looked no more welcoming now than it had before, and dallying wasn't going to make the leaving easier.
And they rode into the stomach-churning vertigo she had come to hate.
Savil huddled beside the fire with her legs curled under her, forcing herself to stay awake. There was, thank the gods, no wind; the cave was warming fairly quickly. It smelled of damp, though, and of the musty taint of the half-rotten leaves that had blown in here with the autumn winds. That damp meant that if she let the fire die, it would chill down very quickly, a chill that would penetrate even their thick wool cloaks.
Once she'd taken the Gate down, she'd had just enough strength to lay the fire, and start it with the coal she'd brought in a fire-safe. After that she'd sunk to the sand next to it, pulling Vanyel close in beside her. He was curled up against her now, bundled with her inside her cloak, his head in her lap; he shook like a reed in the wind. From time to time he moaned and his hand groped for something that seemed to elude him; she soothed him back into sleep, stroking his hair until he finally recognized that she was still with him and calmed a little.
The Gate-crossing had been hard on him, as hard as she'd feared. When she'd gone to take him from Yfandes' back, he'd been half-roused out of his drugged daze; his eyes had been wide open, his jaws clenched. He had been held paralyzed, not by the drugs, but by unfocused and overwhelming terror and pain. It had taken a candlemark to get him soothed down again.
Somewhere just outside were Kellan and Yfandes, standing a watchful guard in the falling snow. Still in their tack, poor things - she'd barely been able to get Vanyel unstrapped from the saddle before collapsing beside him. She had nearly forgotten to activate the Wing-sister Talisman. It had taken Kellan's sharp reminder to shake her out of her fog of exhaustion long enough to stab her finger and let the prescribed three drops of her blood fall on it.
Memory came, then, as sharply defined as if she had bid farewell to the Hawkbrothers scant days ago instead of years.
* * *
'Blood calls to blood, and heart to heart,' Starwind told her gravely, his ice-blue eyes focused inward. He held his slashed palm above the Wingsister Talisman of silver wire and crystals, and his blood dripped onto the heart- stone of the piece, dyeing the clear crystal a vivid ruby.
Savil watched, silently, feeling the power flowing and weaving itself into the intricate design of rainbow crystal and silver wire.
This was nothing like the kind of magic she was used to using; it really wasn't much like that the Hawkbrothers had taught her, either. This was older magic, much older, dating, perhaps, from the times of the Mage Wars, the wars that had wrecked the world and left the Pelagirs a twisted, magic-riddled ruin. She shivered a little, and Starwind looked up, one of his brief and infrequent smiles lighting his face for a moment.
He closed his hand; Moondance touched the back of it, and he opened it again. The slash in his palm had been Healed with the speed of a thought. At eighteen the young outlander now calling himself 'Moondance' was well on his way to becoming that rarest of mages, a Healer-Adept.
Starwind fixed the Talisman in its place on the mask of feathers and crystal beads; it resembled a palm-sized diadem perched on the brow of the mask above the eye-slits. He handed the whole mask to her, and nodded at the Talisman. 'When you need us again, come to us, and let three drops of your own blood fall upon the heart-stone. I shall know, and come to you.'
In all those years since, the heart-stone's bright scarlet had not faded. She only hoped that the set-spell had not faded either. It did seem to her that the heart-stone began pulsing with a dim, inner light from the moment that her blood touched it. But that could have been the flickering of the fire, or the wavering of her own vision; she was too spent to tell, and too drained to begin to sense power even if it was moving under her own nose.
Vanyel stirred at her side, curling his knees tighter against his chest. She shifted a bit, glad that the floor of the cave was covered in several inches of dry, soft sand.
Poor child, she thought, her mind dark with despair. I'm at a loss for what to do with you. You keep reaching out to me for support, and I want to give it to you, and I can't, I mustn't. If I do, you'II just fall right back into the pattern you danced with poor 'Lendel. She stroked the fine, silky hair beneath her hand, and her heart ached for him. You don't know what to think anymore, do you? You're afraid to touch again, afraid to open yourself, you're full of such fear and such pain - gods, when you told Withen that nothing would ever make you happy again -
She swallowed the lump in her throat that threatened to choke her, and blinked at the dancing flames, then closed her stinging eyes and felt tears bead up on her lashes. Starwind, old friend, she thought desperately, where are you? I'm out of my depth; I don't know what to do. I need your help -
She started. There was a swirl of snow at the cave entrance, white-gold and shadow in the dancing firelight. There had been no alert from either Companion-But when the snow settled and cleared, he was there.
He hadn't changed, not at all.
The sword of ice, she had called him when she'd first seen him. Flowing silver hair still reached past his waist when he put back,the hood of his white cloak and let the silky mass of it tumble free. There still were no wrinkles in his face, not even around the obliquely-slanting, ice-blue eyes; he was still tall and unbent, still slender as a boy. Only the cool deeps of his eyes showed his age, and the aura of power that pulsed about him. No mage would ever have any doubts that this was an Adept, and a powerful one.
He smiled at her, and held out his hands. 'Welcome, heart-sister, Wingsister Savil,' he said in the liquid Tay- ledras tongue, gliding to her to take the hands she held up to him in his own. 'Always welcome, and well come thou art.'
'Starwind, shaydra,' her sight darkened for a momerit, and when it cleared, the Tayledras Adept was kneeling at her side, holding her upright.
'Savil, you stubborn, headstrong woman,' he chided, as she felt an inrushing of energy from his center to hers. She swayed a little, and he held her upright. 'What need could possibly have been so great that you drain yourself to a wraith to Gate yourself here?''
'This need - ' She pulled back her cloak to show him the boy curled against her side, his face taut with pain.
