The Pearl of the Soul of the World - By Meredith Ann Pierce Page 0,60

remained in her limbs. She was content to lie unresisting in her husband's arms and let the torrent bear them along. Miles and miles, she thought dreamily: the flood must be taking them leagues from where the Witch's palace had once stood. Were the others— those in the barges and upon the shore—safe? She could only hope, wrapped in a darkness devoid of Solstarlight, or Oceanuslight, or stars. Head pillowed on Irrylath's breast, she slept.

Awareness returned to her just as gradually. Water no longer surrounded them. She no longer felt the rush bearing her along. They had stopped moving. Bruised and waterlogged, she felt herself lying on firm ground, stable and solid, if very soggy. Her garment was sopping, and half her hair—she could feel by the gentle give and tug—lay in water. Someone was speaking her name.

She opened her eyes, though without hope of seeing anything. They ached, painfully cold. Then something struck one of them, a hot, stinging drop. Another fell upon her brow, then ran burning and salt into her other eye. She flinched, blinking, and became aware of stars overhead, a blaze of them.

Someone was bending over her.

"Aeriel, Aeriel," he said.

She moaned and, moving, realized how stiff she was. The pearlstuff in her blood made her feel hazy and strange.

"Irrylath," she muttered, reaching for him. "I was drowning, and you came for me."

To have rescued her, she realized, he must have dived from Avarclon's back. Her dream returned to her, clear at last: Irrylath plunging headlong from high above into the roiling confusion of the flood below.

The starhorse had been trying to bear him to safety, carry him up and away, but he had refused to be saved without her, had come after her instead. Not fallen. Dived. Irrylath clasped her to him.

"Oriencor is dead," he whispered. "You killed her, and the palace fell."

She felt him shudder. His tears ran onto her cheek and forehead. Blinking the burning drops from her eyes, she saw mud flats stretching all around, black soil fanning out on every hand. Water lay in sheets, a cool misty smoke rising from it in wraithlike clouds. Broken bits of furniture, tapestry, devices lay scattered about them like a shipwreck.

Her wedding sari, yellow and immune to any moisture, tangled in a patch of scrub nearby. The mist, full of colored sparks still, swirled and drifted, at times obscuring the sky. Oceanus hung canted in heaven amid a fiery swirl of stars.

Strangely, the night did not feel cold. At last, Irrylath drew back from her.

"Not I," he said. "Not I, but you—you killed her."

She had never been so close to him before. Even by starlight, she saw the four long scars that raked one side of his face, and the fifth that trailed just below the jaw. The scars Pendarlon had given him, an age—no, only two years—ago, when he had been a half-darkangel in Avaric. She laid her hand along those scars.

"In Winterock," she said, "while the palace stood, the pearl gave me a glimpse of what the White Witch did to you."

She saw him flinch, felt the shock that passed through him. He gazed at her. "I thought you knew all along," he whispered. "I thought your green eyes saw everything."

She shook her head. Was that why he had stayed away—shunning not her, but the things he feared she knew?

"It's why I thought I wanted Sabr," he said, "because she knows nothing of that, and even if she ever learns, she'll not believe it. She'll insist on thinking I was brave."

"You were brave," said Aeriel. She remembered him leading the battle from Avarclon's back, swooping to rescue Sabr, confronting his own and his brothers' darkangels. "You are the bravest one I know."

Irrylath shook his head. "I wasn't. I'm not. Oriencor found my every flaw. In the end, she broke me like a toy."

"And you imagined I might do the same?" Aeriel mused, stung, full of wonder at her own stupidity.

Blind! Until this moment, she had been blind. "So you turned to Sabr, who adores you— lonely for someone who did not know your past, longing only to escape that painful memory."

She saw the prince's jaw set, as he nodded, thinking of the Witch. His eyes were like two lampflames burning.

"But Oriencor is dead now," he whispered fiercely. "I will never dream of her or feel her touch or hear her voice again. My rescuer. You have delivered me."

She wanted to contradict him, to protest: he had turned away from Oriencor of his