Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (50 page)

And it wasn’t any thought of power, or responsibility, of sacrificial shoulds or future ifs that made him open his eyes. Only that hearing her voice, he couldn’t do otherwise—couldn’t imagine doing otherwise, though he knew that the choice was between that sweet, dark peace and going through all that he had gone through again…

But this time he would go through it with her beside him.

Tally had cut her hair. Without the sugar-brown silk cloak of it, her head looked small and delicate, like a bird’s.

He wondered how he could ever possibly have considered dying.

“The boys?” he asked, after their mouths parted again. His voice was inaudible and the two words left him as breathless as if he’d lifted them, like huge rocks. She had to bend close to hear.

“They’re safe. The Lady’s keeping an eye on them through her Mirror—we’re bringing them here as soon as we can figure out how to do it safely.”

The mages gathered round: the Lady, with her long hair graying where it hung over the lilies embroidered on her dress; Gyzan, touching his forehead with spells of healing and ease in his mutilated hand; Cuffy Rifkin in rags and necklaces of spell-bones; Chelfrednig and his Selarnist companion Niane, their white robes stained and patched; a couple of Ebiatics in black; a scrawny, chinless Hand-Pricker with a big gray cat in his arms; and others.

Rhion thought that, if there’d been a concerted roundup of wizards by the authorities, it had clearly gone after the powerful ones—aside from the Lady and Gyzan there was no one here of any great strength. It was the first time he’d seen mages of so many different orders working together, something that probably wouldn’t have happened, he thought, if any of them had been very powerful alone.

He whispered, “Thank you,” and the effort of it took all he had. He closed his eyes and for a time heard nothing but the voice of the rain.

“Rhion, I’m sorry.”

He looked up again. The room was empty but for Tally, still sitting on the low stool at the side of his bed. The single candle made a halo of her short-cropped hair. He moved his hand a little to touch it, then whispered in mock severity, “I won’t beat you this time, but you’d better grow it back,” and it surprised her into laughing, as he’d hoped it would.

“No,” she said, her gray eyes growing somber again. “I’m sorry that after all you’ve been through to come home, home isn’t… isn’t…”

“Isn’t what I left?” He looked around him, at the age-bleached stone of the walls, dyed amber where the candle flame touched, and at the half-opened shutters and the glisten of green-black ivy in the rain beyond. Her fingers over his were cool, as they always had been; he knew that his own hands had lost the chill of death.

“But it is, you know,” he said. “I just didn’t know it at the time. What did Jaldis say?
We can afford to think neither of the future nor of the past we leave behind
… He was wrong.” He sighed. “He was wrong.”

“Tally?” The door curtain at the far end of the room moved aside; framed in the darkness were two dark blurs of shadow, one his own height, the other tall. “Vyla of Wellhaven says she has seen in her crystal the armies of Bragenmere moving down the passes toward Fel,” Gyzan’s voice said. “They will be besieging that city in the morning.”

The Gray Lady added, “If the worshippers of Agon don’t open the gates to them, under the impression that doing so would please the Veiled God.”

“So,” Rhion said, as Tally’s fingers closed involuntarily tighter over his. “It’s started here.” As if at a great distance, he thought he saw peace and darkness beckon to him, like a tiny figure at the crown of a far-off hill. But he turned from it, as he had turned from the Dancing Stones, and said softly, “There’s work to do.”

“Now?” Tally looked down at him worriedly, as the dark figures melted back into the shadow of the door, leaving the whispering, rainy stillness of the night to close them round.

Rhion smiled and drew her down to him. “In the morning.” And he fell asleep with his head on her arm.