay. It cannot change your fate.

But Two and I knew a way to do that too, and given time to rally, we had the power. I turned our vision inward upon one memory. A wall in Cataract, my mother’s hands on a lighted,
blazing, burning statuette.

Make, I said to Two, light.

I saw it on the snow first. The coalescing shadow, running outward from my feet. The distorted shape of my own body thrown in all directions round me, as light encircles the glowing lamp.

And then the second long blackness growing outward behind Therkon, the dark shapes coalescing, sharpening, behind the central menhir, behind the flanking stones. The air brightened round me as the light crescendoed, not merely clear but brilliant, dazzling, whiter, brighter, fiercer and more implacable than the heart of the midday sun.

Therkon’s throat made a weird cawing noise. His hands dropped the sword hilt and tried to fly upward but the light pinned them and he almost screamed, cringing, clawing air, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to shrink and back away and run, mindless in the light’s glare, unable to think beyond escape.

“Be still.”

The flight stopped. Therkon—it—the creature tried to crouch and huddle, and when it could not do that it first screamed and then, helplessly, it wept.

And we stared at it, now seeing only Sthassamaer. Knowing beyond doubt that we could expel it, not merely from Therkon’s body but from the living world.

We could excise Tiran as well. In the world that opened before us, there would be spring, and summer, and autumn. But there need never be winter again.

It was no longer any form of retribution, let alone revenge. We knew, as a god would know, that the world would be infinitely better, happier, kinder, without winter. Good was a simple choice.

Perpetual day. Perpetual light.

It dazzled and battered round us, fiery as summer, fiercer than a cloudless noon, pure, overwhelming light. The circle and the outlier stones were bathed in it, we could make it pour out to evaporate the clouds, melt the snow, revive the town, restore an azure summer sea.

Across that blinding vista ran a wisp of memory: my fathers, somewhere in a night I had never shared, talking about gods.

My father Alkhes, his black hair and troublecrew gear a shadow and voice in the darkness, saying, “Gods above—no, that’s not right, is it? If there’re no gods, is there an Above at all?”

After a moment my father Sarth replied. I could see his classic profile above some building’s level, held in that familiar pause for thought.

He said, “There may be no gods as we think of them. And no Above, as we think of it. But there are patterns. Whoever or whatever made them, in everything, the patterns are there.”

Black water, rising. Darkness. Winter’s fall.

Spring’s ascent, dawn over Phaerea. The world opening to the sun.

But that was not the pattern’s end.

Summer was its consummation, yes: grainfields ripening,
maturing fruit. But then came harvest. Apples falling. Leaves falling. The world closing, as the sun changed, so it could sleep.

Because it had to sleep.

Because alone, light was not enough.

The brilliance of our own light eased as we understood. It was possible to erase Sthassamaer, but we could not expunge Tiran. Veenn had said it, we ourselves had said it. In the autumn, he prevailed. This was spring.

And every spring was bedded in time, as we were, as Therkon was, as Rathi had been, as Tiran had been. As Tiran must be again.

“You have broken the pattern,” we said. “You and the Mother are the two sides of the balance. You both have your part, but you must keep the whole. Winter rises.
Winter must also fall.”

It was all so obvious, so clear beyond contention, that we were not surprised when, as the light subsided, Therkon’s body began, gingerly, to uncoil from its cringe. To lower its hands, and relax its face, and dare to look at us with its eyes again.

To pick up the sword, that had fallen into the blood and snow at its feet.

Even then, the solution was so clear and perfect and right as a puzzle piece finally fitted, that we did not heed his movement. Did not invoke the councils of Azo. Did not think on the human, or even on the sagas’ plane, at all.

Until Tiran smiled at us, and lifted the sword to guard, and purred, “But for the proper pattern, there must be a battle first.”

* * * *

The light died. It was bleak midwinter noon, and we were trapped there, mute and paralyzed as a flesh and blood menhir, amid the bloodied but undispelled snow. Only the calamity had changed.

Its lips smiled, Therkon’s less familiar winner’s smile, and it moved the sword a little. The blade no longer dripped, but over its knuckles, where it had retrieved the fallen hilt, everything was smeared with red.

Battle, it had said. A proper part of the pattern, it claimed. And it was true. The pattern was the story, and the story said, Fight. Not merely transition, but struggle and supersession, a
balance of opposing triumphs. Opposing defeats.

If Two and I were to bind it to the pattern, we must also bind ourselves.

So we must fight the same, the endless battle.

But was it expecting, this time, to win?

Horror choked my throat. I had one knife left. Therkon had the sword. How would the world fare, if the ultimate story went awry? If spring came, and Tiran won?

I shut my eyes and my soul cringed. Oh, my mind said numbly. Oh, Mother, what am I to do?

Silence came then, within me as without. The silence of the circle, of the standing stones, whose place had been defiled by death and violence, but could not be destroyed.

Where, a still small voice said into that quiet, do you think the Mother is?

My heart labored as if my blood had thickened. Dryness filled my throat. I could not have said it, but too, too clearly, I understood.

If this was the climactic battle, and we its human actants, who could, who must, Two and I be, if Therkon was Winter’s King?

My hair crisped with more than awe. And then crisped again as Two formed the inevitable corollaries.

If we are the Mother, then somehow, however impossibly, story dictates that we must win.

But if Tiran wore Therkon’s body, how could we inflict that defeat on him?

I opened my eyes and it smiled at me. It had Therkon’s wits along with his flesh and blood. It had worked out the strategy and the inevitable conclusions. Whether the Mother won or not, Two and I could only lose.

“Why?” we said. We did not consciously plan delay, but there would only be so much time to ask our own questions. And now they were driven by rage, by the bursting denial of grief. “How long?”

We expected it to understand, and it did. Why had it sought me in particular, once I came within its ken, and how far back had that knowledge, that seeking run? To the squall that pushed Aspis from the River, to the wreck of the survivor’s ship, to the expulsion of its crew from Kaastria, to the fall of Hondeland?

To the fall of Hringstenn, or further? Right back to the beginning? Even to my beginning? Had knowledge of me, yet greater disaster, first driven Tiran to break the pattern at all?

“How long?”

It shrugged a little. Not with indifference, or denial. This, we understood, in such leaps of thought as Tiran itself made, was a pattern beyond human understanding. And Two’s as well.

“But why? Why?”

Why me, why us, I wanted to scream at it: what was so important that you, whatever you are, would overturn whole nations to get possession of a single, human girl?

Two’s own logic answered. Because I was not simply human. Because I was Two, as well.

“Because of us?”

It narrowed its eyes and stared at me. It was not an expression of Therkon’s. I had one fleeting wild impression that I had pushed it beyond Therkon’s mental and physical repertoire. Now, in this unfamiliar body, Tiran, or Sthassamaer, was acting for itself.

The lids dropped over inhuman black. It looked down into the snow, and answered so softly I could barely hear.

“For the light.”

And as if light had struck to the depths of my own heart’s cavern, I understood.

It lived in, moved with, was itself darkness. It could pursue summer, and overthrow autumn, and best the Mother, for a season. But even if it ran wild, spreading its dominion over the year’s length, what it worsted and hunted could never be held for good.

But Two and I, however anomalous, were merely part of the Mother’s world. We bore, we could kindle light. And we, at least, might be engulfed, assimilated. Possessed.

But if we were not the Mother? Fresh vision of that struck like a literal spear of light.

In this battle, we stood for Her, but we did not become Her. So if we must fight in Her place, we could use our own weapons. We need not accept the adversary’s challenge with a sword. Or even with a knife.

I took a step back as the vision blossomed in my mind like another qherrique statuette. I looked at Tiran, at Therkon, at the sword in his hand, and the Sight melded past and present and I knew what to do.

I stretched my right hand out, empty, not needing any other focus than the will. And I told Two: Fire.

At the gesture Therkon-Tiran blinked. Took in my weaponless hand, and smiled.

It stepped forward. I stepped backward. It raised Langlieve’s sword.

I pointed and Two passed fire through my fingers so I never felt a flush of heat. The blaze streamed out between us without touching Therkon either, and its white spear struck just below Hvestang’s hilt.

Two had recalled even more than I. The sword blade was
triple-tempered, laminated, Isle-made steel. It could probably withstand even our fire. It could go into an iron-ore smelting
furnace, and never melt.

But Therkon’s hand was human flesh.

The heat blazed upward from steel to ivory and that flesh
reacted as it had to the blinding light: Therkon screamed and jerked in pure reflex and hurled the sword away from him as far as it would fly.

Hvestang struck the foot of the recumbent stone’s right jamb with a ringing clash. Therkon reeled back, Tiran spun his body round and tried to take a step in pursuit and we said, “Stop.”

It sounded like my voice, but the air shuddered. The very stones seemed to reverberate. Tiran managed one stride, and froze.

Perhaps the Mother spoke through us again, as when we commanded Tiran before. We had no time to consider. We said what the Sight showed us, with Her authority.

“Battle has been offered. And won. Go now. Find your proper place.”

It raised Therkon’s face. The eyes were still wholly black, but now they glistened. Now, despite the black inhuman sentience, emotion was in them. Longing, perhaps. Unmistakably, grief.

“You cannot possess the light. If you did, the world would die. There would be no light without the world.”

Unspoken, impossible visions flooded through us, light as the product of air and earth and water and the sun’s operation, on some scope both larger than the planet and tinier than its grains of dust. Without those necessities, light would not exist.

And in the dark, they could not exist.

What it loved, what it most desired, it would destroy.

The voice had grown gentle, when we spoke again.

“But if you hold your place, the world will hold. You will not possess the light, but it will go and come again, and you will know of it. It will pass beside you. You will know that. As you could not have seen or known before.”

I really did think my heart had stopped. Because Two and I knew what we were hearing now: not merely the restoration of balance, of the pattern, the ancient story, but the birth of change. We were the witnesses of a new bargain between gods.

Of a new way of being a god.

Tiran raised its—his—Therkon’s face, and Tiran’s eyes, and looked into ours, but this time I knew Who he was seeing.

Someone lifted my right hand, upright, fingers straight, palm out. Go, that gesture said. The pact is made. The pattern changed. Peace returns. It is time to leave.

Therkon’s body joined its hands before its breast. Ours did the same. Tiran bowed its head. We bowed mine. It was not a reverence, on either side. It was a peer’s acknowledgement.

* * * *

As my eyes rose again everything around us seemed to pause. In the edge of my vision, for one impossible moment, I saw snow-flakes halted in mid-air. Unable, unwilling, to fall.

Then the last flake sifted down to earth and stopped. My lungs filled on a long automatic breath. And Therkon raised his head.

Blinking, dazedly, at the bloody snow, the fallen sword. Turning his palm over, to find the great red scorch-mark that in a
minute or so would begin to pain worse than any wound. Turning his face toward me.

Looking at me with Therkon’s own bewildered, bronze-dark, human stare.

* * * *

I had to run about at once for snow to pack his palm and combat the worst of the pain, a purpose that helped swallow the tears and the convulsive shudders of aftermath, to curb the frantic need to scream like a lunatic and hurl us bodily into his arms. If I
babbled throughout, I managed to get him, staggering himself now, to sit down on the recumbent stone. To upturn his snow-filled hand on a knee. To succor his body, before his eyes found the bloody wreckage on the snow.

And after that one blank moment, he understood.

Babble died in my throat. So I heard quite clearly, even though he had his good hand to his mouth as he whispered it, barely
audible.

“Oh. Oh, Dhe.”

I should have been frantic with relief. He understood. Tiran had begun to relinquish him, his wits, if not scathed like his body, might be intact. But all I could see was the look on his face.

The snow sifted, vertically, soundlessly, down through the frigid air, and I wanted to scream it at him: Not your fault, not your doing, not your blame, the Seer foretold it, it wasn’t you!

Then he gave one great shudder and jerked his torso upright, and his bronze-dark eyes turned, as a drowning man’s hand claws for succour, to my own.

I whispered, “How much do you—did you—know?”

Snow-flakes drifted, slightly out of vertical, one alighting, a white moth, on the shoulder of Nouip’s furs. Imperceptibly, it
began to melt. He shuddered again, and spoke.

“It was like—seeing through water.” He was still whispering too. “Wavery. No . . . sound.” He rubbed the back of the good hand across a cheek. “I was—there. I . . . felt. But . . . no words. No thoughts.” He lifted the burned hand and stared at it. “No . . . Nothing would move. Not for me.”

In his palm the snow had melted too. The great red weal showed slick and wet and my own body moved without conscious decision, scooping up another handful, fitting it tenderly among his fingers. Anything to avoid the expression on his face.

“You had,” my own voice shook, but I could say it, “no choice.”

He looked blankly at the snow-pack. His face was remote as the stones.

“And you did act. At the end.” I tried not to shiver. “You threw away the sword.”

“I don’t—” He stopped, dazed again. “That wasn’t—me.”

That was your body, I told him silently. If not by conscious volition, it was the act of your flesh and blood.

And thank the Mother that flesh and blood had reacted before Tiran caught up, before it, he, understood and could make you hold on, and force me to yield. Or else to watch your hand burn, hear your pain, myself torture your flesh.

I sat down beside him with something near a thump and seized his good hand as substitute for hurling both arms round him and clutching hard enough to hurt. He let me take it. He was still staring, more dazed than before.

“Rathi.” He swallowed, as if it hurt his throat. “I remember—Rathi. That was my choice. But the rest.” He shook his head like a drunkard. “Chaeris, what was all the rest? What were we—who were we? What were we doing?”

He had been a conscious witness to it all. But how much, and in what form, did he retain?

“I remember—light.” He had screwed his eyes up involuntarily. “I never saw light like that. Not just shining. It hurt. My eyes would not shut . . .”

I had inflicted that too. I gripped his hand hard enough to crush bones and tried not to haul him bodily into my lap.

“That was me, that was Two, that was the only way to stop it, once it had you.” Even now I can hardly bear to remember that first glimpse of Tiran in his face. “I’m so sorry, I never meant to hurt you, I didn’t even know . . .”

If you were still alive, let alone conscious. If anything of you remained.

The snow had begun to thin atop the great recumbent stone. Dark bumps and hollows shadowed the white blanket, hard stone pressed up under my flesh. Against my shoulder, Therkon shook his head again.

“That was you? Like the qherrique?”

For all that Tiran, all that I had done to him, he had kept his wits.

“That was Two and me. Yes.”

He drew in his breath. And more than his wits had survived.

“You shone? Not like on Skall? Not the knife or, or something else?”

“Not this time. No.”

Oh Mother, I was thinking as the tears pricked, tears of sheer gratitude, I know now why they light You candles across the Isles. The philosopher has survived. Next time, I’ll light a dozen myself.

Beyond my feet the blood no longer steamed. The great red pool glistened though, starkly aberrant, ringed now by slick brown stone.

“The light stopped it?” He hunched suddenly and it came
almost in a moan. “I need never have, should never have touched Rathi? You and Two could have—?” He tried to put the wounded hand over his face.

“No.” I snatched it down. The snow in his palm had melted. I scooped up more. “With Rathi, it, Tiran, Sthassamaer had taken me. You said it. You saw. It was the water. The black water.” Could I, did I have to rehearse for him the inner terrors of that too often told dream? “I couldn’t stop it. If you hadn’t. If Rathi hadn’t been . . .” I did not want to say, I know you felt what you had done then, to me as well as Rathi. But if Tiran had taken me, what else might it have won?

“If Tiran had won then, all would now be lost.”

We spoke no exaggeration, the Sight affirmed. From Two and me to Therkon, on to Anfluga, to the rest of Kaastria, the Isles, Dhasdein, the River. Beyond the River. Tiran would have had the world.

I shuddered. Therkon turned his head and stared at me. More than stared.

“Chaeris.” Then he half withdrew his hand. His muscles began to contract. “Chaeris, is that—you?”

“It’s us.” Suddenly there was no more room for alarm or affront or that ancient fear of being rejected, being different. I pushed the hood back on his shoulders. Then I leant in and actually kissed his cheek in pure exuberance. “It’s me and Two both. Nouip Saw truly. Now, so do we.”

“Oh.” He breathed it, a rising note of comprehension, wonder. Actual joy. For the first time, I suddenly realized in how long, his haggard, bristly face opened in a smile. “Oh, Chaeris!”

His hand turned, grasping mine. He would have used the wounded one as well, had I not caught his wrist. “That is—” It was pure imagination that the light itself had changed, brightening the mid-winter murk. “That is—”

He kissed the back of my grasping hand as impulsively as I had kissed his cheek. He even straightened a little. Though the frown revived, it held a shadow of philosopher’s eagerness.

“Was that when you talked? I could see that. Not hear. Not what anyone said.”

I opened my mouth to say, Yes, and stopped. Someone had spoken, yes. But how could I presume, suppose, suggest, let alone attempt to explain Who?

Did he even know the truth about the Winter Man?

“Do you remember Grithsperry?”

He nodded, looking puzzled.

“They, the shippers, talked about the Winter Man.”

He nodded again.

“Veenn told me. Outside Ve Pool. The Winter Man is the
Mother’s adversary. They fight in autumn, and in spring. In spring, the Mother wins. In autumn, it’s the Winter Man. It—His name is Tiran.”

He blinked. “The name you said?” His brows creased. “Then what is—was—Sthassamaer?”

I wanted to kiss him, this time, in pure relief at the speed of his wits.

“Sthassamaer was Tiran. Tiran gone mad. Trying to make Winter last forever. Trying to take,” I swallowed, “the light.”

He had not spoken to Veenn, but he had heard sagas. I could have expected the world pattern to be spelt out more than once.

“To stop the seasons? But. But that would stop the world.”

I could not help but smile at him, however lunatic it might appear. “Oh, yes.”

He frowned again. And made the next, for him predictable leap.

“So you had to beat Tiran, to stop Sthassamaer?”

I could only nod.

His face had gone blank as the stones. But then his eyes
dilated, almost as widely as when he looked at Rathi.

“But if you fought Tiran . . . Chaeris, that’s the story. If you fought Tiran—who were you?”

I swallowed, hard. “If, if Tiran had taken you. And it really was the story. Who could I, who would I have to be?”

He actually pulled back along the stone. Drops cascaded from the furs and water scattered round him as naked rock appeared between us, under our feet.

“You mean we were—?”

Gods?

“I think—we took Their places. Or They took ours. Or They spoke through us. Or They used us, or—I don’t know how it worked. I don’t think we can know. At least, I don’t think we can explain.”

He licked his lips and then he said it with conscious quotation. “Your words do not work, do not work, do not work.”

“Yes. I think, Yes.”

He shivered as if back in Aspis’ gale. I remembered those moments when I had felt, known another voice speaking through me, and shivered myself.

“But the story.” We were not finished. “Putting that right wasn’t all.”

“What?”

I steeled myself. “At the end, I think. I think She did speak. For Herself. She told Tiran that the way things were would change. The light could not be part of the dark, but, now, the dark could know the light was there. Beside it. And that was something the dark could never have before.”

His eyes shot up to mine. His mouth opened, and nothing came out. Only his expression spoke.

Before he lowered his eyes again, and very carefully, made, left-handed, a gesture that might have been a salute, and might only have mimed taking up a handful of water and letting it slip away.

The gesture he had made with real water, I recalled, when he remembered his dead.

I did not have to say, Do you understand? I did not need, I realized with boundless relief, to say anything. He too had caught the greatest wonder. That we had enacted not merely pattern, but change.

On the heels of that came another, differently appalling thought.

“Oh, heavens, what will my father say?”

“What?”

“My father Sarth.” Consternation pulled me to my feet. “My mother says he’s a philosopher. He reasons that there’s no such thing as a god.”

Therkon’s mouth sagged open like an emptied purse.

“If I have to go back and tell him they exist, that I know they do, firsthand, I’ve felt it, I might even have been one. Oh, how will he deal with that?”

My father’s whole thought-edifice, his world-view, assembled with such pain and struggle in the teeth of others’ easier, prescribed beliefs, the scaffolding of his new life, dismantled. By first-hand experience, the one argument he could never overthrow.

Therkon was laughing. I realized it with disbelief, with outrage that burnt out the shock. “How can you sit there and just, just—! Stop it! Blight and blast it, stop!”

“My lady. My . . . Chaeris.” He was still laughing, shaking with it, tears had streamed unheeded down his cheeks. But he got himself on his feet, and reached his good hand to clamp over mine.

“We are stuck here in the snow, in the furthest reach of the Isles, uncounted voyages from anywhere. And we have still to get down this hill, let alone reach the one small ship. Your father is upRiver. Beyond even Iskarda. Do you not think his answer might be—a matter for some other day?”

I stared at him, as stupidly as he had looked at me. But Two agreed. Yes. We remained in the heart of desolation, we had still to reach Hringstenn, let alone Anfluga, let alone Hamair, Sandouin, all the countless other islands northward. Dhasdein, let be Iskarda, was beyond the limits of our ken.

And if he laughed, perhaps it had been the release of tension, close kin to if not pure hysteria itself.

This truly was here and now. The gods had departed. All that remained was us.

A strand of hair touched my cheek. Fallen from a plait at some point in the upheavals, dropping loose.

And dry. Softly fanning across my cheekbone. Carried by a breath of air.

Therkon’s head came up almost as quickly as mine. He half-turned on a heel. As he moved, wind breathed across us, a tangible drift.

“The snow’s stopped.”

I heard myself say it, stupid with disbelief. Because it had not only stopped, it had been melting. The recumbent stone’s top, the circle-stone salients were all darkly wet and glistening, their white thatches gone.

And the light, that I had thought pure imagination at Therkon’s joy, really was brightening. Illuminating more vividly, more terribly, the great pool at our feet.

* * * *

Therkon was staring at it too, face speaking all that I felt. Loss. Regret. Rage. Protest. Grief. Abiding guilt.

I did not repeat what Azo had told me on the Sea-fort tower, or Two had argued on the way into Gildair. Whatever prizes death bought, they could not mitigate the price.

I shut my eyes a moment, letting Two carry me through the passages of memory, Eithay, Skall, Gildair, Rangar, the long spaces of ocean, the kaleidoscope of images. What use to ask wh
ere or when Sthassamaer had found him, if there had been
influence, or knowledge, or how much knowledge, before the end? Perhaps it had already been happening on the way to Gildair, when I had seen that contradictory flash of greed in Rathi’s face. Who, using the words of humans to trace the path of—gods—through time, could possibly say?

Therkon’s arm came round me. Very softly, Therkon’s voice spoke in my ear.

“We will come back. With the others. With a bier. We will not demean him. Nor will we leave him. Not like this.”

He moved away from me. The furs swirled and stooped. Steady-handed, he lifted Rathi’s head from the muck of blood and water, brought it to the body. Suddenly knowing what he
intended, I hurried in turn to help re-arrange the corpse. To draw the weather-canvas over all.

To make my own invocation as Therkon made his strewn-water reverence. We will come for you. You will be cared for. We will not forget.

When we turned, at last, for the circle’s entrance, the blood had already diminished. It was seeping away into the earth, I
realized, as rain or snow might, between the faces of small
resurfacing stones.

* * * *

Beyond the portal we met the first actual gust, blowing up out of the south-west in a rush very nearly warm. Instinctively I unfastened my weather-canvas, and Therkon put back Nouip’s cloak. As he shifted Hvestang’s harness to his other shoulder, I saw that the hilt had been scorched brown, but remained intact.

By the time we reached the hill foot the snow was melting like a mirage, bedraggled grass and bushes swimming up through the mid-winter white, sterile purity dissolving into earth ochres, reds, browns. And suddenly, green. A bud sat on the lowest bush on the open sward. A single dot of color upon naked brown twigs. But beneath, incredibly, impossibly on the still-dark earth . . .

Therkon and I broke stride together, exclaiming in chorus, “Crocuses!”

They were only buds, but already the colors announced themselves, brilliant little sheath-rims of purple and gold. They would open in a few days, in a day or two. Perhaps, in this sudden
enchanted termination of winter, this very day.

Already grass stems, old, bedraggled, but shot with dull, faint green, showed between the town cobbles. Water was running down a street center, and sound rose everywhere, the tinkle and rattle and burble of water freed in thaw. However unlovely the wreckage that thaw released.

And as we came out at the quay-end, a bow-shot from where Anfluga lay, half a dozen plump, short-legged brown-mottled birds suddenly materialized among the headland stones.

We both stopped: it was impossible not to stop, not to absorb the first moving life in Hringstenn, to stare, no longer with dis­belief, but irresistibly, with joy.

The birds scuttled and scurried amid the beach pebbles. One of them began calling as we looked. Tuck-tuck, it cried, sharp as a rock-hammer. Tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck

“Turnstanes, down on the beach, tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck . . .”

For the first time I began to weep.