This had been Vera's favorite way when she was younger. It led up a long hillside to a stretch of wood, where there was fine hunting in autumn, and where in spring the ladies liked to go a-Maying. It was a pleasant ride on a warm afternoon, ending in a little lake beyond the wood, where a rider could stop to rest and water her horse, and swim if she were minded.
He left the child by the road, with such blessing on her as he had to give, and a word of warding that would bring her back safe to Haven. She did not want to be left behind. There was no time to explain; he bucked her off as gently as he could, pausing to see that she was unharmed, before he went on alone.
As he ran through the wood, his nostrils twitched. That scent beneath the scents of living greenery-he knew it from another life. In this body the senses were keener; the scent was stronger. It was cold, like the breath of graves, and all around it was woven the sick-sweet stench of death.
Dashant.
Mathias could not hold himself in. Not now. Vera was ahead, dismounted by the lake. He could see her in his mind's eye, walking along the shore, hand-in-hand with a tall, dark-haired young man. Her face had grown somber since Mathias had died, but it was as beautiful as ever. Lord Terrell bent his head to hear what she said. His smile was so warm, his glance so tender, that Mathias need have no doubt of it: this man loved this woman with all his heart.
Behind them, unseen and unnoticed, the waters of the lake had begun to stir. Darkness was rising.
The spell was keyed to this place, where her heart was. It would set hooks in her soul and draw her down into itself, and swallow her.
His lungs were burning. His legs were beyond pain. And still there was the last ascent to face, and the steep twisting track down to the lake. He would never come there in time. The thing in the lake, Dashant's conjuring, would rise and devour her.
Deep within, he found a last surge of strength. He sprang to the top of the ridge and skidded down the track to the lake. Its waters were heaving. The dark thing was close to the surface. The two on the shore were still oblivious, lost in one another.
There should have been an escort. Mathias could detect no sign of them. It was eerily like the battle in which he had died: the same cloud of deception, and the same utter abandonment.
This time Vera was warded. To his eyes it was like armor of light. But even that would no be proof against what rose to take her. Dashant had awakened something very, very old and very, very black. It loathed the light; living flesh, to it, was abomination.
The wards warned her-too damnably late. She turned in her lover's arms. Her eyes went wide.
It was like a towering wave. It was darkness absolute. It reached for her.
She did not cower-not Vera. Her only weapon was a dagger, but she drew it and set herself between the darkness and her consort. He was a fraction slower to understand, but his wits were quick enough once he saw what fell upon them. He summoned up a spell, a bolt of light against the dark.
It guttered and went out like a candle in a whirlwind, nearly taking Terrell with it. The darkness took no notice of him at all.
Mathias' whole heart and soul screamed at him to leap between his lady and the thing that would destroy her. But it only had volition through the one who commanded it. Dashant was near-he had to be.
Power of this magnitude needed a mage's fullest strength and focus.
There. On the far side of the lake, in a ruin from the older days. Legend had it that had been a sorcerer's tower during the Mage Wars. Mathias in this incarnation knew that for truth. Dashant was drawing up the dregs of power that had gathered there, feeding his own strength.
He had paid a high price for his ambition. He was skeletally gaunt; his face was twisted with scars.
One hand was a claw. His own spellmongering had done it to him, but in the darkness of his bartered soul, he held Vera to blame.
Mathias had no magic to match his, and next to no strength. He had only the weight of his body, driven at the speed of desperation. He hurtled over the broken wall.
There were wards, protections. His flesh charred and crackled at the touch of them. He ignored the pain, ignored the barriers, ignored the slow and excruciating dissolution of his mortal substance. He fell on Dashant.
Bones snapped like dry sticks. His own, the sorcerer's-it did not matter. Dashant screamed.
Mathias had no breath left for such a thing. Silver hooves battered the writhing body. His nostrils filled with the iron scent of blood.
On the edge of awareness, he knew that the darkness had collapsed upon itself. Terrell drove it back with a barrage of fire-spells.
This world would believe that Terrell had saved his queen from Dashant's last assault. That was fitting. She would never know who had broken the laws of heaven for her-would never suffer that guilt.
Mathias' knees buckled. He was dying, again. He made certain that when he fell, he crushed the sorcerer's remains beneath him.
The last of his sight saw the blue of the mortal sky, and the brightness of the sun, and a pack of pale gleaming shapes drawing in. The baying of hounds was painfully loud. They were almost upon him.
He let go. The world whirled away, sky and sun and Companions, all of it-even the hounds of heaven.
* * *
He knelt on grass that never faded, under a sun that never set. His form was a man's again. He was rather surprised to feel no pain; no broken bones, no bruises.
Not that it would have mattered if he had. His heart was as light as air. The grief was gone from it.
He knew, at last, the peace of this blessed country.
He knew also that he had no right to any such thing. Three judges stood over him. They seemed to be Companions: white horse-shapes, supernally beautiful. Their eyes were not blue but dark, like the night full of stars.
Their hounds lay at their feet, panting like mortal dogs. None seemed to bear him any malice for outrunning them. He was caught, after all. He had come to face his judgment.
'Whatever you do to me,' he said to his judges, 'let it be enough. No one else should pay for what I've done.'
'No?' said the judge in the center, who was perhaps the chief of them. Its eyes flickered toward one who stood not far from Mathias: the great one, now much shrunken and its light greatly dimmed. It could have been a mortal horse, standing with head low, ears slack as if exhausted.
His heart went out to it. He rounded on the judges. 'If that one has any guilt, let it be on my head.
Let me pay for whatever sins it has committed.'
'You would pay a doubled and trebled price?' the judge asked him. 'Even if that price should be the dissolution of your very self?'
'Even so,' Mathias said without hesitation.
The judge stood motionless. There was no breath here, and no heartbeat to mark the passage of time; only the stillness of eternity. Mathias existed in it in perfect peace, without fear, without apprehension. Whatever sentence was laid on him, he would accept it. He had done what he was set in the world to do. The rest, as the singers sang, was silence.
After a moment or an eon, the judge spoke. 'All things are possible under the eyes of heaven.
What you did, you were permitted to do by the One who is above the gods; and you did it for love of another. That mitigates your sentence. Yet sentence there must be, for you broke the laws that divide mortal from immortal, and did violence to the barriers between life and death.'
Mathias bowed his head. 'That is true,' he murmured.
'You did it knowingly,' said the judge, 'and in full knowledge of the consequences. Therefore we grant you justice. Since the world of the flesh is so dear to you, we condemn you to return, and to live life after life in human form, each time anew, each time without memory of the life before-save only once in each life, in utmost extremity, when you will know what you are and why you have come into that life.
And because you would have surrendered your very soul for the Queen and the Kingdom of Valdemar, we charge you to serve it forever, in life after life, until with the passing of time you shall have atoned for your transgression.'
Mathias sank down under the weight of that sentence, on his face in the undying grass. And yet his heart
