They crept from a vent in the wall and found themselves on a path. A proper path, if narrow; soft grass leading to a blue-painted wall and around the corner. Nothing like the hideous scramble that had brought them this far. "Faster," Rien said.
Benedick choked. "By four days." His jaw moved as if he were considering spitting out a tooth.
Someone came toward them. Several someones. Rien could not see clearly enough to make them out, beyond shapes rounding that corner. They bore a stretcher between each pair. She thought how nice it would be to lie down on one of those and sleep.
The next she knew, someone was lifting her from the grass with brutal hands. She might have fallen, but must they be so brutal?. Every touch was like fire. No, her skin was on fire. Melting away at their touch.
She heard Benedick talking, heard him explain. Another voice answered, a woman's, stern but comforting because of it. There was music, chimes and flutes and drums. Someone accompanied them. She lay on the stretcher, her eyes closed, and it was very peaceful. A crier sang out: Honor them, for it is in your name that they have done what they have done, over and over again.
A shadow fell over her, and she made a soft noise in the anticipation of more pain, but something cool dripped onto her lips and she swallowed, and swallowed again, a thin trickle wetting her mouth and soothing the unbearable nausea. She opened her eyes. Somehow, they had come within a mighty city, pearl-colored structures projecting from the walls of the cavernous open space as it arched up and around them. If Rien lifted her head, she could see another stretcher behind her.
In addition to the bearers at either end, two women walked beside Rien's litter. One was willowy, her silver hair—silver with age, not white like Tristen's—falling in waves. She must be a relative of Perceval's, because she had the same pert nose and broad square cheeks, though softened by time. Her face was more fine of detail than Perceval's, though, so instead of looking square and a bit unfinished, it took Rien's breath away.
The other was of less than medium height, her auburn hair clipped close, so it only curled once from the scalp.
Her gray was only a scattering, her face more pug-nosed and not so square. She had freckles and she wore a sword, or more likely an unblade, bumping on her left hip.
"Rien," Rien said when the flow of water stopped, trying to lift her hand to introduce herself.
"Shh," said the white-haired woman. "We know who you are, sweetheart."
Rien reached anyway, got her hand up and onto the woman's arm. But the other one reached down and took her wrist, feather-soft, in a gloved hand. "I think she is asking our names, Arianrhod."
Arianrhod.
Arianrhod Kallikos?
No light shone behind her; no halo graced her head, except in the way the sunlight smoothed down the strands so she seemed all dipped in quicksilver. Arianrhod smiled and wet a cloth for her lips, again.
"Mother?" Rien would have asked, but when she tried to lever herself up on her elbows, she slid from her own head like sand through fingers, and fell back into the stretcher undone.
When they left the dead, Dust took Perceval to see the suns. She preceded him silently down echoing corridors, Pinion floating about her with feathertips arched like a child's fingers to trail upon the wall. Even with Dust behind, she strode in confidence, because Pinion would permit no wrong turnings. Even in her confidence, she knotted her fists in hate, because if she chose a direction that Dust disapproved, Pinion also would not permit it.
An air lock whisked open. She stepped inside. The avatar followed. With a soft hiss, air was pumped from the compartment, and then the external lock slid wide.
Perceval did not know what she expected, but the bright flicker of the parasite wings about her, lifting her into space, was not it. There was nothing for them to beat against, but still they beat, and she rose free of the world and the world's gravity, emerging from the air lock like a butterfly from a chrysalis, all wreathed in shimmering bronze.
The cold seemed less. She was only a little uncomfortable, and she thought the parasite wings were protecting her as much as they enslaved. Although she felt pressure and currents against them, she didn't understand how they could fly in vacuum until a voice spoke in her ear.
Or, the memory of a voice spoke in her mind, more precisely: as there was no air to bear up wings, there was no air to carry sound. But her colony could make her think she heard him, just as it could make her feel that she loved him.
Dust said, "Pinion is as adaptable as you, beloved. He can fly the solar winds. Light pressure and electromagnetism and matter are all the same to him. Fear not, for he will ward you."
He had come behind her, and hovered now at her flank, a bowering shadow. She tilted her head forward and looked down into the suns.
She had seen them from space before. But she had never stepped outside for the sole and express purpose of turning to them, like a sunflower, and watching the old consume the new.
The waystars were comprised of a smaller and more massive white dwarf primary and its larger but lesser partner, upon whose photosphere it fed. Soon the equilibrium of their dance would fail, and the white dwarf would die with such violence that it would take its entire stellar neighborhood with it.
Perceval thought of the world behind and around her, the untold thousands of lives. The innocents dead and frozen in its holdes. The dead resurrected at work in the chambers of her father's house.
"What do you want from me?" she asked, thinking that if Dust could speak to her silently, he could hear her when she spoke in return.
"Only what I have begged," he said. "Be my captain, Perceval Conn. Bring us out of peril; set us under way again."
"Why me?"
He snorted softly in her ear. "You would prefer Ariane?"
Which of course was not an answer. "Bargain with me." She did not take her eyes off the waystars, though she thought maybe she didn't need her eyes. Pinion could see all around, it seemed. And if she could feel what Pinion felt, she could see what Pinion saw.
Dust nodded. Perceval savaged her cheek with her teeth, for the pain, to not feel comforted by his approval.
"What is it you wish, beloved?"
"I want the parasite wings gone. I want you to stop manipulating my biochemistry. I want autonomy."
"And then you will be my captain?"
"And then I will consider it. When you permit me to think clearly."
His hand on her shoulder. They stood on nothingness, framed in the gargantuan lattice of the world, their wings cowls of shadow catching rills of light from the waystars, as when sun falls through the dusty air.
"No," he said.
"Then we have nothing to discuss."
"Have we not? I give you more freedom than you know."
The parasite wings would not allow her to drift. But she floated, and looked upon the suns with her own eyes, and did not turn to her captor.
"It is not a gift of freedom," she said, and if she had been speaking aloud it would have been through clenched teeth, "not to seize everything that it is in your power to seize."
He was silent at her back. His hand fell away. After a little time, while Perceval wondered that her lungs did not yet ache nor her head spin from lack of oxygen, he seemed to collect within himself, and thus to draw away.
Perceval's shoulders—and the parasite wings—drooped in relief.
And then he pulled her from herself like a fist from a puppet.
When Rien came back to consciousness, she floated in cool weightlessness. There was no pain, except a pinch atop her foot and another in the crook of her arm. She breathed deeply, startled, and felt her jaw restrained by a mask. When her eyes opened, the index of refraction between her cornea and the substance she floated in left her blinking against a pale blue blur. When she convulsed, straps dug hard into her biceps, holding her arms immobile so she could not tear out the tubes.