Tad Williams: Shadowheart

... When she first as a child stood in snow, laughing…

... The night her mother died and she took the Fireflower, and her sense of what should be would not let her weep…

... Her eye, knowing…

... Her lips, warm and forgiving after that terrible fight…

The associations went on and on, unstoppable, and Barrick Eddon was terrified by how little he could do beyond holding onto those parts of himself he could still recognize.

I was a fool to agree to this , he thought. It is like the story of the greedy merchant—I will get everything I wanted, but it will fill me until I swell like a toad and then burst like a bubble.

Saqri suddenly stopped and turned toward him—a graceful transition from motion to absolute stillness. She used words to speak out loud but he heard them in his thoughts as well, where the meanings were subtly different. “I have thought all the day and I still do not know whether to embrace you or destroy you, manchild,” Saqri told him. “I cannot understand what my beloved great-aunt thought she was doing.” A tiny shift of the mouth betokened a scowl. “I stopped wondering at my late husband’s actions long ago.”

Her thoughts came with a sting even sharper than the wind off the booming black sea. “It isn’t ...” He fought to keep his concentration through the flurry of foreign recollections and impulses. “It doesn’t matter anyway. What she wanted. She sent me and… and then your husband gave me the Fireflower.”

She looked at him with an expression that did not quite reach compassion. “Is it painful, then, child?”

“Yes.” It was hard to think. “No, not painful. But it… I think it is too much for me. That soon it will… drown me ...”

She took a few steps toward him, her head tilted a little to one side as if she listened. “I cannot feel you the way I could always feel him—but nevertheless, you are there. How strange! You are truly shih-shen’aq .” It was a thought that did not become a word in his language, but still blew toward him with its meaning trailing— flowered, enbloomed, blossomhearted : it meant to blaze with the inner complexity and responsibility of the Fireflower.

“But what does that mean?” he begged her. “Is there no way my thoughts can be quieted? I’ll go mad. The noise, it’s getting… stronger!” And had been since Ynnir had passed it to him, a fever in his blood just as terrible and mortal as the illness that had nearly killed him back in Southmarch, but a fever without heat, something altogether different than any earthly malady. “Please… Saqri… help me.”

Something moved in her face. “But there is nothing I can do, manchild. It is like asking me to save you from your blood or your own bones. It is in you now—the Fireflower is you.” She turned away to look toward the ocean. “And it is more than that. It is all of my family—all we have learned and all that we are. One half of it is in you. It may kill you.” She lifted her hands in a deceptively small gesture, whose meanings rippled out in every direction— Defeat is Ours was one meaning, a strange mixture of resignation, terror, and pride. “And the other half is in me and will certainly die with me.” She looked up, and for the first time he thought he saw something like pity in her hard, perfect face. “Take courage, mortal. The ocean has beat at this black shore since the gods lived and fought here, but it has not devoured the land. Someday it will, but that day has not yet come.”

Everything she said set off ripples in Barrick’s head like stones cast into a pond, each ripple intersecting with a dozen more and filling him with half-glimpsed memories and ideas for which the language of his thoughts had no proper words.

Black shore…

The first ships foundered here, but the second fleet survived.

The ones who sing beneath the waves… Listen!

It was like standing in a temple bell tower while the great bronze bells thundered the call to prayer. The voices seemed to shake him to his bones—but at the same time the attack was as silent as a subtle poison. “Oh, gods. I can’t… stand it.”

“But why did she do it?” Saqri scarcely seemed to hear him, looking up to the cloud-painted sky as if the answer might be swirling there. “I can understand Ynnir giving the Fireflower to a mortal, mad as it is—my husband would have taken any gamble, no matter the danger, to try to craft peace. But why would Yasammez mock him with that which she herself holds most dear? Why would she send you to him in the first instance?”

Her great age, voices suggested. Even the mightiest can decay…

Hatred, said others, full of anger themselves. Yasammez has built her great house on the rock of her hatred…

Barrick couldn’t understand why none of them, not Saqri, not the even the Fireflower voices, suggested that which was so obvious to him. Did they really understand so little of despair, these people who should have understood it better than any—who saw their lives as an inevitable defeat lasting thousands of years?

“She wasn’t… mocking the king,” he said, struggling to make words out of the cacophony of his thoughts and senses. “She was mocking… herself.”

Saqri whirled to stare at him. For a moment, by the weird, stony look on her face, Barrick thought she would strike him, or call her Ice Ettins to take off his head. Instead, she tilted her head back and laughed, a throaty burst of anger and amusement that caught him utterly by surprise.

“Oh! Oh, manchild!” she said. “You have taught me something. We must not let such a rarity end too quickly! I will honor my great-grandmother’s wishes, no matter how obscure their origin, and we will try to find a way to mute the Fireflower, at least until you have learned to live with it.”

“Can… can such a thing be done?”

She laughed again, but sadly. “It never has been. It was never necessary. But there has never been a scion of the Fireflower quite like you, either.”

Like a walking white flame, she led him back over the black sands to the foot of the stone stairs where her armor-skinned warriors stood waiting, their eyes only glints deep beneath plated brows. The row of huge creatures parted with surprising grace to let her lead Barrick past, then fell in behind and followed them back up the winding hill-steps to Qul-na-Qar.

It was worse for him inside the castle: the ancient walls and passages put so many thoughts into his head that the voices in his skull swooped and chattered like bats startled from their roosts; it was all he could do to follow Saqri. A few times he stumbled, but felt the broad, stone-hard hand of one of the queen’s escort close on his arm and hold him up until he found his feet again.

The Ice Ettins were not the only ones following them now. As soon as Saqri had entered the castle, a flock of shapes had appeared almost as suddenly as the Fireflower voices—Qar of every shape and appearance—but they seemed hardly even to notice Barrick. It was Saqri they surrounded, their voices full of worry and even fear for her health, and those who could not speak through the heavy air found other ways to make their unhappiness known, so that a cloud of dismay followed Barrick and the queen across the great central halls and down the Weeping Staircase. It felt as though the jabber of their thoughts and the whirl of Fireflower memories were pounding away at his wits like a hailstorm.

Barrick stumbled again. He was no longer certain how to make his legs work properly.

“I… can’t ...” he tried to say, then stopped to stare at Saqri, her guards, and supplicants. They were all changing, stretching, shredding like shapes made of smoke under the barrage of so much noise, so much life, so much memory . He couldn’t remember what it was he had been about to say. Their now-unrecognizable forms curled into a dwindling whirlpool of color in the midst of the blackness and the clamor in his head suddenly went quiet. As the spin of light gurgled away, he fell into nothing, but he accepted the darkness with gratitude.