9

Garric lay with his eyes closed, savoring the fact that he had no responsibilities whatever for the moment. Tiny hands smeared ointment on his scrapes and shallow cuts; as before, the Serian healers chattered birdlike. The only injury that really hurt was the bruise over his ribs, and he wasn't even sure how he'd gotten that one.

But he was tired. He was so very tired.

"Thanks for bringing Ilna back," Cashel said. "I wish I could've helped, but I guess you didn't need me."

Garric tried to laugh. He shouldn't have: it felt like a handful of knives stabbing into his lower rib cage. When he managed to stop gasping he wheezed, "A lot of it was Ilna bringing us. We wouldn't have done it without her."

"He had to carry me most of the way," Ilna said in a thin voice from nearby to Garric's left. She wasn't a person Garric imagined would ever break, but she must have been worn very close to vanishing, like a knife sharpened too often. "But the Hooded One is dead."

Garric opened his eyes and sat up. The Serian child chided him in words he couldn't understand and would have ignored in any case. "That's true isn't it, Tenoctris? The Hooded One is dead."

A dozen lanterns hung around the walls of the room, the light of each throwing its lamp's shadow onto the paper shade. A brazier heated medicines in porcelain bowls under observation by the old Serian woman, while the male healer painted styptic on Tenoctris' scratched thigh.

Liane was massaging Ilna, whose muscles looked as flaccid as warm wax. Worn very close to vanishing...

Tenoctris sat up. She managed a smile, though the lines around her eyes tightened every time the healer's brush touched her.

"I thought the same thing a thousand years ago, you'll recall," she said. "Perhaps it's true this time, but I'm afraid that doesn't really matter."

"It matters to me," Sharina said. She spoke quietly, but her voice had no more mercy in it than an axeblade does. She sat near Cashel, her hands crossed in her lap over the hilt of the Pewle knife.

"Yes," said Tenoctris, nodding with her former quiet authority. "To all of us. And to the Hooded One himself for the considerable length of time it took him to fall. But he was only part of the problem."

Ilna looked up at Garric. She smiled, a disconcertingly cold expression.

"The tree wasn't the Throne of Malkar," she said, a reference that only Tenoctris among the other people in the room might understand. "But it was too much for me. I was weak."

"No," said Tenoctris. "It was your strength, not your weakness, that made you vulnerable. But your point is correct: the Hooded One was the human agent of an impersonal force. The force will work through others as it worked through him, and through what you call the tree. Malkar waxes and wanes. Malkar is rising now, just as it did a thousand years ago. If it continues, it will smash the Isles back into barbarism."

"Not this time," Garric said. He hugged himself, trembling with emotions and memories that were only partly his own. "Not this time!"

Garric thought he felt at the core of his soul the king laughing. "Not this time, lad!" he heard as if in a dream. "Not this time, King Garric!"