At first, Jarel could not believe that it had happened. Even though he’d been forewarned, he could not believe this! That a small object like a stunner should be lifted by the force of mind alone was one thing—an incredible thing, a thing in itself upsetting to a bunch of confirmed disbelievers like Dulard and Kevan. But a great mass of rock—a total defiance of every natural law known to science …
An advanced thing, she’d called it. An advanced thing that could be “awakened” in a man who was not in himself different, not superhuman? By what means? By belief in a stone? What are we missing, he thought, we of the Empire who are so all-fired proud of our technological prowess? We who study human beings as if their minds were no more than perishable computer circuits, who analyze their behavior and their brains in Research Centers as if they were simply a superior strain of white rats? How could we have blocked out a whole area of knowledge in the name of the very science that should have revealed it to us? Scientists? Why, to her people we must seem no better than primitive tribesmen hiding from a thunderstorm!
But in this case it was a good thing that Imperial science was backward, Jarel thought dazedly. If it weren’t, Dulard would not have been so overcome as to give the order for retreat.
It had not been only Dulard, of course. Some of the colonists had witnessed the thing, and they had been the first to demand that the ship be held until they could get aboard. They had come here prepared to deal with all sorts of hardships and hazards—but not with this. Not with a threat that was immeasurable because its very existence invalidated every measuring stick by which they had been trained to judge. What good is superior technology against something that breaks all of technology’s rules?
It’s a lot more comfortable to live in a world where the rules still apply.
So this would become an “off-limits” planet, like the ones with virulent bacteria that couldn’t be tamed, and the ones with inhabitants who were in the habit of playing around with radioactive poisons. These natives had now been shown to be equally dangerous. “To think we stunned them,” someone said. “Kept them locked up, and all—”
“Personally,” another man remarked, “I think those ‘helpless’ captives were running the whole show all along. They didn’t need to worry about trifles like stunner effects with what they’ve got.”
“What’ll they do to get back at us? They wouldn’t have shown their hand unless they were ready to act!”
“They’re probably gathering out there now. They’ll disarm us all, and then destroy the ship.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Dulard. “But I sure as heck know that this is something we want nothing to do with.”
Unreasoned fear, thought Jarel. How did Elana’s people know that the colonists would be so afraid, just on the basis of one man’s demonstration? A man who didn’t even try to harm them? Of course, he had reason enough to want to. Perhaps the colonists were being deliberately trapped by their own consciences. Were all peoples thrown by what they didn’t understand? It seemed such an unnecessary drag on progress. And then Jarel thought, no, it wasn’t. It was a built-in safety factor. Dulard was right, but for the wrong reasons.
The forces of the mind dangerous? You bet they were! What would the Empire do with them if it had them? And imagine such powers “awakened” in a guy like Kevan! An advanced thing … a thing further down the road. If there was any sort of natural progression, and Elana said there was, why, it worked out very neatly to keep the matches away from the baby.
Within a few moments of the native’s display of power, the decision to turn the other captives loose and to start work on the reloading of the ship had been made. Dulard was a realist. It was not that he was afraid personally. But he had not gotten to be a commander in the Imperial Exploration Corps by ignoring the dictates of prudence. He was charged with the responsibility for the long-term safety of the colony. If that colony was wiped out, it would be on his head; and he could see no justification for such a risk, not when they could start again somewhere else.
In the excitement, Jarel hadn’t had time to consider his own position. He himself had been stunned in the instant following his stunning of Kevan, but he had been released from paralysis shortly thereafter. Now for the first time he began to realize what he’d gotten himself into. There were men at his elbows; he was under arrest.
They were motioning him toward the ship. Quickly, he “spoke” to Elana, telling her of the success of her plan, for he suddenly took in the fact that without him, she would have no way to be sure that the ruse had worked. Her reply flashed into his mind, strong with the overtones of incredulous joy.
Not until then did it dawn on him what had actually happened when she dashed toward the rockchewer.
She had not known what form the thing would take. She hadn’t expected the native to save her; she had expected to die. Yet she had not been in despair; she had done what she did not out of rebellion against a horrifying fate, but solely out of concern for the keeping of her secret. It had been premeditated, several things she had said now pointed to that. She had never had any defense against the Research Center’s methods at all; when she had claimed “a way to deal with that problem,” she had meant this way. This was why she had begged him not to leave her stunned, and when she had promised him proof of her belief that she knew what was worth dying for … well, this was the proof.
The secret was that important. Not just to this world, but to others; she’d said there were complicated reasons.Before, Jarel knew, he might have told someday—not the circumstances, not enough for anyone to connect it with this planet, but just the fact that there was an advanced civilization, a civilization with answers, a reason for hope. A fact that would seem helpful for people to know. But Elana had said that it would not help. And what she had said, she had been ready to back up. He knew now that he would never tell anyone a single word.
It was like nothing I’d ever imagined—the zenith of all hope, the bright pinnacle of joy that you think can never come to anyone outside of a storybook! One moment like that makes all the rest worth going through: all the peril, all the grief, and yes, even the nightmare of believing that you are going to die. None of the bad part has any importance at all beside such a thing as happened to us on Andrecia in the moment of our triumph.
I felt suspended, light, almost as if I too were floating on air! When you’re convinced that you’ll soon be dead, you are free in a way that you can never be at any other time—free in the sense that anything can happen to you and you will not mind, because you have already faced the most frightening thing there is to face. So if what happens is something good, something so good as suddenly knowing that you are going to live after all, why, that in itself is pretty tremendous. But if on top of that you know that a whole world, a whole race of people with a practically unlimited future has been rescued too, rescued because someone you love has achieved a success far beyond anyone’s highest expectations, there just aren’t words for it.
For I knew, even as I looked up at the hovering mass of rock that magically did not fall, that Georyn had saved more than my life; I knew that our mission had been fulfilled, that the invaders would leave without captives, and that the freedom of the Andrecians was now assured, at least as far as removal of this particular threat could assure it. Don’t ask me how I knew, because it really wasn’t evident at that point. Not until Jarel told me silently what his commander had said did I get any confirmation.
Father contacted me almost immediately, and the emotion that drove our thoughts was pure elation. He and Evrek, after an unsuccessful attempt to free me that I so far knew nothing of, had hidden in a dense clump of trees at the farthest edge of the clearing and had seen everything. At first our exchange was wordless; we were just plain overwhelmed. Finally I began to think a little more coherently, coherently enough to take in the marvel of it. Oh, Father—I never guessed, I never dreamed …
You did a very brave thing, Elana. Sometimes the outcome of that can surpass all hope.
The outcome of belief in magic can certainly surpass all hope, I realized dazedly. I thought of how close I’d come to taking Georyn’s away from him. Why, if nobody believed anything except what they understood, how limited we’d be!
The ecstasy didn’t last, of course. Heights of feeling never do, and in this case I still had plenty of worries left to close in on me. For in a very little while I remembered the thing that the excitement had driven from my mind, the thing I must now find courage to confess. I had broken the Oath. You shouldn’t complain, I guess, when your life has just been miraculously spared, yet the thought of my career as an agent being over before it started was a sobering one; I hadn’t expected to be around to face the music. Not that I would have acted differently if I had, but dismissal from the Service wasn’t going to be pleasant. And what if the repercussions were bad, not only for me but for Jarel’s people? Or what if Jarel told, and the colonists changed their minds about leaving? Jarel had put himself in a tough spot by stunning the man who had been about to kill Georyn. In our one brief exchange before he was taken to the ship under guard, he assured me that no matter what happened he would not explain his true reasons for doing it. Still, mightn’t they put pressure on him?
Father, you don’t know! I thought despairingly. I made a disclosure, a deliberate disclosure! I told one of the Imperials …
Don’t worry about it now. We’ll talk later.
At that moment Evrek’s thought came through to me, strong, urgent. Darling, you’re all right! Oh, Elana, when I think …
I’m all right, Evrek. Everything’s all right now. But I shied from the contact, for with Evrek and myself it was not all right, nor would it be for some time. And since it was not his fault, I did not want to ever let him know.
And there was another thing that was not all right. There was the inevitable ending. I turned to Georyn, realizing that without some explanation he couldn’t possibly appreciate the full scope of this fantastic victory. I hoped for his sake that we could get away before the man who was operating the “dragon” recovered and brought the thing to life again! So far, all the Imperials seemed to be stunned—figuratively, not literally—but there was no telling how long it would last.
They freed us quickly; not only Georyn and myself, but all the other Andrecian prisoners. They chased us out of camp, in fact! We were a threat to the very foundations of their logic, to their most deep-seated conceptions of their own power. If a man can by sheer mental force defy the laws of gravity and keep a huge mass of rock suspended in the air—suspended so that not even a pebble falls to earth in its natural fashion—what is he likely to do next? Deactivate all the blasters, perhaps? Reduce the ship and the barracks to dust? I think they thought if they ever got us inside their research center we would blow the place to smithereens and emerge unscathed. I only wish it were true! If it were, I would be glad to volunteer.
As Georyn and I started toward the forest Father’s thought came again, insistently. We’ll wait for you at the fork in the path. Let’s say in an hour. One hour from now.
An hour? What’s the delay for?
There was a slight hesitation, after which he replied, When you come, you must come alone, Elana.
He did it the best way, the kindest way. He knew that our courage was at its highest pitch, that the elation of our victory would carry us through; to have drawn it out until the next morning would have helped neither Georyn nor myself. It would have been an awful letdown. As it was, the despair, the joy, and the final sorrow were blended into one climactic memory that will never be surpassed by anything I may experience later.
And it was no shock to Georyn; he was half expecting to see me dissolve into thin air at the moment of the dragon’s death in any case. But to me, at the time, it seemed heartless. Suddenly even the parting itself seemed heartless, unnecessarily so. I tried to express what I felt lightly, not trusting myself to be forthright. Isn’t the dragon-slayer always given a reward? Doesn’t the fairy godmother always whisk him off to some fabulous castle where his every wish is magically fulfilled?
Father could see well enough what I was leading up to, and he said what had to be said. Elana, surely you know that what you’re suggesting would not be a reward for either of you.
I suppose I did know, but I wasn’t quite ready to admit it. Wouldn’t it? I persisted.
Have you forgotten that all too often the spell’s broken? The magic castle turns back into a miserable hovel and the prince’s fine raiments revert to rags?
Bitterly I responded, That may happen in any case! We’ve done something that can’t be undone, made him into something different from what he was, made him want things that Andrecia can’t give him. He will never fit here or be happy here. Aren’t we responsible for him now?
We are, yet there’s no help we can give. To take a Youngling aboard a starship is highly illegal, Elana; but that’s not why I’m refusing to do it. I would break policy if I thought good could come of it, as I have in certain other things. But it wouldn’t be good for anyone, least of all for Georyn. He would not be a hero away from his own time and place.
He’s right, I thought. Inside, I can’t deny that. Georyn would be a misfit in our world too, but at the bottom instead of at the top, and I’d be the last one to wish that on him.
There’s one more thing, Elana. You must take back the Stone.
No! That, I won’t do!
It’s for his own protection. He may misuse it; if he does, then someday it will fail him.
It was the last straw somehow. I had been warned; I’d been told on the night I was sworn that this job can exact a rather terrible price. I was willing to pay it. I hadn’t balked at any of the big, important things.
Yet if one sort of magic can come true, why not another? Why not the “happily ever after” sort? I knew, of course, that that just isn’t the way things work. But to ask me to take Georyn’s power from him seemed one demand too many.
Hand in hand, Georyn and the Enchantress went forth from the place of the Dragon, and they came to a glade within the wood, hidden from the path along which the other freed captives were hastening. And Georyn knew that the time he had so long dreaded was now come, when the Lady must depart into the enchanted realm; and if it were not for the harm to her, he thought, he would have preferred to dwell beside her in prison than to endure this parting.
Then as they sat upon the grass, the Enchantress faced him, saying, “The Dragon has in truth been defeated by your magic and will presently depart into the dark region whence it came; no more will it ravage this land. The world is now safe for your people; so must we not rejoice, however hard this hour may be for us?”
“I rejoice indeed for the world,” he answered, “and for your escape. But I fear that not all the evil has yet been vanquished.”
“One can never vanquish all the evil,” she said. “That we should have prevailed against this much of it is a thing of wonder.”
“That is not quite what I meant,” Georyn replied, troubled. “Lady, why did you approach the Dragon as you did? It seemed almost that you sought death. Terrible indeed must have been the doom that awaited you, if the monster’s jaws were to be preferred!” But he did not voice his deepest fear, that having given up her power she might not wish to live.
Quietly she answered, “That was not the way of it; I would not have done the thing out of unwillingness to suffer, Georyn. But there are some evils against which no amount of bravery can prevail. Even before I revealed myself, I learned that if I were taken to prison, I would be forced to disclose the secrets of the enchanted realm by fell sorcery—sorcery against which I would be powerless, with the Emblem or without it.”
“I hope,” said Georyn darkly, “that the folk of this world are worth what has been risked! There are times when that seems open to doubt.”
“You jest, Georyn! You do not really have any question, do you? Such doubts rise not from wisdom but from the acceptance of half-truths.”
“Good magic would have little meaning, were there no good in men,” he conceded. “But now, your peril is ended, and you are truly free? I cannot part from you thus without knowing that you will be safe hereafter.”
“I am free and safe. You need have no fear for me.”
“But you do not smile, Lady,” he said. “And for you all is not as it would be, had you never come here.”
“No, Georyn, for I have lost the Emblem, as you know,” she said sadly. “I am no longer fit to wear it, since a wrong was done when I revealed myself, as had been foretold.”
He pressed her hand, and for a moment he knew naught but wrath at the ways of enchantments, that she should be so punished for a thing that, like all her acts, had stemmed only from her goodness. It did not seem fair! Fervently he declared, “I would give my life to restore your Emblem!”
She managed a thin smile after all. “Do not worry about me, Georyn. Twice you have saved me from far worse fates than that which I took upon myself when I saved you. There is more to my world than you have ever dreamed, and—”
Georyn broke in, saying, “I would not have you think that I would turn your sorrow to my own benefit, and yet—I must ask, Lady, for I will never love anyone as I love you. Is there no chance, now that you no longer wear the Emblem, that you could remain in my world?”
Gently she drew her hand away from his. “There is no chance. My vow still binds me, though no more shall I be trusted to serve in the same fashion; but even if that were not so, it is not possible for enchanted folk to remain long in the worlds of men. I will not deceive you: I love you—oh, how terribly I love you—but I could not live in your world for more than a little time. The stars have a hold on me; I would miss them, and I—I would be torn in two, Georyn.”
“Do not speak of it,” he begged her. “I know it. I have always known, and it was cruel of me even to ask.”
“Cruel? After what I have done to you, Georyn?”
Slowly he replied, “If by that, you mean you have shown me that which I cannot have, I would choose such cruelty over any other woman’s kindness, Lady. For it is better to know of what exists than not to know. I would rather be helpless than blind; and if in seeking wisdom as my reward I got more than I had need for, well, that is not your fault but mine, for being what I am.”
“And if you were not what you are, Georyn,” she said, “you could not have conquered the Dragon; so there is nothing for either of us to regret. We are both captives still, captives of our own worlds’ boundaries, for enchantments are not unworldly things, but only ways of seeing what is already there.”
Georyn drew forth the Stone and held it for a moment, wistfully, upon the palm of his hand. Then he extended it to the Enchantress, saying, “You must take it back, Lady. For now, without the Emblem, you need it more than I.”
“Oh, Georyn, I cannot! It may be of use to you again, someday—” She looked at him with concern. “Without it, you will have no magic powers at all, will you?”
“You know that I will not. But perhaps it is better so; for without you to guide me, I would not really know what to do with them; and as you have often told me, such things misused are perilous.”
She paused, then with reluctance admitted, “That is true, and I have indeed been directed to take back the Stone. I had thought to disobey and let you keep it, for I would not deprive you of what you have earned at such cost. But since you offer it freely, I will accept—although not for my own sake, for even without the Emblem I have the powers of my people, which are greater than you know.” Taking the Stone, she added thoughtfully, “Perhaps, Georyn, the condition of which I once told you has come true after all, since you must give up this that you have deemed necessary to your triumph.”
Puzzled, he said to her, “But, Lady, that condition was fulfilled when you sacrificed the Emblem.”
She stared at him as if such a thought had never before occurred to her. “Did you see it so?” she whispered.
“But surely. How else could I have gained the full power of the Stone? How could I have succeeded, if it had not been for that?”
To his amazement, she began to weep. He put his arms around her, and she clung to him just as a mortal maiden might have done. “Oh, Georyn,” she sobbed, “the ways of enchantments are indeed strange! I understand them no better than you, I think.”
And Georyn knew that in this moment he was the stronger, and it was for him to comfort her, presumptuous as that seemed. He held her to him and stroked her hair, and he said softly, “Do not grieve, Lady! For us to love, and weep for it, was but the price of the victory; I knew that in the beginning, and I cannot believe that you did not. Without this love I could have done nothing, and the Dragon would have overcome the world even as you said. And were that not so, still I would not choose to reject what has been for the sake of the sorrow to come.”
Thereupon he kissed her, and for a time they did not speak; but in the end she rose and said, “The time allotted me is past; shall we fail in courage now, we who have faced the fire and the Dragon? Farewell, Georyn!” And with those words she turned from him and walked out of the sunlight into the gathering mist of the wood.
Jarel lay on the bunk in the small, bare cabin, waiting for liftoff. He knew that what was ahead of him would be no picnic, and that logically he should be miserable. But somehow he couldn’t be. He felt almost exultant. They were pulling out. The barracks had been dismantled in short order, the equipment had been loaded onto the ship, and the rockchewer was being brought aboard. In a few more hours all that would be left of the Empire upon this world would be the black scar of the clearing.
Someday, the natives might build a city over that scar.
It had been worth it. Sure, his future prospects were at the moment pretty grim; but if the girl, Elana, could do what she had done for the sake of this thing, for the sake of the secret that must now be kept not only to protect the natives, but also, she’d said, to protect the Empire, he too could face what he must.
Thinking about it, Jarel began to understand a little. It could hurt, all right, for the existence of an advanced civilization to become common knowledge. For instance, he was going to have to practice medicine from now on knowing that everything he did was far, far behind what had been discovered elsewhere; if everybody engaged in medical research knew that, they might give up in despair. Yet if they kept on without knowing, then someday they might discover something totally new and significant just from having followed a different path, something Elana’s people had missed. Thousands of years from now, the natives of this world might do the same!
If that was how it worked, then it was worth whatever sacrifice anybody had to make. And he wasn’t about to back down, now that it depended on him.
In the old days a man who turned a stunner on one of his own shipmates might have drawn a jail sentence. For Jarel, it wasn’t going to be that simple. Perhaps if he could present a reasonable motive, his assault on Kevan might be considered a crime; but if he gave no motive, if he looked his commanding officer in the eye and disclaimed all knowledge of why he acted as he did, well, there would be no court-martial. Instead, there would be a medical inquiry.
Anyone who suddenly attacked an Imperial citizen without apparent provocation was considered unstable, Jarel realized, and modern medicine did not allow such instability to remain untreated for very long. As a doctor, he had a fair idea of what he was in for. It wasn’t going to be fun.
They would be able to uncover his motives from his subconscious mind, naturally. (The methods that the marvels of Imperial science had made available for that purpose were not confined to use in research on primitive species.) But the secret would not be endangered by this, for in his case they would not believe what they found. At least they wouldn’t believe that it had any substance in reality. Not so long as he steadfastly denied any conscious knowledge of it, they wouldn’t, which, of course, was what he must do. They would not want to believe. And on the face of it, any man who had subconscious delusions of having communicated by mental telepathy with a young girl claiming to represent a superior civilization was a prime candidate for therapy. Resisting that therapy might prove to be quite a challenge. Jarel hoped that he would be equal to it.
The whole business was pretty ironic. Here he had been ready to resign from the Corps, and now that she had given him back the dream, now that he wanted desperately to stay in, he was facing discharge. Whether or not he managed to avert that, an episode of mental imbalance on his record wasn’t going to help his career. And with his sentiments about certain aspects of Imperial policy being what they were, his loyalty might be questioned. That too was ironic, because he had never been more sincerely loyal to the Empire than at this moment.
And he couldn’t tell anyone the reason for this sudden loyalty, this new faith in the Empire’s future! He couldn’t ever reveal why he believed that Imperial civilization was less corrupt than it seemed. There’s nothing wrong with us as a people, he thought. We are not decadent, not wicked, not on the wrong road! We are going somewhere after all. We are as far below her people as the natives are below us … but someday! Is there a federation of human species, perhaps? Is Elana’s civilization the outgrowth not of one people’s maturity, but of many? Is it true that there’s good in reaching for the stars?
If it is true, Jarel reflected, then we must work for it. A hard job? Of course, because there were evils to be avoided in the process, evils like the one almost committed on this planet; and if you were involved, you had to accept personal responsibility, not some vague share of a collective guilt that didn’t really exist. Yet you had to be involved. Where would anything ever get if everybody who had any moral scruples dropped out?
Suppose he’d never joined the Corps. Or suppose, two days ago, he had been able to resign on the spot. Neither Elana nor the man she had trained would have been saved; there would have been no miraculous demonstration of the natives’ potential, and the takeover of this world would be proceeding according to plan.
He would never resign now. He would stick it out and fight—and somehow, someday he would win back the Corps’s respect. There would be some rough going. The secret would be difficult not only to keep, but to live with, for there was a frustrating side to being shown only a glimpse. In spite of that, he wasn’t sorry for anything. He would hang onto the memory of what had happened on this planet for the rest of his life; of that, Jarel was very sure.
We stayed on Andrecia one more night. I was near collapse by the time we had set up our temporary camp; the reaction was setting in. So, although it was still early in the day, Father made me lie down and, through deep telepathy, helped me fall asleep. The next thing I knew it was morning, and Evrek had already started back to the hut by the river. Before following him, we checked up on the Imperials to be sure that they had pulled out all their equipment.
I sat on the scorched ground at the edge of the now-deserted clearing and looked around at the grim skeletons of the trees. It was a forlorn, gray morning; the rents in the cloud cover had closed in, hiding the sun. From somewhere deep in the forest came the piercing cry of that elusive Andrecian bird I’d never managed to catch a glimpse of.
Father and I had not talked the day before; he had sensed what I was going through and had left me alone to do it, for which in some respects I was thankful. He’d passed no comment on my confession beyond requiring a detailed report of what Jarel and I had said to each other. Evrek had not commented, either; in fact he’d made a point of avoiding me, on Father’s orders, I was sure. Evrek had taken a terrible risk for my sake, though I didn’t know it at first, and my coolness to him must have been hard to accept.
He had tried a rescue. To my astonishment—for I would have thought the danger too great to be justifiable—I learned that he had actually been in the Imperials’ camp, under my window even, sometime during the night. He and Father, I gathered, had been communicating, though they hadn’t wanted to raise my hopes, or to further arouse my fears. For Evrek had been fully prepared to die with me if he was caught; we would not have had to rely on makeshift measures. Miraculously, he was not caught. But he found, of course, that to free me was just plain impossible. He could not even toss anything to me through the window, for Jarel was with me. As he told me this part, Evrek seemed about to say something more; but Father broke in quickly. “Later, Evrek,” he commanded. “This isn’t the time.”
Now, Father came over and sat down on the low outcropping of rock behind me. For a while neither of us said anything. Finally, following my gaze to the charred undergrowth, Father began, “It’ll grow again, you know. The forest will push its way back. To erase the clearing will take longer, for they sterilized the ground. But in time, time as we reckon it, no one will be able to tell that they ever came.”
I looked at him; then, silently, I began to cry. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I burst out, “Oh, Father, I broke the Oath! I broke it, and if Jarel ever tells what he knows all kinds of damage may be done! They may grab a dozen more worlds, and we won’t be able to stop them! I’m not any good at this; I couldn’t ever become an agent now, even if the Service would have me.”
“You will not be released that easily, I’m afraid. You made an irrevocable commitment, to which you’re still bound.”
I dropped my head to my knees and sobbed. For a time Father let me cry. Then, gently, he drew me around to face him. “Look at me, Elana. Be very honest: are you sorry you chose as you did?”
There was only one thing I could say; I met his eyes and said it. “No. I would do the same thing again. And the mission did succeed on account of it. Yet I betrayed the Service.”
Astonishingly, he smiled. “No, as a matter of fact you didn’t. There’ll be a formal inquiry, but you’ve no need to worry about the outcome.”
“But I failed to stick by what I was sworn to!”
“Elana,” Father said seriously, “the Oath demands more of us than blind obedience. Its literal words are a mere reflection, a poor attempt at expressing something that can’t be fully expressed. They are anchors, not shackles. You didn’t fail by violating them any more than Georyn succeeded by repeating the magic spell you gave him; the Emblem is no less an artificial device than the Stone.”
“Do you mean to tell me that breaking my sworn word is all right?”
“No, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is a much harder thing to grasp: sometimes, when in our best judgment it is justified, we must be willing to do what’s wrong and take the consequences. We wouldn’t be fit for this work if we didn’t have human feelings! And in this case none of the consequences were bad. You needn’t worry about the disclosure spreading. If Jarel tells later, without proof, he will not be believed.”
I stared down at the ground. There was a strange-looking beetle that had somehow escaped the invaders’ destruction of native life forms; I watched it try to climb the rough surface of the rock beside me. All of a sudden I caught a hint of Father’s thought, something that he wanted to tell me, yet did not know quite how to bring up.
“You knew!” I exclaimed. “Somehow you knew in advance what I was about to do and how it might turn out!”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “During that rescue attempt, Evrek overheard your opening words to Jarel and realized that you were going to reveal the plan. I guessed enough of what could come of that to gamble on it; otherwise I wouldn’t have let it happen. You know, don’t you, what a strict interpretation of the Oath demanded of me?”
I nodded, not daring to speak.
“So you see,” Father went on, “that I’m in much the same position as you are, and Evrek is, too. He did not stop you by force, which he was equipped to do; nor did I order it. For that matter, for him to try the rescue in the first place involved a risk of disclosure that strictly speaking ought not to have been taken. All three of us are technically forsworn, and not one of us has any regrets.”
Awed, I asked, “How could you possibly have known enough about Jarel to trust him?”
“I didn’t. I trusted you.”
I’d judged Jarel accurately, of course. And yet— “They arrested him,” I said. “He was the only Imperial who disapproved of what was being done to the natives. Why should he be the one to pay for it?”
“Because he was the only one willing to,” Father answered.
“Everyone we contact is hurt by it!” I said unhappily.
“Yes. But from what you’ve told me about him, I think Jarel’s as likely as the rest of us to find the game worth the candle.”
Slowly I said, “Evrek’s been hurt, too. And yet he took that awful chance! I didn’t deserve it. Oh, Father, the whole mess was my fault. I got caught because of a feeling for Georyn that I never meant to have, that I knew was foolish and wrong—”
“That’s not the way to look at it, Elana.”
“What other way is there?”
He hesitated. “Why do you think I failed to do anything when I first saw how it was with you and Georyn, if not because I believed that the love between you, hopeless though it was, might lead to good?”
“But then you—you used me, in just the same way as you used Georyn! I was only another pawn.”
“In that sense, Elana, so are we all. We act in the light of the knowledge we have. Do you suppose I see the whole picture? Do you suppose anyone does?”
He stood up and held out his hand to me; I scrambled to my feet. As we walked back across the clearing, Father said softly, “A very wonderful thing happened here yesterday, a thing that in some societies would be counted as a miracle. Don’t let your joy in it be spoiled by the circumstances; for neither you nor I can be sure that it would have happened as it did if they had been any different.”
“A miracle,” I said bitterly. “Yet it was all a sham, a fake, right from the beginning.”
“No! It was real, Elana! As real as anything ever can be. The Youngling interpretations of it may be superficial and naive; but so is ours. Our presumption in thinking that we saved this world by our intervention is, underneath, as ridiculous as Georyn’s in thinking that he did it by slaying a dragon. Or Jarel’s in crediting it to his personal humanitarianism. Yet the fact is that the invaders are gone, and they would not be gone if any of us had been less faithful to our own beliefs.”
“That’s almost like saying that Youngling beliefs are true.”
“Of course they’re true. How else could they be worth living for or dying for? But there are different kinds of truth. And if our kind is more mature than theirs, it’s so only because we know that.”
In the pocket of the cloak I was wearing was the Stone that Georyn had returned to me. Slowly I drew it out and stared at it, weighing it from hand to hand. Father watched; his face had a faraway look. Then suddenly he turned to me. “Let me have that,” he said gently.
I hesitated, not wanting to part with the thing; it had come to mean something. Wasn’t I to be allowed even this much of Georyn? “I—I was planning to keep it,” I wavered. “As a sort of souvenir.”
He reached for it and, reluctantly, I opened my fingers. “Souvenir? The word’s cheap,” he said. He began to reknot the leather thong with which Georyn had bound the Stone to his belt. Passing it through the Stone’s hole as a single strand, Father fashioned it into a pendant.
Smiling, he held it out. “Wear it, Elana. You returned Evrek’s Emblem; wear this in its place until you get one of your own.”
I bent my head, overcome by an inexplicable surge of happiness. Father raised the Stone, free-swinging, just as he had held the Emblem before the campfire on that first night. I sensed what he was waiting for: Not casually! With ritual, Elana! And so very softly I whispered the now-familiar phrases, as I had at my investiture, and then with the formal words, the words of the Presentation, Father placed the thong around my neck.
It is still there. And though when the trip’s over and we are home again I will receive a proper pendant to replace it, I do not think that that will have any more significance.
Father took my arm. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to the hut. Evrek’s waiting for us, and I’ve recalled the ship.”
I didn’t move. Georyn! I couldn’t just go without telling him that I had the Emblem back again! He was undoubtedly still somewhere close by. “Do we have to sneak away like this?” I said desperately. “Couldn’t you bring the ship—”
“Here? So that Georyn could watch you fly away in your enchanted chariot?” He shook his head, and then with forced lightness he went on, “No, I should say not! They will have legends enough without that.”
Now in the days following the slaying of the Dragon, Georyn went in triumph to the King and received of him gold, fine raiment and armor, and a spirited mount. But of this wealth he gave much to his father and elder brothers, who had been among the freed captives, and much also to the poor folk of the village; and for himself he kept only such as he could carry on a long journey. For he no longer wished to live as a woodcutter nor yet at the court of the King; and since the world beyond the Enchanted Forest seemed not so perilous as it once had, he intended to see it, for perhaps in the seeing he might find another sort of wisdom.
But ere Georyn set forth, he went again to the abode of the Dragon; and the monster had disappeared, and so too had all its fearsome servants, who had no doubt by now regained their natural form. It was a dismal place, upon which the destruction that the Dragon had wrought lay heavy, and he was not sorry to ride away. Upon leaving, he avoided the glade where he and the Enchantress had parted. Rather, he rode back to the deserted hut by the river; and he searched for some token that had been the Lady’s, but everything that had been made by magic was gone. By his own pallet, however, he found the carven cup she had given him on that sunlit day when she had taught him the charm: the cup from which they had drunk the magical draught, seeing for the first time into each other’s hearts. And this he put carefully away in his saddlebag, knowing it for a greater treasure than any the King had placed there.
He knew that he would not see the Enchantress again. She had passed out of his world—where, and by what means, he could not ever hope to understand, but he knew that it was not like dying; somewhere, in that strange enchanted realm beyond the stars, she lived as she had lived here, and experienced all the joys and sorrows to which her human heart was heir. And no longer did he fear for her; for once, at the moment of her going, she had spoken to him. She had been nowhere nearby, yet suddenly he had heard her voice as clearly as if she stood beside him, and he had answered.
Georyn!
Lady! Can you then speak from the enchanted world?
No, I am still in yours. I speak in the way of my people; I did not know you could hear!
Your voice is clear to me. Could we have spoken so all along?
We did, in a sense. But from this distance it is a rarer thing. It requires a feeling, an urgency—of fear, perhaps …
Or of love?
Or of love, Georyn.
Will we be able to do this again?
Never again, for I am leaving. In only a few moments, I am leaving! But I could not have gone without telling you that I again wield the forces of good magic!
Your full power, Lady?
My full power. I wear the Stone, and it has, for me, the might of the Emblem; and someday soon I shall regain the Emblem itself.
Was there then no evil after all?
There was evil, but it is overridden. I am safe from it, for a time, at least. I thought you would want to know.
It is the only happiness now possible to me, to know that all is well with you!
Do not say that, Georyn! I cannot bear that it should be so for you! What will you do now?
I shall travel to the ends of the earth, Lady, for have you not told me that the world holds wonders past my knowing?
You are wise, as usual; it is the best way, for you will indeed see wonders. I too shall visit lands beyond my present imagining; and in time this grief will lessen, for both of us. Let us remember only the joyous part.
I shall remember it as the core of my life.
Then, as the Lady’s voice faded, he glimpsed the world as she saw it, from above. Oh, Georyn, I wish you could see … our meadow is a circle of pale gold, and the river a shining thread, and the Enchanted Forest is not dark at all, but only a patch of greenness … and of the village road, I see both ends, though there is another road beyond it which is hidden. Georyn, we are rising above the clouds now …
And after that, she was lost to him. Yet he was sure, as he would be sure for ever after, that the powers that were hers to tap would endure beyond time and space, for as long as the worlds of men or of enchanted folk should abide.