Andre Norton - The Warding of Witch World

Ibycus had loosed his hold on the staff and Firdun was plainly leaning upon it to keep himself erect. Aylinn released Elysha’s hold on the moon wand. It fell to her knees as if she could not hold it, light as it was. Kethan felt Uta’s warmth vanish. The cat must have loosed her hold on him.

Though the strength was wrung out of them all, they knew also that they were free. But Firdun swung around to face Ibycus squarely.

“What have you done to me?” His voice scaled up as if he were back in boyhood again.

“Nothing.” The mage seemed in no hurry to take back his staff, which Firdun was thrusting in his direction. “We must all make our choices for ourselves, Gryphon-born.”

Firdun lifted the staff as if he would hurl it from him. Then, his eyes seeing afire, he threw it so the mage caught it easily before it touched the ground.

“I will choose as I wish,” the young man said. “I am what I am—and none shall make me other.”

Ibycus smiled wearily. “So say we all upon occasion. Yes, your choice is your own. But at this moment we are bound together and only failure of our mission will tear us apart.”

Firdun’s head went down. His empty hands clasped, opened, and clasped again. Then he finally raised one and muttered some words, and Kethan knew their ward was down.

Aylinn leaned back against her foster brother’s shoulder. “It is not well,” she said, so softly that he hardly heard her.

“In what way?”

“Kethan, you know that I have sometimes—when the Lady empowers me—foresight. For Elysha—for him.” She nodded toward Ibycus. “It is perhaps only my inner fear, but out of this we shall all come changed. We have taken up the weapons of the Great Old Ones and some of those are not for us.”

As always they all felt the overpowering fatigue which followed the Power drain. And they were eager to join the Kioga, eat of roasting grass hens on improvised spits at the fire, drink, and find their bedrolls. Firdun had not spoken with any since they had left the place he had warded. He ate little and put his bedroll a little apart. There was a strange, set cast to his features, as if he were no longer the comrade they had known. Now and again he looked toward Ibycus, scowling, as if the mage had set him to some task he hated.

Even as Firdun watched the mage covertly, so Kethan saw Aylinn watch Firdun. Her face was nearly as sober as his. With the moon directly above them, she, too, drew apart, and Kethan knew that she communed in her own way with the Lady, this time with a troubled heart.

He made very sure the stone he had brought from the winged ones was safe. He put it, wrapped in a bit of cloth, under where his head would rest—having a ghost of an idea that perhaps it would foster dreams. And this night he wanted to escape—escape into that dream of the valley guarded by stone cats and the black-furred, beautiful one who had enticed him there.

Only this time he did not go four-footed. He recognized the pillars with their seated cats, but he was all man this night in spite of his strong-willed desire to change.

Then she stepped into the open from behind one of the pillars—not a cat now. Her head with its short-cut, thick black hair came to a little above his shoulder; her slender body revealed by the straight one-piece garment she wore was human, graceful, even as she had possessed feline grace before.

“Lady…” He hesitated, not knowing how to address her.

She smiled but did not answer. Instead she came to him, soft-footed, and raised both hands to draw down his head. He felt her soft lips nuzzle against his cheek.

“Great Warrior,” she breathed rather than spoke. “It has been so long for this one.”

Without being fully conscious of his action, Kethan’s arms went about her, drawing her even closer.

“Beautiful one—who are you who comes to me so?”

He heard a soft chuckle. “Learn the answer to that, Great Warrior, and when I come I shall stay—as you wish. It has been so long.” Now she sighed.

Even as she sighed, she faded to nothingness in his arms and was gone. And he cried out hopelessly even as he saw the cat pillars also spin into nothingness.

If he dreamed more that night he did not remember it. With the morning his frustration sent him out on scout even before the camp was dismantled.

He took the same trail he had followed before, save that he no longer tried to trace out the scent of Jakata’s people. The winged ones had promised an easier way to what they called the Land of the Dead, and Ibycus believed that that was the direction in which Jakata was headed—if he had survived the evil he had called up.

“Though doubtless he did,” the mage had commented as they decided on Kethan’s direction, “or we would not have been tracked last night. Unless he loosed what cannot be controlled. But if that were so, this”—he held out his finger ring, the same dull stone now power empty—“would have given us warning.”

The trail led them more to the north, and as the day advanced, the distant mountains raised a jagged barrier across the horizon. Once they skirted ruins of some size—a keep which might have been even greater than their Gryphon’s Eyrie, Firdun thought. But they did not approach closely, and there was a feeling of desolation and despair which appeared to reach out to them from those tumbled walls.

Here, too, were the remains of walled fields where once crops had been sown. Even here and there a degenerate lone stalk of grain waved a tassel in the breeze. But the travelers did avail themselves of what was furnished by an ancient orchard. Most of the older trees had moldered away, but there had been fresh saplings arising from long-rotted fruit. And several of these bore a heavily ripe crop, so the travelers made that their nooning and relished the sweetness of fresh fruit again.

By afternoon they had reached the beginning of the heights. There was the remains of an old road, but they did not follow that. Rather, Kethan scouted a more difficult way up and down the reaches of some valleys, being careful to note if there were any signs of past habitation there. A large cellar hole suggested that there might once have been a hunting lodge. About it was a strong smell of bear and he mind-sent back a warning to avoid the possible den.

For two days they traveled so. At first their pace was slow, for they had all suffered from the draining of Power, but strength returned. Firdun had kept to himself. Nor did he sleep well at night, for the import of what had happened weighed upon him. He was no adept like Alon, no master of both the lesser and the great Powers. Yet he could not deny that in those moments when he had grasped Ibycus’s staff it had seemed that a key turned deep within him.

He bit down upon sour fear. Many times he had wondered how Kethan could reconcile his two selves, pard and man. Now he wondered if he himself had, in some way, been splintered and now carried a second being within. Though he had always felt the loss of not being one of the melding Eyrie, yet that act of his had seemed to come as if he had planned it and knew that it would succeed.

“Firdun?” Startled, he looked up. They had dismounted to lead their horses up a rough grade. He realized that his horse had been snorting and sidling, and he saw that Aylinn with Morna had caught up with him.

“Moonlady?” he returned, soothing his horse. She wreathed her reins about Morna’s saddle horn and the were horse dropped back, still following steadily.

“But I am Aylinn,” she said now. “Trail companions follow no formal speech. Firdun, is all well with you?”

He wanted to turn her off with a quick denial. Somehow he could not.

“I wonder,” he said slowly, finding it difficult to put his unease into words, “if I am still Firdun.”