Clouds End by Sean Stewart

Author:Sean Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 1996-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Outside-Inside

And then, to their surprise, the singer began to speak of Hazel Twist. His youth, his wit, his strategy, his courage. She spoke of his rise in the Empire, and his fair wife, Willow Blue. She spoke of the Fire that had come sweeping in from the edge of the forest, laying waste to the fair lands of Palm and Date.

Startled, the audience fell silent, glancing uncomfortably at one another. They strained to get a better look at the storyteller, but she was far from the torches. Outside, the storm screamed and spat. Water dripped steadily through the leaking roof into the fire, and clouds of steam, smelling of smoke and blood, eddied through the kitchen and dining hall. Shale opened her mouth to whisper to Foam, to ask if he understood why the tale that was supposed to be of Seven was all of Hazel Twist. But however hard she tried to speak, Shale’s words miscarried, dying stillborn on her tongue. She gazed at the singer—the Singer!— and her eyes widened in shock.

The Singer’s eyes gleamed like embers and her voice was thin and desolate as the winter wind. “For the war-torches burn on both sides of the one-sided world. And every story has two sides, that are one. In every pair of twins, one must go into the Mist.”

The Singer was wreathed in coils of mist, silver-sheened, electric. Her form began to ripple and flow. This story too will end at home. But the loop that ends by the hearthside will be deeper and more strange than the loop that brought you here.” And it seemed to everyone in the hall as if she were somehow vanishing into her own words, into her own voice, until it was only the keening wind outside that whispered,

Great stories turn to small ones;

Bright fires fall to ash . . .

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