Orson Card - Wyrms

And both kings able to speak with a woman who remembers being a wyrm. Being every wyrm that ever lived."

"Then I'll serve you."

"And more," said Patience. "I want more of you."

"What more can I give? All my wisdom is in the ways of war."

"My womb has borne a child, but it was a monster, and it's dead. I need heirs to my kingdom. Unwyrm doesn't watch now, to make sure that the line of the Heptarchs doesn't fail. So I need a consort who can create children who are large and strong, keen of mind and quick of hand. I need a consort who can teach my children what strength and wisdom are."

He said nothing, and his open eyes stared at the ceiling.

"And more," she said. "He's gone from me. The desire that burned in me for so many weeks is gone. On the boat when you touched me, and I wanted you then, I feared that it was my desire for Unwyrm. But now he's gone from me, and still when I see you I love you.

Surely God will let his Vigilant answer the need of a weak and frightened girl."

He smiled. "Weak and frightened."

"Sometimes," she said. "Aren't you?"

"Terrified. Of you. I never thought to marry a woman who could kill me with a little piece of string."

"Then you'll marry me?"

"I'll serve you as I can," he said.

She bent to him and kissed his lips. Behind them, now, Reck and Ruin lay in torment, sweating and tossing and ranting on their beds. Strings and Kristiano bent over them, bound them so they did not scratch out their eyes, wiped their brows to cool the fever, sang softly to them to soothe away the terrible dreams.

Will and Patience watched, and spoke to them in the moments of sanity. Sometimes Ruin became Angel, and Patience could talk to him; a hundred times, it seemed, he begged for her forgiveness, and she for his. I betrayed you, he would say; I killed you, she would answer. Then they forgave each other until the memory returned afresh.

Reck had no words in her madness, except, now and then, the learning of the Wise that had dwelt in Unwyrm's mind. She would lie staring at the ceiling, at the fire, at the wall, whichever way her head happened to face.

Kristiano and Strings sang the ancient geblings songs of mighty deeds in battle, of terrible and forbidden love, of the sins of fathers remembered by their daughters, of the great gebling kings and their battles for the soul of the world. No one knew if Reck even heard the music, or if it helped her follow some thread out of the darkness; until one day in deep winter, when the snow was three meters deep and they brought in food through the second- story doors. Strings turned away from Reck after an hour's song and then, suddenly, turned back. "She wants me to go on," he whispered. Will and Patience came, then, and listened as Kristiano joined in the song; they wept in relief when Reck smiled in her troubled sleep.

She was not lost. The songless wyrms had not stolen her utterly away.

Late in the winter, when the snow was grey from coal fires. Will regained some feeble use of his right hand. He could curl the fingers into a grip-not enough to wield a sword, but enough to help his left hand. It was enough of a triumph for him to be willing to do what Patience had asked him to do; as Heptarch, she proclaimed him her consort, and they loved each other in the cold sunlight through the upstairs window.

Not long after, Kristiano called to them to come; Ruin was awake. When they came into the room, he was kneeling beside his sister's bed, his face grave. He saw them, and held out his arms, embracing Will, then Patience, and looking at them with new respect. "You bear it all your lives," he said. "Alone."

But Will's hand was touching her shoulder, where Ruin did not see-Patience knew that the solitude was not as complete, not as unbridgeable as Ruin thought. He knew only Angel, good and grief-stricken Angel, whose isolation from humankind had been more complete than any other man she could think of. But it was not inappropriate, Patience decided, for the gebling king to have the memory of human life at its most tragic; she did not tell him that not all humans were so utterly alone.

And then, when the wind turned southerly and warm, and the snow melted, and the first shoots brought green back to the forest below, Reck awoke. Her eyes were distant, her thoughts remote, and often she would startle, as if she had only just come awake. She had thoughts she could not put into words; she could not tell them stories of her lives among the wyrms, because there was no language for it. But as they made their plans for the future government of the world, she listened, and from time to time spoke quietly and unknotted the tangled threads of the future.

They did not call her Reck anymore; she did not remember the name, for wyrms had no names, and had never needed them. Yet even though she had lost her name in the labyrinth of her mind, she had not forgotten them, and loved gaunt and gebling, dwelt and human, with the compassion of mother for child. They began to call her Mother Wyrm, and though Ruin had some hours of grief, longing for his sister, he also loved this new soul that dwelt in his sister's body; she comforted him for his loss, as she comforted them all.

They all soon realized that Mother Wyrm had grown stronger, with Unwyrm's memory within her; Strings and Kristiano reported that she was always with them, and they could do nothing without her consent. Oddly, though, she wanted nothing from them; the result was a freedom ' they had never known before. They still felt the needs of ' the others there in the House of the Wise, but they were ' not compelled to obey. Instead, there was Mother Wyrm within them, awakening their own will, strengthening it. "We're free," said Strings, "in bondage to her."

Hearing that, Ruin spread the word through Cranning that gaunts should be brought to the House of the Wise.

The warm weather brought them like petals on the southern wind, coming into the house in slavery, and leaving it in freedom. And not just gaunts; soon geblings, dwelfs, and humans also came. Mother Wyrm no longer belonged to the little group that had come with her to Skyfoot, and they knew that when they left Cranning to begin their work in earnest. Mother Wyrm would stay behind, for her work was already begun, and would never take her away from this house.

The cherries were in full blossom in the orchards of Skyfoot when the Gebling King, the Heptarch, and Will, her consort and captain, came down out of the mountains.

THE RUINORS HAD BEEN COMING ALL WINTER, AND INTENSIFIED in the spring. King Oruc began to hear whispers, and finally open speech. Agaranthemem Heptek, they called her, and her husband was Lord Will, who had been slave to dozens of great generals, and now was the greatest general of them all. Other Ruinors called her Kristos, and said she had killed the great satan with her own hands;

God would .now give the world to her, and King Oruc would die an agonizing death, after witnessing the torture and death of all his children.

There were also stories of the geblings. How all the geblings in the world had stopped at one moment, their faces twisted with murder and hate, while the daughter of prophecy worked her miracle in the heart of the world.

Now the gebling king had become an angel, and was coming to destroy all human life on Imakulata. Behind him was Mother Wyrm, a great dragon who had been resurrected from a corpse as ancient as the time before the starship; she was calling for the purification of Imakulata, the final battle between human and gebling.

In the spring the Ruinors became reality. A gebling army gathered; the spies confirmed it. And Patience had been seen, had even spoken to one of them. He brought back her message:

"Lord Oruc, my friend," the messenger quoted. Oruc trembled at the way she did not call him King, and at the bitter irony in her condescension. "I come to you at last, to thank you for your good care of my kingdom. You will be well rewarded for the excellence of your regency, for I have not forgotten anything you ever did." She signed it with her dynastic name, and then with the signature he had so often seen: "Patience."