This desert. This barrenness.
Leagh cried harder, and grabbed at a handful of pebbles, loathing them with an intensity she had never felt for anything or anyone before. She threw them viciously away from her, then grabbed at another handful, throwing them away as well.
When she grabbed at her third handful she stopped, aghast at her actions.
Why blame the land for her misfortunes? If she had lost the child she carried, then how could she blame this desert?
A cool breeze blew across and lifted the hair from her face.
A tiny rock squirrel inched across her hand, its tiny velvety nose investigating her palm for food.
Leagh smiled, and then laughed as she felt a welcome heaviness in her belly. She rested her hand over her stomach and felt the thudding of her child’s heart, then …
… then she gasped in wonder and scrabbled her other hand deep in among the pebbles about her.
A heartbeat thudded out from the belly of the earth as well, and it matched — beat for beat — that of her child’s.
“What are you telling me?” she whispered, and then cried with utter rapture as the pebbles explained it to her.
Leagh raised her head and stared at the others. A hand rested on her belly, and a strange, powerful light shone from her eyes. “Faraday,” she said.
Faraday knew what it was she would confront, but her prior knowledge did not comfort her at all within the reality of her vision.
She was trapped, as she had always been trapped (time after time after time). She had trusted — the trees this time — and they had turned their backs on her and left her to this.
A thicket of thorns.
Bands of thornbush enveloped her, pressing into the white flesh of arm and breast and belly and creeping between her legs and binding her to their own cruel purpose.
Thorns studded her throat and cheek so that whenever she breathed, blood spurted and the thorns dug deeper.
Must I always bleed, she thought, and must I always suffer the despair of entrapment?
“It’s a bitch of a job,” muttered a thorn close to her ear, “but someone’s got to do it.”
Yes, yes, Faraday thought, someone has got to do it. She had been so sure that she’d not succumb to the temptation of sacrifice any more, but here she was, embracing it again.
Someone would surely have to die if Tencendor was to be saved, and Faraday supposed she’d have to do it all over again.
Painfully.
Trapped, trapped by the land. Trapped by its need to live at her expense.
The thorns twisted and roped, and Faraday screamed.
It seemed the right thing to do, somehow.
“You have a choice,” said the thorns. “You can succumb and the pain will end … reasonably fast. Or you can fight and tear yourself apart in the effort to free yourself. Which will it be?”
“I…I…”
“Quick! The decision cannot take forever, you know!”
“Quick! Quick! Time is running out!”
Faraday panicked. She opened her mouth to scream — and then stopped, very suddenly calm.
“You choose for me,” she said. “I trust you to choose for me.”
“Good girl,” said the land, approvingly, and Faraday found herself rising slowly through a lake of emerald water, rising, rising towards the surface.
She broke through the surface and shook the water from her hair, and laughed.
“DareWing,” she said, and her hand gripped his shoulder more strongly. “We will be here for you.”
DareWing spiralled through the air, more determined than at any time in his life.
The ground was not going to get him.
He was an Icarii! A birdman! The ground held nothing for him, nothing.
Then why did he feel the tug on his wings so painfully? Why did the weight of his body seemingly grow with each breath so that now he found it almost impossible to stay aloft?
The ground called him: “Walk on me, be my lover, bind yourself to me.” No!
“Bind yourself forever.”
No!
DareWing made a supreme effort, his shoulders and breast and belly aching with the effort of staying within the thermal.
But now he was spiralling downwards, not up.
The speed of his fall increased, and DareWing screamed curses at the ground. He would never allow himself to be ground bound! He was a creature of the air, of the sky, of the stars!
The ground rushed towards him, and DareWing screamed in fear rather than anger. Not fear at death or even pain, but fear that he would be ground bound, that he would never fly again, never soar, never again be the proud Icarii warrior…
He hit the ground with a force that should have killed him outright, but the worst injury DareWing felt was a bruised shoulder and thigh. He scrambled to his feet, and almost overbalanced.
He kept to his feet only with a sustained effort. Why was his balance so out? Why was everything so heavy? DareWing halted, horrified.
His wings had become a burden. For the first time in his long life, DareWing realised that his wings were a burden. They hung like great stone weights from his back, and he could barely move them, let alone will them to lift him into the sky.
“No! Damn you! Give me my grace back! My balance! Give me back —”
My Icarii pride, he thought, and halted, amazed. Have I always been so arrogant?
So contemptuous of the ground?
So blind?
“What do you want of me?” he whispered. “How can I redeem myself?”
