Pilgrim by Sara Douglas

His eyes shining with tears, Goldman stepped after her.

Leagh found her task depressing beyond words. She wished Zared was with her, and yet

was glad he was not. He would only have fussed, and in the end made her feel worse. In the end,

Leagh found the best remedy to her heavy-heartedness was to keep busy…and there was plenty

for her to do.

There were still tens of thousands of people huddled away in hidey-holes and secret

chambers across western Tencendor. Many of them had hardly ventured out for months, ever

since the Demons had first arrived, and Leagh found herself retelling again and again the tale of

the Demons, and what was happening, and how Drago had metamorphosed from betrayer to

saviour (and whenever she said the word ―betrayer‖ she thought of Faraday, and wondered how

the woman was coping), and what a wonderful place Sanctuary was.

―And all you have to do,‖ Leagh always concluded, ―is step through this enchanted

doorway.‖ And she would wave her hand at the glowing rectangle of light that she‘d set up in a

barn, or a farmyard, or the market square of some small hamlet.

The frightened, thin and often sick people would look at her, look at the doorway, and

then exchange glances between themselves.

And then the invariable question. ―Can I bring me pigs?‖ Or cow, or flock of ducks or

geese, or whatever they‘d managed to secrete away in their barns or under their beds, or deep in

their cellars.

Leagh, and she supposed Drago, had never thought that people could have saved so much

of their livestock. Somehow she‘d thought that every creature in Tencendor had been demonised,

but in actuality thousands had been saved.

And so Leagh would smile. ―Of course,‖ she would say, and then smile at the thought of

StarDrifter‘s face as a further herd of pigs or cows or dusty mob of poultry cascaded through

Spiredore into Sanctuary.

But the secreted herds of domestic livestock were not the largest surprise Leagh

encountered.

On the fifth day of her mission, tired and hungry and determined that wherever she found

herself next she would beg a meal before she‘d provide an escape, she stood in Spiredore and

said, ―Take me to those who need to be rescued.‖

And Spiredore deposited her in a cave in the northern cliffs of Murkle Bay.

Leagh spun about as soon as she found herself there, unnerved by the darkness and the

sense of a great many warm bodies surrounding her.

There were snorts, and squeals, and a sense of wave after wave of undulating movement.

And a stench that turned Leagh‘s stomach.

―Who‘s there?‖ she cried, wondering if Spiredore had finally made a mistake and

deposited her in the Demons‘ boudoir itself.

More shuffles and snuffles and the strange sense of great undulating movement.

Leagh realised she was hyperventilating, and tried to calm herself, steadying her

breathing with a huge effort. Her stomach heaved again, and at precisely the same moment her

baby shifted and jabbed a heel or elbow into the side of her womb.

It was too much, and Leagh bent double and retched.

As she wiped her mouth, she felt something brush or bump against the back of her legs.

Her heart pounding, Leagh spun around, and saw that she stared into the grey-lit dawn

beyond the mouth of a massive cave.

She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the dim light…and then gasped as she realised what

surrounded her.

Ten thousand seals. All with their bodies and eyes directed straight towards her.

Among them crawled crabs and lobsters, and above bats and numerous small birds

circled and chatted.

Stunned, Leagh could do little but stare for a long time, then she began to cry as she

realised the enormity of the tragedy that enveloped Tencendor. These seals, alone, waiting for

help, and gathering to them all the creatures they could.

Hoping that someone would come to save them.

Blinking away her tears, Leagh withdrew the cube of light from her pocket and expanded

the doorway.

―Sanctuary,‖ she said, and pointed into the door.

Without hesitation, and in the most orderly exodus Leagh had yet seen, the seals, birds,

crabs and whatever other creatures had hidden in the cave, made their way through the door.

She stood for hours watching them go through, and as the final seals passed into the door,

and Leagh was about to step through herself, a shape circled down from the very peak of the

cave and alighted before her.

It was a very old, and very majestic, speckled blue eagle, and while Leagh had no way of

knowing that this was the eagle that had witnessed the final days of the Seneschal, nor even that

he was the same eagle that she‘d watched spiralling over Grail Lake on the day she‘d sat and

pined for Zared, Leagh nevertheless understood his dignity and wisdom, and she bowed slightly

to him.

―Friend eagle,‖ she said. ―Will you accept Sanctuary?‖

In answer the eagle cocked his head and stared at her belly with his bright eyes, then he

gave a single, sharp nod, and launched himself into the doorway.

With tears still in her eyes, Leagh followed.

In the next two days, she found many similar caches of wildlife.

Gwendylyr ran her evacuation as efficiently as she had run her household, and as

efficiently as she‘d run Aldeni. Theod may have been the one to attend the Councils, and to wear

the glory and the regalia of Duke, but in reality it had been Gwendylyr who‘d kept the

bureaucratic machinery of Aldeni going, had overseen the courts when Theod was absent (and that had been much of the time), and had supervised the social, political and economic life of

Aldeni.

How she‘d managed to bear twin sons amid all this activity she‘d never known. Well,

now her sons were not around to hang on her skirts and slow down her day (and Gwendylyr‘s

eyes always filled with tears when she thought of Tomas and Cedrian), and neither was Theod,

dear that he was. Gwendylyr had a task to do, and she did it fabulously.

Like Leagh, she encountered flocks of sanguine livestock among the hordes of frightened

peasants, and flocks of wilder life among the shadows of valleys and small woods. To none of

them did Gwendylyr deny entry to Sanctuary, and to none of them did she raise so much as an

eyebrow.

The day, however, that a battalion of millipedes crawled over her feet to avoid the

trampling hooves of some thirtyscore red deer, Gwendylyr did permit herself a brief closure of

the eyes and a genteel shudder.

A Sanctuary with millipedes would never be quite the same again.

Faraday had the hardest task of all.

When she first stepped into the trees, she asked Spiredore to place her somewhere

peaceful, where there were no people. First she needed to walk, and to come to terms with her

re-acquaintance with the forests. In strict chronological terms, it had only been some eight

months since she‘d last wandered the trails underneath the trees, but it felt like a lifetime.

Faraday had not realised how much she‘d changed since Drago had twirled that damned

Sceptre about the Chamber of the Star Gate. She encountered memories in the drooping branches

of trees, in the cascade of wildflowers in shadowed glades, in the well-remembered paths and the

lullaby of the grasses‘ song.

Here was where she‘d fed as a deer, here where she‘d been feted by the Avar, here where

she‘d watched Isfrael being raised without her.

Here where she‘d watched Shra seduce him into manhood.

Here, where she trod again.

And yet, even in sorrow and painful memory, the forest was a gladsome place to be. Shy

creatures peeked out from shrubs, and tentatively nosed her outstretched hands. Not just the

normal timid creatures of the forest, but sapphire and ruby-spined porcupines, orange and blue

splotched panthers, beetles that were as transparent and as lovely as crystals.

Finally, after a half-day spent wandering and remembering, Faraday stepped back

through her enchanted door into Spiredore.

―Take me to my son,‖ she said.

Spiredore took her, as Faraday had been sure it would, to the Earth Tree Grove.

There, as she had known there would be, virtually the entire populations of the Clans

were gathered, save for those who‘d had the good sense to make a decision independently of the

Mage-King and made their own way to Sanctuary.

Faraday had materialised just inside the surrounding ring of trees, and for a brief moment

she knew she could observe while remaining relatively unobserved. The grove was packed. The

Avar sat in a great, murmuring crowd before the Earth Tree and her ring of stone.

It was late afternoon, and brands of fire hung about the circle of stone.

Faraday lifted her eyes. The Earth Tree reared into the darkening sky, massive, far larger

than Faraday had remembered it, but if it looked larger, then it also looked far less healthy. Its oval, dark green leaves were splotched with mould, and most of its trumpet-shaped flowers had