Tarma clenched both of her hands around the limp ones on Need's hilt, fiercely willing the blade to do what she knew in her heart it could not. 'Damn it, Keth -- you can't just walk out on us this way! You can't just die on us! We -- ' she could not say more for the tears that choked her own throat.
'Keth -- please don't; I'll do anything, take my life, only please don't die -- ' Jadrek choked out, frantically.
'Don't... have much choice ...' Kethry breathed, her eyes glazing with shock, her life pumping out into the dust. 'Be brave ... she'enedra ... finish the contract. Then go home ... make Tale'sedrin live ... without me.'
'No!' Tarma cried, her eyes half-blind with tears. 'No,'' she wrenched her hands away, leaping to her feet. 'It's not going to end this way! Not while I'm Kal'enedral! By the Warrior, I swear NO.''
Thrusting a blood-drenched fist at the sky, she summoned all the power that was hers as Kal'enedral, as priestess, as Swordsworn Warrior -- power she had never taken, never used. She flung back her head, and screamed a name into the uncaring, gray sky, a name that tore her throat even as her heart was torn.
The Warrior's Greater Name --
The harsh syllables of the Name echoed and reechoed, driving her several paces backward, then sending her to her knees in the dust. Then -- silence. Silence as broodingly powerful as that in the eye of the hurricane. Tarma looked up, her heart cold within her. For a moment, nothing changed.
Then everything ceased; time stopped. The very tears on Jadrek's cheeks froze in their tracks. Sound died, the dust on the breeze hung suspended in little immobilized eddies.
Tarma alone could move; she got to her feet, and waited for Her - to learn what price she would be asked to pay for the gift of Kethry's life.
A single shaft of pure, white light lanced into the ground, practically at Tarma's feet, accompanied by an earsplitting shriek of tortured air. Tarma did not turn her eyes away, though the light nearly blinded her and left her able to sec nothing but white mist for long moments. When the mist cleared from her vision, She was standing where the light had been, Her face utterly still and expressionless, Her eyes telling Tarma nothing.
They faced one another in silence for long moments, the Goddess and her votary. Then She spoke, Her voice still melodious; but this time, the music was a lament.
'As is my right as Kal'enedral,' Tarma replied, quietly.
Now Tarma bowed her head and closed her eyes upon her tears, for she could not bear to look upon that face, nor to see the shattered wreck that had been her dearest friend lying beyond. 'Anything,' she whispered around the anguish.
'Anything.' Tarma defiantly raised her head again, and spoke directly to those star-strewn eyes, pulling each of her words out of the pain that filled her heart. 'Keth-she's worth more to me than anything. Ask anything of me; take my body, make me a cripple, take my life, even make Tale'sedrin a Dead Clan, it doesn't matter. Because without Kethry to share it, none of that has any meaning for me.'
She was weeping now for the first time in years; mostly when she hurt, she just swallowed the tears and the pain, and forced herself to show an impas-sive face to the world. Not now. The tears scalded her cheeks like hot oil; she let them.
'I put no price on obedience, I will serve You faithfully, Lady, as I always have. Only let Kethry live, and let her thrive and perhaps find love -- and most of all, be free. That's worth anything You could ask of me.'
The Warrior regarded her thoughtfully for an eternity, measuring, weighing.
Then -- She laughed --
And as Tarma stared in benumbed shock. She held out Her hands, palm outward, one palm facing Tarma, one
