He turned his head against hers to brush lips. "It's you I want, Jen. It's you I need. You. I thought of you, dreamed of you. When I wanted to throw myself into the blighters because it would be easier, I thought of coming back to you." He kissed tears from her cheek. "Don't cry, love. Don't cry."
"How can I not? But you're home now, Dan. Home."
Then she realized what she'd said. She drew back, cradled his face, looked into his eyes. "It's important to you? That you come home?"
"I don't think I can carry on without it, but… there's more. I'm the only one with a real home to come back to. To heal, I need you. To live, I need you. But I need the town, too. To do what needs to be done, to be what I need to be, I need my family, your family, our family, our friends. Those arc the roots of the tree that I am, the tree that magic is, the tree of the future."
She remembered then what he'd said. "When the blighters might return?"
"I don't think we destroyed them, Jen. We zapped a lot of them, millions maybe, but I think in the end they retreated. We were down to eighteen, and though we were each bloated with power we were close to the end. Yet they went. If this is their life cycle, perhaps they retreated with enough energy to reproduce, or whatever they do."
"The last time must have been a thousand years or more ago."
"But that's because they ate this place almost to extinction. We've survived. If we slacken birth control, we could build the population again in a generation. Even without that, it'll probably be back in a century or so. Or Earth might send more settlers."
Jenny pressed her face against his shoulder. Eighteen left, all crippled in some way, yet they had to be teachers for a new generation of fixers who might be needed within decades — needed to sacrifice themselves again? He was right. There had to be a better way.
Dan and the few other sane fixers would have to come up with that better way while training new ones. And they'd have to train them in the wild magic as well as the old sort.
She remembered Polly's baby. She knew now he'd been right. They shouldn't interfere too much with nature, but that meant the world must change so that it could accept that. Accept that, no matter the personal suffering, the magic must be restrained unless the blighters returned to feed again. To lead all this, Dan needed his home, and above all, he needed her.
She turned to touch her lips to his brow. "I am home. I am yours. Always."
Lips joined, and she tasted need and lingering ashes. No, need was too frail a word. Starvation. A gaping hollow in the soul he'd tried so hard to hide from her. She could not deny him the feast, no matter what the cost. Gathering him into her arms, she deepened the kiss, took the ashes, held him close, until she felt the first desperation diminish.
"Come, love, come." She pulled his shirt loose and put her hands to the hot skin of his back, already rolling him out of the fire's low glow into some privacy. They tore at clothes, and he thrust deep within, seeming to burn her in the surging connection with those alien places only he could touch.
She climaxed quickly, but he went on, pounding into her until she wanted to protest, to cry out to him to stop. She braced herself and bore it, knowing he was far away, seeking something deeper and stronger than mere orgasm. Something healing for those invisible, terrible wounds. He drove her through two more mechanical annihilations before he shuddered and stopped, limp as the dead.
She winced as she bore his weight, knowing it symbolized some of what was to come. His need was great, but she would grow strong enough to bear it. His healing would draw on her, but she would be a deep enough well. His thoughts would not always be centered on her, but that was as it should be. He was a hero, and a hero's intent is always on the greater goal.
Dan had become what he was in order to save them all. She could do no less. For his sake and the world's, she'd feed and nurture him.
And, tomorrow, she would bring him home.
They dressed as the sun began to rise and breakfasted on stale bread and stewed tea. They laughed about that, remembering the park and the horribly boiled tea there. They talked of the future, gently. He thought there might be many people like her, with a little fixing ability that could be developed so they could take on some of the load. "Perhaps everyone on Gaia's that way," she said. "It could explain why it's such a flourishing, stable world." He met her smile. "Which it is, and will be." When the sun was up, they extinguished the fire, packed his bag, and walked up to knock on the postern gate. The wide-eyed gatekeeper opened it and put the formal question.
"What business brings you to Anglia?"
Jenny answered. "I'm Jenny Hart, citizen, and this is my chosen partner, Dan Rutherford Fixer. We're returning home."
The rule was ancient and absolute. Any citizen's partner had freedom of the town.
Jenny looked at Dan, trying to see him as others would see him. She thought he looked as he always had. He'd done something magical to make his hair short again, and he didn't think it would grow so fast anymore. Some of the stress was fading from his features.
They'd made love again with the dawn, that time for her. When she murmured about cameras, he said he'd blocked them. She knew for sure now that she wasn't bringing wildfire into the town, but winter fire, and she would be its hearth.
The gatekeeper returned to open the gate for them. Holding hands, Jenny led Dan through to face the bewildered, hastily assembled alders.
The trouble with heroes is that they want to come home.
But home needs its heroes, and home is also their just reward.
Shadows in the Wood
by Jennifer Roberson
Awareness stirred. Then stilled. Stirred again, weakly; was like a weary man struggling to open eyelids grown too heavy for his will. Opened. Closed. Awake, then asleep.
He had lived in darkness so long he did not at first believe such a thing as light existed. But it sparked at the edges of awareness, kindled fitfully into life. A very quiet life it was, timid and halting, but incontrovertibly life. He recognized it as such. And in that recognition, he acknowledged sentience. Victory at last over the enemy.
At last? For all he knew, it had been no more than the day before now, this moment, that he had been defeated. Enspelled. Entrapped. But with sentience and awareness came also understanding that such imprisonment as his had been conjured to last a lifetime, or a hundred lifetimes of men older than he. For time out of mind.
But he was not… man. That he knew. The body, the soul, remained imprisoned. Only the mind, the barest flicker of awareness, bestirred itself out of the long, enforced lethargy.
He wondered what had awakened him. Here, there was no scent, no sight, no sound. He tasted nothing, because he had no mouth. He merely was, when before, for time uncounted, he was not.
Was not.
Now, again, all unexpectedly, he was.
Astonishment. Relief. Exultation.
Alive. Not as men marked it, for he, in this place, was nothing approaching human. He had no heart to beat, no mouth to speak, no eyes to see; neither ears to hear nor nose to smell. No body answered his will. No pulse throbbed in his neck. But for now it did not matter. Something in him sensed, something in him knew, release after all was possible.
Someone is coming.
No more than that.
Someone is coming.
It was his comfort. It was his joy. It was the light against the darkness, the shield against the spear.