The Unending Dance
“I ’m fine, I’m all right,” Karigan insisted.
Zachary was hazy in her vision as he leaned over her. She could not hear what he was saying. The stars were pulling on him, stretching his image, distorting his face.
Then the haze lifted and she saw him clearly. He was sitting on the bed beside her. He stroked her cheek.
“I will never let you go,” he said.
“I’m fine, really.” Something, however, did not feel quite right, as if she were still falling, the flutter in her stomach, the disorientation, the heavens slipping swiftly by.
“What is it, dearheart?” he asked.
Her pulse quickened with a familiar rhythm: one-two-three, one-two-three . . .
“I’m—”
He leaned down to kiss her, and just as his lips touched hers, he slid a dagger between her ribs.
She screamed into the heavens, the stars a blur, until a hand reached out and grabbed her by the wrist.
She walked onto the ballroom floor and was drawn into a dance. Her partner was Shawdell. Not the mosaic version she’d encountered before, but the beautiful Eletian with his golden hair and shining azure eyes. He smiled at her.
One-two-three, one-two-three, turn
She tried to pull away from him but could not.
“You don’t want to dance, Galadheon? I thought you’d find this visage more pleasing, but it does not appear so.
It is just illusion, anyway.” In a blink, he was once more the warped glass mosaic.
She cried out when his hands sliced hers.
The offkey music stopped and she stumbled to a halt. Blood dripped from her hands.
“This is not real,” she said. “It can’t be—they pulled me out of the dark, rescued me.”
“Only a child would think so,” he replied, “but you are a woman grown now, and you know this world, my gray world, is very real.”
She could not deny how real it felt.
“I drew you back because we were interrupted and our feast awaits.”
“Feast? I don’t—”
“Come,” he said. “My other guests are ready.”
The guests crowded around her and pushed her off the dance floor toward the refreshment table. Familiar faces leered at her, the faces of those who had hurt her, who had tried to kill her, the disgraced Weapon, Torne, Captain Immerez, old Lord Mirwell, Grandmother, Nyssa . . .
“No,” she whispered, “you are all dead.”
“Are we?” Grandmother asked. She carried a basket of yarn over her wrist. “It is you who makes us live.”
Faceless servants moved the refreshment table revealing the carcass of the great black stallion, Salvistar. His hide was dull. The heavens no longer sparked in his opaque eyes. The guests pulled out knives and daggers and started to butcher his body.
Karigan backed away, horrified, tears washing down her face.
Her shadow, her darker self, detached from one of the ornate columns of the ballroom and gazed impassively at the butchery, a black feather braided into her hair.
Plasmic energy oozed from the wounds inflicted upon Salvistar’s corpse, and dripped down the faces of her old foes like blood as they ate of his flesh.
Karigan could not look upon the carnage.
Her dark self remained mute and stared at her to see what she would do.
“You should partake of the refreshments,” Shawdell said. “It would make you strong, strong unto a god yourself. Your eye ensures it. Why be an avatar when you can be a god?”
Karigan touched the patch that covered her mirror eye. “N-no.” She stumbled back.
Dark Karigan finally spoke. Our loss.
Those two words confirmed for Karigan that if she ate of Salvistar’s substance, not only would she become immeasurably strong, she would become her darker self.
Strong enough to face Mornhavon the Black and defeat him, strong enough to obliterate dragons, if need be, and strong enough to rule all the Earth should she choose.
All living beings would pledge fealty to her, even the Eletians.
She could make them pay for all their manipulations.
She could take on the very gods and win.
No one and nothing could overcome her, and because she would be her darker self, the world would be remade in her aspect.
A shadow world of her own creation. Yet the idea of the power beguiled her.
To think she could crush Mornhavon! That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?
It would save the realm, save her friends. Save Zachary.
Only to become the thing she wished to destroy.
She backed another step. “No.”
“Are you sure?” Shawdell asked. “They are saving the heart for you.”
A vision of her biting into the heart came to her, of all that potency leaking out of the organ and her licking her fingers. She’d be a power never before seen, a power above all powers, darker than the night.
But in the night, stars glimmered.
“No.”
Dark Karigan frowned.
“I prefer the light,” Karigan said. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her moonstone.
Only, it wasn’t a moonstone at all but a lump of coal.
She cried out, and the coal morphed into a crow that perched on her hand and croaked at her.
It snatched her eyepatch right off her face and pecked her eye.
Mirror shards shattered in her vision and fell away.
The crow stabbed deep into her eye socket and began to feed.
She screamed.
A hand on her shoulder.
She whipped around. All was green around her like spring. Pasture grasses grew to her knees and smelled fresh, of dew and damp soil. There was the G’ladheon estate, the house and stables, in the distance.
“Kari girl,” said Aunt Stace.
Karigan could not see her aunt clearly for the sun was directly behind her. Karigan squinted.
“Kari,” her aunt said, “be careful with that stick. You could poke an eye out.”
Karigan glanced at her hand. She held a stick like one of the ones she used to pretend was a sword when she was young. She’d engaged in mock fights with the stablemaster’s boy or one of her friends. Her aunts had often warned her about poking out an eye.
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” Aunt Stace said.
“I will.” But when Karigan looked back up, her aunt was gone.
“Come back! Come back!” The words, however, were not her own. Strong, warm hands held hers like an anchor. She did not slip away into the heavens again, but she felt as though she floated in a haven of light and warmth.
“She’s back,” someone said in a far-off voice.
“Thank the gods,” said another.
“Rest, Karigan, we will keep watch. We won’t leave you alone.”
And she drifted and slept.
M ostly she slept in blissful nothingness. No dreams, no awareness, no falling through the heavens, but she’d periods of lighter sleep, or whatever the netherworld was, in which she drifted and could hear voices now and then. Mostly she ignored them for they were but a distant babble.
“—insisting upon seeing her.”
“Her secretary. Yes, sire. He says it’s—”
Floating, flowing, uncaring.
“—and another who claims he’s kin. He says—”
It was of no matter. It was nothing and she floated on.
S he became aware enough to crack open crusted eyes, and in so doing was careful to cover her mirror eye.
The light was golden, but the corners all dark.
She turned her head. Sitting in an armchair nearby was Estora, her gaze fixed on an embroidery frame.
Light fell upon her face as if she were a goddess of ancient lore as she drew her needle through taut muslin again and again.
One-two-three, one-two-three
Karigan shook her head against the rhythm, the rhythm of the endless dance. Would she ever be free of it? She cried out in frustration.
Estora looked up from her work in surprise. “Karigan? Karigan, can you hear me? Are you awake?”
“No,” she mumbled.
As she comfortably drifted back to sleep, she heard Estora say, “Fastion, send a runner after Ben Simeon. I think—”
D uring another brief awakening, she saw Connly dozing in the chair. She did not disturb him. Why were people sitting beside her bed? Where was Ghost Kitty? Then she remembered this was not her bed. This one was much nicer. A mental shrug, and she returned to her peaceful drifting.
W hen next she awakened, gray daylight streamed in from a window somewhere.
At first she could not recall where she was, but then it came back to her—the harvest ball, the wraith, the death of Salvistar, and falling through the heavens.
Strange visions came to her of which she couldn’t make much sense. Perhaps they’d been dreams.
She remembered also being carried by Zachary, the worry on his face he could not hide. She must reassure him. She sat straight up.
“I’m fine! I’m fine!” she cried.
Poor Ben Simeon who had been sitting quietly beside her going over case notes was so startled he bowled over backward in his chair, all his papers poofing into the air.
“I’m fine!” she cried again.
Ben groaned where he lay, papers softly drifting down upon him. “I’m not sure I am.”
She smiled, and had he not been on the floor, he would have seen it was a mischievous smile, not malicious.
“Better than breaking your finger,” she said.