His eyes narrowed; he had heard about this. “And Jaelle has made you an acolyte?”
“Two days ago. She is very wise.”
An arrogant child. It was time to assert control. “Not,” he said sternly, “if her acolytes presume to judge her, and her messengers offer messages of their own.”
It didn’t faze her. With a shrug of acceptance, Leila turned and continued up the slope to the sanctuary.
He wrestled with it for several strides, then admitted a rare defeat. “Hold,” Loren said, and heard Matt’s snort of laughter beside him. “What is your news?”
The Dwarf, he was aware, was finding this whole exchange richly amusing. It was, he supposed.
“He is alive,” Leila said, and suddenly there was nothing amusing about anything at all.
There had been darkness. A sense of movement, of being moved. The stars very close, then impossibly far away, and receding. Everything receding.
The next time there was an impression, blurred as through rain on glass, of candles wavering, with gray shapes moving ambiguously beyond their arc. He was still now, but soon he felt himself slipping back again, as a tide withdraws to the dark sea wherein there lie no discontinuities.
Except the fact of his presence.
Of his being alive.
Paul opened his eyes, having come a long way. And it seemed, after all the journeying, that he was lying on a bed in a room where there were, indeed, candles burning. He was very weak. There was astonishingly little physical pain, though, and the other kind of pain was so newly allowed it was almost a luxury. He took one slow breath that meant life, and then another to welcome back sorrow.
“Oh, Rachel,” he breathed, scarcely a sound. Forbidden once, the most forbidden name. But then intercession had come, before he died, and absolution allowing grief.
Except that he hadn’t died. A thought like a blade pierced him at that: was he alive because he’d failed? Was that it? With an effort he turned his head. The movement revealed a tall figure standing by the bed gazing down at him from between the candles.
“You are in the Temple of the Mother,” Jaelle said. “It is raining outside.”
Rain. There was a bitter challenge in her eyes, but it couldn’t touch him in that moment. He was beyond her. He turned his head away. It was raining; he was alive. Sent back. Arrow of the God.
He felt the presence of Mörnir then, within himself, latent, tacit. There was a burden in that, and soon it would have to be addressed, but not yet, not yet. Now was for lying still, tasting the sense of being himself again for the first time in so very long. Ten months. And three nights that had been forever. Oh, he could go with joy a little ways, it was allowed. Eyes closed, he sank deep into the pillow. He was desperately weak, but weakness was all right now. There was rain.
“Dana spoke to you.”
He could hear the vivid rage in her voice. Too much of it; he ignored her. Kevin, he thought. I want to see Kev. Soon, he told himself, after I sleep.
She slapped him hard across the face. He felt a raking nail draw blood.
“You are in the sanctuary. Answer!”
Paul Schafer opened his eyes. With cold scorn of his own, he confronted her fury. This time, Jaelle looked away.
After a moment she spoke, gazing at one of the long candles. “All my life I have dreamt of hearing the Goddess speak, of seeing her face.” Bitterness had drained her voice. “Not me, though. Not anything at all. Yet you, a man, and one who turned from her entirely for the God in his wood, have been allowed grant of her grace. Do you wonder why I hate you?”
The utter flatness of her tone made the words more chilling than any explosion of anger would have been. Paul was silent a moment, then he said, “I am her child, too. Do not begrudge the gift she offered me.”
“Your life, you mean?” She was looking at him again, tall and slender between the candles.
He shook his head; it was still an effort. “Not that. In the beginning, perhaps, but not now. It was the God who gave me this.”