So many mysteries to unravel! So much to discover! Almost, she lost the road, but she pulled it tight again.
“Go. Go,” she called to them.
Sharp Edge and Sibold did not hesitate. They were bold and eager. They crossed under the glittering arch and walked into the east, Sharp Edge to teach and learn from the Hidden One and Sibold to guard her and care for the horses and gear.
The threads pulled taut as the stars wheeled on their nightly round. It was time to close the gate, and yet she was caught betwixt and between. Always, the yearning to go, and always, the yearning to stay.
There!
An old man rides alone on a lonely road, his back to her. She cannot see his face, but she knows who he is, the last of his kind. Almost she calls to him, but he has already faded from sight.
She hears the tentative noises of folk beginning to shuffle their feet, yawn, murmur a song. Argue good-naturedly. A stomach growls with hunger. Someone coughs.
Sanglant laughs, a bright sound that lights the world, and, of course, those who are not caught in the weaving as it unravels laugh with him.
A hound yips.
She sees the black hound as it halts to stare back at her through the crown woven out of the stars. Its mate pauses beside it, also looking back. The hounds can see her, because she is heir to Lavas. They gave her a litter of puppies, but they themselves never belonged to her.
Ahead of them on the path, a dark-haired man walks into a meadow. There is still sunlight, shadows falling long but not yet swarming to overtake the grass and bramble vines laced along the edge of the trees. He must be walking farther west where it is still day, or perhaps this is another day, one not yet come. The salamander eyes she took from her mother can discern shapes in what to humankind may seem darkest night.
He pauses where a wild bramble rose has sprouted out of the grass. Its twisting vine boasts only one delicate blood-red bloom, but that is enough to lend the snarl of branches an intense beauty. Because he bends to look more closely, she sees many buds forming within the pale leaves, not yet flowered. It’s only that one must be patient, and resolute.
He straightens, calls his hounds, and walks on, into the haze that marks the land beyond. She takes a step, and another, to follow him.
“Liath,” Sanglant said, behind her. “Where are you going?”
After all, the gate scattered into a spray of incandescent sparks, and she turned, and came home.
EPILOGUE
ON a hill surrounded on three sides by forest and on the fourth by the ruins of a fortress stood a ring of stones. Some said they were the bones of a castle buried so deeply that only the battlements of the tallest tower rose above the earth. A few claimed that sleeping youths lay drowned in slumber in hidden chambers deep in the ground.
Most simply called them the wings of the phoenix.
On the twelfth day of the month of Setentre, the feast day of St. Ekatarina, the afternoon faded swiftly to twilight as a company of riders splashed across the ford and pushed through the ruins. A pair of watch fires burned on the other side of the river, marking the sentry towers of the prosperous village that lay within sight of the hill crowned by stones.
“Are you sure, my lord prince?” asked the eldest of the riders, a battle-scarred man wearing the black-and-gold surcoat of the elite Dragon guards. “This is the third night, and we’ve seen nothing … Better we rest and make ready. The queen’s progress will leave Thersa tomorrow.”
The first threads were faint, flowering into brilliance only as the archway snapped fully into existence.
“Hai!” cried the youth, urging his horse forward with his best companion right behind him and the older men trailing after with the kind of looks best known and understood by men who were once as impulsive in days long past.
She came clear in a shower of sparks as the gateway spit and dissolved around her. Her companion was an older man, well armed and well seasoned. He led a string of three horses in the manner of a traveler accustomed to long journeys. Both wore the distinctive black cloak trimmed with gold braid that marked the phoenix messengers and under that a plain wool tunic in the Wendish style, but instead of leggings she wore trousers like an easterner, and her black hair was tied back in braids and covered by a lacy waterfall of gold beaded netting that framed her striking dark-skinned face and those astonishing blue eyes.
The most glorious woman in all the world!
He dismounted, dropped his reins, and ran down to meet her. Seeing him, she halted as she came up to the low wall that separated the fort from the crown.
“Fulk! How are you come here?”
He hopped from one foot to the other, wanting to touch her hand, or her face, or her hair, but settled down finally and rubbed his beardless chin sheepishly. “They sent me to court for seasoning.”