THE DOOR INTO SHADOW
She walked away, then, and her companions stared after her. Their eyes on her retreating back were as unbearable as sun on blistered skin, but still she ignored them. The darkness beyond the camp began to swallow her.
(A nightmare has no weapon to use but your own darkness.) Herewiss's thought burst into her mind, cold and passionless as a knife. (Resist, and it only cuts deeper.) She kept walking.
(One night, 'Berend,) he ordered. (One night's pain is all we can spare you. We've lost too much time already. Be finished by dawn, or we won't wait.)
She shut him out and went off into the cool night, looking for an end.
Thirteen
"Well," the Goddess said, "your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time."
Children's Tales of North Arien, ed. s'Lange
How long she walked, she had no idea. The stony valley all looked the same. Eventually, she simply sat down and began to weep for life wasted.
Sometime later, the rocky night turned into the night that lay inside her, with stars showing through the great shaft in the roof of her cavern, and the much-muted song of the mdei-hei rumbling in the shadows. She didn't care about them in the slightest, or about the starlight, or the sound of the Sea, or the huge obscure shape of Hasai towering over her in the darkness. She sat hunched up and waited for life to go away.
It wouldn't, annoyance that it was. A solution occurred to her, but she had no energy for it. And anyway, everything she had ever done, she had botched — surely she'd mess up a suicide too. A life of study without use, learning without wis-dom, action without satisfaction, Power without focus, lust without love: What use was it? She sat there and tried to bleed to death through the wound above her heart. "You will not achieve death for some days yet," said the subdued voice of the Dragon above her, using the precogni-tive tense. Annoyed, she leaned back against the great forelimb gin-gerly, careful not to disturb the blood clotting on her breast. She closed her eyes, squeezing out useless hot tears. "Drop dead," she said. "We have done so."
"Try it again. You missed something the first time."
THE DOOR INTO SHADOW
"Speak for yourself, sdaha," the voice of thunder said. It had her own annoyance in it. Tonight, as occasionally happened, she didn't have to look
up at Hasai in order to see him. His eyes burned silver, but they burned low. His talons clenched the stone floor in a painful gesture that made her remember the cave at the Morrowfane.
"The nightmare spoke some truth," he said. "As with your Lovers, you will not permit us to have what we need, so that we, in turn, may give you what you need. You believe you must do everything yourself. But there is no such thing as perfect self-sufficiency, even among humans."
She shook her head, confused, thinking of what her father used to tell her: You'll never be able to depend on others, if you can't first depend on yourself.
Hasai winced at her in Dracon disagreement. "You cannot depend on yourself if you cannot first trust others." Segnbora sat still, trying to understand, but the words made no sense. Hasai gazed down without moving for a long while, and at last shuffled one huge forelimb back and forth along the floor. "We are you," he said with terrible intensity. "If you cannot trust us, your trust of yourself will be betrayed every time. Sdaha, hear me!" It was no use. It made no sense.
"Sdaha, " Hasai said, so low it could have passed for a whis-per. "What lies beneath your stone that you dare not lay open? What terrifies you so much that the Shadow would resurrect the memory in the hope that you would die of it?"
That got her attention. "It brought forth that memory be-cause it sees me as a threat. In a way that's good, I suppose. It means I may be able to do it some real harm at Bluepeak."
She leaned sideways and put one hand upon the stone at the bottom of her mind. It burned hot as flesh beneath a half-healed wound, warning her off. Her insides flinched at the touch of it, and she began to tremble.
Pain experienced stops hurting, she knew. The mdeihei had taught her that. There was another reason to look below the stone, too: The Shadow had found her weak spot. If she didn't deal with it now, it would strike her there again, perhaps at Bluepeak. And how could she betray Lorn at a moment when he would need her the most? She couldn't. She couldn't see
her friends' lives lost, her liege-oath broken, the Kingdoms foundering for lack of the Royal Bindings. . She smashed one fist down on the stone. Damn! Damn! "Taueh-sta 'ae mnek kej!"
"Mdaha," she said, shaking all over. Slowly, she leaned forward until she was on her hands and knees over the stone. "Mdeihei— " They leaned in close, the huge form above her, the many indistinct forms in the shadows. She reached behind her, to-> ward Hasai. Wings reached down to shelter her, but it wasn't shelter she was interested in. Her hand found the burning mouth, and jaws closed over it. She pulled those wings down around her, into her, wore them and their body and their heart.
Under the stone, darkness burned. She cocked forward the terrible diamond razors of the wings' forefingers, intent on the place where her deepest anguish lay. "My mdeihei, this is what you wanted. And what I want now. If we die of it. ."
A roar of defiance and challenge went up from the gathered generations. "Mnek-6, " she whispered, / remember. Her talons raked down and laid her soul bare at last. Stone peeled away, and her control went with it. Night fell. .
Her nuncle, of course. Nuncle Bal was in and out of the old house at Asfahaeg all the time, busy around the land — gar-dening, cutting trees, planting new ones. She had watched him about his business often enough, and sometimes she had noticed him looking at her for a long time.