Maze of Moonlight, Gael Baudino [ebook reader screen TXT] 📗

grabbed Mirya's arm. “What are you doing to me?”

She turned a corpse-white face on him. The fading light showed that her eyes were sunken, her lips pale and cracked. “I have little,” she said hoarsely. “What I have, I will give. Please accept it, Messire Christopher.”

His sense of cold deepened. “But what the hell are you doing?”

“I am giving you the strength to continue. I am altering all the patterns of which I still have any cognizance so that you may continue to breathe. Come, the flames are close, and the way through is treacherous.”

She took his hand—her grip was like ice—and led him on into the night. Time was passing, the fire advancing. Saint Brigid and all who were willing to call the Elves friends were in danger.

And then Christopher heard it: a long, sustained roaring in the darkness, as of a great hearth, or a forge. The fire.

Smoke was driving into his face as though fanned by the hand of a giant, and his eyes were streaming. He fought for breath, but he knew that with every lungful he took, the Elf weakened. She had little to give, but she was giving it unstintingly.

Again, he dragged her to a halt. “We can't go on.”

“We cannot go back. The fire has lapped about behind us.”

“We're in the middle of it?”

“It is so. The only way out is to continue.” Her face had turned gaunt with effort, its flesh clinging closely to her skull, but her voice maintained its calm. “I have examined the patterns. There is a chance—a chance that I will do my best to make better—that the line of flame ahead will break long enough for us to slip through.”

With a jerk, she pulled him forward. The heat increased, the smoke thickened. Christopher blundered into withering trees, tripped over wilted bushes, went sprawling over felled trunks. Mirya drew him on, picked him up when he fell, encouraged him in a soft contralto that never deviated from dispassionate tranquillity.

Blind, stifling, Christopher clung to the hand that had transformed his grandfather as the roaring of the flames grew into a frenzied crescendo of destruction. Eyes closed, teeth clenched, he drove himself against all instinct into regions of thicker smoke, greater heat, and at last found himself facing a red and yellow wall of flame that stretched form the glowing forest floor to an inferno of burning leaves high above.

Mirya stopped at the sight, put her free hand to her face. “My home . . .” Her voice broke, turned heavy, sobbing. “My home . . .”

Christopher had been clinging to her tranquillity as much as her hand. “It's not all gone.”

“It is fading . . .”

Shaking, he grabbed her by her tunic. “There's Saint Brigid, and Vanessa, and all those people out there. It's not all gone.”

But her eyes, green as emerald, were hollow. She had given all her strength to the baron of Aurverelle. She had kept none for herself.

The flames advanced. Elf and human, clasping hands, stood before them.

“It is here,” said Mirya. “It must be here.” Her eyes were clenched. She was still working magic, still funneling her will into the patterns, reweaving them, shaping them to her own ends. She had changed Roger with this power, and she had helped Vanessa. Now she was altering the world.

But her face and grip went suddenly slack, and her knees buckled. She fell, her head hitting the ground with a thump. Her fingers were strengthless: Christopher might have been gripping the hand of a corpse.

Freed from Mirya's magic, the fire blasted and stung his face. Embers sifted down on his clothes, smoldering, working their way even through his mail. He dropped to his knees beside the Elf. “Mirya!”

No answer.

His face blistering, his hair all but on fire, his clothes smoldering slowly, he looked up to curse the fire, to curse that patterns that had collapsed and taken his world with them, to spew his hate at the maze that brought him to this abrupt and incontrovertible dead end. But he uttered not a sound, for he noticed that, not twenty feet away, the flames had split.

Beyond the gap was a dark waste of charred earth, ruined trees, smoldering ashes. In the night, it virtually glowed with the recent passage of unspeakable heat, but it looked to Christopher like a hand offered in gracious salvation.

The gap widened, paused, started to narrow again.

He had to move. The fire could consolidate at any moment. If he ran, unencumbered, he might make it. But . . .

. . . he was still holding Mirya's hand.

His lungs were fighting against the searing and polluted air, but he looked into her still, pale face. This was the being who had altered his grandfather. This was the being who had, indirectly, sent him off to Nicopolis, pushed him into despair, driven him into madness. But this was also the being who had healed Vanessa, who had provided a haven for her, and who had most recently given everything of herself . . . for him.

Determined, angry, with a pigheaded stubbornness that he was certain would have made even the most willful of his ancestors proud, he bent, slung the limp body of the Elf over his shoulder, and staggered towards the fast-closing gap.

***

“Tut,” said Ruprecht, “I have the best armor in the world.”

The barons of Hypprux and Maris had assembled, with their vassals, men, and equipment, a few miles from Furze; and they had set up an encampment to the southwest of the city. There, in pavilions of silk and velvet, with pennants flying and the sound of fine steel meeting grindstones, they spoke of battle and chivalry, and bragged of their accouterments.

Yvonnet was not to be outdone. “I'll remind you of my horse, cousin,” he said, reaching for another half of a chicken from the heap piled on the long dinner table before him.

In other parts of the camp, cooking fires smoked and crackled as men-at-arms gathered for their ration of meat, cheese, and