The Wizard Knight - 02 The Wizard by Gene Wolfe

Author:Gene Wolfe [Wolfe, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fantasy, Need to Read, Award Winners
ISBN: 9780765312013
Publisher: New York : Tor Books, 2004.
Published: 2006-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two. Lost Loves

Night blacker than the blackest night of storm enveloped us. I heard the rush of waters, as I had when I had breasted tides and dark, uncharted currents with Gar secg. There was a great pounding, swift and very deep. I tried to imagine what sort of creature might make such a noise, and the image that leaped into my mind was that of Org, green as leaves and brown as bark, alone in a forest clearing and pounding the trunk of a hollow tree with a broken limb. Under my breath I murmured, “What’s that?” And Lynnet heard me and said, “It is my heart.” As soon as she spoke, and I knew she was right and wrong, that it was my own heart, not hers. For a long time we walked through that dark, and I timed my steps and my movements to the thuddings of my heart.

The darkness parted, as at the word of the Most High God. What had been dark was pearly mist, and I saw that there was grass, such lush grass as horses love, underfoot; the mist spangled it with dew.

“This is a better place,” Lynnet told me; perhaps I did not speak, but I agreed. Sunbeams lanced the mist, and as it had made the dew, so it now made a colonnade of mighty oaks. She began to run. “Goldenlawn!” She turned to look back as she spoke, and I have, on my honor, never seen more joy than I saw in that wasted face.

Beside Sheerwall, the castle would have been an outwork—such a gray wall as a strong boy might fling stones over, a round keep prettily made, and a square stone house of four stories and an attic. It was, in short, such a castle as a knight with a dozen stout men-at-arms might have held against fifty or a hundred outlaws. Nothing more.

Yet it was a place very easy to love, and made me think, all the while that I was there, of the Lady’s hall in Skai. The Lady’s Folkvanger stands to it as a blossoming tree to a single violet, but they breathed the same air.

On its gates stood painted manticores. Their jaws held marigolds as the jaws of cows sometimes hold buttercups, and there were marigolds at their feet, and to left and right of them more marigolds, not painted but real, for the moat was as dry as Utgard’s and had been planted as one plants a garden, while manticores of stone stood before the gates.

There were servants and maiden sisters, fair young women who might have married in an instant, and anyone they chose. All were filled with wonder that Lynnet, whom they thought never to see again, should unexpectedly return; and after them, a grave old nobleman with a white mustache and the scars of many battles, and a gay gray lady like a wild dove, who fluttered all the while and moaned for joy.

“This is Kirsten,” Lynnet told me,

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