Guy Kay - Ysabel

Who are you?

The repeated question, over and again. The one he’d hated, having no answer. Now he did. Ysabel had given it to the three of them.

The world rocked and spun, unstable and impossible. Ned made a small, helpless sound; he couldn’t stop himself. This was too vast, it meant too many things, too many to get your head around.

He saw Phelan looking at her.

The wide, thin mouth quirked sideways. “When?” he whispered. And then, “Whose?”

Ned stopped breathing.

She smiled, grave and regal, not capricious or teasing now. She shook her head slowly. “Some things are not best told. Even in love. Perhaps especially in love. Is it not so?”

More questions than answers in the world, Ned thought.

Phelan lowered his head.

Her smile changed a little. “You knew I would say that?”

He looked up. “I never know what you will say.”

“Never?” Faint hint of irony, but a sense she was reaching a long way for it.

“Almost never,” he amended. “I did not expect this. None of this. Not the searching you decreed, forbidding battle. Not the boy being…what you say he is. Love, I am lost.”

“And I,” Cadell said. The other two turned to him. “You altered the story. He led us here. The boar guided him, and us. This means?”

This means?

Ysabel turned to Ned. The clear, distant gaze. The eyes were blue, not green, he saw. And something was unmistakable now. You would have to be blind, or truly a child, not to see it: the sadness that had come. She looked steadily at him and said, more softly than any words yet spoken, “What must I answer him, blood of my blood?”

He didn’t reply. What could he possibly say? But he saw now—he did see—an answer to the one question, about his being here and his aunt and his mother, and their mother and hers, fathers or mothers back to a distant presence of light down a long tunnel from the past.

Where the woman before him waited in a far, faint brightness.

She turned from him, not waiting for an answer. Looked to one man and then the other. “You know what it means,” she said. “You know what I said beside the animal that died to draw me into the world again. Neither of you found me first. You know what follows. The chasm is here. It is still here.”

What will follow, you should not see.

Phelan had said that to him, at Entremont. But Ned had stayed, and seen, and led them here to this.

“You never said there was a child,” Cadell murmured.

And Ysabel, quietly, echoed him. “I never said there was a child.”

“Only the one?” Phelan’s eyes never left her now.

“Only the one, ever. One of you killed the other, and then died himself, too soon, leaving me alone. But not entirely so. That time. I was carrying a gift.”

“You do know what it will mean, love, if we go down together there? Both of us.”

Cadell, the deep voice soft, but unafraid. Making certain.

She inclined her head gravely. “We all know what it will mean. But neither of you found me, and the boy is in the story.” She had never seemed so much a queen as she did then, Ned thought, staring at her.

The two men turned—he would remember this, too—to look at each other. Fire and ice subsumed in something he wasn’t smart enough—hadn’t lived nearly long enough—to name.

Phelan turned back to her. He nodded his head slowly.

“I believe I see. An ending, love?” He hesitated. “Past due, must we say?”

Ysabel shook her head suddenly, fierce in denial. “I will not say that! I would never say that.”

She turned to the bigger man. One and then the other. One and then the other. Ned wanted to back away, against the cave wall, feared to draw attention by moving.

She said to Cadell, “Do you still believe our souls find another home?”

“I always have, though perhaps not all of us. We have had a different arc, we three. I will not presume as to my soul. Not from that chasm.”

“You will search for me? Wherever I am? If there is a way?”

Ned was crying now. He did back up until he bumped into the cold stone wall by the opening to the south. He could feel the wind here.

Cadell said, in that voice men and women might follow into war and across mountain ranges and through forests and into dark, “Wherever you are. Until the sun dies and the last wind blows through the worlds. Need you ask me? Even now?”

She shook her head again, and Ned heard her say, “No, I didn’t need to ask, did I? My shining one. Anwyll.”

Beloved.

Cadell stood another moment looking at her, memorizing her, Ned wanted to say it was, and then—not reaching out, not touching her—he said, “It is time to go, then, I believe.”

He turned and came this way towards the opening. At the edge of the drop he paused beside Ned and laid a hand upon his shoulder. No words.

Nor for the other man, though he did turn and they exchanged a glance, grey eyes and blue. Ned, weeping in silence, felt as if he could hear his blood passing through the chambers of his heart. Blood of my blood.

Cadell went down then, jumping over the edge to the steeply sloped plateau. Ned saw him in the late sun’s shining, the very last of the day’s light, as he walked over to the low, dark green bushes that surrounded the chasm that was a place of sacrifice, said in the tales to be bottomless.

He did pause there, but not in anything like fear, nothing of that at all, for when he looked up and back, past the two men to the woman, he was smiling again, golden and at ease.

And that is how Ned Marriner last saw him, through tears that would not stop, when he took a final step and went over to his ending without a sound.

Ned looked at emptiness where a man had been. He turned his face away. He saw a pair of birds wheeling to the south, across the mountain’s side. The sky was not falling, though this was a time and place where you could imagine it doing so.

He turned back, to Phelan. That one stood another moment, looking down at the chasm. Then he came forward towards the drop to the plateau. He passed close, as Cadell had. He didn’t touch Ned, though. Instead, he slipped out of his grey leather jacket and laid it, lightly, on Ned’s shoulders.

“It will be cold when the sun goes down,” he said. “There is a tear, I’m afraid, in one shoulder. Perhaps it can be repaired.”

Ned couldn’t speak. His throat was aching, and his heart. Tears made it difficult to see. Phelan looked at him another moment, as if he would say something else, but he didn’t.

He went over the edge, lightly down as always, landing easily, and he went to the chasm’s brink as the other man had done.

Ned heard Ysabel behind him. He didn’t turn. He was afraid to look at her. The man below them did, though. He did look.

“Anwyll,” Ned heard her say, again.

The man so addressed smiled then, standing on a mountain so far from the world into which he had been born, claimed there by sunlight, which had not changed in all the years.

He looked past Ned, to where she would be. He spoke her name.

“Every breath,” he said to her, at the end. “Every day, each and every time.”

Then he stepped over the rim and down into the dark.

AFTER A FEW MOMENTS motionless against the cave wall, Ned had to sit down. He lowered his legs over the edge of the drop, looking out on the end of day and at the slanting ledge where no one stood any more. He hadn’t known it was possible to feel this much sorrow, so hard and heavy an awareness of time.

Until the sun dies.

The sun was going down, would rise in the morning—people had to make themselves believe that it would each time nightfall came. He remembered Kate Wenger, only last night, talking of how sunset had never been a moment of beauty or peace in the past. Men and women fearing that the dark might come and not end.