Under her the fire roiled, the subsurface turbulence growing. Local temperature increasing sharply, Spot said. Survivability index is decreasing. Force field duration estimated fifteen seconds . . .
“Going to use another ten of those looking,” Dairine muttered. And maybe another five . . .
—and just kept listening, listening. That voice, laughing, scorning, speaking in anger or pain; you are the only one who hears me. The only one. Around her the fire licked and blasted at her shield, and Dairine hung on, stopped breathing, turned off the life support because it was eating energy, the roar scaled up—
And she heard it. The whisper. So weak, so faint.
Down! she said to the force field. Obediently, it sank further into the Sun’s roiling plasma. The whisper was weaker. But it was also closer.
Down!
She sank faster. The heat began to pierce the shield now. Nonsurvivable in five seconds, Spot said.
Dairine let go of the Sunstone, thrust her arm out into the fire, reached, felt around—
Her hand touched something that wasn’t plasma.
Dairine clutched it, desperate. Get us out! she screamed to Spot as all around a new wave of turbulence rose up around her as if from a sea suddenly agitated to storm.
The roaring scaled up once more until it obliterated everything. White fire utterly blinded her as the shield began to collapse.
She felt the familiar fizz of a last-ditch transit spell folding in around her. From light, everything abruptly flashed into darkness as a great burning winged shape came diving in past her through the corona and arrowed into the surface of the Sun as if into a pool.
Under Dairine the chromosphere heaved and rippled like the liquid it was. The enraged corona lashed at her as everything went black. And the last thing Dairine knew was the sense of something heavy, inescapable as gravity, dragging her down . . .
A bare moment later she came down on something hard and cold with a heavy weight clutched in her arms, crushing her. I can’t breathe. Am I in vacuum? But she didn’t care; the coldest vacuum to be found from one end of the universe to the other couldn’t have kept her from opening her eyes right then. Wheezing, her chest tight with fear or anoxia, she didn’t care which, Dairine opened her eyes to see what she held.
It was something in humanoid shape, long, lean, still afire with terrible light, too bright to look at—limbs splayed every which way, a heavy dead weight. Dairine gasped again, struggled up from beneath, desperately blinked her tearing eyes to try to see something besides a blur. As she tried to sit up, long hair fell into her face—sun-golden, silken fine. In anguished haste she pushed it away, squinting and wincing into the raging glow around what she held, trying to see something that mattered more than hair—a face, eyes with life in them, a chest with breath in it—
What Dairine held stirred weakly against her. She felt a heart beating, she heard a wheeze of breath. And now the tears in her eyes weren’t entirely to do with the light, though that blazed still. “Oh God!” she moaned, trying again to sit upright, but he was too heavy, and she was too tired all of a sudden, it was all hitting her at once . . .
An instant later there was a shape bending over her, even taller, nearly as lean after months of pain suffered for the one who’d been lost. He helped her with the weight, shifted it so that Dairine could at least sit up. Nelaid was holding her in one arm and his son in another, gasping with shock as awful as Dairine’s. He looked up into the dark of the space above the Moon and cried, “Miril!”
And barely a gasp later Roshaun’s mother was there in a spill of silver-fair hair, taking everything in, pulling off her long outer robe and wrapping her son in it. Roshaun shone through it like a candle. Nelaid and Miril bowed themselves over him, holding him tightly, shaking with their own anguish and relief. “He’s breathing,” the Lady Miril was whispering, “O Aethyrs be thanked, he’s breathing . . . !” And then she threw her arms around Dairine. “Daughter, he’s breathing, what did you do . . . ?”
“What I taught him,” Nelaid said, his voice muffled as he once more held his son close.
“What he taught me,” Dairine muttered, and rubbed at her eyes, still tearing uncontrollably. But it wasn’t so much because of the light now. That was slowly fading, and even through the blurring of her eyes Dairine could make out the long nose, the clean-cut features. There was a slight frown stamped on them.
Someone came astronaut-bouncing along toward them, a little clumsily. “Sorry,” Dairine’s dad said, thumping to his knees beside them, “I keep thinking I’m getting the hang of this and then I fall over again. Dair, what the hell was that, what did you just do there?”
“Got in trouble,” Dairine said between heaves of breath.
“You have no idea,” her dad said, “no idea how grounded you are!”
“Okay,” Dairine said, and fell over on him.
He caught her and held her in a way not too much different from the way Nelaid was holding Roshaun. Nelaid’s voice was choked. “Oh, my son, how are you even here, how does this come to be, what have you been doing?”
A long, long silence. And then, though his eyes stayed squeezed shut, then came words at last, raw and difficult, in a voice unused for so long:
“Holding . . . someone’s . . . place.”
“Take him home,” Dairine gasped. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“You will not,” her father said. “You will stay right here until Nel comes back for you.”
“Okay,” Dairine said, and slumped back onto her dad again.
“Nita? Kit!” she heard him shout.
“Roshaun,” Dairine said, and fainted with a smile on her face.
A crowd of medical wizards was already gathering around Roshaun and Dairine and Penn, Matt being one of the first to arrive. Nita knew she had nothing to add to their expertise: she stood back and let them get on with it. Besides, she was in a state of shock of her own, though she didn’t require medical assistance.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Oh, I can’t believe it—”
“I think you’d better,” Kit said behind her, hushed.
“But finally . . .” Nita said. So many of the things she’d seen in her head, the terrors, the things she didn’t understand: in terms of this, they made sense. This was what had been coming. This was what she had been afraid of—Wow, was I dim!
“So all that worrying you were doing,” Kit said, “turns out to have been for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” she said, so torn between annoyance and relief that she was having trouble pushing the words out. “For this. It was all part of the process. Everything counts.” Just for that moment, the vision was staggering, and Nita saw it whole; event and causality with joined hands, dancing, dipping each other, taking turns leading, deadly serious but laughing, too. It was too big for her to take in, but Nita knew suddenly that it wouldn’t always be. I’ll get the hang of this. It may take forever but it’s going to be so much fun when it isn’t scaring me to death . . .