— and a sore throat from much howling. Now he sat under an alder with Khavrinen flaming in his lap, meditating; for hours he hadn't moved, gazing across at the Fane with an expression that was half wonder and half fear. Harald and Moris had been keeping so close to one another that one might have thought they had been lovers for only a week or so, rather than several years. Dritt and Lang had become almost obsessive about caring for their horses, and the otherwise fearless Lang had been looking over his shoulder a great deal. Even Sunspark, while in its horse-shape, had been cribbing quietly at an elm tree, leaving small scorched places bitten out of the bark.
She laughed at herself then, a mere breath of merriment. And me. All this time on the trail, all this time I've been a hunted woman — look what kind of watch I'm keeping. My back turned to open country, where Goddess knows what could be coming up from behind — and me sitting here staring at this silly kill as if it's going to jump out of the water and come after me! Yet that silent benevolence kept watching her, kept waiting.
She shivered with expectation. Practically at the same mo-ment, a clear melodious sound like the night Ending its voice rose up in the distance — then was joined in the long note by another voice wavering downward a third, and yet another, higher by a fourth. The unsettling harmony sent a delighted shiver down her spine. The wolves were on post as their rearguard, singing to while away the watch. The Goddess's dogs, she thought, the old affectionate name for them — votaries who sang to Her mirror, the Moon, through all its phases, silent only when She was dark and dangerous. Where is the Moon tonight, Segnbora wondered,
glancing upward. It had not yet risen. But she was distracted, as always, with the sight of the first few stars pointing through the twilight, and the memory they always recalled. How old was I? she wondered, but wondering was vain. Very small, she had been — small enough to still be wearing a shift instead of a kilt, but large enough to push open the front door of the old house at Asfahaeg and escape at bedtime. She had gone out into the dark, unsure just what she was looking for, then had glanced up and found something, a marvel. Not just sunset, or dusk, or dark, but a sky burning with lights, every one solitary and glorious; and she knew, small as she was, that somehow or other she and those lights were intimately connected.
Now she knew them as stars, knew their names, knew about the Dragons that had come from among them, and about the Goddess Who had made them. But the wonder had never left Segnbora: that desire to get closer to those lights that called her — and, eventually, closer to the One Who had made the stars. When the Rodmistresses tested her at the age of three and found the Fire, she had been overjoyed. Everybody knew that when you had the Flame, you often got to talk to Her.
But years of study had failed her; school after school had been unable to provide her with a focus strong enough to channel the huge outflow of her Power — and so there had been no breakthrough, and no truedreams in which She walked. After much bitter time she had admitted the truth to herself, that she was one of those who was never going to focus. She might as well give up sorcery and lore and Flame and all the other timewasting for something useful, as her father had always said.
So it was that she had met the Goddess at. last. She was good with Charriselm; she went looking for a job as a guard in a little Steldene town called Madeil — and found Freelorn in the mucky alley behind a tavern. Later, fleeing from an old keep in which the aroused Steldenes had laid siege to them, the group had come across a little fieldstone inn on the border between Steldin and the Waste. It was strange that there should, have been an inn out there at the very edge of human habitation, but the innkeeper had put them all at ease. Find
ing that they were short of money, she offered to share herself with one of them to settle the scot. A common enough ar-rangement, and
Segnbora had won the draw for the privilege. It had been a sweet evening. The innkeeper had been fair, but there was more to her beauty than that. A long while they sat together by the window of Segnbora's little room, she and a white-shifted shadow veiled in hair like the night, talking and breathing the apple-blossom scent while the full Moon went softly up the sky. The talk drifted gradually to matters that Segnbora usually kept deeply hidden — old joys, old pains
— while the brown-and-beige-banded pottery cup went back and forth between them, filled with a wine like summer wind running sweet under starlight.
I'm talking a great deal, Segnbora had thought, not so much frightened by the intimacy as bemused. The wine— But the wine was not intoxicating her; she was seeing and feeling, if anything, more clearly than usual. Shivering with delight at the feeling of magic in the air, she drank deep of the cup, deeply enough to drain it… and found it still three-quarters full. Two hours we've been drinking from this cup, she realized, and she only Jilled it once.
She looked across at the other, then, and realized Who had come to share Herself with her, as She conies to every man and woman bom, once before they die. Not Mother now, as she had been at dinner, feeding them all and gossiping about the Kingdoms, but the aspect of the Goddess she loved best
— Maiden about to be Bride, Creatress about to create some-thing as beautiful as the multitude of stars. Back and forth a few more times that cup went, while Segnbora drank deep of building joy and anticipation, and named the Other's name, and saw her joy reflected a hundredfold, a thousandfold, in-calculably.
Then she went to bed. And was joined by warmth that enfolded, and lips that spoke her name as if she was the only thing in creation. She was intensely loved; and was given to drink of that other cup that briins ovei forever, the endless source. She drowned, eternally it seemed, in the deep slow bliss of her own deity, and the Other's. .