"Varthlokkur?" Verloya whispered.
Varthlokkur nodded. Nepanthe shook even more. A scratchiness entered Verloya's voice when he said, "You honor us." Varthlokkur involuntarily turned to Nepanthe. He had to tear his eyes away. He had waited so long.
His glance was too much. She uttered a frightened cry, fled with the grace of a gazelle.
"The honor is something best discussed privately... Your daughter... What's the matter?"
Verloya shook his head sadly. "Too much exposure to her stepmother. Excuse her, if you will."
"Of course, of course. I am Varthlokkur. There're legends about me. But there's not much fact in them. Consider: What do they say about Storm Kings in Iwa Skolovda? Please, if I've offended the young lady, send my apologies."
Verloya indicated one of his sons. "Tell Nepanthe to come beg pardon."
"No. Please don't. I'm sure it was my fault."
"As you will. Boys, leave us talk." Sons and servants alike moved to a distant table. "Now, sir, what can I do for you?"
"It's ticklish, being whom I am. Are you familiar with the Thelelazar Functional Form of Boroba Thring's Major Term Divination?"
"No. I'm almost' totally ignorant of the Eastern systems. A Clinger Trans-Temporal Survey is the best I can manage. We're rather minor wizards here, now, except for our ability with the Werewind."
"Yes, a Clinger would do. What I want you to see is close enough, time-wise."
"A divination brought you here?"
"In a sense. I'd rather demonstrate than explain. Do you mind?" He treated Verloya with all the politeness he could muster. The man was due for a shock.
"The best place would be the Lower Armories, then. Bring your things."
An hour later, having taken it better than Varthlokkur had anticipated, Verloya said, "I can't quite grasp this business of Fates and Norns. The whole mess looked like a chess game where the rules change after every move. It was crazy."
"Quite." Varthlokkur explained his theories once they had resumed seats before the fire in the Great Hall.
The wizard was uneasy and annoyed. There had been some new information this time. The divination had hinted that his old sins would catch him up.
Verloya, too, was troubled. He wasn't pleased by his children's role in the game.
Varthlokkur now suspected whither the thrust of his second great destruction would go. It hurt. And he knew it would change him again, perhaps as radically as had the destruction of Ilkazar.
They sat silently for ten minutes, each nursing his special disappointment. Finally, Varthlokkur remarked, "The divination hasn't changed in two centuries."
"I saw. I understood why you're here. I can't lie. I don't like it. Yet I couldn't change it if I wanted.
"You'll have difficulties with her," he continued. "Today's behavior wasn't untypical. In fact, I guess she must've been damned curious to stick abound as long as she did. My fault, I guess. Should've put a lid on my wife's nonsense back when. But I was too busy trying to make men of my sons. I didn't take time to worry about Nepanthe... I'll give you a reluctant blessing for whatever good you might do her. But that's my limit. I just don't like the bigger picture. I'd hoped I could teach the boys better. The Empire is dead."
"Maybe if you used the Power..."
"I won't use magic. I swore never to force anybody to do anything again. This's no exception. It'll be done without, or not at all."
Having come to terms with the girl's father, Varthlokkur began his long and seldom-rewarding effort to light a love-spark in the heart of a unicorn-girl. Occasionally it looked like he was about to break through. More often he appeared destined to inevitable failure. But he had learned patience in his centuries. He had time. Like the eroding waters of a river, he gradually wore the rock of Nepanthe's fear. By the time she was nineteen she looked forward to his increasingly frequent visits, though she saw him more as a kindly philosophy teacher than as a potential lover. There would be no lovers for her, she believed.
He was sure she secretly wanted one. Sadly, she awaited a knight-charming from a jongleur's tale, and in such men her world was painfully lacking.
Which was a pity. A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse. Varthlokkur conceived of his world as being populated only by friends and enemies, without absolutes, with good and evil being strictly relative to his own position.
On Nepanthe's twentieth birthday Varthlokkur proposed. At first she thought he was joking. When he declared he was serious, she fled. He hadn't sown his seeds deeply enough. She refused to see him fora year. She hurt him terribly, but he refused to be daunted.
Though she eventually resumed speaking, she remained defensive and flighty, and tried to keep Valther nearby to protect the virtue she fancied threatened.
Verloya's death caused her to relent. It was Varthlokkur who best comforted her at her father's funeral. But the break in her defenses was in appearance only. She wasn't going to let him get too near.
Then Varthlokkur suffered a loss of his own. Marya passed away during one of his increasingly short stays at Fangdred. He began to suspect that she had known what he was doing and had kept her peace. He honestly grieved at her passing. A better wife a man couldn't have asked. Sometimes he wondered why he couldn't be satisfied with the good things that did touch his life. There was no absolute, compelling force, outside himself, making him pursue the destinies he foresaw in his divinations. If he wished, and wanted to employ the will, he could become a simple farmer or sailmaker... He didn't have the will. He believed that it was his duty to fulfill the destinies he had foreseen.
Nepanthe's resistance remained like steel or adamant, wearing but never breaking. Six years later, when her brothers' through-the-halls war games matured into plans for genuine conquests, she still hadn't surrendered. She accepted him as part of her life. Maybe she even expected an eventual pairing. She had learned to be at ease with him again. But she refused to help the relationship to develop an affectionate scope.
Impatience undid Varthlokkur. One evening he proposed. As usual, Nepanthe put him off. The first of their great angry arguments ensued. Afterwards, frustrated, he returned to Fangdred determined to pursue a course the Old Man had championed for years.
The Old Man. He might have been a mystery to himself. No man could keep in memory all the ages and events he had seen and heard and experienced. He barely felt he belonged to the realm of humankind. Lusts, loves, hatreds, agonies and joys, passions, what were those in the mill of time? Grist. Just grist for the grinding wheel. What remained of parents dead ten thousand years? Not even a memory, other than unspeakably archaic, alien names. Youth? He had never been young. Or so it seemed now. He had few memories of running joy, of a girl, and wildflowers and clover scents in spring (her name sometimes haunted his lonely dreams, and her face frequently came to him in his odd, brief, happy moments). His past was a corridor infinitely long, passing a million doors with memories shut up inside, all in old man's shades of gray. The color had faded from present and future. The past dwindled back to the dark point where he had first encountered the Director. He missed that most, the brights, the scarlets, the greens, the blues, of mighty loves and aches and passions. He was the oldest man in the world.
Except one, though he thought his friend, the Star Rider, the Director, might well be dead. He had heard nothing from the man since the Nawami Crusades, a thousand years ago, though his handiwork appeared, in hints, in the background of the epic tale of the Fall.
Once the Old Man had wanted to live forever. But then he and the world had been young and he had loathed the thought of missing its future ages. Once when magic had been equally young and unbound, and he still had had the capacity for innovation, he had risked his soul and humanity to seize the immortality he owned. It was an irreversible Star Rider gift that exacted its cruel price in alienation and boredom and a debt he might never completely discharge.