The Children of Kings by Marion Zimmer Bradley
She folded her hands in her lap and studied her surroundings with new perspective. The copse and hillside, once bleak with the coming of night, abounded in resources. Everything she needed was here. She no longer felt cold or stiff. A gossamer web of life-energy surrounded her, filled her, bound her in harmony to the living world. It also shielded her from any unwelcome presence. A passing fur trapper would see only brush and rock.
The last shimmer of color had almost disappeared from the jagged western horizon. Night folded its cloak across the face of the world. A hush arose from the hills, a stilling of the wind. The clouds thinned to reveal the vast milky sweep of the galactic arm. A hundred hundred suns burned like lightning pinpoints, their numbers beyond human reckoning.
Somewhere out there lay Terra, ancient and legendary, and the worlds that made up the Federation, Castor and Ephebe, Wolf and Thetis. The assassins and schemers and far-off battles diminished to fleeting inconveniences. She must be careful not to underestimate them, for flesh itself was all too fragile, but neither would she accord them the privilege of controlling her through fear.
She was a grown woman, a Keeper . . . a daughter of Hastur. She would face life on its own terms.
19
Even before she reached the outskirts of the Yellow Forest, Kierestelli sensed the change in the trees. For most of her journey, she had slipped through thicket and grove, shaping herself into harmony with the natural landscape. Now she sensed a withdrawal. Hillside and forest turned opaque, and chill winds brushed the edges of her awareness. Dry leaves crunched beneath her feet, when only a day before she had passed without a sound.
She slowed her pace. There was no point in pushing harder, insisting that the forces guarding the heart of the forest give way before her will. She was the supplicant here, returning without any expectation that the home she had left was still hers.
This part of the forest filled the hollow between the hills. The trees grew taller here, their trunks gnarled with age. As she went on, their tops intertwined to form a canopy, imperfect and shifting in the wind.
It is as all life, each part flowing into a greater whole, she thought. None of us is truly separate.
She halted, tipping her face to catch the dappled sunlight. Motes of brightness flickered behind her closed eyelids. For a moment, she felt as if she floated in a sea of softly effulgent lights or perhaps of living stars. The intimation of chill receded. As if from a distance, she caught the chiming of sweet notes, a harp’s laughter, the ripple of a snowmelt stream, a riot of songbirds after a rain.
Overhead, leaves rustled. Shafts of sunlight glittered on motes of forest dust. As quickly as the rays appeared, they vanished as the branches shifted. Their warmth lingered like an afterimage in Silvana’s mind. It cradled her, lifted her up, sustained her. In her imagination, the trees inclined in salutation, then parted before her. She hesitated.
“So you have come back to us.” The words came in a low voice, the casta archaic but perfectly clear in the way an ancient chant would be understood in spirit as well as syllable.
Between one pulse of her heart and the next, a chieri emerged. The figure was, as all those ancient people, tall and slender, androgynously beautiful. Gray hair fell halfway to narrow hips; the only garment was a sleeveless tunic that looked as if it had been woven from tree bark and moonlight. Colorless eyes met Silvana’s without a hint of emotion.
No welcome, no censure, no curiosity. Only the immense gift of recognition.
She raised her fingertips to her forehead and said, in the language of the chieri, “Foster father.” The word actually meant Nurturer-of-children-who-belong-to-the-race.
“The river flows in only one direction,” Diravanariel answered, keeping to casta.
“All water is one,” she answered. “Did you not teach me that truth yourself?”
A chuckle answered her as a second figure stepped from behind the largest of the trees. “You must concede the point, Dirav. There’s no hope when she starts quoting your own words back at you.”
“Uncle David!” All dignity fled, she rushed into the Terranan doctor’s arms.
As he drew her tight against him, she felt the thinness of his flesh, the withering of muscle, the brittleness of bone. Very much like one of these ancient trees, he retained surprising vitality for a man of his years. She pulled away, looking up into his smiling eyes, saw the lines of laughter bracketing his mouth, the mass of silvered hair, and thought, My father might look like this, had he lived.
“You’re all grown up,” he said, smiling even more deeply.
“These many years since. Now I’m Keeper at Nevarsin Tower!” To her own ears, she sounded like a child greeting a beloved uncle, bragging about her achievements.
“It does not surprise me.” He pressed dry lips to her forehead. “We’re all very proud of you.”
We? Her gaze flickered to the chieri. Diravanariel stood like an island of immobility against the constant play of dappled light.
“Why have you returned?”
“She’s only just arrived!” David protested. “Give us a little time to catch up before getting down to business, or she will suspect we of the forest have lost all notions of hospitality.”
Silvana walked over to the chieri. She knew better than to touch him, uninvited, but she held out her hands. “You welcomed me when I was a small child and had no choice in the matter. Is there no place for me in your heart now that I am grown and come to you freely?”
“Child, you will always be cherished among us. More is at risk than any one individual, no matter how beloved. I speak for what is left of our people and those few and fragile new lives we guard. Have you forgotten how perilous is the world of men? I ask again, Why have you returned? What danger hunts you this time, and will it follow you into our midst?”
Silvana lowered her hands. Where was Lian? Had something happened . . . or was Lian’s absence a way of preventing their reattachment to one another?
If I see Lian, if what once existed between us has not changed . . . I may never want to leave . . .
“If I had any awareness of such danger,” she said tightly, “I would never have come. I am a trained Keeper. There is not much of importance that escapes my notice.”
Diravanariel’s posture softened. A stray curl of breeze lifted the moon-pale hair. One slender six-fingered hand brushed hers with a touch as delicate as a butterfly wing. She felt as if the entire forest, trees and sky and ferny undergrowth, distant birds and small furred creatures, flowers and sun-bright meadows, wrapped her in a homecoming embrace.
In a voice suddenly thick, she said, “My mother found me. I don’t want to be found. I didn’t know where else to go.”
David drew in his breath. In that faint, sharp sound, Silvana sensed a riot of questions. He asked none of them, however. He had lived a long time with the chieri. Instead, he slipped one arm around her shoulders. She felt his desire to reassure her, but it was not for him to offer her refuge. It came to her then that in order to be welcomed, she must be equally prepared to accept refusal. Diravanariel was right; no personal need, no matter how great, must be allowed to place the entire community at risk.
Still, it was good to see these two again, the chieri who had taught her, given her so many gifts of mind and spirit, and the man who had kept alive her own human identity. She stepped back from them, signaling her acceptance that this brief greeting might be all she received.
With a tilt of the head, Diravanariel led the way deeper into the forest.
The chieri did not cluster together the way humans did. Perhaps once, in their long-distant past, they had lived in technologically sophisticated cities, but no longer. With the passing of ages and their withdrawal to the planet of their origin, they had forsaken the trappings of civilization for the simplicity of the natural world. If we are all there are or will ever be, they seemed to be saying, then let
Some chieri lived in caves or in houses in thickly growing trees. Diravanariel’s extended family constructed shelters woven from naturally fallen branches and fabrics spun from bark fibers and downy feathers. Such a dwelling might last a handful of seasons or be abandoned to wind and water when the desire to commune with a different part of the forest arose.
Silvana followed her foster parents into a little clearing, barely ten paces across. Among the thick boles of the trees, she spotted a half-dozen structures of white and glimmering gray, ridged along the center of their roofs to facilitate runoff of rain and snow. The largest one looked as if it easily contained several chambers the size of her own at Nevarsin. Although there was no sign of a fire, for cooking or other purposes, two waist-high looms had been set up. A chieri sat cross-legged before the nearer loom, dressed in a long, loose robe. Pale hair rippled like a cascade of living starlight with the movement of the shuttle. At the approach of Silvana and her friends, the weaver stopped work and rose, a single movement of breathtaking grace. Soft lips curved into an expression of delight.
“Star maiden, daughter of my friend! How it brightens my eyes to see you again!”
“And you, S’Keral.” Silvana’s hands flew through a gesture of respect. She had not used it since she’d left the forest.
Keral took a step to meet her, and the fabric of the robe flowed around the curves of breasts and belly. The touch of fingertips to fingertips flashed through Silvana’s mind. Telepathic sensations rushed through her, the complex patterned texture of Keral’s personality, pleasure at their reunion . . . the intense and abiding joy at the new, utterly unexpected life.
When David had come to greet Silvana, Keral had remained behind in the sheltered nest, pregnant again. For the two of them to have produced Lian had been a miracle beyond imagining. Not even the chieri language, so rich in the nuances of joy, had words to describe what a second child meant to their entire race.
For a long moment, Silvana stood there, just barely touching the chieri. Tears blurred her physical sight, intensifying her inner vision. The feeling of overflowing abundance saturated her. Every twig, every bud, every seed lying dormant in the soil, every creature drawing new sustenance from the rich decaying leaf-fall, all sang to her, lifted her up.
How could a single event, one impending birth, so transform the entire world?
Silvana’s mind stretched wider. In that fundamental unity, Diravanariel’s people were linked to every other chieri gathering. Here and there, like motes of sun-drenched brightness, she sensed the shimmering auras of fertility. It seemed that the Hellers themselves, their peaks rising like snow-shrouded giants, echoed their delight.
She wanted it to go on forever, this bliss that was at its heart an affirmation of love, of connection, of mutual joy.
I want to stay. I want to never leave you all again.
“We have never been separated.” Diravanariel had glided soundlessly to her side. Those words, spoken with the tender intimacy of a parent murmuring to a beloved child, swept away all other thought. “You have always been here with us.”
How could she have been so blind? In her childish grief, she had felt herself expelled, ejected. Forsaken. In truth, the change had been one of outer appearance only, like taking off one garment and donning another, stone city walls exchanged for trees, laran circles for dancing beneath the moons. The bond had not waned. She had carried it with her, although she herself had barricaded the memory of it in a distant corner of her mind. She would never do so again.
The rapport faded from the peak of intensity. Silvana came back into herself, her limited, separate human self.
David brought up a seat with a back support and placed it beside Keral’s loom. With a smile, he offered it to Silvana. “Lian made it for me when I began having difficulty sitting on the ground. Or rather, getting up from the ground.”
Lian. Just to hear the name spoken aloud pierced her. A dozen questions pressed the boundaries of her thoughts.
Where was Lian? Not here, with David and Keral? Had something happened?
She forced her mind to stillness. Keral gave her a measured look, kind for all its unflinching directness, and said nothing. Dirav sat comfortably on the bare earth, looking up as three other chieri emerged from the forest. Silvana did not know them nor they, her, and they were shy and curious. David inquired about Silvana’s life since leaving the Forest, her work first as leronis and then as Keeper, and the strange chieri listened intently. Keral resuming weaving, humming softly.
As if moving through the steps of a formal dance, one or another of the chieri left the group and returned with platters of food, fruits of many sorts, vegetables, and the thick, honey-sweetened nut paste Silvana had loved as a child. Dirav began a lilting ballad—a sweet song in a very old dialect. The other chieri joined in, their voices weaving counterpoint to Dirav’s steady melody. They sang of taking leave of the many worlds where their kind had walked, of distant stars no more than a blur in the galactic mist, of turning away from cities whose towers covered half the sky, of laying down wars and their terrible weapons, weapons of mind as well as matter . . . of coming home.
Home to these forests under the crimson sun.
Home to earth and snow and the long twilight of their race.
Day wore into dusk. The song ended, replaced by another, this time a chant of welcome. With the thickening of the shadows, however, the temperature fell. Silvana shivered a little.
“You’ll stay indoors with us tonight,” David said. “These old bones don’t tolerate the cold nearly as well as when I was younger.”
Dirav made a gesture of approval, and the gathering began to break up. Silvana went to bid her foster parent good-night. Together they strolled around the perimeter of the settlement.
“You have grown well and strong,” Dirav said. “For a time after you left us, we feared the world of humans might change you.”
“I do not know if I am better or worse than I would have been had I stayed.” She was what she had become, what humans and chieri, each in their own time and manner, had made of her.
“And wise as well, to understand that we never step into the same river twice.”
“No.” She could not resist a smile. “There is one thing I would like to know.”
“Ask, then.”
“Did my father—did Regis ever come looking for me? Or did he just forget about me?”
Dirav regarded her, pale eyes glowing with their own inner moonlight. “He came.”
“But—” She bit her lip, caught in a torrent of feelings, relief and outrage and things she had no words for. “I never knew.”
You never told me!
“I myself closed the Forest against him. After a time, he stopped coming.”
“After a time? How many times?”
“Many.”
A wave of strangeness rushed through her, as if the world had just shifted on its axis, so that the sun now rose in the west. So few things in life were certain—death, next winter’s snows . . . and that her father had abandoned her.
Why? howled through her. Because evil men still menaced the innocent? Because of the memory of her half-brothers, slaughtered in their cradles simply because they were the children of Regis Hastur? Because children do not thrive in isolation and Lian needed someone of a similar age?
Because they loved me too much to let me go?
Did the reason matter? Did any of it matter—yes, it did. Linnea, weeping in the night for her lost daughter, mattered. Regis, returning again and again, quartering these hills in vain, mattered.
And she herself, growing to womanhood and building her life around a core of bitterness, her grief mattered, too.
She looked inside herself for righteous fury at those who had stolen life and family from her and could not find it. There was no selfishness in Dirav or Keral
If I had returned with my father, she thought, I might never have become a Keeper. My bloodline alone would have made me too valuable, for reasons having nothing to do with my own happiness. Perhaps I might have forged my own path . . . but I would not be here now, in this place under the stars.
“I must think about this,” she murmured. Greatly daring, she slipped her fingers into the crook of Dirav’s arm. Together, they ambled back to the clearing.
Fairy-soft lights flickered inside the dwelling shared by David and Keral. Leaving her boots neatly arranged beside the door, Silvana slipped inside. The air was warm and smelled of conifer needles and herbs. Patches like laran-charged glows illuminated the interior. The walls were patterned in tapestries of spider-silk and translucent blue snowmoss, providing both insulation and beauty. The effect presaged the ancient Comyn style, only without the use of stone.
At the far end of the chamber, Keral and David stood talking to a chieri. At Silvana’s entrance, the newcomer turned to face her, more beautiful than memory . . .
Lian.
Silvana’s heart caught in her throat. Lian’s hair bore hints of red among the moon-pale strands, like living embers still aglow. Silvana had forgotten the silvery lights in Lian’s eyes that made it seem as if she were gazing into some distant place, a realm of heart and soaring spirit. She had forgotten, too, how tall Lian was, although not as tall as Keral, and how gracefully made.
Keral’s lips curved in a smile as he crossed the distance between them and held out hands, palm up, in invitation.
No, Silvana realized. Not he, for the movement had brought Lian more fully into the light and now, through the gossamer fabric of Lian’s tunic, Silvana saw the roundness of breasts and hips . . . the faint swelling beneath the slender waist.