if it was anger or something else. He stepped forward and grabbed Riven by the cloak. The shadows around him engulfed them both, spun and whirled.
“I’m not! I’m fighting all the way.” He calmed himself, spoke in a softer voice, releasing Riven. “I’m fighting all the way, Riven.”
Maybe Riven understood, maybe he didn’t.
They stared at one another a long moment. Riven’s face fell.
“How can it be the only way, Cale? After all this?”
Cale shook his head, smiling softly. “How can it not? How else could it end?”
Riven looked away, down. “You’re doing this for him?”
“There’s nothing else,” Cale said. “Just us. That’s the reason for everything. Understand?”
Riven looked up, his face stricken.
Cale held out a hand. “You’ve been my friend, Riven.”
Riven’s lower lip trembled. He clasped Cale’s hand, pulled him close for an embrace.
Cale took Weaveshear by the blade, handed it hilt first to Riven. The reality of his decision started to settle on him. His legs felt soft under him. His hand shook. Riven pretended not to notice.
“The fiend doesn’t get this,” Cale said. Riven took it, nodded.
“I will keep my promise,” Cale said. “You keep ours to him. You remember it?”
Riven’s face hardened. He nodded again. “I remember it.”
Cale turned to Rivalen. “Keep your word, too, Shadovar.”
Rivalen’s face was expressionless, his eyes aglow.
Faces and memories poured through Cale’s mind but he pushed them aside and pictured Cania. He drew the darkness around him.
At the last moment, he changed his mind and pictured not the icy wastes of the Eighth Hell but the face of a grateful boy, the boy who had once invited him into the light. It suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world that Cale see Aril, a boy he had met only once.
“Good-bye,” Cale said to Riven.
Riven didn’t speak, perhaps he couldn’t. Eyes averted, he signed, “Farewell” in handcant.
Aril slept on his side, peaceful in his small bed. Blankets covered him to the neck. His head, with its mop of hair, poked from the bedding. Cale stared at the boy for a time, thinking of times past, friends and enemies, all of them the scar tissue of a lifetime. Aril slept peacefully, contentedly. Cale found the moment … fitting.
A boy sleeping safely in his bed, free of fear, with his whole life before him. He realized why he had needed to see Aril instead of Shamur, Tamlin, or Tazi. He wanted the last person he saw on Faerûn to be innocent.
He put the back of his shadow-dusted hand on the boy’s cheek and thought of Jak.
“I did what I could.”
He hoped it made a difference for someone, somewhere.
He stepped through the shadows and into the darkness outside the small cottage. The quietude of the village seemed alien after the chaos of the battlefied. He had only a short while before time back in the Shadowstorm would resume.
The smell of chimney fires filled the cool air. He glanced around the village. Three score cottages sat nestled around a tree-dotted commons, quiet, peaceful, safe. The two-story temple of Yondalla, the lone stone structure among the log and mud-brick buildings of the village, sat near the common’s edge and rose protectively over the whole, a shepherd to the sheep. Smoke issued from the temple’s two chimneys, filling the glen with the smell of cedar, and home. The hearths burned fragrant wood and were never allowed to grow cold.
Cale inhaled deeply. He fought back tears born in realizations come too late.
He allowed that on at least one night not long ago the village owed its safety not to Yondalla, but to him. He had killed a score of trolls while he had answered to Jak’s ghost, while he tried to climb into the light.
But there was no answering to the dead, and the light was not for him. Not anymore. Not ever.
He looked up into the vault of the sky, unplagued by the roiling ink of the Shadowstorm. The Sea of Stars twinkled above him, Selûne and her train of glowing Tears. He fancied he could see an absence in the celestial cluster circling the silver disc of the moon, the hole out of which one of the Tears had plummeted to Faerûn, the hole for which Jak had died, the hole mirrored in Cale’s soul. He thought of the little man and his pipe, tried to smile, but failed. He had never filled the hole. And now he never would.
Power burned in him, cold, dark, near limitless. He could hear words spoken in the shadows on