She stopped. Dizziness grabbed her. Did I talk on a single breath?
“I see,” he responded after a while. “Thank you, dearest.”
She came to him and. kissed him, tenderly because of his hurt mouth.
Later that night the wind dropped, the clouds regathered, and rain fell, slow as tears. By dawn it was used up. Laura rose blindingly out of great waters, into utter blue, and every leaf and blade on the island was jeweled.
Eyath left the crag whereon she had perched the last few hours, after she could breast the weather no more. She was cold, wet, stiff at first. But the air blew keen into nostrils and antlibranchs, blood awoke, soon muscles were athrob.
Rising, rising, she thought, and lifted herself in huge upward spirals. The sea laughed but the island dreamed, and her only sound was the rush which quivered her pinions.
At your death, Vodan, you too were a sun.
Despair was gone, burned out by the straining of her wings, buffeted out by winds and washed out by rain, as he would have demanded of her. She knew the pain would be less quickly healed; but it was nothing she could not master. Already beneath it she felt the sorrow, like a hearthfire at which to warm her hands. Let a trace remain while she lived; let Vodan dwell on in her after she had come to care for another and give that later love his high-heartedness.
She tilted about. From this height she saw more than one island, strewn across the mercury curve of the world. I don’t want to return yet. Arinnian can await me till… dusk? Hunger boiled in her. She had consumed a great deal of tissue. Bless the pangs, bless this need to hunt — bless the chance, ha!
Far below, specks, a flock of pteropleuron left their reef and scattered in search of piscpids near the water surface. Eyath chose her prey, aimed and launched herself. When she drew the membranes across her eyes to ward them, the world blurred and dimmed somewhat; but she grew the more aware of a cloven sky streaming and whistling around her; claws which gripped the bend of either wing came alive to every shift of angle, speed, and power…
Her body knew when to fold those wings and fall — when to open them again, brake in thunder, whip on upward — when and how her hands must strike. Her dagger was not needed. The reptiloid’s neck snapped at the sheer violence of that meeting…
Vodan, you’d have joyed!
Her burden was handicapping; not heavy, it had nonetheless required wide foils to upbear it. She settled on an offshore rock, butchered the meat and ate. Raw, it had a mild, almost humble flavor. Surf shouted and spouted around her.
Afterward she flew inland, slowly now. She would seek the upper plantations and rest among trees and flowers, in sun-speckled shade; later she would go back aloft; and all the time she would remember Vodan. Since they had not been wedded, she could not lead his funeral dance; so today she would give him her own, their own.
She skimmed low above an orchard. Water, steaming off leaves and ground, made small white mists across the green, beneath the sun. Upwelling currents stroked her. She drank the strong odors of living earth through antlibranchs as well as lungs, until they made her lightheaded and started a singing in her blood. Vodan, she dreamed, were you here beside me, we would flit off, none save us. We would find a place for you to hood me in your wings.
It was as if he were. The beating that closed in from behind and above, the air suddenly full of maleness. Her mind spun. Am I about to faint? I’d better set down. She sloped unevenly and landed hard.
Orange trees stood around, not tall nor closely spaced, but golden lanterns glowed mysteriously in the deeps of their leafage. The soil was newly weeded and cultivated, m bare to the sky. Its brown softness embraced her feet, damp, warmed by the sun that dazzled her. Light torrented down, musk and sweetness up, and roared.
Pinions blotted out Laura for a moment. The other descended. She knew Draun.
His crest stood stiff. Every quill around the grinning mouth said: I hoped I might find you like this, after what’s happened.
“No,” she whimpered, and spread her wings to fly.
Draun advanced stiffly over the ground, arms held wide and crook-fingered. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he hawked. “Khr-r-r-r.”
Her wings slapped. The inrush of air brought strength, but not her own strength. It was a different force that shook her as she might shake a prey.
“Vodan!” she yelled, and somehow flapped off the whirling earth. The lift was slow and clumsy. Draun reached up, hooked foot-claws around an alatan of hers; they tumbled together.
She scratched at his face and groped for her knife. He captured both wrists and hauled her against him. “You don’t really want that, you she,” his breath gusted in her ear. “Do you now?’ He brought her arms around his neck and he himself hugged her. Spread, his wings again shut out the sun, before their plumes came over her eyes.
Her clasp held him close, her wings wrapped below his. She pressed her lids together so hard that dark was full of dancing formless lights. Vodan, passed somewhere amidst the noise, I’ll pretend he’s you.
But Vodan would not have gone away afterward, leaving her clawed, bitten, and battered for Arinnian to find.
Tabby was still asleep, Holm still looking for his poor friend, Draun lately departed with a remark about seeing if he couldn’t help, the retainers and fishers off on their various businesses. The compound lay quiet under the morning.
Rochefort stole back into the bedroom. She was among the few women he’d known who looked good at this hour. The tall body, the brown skin were too firm to sag or puff; the short fair locks tangled in a way that begged his fingers to play games. She breathed deeply, steadily, no snoring though the lips were a little parted over the whiteness beneath. When he bent above her, through bars of light and shade cast by the blind, she had no smell of sourness, just of girl. He saw a trace of dried tears.
His mouth twisted. The broken lip twinged less than his heart. She’d cried on his account, after they came home. “Of course you can’t tonight, darling,” she’d whispered leaning over him on an elbow and running the other hand down cheek and breast and flank. “With this trouble, and you pulled ninety different ways, and everything. You’d be damned callous if you could, how ’bout that? Don’t you cry. You don’t know how, you make it too rough on yourself. Wait till tomorrow or the next night, Phil, beloved. We’ve got a lifetime.”
A large subdivision of my hell was that I couldn’t tell you why I was taking it so hard, he thought.
I’d kiss you… but you might wake and — O all you saints, St. Joan who burned for her people, help me!
The knowledge came that if he dithered too long, she would indeed wake. He gave himself a slow count of one hundred before he slipped back out.
The roofs of the buildings, the peak beyond them, stood in impossible clarity against a sky which a-pair of distant wings shared with the sun. The softest greens and umbers shone no less than the most brilliant red. The air was drenched in fragrances of growth and of the sea which tumbled beyond the breakwater. No. This much beauty is unendurable. Rochefort walked fast from the area, onto a trail among the orchards. Soon it would join the main road to the landing field.
I can’t succeed. Someone’ll be on guard; or I’ll be unable to get in; or something’ll happen and I’ll simply have been out for a stroll. No harm in looking, is there?
Merely looking and returning for breakfast. No harm in that, except for letting her Avalonians be killed, maybe by millions, maybe including her — and, yes, my shipmates dying too — uselessly, for no reason whatsoever except pride — when maybe they can be saved. When maybe she’ll see that I did what I did to end the war quickly that she might live.