David Zindell - Black Jade

She stood up and stepped carefully down to the river's bank, where she scooped up a handful of old snow. After shaping it into a ball, she returned to the blanket. She sat holding it before her face as if it might reveal the shape of the future. At last she said, 'King Jovayl was right about you. This journey has changed you.'

I felt a bright, warm thing filling up my blood with an unbearable heat. I no longer feared letting it loose into Atara like lightning.

'Tell me that you believe in the future,' I said to her.

She squeezed her snowy ball and replied, 'Of course I do.'

I took the snow from her and cast it into the river, where the dark, churning water swept it away. I took her cold, wet hands in mine. I held them, tightly, until they warmed, and then grew hot.

'Say that you will be my wife.'

'You want my promise?'

'No — I want you say that it must be. That no other future can be.'

She sat breathing quickly, and she said, 'I almost believe that.'

I stared at the blindfold binding her face. My eyes felt like fire-stones, and I wanted to burn it away.

'Don't look at me like that!' she told me.

'How do you know how I look at you? You are blind.'

'I have never been that blind. I can feel you looking and looking.. and loving, the way that you do, with all the fire of your sweet, sweet heart, which I want to — '

I kissed her then. I felt something inside her melt, utterly, and flow like a sweet liquor, and so I cupped my hand around the back of her neck to pull us together. Her lips crushed against mine as she threw her arms around my back and pulled on me, fiercely, as if she wanted to take every part of me inside her. From within her throat, and mine, came a deep murmur almost like a growl, and we must have sounded like animals. But we were angels, too, for we kept passing the bright, warm thing to each other in our lips and our breath and our pounding blood, back and forth, until the fire grew so brilliant and hot that we could not bear it.

At last, she pushed away from me, and sat sweating and gasping. Her breath steamed out into the cool air as she told me, 'What I won't make with you is a child, not here and now — not with men still dying on crosses, as you say.'

'No — that would not be right,' I agreed. 'But someday, you will bear me a child. The most beautiful, beautiful child.'

She smiled, then laughed as she took hold of my hand and squeezed it. She said, 'Oh, Val, I do believe you — what else can I do?'

I kissed her again, and for a longer time. Then I told her, 'When the baby comes, you will look upon him with new eyes, I promise you.'

'But what if we have a girl?'

'Then you will look upon her even more gladly, as will I — especially if she is as beautiful as you.'

She sat quietly for a moment as she oriented her face toward me. Then she asked, 'Do you still think I'm beautiful?'

'More beautiful than any woman I've ever seen,' I told her. 'Even Asha and Varda, all the Star People, would envy you.'

She tapped her fingers to her blindfold and said, 'They would not envy me this, I think.'

I reached out to untie her blindfold and pull it away from her. I traced my fingers beneath her brows and across the bridge of her nose, even as my eyes grew warmer and I couldn't help looking and looking. Finally I said, 'A day will come when you will take this off for good. You will see again, Atara.'

She grasped my hand, and pressed it over the front of her face. She said, 'But I see so much now. I see you.'

I listened as the eagle above us let loose its harsh, haunting cry. I said, 'Tell me what you see, then.'

'I see a man,' she said, 'who had lost everything in the world, only to gain the whole world, and more. You are larger now, somehow, inside. Like that impossible stallion you ride. Like the sun. I don't know how your skin can contain you. You are wilder — so willful and wild. And even angrier than before, and you hate Morjin no less. But it is a different force now. It does not rule you. You rule, now. The man I have wanted to be with every hour and with every breath since I first laid eyes upon him: he, who almost died. I see that one, who somehow found a moment of compassion for the vilest of beasts, even though that beast had slaughtered all that he loved.'

'Not all,' I said, squeezing her hand.

'But your mother and grandmother, your beautiful brothers, they — '

'They are here,' I said, pressing her hand to my chest. 'For so long, I kept thinking of them as murdered, dead. But truly, they live.'

I knew she wanted to weep, but at that moment I felt nothing except joy, and so I held her close to me. For a while, she did weep, but soon her soft sobbing gave way to a deeper heaving of her belly as she began laughing with a gladness for life that she could not contain. Finally, she sat back away from me and said, 'There is such a light in you — this beautiful, beautiful light! Kane says it is like a sword; I mould say like the sweetest fire. I've never known anyone to love like you, to live like you, not even Bemossed. The passion. It is what you were born for. Sometimes, I know, I am all ice inside, but when you touch me the way you do, I'm all water.'

She paused to draw in a deep breath, then added, 'And. that is why I love you. And why I will marry you.'

She kissed me, and then laughed for a long time, a delightful sound, like the ringing of the river. Then I could not contain myself. I leaped up, and pulled her up to her feet. I wanted to throw off my tunic and let the wind cool my burning skin. I wanted to fly like flame over the mountains. Why didn't their snow, I wondered, melt when I looked at it? Why didn't Atara gasp out at the fire in my hands when I took hold of her sides? I lifted her off the blanket then. She was a tall woman, large-boned with lithe muscles like a great, tawny cat, and yet I lifted her as if she were a child, and then whirled her through the air as I began dancing about.

After I had set her down, she turned toward me and said, 'I see a bird, Val. Bigger than that eagle that called to us. Bigger even than a dragon. He is a great swan, as silvery as that sword of yours, and he flies toward the stars. Once there, he becomes a star: so big, so bright. And that is my star, whose light I cannot live without.'

For a while, we stood together on the cool grass, arm in arm. We faced the mountains to the east, over which the sun had risen only a few hours before. Beyond the Nagarshath range stretched the bright, emerald grasses of the Wendrush and the beautiful mountains of my home. And beyond that, the sea. All of Ea, it seemed, lay before us. It would have been easy to think that the whole world was ours, existing only for our pleasure, as Morjin thought of things. And the world was ours — but only to love as we loved each other and to protect with our last breath. I did not need to speak of this to Atara. If our marriage was to mean anything at all, it could only be that we must live for something much greater than ourselves.

I reached down to pick the first flower that I could find, and I pressed into her hand.

'Here,' I told her, 'take this as my troth.'

'A dandelion, Val? It is the most common of flowers.'

'Today, no flower in the world is common to me. But what would you have me give you?'

'Only this,' she said, squeezing her hand around the flower. 'You're right — it is perfect.'

'But what would you give to me?'

She sniffed the air and said, 'A star lily, I think. Their fragrance is so sweet.'

I looked about the meadow at the many flowers, and I finally espied one of these lilies, with its long, slender white petals and bright yellow center like a bit of starfire. It grew among some buttercups and fairies' eyes twenty yards away. I moved to step over to it, but Atara laid her hand on my shoulder.