Black Jade

I looked out across the river at the acres of star lilies and white fairies' eyes gleaming in the strong sunlight. In the sky, an eagle soared, a little streak of gold against icy mountains and bright blue rock. The whole valley, with its brilliant green fields and forests powdered with snow, seemed on fire.

'What you say is true,' I told her. 'And yet, somewhere in the world, right now, a bird of prey is tearing out the insides of a vole or a hare. And somewhere, a man or a woman is dying upon a cross.'

'That, too, is true,' she said, and her voice grew thick with sadness. 'But even dying, they look out upon the same sky and the same earth that we do.'

I pressed her hand to my face, and I said softly, 'But you do not see at all now, not even with your second sight.'

'Don't pity me,' she said, pulling her hand away from me. The old coldness seemed to fall over her face like a cloud covering the sun.

'I don't pity you. But I will not believe there is no hope.'

She smiled coldly, even as her sadness deepened. Her fingers reached into the spray of blond hairs falling over her shoulders. She managed to pluck one of them out, and she held up this gleaming, golden filament for me to see. 'One chance only, Val. One slender, slender chance exists, finer even than this, of what you hope will be. And for all our gladness at finding Bemossed and what he has accomplished, it is exactly the same chance we have of defeating Morjin, in the end.'

'I know that,' I told her. 'But even if there is only one chance in ten thousand, I will think of how we might bring his defeat, and nothing else.'

I reached out and prised the hair from her fingers. I coiled it around one of mine, then folded it into a handkerchief, which I put in my tunic's pocket. And I said, 'Almost nothing else. If there is only one chance in all the universe of you being made whole and marrying me, I will make it be.'

She sat next to me, with the sun beating down upon her, and the essence of horse and her musky skin steamed off her garments. I listened to her deep, quick breaths. Then she said, 'You sound so sure of yourself. The tone in your words — I have never heard you speak this way.'

I felt my own breath building in my throat like a storm. I no longer doubted that I could give voice to what whispered in my heart.

'My grandfather,' I told her, 'believed that a man can make his own fate. What can a man and a woman together make? Everything, Atara.'

She stood up and stepped carefully down to the river's bank, where she scooped up a handful of old snow. After shaping it into a ball, she returned to the blanket. She sat holding it before her face as if it might reveal the shape of the future. At last she said, 'King Jovayl was right about you. This journey has changed you.'

I felt a bright, warm thing filling up my blood with an unbearable heat. I no longer feared letting it loose into Atara like lightning.

'Tell me that you believe in the future,' I said to her.

She squeezed her snowy ball and replied, 'Of course I do.'

I took the snow from her and cast it into the river, where the dark, churning water swept it away. I took her cold, wet hands in mine. I held them, tightly, until they warmed, and then grew hot.

'Say that you will be my wife.'

'You want my promise?'

'No — I want you say that it must be. That no other future can be.'

She sat breathing quickly, and she said, 'I almost believe that.'

I stared at the blindfold binding her face. My eyes felt like fire-stones, and I wanted to burn it away.

'Don't look at me like that!' she told me.

'How do you know how I look at you? You are blind.'

'I have never been that blind. I can feel you looking and looking.. and loving, the way that you do, with all the fire of your sweet, sweet heart, which I want to — '

I kissed her then. I felt something inside her melt, utterly, and flow like a sweet liquor, and so I cupped my hand around the back of her neck to pull us together. Her lips crushed against mine as she threw her arms around my back and pulled on me, fiercely, as if she wanted to take every part of me inside her. From within her throat, and mine, came a deep murmur almost like a growl, and we must have sounded like animals. But we were angels, too, for we kept passing the bright, warm thing to each other in our lips and our breath and our pounding blood, back and forth, until the fire grew so brilliant and hot that we could not bear it.

At last, she pushed away from me, and sat sweating and gasping. Her breath steamed out into the cool air as she told me, 'What I won't make with you is a child, not here and now — not with men still dying on crosses, as you say.'

'No — that would not be right,' I agreed. 'But someday, you will bear me a child. The most beautiful, beautiful child.'

She smiled, then laughed as she took hold of my hand and squeezed it. She said, 'Oh, Val, I do believe you — what else can I do?'

I kissed her again, and for a longer time. Then I told her, 'When the baby comes, you will look upon him with new eyes, I promise you.'

'But what if we have a girl?'

'Then you will look upon her even more gladly, as will I — especially if she is as beautiful as you.'

She sat quietly for a moment as she oriented her face toward me. Then she asked, 'Do you still think I'm beautiful?'

'More beautiful than any woman I've ever seen,' I told her. 'Even Asha and Varda, all the Star People, would envy you.'

She tapped her fingers to her blindfold and said, 'They would not envy me this, I think.'

I reached out to untie her blindfold and pull it away from her. I traced my fingers beneath her brows and across the bridge of her nose, even as my eyes grew warmer and I couldn't help looking and looking. Finally I said, 'A day will come when you will take this off for good. You will see again, Atara.'

She grasped my hand, and pressed it over the front of her face. She said, 'But I see so much now. I see you.'

I listened as the eagle above us let loose its harsh, haunting cry. I said, 'Tell me what you see, then.'

'I see a man,' she said, 'who had lost everything in the world, only to gain the whole world, and more. You are larger now, somehow, inside. Like that impossible stallion you ride. Like the sun. I don't know how your skin can contain you. You are wilder — so willful and wild. And even angrier than before, and you hate Morjin no less. But it is a different force now. It does not rule you. You rule, now. The man I have wanted to be with every hour and with every breath since I first laid eyes upon him: he, who almost died. I see that one, who somehow found a moment of compassion for the vilest of beasts, even though that beast had slaughtered all that he loved.'

'Not all,' I said, squeezing her hand.

'But your mother and grandmother, your beautiful brothers, they — '

'They are here,' I said, pressing her hand to my chest. 'For so long, I kept thinking of them as murdered, dead. But truly, they live.'

I knew she wanted to weep, but at that moment I felt nothing except joy, and so I held her close to me. For a while, she did weep, but soon her soft sobbing gave way to a deeper heaving of her belly as she began laughing with a gladness for life that she could not contain. Finally, she sat back away from me and said, 'There is such a light in you — this beautiful, beautiful light! Kane says it is like a sword; I mould say like the sweetest fire. I've never known anyone to love like you, to live like you, not even Bemossed. The passion. It is what you were born for. Sometimes, I know, I am all ice inside, but when you touch me the way you do, I'm all water.'

She paused to draw in a deep breath, then added, 'And. that is why I love you. And why I will marry you.'

She kissed me, and then laughed for a long time, a delightful sound, like the ringing of the river. Then I could not contain myself. I leaped up, and pulled her up to her feet. I wanted to throw off my tunic and let the wind cool my burning skin. I wanted to fly like flame over the mountains. Why didn't their snow, I wondered, melt when I looked at it? Why didn't Atara gasp out at the fire in my hands when I took hold of her