The wind whipped overhead, the trees thrashed, and the pendants shot away, across the streaming line of soldiers, out and out, falling and flaring in a hailstorm of fire and ice.
On a bed of mud and broken glass, the scholars and soldiers fought, the difference gone from their faces. Laysia braced herself among them, holding the space where her brother lay. Pain and terror and fury curdled the air, but she no longer heard it, for Kate had run ahead with the others, racing to find their sister.
Moving shadows blotted the sun; Loam rumbled beneath her feet, the air snapping and alive. Laysia looked up at the stippled sky.
A hailstorm had spun upward from the ridge. It hung there a moment, frozen stones in a summer sky, before it whipped across the horizon. Ice fell and turned to fire, and the wood flamed. Beside her, even the fighting men stopped to watch it, agape.
Then two small figures appeared on the ridge and raced down into the hollow, the sky glittering behind them. Jean!
She watched the children run to meet their sister, shouting with joy and relief. With dread, Laysia had remembered the old woman’s words, a child lost, a child gone, but perhaps even dreams could be mistaken!
Then, to her horror, another figure topped the rise, a man in heavy brocade, teetering, aflame. Before she could call out, he dived toward Jean, swinging a fistful of the deadly pendants over his head like a slingshot.
Ashadow fell across the hill, and Jean spun in time to see the silver orbs flash against the sky. Then a squall shot across the hollow and knocked her aside. She fell into the grass as it plowed past, sweeping the man from the hill and heaving the pendants against him. Pop! Pop! Pop! They exploded, igniting his hair and clothes. Flaming, he shot backward, through the barn doors and into the pile of orbs heaped there. For a beat, the barn seemed to glow, then it withered, buckling. With a volcanic roar, it exploded skyward in a shower of fire that lurched to heaven before falling in a mass of flaming pieces, a thousand shooting stars snuffed to ash.
Hungry dark,
Devouring.
It will come
And teach you
To know fear,
And you will lose
Your very selves
Amid a blood tide
That pierces to your heart.
But take hope,
For the smallest candle
Will light a torch,
To make the end,
Beginning.
— Orchard Vision, Age of Anam, Ganbihar
From the smallest of them, the child at play, had come the end of all things, and the beginning. Laysia had watched the old tale unfold all unexpected. She should have been joyous. But in the shattered hollow, she sank back to her knees beside her brother. Lan lay torn beneath the empty sky, and unlike the ancients, she had no healing.
“I remembered your song,” the little one said, coming to her with trepidation. Glass crunched underfoot, and Jean kept her eyes from the fallen man. “The water drop and the wave.”
Tur Nurayim’s song, Laysia thought as she praised the child. She heard her own voice from a distance. Not mine. Tur Nurayim’s song. He had so many. Songs of play, and teaching, and power, and healing. He had so many that she had hummed them, sometimes, in her sleep.
She watched the life seep from her brother, his face so changed, and thought, This, at least, I can give him. A remembrance of lost power as he goes, a song of comfort, of mending. So she sang of fibers rejoined, of wholeness, of health.
Beneath her hands, the wounds closed, and Lan breathed easy.
The age of wolves had ended.
Or at least that’s what Laysia said, when a day had passed. Susan was happy for her, happy for all of them who acted like they had woken from a bad dream.
In Susan’s opinion, though, the age of wolves had given way to the age of awkward silences. For a full day after they’d returned from the clearing, Max had been quiet. If she looked at him, his eyes slid away and he would find some work to do, helping guide people down to the valley, now that even some of the red cloaks came looking. The hours that had followed the battle had been full of confusion. Some of the watchers had disappeared, and the old man — the Guide — could not be found. But then red cloaks approached, this time seeking entrance, and help, and already their faces had begun to shift as they streamed down into the valley, where the sanctuary stood out in the summer sunlight, the mist all gone.
She’d been waiting for Max for so long, she thought they’d have lots to talk about.
But the absent old man still stood between them. Max mumbled an apology there among the red cloaks and the watchers, but it was not enough, and he couldn’t seem to find the words for what would be. Uncharacteristically, he had run out of things to say.
And Susan, who’d longed for quiet ever since she’d heard the first hissing of the mist, now found that the sudden silence just made the gaping hole between them seem bigger. She’d wanted quiet, but not this kind.
It was Nell who finally put a stop to it. She and Susan found Max on the hill after he’d shown a knot of newcomers to the outer wall.
“Max . . .” Susan said.
He looked briefly at her and then found the wheat stalks mesmerizing.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Nell burst out. “How hard is it to just say you were wrong? W-R-O-N-G. Wrong! For once, the great brain made a mistake!”
Max looked up at that, color in his face. After a second, he seemed to come to some kind of decision. He laughed a little.
“Okay, fine. I was wrong. W-R-O-N-G. And you — you were right, Nell. You tried to tell me.”
Nell, who had been fully prepared to elaborate, looked
