his body as though he burned, coiling from his chest, flowing away . . . and then Ista wondered if she was looking at a rope, or a conduit. And where that conduit emptied out. She glanced back along the floating line of light and was moved to grasp it, let it tow her along to its destination as a cable might pull a drowning woman from the water.
Her dream-hand reached, gripped; the line broke, shattering under her fingers, spattering away in bright ripples.
The man on the bed woke, panted, started half-up. Saw her. Stretched out a burning hand.
“You!” he gasped. “Lady! Help me, in the god’s name—”
Which god? Ista could not help thinking, in a sort of tilted hysteria. She dared not grasp that terrifying fiery hand, for all that it reached for her. “Who are you?”
His wide eyes devoured the sight of her. “She speaks!” His voice cracked. “My lady, I pray, don’t go—”
Her eyes snapped open in the dimness of the little inn chamber in Vinyasca.
Nearly the only sound was Liss’s slow, regular breathing on her pallet across the room. The festival dance had evidently ended, the last drunken revelers departed for home, or at least passed out in doorways along the route.
Silently, Ista swung her feet out of bed and padded to the locked shutters to the balcony. She eased up the latch and slipped out. The only lights were a pair of wall lanterns, burning low, flanking the closed doors of the temple across the plaza. She gazed up into the night sky at the waning moon. She knew it for the same moon as in her vision. The place, the man, were as real as she, wherever they were. So did the strange man dream this night of Ista, as Ista dreamed of him? What did his dark straining eyes see that made him reach out so desperately, and was he as bewildered by her as she was by him?
His voice had been rich in timbre, though scraped thin with pain or fear or exhaustion. But he had spoken in the Ibran tongue shared by Ibra and Chalion and Brajar, not in Roknari or Darthacan—albeit with a north Chalionese accent tinged by Roknari cadences.
I cannot help you. Whoever you are, I cannot help. Pray to your god, if you want rescue. Though I do not recommend it.
She fled the moonlight, locked the shutter, huddled back into her bed as soundlessly as she could, careful not to wake Liss. She pulled her feather pillow over her head. It blocked all vision except the very one she did not want to see, burning in her mind’s eye. When she woke again on the morrow, all the events of the previous day would seem a more faded dream than this. She clenched her hands in her sheets and waited for the light.
AS LISS WAS BRAIDING ISTA’S HAIR, SOON AFTER DAWN THE NEXT morning, there came a knock on their chamber door, and Foix dy Gura’s voice: “My lady? Liss?”
Liss went to the door and opened it onto the gallery that ran around the inn’s interior well court. Foix, fully dressed for the road, gave her a nod, adding a little bow to Ista, who came up behind Liss’s shoulder.
“Good morning, my lady. Learned dy Cabon sends his abject apologies, but he cannot lead prayers this morning. He is fallen very ill.”
“Oh, no,” said Ista. “Is it serious? Should we send someone to the temple to ask for a physician?” Vinyasca was much smaller than Valenda; was the Mother’s Order here large enough to support a physician of good learning?
Foix rubbed his lips, which kept trying to quirk up in a smile. “Ah, I think not quite yet, my lady. It may just be something he ate yesterday. Or, er . . . wine-sickness.”
“He was not drunk when I last saw him,” said Ista doubtfully.
“Mm, that was earlier. Later, he went off with a party from the local temple, and, well, they brought him back quite late. Not that one can diagnose with certainty through a closed door, but his groans and noises sounded quite like wine-sickness to me. Horribly familiar, brought back memories. Mercifully blurred memories, but still.”
Liss smothered a laugh.
Ista gave her a quelling frown, and said, “Very well. Tell your men to stand down and leave their horses to their hay. We shall attend the morning service at the temple instead, and decide whether to take to the road again .