Huma found that he could no longer move. His hands and feet were cold, as if he had spent the day on a winter outing. Breathing hurt him; his lungs ached as he held his breath, inhaling only when the pain became too much for him.
The woman cradled his head in her arms, her eyes heavy with tears.
"We have won," he told her, the joy in his voice unmistakable.
"Yes," she agreed, her voice hushed. "In the end, it was you who saved the day." She tried to smile and failed. "You saved the day just as your men knew you would."
He tried to nod but found the motion made him sick, made his head swim. His eyesight was failing, and he was no longer sure what was going on around him. He tried to smile and asked, "What happened?"
"It was the dragonlance," she said, blinking rapidly. She looked upward, away from his pale face and added, "It cut to the heart of her power and destroyed it. Destroyed it and her army at once."
"I didn't know," said Huma.
"No way you could," she told him.
"My men? How are my men?"
She looked at the field around her. The womenfolk had lighted fires on the surrounding hills. Many of them, looking for husbands, brothers, and sons, slipped among the dead, searching.
"Your men are fine," she lied to him. "Most have survived." Most had died, killed before the obelisk had been destroyed, but she couldn't tell him that.
Almost as if the words soothed him, he relaxed. "That's good," he told her. "Very good. Now that it's over, I can go to sleep. I'm so tired."
She wanted to scream at him. Wanted to order him not to give in to death so easily now, but knew it would do no good. In the fading light, she could see that he looked peaceful. At ease for the first time since she'd known him, now that the war was over and the Dark Queen finally beaten.
She felt him shudder once and realized that he was gone. Gently, she laid him down and then walked to the edge of the crater to retrieve the dragonlance. She wanted it to mark his grave. For a long time she stood looking at him, silently remembering their sacrifice.
They could have had a few fleeting years together as husband and wife, but the cost to the world would have been too great. They had agreed to forego their pleasure so that others could find happiness.
As the tears filled her eyes again, she realized that they had been cheated. She had expected them to have more time together, but that had been cruelly snatched from them.
Without thinking about it, she began to shimmer and glow.
When the remainder of Huma's army finally found him, he lay at the feet of a silver dragon. The beast had stood over him, guarding his body until he could be properly buried.
From the Yearning For War and the War's Ending
ONE
In Hospital, Palanthas
April, 353
Athelard to his brother Bayard, greetings,
I hear in a letter from our mother that you, too, have chosen the path of a father you do not remember, of the older brother who sends you this. That you have chosen, if indeed it was ever a choice, to take up the calling, to enter, as Mother has written, The ancient and holy Solamnic orders, now that the siege has been lifted, the armies of the enemy driven back once again from our land and from those things we are honor bound to defend by the measure and the code. As always, Mother's words are graceful, high-sounding. I hear them as I sit by a window that must face west, for I can feel the warmth on my face most deeply when the loudest bird song is passing, when the first crickets of what must be early spring begin that scrape and rattle that brings night to the ear. And since the handwriting in my letter no doubt will surprise you, I must tell you one thing more, that in this room sits a nurse, attentive and kind, who writes down the long words, the longer thoughts from brother to brother. Her voice is soft, muffled. Harder to hear than the sound of the birds or the crickets. I can only imagine she has turned away from me as she writes down what I have to say to you.
She asks me to continue, her voice louder now. As I have said, she is kind. She is attentive.
I wish that when I was younger I had paid more attention to bird song. My nurse has told me that the birds in the evening sing the names of those who will die in the night. I have no itch for prophecy, but I suppose that the song is subtle, that perhaps different birds sing at different times of the day, or that perhaps there is even a language among them — a sort of call and response, some quarrels I might understand had I listened earlier and more intently. It would be good to eavesdrop — something to pass the time in what the surgeons insist on calling this house of peace and healing. But it is the land now that is peaceful and healed, the hospital haunted with battle and pain and uneven memory.
Because that story you have heard about the blind is only true in part, that when sight goes, the other senses… sharpen? Intensify? Bayard, if this world were all poetry and justice and balance, and beauty no accident — if things took place because they were more beautiful or poetic or just — then the myths regarding the blind would be physical law: what war hath taken away, nature restoreth, or a similar poetry. But it is not like that. What you do in the blackness is pay more attention, and if cardinals and finches and larks all sound the same to you, it reminds you only that long ago there were some things you neglected.
But you cannot blame yourself for the oversights of childhood and of study, because any tale that is entirely and unarguably true, whether of blindness or of birds or of battle, or of something purely noble in any of these things, is the wildest tale of all, for none of these are purely understood until we sink into darkness, until we rise on thin and delicate wings, or until we carry a lance while the fire descends.
Our mother says you are «eager» for news of the siege, for accounts of heroism and high adventure, that you practice your swordplay in the parlor, much to her ill ease and at the mortal peril of her heirloom vases and silver. That you sing of "returning souls to Huma's breast" as your sword dances carelessly near cabinet or candle.
The words of the chant are "Return this soul to Huma's breast," Bayard. To be spoken over the fallen body of a comrade, not over the phantom draconians you fight amidst Mother's porcelain. The chant is more individual, more personal than you have imagined. But you were not there at the siege.
Do you know that sometimes the darkness seems more penetrable? That it shifts from a uniform blackness to a muddy or even rust-colored brown? Or it seems to shift to those colors I believe I still remember. Then, perhaps, it is only from the monotony of dark that I imagine the colors arising. Perhaps even dead eyes play tricks, as the living eye plays over the white on white of a blizzard and begins out of boredom or dazzlement to see impossible reds and greens in a snowfall.
For the snow, pure white on white and over white, began to fall as we were on the road to the tower, as we heard the footmen grumble about Now snow on top of everything else, Sir Heros grumbling back to me, now grumbling on top of snow, as I set his helmet and sword in front of me on the saddle so that the blanket I had wrapped about my shoulders would cover them, too, would keep them spotless and dry for the battle we knew was coming, inevitable as weather.
It was a mist at first, undecided between snow or rain, though you could guess it would decide as soon as the temperature dropped, the steam rising like mist from the horses, from the breath of the soldiers, until we rode through a fog and I could see no farther than Sir Heros in front of me. I followed his horse and assumed he followed the man in front of him, and he the man in front of him, and somehow I reasoned that whoever led our column had ridden out of the mist by now or at least had the wisdom to know where he was going. And the ground turned to mud beneath us — not that you could see it, but you could hear the hooves of the horses suck and spatter within it. Had I foresight I would have seen this as training for blindness. But foresight in this country was as dim as the horseman ahead of you.