CHYR
As they marched from the Wood they heard a distant rumbling. At first, Anson thought it was thunder, and then it was a rustling. It was almost a singing, but none of them could make out the words except maybe Ohean, and they did not ask him. His face was set and the hood of his great mantle was drawn back.
“This is it. This is the moment.”
From the Wood the land dipped down to a low valley, and to their left stretched the hazy blue shadow of the Throndon Mountains.
“A little way south are the lands of Thaary and Vand, and see, if we journey a day, we will stand before the Crystal City itself.”
Above them, at the end of the vale there stretched a band of forest, deep green, nearly black green, and Anson wondered, but they all wondered, if that was a true wood, or the trees and the spirits of trees which had gone ahead of them.
“We’ll never catch up with them,” Arvad commented, but Inark said, “We will. I feel it. There is a great change happening, and we are in the center of it. I feel…”
Her words stopped. Her mouth hung open and her head swung in the direction of the Throndon.
“It is coming from the hills.”
They stopped around noon, near a little brook, and the weather was fair, the water clear and the sky deep blue.
“That look on your face?” Soren said to Theone, sitting down beside her.
“Everything is right,” she said. “At this moment. I’m just waiting for something to go wrong.”
Soren squeezed her hand, smiled devilishly and said, “Why do that? Things will go wrong soon enough without you worrying for it.”
The rest of that day they climbed through the green hills leading up to the forest, and it was a forest, and they were light hearted and Theone tried to check her light heart, found herself saying that everything had always gone wrong. But the Beryl was warm on her breast.
Why shouldn’t you be light of heart?
Why shouldn’t you be light of heart?
Theone had believed she was talking to herself, but the second time she knew the voice.
Star and no Stone am I! The Beryl sang, and there was a laughter in its song.
“How?” Theone began.
Whenever you listen for me, I will always come.
Next She added:
Even if you are not listening, I will come.
“But that time… Down below…. With Dissen… with Inark. You….”
I was there.
“But…”
Be thou, light of heart! I have always been there. And I always will be.
And then she was silent.
But going up the hill, toward the forest, which the closer they came, seemed to stretch directly overhead, Theone did feel light in her heart.
That night they slept in a clearing at the edge of the hills. Looking way below, it was hard to imagine how steep the climb had been, the view of the vale was laced in black forest. Ohean unrolled his coat under a tree and went to sleep straightaway, but the rest of them remained awake for some time.
“How he does it, I do not know,” Conn said.
“He is a wizard,” Inark said. “I, on the other hand, am a very recent witch, and my nerves are jangling.”
Theone nodded to this.
“Kenneth and I know how to sleep,” Soren said. “We’re soldiers. We do it on command.”
So saying, Soren hooked an arm about the worried Theone, and brought her to the place where he had laid out his bedpile, and Kenneth reached for Arvad, but Inark said, “And who will keep watch with the witch?”
“No one needs to keep watch at all.”
Ohean had risen. His hand was on her head and he whispered something. Instantly she could think of nothing but sleeping. The moon was large and white and the stars twinkled.
Ohean said, “Once you gave me the gift of support. Now I will give you rest. Sleep.”
And stumbling with grateful yawns to her bedpile, Inark drifted into darkness.
When she blinked again, everyone was waking, and Soren and Kenneth stood, terrified. Inark was wiping sleep from her eyes and she instantly came to wakefulness when she saw Ohean standing with his staff planted before him, and Conn, blue hooded in his blue cloak, looking serene beside him. Arvad had just waken, and he and Anson looked sleepy while Theone clutched the Beryl, blue and burning at her breast.
There was a steady tramping through the woods, and torches and a party and Ohean said, “Stand firm.”
“It is what I sensed,” Inark said. There was a smile in her voice.
Theone, watching, had fought the urge to come close to Soren and Kenneth. Now she knew she must. Before she had not wanted to be some shrinking woman dependent on her man. Now she knew she had to stand with him, that she and Kenneth and Soren were the same thing.
Lacing through the thin trees there came a train of riders on black horses, and light was coming so that it was too much to hope that they weren’t really all in black, that maybe this was a random assortment of dark troops. Theone did not know that Kenneth and Soren, who had been part of this, were sweating from their palms, their scalps, their upper lips as much as she was. She did not know that what Soren wished to do more than anything else was run. She knew the black trews, the black boots, the sable cloaks, the faces hooded or helmeted, the helmets with the long dark horsehair plumes. The Hands. The Black Star.
“And yet we must meet them,” Conn spoke. And though his voice trembled, there was no fear in it.
And Anson murmured, “Blessed are they who standeth and wait at the door.”
And as they approached, suddenly all were surprised to see at the head of this army an old man on a white horse, all wrapped in silvery white, or white shot with silver, and a cloud of grey tendriling hair came from his head and a great beard bloomed from around his face and as he approached, raising his hand, he called: “Hail Ohean, who has crossed over again from the East in this blessed time.”
And when they looked at him, Ohean looked like a child, and his red coat and his clothing were old, and the troop came to rest, and helmets were lifted and hoods pushed back and these men, though they were dressed as Hands, pale and black haired and dark eyed as Soren and Kenneth, were smiling brightly, and even those who seemed grave, seemed to hide some smile. Their eyes twinkled and Ohean spoke, smiling brightly as he came to the old man, and grasped his reins.
“Oh, and bless Mahonry, the First of us who crossed over in the first days with Maharion and declared the ancient Compact. Oh, hail! All, hail! You have at last come again into the world!”
Anson was thinking. All of them were. Mahonry was one of the Five. Beyond that none of them knew, but as they looked at the old man whom Ohean greeted with such fatherly affection, they were sure they should have known more. Anson knew him, though. For this had been the old man who had come to him on the small island during his isolation. Even as they were thinking this, Mahonry gestured to one beside him.
He had the same look as Soren. There was laughter in his dark face and he possessed a clear, bright brow. He dismounted from his black steed and came before Soren, saying: “Speak, and win peace.”
Soren hung back, but Kenneth said, “Sir, what are you? You look like…” he faltered then, and it was Soren who said: “You look like what we once were. In darker, more shameful days.”
Even as he finished speaking, there was such a look of pain on Soren’s face, and he barely finished the sentence. Theone touched him lightly, but the one who had spoken said: “I am Gilvaethwy, and I am what you were in days far brighter. Come, you. And you, Daughter,” he said to Theone. “You are for another. You, my sons, come with me, and I will make you clean again.”
“Sir,” Soren said, quickly, “I have never been clean.”
“Everything,” Gilvaethwy pronounced, “is clean. Only no one remembers.”
And he took them by the hands, and he led them through the woods and still they were in the time between the night and sunrise, and there was a pool, and he bade them strip, and so they did, and it was all as a dream, and then he bid them go into the pool, and when Kenneth placed his toe in the water he yelped.
“A great soldier such as yourself undone by a little water?” the Gilvaethwy said, and Soren yelped as well, for when he placed his leg in the water, it was so bone cold he wanted to leap out. He dared not. He placed himself in the water, feeling miserable, so frigid he didn’t know what was happening with Kenneth.
And then he was being scrubbed roughly by Gilvaethwy, so roughly he thought he would cry and he wanted to shield his sex, all his tender parts from the scrubbing, but soon he knew the Master would not harm him. He wanted so badly to cry, and then he was crying, and it had nothing to do with the scrubbing, and his wrists were burning, and all of the pool was warm now, warm with salt as if from his tears. And everything was salt and again he was being washed, more gently and this hand was not the hand of a man, but of a mother, and it was gentle, and it washed all of him. He shielded no part. Water was in his eyes and a voice he could not call man or woman’s bade him step out, and then he was being toweled gently and lain down like a little child and he remembered, long ago, in the Mother’s house he’d had a mother, his own sweet mother who bathed him and rubbed his back and rubbed oil into his skin, and he cried for the remembering of her. He remembered Theone coming to him, how gently and in ignorance they’d made their way to love, and he wept remembering the infant long gone, long gone. In the distance an old man was calling, “Arlan!” bu this meant nothing to him and then the Master was saying, so gently: “Dress.”
And for some reason Soren thought he would open his eyes to see white things. But instead they were black. Black soft undergarments and then black trews and boots and a black shirt and tunic and a black cloak and helmet with a horsehair plume and he feared to touch any of it.
“Do not fear to touch,” Gilvaethwy said. “All is yours, save the sword which you must win. Put them on.”
And Soren saw that, in confusion, Kenneth was dressing, and as he looked at his hands he cried out and at the same time Kenneth did as well.
For years now, since he had left, Soren had tied a band over the one thing that remained of his past, but the Black Star was always on him, branded on him since his Embuement.
“But today is your Enbuement, as we had of old,” Gilvaethwy said, “and these must be worn in pride.”
And on his wrists, on both the right and the left were stars going from pale silver to palest gold, to deeper gold then back again.
“In ancient days when Phineas arrived he snuffed out the the Star and made it Black. But of old it was Gold, and so it is again. Thou art the Lords of the Gold Star and of the Silver Star. This,” he said regarding the batallion of men in black who had coming riding with him, “is your army to command.”
And now Soren saw that Kenneth stood before him, and in his face was a look of wisdom and of strength and of power, such as he had not previously possessed.
“But Master, they are all yours,” Soren began.
But even as he spoke, Gilvaethwy was gone.
