The Door Into Fire (13 page)

Silence is the door between Love and Fear,
and on Fear’s side, there is no latch.

Gnomics,
33

Sunset was glowing behind his back when Herewiss woke up. He opened his eyes on a wide barren vista of earth and scattered brush, streaked with crimson light and long shadows. He stretched, and found that he ached all over. It wasn’t all backlash; some of it was the pain of having been tied in the saddle and taken a great distance at speed.

“Good evening,” someone said to him.

He didn’t recognize the voice, a deep, gentle one. Then as he turned his head, the memories snapped back into place. The new person, the woman. This must be her.

Looking up at her, Herewiss’s first impression was of large, deep-set hazel eyes that lingered on him in leisurely appraisal, and didn’t shift away when he returned the glance. And hands: long, strong-fingered hands, prominently veined, incongruously attached to little fragile bird-boned wrists and too-slender arms. She was very slim and long-limbed, wearing with faint unease a body that didn’t seem to have finished adolescence yet. But her muscles looked taut and hard from assiduous training. She sat cross-legged on the ground by Herewiss’s head, those strong hands resting quietly on her knees, seemingly relaxed. But his underhearing, hypersensitive from the large sorcery he had worked, gave him an immediate feeling of impatience, an impression that beneath the imposed external calm seethed something that had to be done and couldn’t. Her dark hair was cut just above the shoulders; Herewiss looked at it and smiled.
She wants to make sure they know she’s a woman,
he thought,
but she doesn’t have the patience for braids....

“Good evening to you,” he said, propping himself up on one elbow and then frowning—he had forgotten how sore he was. “I’m sorry I missed your name when we were on the way out—”

“You were hardly in a condition to remember it if you’d heard it,” she said, reaching out to touch hands with him. “Segnbora, Welcaen’s daughter.”

“Herewiss, Hearn’s son,” he said, touching her hand, and then flinching. No matter how fordone he might be, there was no mistaking the feel of Flame. And she was full of it, spilling over with it. It had sparked between their hands, faint blue like dry-lightning, as if trying to fill the empty place in him. Something very like envy whirled through Herewiss’s mind, to be replaced immediately by confusion. With power like
that
, what was she doing
here?

She was rubbing her hands together thoughtfully, and still looking at him, her curiosity more open. But at the same time she read the look in his eyes, and her expression was rueful. “You felt right,” she said softly. “The funny thing is, I think I did too….”

For a few moments more they regarded each other. Then Segnbora dropped her eyes, reaching down with one hand to play with the peace-strings of her sword, sheathed on the ground beside her.

“That was some sorcery you worked,” she said, and looked up again. Her face was all admiration, masking whatever else was in her mind. “You were out for two days.”

“Where are we now?”

“About fifteen miles from the border of the Waste. We only have to cross the Stel. Freelorn will be glad you’re awake. He was worried about you.”

“Don’t know why,” Herewiss said, and sat himself up with an effort. “He knows I always take the backlash hard.”

“I’m sure. But he never saw anything like that display before. Some of the effects were—”

“Unexpected.”

“Yes. Especially that business with the fire.”

“Where is he?” Herewiss said hurriedly.

“Out hunting. They left me here to watch you. This is safe country, too empty for Fyrd, I think. They’ll be lucky to find anything. Dritt is here too.”

He looked around and located Dritt sitting atop a boulder, a big stocky silhouette against the sunset. He was munching something, and Herewiss became immediately aware of the emptiness of his stomach.

Segnbora was rummaging in a pouch. “Here,” she said, handing him an undistinguished-looking lump of something crumbly.

“Waybread?”

“Yes.”

It looked terrible, like a lump of pale dirt with rocks in it. He bit into it, and almost broke a tooth.

“Goddess above,” he said, after managing to get the first bite down, “this is
awful
.”

“And what waybread isn’t?”

“Worse than most, I mean.”

“It’s also more sustaining than most.”

“I think I’d rather eat sagebrush.”

“You may, if they don’t find anything out there. Eat up.”

Segnbora took a piece too, and they sat for a few minutes in silence, passing her water skin back and forth at intervals.

“The fire,” Segnbora said suddenly. “And your messengers—the hawk, that ball of flame that met us when we came out—those really interested me. Those were no illusions. Those were real.”

He studied her uneasily, not responding, trying to understand what she was up to. She was looking thoughtfully over his shoulder at something fairly close by. Herewiss put his mind out behind him and felt around. Sunspark was some yards behind him with the other horses, once again a vague blunt warmth wrapped in the stallion-form, grazing unconcernedly.

(Yes?) it said.

(Our friend here—) Herewiss indicated Segnbora.

(So?)

(I think she sees you for what you are.)

Sunspark waved its tail, making a feeling like a shrug. (That’s well for her. I’m worth seeing. . . .)

Herewiss returned his attention to Segnbora. She continued to gaze past him for a moment. Remotely he could sense Sunspark lifting its head, returning her look.

(Another relative,) it said. (This world seems to be full of my distant cousins.)

“An elemental?” Segnbora said, turning her eyes back to Herewiss.

“Yes. Why?”

She gestured at his empty scabbard. “You have no sword.”

“I beg your pardon?” Herewiss said, shocked.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to change the subject. But I’d been meaning to ask you about that.”

Herewiss felt outrage beginning to grow in him, and a voice spoke up in his memory: some Darthene regular, way back during the war. (“Spears and arrows are a
boy’s
weapon! Afraid to get up close to a Reaver? ... A man isn’t a boar to be hunted with a lance. A
man
takes on another man blade to blade. Earn’s blood must be running thin in the Wood —”)

Oh, Dark, I thought I got over this a long time ago!
Herewiss took a deep breath and pushed the anger down. “It may be none of your business,” he told Segnbora, as gently as he could.

“Then why are you so obvious about it? You wouldn’t be wearing that around if you didn’t want to attract attention to it. Freelorn’s people think it’s something to do with a family feud, and they won’t mention it for fear you’ll take offense. But there’s something else there—”

“Freelorn knows. And he doesn’t speak of it either,” Herewiss said, trying to frighten her away from the subject with a sudden knife-edge of anger in his voice.

“Maybe someone should,” Segnbora said, so very softly that he sat back in confusion. “I saw how he looks at that scabbard. He looks at it, but he doesn’t look at it—as if it was a maimed limb. He hurts so much for you. I didn’t know why—but now— It’s a matter of Flame, isn’t it?”

“Listen,” Herewiss said, “why should I discuss it with you? We’ve barely met.”

Segnbora smiled at him, that dry, rueful smile again. “Fair enough,” she said. “Let me tell you who I am, and perhaps you’ll understand. I come of fey stock from a long way back—generations of Rodmistresses and sorcerers. The male line has descent from Gereth Dragonheart, who was Marchwarder with M’athwinn d’Dháriss when the Dragons were fighting for the Eorlhowe. The female line comes down from Enra the Queen’s sister of Darthen. Two terribly eminent families…and I’m something of an embarrassment to both of them.”

Segnbora began playing with her sword’s peace-bindings again, smiling slightly. “We usually come into our Power early, if it’s there. They took me to be tested when I was three years old, and they weren’t disappointed. The Flame that was in me shattered all the rods and rings and broke the blocks that they gave me to hold, and the testers got really excited. They said to my mother and father, ‘This one is a great power, or will be when she grows up—you should have her trained by the best people you can find. Anything less would be a terrible waste.’ So they did. And I studied with Harandh, and Saris Elerik’s daughter, and the people at the Nhàirëdi Institute in Darthis, and I did a year with Eilen—”

“That old prune?”

“You know her. Yes. And others too numerous to mention. I hardly spent more than a year or two in the same place.”

“It’s not the best policy to change teachers so often,” Herewiss said. “I wouldn’t think there would be time to build up a good relationship—”

“You’re right, it’s not, and there wasn’t,” Segnbora said. “There was this little problem, you see. I had too much Flame. I kept breaking the Rods they gave me to work with; they would just blow right up, boom—” She waved her hands in the air— “any time I tried to channel through them. And all my teachers said, ‘It’s all right, you’ll grow out of it, it’s just adolescent surge.’ Or, ‘Well, it’s puberty, it’ll be all right after your breasts grow.’” She chuckled. “Well, they grew all right, but that wasn’t the problem. After a while I started wondering why every teacher seemed in such a hurry to refer me to another one, supposedly more experienced or more advanced. Once or twice I made so bold as to ask, and got long lectures on why I should let older and wiser heads decide what was best for me. Or else I got these short shamefaced speeches on how I needed more theory, but everything would be all right eventually.”

Herewiss made a face.

“That’s how I felt,” Segnbora said. “Well, what could I do? I gave it a chance, stuffed myself with more theory than most Rodmistresses would ever have use for. It was better than facing the truth, I suppose. And eventually I got to be eighteen, and they took me to the Forest Altars in the Brightwood, and I spent a year there in really advanced study—or so they called it. You know the Altars?”

“I live in the Brightwood,” Herewiss said dryly.
And a lot of good it’s done me!
“Go on.”

“Yes. Well, when I turned nineteen, and Maiden’s Day came around, I swore the Oath, and they took me into the Silent Precincts, and they brought out the Rod they had made for me. They were really proud of it, it came from Earn’s Blackstave in the Grove of the Eagle, it’d been cut in the full of the Moon with the silver knife and left on the Flame Altar for a month. And they gave it to me and I channeled Flame through it—”

“—and you broke it.”

“Splinters everywhere, the Chief Wardress ducked and turned around and took one right in the rear. Oh, such embarrassment you haven’t seen anywhere. The Wardress claimed I did it on purpose—she and I had had a few minor disagreements on matters of theory—”

“Kerim is a disagreement looking for a place to happen.”

“Yes,” Segnbora said tiredly, “she is. Well. They went down the whole Dark-be-damned list of trees, and I broke oak Rods and ash and willow and blackthorn and rowan and you name it. Finally the Wardresses who were there said they’d never seen anything like it, but they couldn’t help me. So here I am, so full of Power that sometimes it crawls out my skin at night and changes the ground where I lie—but I can’t
control
so much of it as to heal a cut finger, or bring a drop of rain.” She sighed. “A whole life wasted in the pursuit of the one art I can’t master.”

Herewiss sat there and felt an odd twisted kind of pleasure.
So I’m not the only one like this! Well, well—
But then he pushed it aside, ashamed of it.

“Precisely,” Segnbora said, her voice tight, and Herewiss blushed fiercely. “Oh,” she said, and smiled again, “they really push you at Nhàirëdi; my underhearing got awfully good.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be. I must confess feeling a moment’s satisfaction when I realized what your problem was. I’m sorry, too.”

Herewiss sighed. “You’re a long way from the Forest Altars.”

She shrugged. “How long can a person keep trying?

I spent three more years in the Precincts, fasting and praying and trying to beat my body into submission—I thought I could tame the Power that way.” She snorted. “Silly idea. I ended up half-wrecked, with the Fire almost dead in me from the abuse. I had to let it rest for a long time before it would come back. Then after a while I said, ‘What the Dark!’ and just went off to travel. The Power’s going to wither up in me soon enough, but there’s no reason to be bored while it does. I made Freelorn’s acquaintance in Madeil; and traveling in company is more interesting than being alone. Especially with him.” She chuckled.

“But you still have a lot going for you,” Herewiss said, though the empty place in him realized how such a statement might feel to her. “You studied at Nhàirëdi, you certainly got enough sorcery from them to make yourself a living by it—”