“The Storm Lord apologizes to his handmaiden for an uncomfortable bed?”
“And for his lack of knowledge, which fails to team with his years.”
“Zastis,” she said. Her voice was very low. “It’s Zastis. And every moment of it I was alone here, until now.”
He found her mouth then, through the sinking of the sun. It was sweet and unknown country that the sunset made.
Somewhere in the hills above Koramvis, the Thaddrian watched the stars of dusk come out, and the Red Moon among them, and then the last Star of all, redder than the cookfire on the stones.
Zastis disturbed the Thaddrian, but he was used to it and to setting his body aside.
He had made the fire on the stones to add normalcy, but it did not. The lake was far off, the mountains loomed. This hilltop seemed bizarrely out of the world while being totally within the world. All around, the Amanackire, the tawny and the icy-pale, sat meditating, some through the formula of prayer.
The Thaddrian thought of the miracle they had wrought. Then stopped thinking of it. The mystery was over. He was homesick for his temple on the plain, the fat High Priest and his wine jars—and his surreptitious ladies, at this season. For the useful scrolls and cartographies, the rituals, so empty but so pretty. He was thirsty for mediocre things. He had forgotten, having grown irritable with it, his love for mankind.
“Soon,” she said.
He glanced up and saw Ashni standing across the fire.
Her smile was so lovely, so redolent of everything that did no harm yet was limitless—sky, stars, light.
“You’re going then, madam,” he said. It was rhetorical, requiring no reply, getting none.
Gradually all their eyes, even those weird pallid eyes, were coming to her.
She told them, succinctly, with no words, that now she would leave them.
None of her Lowlanders objected. They bore it, pridefully, the Chosen Race, the Children of the Gods. He felt the loneliness creep down like wolves from the mountains. Did no other feel the loneliness, too?
She’s only a girl, he thought stupidly. Fourteen, fifteen. Long, silken hair and lily skin. But her eyes found him again. She was not only a girl, at all. There had been that legend in Thaddra of a wolf child. Some mirror-image of prophecy. What could she be now?
But she was walking away, quite briskly, as she always walked—a swift and effortless glide, hair fluttering out like butterflies—something to be done. Up the hill. There was a rock there, about a hundred feet above. She went right the way to the rock, and climbed it in three steps. She seated herself on the rock, and he could see her there. They could all see her.
What would happen?
It was like a soft little rill, a child’s giggle, or a stream’s, in his brain. His personal creed had always denied that final metamorphosis. Raldnor and Astaris had ridden into the jungle on a wagon. Ashni, at some juncture of the night, would walk away among the hills, alone.
When he woke, near dawn, the rock on the hill was vacant, and the Thaddrian priest of the Dortharian Anackire comprehended that this was what she had done.
He was raking the ashes of the fire, looking for the sausage he had let be blackened there, when some strangeness made him lift his head again.
The sky was already expanding, a crystal smoked with gold in the east. Then a tiny silver sun with streaming hair was birthed out of the gold.
The Thaddrian jumped to his feet, clutching the cindery sausage in his hands, waving it at the Amanackire until they roused, some waking, some simply moving in, sleepless, across the hill.
There in the morning sky blazed the star.
In Elyr they would be whispering, murmuring in their solitary towers. They had foretold the star, the appearance, its passing away. For now, they would worship it, a sign of peace, the ray of hope.
In all Lan they would be seeing it, from their blue heights, from out of their close-wrapped valleys. The young man riding into Amlan with a ragged clatter, Yannul’s son, would look across the roofs and see it and swear, knowing others of his kindred saw it too. And Safca, in the eye of a dark tower of the Zor, like any Elyrian, would spy the star and hold out her hand, childishly to view it on her finger’s end. Raldanash, land-bereft on the sea that folded toward Vathcri, in the stern of a blue-sailed ship, would look, the outcry of the sailors lost on him. He would smile to see the star, so like a tear. All over Vis they saw it, woke and saw. On Ankabek, the man and woman, hero and heroine under the oak trees, beheld the star caught in the branches like one more disc of silver. Their bodies still locked, they turned back again to find light in each other.
The Thaddrian, having got up the hill, learned that the rock’s far side was a minor precipice from which no one could have descended save by means of wings. He loosed the sausage down it, like an offering. Ashni had stolen by all of them, then, even the sleepless Amanackire, as they snored. She was gone to be a peasant in Thaddra, or to run with wolves.
He grinned at the sky, crying with joy.
“And yet,” he said, “Ashni, you are also the Morning Star.”