EPILOGUE

When the snows came, the Neither-nor hibernated.

Deep in a rug-hung cave, in a bed piled with covers, pillows, furs, It dozed through week on week of storm that stifled Its forest, locked the Door.

In Rathsweek, pale and weak as an invalid, the Neither-nor crept out from bed, to the cave-mouth, to look out. The forest glinted, dripped, sparkled with melting snow; the rock walls of the glen were ruined ice palaces where they were not nude and black.

It was a day, by Its reckoning, sacred to Rizna, a day when Birth stirs faintly below the frost, deep in the womb of Death. Not a day to look out, alone, on a winter forest, spy on its nakedness. But the Neither-nor was not afraid of powers; It owned too many for that; and when the figure in red appeared far off, like blood on the snow, the Neither-nor awaited it calmly, shivering only in the cold.

But when it came close, stumbling, knee-deep in snow, near enough to be recognized, the Neither-nor gasped. “I thought you were dead.”

The girl’s eyes stared, but didn’t seem to see. Except for the shivers that racked her awful thinness, and the raggedy red cloak, real enough, the Neither-nor might have still thought her dead.

On feet bound in rags, Nod struggled toward It. Overcome with pity, the Neither-nor began to make Its way toward her, but Nod held up an arm; she would come alone.

When she stood before the Neither-nor she drew out Suddenly, and with all the little strength left her, struck the Gun against the rock wall, cracking its stock. “No,” the Neither-nor said, taking Nod’s shoulders in the Two Hands. “You haven’t failed. You haven’t. The task is done. Red-hand is dead.”

She stood, the broken Gun in her hands, a negation frozen on her dirty face, and the Neither-nor released her, frightened, of what It could not tell. And Nod began to speak.

He had not his brother’s enthusiasm for works and words, but he had loved his brother deeply, and in his kingship the works would go forward. In that winter the Harran Stone was completed; there his brother lay, with Harrah, their flawed love made so perfect in their tomb that even in the darkest of winter days, shut up in the Citadel, Sennred had not sensed his brother’s ghost was restless.

He had turned an old prison into a theater. A scheme for making books without writing them out by hand, that Sennred little understood or cared about, he had fostered anyway.

He looked after these things, and his peace, patiently through the winter of his mourning. And hers.

It had been easy to confirm her in sole possession, in perpetuity, of Redsdown; he had with pleasure expunged every lien, attachment, attainder on the old fortress and its green hills. To console her further was impossible, he knew; with grownup wisdom he had let time do that.

When spring, though, with agonizing delays began to creep forth, he sent gifts, letters impeccably proper, so tight-reined she laughed to read them.

And on a day when even in the cold old Citadel perfumey breaths of a shouting spring day outside wandered lost, he prepared to go himself.

There were seven windows in the chamber he sat in. Against six of them the towers of the castle and the City heights held up hands to block the light. The seventh, though, looked out across the lake and the mountains; its broad sill was warm where he laid his hand.

Out there, in those greening mountains, somewhere, the Woman in Red held her councils.

She was not Just, they said, though like the Just she spoke of the old gods—but when she spoke she cursed them. What else she spoke of the King couldn’t tell; his informants were contradictory, their abstracts bizarre. Of the woman herself they said only that she wore always a ragged red domino, and that she was a waterman’s daughter with cropped blond hair. The Grays thought her dangerous; the old ones’ eyes narrowed as they glossed for him one or another fragment of her thought. The King said nothing.

People were stirred, in motion, that was certain. He gathered she spoke to all classes—Just, Defenders, Folk. Some he sent to hear her strange tale listened—and didn’t return.

A spring madness. Well, he knew about that… almost, it seemed, he might have brought it forth himself, out of the indecipherable longings that swept him on these mornings: he felt himself melt, crumble within like winter-rotten earthworks before new rivulets. Sometimes he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Down on the floor of the old Rotunda as the King and his retinue went through, the patient Grays were still at their cleaning work. They had accomplished much since Sennred had first noticed them, that day Red Senlin had come to the City to be King. The tortured circle dance of kings he had seen them uncover then had proved to be not a circle but part of a spiral, part of a History they thought, emanating from a beginning in the center to an end—where?

You must learn to pretend, dead Redhand had said when they stood here together, if you would live here long. Well, he was learning: would learn so well, would live here so long that he could perhaps begin to lead that spiral out of its terrible dance, lead it… where?

In the center of the floor, the Grays had begun to uncover bizarre images—a thing with vast sails; stars, or suns; creatures of the Deep.

Didn’t the Woman in Red talk too of suns, and sails, and the Deep? She had for sure talked of bringing her news to the King. Did he dare stop, on his way Outward, to speak to her, listen to her? They had all advised him against it. A spring madness, they said, people in motion.

He stepped carefully past the grinning kings to the door Defensible, newly widened that winter. His laughing servant held a brand-new traveling cloak for him.

And what if it was not madness at all, not ephemeral? What if Time had indeed burst out of his old accustomed round, gone adventuring on some new path? Would he know? And would it matter if he did?

He took the cloak from his servant. He would see Caredd soon, and that did matter, very much.