“Why did you choose me?” He could scarcely speak. “I am nothing. Unacknowledged by my own father. I am the last person anyone would choose! I am the least.”
“And in you my might will be made visible to all people,” the stranger replied in a voice more golden than sunlight, more silver than moonlight, more varied than all the starry host. “When the people of the Near World see your triumph over the dragon and the goblin, they will know it was through my doing. And they will hear the Sphere Songs once again.”
But the Chronicler shook his head. “Alistair. He’s your hero. He was chosen ahead of me, and the earls will choose him still.”
“I did not choose Alistair to walk your path,” said the stranger. “His life and his death are not your business. Your business is to do the task for which you have been called, to become the man you were born to be.”
“I was born an accident,” the Chronicler said.
“You were born for a purpose,” the stranger replied, “and in the best form to fulfill that purpose.”
Suddenly the Chronicler felt hands upon his shoulders, and his gaze was fixed by a pair of eyes—eyes of no color and all colors, deeper than the drop behind him. He thought he could fall into those eyes and lose himself and be better for the loss.
“The time is near,” said the voice, which rang in the air around him, the wholeness of all voices joined into one. As though created by that voice, an image formed within the Chronicler’s mind. An image of a black stone, beneath which roared the waters of many conjoined rivers.
Protruding from that stone, a carved sword.
Halisa.
As familiar to the Chronicler as his own two hands and as rightly a part of himself. He longed to reach out and take it, to latch hold of the completeness his life had lacked, though he had scarcely admitted it to himself.
But it was only a vision. And, a bitter part of his mind tried to insist, that was all it ever would be.
Then the voice of the stranger crashed through his brain, and all else was forgotten:
“The flame of the Dragonwitch draws to its end. Twice she has been killed in fire, in hatred, in the heat of furious passion. The third death she will die in water, in the sweeping of true life, which the death-in-life she knows cannot resist.
“Call up the rivers, Smallman King. Call them up from the deep places and overwhelm the fire with living water.”
As that voice spoke, the words turned to water themselves, and they swept down upon the Chronicler, catching him up and bearing him over the precipice. He screamed and felt the thrill of a fall that never came. For the water carried him up, higher and higher, into the light that sang a song he had always known but never before heard.
Then he was standing on a small boulder, surrounded by trees and the stunned silence of the watching Wood Between.
The Chronicler gasped and teetered for a moment before he fell from the stone and landed in the tall green ferns below. He picked himself up, his limbs shaking, brushing bracken from his sleeves. Water dripped down his face. He wiped it away, then stood a moment, staring at the drops that gathered in the palm of his hand. They gleamed as though touched by sunlight, but there was no sunlight this deep in the Wood.
“Ah! There you are, fool mortal!”
The Chronicler clenched his fist, hiding the water, and turned to face the wrath of Sir Eanrin. The knight wore his man’s form, but his face was that of a snarling moggy.
“Have you any idea how dangerous it is to walk the Wood without a Path? Do you have the slightest notion how quickly you could be sucked away like a duckling into rapids, never to be seen or heard from again?”
The Chronicler offered no explanation but stood staring at the cat-man, whose quick eyes suddenly picked up details his ire had nearly missed. Eanrin frowned. “You’re all . . . wet. Did you fall in a stream or find yourself a thundershower?”
The Chronicler shook his head. Drops of water fell from the ends of his hair, spattering the ferns beneath his feet.
Eanrin regarded him uneasily. Then he put out a swift hand and grasped him by the shoulder, propelling him back the way he had come. “Stay on the Path,” he said, “and don’t wander off on your own. I might not be able to find you next time.”
Trotting to keep up, the Chronicler stole a glance into his hand, uncurling his fingers. The sparkling water still rested there, like a quiet pool. As he looked at it, he thought he heard a voice in the depths of his heart saying:
“Call up the rivers, Smallman King.”
3
I SET UPON THE REST OF THE NEAR WORLD with a fury it had never before seen. Fire from the sky rained upon mortal heads. Across the nations I flew, and wherever I saw the glow of Asha shining through the open doors of a House of Lights, I flamed. My fire burned and consumed those lofty Houses, leaving smoldering rubble in my wake. Nothing could stop me. No one would dare.
Until Etanun found me.