Elder Race(28)

Lyn kneels down beside me, though still with a definite distance. “You have earned the right to call me Lyn, if you wish.” It is a huge concession and one that she is frightened about making. I search my records and recollections, and I guess that in normal social situations this would be an open door to greater intimacy in the future, letting me across some invisible but crucial threshold. And she is scared of me and what I might do without that door between us, and I can’t honestly say that she is wrong to be, because I am a mess, and when the DCS lifts, who knows what I’ll feel? Not to mention that getting on the equivalent of first-name terms with one of the locals is also absolutely against contamination procedures. And so obviously I should say no. That would be the rational DCS-prompted choice.

But the word doesn’t actually come out, and I nod instead and say nothing, and apparently that is acceptance enough, because an extra spark of fear lights in her eyes and stays there. She is the princess from the stories who has made a promise to a wizard, and knows that it will be collected on. And I am that wizard, and don’t know what I might do when I am not (or when I am more) myself.

What I actually say is, “Why are you dressed like that, anyway?”

The non sequitur catches her by surprise and she looks abruptly defensive and embarrassed. “You were dead,” she tells me. “Esha was sick. I was going to have Allwer lead me to the demon’s house beyond Farbourand. And call it out.”

“You were going to do what?” I honestly do not understand what she means.

“I was going to call it out. Challenge the demon to fight me,” she says defiantly, and then, her voice breaking with the sheer desperation of it all, “It’s how it’s done.”

Something is building up inside me, behind the shield of the DCS. I see it approach as one might dispassionately watch a flash flood while standing in the dry riverbed. Of course, the DCS will keep it all bottled up so I can make safely reasonable decisions. No matter that all my systems are stretched to the limit with the self-repair effort. No matter that I’ve been leaning on it far too much since my outburst at Watacha.

I feel my heart break, in a way that I would never be able to fix, not even if I took it out right now and tinkered with it. Staring at Lynesse Fourth Daughter, dressed in her finest, sword at her hip, off to do something that is What Princesses Do when there are monsters and demons and wizards in the world. Something that was surely not actually what they did, back in the days her myth-cycles originated in. Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only What we wish we’d done, rather than How we actually did it. But she’s brave, and maybe she’s stupid, and she knows that this thing, that even I don’t understand, needs to be faced down and defeated, and she doesn’t know any other way. And, frankly, there is probably no response available to her culture and available technology that would be any better, so: Single combat, why not?

I am overwhelmed by a terrible sadness, but it’s a good sadness in a way. It isn’t the leaden weight of my own self-pity and misery, the biochemical fallout of malfunctioning metabolism and cognition that just casts a dour filter over everything, whether there’s cause or not. I am sad for Lynesse Fourth Daughter, trying to be something that never existed in the world, and failing because it’s impossible, and trying again.

“Let us go to Farbourand and the demon’s house,” I tell her. “I don’t know what we will find there or what we can do about it, but I can keep the demon from placing its mark on us. I’d rather we avoided the mobile elements of the demon because, as you’ve seen, I can’t ward off physical harm as I can its influence. But if we can get to this origin point then . . . who knows?”

I look at the other two. Neither of them wants to do this, and I’d not blame them for leaving. Esha loves Lyn, though, and would not leave her, and Allwer . . . something of Lyn’s fire has kindled in him, I think. He is a man who has made bad choices and suffered for them, and had written his own life off as lost. Now he has the chance to remake himself and, having cut away all that bad history, we find a strength of character underneath that even he would not have guessed at.

“I’ll lead you there,” he confirms, looking as though he can’t believe what he’s saying. “I’ll show you the demon.”





Lynesse


THE NEXT NIGHT, NYRGOTH Elder insisted they find a clearing, and then spent some time staring blankly at the clear night sky, at the frost-glints of stars. Sitting unobtrusively close, Lyn saw his lips move, an inaudible conversation with an invisible presence. He finished abruptly, turning right into her attention so she had no time to pretend she had been doing anything else but watching him.

“I’m . . . speaking with my familiar,” he told her, “as if that would mean anything to you.”

It was by no means the strangest thing he had said. She knew the word well from the palace, where it covered a variety of hangers-on, servants and courtiers who moved about their greaters in respectful dances.

“Another worker?” Using the archaic word he’d chosen when speaking of the beast they’d met in the mountains.

“Although sometimes my master, also,” he agreed, and that also seemed entirely in keeping with what she knew of wizards from the stories. “It passed over us, and I have seen what it saw. The forest covers much, but I see Farbourand, and I see beyond to where this thing is, whatever it is. My familiar sees a structure of some kind there, that must be what Allwer saw. You couldn’t miss it from Farbourand’s walls now.”