Liar's Oath

Chapter Eighteen

The light strengthened, spread around them. “Well met, kinsmen!” came a ringing cry, so like the iynisin that Aris flinched. Then he realized that this held the true music.

“Elves,” whispered Seri. “But we aren’t their kinsmen—”

“Those are,” Aris said, fighting for breath. The aftereffects of healing clogged his mind; he wanted to fall in a heap and sleep. “The iynisin—” But the elves were dropping lightly down from above now, bringing their own light, in which their expressions showed clearly: astonishment and consternation.

“But you’re not—” said the first, then his mouth shut in a straight line.

“Who are you?” asked the next, after a similar look and recoil. “How have you made that light? Is this some new human magery? Are you in league now with the dark cousins?”

Aris had not known he could make such light, and now he did not know why it vanished, with a sudden shifting of shadows. “I am mageborn,” he said. “But—”

“I am not mageborn,” Seri interrupted. “I am a Marshal-candidate, from Fin Panir, and I have no idea why the light came.” She still burned with it, brighter than their elflight but as steady. “But we are not in league with those creatures; they attacked us as we camped.”

“In truth . . .” What must be the leader of this group appeared now, striding down the slope and around to confront them. Elflight, Aris realized, cast none of the harsh shadows his magelight had thrown; its radiance softened the shadows of Seri’s light, though it did not dim its brilliance “You say you were attacked, by many?”

“Yes.” Seri said. Aris glanced about but saw no bodies. He thought he had killed at least one of those he struck from behind . . . had they carried them away?

“If you were attacked,” the elf leader said with such perfect clarity that it seemed an attack of language, “then why do we see blood only on your blades and clothes, while you stand unwounded? Or are you such mighty warriors that you can without danger engage a party of iynisin which might daunt even our band? For that matter, where learned you that name, which is not commonly used by mortal men?”

Around them now were the elves, all armed for battle as he had never seen elves: terrible and grim they looked, in the light of their magery He saw some of them look at the trees the iynisin had cursed, and knew they would not forgive such an injury. He heard the cries of one who found their horses, and sang the news to the leader in that elvish tongue he had not learned. They will not believe us, he thought to himself. Here we are unhurt—they will believe we were with allies. His heart contracted. The elves had never loved or trusted the mageborn, and with good reason.

“Aris healed us,” Seri said. She wiped her blade on a hanging shred of her tonic. “If you look, you will see he could not heal our clothes.” Then she looked more closely at the smear on the cloth. “By—it has silver in it, this blood! Or is it your light?”

“Let me see,” said the leader, stepping closer to her. He held out his hand for her sword; she handed it over as if to a Marshal, hilt first, across her fist. His brows rose, but he took it courteously, then looked closely, then sniffed it. “Well,” he said. “It is indeed iynisin blood, lady, so whether it came from a quarrel among friends or a meeting of enemies, we give you thanks for it.” He passed the sword to the others, each of whom examined it. The leader looked at Aris. “You healed, she said. You have the healing magery of your forefathers?”

“Yes, sir,” Aris said. He held out his own blade. “And though I fought with less skill, I did spill some of their blood.” His blade, too, the leader took and examined, then returned it, as another elf handed Seri back her blade. Aris wiped his own, and sheathed it, under those watchful eyes. When he looked up, the elf spoke.

“So you would say that you and this lady were beset by iynisin, and fought them off, and you with your power healed your wounds?”

“That is what happened, yes.”

“A mageborn and a peasant together? A peasant with the power to call light? And it happens that iynisin come upon you in this place?”

Aris had no chance to answer; Seri broke in. “Yes, that is true. We came from Fin Panir, to—” She stopped, and glanced at Aris. What they had been discussing was no business of elves. The elf waited, brows raised.

“Seri and I were friends before we came to Fin Panir,” Aris said. “Before Gird died. I came to ask him to allow me to use my magery to heal, and he granted that, but put us both in training there. We have little time together—”

“So you rode a day’s journey away to find privacy?” The elf’s question implied only one use of such privacy.

“No, we’re on a longer journey.” Aris gestured to his pack, which one elf was examining with care. “I have been granted permission to travel, and test my healing in other places; Seri is my—well—supervisor. The Council wishes a peasant-born to make sure I don’t misuse my powers.”

“They let a friend have this right?”

“I’m a Marshal-candidate,” Seri said. In her voice was the certainty that a Marshal-candidate would tolerate no misdoings from anyone, least of all a friend.

“And his lover.”

“No.” Seri shook her head. “We have never been lovers; we don’t need to be lovers.”

“Ah. Rare in humans, though I have heard of it. Well, then, young mortals who are not lovers, can you explain how you called upon yourselves the malice of iynisin, or why you called on us with your light? We thought it was elflight, and you beleaguered elves: we came to your aid. We had seen magelight before—” Here the elf looked at Aris. “We would not have come for that, but this light—” he gestured at Seri. “—is something we do not know and mixed with yours might be elflight.” This time more gently, he asked her. “Are you sure you do not know how you called it?”

In that lessening of tension, with the elf’s change of tone, Aris felt exhaustion sapping his strength again. Only immediate danger could keep him alert now, after such a day and night, after the healing power he had poured out. He heard Seri’s explanation through a thick fog, and only realized he had fallen when someone caught him. Not Seri; he knew her hands. These were as alien as tree limbs: cold, strong, but not ungentle.

“—He’s like this after healing sometimes,” he heard her say. “Keep him warm—” He could not argue, but he could hear what they said, as they wrapped him in a blanket and laid him aside, while the leader still talked to Seri, and one of them stirred the fire and set the kettle back on it.

He listened to the voices, their sweet chiming voices and Seri’s warm, practical peasant burr, comfortable as an animal’s shaggy hide. She said nothing about Luap, but talked freely about her own training, Aris’s training, the changes of policy that everyone discussed. Gird’s legacy had been a government with few secrets, its issues argued openly in every market in Fintha. When the kettle boiled, he was able to drink a mug of the hot herbal brew, which opened his eyes and let him see that Seri’s light had, at some point, gone out. Or back. She was telling the elf leader exactly what the iynisin had said, word for word as far as Aris could tell, and then describing the fight.

“I thought Ari had been killed; I’d been forced far enough away that I saw one sword go in—so I ran for the rockface. That way I had something at my back.”

The elf leader nodded. “Wise—and this is your first real battle?”

“Yes . . . in the war, we were too young to do more than camp chores.”

More raised brows. “You were too young to do camp chores, unless I read your age wrongly. But didn’t you know your—Aris?—could heal his wounds?”

Seri shook her head. Her braid had come completely undone, and her hair looked like a wavering dark cloud. “No—he’d never healed himself before. We thought it worked only on others. When I saw him get up, I was as surprised as the iynisin. More, because they hadn’t seen him; he came up behind them.”

“I know why we didn’t know I could,” Aris said. His mind had caught hold of its familiar net of thought. They all turned to look at him. “It hurts—and the one time I tried it, that time I cut my hand on the sickle—”

“I remember,” Seri said. “He was cutting wild grass for Gird’s army,” she said to the elves.

“—I thought to try it and it hurt a lot. So I quit.”

“But it didn’t hurt me,” Seri said. “Or any of the others.”

“No, and I think I understand that, too. You see—”

“Not now, Ari.” Seri smiled to take the sting out of that. “You’re not all the way awake yet.” He was, but he wouldn’t argue with her. If she wanted him to think it out somewhere else than with elves, he would. He sipped the bitter brew again, and wondered where her light had gone, and even more where it had come from. She shouldn’t have been able to do that.

“What do you, young mortal, think of your friend’s light?” That was the elf leader, pointing to him. Aris, in the midst of another sip, almost choked, and put the mug down.

“I don’t know. I didn’t know she could do it—I never heard of anyone coming alight but mageborn, and not all of them. And as you saw, her light was not the same color as mine.”

“And you, she says, did not call light before: why this night, and not others? Did you never before need to see your way in the dark?” The sarcasm of the second question almost confused his answer to the first; perhaps Seri was right, and his wits lay more scattered than he thought. He hesitated, trying to gather them, before he answered, but the elves did not seem impatient. Only interested.

“We needed to see,” he said finally. “Other times—it might have been useful, but I didn’t really need it. Here—we felt the evil coming—”

“Did you call on the gods for aid?”

Had they? He could not quite remember. There had been a voice in his head—“Father Gird,” he said. His voice chimed with Seri’s, saying the same thing.

The elf leader frowned. “You’re Gird’s children? I thought only one of his children lived, a grown woman.”

“Not really his children,” Seri said, trying without success to smooth her hair. “But we called him Father Gird. Not to his face, it wouldn’t have been respectful, but with each other.”

“How old were you, when you left your homes?”

Aris tried to think. He wasn’t entirely sure; the mageborn and the peasants reckoned age differently. “I had lost my front teeth,” he said slowly. “I suppose we were—” He held up his hand. “—about this tall.”

“Children!” the elf said. The elves spoke softly in their own language, a murmuring ripple, then the leader said, “So you called Gird your father?”

“Lots of people called him Father Gird,” Seri said. “Or Gran’ther Gird.”

“And you believe he spoke to you in your peril? How do you explain that?” Aris could not explain that, or the recurrent dreams he and Seri had had since Gird died. He shook his head. The elves spoke again to one another, and he tried to make sense of the beautiful sounds. He wished they would sing; he had heard elves sing at Gird’s funeral.

He woke just at dawn, to find the elves standing in a circle around the two of them. Their elflight had drawn in around them, leaving Aris and Seri to the dawnlight. Seri looked as sleepy as he felt; in the cold predawn light, the dried blood on her clothes looked like smears of black mud. Aris scrambled up, uncertain of many things. The elven leader neither smiled nor frowned.

“We have no memory of any such as you,” he said. “The blending of your lights last night . . . this is new. In all our memory, none of this lady’s race has ever called such light, and we know no other living person with the magery among the mageborn.” He looked at the cluster of trees, motionless now in their posture of anguish, blackened as if burnt, leafless, the ground beneath them ash-gray. “And there is the work of the iynisin, the un-singers, those who hate the living trees for the One Tree’s choice. We found their blood on your blades . . . and I say we do not understand. We knew Gird, but we do not know you.” The elves came together; their light brightened so that Aris could hardly see their faces. “We do not condemn you, for the iynisin blood you shed. But we do not commend you, for those trees which the iynisin blasted, and the creatures dead with them, and the spring now tainted. Heal that, if you can—if not, you have a long journey afoot, and the gods will deal with you.”

The elves vanished, withdrawing their light with them; where they went, Aris could not see in the glare of the risen sun. He blinked; Seri came to him and put an arm around his shoulders. She was shivering; they both were. Around them, the new grass sprang, somewhat trampled but green and healthy; it stretched to the edge of the hollow. But the trees, and under the trees—all that was dead, not only dead but a death that held no promise of rebirth. Aris felt his mouth dry with fear as much as thirst. How could he heal that?

Gingerly, they moved into the twisted shadows of those twisted trees. The earth beneath felt dead, as if they walked on salt or iron filings. When they came to the horses—what had been the horses—Seri gave a choked cry and ran forward. Whatever magery the iynisin used had killed them as well, drawing them into strange unhorselike shapes as it worked, leaving the dead bodies hardly recognizable, the very hairs of mane and tail stiff as thorns. Aris moved past the horses to the spring, which the evening before they could have heard bubbling from here.

In its hollow, a plug of dirty wet earth like mucus, and a thin black stain along the line of the beck. It stank of death and decay, as disgusting a smell as the shambles in the lower market. Aris prodded the sodden earth with a stick that shattered in his hand. He was going to have to dig it out with his fingers. He shuddered; he did not want to touch the oozing slime. Behind him, he could hear Seri’s boots scuffing the dead earth, the shriveled leaves. She was probably trying to do something about the horses, but he knew he had to clear the spring first. That was the earth’s lifeblood.

He laid his hand just above the lowest part of the spring’s hollow, trying not to smell it, and tried to feel his way into it. Nothing. Grimacing, Aris plunged his fingers into the cold, slimy mess and tugged. It felt worse than anything he’d ever touched. Gobs of cold stinking goo came off; he wiped the stuff from his hands on the ground beside the spring and reached in again. It’s cursed, he thought to himself. There’s nothing healthy in there at all; it’s all gone wrong. Something warmer than the rest wriggled against his fingers and he almost cried out; when he yanked his hand free this time, he saw a dank tendril pull itself back into the muck.

Seri’s hand on his shoulder felt as hot as a firebrand. “I hope Father Gird knows what he’s doing,” she said.

“He didn’t do this,” Aris said, wiping his hand on the dry earth again, and wishing he didn’t have to put it back in there with whatever that was. “The iynisin did this.” And us, he thought, because we came out here not knowing what we were doing.

“Can you heal it?” Seri asked, as calmly as if she were asking if someone could weave a fircone pattern.

“I’m trying,” Aris said, putting his hand back on the damp hole. Was it any less slimy? Could he feel even a trickle of something that might be clean water?

“It doesn’t look like it.” Seri’s face, when he glanced at her, gave no hint to any other meaning than the words themselves. “It looks as if you’re digging muck out of a smelly hole—not healing a spring.”

Aris felt a blinding rage, a white hot boiling fire that nearly escaped through his teeth. He clenched them, and looked at her through the flickering blaze. Her calm face . . . her eyes that were not looking at him, or the spring, or anything else. He saw the tears rise, glittering, in the early sun, and overflow; she did not even try to blink them away. His rage fled as suddenly as it had come. When he could get his breath back, he said “I can’t reach my magery. You’re right—I’m just digging and hoping.”

“Aris!” She threw her arms around him so suddenly and so tightly that he lost his balance and they both nearly fell into the spring’s hollow. “I’m frightened. I don’t know what this means, what the iynisin were doing, what the elves meant—and the horses are dead and all the trees and there’s no water and—”

She had never been frightened but once that he knew of; he had always relied on her. She had been awake last night when the iynisin came; she had fought with far more skill than he . . . and now she lay against him, shuddering all over like a frightened child. As they both were, he realized.

“I am too,” he said. He could not even stroke her hair, not with his hands soiled by whatever curse the iynisin had laid on the spring. “I am, and I don’t know what to do about it.” For a long moment they huddled together. Oddly, saying aloud that he was frightened made the fright more manageable. It wasn’t some nameless horror, some impossible alien presence: it was fright, the same ordinary fright that he had felt before in his life, worse perhaps because they were in real and not imagined danger.

As he thought this, warmth seemed to flow over him. He glanced up. The sun had risen well above the lip of the hollow by now, and its power seemed no less than it should be. He was frightened, hungry, tired . . . but alive, and warmer every moment. He shifted, and Seri too sat up.

“How silly,” she said. “So that’s what that kind of fright feels like. Ugh!” She shivered, but more as someone who steps unaware on spilled water than fear. “And it seemed to go on forever, but it couldn’t have. . . .”

“No.” Aris’s hands had nearly dried. He looked at the moist hole, the gobs of wet muck he had torn out. “I wonder why I thought that would work. You were right; it needs real healing. And I can’t.”

“What if they come again?” Seri said. “It’s daylight now; supposedly they can’t come in daylight, but—”

Aris spread his dirty hands. “I don’t know. We’ll fight, I suppose, and if that’s not enough, we’ll die.” Until he heard the words come out of his mouth, he did not know how serious he was. They might die; they might have died last night and if the iynisin came back they probably would. He didn’t think the elves would come back to help them.

Suddenly it seemed ludicrous. Yesterday they had been eager to leave Fin Panir, eager to ride out into the unknown and find adventure, and all in one night they’d had more adventure than he had ever imagined. And he was tired, hungry, filthy, and quite ready to spend the rest of his days playing scribe to Luap, if only he could get back there.

Or was he? He met Seri’s eyes, to find the same speculative look coming back at him. She, too, had gotten more than she bargained for, but now she was coming to grips with it. He didn’t want to go back and be Luap’s scribe, the tame healer of the safe city, doling out dollops of power to close cuts and ease bruises and mend the odd broken bone. It wasn’t contempt for those sick or hurt . . . it was simply that others could do that. Herblore and time would heal most of it, and the healers he’d been training could do the rest. No—he wanted to find out if there was something only he could do. He had wanted a challenge, and here it was, and he wanted to meet it. He felt a smile stretch his grimy face. Seri grinned back.

“We were idiots,” she said. “We came out here expecting nothing worse than a stray thief, when we knew—we should have known—that these empty lands are empty for a reason. We were playing at being careful, and it nearly killed us. It’s not maneuvers: it’s real.”

“Right.” Aris stood up. The spring still stank; the trees still arched in anguish over them. “So how much water was left in the kettle when the elves left?” Very little, it turned out. Aris sloshed it thoughtfully back and forth, and did not pour it into the mug Seri held. “Wait,” he said. “I’m thinking of something. Let’s go up and see if there’s dew on the grass.”

Out of the hollow, the wide plain lay lush and green; the dew they could lick from the grass refreshed without satisfying. Aris looked back. In full daylight, the hollow looked even worse. They could not leave it like that, even though it meant spending another night far from any settlement. He hoped the dead trees would burn.

The column of smoke rose, oily and rank, from the dead horses and twisted trees. They had lighted it from their campfire, after carrying their remaining gear, including the kettle with its swallow or two of water, up out of the hollow. Seri, who had served with her grange’s fire patrol, had told Aris which way it would burn, sunsetting, away from the city.

“And this season, with the new green, it should not go far, and be no worse than a storm-lighted fire.”

It looked worse; the trees writhed in the fire as if they were still alive, popping and cracking and showering sparks. The smoke twisted, billowed, clear evidence to anyone as far as the horizon that something dire had happened. A back gust whirled it up Aris’s nose; he coughed and shook his head. They waited; the fire burned away from them at last, the trees shattering into fallen coals. Without their shape, the hollow looked naked, vulnerable. Aris whispered an apology without realizing he’d done it until Seri looked at him.

“I was thinking of the Lady, of Alyanya,” he said. “You remember what you told me, long ago—that the springs are sacred because that’s where she gives her blood to the world?”

“Yes.” Seri’s ash-streaked face looked years older than the day before. He thought his probably did too. “And defiling a spring is like raping the earth itself. And all we can do is burn—” Her voice broke.

Aris looked away, blinking back his own tears. His gaze followed the smoke column into the sky; he grieved at its stain on what had been clean blue from one rim of the world to the other. It rose more gracefully now that it had consumed most of its tainted fuel, its black ugliness paling to gray as it burned slowly along the grass. “Come with me,” he said finally, taking the kettle and starting back down the slope toward what had been trees.

“Wait, Ari—it’s too hot.” Seri caught at his arm. Then as if she had touched his mind instead, she moved with him. They said nothing more, even when the heat of fire beat on their faces, even when the coals they could not avoid scorched their boots. Aris found the spring’s deep hollow surrounded by smoldering logs; he kicked one aside and knelt on the hot soil. The spring’s outlet, first plugged by the iynisin’s foulness, had burnt to a solid cake of muck in the fire. Aris tipped the kettle, as carefully as if pouring into a tiny cup. He knew no words to say, but he heard Seri chanting.

The first drop of water seemed to hang long in midair, sparkling in the light of the sun like a great jewel. Aris watched it hit the center of the original spring. It sat on the surface a moment, then made a tiny round spot of darkness. The next fell, and the next. Aris strained to hold the kettle steady, to have each drop fall exactly on the one before. He knew that was important, though not why. The sound of each drop falling echoed in his ears, as if they were hoofbeats, drumbeats, the tramp of armies . . . he had to keep the pattern, make the intervals regular. Drop by drop, he emptied the kettle and the dry, baked earth clogging the spring absorbed it.

When the last drop had fallen, and nothing happened, he started to shrug and stand. Then he felt his power return, as unaccountably as it had vanished. His hands itched and stung, he held them out over the single drop of moisture. Seri’s hands gripped his shoulders; he felt her as a great reservoir of power, and drew upon it, trying to force a way past the obstruction. But it was like trying to heal a block of stone; he could tell he was doing something wrong. He sat back on his heels, enduring the torment of his unused power.

Then he realized . . . he had been trying his peoples’ way, using force where violation had been the original wound. How could he use his power without repeating that violation? He tried to imagine it trickling out, as the water had, drop by drop, to be absorbed or not, as the spring—as the Lady chose. He cupped his hand gently over the damp spot, protecting it from the sun, the hot acrid air. A gust of cooler air brushed along his face. He looked up.

The smoke had shifted shape with the change in wind. Now it arched over him—over the spring—in almost the shape of a great gray horse. Gird? he thought. It could not be Gird’s old horse . . . it was just smoke on the wind.

Thunder muttered; Seri’s grip on his shoulders tightened. Another gust of cold wind made his skin roughen; he felt a sudden weakness as his power surged out of him as uncontrollably as a lightning bolt. He squeezed his eyes shut; when he opened them, rain stung his face. The sky had darkened, one of the spring storms, he thought, coming up unseen in the shadow of the smoke. Lightning flashed, so near that light and sound came together: he felt his teeth jar together. Rain fell harder, hissing on the hot coals that had been trees. Steam rose in swirls, blown by the wind. Perhaps the rain would waken the spring, when he had not. He huddled with Seri under the storm’s lash, until it cleared as suddenly as it had begun. The last of the raindrops sank into that sterile soil; the surface seemed to dry almost instantly.

He felt a great tearing sadness. They had cleansed with fire, and the rain with water; he knew nothing else to do. He blinked the rain out of his lashes and looked up.

The horse standing across the hole that had once been a spring did not look like Gird’s horse. It seemed made of air and cloud, storm and smoke, all the colors of the sky, and all the power of thunder. Its dark muzzle snuffed at the dry hole; its eyes accused. Aris found himself talking to it as if it were mortal.

“The iynisin cursed it; we tried to cleanse and heal . . . but I don’t know how.”

A sound between snort and grunt: a challenge. The delicate nostrils widened, sniffed at him, and over his shoulder to Seri. Then, with deliberation, one forefoot went into the hole. Aris could not see how deep; he could not look away from those eyes. He saw the quick withdrawal of the hoof, a flurry of mane and tail, then nothing as a final clap of thunder shook him to his face.

No rain followed: the sky arched unclouded overhead, with the sun halfway down the afternoon sky. In the arch of the hoofprint, as they watched, the damp earth darkened, sifted downward, and a line of silver appeared: the sky reflected in living water. Slowly, steadily, it widened to a circle, and the circle lifted to fill the hole. Aris felt something in himself that echoed that movement, something filling a hole he had not known was empty.

“Aris, look!” Seri tugged at his shoulder. He turned. Where there had been blasted, sterile soil, covered with ashes and the burnt remnants of trees, a few green leaves showed. It could not be; it was too soon. But there they were, looking exactly like young sprouts anywhere. Aris touched one lightly; he felt only the surging growth of a healthy young seedling just emerging from its sleep.

Seri reached back to touch the water in the spring; he wanted to stop her but was too late. She put her wet finger to her forehead, then the nearest seedling. “Alyanya’s grace,” she said. Aris echoed her. Whatever else had happened, Alyanya had chosen to restore her spring. The spring gurgled suddenly, almost a chuckle of amusement and content; its water overflowed the central hole and swept down the little channel, sweeping away ash and sticks. Aris wondered if they dared drink from it, or if that would be sacrilege; Seri had no such doubts, and with another brief prayer sank the kettle in the deepest part of the spring. “She doesn’t want us dying of thirst and making another mess,” Seri said. “Drink your fill.”

The water tasted of water, clean and pure as any springwater. Aris drank, and let it wash away the night’s fear, the day’s frustrations. When they had had enough, they went back to the gear they had left above the hollow. Not all had been destroyed in the fight, or in the fire; they had food enough for a day or so, and a change of clothes. Aris went to fetch another kettle of water, and found that the spring had swept the old channel clear as far as the deeper pool where they’d watered their horses the day before. He called Seri; they took turns bathing, with the other keeping watch above the hollow, and changed into clean clothes. Seri had washed her hair; it lay slicked to her head, braided tightly. Aris looked at the blood-stained rents in the clothes he’d been wearing. It was hard to believe that blood was his, that he had been wounded there, and there, and there, and yet was walking around in the sun with no wounds upon him.

“We should wash those before we mend them,” Seri said, “but I don’t know if it’s right—”

“She’s brought the water back, and its—she might see it as another gift, our blood.”

“It’s smelly dirt, is what it is,” Seri said. Aris looked at her, surprised. He had said something like that, long ago, when she’d tried to explain her peoples’ rituals in building or reaping. Now she wrinkled her nose at him. “All right. I know better. But washing dirty clothes is not the same as ritually blooding a foundation.”

“It might be, if we thought of it that way,” Aris said.

“It’s not the same. Else anyone could treat a spring as a common washpot, and claim to have a ritual in mind.” She shook her head, and the first tendrils of her braid came loose. “But—we need to do it, and we’d best get on with it.”

In the cold water of the larger pool, the dried blood melted into faint pink streaks and left rusty stains on the cloth. A smell of blood rose more strongly as the water soaked into the stains. Aris scrubbed at the gray shirt, the gray trousers, the blue tunic . . . he had bled more than he’d realized, and felt almost faint thinking of it. He did not look too closely at Seri’s washing; he didn’t want to know how much she had bled. Finally they had all the blood out that would come out, and wrung the clothes as dry as they could. Aris watched the clean springwater cut through the hazy pink, watched it clear gradually, in ripples and swirls, the last taint of blood from the pool. Alyanya must not be angry with them, if she kept the spring open.

They spread their clothes on the grass, up above the hollow, in the evening sunlight, and considered whether to start walking back to Fin Panir or spend the night near the spring. Aris yawned so, that Seri finally suggested napping awhile.

“You had no sleep last night,” Aris said. “I had some—I’ll watch first.”

“You’re half asleep already,” Seri said. “You wouldn’t be able to stay awake—” And in the end Aris curled up where he sat and fell asleep.

Sunlight woke them both. Aris stretched, blinked, and sat up. Why hadn’t Seri wakened him? She was awake now, looking around with a puzzled expression. “I slept,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to, but—”

“It’s all right. We’re here, we’re alive.” He felt completely rested, alert, better than he had felt in a long time, as if sleeping on the living earth had restored him. He stood, and looked down into the hollow. A thin haze of green covered the black scars of the fire; along the line of the brook, it thickened to a brilliant streak of emerald and jade. It had come back so quickly—how could that be? Was the damage done by the iynisin so superficial? He could not believe that; he had touched that earth, the agonized limbs of tortured trees—those had not been minor wounds. The elves had not thought them minor. So this recovery meant some power had intervened, restoring what it could not heal.

He felt an urge to go back to the spring one last time before they set out for Fin Panir. After they had eaten, he and Seri went down the slope, sniffing the fresh green smell of growing things that replaced the stench of death and burning from the day before. Even the horses’ skeletons had crumbled, erasing the memory of their contorted, unnatural transformation and death. The spring rose, pulse after pulse of pure water trembling the surface, shaking the reflections of their faces as they leaned over it. Aris felt at one with it, with the power of Alyanya to bring life and growth, with the water and the growth of plants, with sunlight and the wind that blew through it, with Seri—as always with Seri.

When he looked up, two horses stood across from him, a bright and a dark bay.