Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(29)

Will I watch you die?

She picked up her skirts and hurried after her strange guide. A bird sang, and she glanced briefly aside from her path, glimpsing the flash of a pale, speckled breast in the darker shadows.

“I’m here,” sang a silver, trilling voice.

Daylily scowled at him. Then she turned her face away and refused to look, no matter what it might say. Soon the outward portions of herself no longer heard it at all, and what the inner portion heard no longer mattered.

They followed the trail left by the sylphs as they had dragged Daylily along, though Daylily herself did not recognize it. Nor did she recognize the five silver-branch trees growing close together, reaching out tender arms to touch one another with the comfort of kindred. They seemed almost to shine in that gloom, and the Wood stretched forever around them on all sides. The trees meant nothing to her now.

But Sun Eagle stopped. He stared at those trees, his black eyes searching for something he could not quite see. When Daylily glanced at him, she saw . . . what was that expression? Hunger? Yearning?

“I have searched long and hard for this gate,” said Sun Eagle. “I have wandered the Between with my brethren, and I have looked upon many worlds. But I have never found what I sought till this day.”

Daylily shuddered at the sound in his voice. It was too close to tears, and she could not bear tears, not from him. “I see no gate,” she said.

“You have not yet learned how,” he replied. He guided her with gentle force toward the trees, and they seemed to quiver at his approach. Daylily thought that, if they had not been caught by roots, they would have sprung up and run.

The two trees in the center of the cluster formed a delicate, curling arch with their branches. Sun Eagle led Daylily until they stood between these trees, and Daylily looked out through the thin veil of leaves.

She saw the Near World beyond, and the wall of the gorge.

This woman who had trod the Paths of Death alone and unguided, who had breathed in more poison than a mortal should and still lived, held herself together like the foundations of a crumbling building. Nothing outward betrayed what she felt.

But the bronze stone over her breast seemed suddenly to throb with a pulse more eager than her heart.

The Near World!

“Please,” Daylily whispered softly. “Please, don’t make me go back. Not to my world.”

“You say that now,” Sun Eagle replied. “But then you will be lost too long, and you won’t be able to return. Even when you wish to.” His face was as sharp as his stone knife, and he would not look her way when she turned pleading eyes to him. “We must return, Crescent Woman. We must return while we may!”

They stepped through the silver-branch trees, passing from the Wilderlands and the forever-reaching Between back into the world of Time and decay.

The light was too bright, and the heat of midday crushed down upon them. Daylily shaded her eyes, blinking, and her vision slowly adjusted. She saw that she stood before the gorge path she had descended. She recognized its twists and turns from but a few hours before, though perhaps it was more clearly cut than she recalled.

“The Land,” said the warrior. His voice was a breath, a prayer. Daylily turned to him, surprised by the emotion she heard in his tone. It was too savage to be joy. How long had he wandered in the Between?

Then something struck her that she should have noticed right away but that her mind had refused to see. Or rather, refused not to see. The mind is a powerful thing, and it will do all it can to organize the world into understandable forms, even deceiving itself if it deems deception necessary.

But Daylily, however skilled she was at self-deception, could not avoid the sudden truth that overwhelmed her. Her gaze lifted up to the edge of the gorge, to the tablelands above. To the empty place in the sky where Swan Bridge should arch in remarkable majesty.

A scream caught and strangled her, and she gasped for air.

“What do you see?”

Sun Eagle watched as fear fought with self-control for mastery of Daylily’s face. But she stood silent, gazing up at the lip of the gorge, and if he could discern nothing else about her, he saw disbelief in her eyes.

“The—” Her voice broke, and she swallowed to wet her tongue and throat before continuing. “The bridge is gone.”

“Should there be a bridge?”

“Yes.” Daylily traced an arch in the sky from gorge edge to gorge edge, over the Wood. “There. Swan Bridge.” Then she shook her head, and a little color returned to her deathly face. “No. No, we’ve come out wrong. You’ve followed the wrong trail. This is not where I entered. . . .”

But she knew that wasn’t true.

Daylily was many shameful things that she hid from herself and the world as best she could. But she was no coward. With a growl in her throat echoing the growl in her mind, she picked up her skirts and hastened from the shelter of the trees across the stones. Her wedding slippers, long since destroyed, offered no protection either from sharpness or from the heat of the sunburnt stones. Each step was agony, but this only made her quicken her speed. The warrior fell in behind her, and she heard him muttering even as they climbed the trail, their hands clutching the rope for support, “This was not here in my time.”

Not in her time either.

But no! She would not think of that! She would not think at all until she reached the tableland above. She heard Sun Eagle taking deeper breaths as they went. As they drew near to the end of the trail, she heard him say with sudden, painful eagerness, “It must be. It must be!”