Envy, spite, malicious gossip like cockleburs, wads of gluttony like soft-bodied maggots, a sniggering delight in others’ pain, thoughts and fears more misshapen, harder to hold, than the bright words he had found so painful. He felt himself grow heavier, as if he were filling with literal stones and muck, felt himself cramping into ever more painful positions as he tried to hold it all, and bring the rest of it in. Like a tidy housewife whose home is invaded by raucous vandals, he tried to protect some small favorite crannies of his mind, long-furnished with joyful memories—and failed. The stink and murk of it found every last crack, and filled them all. He felt himself creak, the foundations of his mind almost shattering from the weight. What would happen then?
He had it all. He dared not open his mouth, lest something vile leak out. The faces around him were stunned, horrified—he could not imagine what his face looked like, but it must be worth their horror. Transform, the gods had said. And just how? That ungainly, rebellious mass struggled to get out, and he squeezed. He did not feel the stones beneath his knees, then his hands—he felt only the terrible crushing weight of fear, the compression of hatred.
Through scalding tears Luap saw that homely, aging face transformed. Like the High Lord’s windows, he thought. From outside, they looked dark—until at night a light woke them to brilliance. Now light illuminated Gird, almost too bright to watch, and from his mouth came rolling the words they all understood without quite hearing them. Beside him, the Autumn Rose murmured a counterpoint to Gird, her face radiant. Then she was silent. Luap felt his own heart lift, expand—and then his sight, as if Gird’s speech awakened all his magegifts at once. He saw clinging darkness rolling away, lifting, knew in his bones precisely what Gird was doing, and what would come of it.
He could not bear it. It should not be Gird, who had earned a peaceful age, a time of rest. He should be the one. But when he opened his mouth, it was stopped, and the breath in it.
—You have other tasks—
He would have argued, but he had scarce breath to stay on his feet, and when he recovered, Gird was silent. Above them the cloud visible only to a few shifted, as if it were living spirit meditating attack. Gird was staring at it, mouth clamped shut just as so often before. Then—then his eyes widened, and his jaw dropped in almost comic surprise. Again Luap tried to move to his side, to help however he could. But again he could not move. Gird shrugged, then, and eyed the cloud doubtfully.
Even as he watched, Luap was thinking how he could record this in the archives. What would be believed, what would be too fantastic even for the superstitious, what would cause controversy, and what bring peace? He had no doubt that this was Gird’s death. The man was too old, too battered by his life, to survive this.
—No one could—As he swayed under the pressure of that answer, he wondered if that was what Gird had heard.
And then the cloud settled on Gird, condensing, becoming, in the end, visible to everyone. That dark mass had no certain form, no definite edges. It weighed on him, pressed against him, until he sank first to one knee, and then the ground. They could not move to help, not until he lay flat, hands splayed on the stone, struggling to rise, to breathe—not until the darkness vanished, and Gird lay motionless.
Luap knew before he reached Gird’s side that he was dead. His flesh was still warm, his broad blunt hands with their reddened, swollen knuckles still flexible, almost responsive, in Luap’s. Luap blinked back his tears and looked at the crowd. Silent, awed, most of them had the blank and stupified look of someone waked from deep sleep. A few were already weeping.
But the air around them had the fresh, washed feel of a spring morning after rain. Inside, in the chambers of his heart where he had struggled to wall up ambition and envy, Luap knew that walls had fallen, and nothing was there but love.