The Chaos Balance

XCVIII

Nylan glanced back over his shoulder, and his eyes wanted to twist away from the grove in the valley. This time, knowing what he knew, he resisted the impulse, and took a long look at the grove and at the trees.

“It’s gone…”

“It’s still there,” said Buretek. “We just can’t see it. It’s got a magic shield, like the angels said.”

Sylenia, riding between and slightly behind the two angels, nodded. In his seat behind the nursemaid’s saddle, Weryl waved a hand clutched around a small brown pine cone.

The smith glanced at the redheaded healer, whose preoccupied look indicated her thoughts were far from the dusty road leading southeast to Syskar, the Cyadorans, Fornal, and more battles. He took a deep breath.

After two days in and around the grove, while he and Ayrlyn were certainly more rested, neither had learned much more than they had discovered on the first night. The “dreams” or visions or images repeated themselves, with virtually no variation. The grove held the same balance of order and chaos, yet order-and peacefulness-seemed to predominate.

“That’s the key, you know,” Ayrlyn said.

“What?”

“Balance.”

“It has been anywhere,” Nylan half-agreed, “but the problem is that human beings don’t accept balance. We may talk about it, but our actions are something else. Human desires for anything-love, power, coins-seem unbounded, and that doesn’t fit with the idea of balance.” He paused as a pain stab of discomfort flicked through his skull. Where was he deceiving himself? “I’m as bad as anyone,” he added. “We needed to survive. We got that. Then we wanted some shelter and comfort. We got that. Then I didn’t want to always worry about what Ryba had in mind…” He shrugged. “It just goes on and on. Sure…putting things in balance would help. But how do we get the Cyadorans to stop trying to take over the rest of Candar? We can’t just tell them that they’re unbalancing things.”

Ayrlyn glanced at the dying scrub tree just off the shoulder of the road. “I don’t know. Not yet. But it’s clear that everywhere, and here more than most places, in the end things do balance.”

Nylan wondered. Did they? Or was the balance that of equalized power? Or did power triumph? Concentrations of power-like Cyador and Westwind-seemed to endure for a long, long time.