“You are meant to be one of mine, one of my brave hearts, one of my great ones. I see it in the way you are revealed by the stars, as immutable and shining as they are. Yours is to be a path of great accomplishment, a path no other has taken before. Will you walk it?”
He started to say no, to back away, to do something to break the spell she had cast over him. But even as he made the attempt, she pointed toward him and said, “Will you embrace me, Logan Tom?”
In that instant he heard in her voice a power that he had not thought existed. It wrapped him in chains of iron; it bound him to her as nothing else could. He saw her for what she was; he recognized her vast, ancient power. The stars overhead seemed to brighten, and he would swear ever after that he saw the moon shift in the sky.
He dropped to his knees before her, not knowing why, just doing so, hugging himself against what he was feeling, lost to everything but her last words: Will you embrace me?
“I will,” he whispered.
“Then you will become my Knight of the Word. As he was, once upon a time.”
She pointed to his right, and when he looked the fisherman was back, standing on the shore, casting his line. He made no response to the Lady’s gesture and did not turn to look at Logan Tom. It was the same man, but this time Logan understood instinctively who he was and what he was doing there.
He was the ghost of a Knight of the Word.
“It is so,” said the Lady.
Logan blinked, then looked back to her. What do you want of me? he tried to say, and failed.
Yet she heard him anyway. “The efforts of my Knights to keep the balance of the Word’s magic in check have failed. The balance is tipped, and the Void holds sway. Yet this, too, shall pass. You will help to see that this happens.
You shall be one of my paladins, my Knights-errant, my champions against the dark things. You will do battle on my behalf and in the name of the Word. Your strength is great, and few will be able to stand against you. In the end, perhaps none.”
He licked his lips against the sudden dryness. “I don’t know if...” His voice shook. “I don’t know how to . . .”
“Give me your hand.”
She moved closer to him, gliding across the waters, her own hand extended.
She approached to within a few feet, and her closeness caused him to shudder. He could feel the heat of her presence, an invisible fire that brightened so that everything else disappeared. He stood alone in the circle of her magic, of her power.
He reached out and took her hand in his own.
Flesh and blood met heat and light, and the contact was sharp and penetrating, and it sent shock waves coursing through Logan’s body. He gasped and tried to wrench free, but his body refused to obey him, standing firm against what was happening to it. The shock waves rose and fell, and then disappeared in the face of sudden strength that began to build from within him.
He was reborn then, made whole in a way he could not explain, but that embodied fresh determination and courage.
Visions of the future filled his mind, and he saw himself as what he could be, saw those he would impact and where he must go. The road he had been set upon was long and difficult, and it would exact much from him. But it was a road that burned with passion and hope, so bright with possibility that he could not even think now of forsaking the trust that had been given to him.
The Lady released him, a gentle withdrawal of her touch that left him suddenly empty and oddly bereft.
“Embrace me,” she whispered. Without hesitation, he did so.
*
A SUDDEN LIGHT bloomed in the darkness of the trees off to his right, causing him to blink, and his memory of that first meeting with the Lady vanished. A second later the light became a fire burning hot and fierce. No one would light a fire at night in the open unless it was meant to be a signal.
He squinted against his confusion. Had he dozed off while waiting to discover who he was supposed to be meeting? He wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember.
One moment he had been thinking back to his first meeting with the Lady and the next the light had appeared. He took a moment to reorient himself. He was sitting in the AV, parked by the side of the road. Ahead, a broken iron crossbar sagged to one side and the road stretched away through a wide swath of moonlight to a heavy wood before branching left and right a hundred yards farther on to run parallel to the Rock River. He couldn’t see the river, but he knew from the maps he carried that it was there.
A scarred wooden sign set off to one side reassured him that he was where he was supposed to be. Sinnissippi Park. His destination.
He turned on the engine and eased the AV ahead past the broken gate and up the cracked surface of the blacktop road. As he neared the fire, he saw a solitary figure standing close to it, a silhouette against the light. He slowed the AV to a crawl and peered in disbelief.
It couldn’t be ...
O’olish Amaneh. Two Bears.
He stopped the Lightning where she was, killed the engine, and reset the alarms. He took his staff from where it rested against the seat beside him, opened the driver’s-side door, and climbed out.