Andrecia shines below us, blue-green but swathed in white. We have remained in the vicinity for some days, awaiting our new orders, for the ship’s original mission was canceled when we were diverted here. But we are breaking out of orbit now, and soon there will be only the emptiness of interstellar space. The next planet we see will be the world of a different people, and it may be thousands of years before a starship touches Andrecia again.
Will it be their own starship—Georyn’s people’s? Will they go out to invade some distant solar system, even as an older Empire once invaded theirs? And will the Imperials in that future time, perhaps, be the ones to wield the powers of enchantment? Where will we be then, I wonder; I mean, our descendants—mine, and Evrek’s? For of course I’ll marry Evrek someday, that hasn’t changed. Only I think it will be quite a while yet before that happens. I’ve a lot of training to catch up on, for one thing, before I go on any more world-saving expeditions. The next time I want to be better equipped.
If good came of what I did on Andrecia, I can’t really claim any credit for it. It was not by my design that things worked out; if Georyn and Jarel had been less than they were, my rashness would have brought disaster on us all. What’s more, I did not even believe in my own spells, and I came awfully close to ruining everything on that account. It’s only now that I know the magic was real, and that Georyn did what he did through a genuine faith rather than a false one. If that were not true, then nothing would be, and no people’s symbols would have any meaning at all. And that cannot be, for then we’d all still be living in caves on the planets where our ancestors evolved.
Georyn and I won’t ever forget each other. I don’t suppose I’ll be forgotten on Andrecia for some time, as a matter of fact. The legend will be handed down from one generation to the next: how the dark-haired Lady of the Forest bestowed an enchanted Stone upon the woodcutter’s son and helped him to slay the Dragon, and was never again seen by any mortal. In time, people will laugh at the story, and long before they build that first starship, they’ll be saying that magic spells and enchanted stones are only foolish tales. And none of them will ever suspect that the Enchantress was only an ordinary girl who wasn’t very good at her job and who didn’t want to be endowed with any supernatural powers in the first place.
Sooner or later, Georyn will find himself some Andrecian girl. The appropriate thing, I guess, would be for him to marry the King’s daughter; I don’t know whether the local King has a daughter, but if he doesn’t there are doubtless other fair ladies worthy of a slayer of dragons. I hope that Georyn will love her, and that that at least will bring him joy. For he will never, of course, be content with Andrecia; the door we opened is not one that he can ever close, and I doubt that he would choose to, even if it were possible. There are worse fates than to see beyond your grasp.
As for me, I am as bound to my heritage as he to his. I am not supposed to cry, and I won’t anymore. For Evrek has come to stand beside me at the viewport, and together we will watch Andrecia recede, until the time when we are swept into the black night of the stardrive; and in the morning there will be another world to think about.