Or perhaps she was simply not solid enough herself anymore to fall through.
Either way, she didn’t mind. After all the horror of recent memory—horror that her conscious mind had been too numbed to recognize, but that her raging subconscious had experienced in all the vibrancy of dreams-come-true—a stroll in the heavens was quite pleasant.
How she had come here, she couldn’t decide. She had vague recollections of the shadow’s scream, followed by a long, long fall. Then she’d opened her eyes and found herself lying upon this cloud that was softer than lamb’s wool. All was gray-blue around her with the promise of dawn nearing. She got to her feet, unsteady at first, then started walking, stepping from cloud to cloud.
There were other children. None of them were near enough to call out to, but she could see hundreds of them all round her. Dark children of the South Land, clad in garments very like her own. Her brothers and her sisters through the binding of the nation.
They had all passed through the black door of the Mound.
Lark shivered at this almost memory. It couldn’t be a real memory since she had been unconscious, lost at the time in the light of the Bronze. But somewhere deep inside, she came so close to remembering, it was frightening. She would spend the rest of her life trying to forget what she had never truly known.
Lumé began to rise. The clouds, dark purple beneath her feet, came alive with red, with saffron, with gold, rippling like swiftly moving water as the light spread farther and farther. Lark heard gasps of delight from the great crowd of children surrounding her, but then those gasps were swallowed up in the sound that followed.
The sound of Lumé’s Song.
He appeared on the edge of the horizon, lordly and powerful, a vision-filling giant even at this vast distance. He was young and he was old, and his hair streamed like flames, and his body flamed as well, a vibrant flame full of life. From his mouth poured the Melody, and it was the Melody itself that exploded with light, and shot the colors across the clouds, across the waking world.
As Lumé rose, he danced, and Lark found she longed to dance as well. She raised her hands above her head, and her feet moved in a rhythm hitherto unknown. All the children danced, each a different dance, unique in its pattern, hundreds of inimitable patterns that moved together with the Song of Lord Lumé and scattered tufts of light-infused clouds beneath their feet.
They raised their sweet, childish voices and sang. Theirs was not the language of the Sun, but language did not matter here, high above the worlds.
“I bless your name, oh you who sit
Enthroned beyond the Highlands!
I bless your name and sing in answer
To the Song you give!
“My words in boundless gladness overflow,
In song, more than words.
Joy and fear and hope and trembling,
Bursting all restraint!
“Who can help but sing?”
So the sun rose and danced across the sky. And his Song became milder, more distant as he climbed those high blue vaults, and the clouds gave up their brilliant colors to become a softer, gentler white. Lark, exhausted and happy, sat down suddenly, closing her eyes, feeling the warmth of Lumé’s blaze upon her skin. The darkness of Cren Cru’s Mound was all but forgotten now.
When she opened her eyes, she found herself gazing into the face of a friend she had not known she knew.
“Hullo,” she said.
“Hullo,” said the Prince of Farthestshore. He crouched down before her, and his smile was more beautiful than Lumé himself. He wasn’t a man, exactly, but he wasn’t a Faerie either. Lark didn’t know what he was, but she didn’t think such questions mattered now.
“Thank you for the Song,” she said.
“Thank you for the singing,” he replied, and this she thought strange. With Lumé, Hymlumé, and all the hosts of gleaming stars to sing for him, why should he care about her one, feeble voice? Yet the delight was evident in his eyes.
Lark blushed, so pleased at the Prince’s pleasure, she hardly knew which way to look.
The Prince said, “Are you ready to go home now?”
“Go home with you?” she asked hopefully.
But the Prince of Farthestshore shook his head. “Not yet, Meadowlark,” he said, and she liked how her full name sounded when he spoke it. “I need you to sing in your own world a little longer. Are you ready to do that for me?”
She sighed and shrugged. “I’d rather go with you.”
“What about your ma and da? Your sisters and your brother? Don’t you think they need you?”