"I thought I lay with Niah."
"She was there."
"But you were, too?"
She nodded, and then, to her horror, began to cry with great gulping breaths.
"Zenith ... Zenith ..." WolfStar stirred as if his injuries made him totally unable to comfort Zenith.
"I only had mind for Niah," he eventually said. "I thought that she would destroy you, and I thought only to enjoy her strength."
Zenith continued to sob, slightly louder now.
"But I was wrong. Ypw had the strength to defeat her, and I have ever admired strength and —"
"Oh, shut up!" Zenith slammed a fist down on the bed.
"Tell me why you are here," he said quietly.
She turned her head away.
"Why did you come back to me, Zenith?"
She whipped her eyes back to him. "I came to see you so I could put some of my own demons to rest!"
"And have you?"
She shook her head.
WolfStar extended his hand. "Please, take my hand, Zenith."
She ignored him.
"Please ... I think that you and I are alone in this night, and I think that you and I both need some comfort."
"Not from you!"
"Nevertheless," he said, "I am all that shares this gloomy and pain-raddled night with you. Take my hand."
And eventually, she stretched out her own hand and took his.
Later, when she had gone, WolfStar lay on the bed, and allowed himself to laugh.
Chapter 27
Axis Resumes a Purpose
DragonStar looked at the group before him, and wondered at how he would tell them the worst of possible news. They had trusted him, and he had not been able to provide for them.
Now he had to tell them that, in all likelihood, the entire struggle had been in vain. That Sanctuary would fall. And if Sanctuary fell, then, in all likelihood, they would die.
"Well?" Axis said.
He stood belligerently before his son, hands on hips, dressed in his habitual, comfortable black clothes, booted, armed, and prepared for war.
Azhure stood beside him, calmer, but DragonStar knew her well enough to know that Azhure's exterior calm was a face she'd cultivated over the years to provide an antidote to Axis' tendency for confrontation. Internally, she would be as angry, as frightened, and as unsure as everyone else in the room.
DragonStar glanced behind his parents. Many were here: the four witches still in Sanctuary —
Faraday, with so many mental and emotional barriers in place she looked like a piece of fragile Corolean glass; Leagh looking wan and exhausted; Zared, Herme and Theod, almost as belligerently anxious as Axis; StarDrifter, looking distracted (and DragonStar wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that Zenith wasn't in her quarters and couldn't, for the moment, be found); FreeFall and EvenSong, looking as useless as DragonStar himself felt; several of the Avar Banes, and Sa'Domai, the Chief of the Ravensbund. Sa'Domai looked, by far, the most collected person in the room, and DragonStar supposed that anyone who spent much of their life
dodging collapsing icebergs and battling the storms of the Icebear Coast might possibly find interstellar Demons a mild threat by comparison.
"I have no good news," DragonStar said, unable to keep the bitter twist from his mouth. He gestured helplessly. "I hope that Urbeth will do what she can to aid the Mother and the Sacred Groves, but I cannot rely on her being able to stop the Demons. If the Demons manage to feast on the power of the Sacred Groves, then — at the moment — I cannot think what might stop them."
"You are StarSon," Axis said flatly. "You have demanded that title since infancy. It is your job to know what is to be done!"
"And you went through your entire battle with Borneheld and Gorgrael with nary a single doubt, Axis?" DragonStar said. "You walked through the entire adventure gloriously confident and without putting a single foot wrong, without losing a single bloody life to your mistakes?"
Axis looked away.
"The icepack cracks and reforms," Sa'Domai said. "No-one ever knows where the cracks will appear next, but the icepack always reforms."
DragonStar took a deep breath, both grateful for Sa-Domai's philosophical interjection, and resentful at his calmness.
"I do not doubt that Sanctuary will fall," DragonStar said. "At the least, we have to plan for it."
"And what," FreeFall said, "do you plan to do about it?"
