All light suddenly drained from the sky. The chariot team quivered the length of their bodies and stopped still. The whole scene seemed to congeal in soundless stasis. It brought Raldnor from his thoughts. He glanced upward through the carved boughs into a breathless mahogany overcast. Not a whisper of wind or rustle of life. It occurred to him that there seemed to be no birds. Then the light blackened totally and was gone; the sun had been put out. In the preternatural midnight, a gust of primeval terror swept over him. It had nothing to do with actual fear. It was something older, more intrinsic.
His head ringing with silence, he jumped from the chariot and slashed the team free. They ran at once, their shod pads making no noise.
The thunder came then. Not from the sky. It was under his feet.
The grass parted without wind. The trees began to creak and shake their leaden flags. The earth pitched. He was thrown against iron limbs a moment, but the ground was trembling and sliding. He rolled helpless across a landscape upset on its side. A large cibba sprang up with a victorious scream and appeared to bound in great hops across the forest floor. Other trees fell in ranks. He could not rise. He lay scrabbling at the soil like a terrified animal. There was nowhere to run or to hide.
The last spasm, when it came, was almost gentle. It rolled, like a sea wave, languidly, over the ground, and settled.
He lay there, holding on to the still land with his hands. Presently he got to his feet and spat earth from his mouth. He might have been in a different place. Dragon oaks leaned sideways; others lay across their own chasmic uprootings. One had smashed the back of his chariot.
He began to walk through the leveled forest as the sky lightened to cinnamon. He negotiated fallen things and the places where the rock had split and spewed up underlying humus.
There was a clearing ahead of him, a clearing that had not been there before. He glimpsed what remained of a chariot and its team. A man lay on his side—dead. There was a woman standing not far off. It was so dark still that he did not make out the color of her hair until he was near.
Her face was like parchment, her eyes wide open and completely blank. She might have been dead though still somehow standing, like the warriors in ancient Vis tombs. In a moment of enraged sanity he wondered where in damnation were the captains he had sent after her. He stopped half a yard away and said: “Princess.” She did not answer or look at him. “Are you hurt?” he said. She had never been so physically close to him; neither had he seen her so empty. She had seemed before only vacuous, hidden away, closed in, but now she was hollowed out. She might have been cauterized to her very soul. It was no longer applicable to treat her as something royal and untouchable, though any man who laid a finger on her, without prior consent by the Storm Lord, would lose the hand as well. That was their law. But this was only a woman, a living creature in need. He put his hands on her shoulders, but her eyes did not even flicker.
Conscious of holding back his strength, he slapped her face, then caught her as the blow toppled her. He felt all her sinews loosen, and so continued to hold her up. Her eyelids fluttered. The film left her eyes, and suddenly she was back inside them, looking out.
“I’ve never seen death before,” she said in a cool and rational voice. “They kept it from me.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked her again.
“No. I am alive.”
He knew from her tone she meant something other.
A growl of storm thunder ripped the shattered clouds. The sky began to weep, a long drowning sheet of cold tears.
“Who are you?” she asked suddenly.
With a certain irony he said: “The Commander of your highness’s personal guard.”
The rain beat down. Her fabulous hair seemed full of fires.
He had never thought to desire her before. She was too beautiful, too unalive. But now, still holding her shoulders in the lashing rain, he met for the first time, and fully, those unsurpassable wells of her eyes. And though her face still reflected serene abstraction, there came a thrust of pure ego in him—his reaction to her and against her. And abruptly he had bridged the depths of her eyes and found their floor, and she was in his skull like a flame and he in hers.
There was a moment of shock and utter fear between them both, but each knew the other totally.
She said aloud: “How—?”
“You know.”
“Wait—” she cried out, “wait—” But there was a wild joy in her face, and in her mind a conflagration. He knew all the internment as she had known it, as she knew all of his.
He pulled her against him and she moved to him as frenziedly. The longing came swift and devouring and fed on itself in each of them.
In the black ruin of the forest, under the spinning sky, they came together in a coupling like beasts in the aftermath of horror, and as if they had awaited it all their lives, like the last man and the last woman in the world.
The pulse of the rain had slackened.
He looked at her face and said softly: “This was insane. Anyone could have come here and found us. I shouldn’t have exposed you to risk like that.”
She smiled.
“You didn’t think of it. Neither did I.”
There stirred between them that communion given to their minds. He kissed her mouth and lifted her to her feet. He might have known her always, she him. The visions of her life before were nebulous, locked in; she had experienced no great yearnings or doubts. His own ambitions, dreads, desires had faded. At this moment she was all he wanted. He could not see beyond it.
“We could find a wagon in the hills, travel over the mountains like peasants. We’d be safe in Thaddra,” he said.
“They’d find us,” she said.
“What then? What? Amrek takes you and I waste my life in his armies.”
“For now,” she said, “for me, this is enough. I have no gods, but She, perhaps, will help you.”
Knowing everything, she knew also his race. He did not fear her knowledge or resent it. In a way, she had made him back into what he was, but it was the best of him, not the least.
There came a shout from the trees. It came from another planet. He did not at first believe in it. But she cast at him one long glance, full of sadness and regret. And then they were apart and she was quite still, an icon again, the nadir of her eyes dissolved once more in subterranean amber.
Four of Kathaos’s men had found them. They looked askance at Raldnor, embarrassed that they had known him before his circumstances altered. A captain of the Wolves was with them; the other two were dead, crushed in the deep gut of an earth crack.
She looked no different when she mounted the chariot and was driven away. Only the echo of her thoughts remained, like music carried on the wind.
Seven milk-white cows were slaughtered before the altars of the Storm gods. Did the steaming blood appease their anger? Who knew for sure, though the auguries improved when groped for in the entrails.
Half a forest felled, great rocks displaced. Ibron had boiled like a caldron.
For the most part Koramvis had escaped. Some dwellings in the lower city came down and a whorehouse, killing ten of its best girls. It was a religious city for many days.
Kathaos, sitting in his carved chair, an open book before him, let them wait a little, shuffling their feet; let them see, these two dragon soldiers, that it was not his custom to give time to such as they. In the corners twilight thickened stealthily.