gazing into this clear crystal when I had cried out in my sleep. 'He sees you, doesn't he?' she asked.
'In a way,' I said. 'But it is more as if he can smell the taint of the kirax in me.
Whatever Count Ulanu has communicated to him as to our deaths, he knows that I'm still alive.'
'He is still seeking you, then?'
'Yes, seeking – but not quite finding. Not as he would like.'
'He mustn't find you,' she said with a quiet urgency in her voice.
'Time is on his side,' I told her. 'It is said that the Lord of lies never sleeps.'
'Do not speak so. You mustn't say such things.'
Of course, she was right. To anticipate one's own defeat is to bring it about with utter certainty.
There was a new fear in her voice when she spoke of Morjin and a new tenderness in her fingers as she stroked my hand. I pointed at the sphere of gelstei she clutched against her breast, and I asked, 'Have you seen him then? In your crystal?'
'I've seen many things,' she said evasively.
I waited for her to say more but she fell into a deep silence.
'Tell me, Atara,' I whispered.
She shook her head and whispered back, 'You're not like Master Juwain. You don't need to know everything about everything.'
'No, not everything,' I agreed.
Maram, snoring loudly on the other side of the fire, rolled over in his sleep as Liljana shifted about against the cold and pulled her cloak more tightly about her neck. I sensed that Atara was afraid of waking them. So it didn't surprise me when she stood up, took my hand and walked with me a few dozen yards across the snowy ground into the darkness surrounding our camp.
'It's so hard for me to tell you, don't you see?' she said softly.
'Is it that bad then? Is it any worse than what I've seen?'
I told her about the thousands of deaths I had died in my dreams. This touched something raw inside her. I felt her seize up as if I had stuck my finger into an open wound.
'What is it?' I asked her.
Her whole body shook as if suddenly stricken with the night's deep cold.
'Please tell me,' I said, holding her against me. 'No, I can't, I shouldn't – I shouldn't have to,' she whispered.
And then she was kissing my hands and eyes, touching the scar on my forehead, kissing that, holding me tightly – and then she collapsed to her knees as she threw her arms around my legs and buried her face against my thighs as she sobbed.
I called to her as I stroked her hair, 'Atara, Atara,'
A little later, with the night's wind cooling her grief, she managed to stand again and look at me. And she told me, 'Almost every time I see Morjin, I see you. I see your death.'
The wind off the icy peaks around us suddenly chilled me to the bone. I smiled grimly at her and asked, 'You said almost every time?'
'Almost, yes,' she said. 'There are other branchings, you see, so few other branchings of your life.'
'Please tell me, then.'
She took a deep breath and said, 'I've seen you kneeling to Morjin -and living.'
'That will never be.'
'I've seen you turning away from Argattha, too. And going far away from him. With me, Val. Hiding.'
'That can't ever be,' I said softly.
'I know,' she whispered through her tears. 'But I want it to be.'
I held her tightly as her heart beat against mine. I whispered in her ear, 'There must be a way. I have to believe that there's always a way.'
'But what if there isn't?'
The star's light reflected from the snow was just, enough for me to behold the terror in her eyes. And I said, 'If you've seen my death in Argattha, you should tell me. So that I might fight against it and make my own fate.'
'You don't understand,' she said, shaking her head.
She went on to tell me something of her gift with which she had been touched. She tried to describe how a scryer's vision was like ascending the branches of an infinite tree. Each moment of time, she said, was like a magical seed quivering with possibilities. Just as a woman lay waiting to blossom inside a child, the whole tree of life was inside the seed. Every leaf, twig or flower that could ever be was there A scryer opened it with her warmth and will with her passion for truth and her tears. To move from the present to the future, as a scryer does, was to find an eternal golden stem breaking out of the seed and dividing into two or ten branches, and each one of these dividing again and again, ten into ten thousand, ten thousand into trillions upon trillions of branches shimmering always just beyond her reach. The tree grew ever higher toward the sun, branching out into infinite possibilities. And the higher the scryer climbed, the brighter became this sun until it grew impossibly bright, as if all the light in the universe were pulling her toward a single, golden moment at the end of time that could never quite be.
'It sounds glorious,' I said to her.
'You still don't understand,' she said sadly. 'Morjin, and his lord, Angra Mainyu – they are poisoning this tree. Darkening even the sun' The higher I climb, the more withered branches and dead leaves.'
The wind in my face seemed to carry the stench of the burning Library in its sharp gusts. For the thousandth time I wondered how many people had died in this terrible conflagration.
'But there must be a branch that is whole,' I said to her. 'Leaves that even he cannot touch.'
'There might be,' she agreed. 'I wish I had the courage to look.'
'What do you mean?'
She put her crystal in her pocket and grasped my hands. She said, 'I'm afraid, Val.'
'You, afraid?'
She nodded her head. The starlight seemed to catch in her hair. Then she told me that the tree of life grew out of a strange, dark land inside her.
'There be dragons there,' she said, looking at me sharply.
My heart ached with a sudden, fierce desire to slay this particular dragon.
'A scryer,' she said, 'a true scryer must never turn back from ascending the tree. But the heights bring her too close to the sun. To the light. After a while, it burns and blinds – blinds her to the things of the world. Her world grows ever brighter. And so she lives more for her visions than for other people. And living thus, she dies a little and grows ugly in her soul. Old, ugly, shriveled. And that is why people grow to hate her.'
I pressed her hand against my wrist so that she could feel the beating of my heart there. I said, 'Do you think I could ever hate you?'
'I'd want to die if you did,' she said.
In the dark I found her eyes as I took a deep breath. I said, 'There must be a way.'
There must be a way that she could stand beneath this brilliant, inner sun and return in all her beauty beajing its light in her hands.
'Atara,' I whispered.
I knew that for me, too, there was a way that the valarda could not only open others' hearts to me, but mine to them.
'Atara,' I said again.
What is it to love a woman? It is just love, as all love is: warm and soft as the down of a quilt yet hard and flawless like a diamond whose sheen can never be dimmed. It is sweeter than honey, more quenching of thirst than the coolest mountain stream.
But it is also a song of praise and exaltation of all the wild joy of life. It makes a man want to fight to the death protecting his beloved just so this one bit of brightness and beauty, like a perfect rose, will remain among the living when he has gone on.
Through the hands and eyes it sings, calling and calling – calling her to open up the bright petals of her soul and be a glory to the earth.
I touched the tears gathering at the corner of Atara's eye and then wiped away my own. I looked at her a
