Andre Norton - The Warding of Witch World

Mouse smiled sadly. “We learn all our lives long. If we do not, then we are not what we were born to be. Keris believed that he was less because he had no talent. Yet a talented one could not have embodied Hilarion. Sister,” she said to Destree, “what hope is there?”

“I do not know, for never have I seen this before—though I have heard of it. We can only hope that he will awake.”

Yet, though they took turns at his side, he did not. At dusk Mouse drew well apart, so that the effects of the adept’s Power discharge would not weaken her call, and reached Gull with her message.

“This Tregarth?” Gull asked last of all.

“We do not know—he seems asleep.”

Gull made no comment. The old distrust of male talent still might hold with some of the sisters. But surely the time for such aversion was gone. They had moved mountains to save their country, but here a man might have done even more.

Dawn was paling the sky. Destree set aside the small spouted cup from which she had dribbled her most potent restorant into Keris’s mouth just moments earlier. The potion would keep the body living, but it could not recall the spirit which had left it. The dawn wind brought the scent of the not-so-distant sea.

She had heard the message from Lormt: they were to return; their quest was finished. Already the found gates were being closed and warded. Their own had been the worst because of the blood price.

She was aware of movement near her. Jasta came up to stand beside the unconscious man.

*There is still a spark.*

Destree turned upon the Renthan swiftly. “How can such be reached?”

*Who gives life, Voice? Who would save a valiant one who gave to her earth?*

“Then”—her hand was already on her healer’s pack—“I shall seek.”

This would be a different kind of seeking than when she had found Nolar, for it was not a seeking in place or time, but beyond them both. She spoke to Mouse, and to Eleeri, but she was surprised when the mare Theela joined them, and then Gruck without a word.

There was a potion to be drunk, then she stretched beside Keris’s motionless body. Into her began to flow what they could give her—strength.

There was darkness and she knew that she followed someone who had earlier fled this way. Waves of fear beat at her, as might the dashing waves of the sea. She held tightly to the picture of Keris—not as she had seen him last stretched seemingly lifeless on the ground, but in his full vigor of body and mind.

Down that black road she sped, feeling that in her which was eating at her strength. Then she saw that wisp of a grayish thing which clung desperately to an imprisoning wall.

Only a wisp of a thing—no, that she did not believe. Destree set herself to infusing into it to that other—that one in her memory. There—and there—and there! She called for strength—it came—held—while she built that body, made it whole and no wisp of shadow.

“Keris!” she summoned.

Then she opened her eyes upon the sun and those about her, so united in a friendship bond that it could never be broken. Now she turned her head.

His eyelids arose slowly. There was wonder in his face. Not the face of an idiot—by the grace of the Lady, this was again a man.

“Keris!” Her voice was loud in her joy.

He smiled. “You need not deafen a man, Lady—I am right here.”

The first of the early fall rains had swept through during the night, again making the crumbled section of the vast pile dangerous with falling bits of masonry. Since the Turning had brought down one tower and a portion of two of the connecting walls, the sages had done their best to ensure no more great collapse (there were enough holding spells cast there, stated Owen, to smother a tempest), yet there continued to be a certain amount of deterioration. Even so, the mainly elderly sages and those they managed to lure into helping them were still entirely intent on locating all they could find in the sealed archives which the first damage had revealed.

But now those more in touch with the world at large had other and momentarily more important matters to deal with. The great hall was still their meeting place and the hide map of their world was still fastened to the long refectory table. There were new markings in a goodly number on the eastern continent pictured there, but very few on the western.

This morning, however, it was not the map which engrossed the company gathered there. They had pushed benches, chairs, and a couple of stools into an irregular circle.

The man, leaning back as if bone-weary, spoke first as the lamps began to gutter out.

“It is done.”

A sound which merged into a vast sigh answered him from the others. Tension drained from other bodies, leaving them feeling nearly as weary as the speaker.

But there remained a question which held them tightly bound still in that company.

“Keris?”

Dahaun’s hand was clasped so tightly in Kyllan’s that it would seem their flesh was melded together forever, even as it was in that distant body of their son.

Hilarion had raised both hands to cover his face, and his answer sounded muffled. “I do not know.”

There was the scratching of chalk against slate as the old woman in the wheeled chair wrote a terse message and pushed it to her neighbor, the witch Gull.

Gull fingered her jewel, gave a sidelong glance to her companion Willow. Then she spoke, her monotonous voice sounding harsh as the chalk she answered: “They will be fighting with all the talent they can summon; we dare not break into their struggle now. If he can be saved, those with whom he has companied will save him.”

“Small comfort you give us, Gull,” Jaelithe Tregarth returned. “But the gate is gone, Hilarion.”

He nodded, his head still in his hands. Kaththea had arisen and come to stand behind him, her hands massaging the flesh of his upper shoulders and the nape of his neck.

Gull spoke. “So. And you can chain the other also? Or must you travel yourself to each, since we have more time?”

It seemed to most of them there that she had abandoned the problem of Keris—almost as if some of the coldheartedness of the earlier generation of her kind had frosted her emotions.

Now the adept raised his head and faced her squarely. “Those we have found to be quiescent we can close from afar. That which your sisters hold in the spell of Mouse’s laying…” There was a crooked little smile on his lips now. “There it must be your Power to lead mine to the goal.”

Nolar twisted her fingers, stained a little from the potion she had been laboring on when summoned here. The old and deeply embedded distrust of the witches for men of Power—surely it would not hold now! That a witch and an adept would share their very different but formidable learning would be as overturning in its way than the removal of the mountains.

“The All Mother has agreed to any service needed.” Gull’s thin lips screwed together as if she found that statement bitter. “Willow will wait for any signal from Mouse. Cricket, Moth, and Ash hold the capping now. You must deal through them.”

“Best now, then.” Hilarion pulled himself up from his chair, levering himself with his arms. Kaththea was at his side and Nolar’s healer’s instinct brought her to them both.

Lady Mereth made no attempt to use her writing slate, but her hand caught at Dahaun’s and she looked straightly up into that ever-changing face of the Lady of Green Shadows.

There was a strange calmness to Dahaun’s features and she spoke something which might be a message for them all:

“He is not beyond the Final Gate, for if that were true, we who gave him life would know. Thus there is hope.”