Wintermoon

illusory thing seemed real, as in the village. Therefore, how would this saga be resolved?

She pondered too with the winter snow in her heart, if Zemetrios would have been driven mad by the finish of it.

The ultimate problem was their return to the world, which still she had not solved. Maybe they must stay here, despite all expiation. And maybe too they would be segregated here from each other.

Do I love him?

Even in that extremity and strangeness, this question was paramount, and unanswered.

Sometimes she sat alone in the winter yard of the simulated Rhoian house, gazing up at the multicolored stars. Indoors the men talked rationally, remembering old campaigns.

The food and drink she had found in the kitchens had nourished her, and them. Even the rug bed she had made herself was comfortable. She could sleep now. Anywhere therefore would have been comfortable.

Perhaps madness has taken all of us.

But the lion lashed its tail in her spirit, and she herself quieted it. Be patient.

When next the blue orb rose, that would be the Seventh Night, as far as she knew. She could do nothing but wait.

In sleep, she heard Zemetrios speaking to her very softly. “It’s done, Cliro. He has gone.”

Instantly she was fully awake.

“Where?”

“Away. Away where he must.”

He spoke of Yazon. Who, it seemed, had gone back to the lands beyond death.

Zemetrios said, “This has been a dream.” She thought, Thank all gods, he knows. “But it was a dream I needed to be dreaming. Oh, Clirando, I should have given him that, no matter how he was. I should have tried so much harder to save him, in the true world, while he lived. Not dragged him into my house and shunned and treated him like a sinful baby, despised and left him always to himself, busy with my own affairs. I should not either have gone out, and left my servants at his mercy—afraid of him, afraid to offend me. I’ve done what I should have done, but here. It’s—freed me. But I shall never cease to be sorry.” He leaned close to her, resting his forehead on hers. “How long has all this gone on? It seemed a year—But he was my friend, my brother—oh, Cliro—if only I’d done this then, as I should.”

She held him. They lay wrapped among the rugs, like two children in the dark. “Hush, my love,” she said. “If only any of us had done what we should. We see it clearly when it has passed by. Yet we must try to see, and try to do. That’s all the gods ask. That we try.”

And she thought, And is he my love, then?

And she thought, Yes, he is my love.

They curled together. Beyond the narrow window the blue disk gemmed the sky.

He had survived the test, and was not deranged. Each of them had paid their debt to themselves. They slept exhausted in each other’s arms.

The next time they woke, it was together, and they lay on the bare plains of the moon. The house with all its lamps and groves, its rooms and well and yard, was gone. Only those mountains like spines scratched along the horizon.

The earth hung above, and all the stars.

“There was a way that led us here, beyond the rocks,” he said. “But how do we find it?”

Clirando stared into her mind. There were visions there still, things which came from the magic not only of this place, but from the sorcery of the Isle.

Slowly she said, “There’s home,” nodding at the disk above.

“But the way to it?”

Clirando’s brain showed her the magicians in the square who had called the stars.

Instinctively she raised her arms.

Up in the inky black, the exquisite jewelry shivered. One by one, stars—stars— detached from their moorings. They began to float down, not a swarm now, a snowfall—

If it was a dream, you might do anything. And if not, still you might attempt it.

The stars wove around one another in slow, sparkling tidal surges. She thought of the old woman weaving on the headland, the old man who made snakes at the forest’s end, and of the stilt-walker lighting torches.

High in air, a bridge began to form in a wide, swooping arc. It was laid with coruscating stella stones— emeralds, rubies, amethysts—it curved down toward the surface where they stood, making a hill-road for them to climb. While the rest of the arc soared away like the curve of a bow. Infinities up in the air, the earth disk had received the far point of this incredible bridge, without the tiniest ripple.

They neither debated nor held back. Both he and she ran at the bridge of stars, this extraordinary path that led toward the ordinary, and the mortal.

Simultaneously they leaped, landed. Clirando felt the faceted paving under her feet. Ethereal colors washed them like high waters, now copper, now bronzy, now golden.

Not to sleep so long—it had been worth it, to know a dream like this one.

Both of them laughed. Children laughed like that, innocent, and prepared to credit that dreams came true.

As so often on the Isle, shoulder to shoulder, Clirando and Zemetrios broke into their companionable, well- trained, mile-eating lope. Over the night, over the heavens, running home through the spatial outer dark which, for them, was full of a rich sweet air, mild breezes, summery scents, branches of static stars, rainbows and light, wild music, half-seen winged beings.

Clirando knew no fear, no doubt, and no reticence. She thought idly, as she bounded earthward, This is the truth.

But somewhere, something—oh, it was like a vagrant cloud, feathery and adrift. It bloomed out from nowhere. It poured around her. Zemetrios was concealed. She half turned, missing him, and then a delicate nothingness enveloped her. That too brought no alarm. It was also too good, too true.

And after only a second anyway it was done.

And then—

“Clirando!”

This known female face bending to hers, someone well liked, familiar—

“Tuyamel?”

Clirando’s eyes were clearing. She stared into six faces now, all known, all in their way loved. Her girls, the women of her band.

“Lie still, Cliro,” said Tuy firmly. “You’ve flown such a great way off, and had such a long journey back.”

They were sworn to secrecy, they assured her, all of them. No one who came here must ever afterward speak of the secrets of Moon Isle. Besides, they knew very little.

“Certain persons—they go to certain places. The priests—and the gods—direct them. Some even go—so we heard—to the moon itself. And you went somewhere, Cliro. That’s what they said.”

Her band told her how, the morning after they had beached their boat on the strand of the Isle, they had found her unconscious, and had not been able to rouse her. Though she breathed, she seemed all but dead. And so they picked her up on a litter improvised from cloaks, and bore her inland.

An ancient priestess by a beacon on the cliff top declared Clirando had suffered no awful harm. “She has not slept a while,” the priestess said. “Now she must.”

So Clirando’s loyal girls carried her, with much care and attention, to one of the seven inland villages of the