“Just lie you quiet”—her murmur is a mourning—“and it will be over.”
He shifts beneath her, a small sound looses itself from his throat. He nestles closer, nuzzles her arm. It freezes her, breath rattling in her throat at his trust of her touch.
N’da, she cannot quail, not now! She has given everything for him—can she not give this last? A kindness, really, it would be. Never would this changing take him, ruin him—never would he have to suffer!
Never either would he live, or love, or see Moons, or Stars, or Sun.
Slowly, inevitably, she draws the blanket aside. Her son takes a deep, soft breath, mutters, a frown twitching at his brow as if his dreams are unquiet, and she knows. She knows she hasn’t the courage, she cannot do this.
And she turns to see Talorgan blocking the door, brown face sepulchral even in the warm candlelight.
“Lakisa,” he whispers in numb, almost fascinated horror.
The blanket drops from nerveless fingers to the floor. She sees a reflection of herself in his eyes—as if she Sees through his eyes: half-dressed, wild-eyed, her hand snarled in her slumbering son’s hair, pulling his head back as if baring it to the knife.
“Lakisa.” Talorgan’s eyes are black and half lit, even nightsight shadowed, unreadable. His voice twists from horror to accusation. “What are you doing?”
Dreams. Truths…
Apparitions.
With a choked cry, Lakisa runs. Talorgan grabs hold of her, shakes her. His eyes are shadowed, panicked—it feeds her own panic, gives her strength beyond her means. She yanks away, flees from the wykupeh and outwards. The branches snag at her hair. Sobs hitch at her ribs as she runs; they nearly fell her but she keeps going.
River winds before her, a ribbon set ablaze in the last rays of dusk. Fire rises into the morning, circling above her. A shining, glittering Hoop of air and darkness, glittering gold and malice, a ring of death and madness…
And Dreaming… shifts.
Snatches Tokela back in his own heart, his own body, and he sees—though his eyes are closed, his body asleep, how can he see?—he sees his father standing above him. And in that instant he realises what his father was.
A buffer of sanity. Of silence. Of blessed, blessed stillness.
Talorgan’s eyes are dark, unfathomable with emotions he finds uneasily admitted, and now the pain of holding them within is a scream within Tokela’s memory. Shaking fingers touch Tokela’s lips, trace down his throat. A sigh, almost a sob, escapes Talorgan as he discovers the pulse beating there, strong and steady.
Then he reaches down, brushes his son’s forehead with gentle fingers, then bolts out the door after Lakisa.
no, don’t go, don’t go, don’t…
Fire sucks him back, blazing in his heart, rising into the morning, circling above him… above her the glittering Hoop of Stars and darkness wheels, cast from Earth and born in River. For she is trapped and so he is trapped, and it is, in the end, the same, with only one way to extinguish the conflagration within their mind…
River is chill; the shock forces the breath from Lakisa in a clutch of bubbles, scoops her deep. Without air she sinks, and a copper cloud rises about her, silt wafting upwards through her hair, obscuring her vision, quieting her heart.
Stillness. Peace.
Something tugs at her hair. She struggles but it’s strong, snarling tight to drag her away from the soft, dark cocoon. She twists, weightless, gains her freedom but the damage is done and she shoots back up like an arrow.
Talorgan is there, ungainly and frightened, leaning too far over in the small dugout and calling her name. He cannot swim; to come out in the boat at all shows how desperate and afraid he is. He might have been drinking but neither is he drunk—he is more sober than she has seen him in months, and there is a knowing in his eyes. Knowing, and other things that she has no name for, things that rouse the ever-present panic.
In this Dream, thisnow, Tokela can name them—he knows them, all too well.
Fear. Devotion. Surrender.
He knows what his father, cornered and driven past any reason, did—and will do.
But Tokela didn’t/doesn’t want to know. He didn’t/doesn’t want to be held within this sway of memory/Dreamings, doesn’t want to be there, again, as it happens. Yet he is dragged along in his dam’s wake, as it has been since he was Shaped within her womb—don’t let my son die, i cannot bear to lose another—tangled and twined fast in a song of Other.
Though he tries to break away, tries to stop it, stop it, stop it. As his world heaves about him and the Dreaming takes him back, as
Talorgan snatches at Lakisa, voice harsh and shrill with fear, as he lunges too far and the dugout tips. Falling atop her, suddenly and painfully, driving the breath from her lungs as he slams into her then struggles underwater, his body heavy with wet and flesh, flailing and clutching to her, trying to help and merely sinking them further. For precious seconds she feels air upon her fingers, touches the wood of the boat, clutches at it as
in a narrow bedshelf her son lies, eyes closed against Stars, his heart a-blaze and dawn-hot wings snarled by cloying, gossamer threads. In unconscious reaction he reaches out to stop the pain, as
a broad, strong hand clamps to her wrist and seizes. Lakisa tries to take them up but instead is dragged down, down, into the silt and the inky shadows. Talorgan is gone and in his place is an empty shell of sinking stone, taking her with the undertow, taking them all into the copper-cool depths until
the Dreamings die and Tokela tears free from the awareness—stops it, silences it—and their Fire is smothered with Rain and Earth, shut away with only the faintest glimmer of Sun fading into the river bottoms, and
it is like giving birth
