“Because to murder a woman who is carrying is such a great transgression that even the masters and mistresses of Garth Howell would not dare to do so,” Hyana replied. “Gunnora is a powerful spirit who protects the unborn, and those who carry them. They dared not harm Elys outright. They feared Gunnora’s reprisal too much.”
Eydryth walked forward, and they followed her. The songsmith’s eyes adjusted more to the strangeness of this Place, and she could see lines of Dark light arcing over her sleeping mother’s form, as though she lay within a cage.
“Beyond the cage, beneath the flesh,” Alon whispered. “The Seventh Defender of Arvon sleeps before us.”
“How can we free her?” Hyana asked. “I know of no spell to undo this kind of sorcery.”
“Nor do I,” Joisan admitted.
“Landisl cannot help us here,” Kerovan said. “This Place is outside our world, and not within any that he ever trod.”
Eydryth scarcely heard her family’s comments. She stared at those lines of Dark light. And the longer she stared at those lines of Dark light arcing over the pallet, the more they seemed to her to akin to harpstrings. As though they could be… plucked. Music. Music had been the key to so many of the spells they had encountered…
“Alon…” the minstrel whispered hoarsely, “lend me all your strength!”
“You have it,” he replied, and a moment later his fingers tightened around hers. Power flooded her… poured into her in a wave of warmth.
Humming, the songsmith formed in her mind the image of a giant finger pick. Concentrating fiercely, she forced herself to see it, glimpse it hovering over those “strings.”
Then, with an effort that made her break out in a sweat, she moved her giant mind-pick downward, made it pluck one of those “strings.”
A sound so loud it staggered her boomed out. Eydryth waited, but the cage remained in place. She concentrated again, and “plucked” another string. Then another.
“That’s three,” Alon said. “One of the numbers of Power.”
“What are the others?” she asked. “Three did not work, as you can see.”
“Seven,” he said. “And nine.”
“Seven,” she said. “Seven Defenders… and, Alon”—her voice grew more excited, as she swiftly counted—“there are seven ‘strings’!”
“Try it,” he urged.
Shaking with the effort it took, the songsmith plucked the strings steadily… until finally all seven had been sounded.
Nothing happened. Eydryth fought back tears of disappointment.
“Seven… it must be related to seven,” Alon whispered. “It cannot be coincidence. Spells are often constructed with repetitions of certain numbers, words, sounds…”
“Seven Defenders, seven strings…” Eydryth whispered. “Seven sevens…”
“Try it,” Alon urged again.
Eydryth began. Wielding the huge “mind-pick” was taking an increasing toll of her strength… and of the borrowed Power she was getting from Alon. The songsmith knew she was draining him every bit as surely as Yachne had planned to. His hand in hers began to tremble.
And still she sounded the notes. Seven different notes, in a complex pattern, choosing them nearly at random… but aware all the time that a melody was being shaped. A melody of love, of longing. A child’s love for her mother, a husband’s love for his wife… all of that and more she forged into that melody.
Fourteen… twenty-one… thirty-five… Blackness was nibbling at the edges of her vision, like a voracious rasti. Forty-two… forty-nine!
With a suddenness that made them all blink and stagger, the lines of Dark light vanished!
Alon and Eydryth stumbled forward; then Alon caught her arm, held her back. “Let your father go first,” he whispered.
The songsmith hesitated, then halted, knowing the Adept was right.
Slowly, reverently, Elys’s lord approached the pallet; then his fingers went out, stroked his sleeping wife’s cheek. “Elys…” he whispered. “Oh, my heart… my lady…”
Gently, he kissed her forehead, her lips; then Jervon raised her hand, prisoned safely within his own, to his face. A tear broke free, ran down his stubbled cheek, to trickle at last over her finger. At that touch, the sleeping woman’s eyelids fluttered, then lifted. She gazed up at him, bewildered. “Jervon…” she whispered. “My lord…”
“My lady,” he murmured, in a hushed, ragged voice. “Oh, Elys!” Quickly, he scooped her up into his arms, and, when Kerovan would have aided him, unsure that his friend was up to bearing her weight, shook his head fiercely at the other.
Silently, the group trailed behind them as Jervon strode forward, carrying his precious burden, and vanished through the Gate, leaving that uncanny Place behind forever.
When they emerged back into the clearing, it was into full sunlight. Elys seemed to have suffered no ill effects from her long ensorcellment, and as soon as her husband set her on her feet, she held out a hand to her daughter. “Eydryth?” she whispered. “Can it be?”
“Mother!” the songsmith said, and then the two of them were hugging and weeping with joy. Eydryth felt as though her heart could hold no more happiness. To have both her parents returned to her in the space of a single day!
When, at length, Elys was able to relinquish her hold on her child (as though she were afraid one of them might be torn away again), she greeted her friends. “Tell me what has chanced,” she begged, “for I remember naught.”
Voices rose in an excited babble as each tried to render his or her own version of all the lost years. When their story was finished, the witch’s lovely features were troubled, but Elys had been a warrior for years in a war-torn land, as well as a witch, so she did not cry out or rail when she discovered that the Adepts at Garth Howell had stolen nine years of her life from her.
Instead she shook her head, staring around her. “I remember nothing,” she said simply. “As far as I know, I lay down to nap in Kar Garudwyn, then awoke here. It is you”—she gazed at her husband and grown daughter, her friends and shield-mates—“my loved ones, who have suffered, not I!” Her mouth tightened. “I swear by All the Powers That Be, there will be a reckoning.” Her voice was quiet, but a note in it sent shivers down Eydryth’s back.
In silent accord, the group turned to make their way across the clearing to where the horses were tethered. But scarcely had she taken more than a step when Elys suddenly gasped, putting a hand to the small of her back. “Elys?” Joisan was at her side immediately, her arm circling her friend, supporting her. “Is it the baby?”
Eydryth’s mother nodded. “And none too soon, apparently,” she said, with a grim attempt at humor, “since I have been carrying him, if what you tell me is true, for nine years!”
The single group quickly separated into three. Hyana and Joisan, both experienced healers and midwives, tended Elys as the hours passed. Jervon and Kerovan rode out of the clearing in quest of supplies and transportation for Elys, and returned some time later with their horses hitched to an ancient wagon they had managed to persuade a local farmer to lend them. They had left their swords with the man as a pledge of good faith in lieu of the future payment in gold they promised.
Eydryth and Alon worked together to bury Yachne, then spent their time talking, tending Monso and the other horses, catching each other up on the desperate hours of the past night. The songsmith learned that the Adept had been caught and tricked into entering Yachne’s illusion-cloaked circle with a vision of herself, lying upon the ground with a broken leg.
The sun was slantingtoward the west, far past noon, when a squalling yowl of indignation—sounding almost like a cat whose tail has been assaulted by an unwary foot—filled the clearing. Eydryth and Alon, hand in hand, went together to gaze upon where Jervon, grinning broadly, stood holding the Seventh Defender of Arvon.