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

own denials and fears thrown into his face like a bucket of hot pitch. “Tell me, now. How human am I? How much starlight do you see in me? What kind o' fading does such as I face?”

If Lake's words had stung, Varden gave no sign. “What do you intend to do for her?” he said.

Lake stood up, folded his arms, hung his head. “God know. I dan. I'll think of sa'thing, though. What wi' the schism and all, the Church is turning bad. Gregory set the Inquisition loose on sorcery some years back, and so I'm ha'way expecting . . .” He shrugged. He did not want to say it. Someday. Any day.

But Varden was shaking his head. “The Inquisition has attempted before to make inroads into Adria. It was last directed at the Free Towns, at the instigation of Baron Roger of Aurverelle. It failed.”

“That was before I was born,” said Lake, “an' people still talk about it as though it were some kind o' miracle. I suppose it was, too: Roger just turned around and let the Towns go. Just like tha'. But times have changed. E'en the Free Towns ha' changed. It could happen again. And in any case, it wan't take a crusade to claim Vanessa, only one frightened priest and a few woman-hating Dominicans.”

“And what about you?”

Lake snorted. “I'm nearly fifty. I've lived. I've seen enough, and I'm tired of it. I can leave it.” He felt Varden's starlit eyes. Fifty years? Compared to a lifetime measured in eons? Varden had watched the making of the world, and here was Lake insisting that his own tastes had become jaded after only fifty years.

But Varden said nothing. He did not have to. The transparency about him was eloquent enough.

“But Vanessa is young,” Lake forced himself to say. “She dan deserve that.” He shook his head, covered his face with his hands. “My God, she's fourteen. She should be married by now, or at least we should be planning it. But no one i' the village . . . I mean, wha' man in his right mind—”

“Would you . . .” Varden spoke slowly, hesitantly. “Would you let me see her? Perhaps—”

“Stay awa' from her,” Lake snapped. Varden was silent, and Lake looked up at the loft uneasily. “You've got to understand,” he said, his voice a taut whisper, “you are as you are. That's all. But Vanessa and I . . . We're struggling just to be human. It's na simple in this world. We ha' to fight for it, and it hurts us.” The starlight gleamed in Varden's eyes, and Lake's voice shook. “Maybe it will kill us. I dan know. God knows.”

“Or the Lady.”

Lake nodded, torn between beliefs, between races, between worlds. “Whate'er, Varden.”

Silence again. Finally, Varden nodded and rose. “Forgive me for troubling you. Do what you think is best. Roxanne is gone, and I begin to understand now that my work is done. Indeed . . .” He shook his head sadly. “. . . I wonder whether I have not marred as much as I have made.”

“You dan know?”

“Everything is fading. We do not see as we used to. The world is for men now.”

Varden went to the door, cast his cloak about his shoulders; and Lake wondered whether he was now seeing the wall behind him as through a thin veil, whether the shadow Varden cast had lightened from black to gray. Fading, like all his kind, leaving a shadowy legacy behind that, with time, would itself fade into the mortal blood of the world.

But a thought seemed to strike Varden, and he returned to the hearth as he unfastened a chain from his neck. A pendant in the form of a moon and a rayed star swung flashing in the dull glow of the fire.

“Give this to Vanessa,” he said. “Tell her its origins or not as you think best. But—please—give it to her.”

Lake took it as though it were a serpent. “And wha' can this do for her?”

Varden shrugged. “A sign,” he said. “Perhaps a token if she ever needs one. Or, if not, a bauble to catch the eye of a husband.” He smiled thinly. “The hand of the Lady be upon you, Lake.”

And then he opened the door and was gone. And though Lake looked after him, it seemed that Varden's form and the gleam of starlight that veiled him faded long before he had gone far into the falling snow. The road was suddenly empty and dark. All that was left was the cold, and the night, and the snow.

Fading.

Lake closed the door, barred it, and banked the fire carefully; and then he climbed the narrow stairs to the loft, undressed, and crawled under the thick comforter next to his wife. Miriam smiled in her sleep and snuggled closer to him, shifting her head from the feather pillow to his strong shoulder; and he wrapped an arm about her as though to shield her from Varden and all that he represented, as though to gather in his embrace all the mortality and humanity to which he could make some small claim and hold it up as a bulwark against the comforting, frightening, dangerous, immortal light of the stars.

Miriam, at least, was safe: peasant born, stout, smiling, and happy. Vanessa, though, sleeping uneasily a few feet away, tossing amid visions of patterns and futures, was another matter. Well, at least she could sleep. At least she had that much.

The pendant burned in his hand like a latent stigmata. He resolved not to give it to her. Not tomorrow, at least. Perhaps someday, but not tomorrow.

Roxanne was dead. His mother. And now Varden was gone to whatever fate folded soft wings of oblivion about those in whom the immortal blood of the Elves ran pure.

The tears finally came. Truly, he was alone now. “The hand o' the Lady be upon you too, Da,” he whispered, and then he forced sleep to accept him.

Chapter Three

“He had