in the window. Thick black hair and a full beard framed eyes so dark they were almost black. He was not a big man, but his arms on the window sill were corded with muscle and tanned a deep brown by labor in the sun.
Ysanne, unstartled, turned to him. “Tyrth, yes, I meant to call you. Can you make up another bed for me? We have a guest tonight. This is Kimberly, who crossed with Loren two nights past.”
Tyrth met her eyes for an instant only, then an awkward hand brushed at the thick hair tumbling over his forehead. “I’ll do a proper bed then. But in the meanwhile, I’ve seen something you should know of…”
“The wolves?” Ysanne asked tranquilly. Tyrth, after a bemused moment, nodded. “I saw them the other night,” the Seer went on. “While I slept. There isn’t much we can do. I left word in the palace with Loren yesterday.”
“I don’t like it,” Tyrth muttered. “There haven’t been wolves this far south in my lifetime. Big ones, too. They shouldn’t be so big.” And turning his head, he spat in the dust of the yard before touching his forehead again and walking from the window. As he moved away Kim saw that he limped, favoring his left foot.
Ysanne followed her glance. “A broken bone,” she said, “badly set years ago. He’ll walk like that all his life. I’m lucky to have him, though—no one else would serve a witch.” She smiled. “Your lessons begin tonight, I think.”
“How?”
Ysanne nodded towards the bannion resting on the table top. “It begins with the flower,” she said. “It did for me, a long time ago.”
The waning moon rose late, and it was full dark when the two women made their way beneath it to stand by the edge of the lake. The breeze was delicate and cool, and the water lapped the shore gently, like a lover. Over their heads the summer stars were strung like filigree.
Ysanne’s face had gone austere and remote. Looking at her, Kim felt a premonitory tension. The axis of her life was swinging and she knew not how or where, only that somehow, she had lived in order to come to this shore.
Ysanne drew her small figure erect and stepped onto a flat surface of rock jutting out over the lake. With a motion almost abrupt, she gestured for Kim to sit beside her on the stone. The only sounds were the stir of the wind in the trees behind them, and the quiet slap of water against the rocks. Then Ysanne raised both arms in a gesture of power and invocation and spoke in a voice that rang over the night lake like a bell.
“Hear me, Eilathen!” she cried. “Hear and be summoned, for I have need of you, and this is the last time and the deepest. Eilathen damae! Sien rabanna, den viroth bannion damae!” And as she spoke the words, the flower in her hand burst into flame, blue-green and red like its colors, and she threw it, spiralling, into the lake.
Kim felt the wind die. Beside her, Ysanne seemed carved out of marble, so still was she. The very night seemed gathered into that stillness. There was no sound, no motion, and Kim could feel the furious pounding of her heart. Under the moon the surface of the lake was glassy calm, but not with the calm of tranquillity. It was coiled, waiting. Kim sensed, as if within the pulse of her blood, a vibration as of a tuning fork pitched just too high for human ears.
And then something exploded into motion in the middle of the lake. A spinning form, whirling too fast for the eye to follow, rose over the surface of the water, and Kim saw that it shone blue-green under the moon.
Unbelieving, she watched it come towards them, and as it did so, the spinning began to slow, so that when it finally halted, suspended in air above the water before Ysanne, Kim saw that it had the tall form of a man.
Long sea-green hair lay coiled about his shoulders, and his eyes were cold and clear as chips of winter ice. His naked body was lithe and lean, and it shimmered as if with scales, the moonlight glinting where it fell upon him. And on his hand, burning in the dark like a wound, was a ring, red as the heart of the flower that had summoned him.